Chapter Text
Kira had cut her hair. Instead of the former shoulder length, it now ended at her jaw line. Julian wasn’t used to it, and he suspected that she wasn’t either. She was no longer able to tie it back and had developed the habit of yanking her hands through it to pull it away from her face.
It was a habit she particularly showed at times like this, when she would have much rather been throwing or crushing or breaking something, but knew that she was the one who would have to fix it later.
“Do you know what the other members of my cell are doing?” she demanded. “Farming! They went back to Dakhur and decided to grow plants. But me, oh no, not me. I had to join the Militia. Maybe that’s what I should go back and do, if those damn ministers are just going to send me all the way to orbit so they don’t have to listen to me.”
Since the Cardassians’ departure, Julian had learned all kinds of new information about Kira. She was from Dakhur; she had grown up in refugee camps; she had been in the Resistance for most of her life. The withdrawal of Cardassian forces seemed to have freed something within her. She shared these truths forcefully, as if daring anyone to try and make her be silent again.
“They might have sent you here because you have experience with the station,” Julian suggested. Kira scoffed.
“What do they care about the station? They’re just going to give it away to the Federation.” She slammed her hand on the desk. (Dukat’s desk, so recently, but Julian tried not to think about the man if he could help it.) “They’re throwing away everything the Resistance fought for!”
There was nothing Julian could say to argue with that, and it was another topic he personally was trying very hard to avoid thinking about. He went for a different tactic.
“That’s why it’s good that you’re here. To protect the people on the station.”
It didn’t make her less angry (nothing would), but it got her attention. She looked at him and sighed.
When Kira had returned to the station, they each been glad to see each other. It went beyond mere relief that the other person was alive, although there was plenty of that too. It was the pleasure of having a known ally, in a time when everything else was completely unknown.
“How’s Quen?” she asked, in a quieter tone.
Julian shifted in his seat, knowing she wasn’t going to like what he was about to say. He would have been more comfortable having the conversation elsewhere, outside of the office that had been the throne room of Dukat’s private kingdom, but he respected that Kira was determined to use this room, to replace whatever memories she had of its former occupant.
“As well as can be expected without an osteogenerator. I bandaged the ribs.” Next came the hard part. Julian braced himself. “I’ll train whoever you think best for the next step of treatment.”
“Or you could stay and do it youself,” she immediately shot back.
“We’ve been over this, Kira. I can’t.”
“We need a doctor.”
“I’m not a doctor.” He had been firm on this point, the incomplete nature of his medical education a gnawing weight.
“A healer, then! Julian, please. Don’t make me beg.”
The look Kira gave him was pleading, desperate. It did not sit well with Julian, who disliked seeing Kira plead for anything, least of all for him.
“It’s not about you. It’s the Federation.”
Kira threw up her hands.
“They won’t last! What are they going to do, extradite you? They’ll have to get in line with everyone else trying to petition the ministers for something.” Julian had to look away from the intensity of her gaze, but she persisted. “You don’t even have to stay on the station, you can go down to the surface. Everywhere needs help, and I have friends who could protect you, or you could stay at one of the monasteries. There’s sick and hungry people down there. Orphans- even more than before, since the Cardassians left their own children behind. Not to mention the hybrids.”
Julian’s gaze shot up. “Hybrids?”
“Children with one Bajoran parent and one Cardassian.” Kira scowled. “You can imagine how they came about.”
He could, far better than Kira realized. Other hybrids! Dukat had made it seem as if all the others were killed in infancy. But if some of them had survived, they would need medical care, and Julian might be the only person qualified to give it, given his experience with Tora Ziyal.
For a moment he let himself imagine it: living out on some farm in Dakhur, spending his days holding clinics in the surrounding communities. Helping people. Having a home.
But it wouldn’t last. The Federation was coming, and with them, everything that Julian had been trying to escape. He shook his head.
“I can’t,” he repeated helplessly.
“Then at least tell me why. I’ve grown up my entire life fighting for my planet’s freedom. Now we’ve got it, and soon we’ll all be killing each other in civil war, and we’re losing one of the only trained healers I know. Don’t I at least deserve to know why you’re abandoning us?”
Julian winced.
The truth was, he didn’t want to leave. That was why he had stayed, lingering long past what was wise. He kept finding new excuses in the aftermath of the departing Cardassians, telling himself he would say one more day to care for patients like Quen who had been beaten by the departing Cardassians, or to help salvage any usable goods from the rubble in the infirmary.
He wanted to help Bajor recover and grow, to see children raised in freedom whose parents had long lived in fear. To see Kira live in the world she had fought so hard for.
To not have to keep running.
Julian knew that if he left now, it would only be the first flight of many, the rest of his existence nothing but endless lies and running. Could he bear to keep living that way? Was there even a point? No secret could be kept forever, Garak had shown him that. (Garak, another topic Julian was trying doggedly to keep his mind from pursuing.)
In that moment, Julian realized that he did desperately want to tell someone. To choose to have someone know.
What would be the worst that could happen, if he told Kira? She viewed the entire Federation with contempt, and the Bajoran provisional government only slightly less so. She was hardly going to betray him to either group. She might tell him to leave the station, before he put them all in danger, and he would agree with her.
If he hoped ever to confide in someone, she might be his best bet.
“I’ve never told anyone this,” Julian said quietly.
Kira sank into her own seat on the other side of the desk, watching.
Julian opened his mouth, but found that the words would not come out, I’m genetically engineered-augment-mutant-freak choking in his throat before the statements reached his lips. How to even go about telling the story that was so fragmented in his own mind?
“I… I was six.” One crack in the wall; Julian pushed at it, trying to get the long-dammed words to flow. “Small for my age. A bit awkward physically, and not very bright. In the first grade, while the other children were learning how to read and write and use a computer, I was still trying to tell a dog from a cat and a tree from a house.”
Kira blinked at him, not understanding.
“You’ve caught up since then.”
He laughed, but there was no humor to it, no sound. Just a voiceless puff of air.
“I knew that I wasn't doing as well as my classmates. I knew I was struggling. I just didn't know why. All I knew was that I was… a great disappointment to my parents.” Julian’s fingers curled into fists, nails digging into his palms. He had few clear memories of the time, but he had not forgotten the firm, hard-set line of his father’s mouth, or his mother’s tears. “I'm not sure when they made the decision, but just before my seventh birthday we left Earth for Adigeon Prime. At first, I was excited. I’d never been off-planet before, or around so many aliens. But then they gave me a room and started the treatments… and my entire world began to change.”
Kira leaned forward in her chair, frowning.
“Treatments?” she repeated.
This was where the memories splintered, his mind never able to reconcile the havoc that had been wrought as Jules was reborn. He remembered only sensations. The fear, and the pain.
“The technical term is accelerated critical neural pathway formation.” He retreated into the safe refuge of medicine, the distance of the technical. “Over two months, my genetic structure was manipulated to accelerate the growth of neuronal networks in my cerebral cortex. My IQ jumped five points a day for over two weeks. That was followed by improvements in my hand-eye coordination, reflexes, vision, stamina, height, weight- in the end everything but my name was altered in some way.”
Julian had taken care of finishing that incomplete job for his parents, when he left the moniker of Jules behind.
He continued, “When we returned to Earth, we moved to a different city. I was enrolled in a new school using falsified records my parents obtained somewhere. And instead of being the slowest learner, I was the star pupil. It wasn’t until I was fifteen that I found out what they’d done to me.”
Saying it all out loud left him feeling strangely hollowed out inside. As if he could feel the physical space where the secret had been kept.
“I don’t understand. What does that have to do with avoiding the Federation?” Kira asked.
Of course she wouldn’t understand. Even the non-Earth parties of the Federation barely did; it was a uniquely human prejudice, born from the cultural trauma of the Eugenics Wars. Humanity trying to seek control in legislation after the world almost ended in nuclear fire.
“DNA resequencing for any reason other than repairing serious birth defects is strictly illegal,” he explained.
“But it was your parents that broke the law, not you.”
It was his parents who had broken that law. But he had chosen to follow in the family tradition, hadn’t he?
“Any genetically enhanced human being is also barred from serving in Starfleet or practicing medicine. I tried to both.”
“And they caught you?” Kira guessed.
“In my third year of medical school. My parents were arrested.” He still didn’t know what had happened to them after that. He had left before the trial. “I was arrested, too, but they worried that I was too dangerous. Couldn’t risk treating me like someone normal. They thought it would be safer to lock me away immediately. Institutionalize me, like every other augment they’ve managed to find.”
“But you got away.”
Julian nodded.
He should stop there, where it was safe, not risk endangering Kira with the knowledge that no one was supposed to have. But the truth was pouring out of him, burning him from inside out, and he didn’t know how to stop any more than he knew how to start.
“I was being transported to the facility when I was approached by a man from an organization that calls itself Section 31. A rogue, independent agency that seeks out and eliminates threats to the Federation. Judge, jury, and executioner all in one. They wanted me to work for them.”
These memories were perfectly undamaged, preserved in genetically enhanced clarity. These were the specters that haunt Julian in the dark.
He watched Kira understand.
“That’s who you’re worried will find you,” she realized.
“They aren’t used to getting no for an answer.” That was part of what had saved him, ultimately. They were so convinced he wouldn’t- or couldn’t- refuse, they hadn’t been prepared for other outcomes. “I was lucky to escape them and get off the planet. If I’m here when the Federation arrives, it will be easy for them to find me, and they won’t bother waiting for an extradition hearing.”
They’d either snatch him without going through the formalities, or wait until he was once more arrested and repeat the process. Julian doubted he’d be able to get away from them a second time.
Kira’s eyes bored holes into him.
“If you leave now, where will you go?”
Another shuttle, another station, another stop in the stale cycle that he didn’t want to resume. He unclenched his fists and rested his hands atop the desk.
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
“Julian…” Kira reached out hesitantly and placed her hand over one of his own. Based on her expression, she was as unused to making such a gesture as he was to receiving it. “I know what it’s like to live your life running. I know what it’s like not to be able to go home. But Bajor needs you. We need you. The provisional government will be gone in a week, and they’ll take the Federation with them. Until then, if there’s one thing I know, it’s how to hide something on this station from the people in charge. Will you please just… think about it?”
Julian had considered the worst case scenarios of telling Kira. He had not considered that she still might want him to stay.
“One week,” Kira said. “Please. That’s all I ask.”
That brought up another memory, of Quark smiling toothily. How would you like a job? One week only. I’m in the market for a new dabo boy.
Then, Julian had been drawn in by the promise of security, a week of doing something he didn’t care for in exchange for resources he couldn’t get. It was almost the opposite now. A week in ever-growing danger, to do the right thing.
“One week,” Julian said. “That’s all.”