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Volunteering to carry Keiko O'Brien's child was more difficult for Nerys than, for example, killing her first Cardassian.
This was an embarrassing thing to admit for someone who would like to consider herself an ethical person; an ethical person should probably feel better about the decision to save a baby than the decision to murder anybody. She had felt better about it, at the time. Still, she understood the weight of a corpse. A corpse weighed about the same when you killed it as it was going to weigh for as long as you had to carry it. New life, on the other hand, was an unknown quantity which – it turned out – continued to accumulate unexpected bulk on both the physical and the metaphorical level.
Deciding to move in with the O'Briens was almost definitely less difficult than volunteering her body up as a habitat for proto-humans. It was probably even less difficult deciding to kill a Cardassian – or so she'd thought at the time that she'd made the decision. She was currently considering a revision of her opinion.
“I can't go back there,” she announced, to the ceiling of the security office.
Odo generated a furrow in his brow. “Did something happen?”
Nerys glared at the ceiling of the security office. It was bland and Cardassian, but still better than looking at the more alien mound of her stomach. “What time is it right now?”
“Eighteen-thirty-seven, Starfleet standard?”
“Right. That puts us about five minutes into dinner, which means we're about to have the conversation about how I'm feeling, how much I'm eating, whether I'm getting any of the human pregnancy symptoms they expect – and then after they're done prying into all that, we're back to the same exact conversation about whether or not Molly's ready for a bigger bed that they've had every night this week. The exact same conversation! Word for word!”
“Ah,” said Odo, cautiously. “That's ...”
“Get her a bigger bed or don't get her a bigger bed, but just do one or the other and shut up about it! ...is what I would have said if I were there. Which is why I can't be there.” Nerys rubbed her forehead. She'd never heard of anyone getting headaches with a pregnancy before, but no other Bajoran woman had ever been stupid enough to volunteer to have an alien dropped into their stomach, either.
It wasn't that she didn't like the O'Briens. It wasn't even that the O'Briens had overwhelmingly boring dinner conversations; to a casual visitor they would probably seem tolerably dull at worst. You could describe their family life as pleasantly restful (except when O'Brien was on some kind of mildly xenophobic rant, or Keiko had marched up onto a perceived moral high ground and was setting up camp there, or Molly was having a tantrum and throwing everything she owned around a set of quarters that seemed to get smaller by the minute, including Nerys', because she'd been stupid enough to tell Molly that she could come into her room any time she wanted, and why had she done that, what had she been thinking?)
It would all have been fine for a night. Nerys was confident in her mastery of the basics of small talk; after the first political dinner she'd been required to attend with Shakar, Dax had forced her through a solid month of small talk boot camp, and she refused to let this torture go to waste. Small talk with the O'Briens, under the circumstances, was awkward – everything about the situation was awkward – and the constant inquiries into the behavior of her body was driving her more than a little bit up the wall. But they were nice people, and they were trying hard and putting a lot of goodwill on the table, all of which was more than you could say of most of the people she had to talk to at the political dinners.
It was fine for a night. But it never stopped. It never stopped. Nerys didn't understand it. She was used to living in small quarters, used to being surrounded by people; she'd had her own space for four years now, maybe she'd lost the knack, but still she hadn't thought it would grate on her nerves this badly. Or maybe it had just been different underground. Underground, everyone knew how to be quiet; everyone knew it was needed. How could you spend the same night with the same people, over and over again, and just keep on talking? What kind of people didn't need silence?
“You could move back out,” said Odo, after a moment.
“I could.” Nerys leaned back, bracing her arms on the back of the chair behind her. Moving out would be a kind of strategic retreat. She felt off-center and out of balance; she couldn't retreat when she felt too heavy to run anywhere. She sighed, letting her head flop back on her neck. “But I can't. It means so much to Keiko to have me there, it's her kid –”
“Even without that, you've already rearranged your life for the O'Briens,” said Odo. “Significantly.”
Nerys grimaced. The first impulse was to protest that she didn't mind, she was happy to do it, but Keiko and O'Brien weren't anywhere around. “Don't I know it!” she said instead, enjoying the petty taste of the words on her tongue, and lifted her head back up straight. “I can't even sleep on my stomach anymore. Do you know how hard it is to sleep on your back all the time?”
“No,” said Odo, a little apologetically.
“I keep feeling like someone's about to stick me in a suspended animation pod. And the lid won't even fit on top, because my stomach is the size of a damn Horta!”
She let her palm drop on the offending stomach, the strange swell of flesh under her uniform. Odo said nothing. The thought occurred that, to Odo, the whole thing must seem bizarre at best – disgusting at worst. Protecting the fleshy unborn by wrapping them in more flesh. Solid life forms at their most abundantly strange. Jake Sisko had once won a 'bizarre foods from your homeworld' contest at Quark's by having the replicator create him a turducken. She kept thinking about that at the worst times.
“But Keiko didn't get a choice about all this,” she said, aloud. “And I did. It's hard for both of us, but when it comes down to it, I'm the one that got a choice. Right?”
“True,” said Odo. “Hypothetically, you could have said no.”
“Hypothetically,” said Nerys.
Maybe moving in with the O'Briens was a harder decision than agreeing to carry the baby, after all. There was at least one way in which volunteering to carry Keiko's baby was like killing a Cardassian – once you'd done it, that was it. No takebacks. You didn't have to make the choice again and again, all the damn time.
“I'll go back,” she said, trying for a tone of determination. It sounded flimsy to her ears. “Damn! Odo, I'm sorry, I know you've got work to do, I didn't mean you had to listen to me complain for another hour.” She wouldn't have come here to begin with, except that Sisko had seized on the opportunity to loan her old quarters to the Denobulan ambassador almost as soon as she vacated them. It was a huge station; how could it be so hard to find somewhere to be alone?
Odo regarded her for a moment. “Well,” he said, “as it happens, I could use a second opinion on these reports.” He set them down carefully on the desk, next to her. “I've been staring at them all day, and my eyes are tired – or rather --” His mouth creased briefly in one of his strange, artificial smiles. “-- you could say I'm tired of having eyes. Ahem.”
“Hah,” said Nerys, politely. Dax thought it was a good deed to encourage Odo in his attempts at humor. Nerys wasn't sure if she agreed. She liked that Odo was serious. It meant that you knew where you stood.
“I was thinking of spending an hour or so as a potted plant, just for the break.”
“...Now I actually can't tell if you're joking,” said Nerys.
“Quite serious. I didn't want to seem rude by assuming a non-human form while you were still here, but --”
“No,” said Nerys, aware that her attempts not to sound embarrassingly fervent were failing. “No, no, it wouldn't be rude at all – please, go ahead.”
Odo gave a small, awkward cough. “Stay as long as you need to,” he said, “to finish the reports, I mean. We can talk about them tomorrow. Leave whenever you want, don't mind me. Plant cellular structures are extremely absorbing.”
Nerys raised her eyebrows. “If you say so.”
“Well, then,” said Odo, glanced away, and began to melt. Nerys felt a stab of entirely expected envy as she watched him re-form himself, the usual overwhelming beigeness of his person blossoming into a vibrant green. She didn't want to be in another shape, not exactly, but at least she wanted to feel like she recognized the shape she had. She didn't want to be weightless, but she could have done with a little less weight.
But the completion of Odo's transformation distracted her from her brooding. “Hey, that's the one I gave you!” she exclamed, feeling herself break into a smile. “Whatever happened to that plant, anyway?”
Odo sat plantily on the floor and did not respond.
He was probably already absorbed in plant cellular structures, or something. That was fine; that was more than fine. Nerys stretched herself upwards and then wandered around the desk to take a seat in Odo's now-vacant chair. She stretched again and leaned back; glanced down at the Odo-plant, which continued to do nothing conspicuous with itself at all; and then leaned back even further and put her feet up on the desk. Then she had to adjust again, so that the bulge of Keiko's baby balanced between the support of the desk and the chair's back.
There were people who said that every time you took a life, you killed a little piece of yourself, too. Right now, Nerys felt like it was easier to adjust to being less than to being more. But at least when the room was empty – or nearly empty – she didn't feel as much like she was taking up so much damn space.
She picked up the reports that Odo had left her, as a token gesture in case anyone else walked in, and closed her eyes. She'd go back soon. She'd made her decisions. For the next however many months, her body didn't belong entirely to her, but she was the one who'd made that call, and she'd figure out a way to live with it. She'd managed to live with all her choices, one way or another.
For now, at least it was quiet, and she was alone. Mostly alone.
**
It was itchy. Everything was itchy. Everything was itchy and heavy. Odo picked up the pad with his reports and attempted, once more, to focus on it. Yet again, he failed. There had to be millions of wool fibers poking into his skin, and it seemed like he could feel every one of them. A scratch on the back of the pad intruded its presence onto his fingers by the distinction of its texture. The text swam in his vision, and his eyes hurt.
Tired of having eyes, he'd said to Kira – last week? Was it just last week? Ha ha, very witty, Odo. No wonder solids had always seemed resentful of him. If this was how they felt stuck in their bodies all the time, it was a wonder one of them hadn't murdered him by now, just for being so horrendously smug. He could gladly go back in time and punch his past self in the face.
Then again, his past self would probably be just as happy to punch his present self in the face. Sitting around, wallowing in self-pity, mired in sensation, drowning in feelings – his past self would be disgusted. His past self wouldn't understand. But his past self would be correct, all the same.
“This is ridiculous,” he snarled, and raised his arm in a fit of fury to throw the pad across the room –
“Odo?”
Kira blinked at him, and then, with belated courtesy, knocked on the door behind her. “That's station property,” she remarked. “You break it, I have to talk to the security chief, get him to write you up for vandalism.”
The involuntary creasing of Odo's face startled him. Who would have thought that muscles had so many independent opinions about things? “Sorry,” he said, straightening it out again, and carefully lowered the pad to his desk. “There's, ah, a bug in the security protocols that I've been banging my head against all day.” The lie wasn't fooling either of them, but Kira kindly let it pass. “What brings you here today, Major?”
Kira settled herself wearily down across from him, one hand resting absently on her stomach. It startled Odo; he was expecting her to flop. A few weeks ago, she would have. For the first time, it genuinely struck him that the addition of the O'Brien child had changed the way she moved her body in space – less comfortable, more careful. He wondered what it looked like now when he moved, to an outside eye. He wondered what it had looked like before.
He realized he'd missed the beginning of what Kira had been saying, and tuned in again hastily. “-- now O'Brien think we're, what? Ganging up on him?” Kira was saying. “The man is a grown adult! It shouldn't send him into a panic to hear women talking about the facts of life!”
“Mm,” said Odo sympathetically, as seemed to be expected of him.
“And Dax, of course, thinks it's all hysterically funny. Well, she would! I guess for her, having a parasite in her stomach is normal!” She paused. “Don't tell Jadzia I said that. Or the O'Briens.”
Odo chuckled. That wasn't a conscious decision either, though he might have made the decision to do so, had he been thinking about it. If it hadn't been so strange, so uncomfortable, it might have been fascinating, simply observing the things his body decided to do of its own volition. It was fascinating. It would have been fascinating. Observed from a distance, which he had not got.
“But enough about me,” said Kira, after another pause. Her face had smoothed out into seriousness again. “How are you doing?”
Odo had braced himself for it; still, he thought that he could happily exist for another century without hearing those words again. “I'm fine,” he said, gruffly. He could feel his own body language changing, body stiffening without his consent, and wondered if Kira would notice. “Everything's fine.”
Kira gave him a look. Reading expressions was not Odo's forte, but he thought he could translate this time: I think you're full of crap, her face said, but I won't push it. “You know what the worst thing about the timing of all this is,” she said.
“Mm?”
“You could finally have a drink with me, except that I can't have a damn drink.”
This was the first time he remembered hearing this complaint. “Why's that?”
“Alcohol has some kind of negative effect on human fetuses. Seems to me --” She flicked her stomach. “-- like a pretty big design flaw. When in your life are you gonna need a drink more than when you're hauling around twenty extra pounds, swimming in hormones, and stuck on desk duty?”
Odo snorted. “Solid life doesn't appear to be anything but design flaws.”
Almost immediately, he wished he hadn't said it. He might not have any control over his form anymore, but he still had control over his mind and his mouth; he ought to be able at least to exercise that.
Kira was giving him that sympathetic look again, but her tone was light as she said, “We sure as hell are. You've got to laugh about it, or you'll cry.”
“I'm not noted for my sense of humor, Major,” said Odo, stiffly.
“Well, neither am I,” said Kira, with some spirit, “so if you want to follow my example, I guess you've got a couple more options – shout, rant and sulk, take your pick. I've got to say, I really recommend the sulking. Extremely effective.”
Odo didn't think this was quite fair. It was true that Kira had done her share of ranting and sulking over the past two weeks, but only here. Only in the closest thing to privacy that she could get.
She'd been silent for a few moments now; she'd managed to prop her feet up on the desk and was stretched back in her chair, eyes half-lidded, gazing behind him at nothing in particular. He closed his own eyes, feeling a sudden pang. “Major,” he said, “I have to apologize.”
Kira's gaze snapped back into focus. “What for?”
“I was thinking I might take a walk, if you – wanted to review my files, but --” He was too tired, right now he couldn't bear the idea of exposing himself to an assault of unfamiliar sensations, allowing his body to perform its bizarre and independent tricks to whatever audience he might come across. He couldn't leave this room. It was all the sanctuary he had. He drew himself up, stiffly. “I can see what rooms might be unoccupied right now, if you wanted a quiet place to – ah, to work.”
“Oh! I mean, sure, I can take a hint --” Kira cast a longing look in the direction of her feet, and slowly began to ease herself straighter in her chair.
“No,” said Odo, flustered. “I didn't mean – it's just, I can't --” He coughed. Sometimes he'd wondered if finding the right words would be easier when he was a solid, if somehow the constructed physical link between their minds and their glands and their vocal chords allowed them to just know how to communicate. It turned out this was emphatically not the case. “I regret that I can't offer you the solitude that I did before, Major. That's all.”
Kira was silent for a few more moments. This time Odo couldn't read her expression at all. He'd spent so long, when he was young, marveling over the myriad miniscule ways in which solids manipulated their faces. He could control his whole body down to the molecule, and yet that level of transformation had always been beyond him. That, at least, hadn't changed.
“Odo,” said Kira, eventually, “don't take this the wrong way, but if that's what's bothering you, I'm just as happy to sit here and pretend you're a plant. That all right?”
Odo stared at her. “You're not serious.”
“Perfectly serious. If that's OK?”
After a beat, Odo said, “Perfectly OK.”
“Great,” said Kira, and closed her eyes. It was strange how such a small movement coud seem so decisive.
Odo converted his startled laugh into another cough, and sat back in his chair, then straightened hastily again when he heard it creak beneath him. The goal, then, he thought, was not to make a sound, and he thought he could do it.
He'd sat perfectly still in this way so many times, in so many sedentary shapes, comfortably quiet and comfortably invisible. Now he was trapped in this form that was not only capable of movement, but terrifyingly insistent on asserting its right to do so – but if he could control it enough to prevent that, that was something. If he could sit still, still enough to let Kira retain the illusion of solitude, that was something.
Odo sat across from Kira, and let his own eyes close. He could almost believe that he wasn't there.