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Kirayoshi O’Brian trudged down the old El Camino Real path towards his parent’s apartment. He preferred going this way, even if it wasn’t the most direct route. Past the market building on one side and, farther down, Starfleet Academy, where his dad still taught engineering courses.
The bay was restless and there was a decidedly cold nip to the air. He could sit out there on the pier and stare off out into the water for hours. Yoshi was a contemplative sort who enjoyed that sort of thing. Just sitting there and thinking. Sometimes he thought about what it would be like to sail away on one of the giant ocean liner vessels. Or how far he’d get if he just jumped into the water and swam for as long as he could. Today though, he was due at his parent’s and didn’t stop.
Yoshi sighed. He loved his parents, really he did, but he wasn’t particularly excited about seeing them right now. He knew how dinner was going to go. “I’m worried about him, Miles,” he’d overheard his mother say to his dad the last time he’d been there two weeks ago. Evidently he wasn’t as good as hiding his restlessness and general dissatisfaction with life as he thought he was.
It wasn’t that anything was wrong exactly. He’d finished school last year. He had a job and an apartment he shared with two other housemates. He had a family that cared about him and a circle of people he loosely called friends. But none of it felt right. He was just going through the motions. Like a leaf in the wind, he felt blown this way and that, with no control over where he was going and no idea how to change course.
And now his well-meaning but over-bearing mom had picked up on his depressed mood and was going to try to fix things. As we walked up the steps, he made a promise to himself that he wouldn’t snap at her when she inevitably tried. She was only trying to help after all. But at the same time he made it, he knew the chance he’d actually keep that promise was slim. And that made him even more irritable than he already was, he realized as he knocked on the door to be let in.
He was surprised when her meddling took a different form than anticipated. They were halfway through dinner when it came. She put his dad up to it for one. “Listen, Yoshi, how do you feel about taking a trip?” Miles O’Brian asked.
Yoshi shrugged. “Where to?”
“Bajor,” this from his mom. “Nerys inquired about us going for a visit. Molly’s finishing up exams at the academy, and as much as your father wants to go, it’s not a good time for either of us to leave work right now.” Keiko gave her husband a pointed look and he sulked into his beer. “It’s you in particular she wants to see anyway Yoshi,” she continued. “I think this would be really good for both of you.”
Yoshi, of course, had been told about the strange circumstances surrounding how he’d been born. How his parents had been living on a remote space station far away. His mom had had some sort of accident when pregnant with him. His father’s commanding officer had acted as an emergency surrogate and been the one to actually carry the pregnancy to term and give birth to him.
He was even named in part for Kira Nerys. His family had left the space station when he was still an infant though. Too young for him to remember her, or anything really, of his brief time there. Despite moving back to Earth, Yoshi knew his parents still considered her a close friend and kept in touch. Growing up he was frequently called to the com link to say hi to an alien woman with short red hair and a wrinkled nose.
Kira was a war hero, he’d even read about her in class. That she was acknowledged as such, here in San Francisco, Starfleet central where it seemed like every 3rd admiral was a war hero, was certainly saying something.
The Kira he read about, the one who killed legions of Jem H’adair and plotted revolutions was hard to reconcile with the Kira who sent him Bajoran candies and smiled indulgently at him from light years away. The Kira he knew was nothing but kind. As a child he’d frequently gone to bed listening to her tell him Bajoran folk tales. Once when he and Molly were teenagers, Nerys had scared the crap out of them both with a story about Borhyas. They had loved every minute of it.
They spoke less frequently lately. When they did, she would ask about his life, what he was doing, what he wanted to do. Sometimes she told him funny stories about his parents. He would shyly respond to her questions. He didn’t mind talking to Kira, not at all. He liked her. But as a young adult he felt a little uncomfortable, a little intimidated, by her.
“Nerys should have family around her,” his mom was saying. “It’s been too long. And Yoshi, just think, a trip to Deep Space Nine…” The prospect of a change of scenery, an adventure of sorts is definitely intriguing. And so, it isn’t long before he finds himself agreeing to go.
The transport from Earth to Bajor took three weeks. For all Yoshi’s intergalactic start to life, once the O’Brians settled into life on Earth they had pretty much stayed there. Yoshi had only been off planet a handful of times and certainly never on a trip of this magnitude. He tried to act the part of the seasoned space traveler, instead of a gawking tourist, but felt like he was probably failing pretty miserably since everything was so new.
Deep Space Nine was bigger and more imposing than he’d thought it would be. Beautiful, in a gothic, kind of creepy, sort of way. And Kira Nerys. Well, she was just as imposing in person as he suspected she might be. More so, even. Yoshi wasn’t tall, but he stood over her by a good six inches. Despite her diminutive stature, she was clearly the one in charge around here. Kira radiated a sense of authority that was unmistakable. She was waiting for him at the airlock as the passengers disembarked. For some reason, he hadn’t been expecting that. Thought she’d send someone for him or something. She welcomed him warmly. As she placed an arm around his shoulders and led him down the hall, he didn’t miss the strange, curious looks aimed their way by his fellow passengers as well as from the uniformed Deep Space Nine staff. Kira ignored them, so did Yoshi as well.
“You’ll be sharing with me for the time being,” she tells him. “Until the Bolian contingent leaves, we don’t have any extra rooms.” She looks at him almost nervously. “I hope that’s okay. Lieutenant Paka’s practically living with her boyfriend as it is. I could ask them to move in together and give up a set of quarters sooner if you’d like.”
“It’s okay. Really. I don’t mind,” he assures her.
“Well, here we are.”
Kira’s quarters weren’t fancy. Not that Yoshi had particularly been expecting such. Kira wasn’t the type. He knew her well enough to know she was too blunt, too grounded for any sort of frivolity. So unlike most Starfleet officers he’d met. The only concession to her position as commander of the station was that the room boasted a fabulous sight of the wormhole from the view screen that took up most of the far wall. Otherwise the place was pretty plain. An eating nook with a table and a couple chairs to the left. The table boasted an empty mug and a number of assorted padds in a half hazard pile. A couch to the right of the door contained even more piles of various padds stacked on it. There wasn’t much in the way of personal decorations. A medium size plant, his mom would know what type, he didn’t, in a silver bucket in the corner and on the other side of the room, an odd circular sculpture were about it.
“I have to go back to Ops,” Kira informs him after showing him to her quarters. “Make yourself at home and settle in. Or wander around if you’d like. I shouldn’t be too long. 18:00ish, I’ll come find you and take you to dinner? Then maybe a tour of the station?”
“Sounds good.”
“I’m glad you’re here Yoshi,” she says and gives him a quick hug. As she walks out the door, she activates her com badge and he hears her telling some poor Ensign, “For prophets sake, DON’T TOUCH THAT DISPLAY until I get there.”
She takes him to the Klingon restaurant on the promenade. He’d never had Klingon food before. It was certainly interesting and he wasn’t sure he could eat it at first, but found he actually enjoyed it.
Yoshi wakes up the next morning to an odd sound coming from the common area of his new quarters. He finds Kira, in a simple white tunic, kneeling before the circular sculpture on the wall. Her back was to him and she was chanting softly in what must have been Bajoran. The translator wasn’t picking it up. Yoshi didn’t mean to pry, but he was curious and took a step further down the hall.
“Odo valla t’shara. T’shara Odo, t’shara.” He watches as she bows her head and falls silent. After a moment she rises and blows out the candles she had displayed. When she turns, he sees tears in her eyes. She sees him standing in the hallway then and gives him a sad smile.
“I’m sorry Yoshi. I didn’t mean to wake you. Morning devotions is, well, a downside to sharing living space with a Bajoran. I should have warned you. I’m not used to having company much these days I’m afraid.”
“You’re praying?”
She orders a raktajino from the replicator and sits down on the couch before answering. She pats the side of the couch next to her in invitation and he joins her.
“I don’t know very much about Earth religions,” she starts. “What you understand as prayer is, I think, as pretty close a translation as there is. We, Bajorans that follow the faith that is, look to the wisdom of the prophets for guidance in living our lives. Meditations and devotions help focus the mind.” Kira sighs. “I’ve been thinking about a certain friend of mine a lot lately. Just now, I was asking the prophets to look over him, to send him strength. I can’t be there for him but I can pray for his well being. He’d scoff at that, tell me not to bother, but it’s healing to the soul just in the asking.”
Yoshi is intrigued and says as much.
“If you’re interested, I’ll introduce you to one of Vedeks at the shrine. I wouldn’t be surprised if the prophets are attentive to you. You are my child in a way,” Kira says with a teasing grin. “I think you can claim some Bajoran heritage.”
Yoshi discovered Quarks that second day on the station, Kira having pointedly steered him away from the place the night before when they went to dinner. It was quiet, being that it was mid-afternoon and that point at which the lunch crowd had long dispersed but the dinner crowd not yet arrived.
The Ferengi behind the counter hands him a mug of root beer. “On the house,” he tells Yoshi. “It’s been a long time since an O’Brian’s been in my bar. I guess I’m getting sentimental in my old age.”
“You know who I am? Knew my parents when they were here?” Yoshi asks surprised. No one else he had met so far had seemed to know about his connection to the station. Or if they did, they didn’t mention it.
“Kira and I, we’re the only ones left that have been hanging around this space heap since before you were born. Those were the days. I mean, there was that pesky Dominion War going on but still, it’s never been the same since.” The bartender chuckles, “I’ll never forget Kira pregnant. That was a sight you wouldn’t believe. Your dad fawned over her like a sycophant. You know she almost killed the two of you?”
Yoshi shakes his head.
“Ask her about it, if you dare. Chasing after that loony Cardassian like she did. No self-preservation instinct, that woman. I don’t know who was more upset about that, your parents or Odo.”
“Odo?” That name again. Could he have been the friend Kira mentioned earlier?
“Did your parents tell you nothing? Hold on.” Quark rummages around in a storage closet for a moment and comes back out holding a padd. “Odo and Kira,” he says, punching in an access code and handing it to Yoshi.
It was one of those padds containing pictures rather than text. Yoshi saw memorialized a younger Kira wearing a stunning red dress and dancing in the arms of a strange looking man who held her tight and was looking at her like she was his entire world. In a second picture of the same two, this time in uniform, Kira was sitting on a bar stool, the man standing behind her with his hands on her shoulders. Kira was leaning back against his chest and turning her head around to kiss his cheek.
There were other people in some of the pictures as well. Yoshi recognized his dad and Uncle Julian in a few. In another, a pretty dark haired woman with spots trailing down her neck had an arm around both Kira and the man who must have been Odo. Kira was making a vaguely rude gesture towards whoever was taking the picture (probably the Ferengi, Yoshi realized) and all three of them, even the stoic looking Odo, were laughing hysterically.
As Yoshi flipped through the pictures, the Ferengi continued to talk. “I can’t handle this yet, Quark, she tells me. I’m not ready. Someday maybe I will be. Keep it for me? Like I’m running a storage facility here. I’m not even charging her. Once a year though. Once a year she tells Ops in no uncertain terms to leave her alone. She comes in here for the padd and a large bottle of whiskey and disappears into her quarters. That’s another gross Earth drink, whiskey. Disgusting, but maybe that’s why she picks it. She always comes back the next day hung over from drink and with a haunted look. Says it turns out she still isn’t ready.”
“Who is he? They look so happy. What happened?”
“The fool left her.” Yoshi makes an astonished gasp. “Yeah, I don’t know how he walked away from that either,” Quark says. “He loved her. Deeply. Everyone knew it. But that’s a changeling you’re looking at there. He left to save his damn crazy ass liquid people and teach them not to be so hell bent on taking over the quadrant. So far it’s worked, but that there is a lifelong mission for sure. And she let him go. Acts like everything’s ok when clearly it isn’t for her, even after all these years. But then again, it’s not like she can do anything about it.” The Ferengi takes back the padd at that. “Best not to let anyone else on the station see this,” he says and leaves Yoshi to nurse his root beer.
Yoshi sits there, lost in thought for a while. When Kira shows up looking for him, he tells her he wants to stay. Maybe take classes on Bajor. Or get a job on the station. He isn’t sure yet. It doesn’t matter. All he knows is that this place feels like home to him and he doesn’t want to leave.