Chapter Text
The O'Brien quarters smelled like a kitchen that had actually been cooked in, not replicator-clean but the warm, layered smell of garlic that had been put in a real pan, gone slightly past golden. The table was crowded. Six places set for five people and a high chair, because Keiko set it that way and nobody argued with her about it.
Molly had her elbows on the table. Keiko was reaching across to keep Yoshi's cup from the edge and didn't notice, or didn't say.
MOLLY: But could you, though? If you really wanted to.
She wasn't asking Keiko. She had turned in her chair so she was facing Julian directly.
JULIAN: Could you what, specifically?
MOLLY: Tame a Midnight Lynx.
Miles looked up from his plate. His mouth flattened. He didn't say anything yet.
JULIAN: Where did you...
He set his fork down. His head tilted, the question already catching.
JULIAN: You went camping. The Hjarn preserve, the one with the ridge trail.
MOLLY: We read about them at the ranger station. They live in the area. Not the campsite, the area. The whole valley.
She said it quickly, before her father could find that thread.
JULIAN: Huh.
It was a small sound. Ezri was already setting her wineglass down.
JULIAN: So... could you? Yes. Theoretically.
He was looking at the middle distance now, not at Molly.
JULIAN: It's a felid. It's a large felid, but the bonding architecture in felids is fairly conserved. The lynx isn't going to bond the way a pack animal does, it won't imprint on you as leader, that whole framework doesn't apply. But cats do form attachments. They choose. So the first thing (and this is the hard part, this is genuinely the hard part), the first thing is that you have to convince it you're not prey.
MILES: Julian.
JULIAN: Which is not trivial, because to a Midnight Lynx, most things are prey. You're warm, you're slow, you make noise. Everything about you reads as food.
He picked the fork back up, gestured with it, set it down again without using it.
JULIAN: But once it's past that, once it's genuinely decided you're not on the menu, the bond would be real. That's the thing people get wrong. They think a tamed predator is a suppressed predator. It isn't. The affection a cat gives you is not a performance, it's not survival behavior, it actually... it chose you. That part would be true.
Yoshi banged his cup once on the high-chair tray, experimentally. Nobody had been paying attention to him.
MOLLY: So I could.
JULIAN: I wouldn't recommend it.
MOLLY: But you said...
JULIAN: I said theoretically. The recommendation and the theory are two different things.
He held up a hand, and then, because the thread hadn't actually finished pulling, kept going.
JULIAN: The trickiest part isn't even the prey thing. It's play. A house cat plays gently because it learned to. Kittens learn bite inhibition from their littermates and their mother, there's a whole feedback loop, the sibling yelps and the kitten learns that was too hard. A Midnight Lynx never had to learn that. Its idea of gentle is calibrated for something with a much thicker hide than yours. So you'd have to teach it. Deliberately. From scratch, as an adult animal, a behavior it has no developmental scaffold for, and you'd have to do it without ever once letting it succeed at hurting you, because the first time it learns that works...
He stopped. His head tipped to one side.
JULIAN: Although. The Vulcans manage it. Sehlats. They're not lynxes, they're bigger, frankly they're more dangerous, and Vulcan families keep them as children's pets. So somebody worked the problem. There's a body of practice there.
His gaze shifted, briefly, to a new point past the table.
JULIAN: Velik might know how they do it. I should ask Velik.
MILES: You are not asking Velik.
Miles had put his own fork down now.
MILES: Julian. Stop. You are sitting at my dinner table actively encouraging my eleven-year-old to make friends with a...
He reached for it.
MILES: A four-stone murder cat.
JULIAN: I told her I wouldn't recommend it.
MILES: You told her the bond would be real. You think she heard the disclaimer? Molly. Did you hear the disclaimer?
Molly was already somewhere else, chin in her hand, eyes bright.
KEIKO: She didn't hear the disclaimer.
YOSHI: Roar.
He said it to the table at large, pleased with himself, both small hands up like claws.
And the living room made a sound.
The sound was soft: a heavy, considered, four-footed settling, the sound of weight finding the rug.
Everyone stopped.
Miles was up first, between the table and the doorway, one hand back toward Yoshi's high chair without looking, his face still on the dinner he'd been eating a second ago.
In the living room, beside the couch, on the rug Keiko had brought from Earth, sat a Midnight Lynx.
It was the size of a large dog and did not look like one. It looked like something the dark had decided to make solid. Black going to deeper black, a heavy wedge of a head, eyes a flat reflective gold that took in the table, the people, the high chair, and surveyed all of it, calm and total. Inventory. The tufts on its ears moved. Nothing else did.
MOLLY: Oh.
It was a small, breathed oh, all the air gone out of it.
MILES: Nobody move. Keiko, get... nobody...
He had stood too, but slowly, and his voice came out low and even and absolutely certain.
JULIAN: Don't run. None of you run. Running is the one thing...
His eyes hadn't left the animal.
JULIAN: Where did it come from? There's no... we're on a station.
The air beside the couch folded, and unfolded, and was occupied.
Q: Julian! Congratulations.
He was leaning against the back of the O'Briens' couch as though he had been there the whole evening, arms crossed, beaming, in a Starfleet captain's uniform he had not earned and had clearly chosen for the occasion.
Q: I've been neglecting you. I admit it freely. I've been terribly remiss. And you've gone and gotten so fascinating in the meantime. A captaincy. A marriage.
He said the word as though it were a charming local custom.
Q: It seemed rude not to mark it. Think of it as a wedding present. Or a promotion gift. I couldn't decide, so... both. It's a very fine specimen, you'll notice. I went to some trouble.
The lynx had not reacted to Q at all. It was watching Yoshi.
JULIAN: Q. Get it out of here.
Q: I bring you a creature of genuine magnificence (a perfect predator, the precise thing the boy was roaring about not thirty seconds ago, I do listen), and that's the thanks. 'Get it out of here.'
He pushed off the couch with a long, theatrical sigh.
Q: No appreciation. There never is. No matter.
He snapped his fingers.
The lynx was simply not there. The rug held the faint round impression of where it had been, and then that smoothed itself away too.
The room let out a breath it had been holding as a single unit.
Q snapped his fingers again.
Something black and small wound itself out of the air at ankle height, and a sleek short-haired cat (an ordinary cat, a cat-sized cat, glossy as a wet stone) pressed the length of its body against Julian's shins and turned to do it again the other way.
Q: There. All the charm. Considerably less of the danger.
He was already at the edge of leaving, the light around him beginning to lean.
Q: Do watch the claws, though. That part I couldn't do much about.
He was gone.
Nobody said anything. The environmental hum filled the quarters back up, the way water closes over a dropped stone. Yoshi looked at the cat. The cat sat down on Julian's left foot and began, unhurried, to wash one shoulder.
Julian looked down at it. It did not look back. It had already decided about him.
JULIAN: I guess we have a cat now.
Ezri's hand had found his wrist somewhere in the last thirty seconds and stayed there. A breath of a laugh she hadn't quite let out.
Miles lowered himself back into his chair. He picked up his fork. He looked at the cat, and at Julian, and at his daughter, who had slid out of her seat entirely and was approaching the animal on the floor in tiny, deliberate half-steps, hands open at her sides.
MILES: If I see any more wildlife this week, I'm putting in for leave.