Chapter Text
She came to him.
After they retook Deep Space Nine, and she found Ziyal's dead, cold body on the floor of one of many hallways, she studiously avoided him. She helped to unclench his arms, frozen around Ziyal's small shoulders. She pushed him against the wall to watch him crumble at her feet - and then, she stayed away. Never went near his cell; telling herself that everything between them was said and done. For once she had the total control over kicking him out of her life; no trace left. She was going to take that opportunity - and run.
But tonight... tonight witnessed Ziyal's rushed though beautiful funeral on Bajor. The girl, barely a whisper of a woman, was laid to rest in a peaceful ceremony, as the warm sun rolled over the sky and started to sink, red and heavy, right into the horizon line. In the orange glow of Durana lamps, veiled in the eternal sweetness of petals scattered around her head, she was lulled to sleep by spiritual chants. She looked like one of her paintings. 'She sleep in her art'... this thought broke through Kira's defenses. It nearly made her cry, right there in the middle of the ceremony.
When the funeral neared its end, she made a quiet escape. Ditching the unofficial speeches and ruminations, with people milling about the place, she piloted the small runabout back to the station. She craved to be alone. No more words, condolences, praises and sighs. And yet, upon docking and leaving the upper pylon, her steps curiously brought her away from the habitat ring, and close to an isolated part of the station, turned into a makeshift security brig. Away from the sancity of her quarters - and closer to him.
Kira's mind was filling with apprehension. She knew there was one place she ought to go tonight - she knew that with conviction; and she dreaded that. She owed nothing to Dukat... except maybe a few comforting words about his dead child. With certainty, she understood that he had to be informed of where his beloved daughter was interred. She could have asked Odo to convey the message, but suspected she was the only person capable of cutting through his muddled mind. Ziyal was the link of light that once existed between them, before he lost his senses, before she pushed him away. She wanted to stay away as always, and yet, she could not turn back. It was all his mind games, she thought with mounting anger. He liked indulging in that dream: a loving father, a doting mother, and a bright daughter. He liked forcing this dream on Kira too, whenever he got an upper hand, invading her life, and involving her in his.
It was not so long ago, yet it felt like eons, when they spent an evening together, in a relatively amicable atmosphere, for once, talking about Ziyal's bright future...
Cut in half, like her young life! Kira stormed past a few station inhabitants, without noticing their presence. She fought the tears that threatened to overflow her usual defenses. It's been happening a lot lately - and it was a fatal sign. Resistance fighters did not cry. She did not cry when her father died; but now, the sheer force of hurt and anger threatened to overflow her iron dam each time she let her own thoughts stray in this direction - so she didn't. There was always time to grieve. As usual.
Later.
***
Kira rounded the corner and passed two Starfleet security officers, stationed outside the external door to the brig. She came into the first chamber, separated by a golden buzz of a force field from the room where he sat, huddled in a corner. She stopped and took him in. He did not lift his head from where it was it resting, on a limp arm on top of his skinny knees, pulled towards his chest. His right hand was balled up in a fist. His whole figure was blanketed with darkness. Kira's mind searched for words that would not come. At last, she spoke, breaking the silence:
"Dukat… Dukat! Can you hear me?" – it came out in a curt, angered tone. The one she always used to talk to him, to remind him where they stood, on two opposite sides of the universe – "Dukat! I am here to talk to you about your daughter".
She got no reaction from him. His shoulders sagged, his right arm limp alongside his body, the fist balled. He was eerily still, his disheveled hair hiding his face. Not a movement, not a word. Not even a breath.
Fed up, her quick temper flaring, she turned to walk away, but stopped as his face and his words, from ages ago, floated to the front of her mind. They worked together to capture the Bird of Prey. She offered she would look after Ziyal. He was saying goodbye, before he went flying into the darkness, a pirate on the rusty Klingon vessel. His face was lit with love for his daughter and honest gratitude to Kira, for her offer to protect Ziyal from any wrong that might come her way. His eyes shone with part amusement, part genuine tenderness. 'Major, it gives me the reason to live' … were his words, directed at her, speaking of possibilities Kira did not allow herself to consider. Ziyal's face, weaved from a dream, hung in the back, trusting, innocent…
Kira turned around. This was the one thing he did not deserve - to become the living dead on her watch. In the crazy life of this magnificent bastard, war criminal, pirate rebel… their sworn enemy, their ally… his love for his daughter was the one consistent thing, the one aspect of him that pulled him towards light. Ziyal was gone. But in her memory, he needed someone to throw him a rope before he drowned.
Angrily, Kira punched in the code disabling the force field. She would have to get through to him tonight, even if she had to kill him later. 'No, first I finish off Damar, that murdering jerk!', she corrected herself, as she waited for the golden buzz to disappear. She came close to where he sat, huddled, in darkness. Only when leaning closely over him, she could tell he was still breathing. Kira kneeled beside him and shook his shoulder, hard. It earned no reaction.
"Dukat... " - she said evenly - "This is me... major... Dukat, I need to talk to you about something. We did not ask your permission. You can be angry about that later. But she deserved to be given a proper goodbye"...
She trailed off. Her words had absolutely no effect. From where she sat, she could see the hard contours of his forehead and the side of his cheek, resting on his knees. She thought she could recognize trails of old tears, showing on his grey, Cardassian ridges. She never suspected Cardassians knew how to cry, and that thought made her unreasonably angry.
"Dukat!" – she demanded - "I know you can hear me!" To punctuate her words, and let some steam off, she punched his arm. Hard. No reaction. She continued - " I don't want to be here, but I came to talk to you, not to stare at you as if you were made of stone! Stop hiding. I don't have the rest of my life to sit here and try to talk you out of your madness!"
She shook his shoulder again, hard and insistent. He did not even flinch; all her anger was met with more of his stillness.
She fumed with frustration. This day was not easy on her, and the evening was proving to be possibly even more difficult. With Dukat, nothing could be easy anyway. Prophets forbid him to let her get her way with him, even once. Kira's temper flared again. Her fist lifted, as if on its own, and she punched his arm. Again and again, hard. It just did not work, nothing worked tonight to assuage her emotions.
Kira covered her face, and worked to get her breathing under control. The sensible part of her brain argued that no one was benefiting from her beating Dukat in a pulp, though the cynical side of her begged to differ. He deserved it all, and worse. But weighing heavily on her own conscience was her guilt. This inexplicable, limitless pain of having failed Ziyal and failed him in the one promise she always intended to keep. If she wanted to get through to him, to tell him about the funeral, she needed to cool her feelings.
Kira sighed, lifted her hands away from her face and for the first time that night, she properly focused on him. Took a good measure of his long body. He was the skinniest she has ever seen him. Even when limping through the galaxy on the Bird of Prey, he never looked this spent. His grey skin looked unhealthy, with blue and green undertones. The skin on his forehead was dry and creased. His armor seemed two sizes too big for him, sticking away in an unnatural manner. It came unclasped on his right shoulder, the hard edge revealing a large tear in the shirt he wore underneath. Kira felt a painful tremble shoot through her spine. A bitter feeling of pity pooled at the top of her gut. Who was this man in front of her, coming undone? Nearly against her better judgement, she lifted her hand, tentatively. It hung in the air for just a moment, and then moved closer to the nest of his hair.
She expected them to be coarse and coated with dirt, and yet, when letting her fingers stream through them, their softness took her by surprise. Soft and black, like threads of Tholian silk. She never expected to find any softness to him; with his hard looks and biting words. She breathed out, feeling as if she lost her footing and was falling into nothing. She has never touched him before. Punching did not count. They never touched. Most of the time, he invaded her personal space and she did all she could to meet his menacing stance with a threatening pose of her own.
But now, this broken man in front of her... It did not feel as if it was him. Dukat. Her life-long enemy. She let her slim, nimble fingers move through his hair, touching his skin, massaging the back of his skull. Her other hand removed lost strands of hair from his meshavar. It cradled a left side of his face. Gently, she tried to half-lift, half-move it towards her. Initially, he resisted, but after a long while, drinking in her silent caresses, he let her turn his face. His eyes were open but absent of focus and of color, pale and clouded, as if he was looking through her, not seeing her at all.
"Dukat" - she said softly, as if talking to a child - "It's Nerys. I am here. I am real." – she paused trying to see if she could catch a flicker of recognition in his eyes. They still wore an absent expression, so she tried again –
"Dukat, I came to tell you about Ziyal's funeral…"
She felt it before she heard it: a guttural moan, coming from deep within him. Before she realized it, she was flung against the wall with a force that made her wince. She reacted immediately, her split-second responses coming to her aid, but it was a moment too late. He forced her into a lying position in the corner. Her hands were crushed to her sides, his face with pale absent eyes hung just above her face, his fingers digging into her upper arms. But the sight of him was not the most terrifying thing. The sound, tearing out of his chest, from somewhere deep within, a wave of rasping growl rising with moans and ending with the inarticulate, high-pitched wails, sent Kira's mind into a panic. They hung like this for what felt like eternity, though it must have been only a couple of seconds. Her, pushed, immobilized with fear, trembling underneath his iron-like grip, and him, above her, like a predatory bird gone blind and insane, with a guttural cry of pain that she never heard from any living being. She half expected him to start tearing at her face with his teeth. To claw out her eyes.
Instead, he collapsed onto her, his face hidden inside the hollow of her neck, his hands curled up in between his armor and her breasts, both fists balled up this time. She realized he started to sob uncontrollably. She raised a trembling hand to caress his hair again. Cramped, she shifted him into a half-sitting position against the corner. He coiled himself into a ball, shivering against her, mumbling some words in between his sobs. She halted the security officers, who hurried into the cell, shocked with the vision before them.
"Help me to take off his armor." – she commanded them from her sitting position – "You just need to unclasp and…lift it off like that, yes…"
With his armor gone, she rested her arm directly across his shoulders and started to massage the stiff muscles of his neck and back. She snapped at the security people – 'Leave us alone! I will be fine' – as they backed away, unsure. Dukat continued to half-sob, half-wail into her neck, pushing into her with a maniacal desire to disappear in the warmth of her embrace. Kira shifted, trying to get as much comfort as possible underneath the weight of him pressing her into the corner. Her arms moved in wide circles on his back and in his hair, massaging the base of his head, attempting to calm him down.
Her fingertips brushed his ridges. Worked his stiff muscles. His sobs racked her skin. Her heart fluttered with pity.
Yet again, his words, from just a few weeks earlier, floated to the front of her mind. 'We seldom see eye-to-eye Major,' - he told her then, with an unusual glimpse of something akin to honesty in his eyes as he sat, self-assuredly stretched on a sofa, in control of his own life, her life and lives of many people in the Alpha Quadrant - 'But I know you care about my daughter, and for that I am grateful'.
Kira felt the hot, pressing wave of tears fight its way up her throat, and in one final push overflowing her defenses. She clamped hard, but for once did not manage to stifle it. They broke through, painful like fire and run down her cheeks.
"I miss her, Dukat" – she whispered to him, the desperation and anguish intensifying in her with every word - "I can see her face, all the time... a face of a child… She looked so peaceful today too, as if she was asleep - just sleeping.." - Kira's voice was cracking, in this urgent need to talk...So uncharacteristically for her... words were useless, just a source of further aggravation and pain. On Bajor, between too long funeral speeches, she was rendered wordless - but here, in this grey hour between day and night, in darkness, with her old enemy in her arms, they were thunderiung through her mind, breaking the dam. He would not remember any of her words. It mattered not what she revealed to him tonight... He was too far gone, lost in his mind, to be able to take advantage of that open heart...
"She will never talk to me, tell me of her dreams, never again!" - Kira took a shuddering breath and felt her body tremble - "I saw so much Bajoran pride in her… she stood for what she believed in... and for people she loved... she was kind, she hoped for life I could never have... It is so unfair, taken from me, and taken from her!" – Kira continued in clipped words, in between short breaths – "Dukat... I failed her! I failed you... I... please… I never meant for this to happen.." - Her voice shook and broke – "Forgive me... I was not there..."
Her voice gave out. The pain was too much. She had no words left, only the tears. She knew he did not comprehend her confession, and would not remember it. He seemed to have gotten quieter, his head resting heavily on her shoulder. His lips were mumbling some disjointed words of endearment in Kardasi... She saw the large, silent tears marking their way down his neck, to his chest, soaking the thorn black shirt. In response, she tightened her arms around him.
This whispered confession of guilt tonight was for her own mental stability. She would pray to her Prophets for forgiveness, tomorrow. She would beg Ziyal's memory for mercy tomorrow, in the light of the breaking dawn. But tonight, it was in telling Dukat, or the broken shadow of the man that used to be Dukat, that she sought the refuge and relief.
They needed to grieve together, like the make-believe family he saw.
Utterly spent, she closed her eyes and leaned her head against the wall.
***
She came. You knew she was here.
You could feel her breath on your face, like a Bajoran sweet spring weather, like the haziness of waking up next to the warm, soft body of the woman you loved more than your own life, and that immediate need to shut your eyes and disappear right back into her smell, into the dream, mingled with the wind of Bajoran hills, purple colors of midday sky, shifting and falling gently into olive greens of gardens, golden light reflected from the cupolas on their meditative chambers, prayer temples, with their sinking faith right into the sweetness of their voices, re-telling their prayers and entrusting their hearts - those delicate feminine voices, sweet dreams hanging in the air, as your face disappeared into her body again and you would touch her voice as it weaved images of the future in your mind, under your closed eyelids, her hands gently caressing the scales on your neck, your ears, the ridges on your face - and you would hear her sighs as she would shift closer to you, the source of warmth, the temple of energy. Bajoran sky, pouring through open windows, smashing your senses, the sound of birds and children, mingled together, waterfalls and trees, cracking as they grow, sounds of hope and belonging, and life itself - and sweet honey-like pleasure growing in all cells of your body, under her touch; knowing this was your home, your place, your planet and your universe - all loving faces you held dear in your memory will look out for you, float in the air, sing lullabies as you put down your tired head, keep you warm and safe in the cradle of their arms, as you slept alone in a bitterly cold, bitterly grey cell of loneliness and despair...
her delicate breath, like a breeze, waking you, warming your face, for the first time since what felt like forever bringing you back to life...
***
A barely perceptible sound woke her up. She stirred and hissed in pain, trying to stretch her tangled limbs and in the process, coming across a dead weight on her upper body. Her neck was craned in an unnatural position and her back hurt like hell, resting against an extremely hard surface. She cracked open one of her eyes, trying to focus her vision. She grimaced and tried to move, again, only to find out she could not lift her left arm. What in the Prophets name happened to her las night, where was she…
She looked at the nest of silky black hair, tickling her cheek. Then, her eyes wandered down to her right palm, in her laps, currently clasped tightly in two large, grey, Cardassian ones. She heard a peaceful, deep breath, rising and falling near her chest. She felt the reality, rapidly sinking into her, heavy as if her perceptions were made of led.
Dukat. She spent the night in his cell. Asleep, cradling him in her arms. The security guards did not wake her up, for some unfathomable reason. Here she was, in the bleak, cold morning, squeezed against the wall, with the dead weight of Dukat’s sleeping body pushing into her. Who knew what time it was, her shift could have started already and soon enough, the place will be swarming with her colleagues, astonished faces taking in the scene in front of them... She grimaced, growing extremely uncomfortable, embarrassed and very alert. What the hell was she doing, sitting next to him, with his face resting so peacefully on her shoulder! She felt a bitter distaste raise in her mouth. This was wrong, on so many levels! She must have been out of her mind yesterday, talking to him, staying with him, crying and begging forgiveness... it was the pain of losing Ziyal, or maybe she too was losing her bearings. But no more - she needed to get out of here, as fast as possible!
She jerked in place and pushed against the wall, trying to shift the heavy if thin frame of the Cardassian gul to the side. Before she could give the full shove, she felt the weight leave her arm. Dukat pulled himself up, hissing low in discomfort, his grey face still full of sleep. He lifted his hands away from her palm, which suddenly felt cold, and rubbed his hooded, heavy eyelids with his knuckles. Then, his blue eyes snapped open. Without a trace of a last night’s absent madness, he slowly and deliberately looked into her eyes, deep into her; with lucidity that was as clear and sharp as she has ever seen in his eyes. Kira froze, suddenly paralyzed half-way through her movement, like a prey caught in the glare of a predator - with her face barely few inches away from his, her chest gulping air. She found herself sinking into him... staring back into his eyes, directly into the heat of his look, unable to look away. She never allowed contact this close before. It was as if the walls she carefully erected on the foundation of her righteous anger did not materialize - and she was lost in confusion, grappling to touch them with her fingers, blinded by mental fog and mesmerized. In absolute silence, the two of them took the longest moment to look deep into each other. Dukat’s eyes were looking steadily into hers. Probing, asking... Unwilling as she was to admit to herself, Kira could see a trace of last night's pain and heartbreak, hidden inside his look… mingled with a deeper, still halfway dreaming light. She was not sure what her eyes were reflecting back to him...
Suddenly, she flinched. With the corner of her eye, she saw a movement. His hand was raised, lifted towards her face... Before he managed to touch her, to do or say anything, she was on her feet, standing up right, ignoring the protesting pain in all muscles of her body, and walking out of the chamber. On the autopilot of Resistance instinct, she was running away, as far away as possible.
“Lock the force field behind me and keep him under control!” – above her shoulder, without stopping, she threw to the new set of the Federation guards as she walked away briskly across the hall.
***