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Dal’s fine. He’s fine, really, all things considered. He’s not hurting anymore, as the cells of his body aren’t actively working on growing gills or antennae or an entirely new set of lungs or something (he’s pretty sure that was a possibility at some point, and it scared him). He stopped hearing other people’s thoughts (they were loud, they were so loud, he has no idea how Zero can do this all the time), so his headache’s mostly gone now too. His skin itches, a result of mutations and transformations, but Zee says that will hopefully stop soon. He also hasn’t been able to force down a bite of food ever since he got cleared from sickbay because just the thought of it makes him nauseous. But he’s fine. He’s back to normal.
Whatever that means.
He showers, washes down the slime that covered his skin, washes away the sweat and the fear, and feels marginally better, until he dries off and gets dressed and makes the mistake of stopping in front of the mirror. Just to see, he tells himself. Just to check.
The face that stares back at him is his, his scars all exactly where he remembers them to be, his spots and freckles all in the right place. All normal. Except he’s not quite sure what that means anymore.
Dr Jago said the base of his DNA was human, but he’s seen Janeway and he’s seen other holos of humans. Dal’s nothing like them, and he’s nothing like the other twenty-six species picked and mixed together to create the face that stares back at him from the mirror, the lungs that suddenly feel tight right now like there’s a hole somewhere in the hull of the Protostar and the oxygen is rushing out of the ship, the hands that grip the edge of the sink.
There’s nothing like him, and that should make him feel special, one of a kind. Instead, it just makes him feel alone and it aches worse than it did before when he simply just didn’t know.
He stifles a sound in the back of his throat that could either have been a scream or a sob, throws his towel on the mirror and bolts out of the bathroom.
When he comes out, Gwyn’s sitting on his bed, but at least the idea of her seeing him with his hair still wet and messy stopped being embarrassing a couple hours ago.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” he answers as casually as he can manage, because he’s not an idiot, he knows why she’s here, it’s just that he doesn’t want to do this right now. Or possibly ever.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Gwyn asks.
“No.”
It’s a knee-jerk reaction, coming from deeper than he’d like to admit, and Dal drops down on the bed unceremoniously, crosses his arms against his chest and very pointedly stares at the ceiling instead of Gwyn.
“Our captain, as usual, is lying,” comes Zero’s voice then from the door, and Dal wants to be angry at them for snooping around in his head when he didn’t ask for it, when he didn’t ask for any of this, but he’s too exhausted to really bring himself to it. Traitor , he thinks and squints at Zero, but even in his own mind it sounds like tired acceptance.
Gwyn nods gratefully in their direction, even though she probably already knew, and Zero takes that as a sign to hover closer. They’re just settling down on Dal’s other side on the bed when Rok, Jankom, and Murph appear cramped in the doorway like they somehow also knew, and all of them being together? That seems to officially make this a Big Feelings Time, as Rok calls it. It's usually followed by lots of ice cream, and though Dal likes that part, he’s not good at the Big Feelings part. Not at helping others with their emotions, nor at sharing his own. The little tidbits they’ve got him to talk about so far were mostly the result of either Zero’s nosiness or Gwyn’s gentle nudges, and sometimes pushes, in the right direction.
He doesn’t know which one it will be this time.
“You know,” Gwyn starts, careful at first like she’s testing the waters. “I was created in a petri dish too.”
A push.
Dal immediately springs to sit up and stares at her.
“What?” he asks, the word half-swallowed in his throat.
“It’s not the same, but I also wasn’t… born,” Gwyn explains. “I was cloned from my father’s genetic material.”
Dal deflates almost immediately, because of course she was. It's not the same, Gwyn has a father, that’s a very important thing he couldn’t forget even if he tried, but it still feels like a small spark of hope has just been extinguished in him.
He drops back down on the mattress.
“But you had your father... I don’t-” he scrambles for words, and then grabs a fistful of his hair in frustration. “I don’t even have parents! There’s just some weirdo scientist who created me on a whim!”
“But Dal, that doesn’t matter!” Rok hurries to reassure him, and for a second time today, Dal wants to be so angry at one of his friends, because Rok doesn’t get it, of course she doesn’t.
“Yeah, maybe it matters to me,” he says bitterly, staring at the empty white ceiling of the captain’s quarters. “All this time, I’ve been trying to find the answer, Rok. Find who I am. And turns out, I’m nothing. Just a mistake. A failed science experiment.”
“A failed science experiment?” Jankom jumps on the bed and yells at him, in that kind of tone of his that usually tells Dal he’s not just in it for the sake of a good argument. “Jankom calls it that when our lab almost got blown up thanks to our two geniuses trying to make popped-corn! Not you!”
He taps his feet against the bed to finish his tirade with emphasis. It doesn’t make much of a sound, because he’s standing on the soft mattress and when he realizes that, he just drops down, growling in frustration.
“Rok and Jankom have a point, you know,” Gwyn says then and she lies down too so she’s parallel to Dal on the bed. “What you were created to be doesn’t change who you are now. Or how we look at you.”
Dal wants to protest because that can’t be right, because if he can’t even look at himself right now, how could they. But his friends had seen what he really is, a mess of mismatched parts, an amalgamation of twenty-seven species - all of them and none of them at the same time - and they are still here. On his bed, trying to get him to talk about Big Feelings.
Gwyn is right, you know, Dal hears Zero say just in the quietness of their minds. It doesn’t have to change anything.
Dal's gotta teach them to be more sneaky, because he sees right away what they’re doing, extending the same kind of acceptance towards him that he’d so vehemently tried to convince Zero they were deserving of. And Dal’s not entirely sure that he is too, but he at least understands.
I know, Zee , he thinks in return.
The ceiling feels like it’s doubting him.
“I know,” he says then, out loud but still barely above a whisper.
“But it’s also understandable if you feel sad,” Gwyn adds gently.
“I’m not sad,” Dal cuts in and Gwyn just pulls up one of her eyebrows sceptically, so he groans and tries to explain, waving his hands around for emphasis like that could help convince his friends to believe him. “I mean, we barely got away from Starfleet, and now the Romulans are after us too. We don’t have time for this and... ugh, I don’t even know how I’m supposed to feel about it!”
“I... I don’t know that, Dal,” Gwyn admits and it’s sort of like she’s admitting defeat.
“Am I supposed to be disappointed? Angry? Should I be relieved I don’t actually have parents who left me on purpose?”
None of them has an answer to that. None of them mentions Nandi.
“I’m not sad,” Dal repeats weakly.
“You are grieving, Dal,” Zero tells him. He wants to protest but doesn’t.
“It’s okay.” Gwyn shifts slightly so she can take his hand.
“I’m sorry you’re sad, Dal,” Rok says softly and Dal can’t stay angry at her.
“What exactly are ya grieving for?” Jankom nudges him with his foot.
“I dunno. My parents, I guess... You know, I used to… to try to imagine them. Or my people. My homeworld or even my language. I tried to imagine what it’d be like if I found them. It’s childish, I know, I just... Now I can’t find my family, ever. Because I don’t have one.”
“You do, Dal,” Gwyn says, and Dal feels the sudden tell-tale heat of his eyes welling with tears but tries really hard to not let it show.
“Yes. We are here.” Zero agrees.
“Yes!” Rok follows suit. “I know it’s not the same but we’re… we’re kind of your family.”
“I know, Rok,” Dal says because he does, because these days that seems to be just about the only thing he’s certain of, and silently curses his voice for almost breaking at her name. He doesn’t want to cry in front of his friends, not after he already did in sickbay just this afternoon, the shame and the physical pain and the fear of not understanding what’s happening to him more than enough for him to break. He doesn’t want to cry again. He doesn’t want them to know about the covered mirror in the bathroom.
They wouldn’t judge him, he knows this, because they’re here, still here after everything that happened. It’s just that Dal, he doesn’t do crying. He's learned not to. He doesn’t do sentiment, maybe except in very specific cases where he’s about to lose one of them (which has been happening all too often lately, and each time it scared him, and Dal’s been silently praying to every god of every space-faring people he knows the name of that it never happens again).
So, Dal’s trying not to cry. He thinks Zero can probably tell. They can all probably tell. But it’s not a question of pride, it’s a question of sanity, of his life still making sense in all of this. It’s a question of normalcy, whatever that means now when he knows he was probably never meant to be anything close to normal. (And maybe he was never meant to be anything at all, but that’s just another addition to the endless, hopeless list of things Dal will never know. Maybe he was meant to be just an experiment, creation for the sake of creation.)
“I know, I just-” he starts again because he knows, because that’s about the only thing he knows, but there’s so much he doesn’t, and they all kind of form into one big question, one big, gaping hole in the fabric of who he is. And if his friends are really gonna be his crew and trust him and follow his lead, if they’re really gonna be his family, if they’re really gonna stay, then they’ve got to know about it. “I just… don’t know who I am.”
The white ceiling of the captain’s quarters doesn’t hold any answers for that but it’s the only place Dal can look without letting his tears fall.
“Uh, for starters, you dum-dum… you’re Dal,” Jankom says then like it’s obvious, and it sounds so ridiculously simple that Dal actually has to chuckle and he tears his eyes away from the ceiling to look at his friend.
“Yeah, you’re our Dal!” Rok agrees and enthusiastically clasps her hands together.
Our Dal.
“If that is enough for now,” Zero offers quickly and they gently nudge their presence against Dal's mind.
“Yeah,” Dal breathes, the sound half a chuckle and half a sob, and he can't help but squeeze Gwyn’s hand. “Yeah, I guess it is.”
“And the rest,” Gwyn squeezes back and offers him a small smile, “you have time to figure out.”