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(1)
Keiko understood things that grew slowly. She marveled at how much life could uncoil from a seed, a spore, a rhizome, all in silence and apparent stillness.
This was what she'd first noticed about Miles: he had an affinity for quiet. Silence wasn't the first thing most of their crewmates might have associated with Miles O'Brien, but Keiko loved how fully he could be absorbed by an engineering puzzle, how perfectly expressive he could be in the pauses between words.
After Nerys moved in with her and Miles, Keiko thought she knew what was growing among the three of them. In all the strange proximities that they had no names for, she could sense the tendrils of something delicate and new.
But as much as Keiko had tried to shield it from too much light, too much cold or heat, something seemed to retreat. Miles let Nerys to go to Bajor alone and wouldn't say why. Nerys came back and spent that night's dinner telling stories about her time in the capitol with Shakaar, and her laugh was loud and her stories sparkled, but to Keiko, the spaces between her words were cold and barren. Their son was born, and for a moment, Keiko felt the old warmth again, but when they tried to celebrate together, as a family, Kira had left early with Shakaar, all the while insisting that nothing was wrong.
Keiko tried to forget about it. Maybe it wasn't there. Maybe it was for a different climate, a different season.
But one evening, once she had finally convinced Kira to join her for tea, Keiko began to understand.
Nerys was sitting on the couch by Keiko, holding Yoshi, and Keiko watched enchantment animate her face. For a moment, Nerys seemed to only see the baby, but then a familiar, weary discipline dimmed the affection in her eyes and she looked up at Keiko, as if to apologize for showing so much.
"I'm sorry, Keiko," she said. "I'm keeping him from you." She started to lean towards Keiko, reluctantly, preparing to hand the baby back to her.
Keiko stopped her, gently, placing her hands against Kira's arms where they met Kirayoshi's tiny body. She felt the warmth of them and smiled. "Nerys, you are the one who kept him with me. You're the reason he's here at all. So you hold onto him as long as you want."
"I'm not sure you really want me to do that," replied Kira quietly.
"Nerys," said Keiko, "You're his family, too! You're allowed to love him, you know."
Kira allowed herself a small, cautious smile.
"What if he and Molly came to stay with you a night or two next week?" asked Keiko. "If you're all right with it, they could even come every week."
"Are you sure?"
"Of course! Honestly, I'd love to have some time to work on my research, and I want you to have a chance to spend some time together."
Nerys's grin was warmer than anything Keiko had seen from her in weeks.
Later that week, in the unaccustomed quiet of her quarters, Keiko turned to her work. She'd just joined a Bajoran research team working on aldan. It was a low shrub with tight-coiled, twisting branches, and it used to blanket the tundra of Bajor's polar continent. She'd heard something from her Bajoran colleagues about what the ancient poems had said about it: that the scarlet blooms that erupted only once every decade were how the earth set itself ablaze as a beacon to the Prophets. Keiko pulled the small specimen chamber from the compartment--she was always surprised by how heavy they were--and looked down at the tiny, shriveled thing that seemed to shrink away from the glass that contained it.
It looked better than it had when Keiko had collected it from a crevice between two rocks, half its leaves gone and its shoots mottled with fungus. But she had a hard time picturing this plant surviving a polar winter, let alone sending rhizomes into the frozen earth or growing big enough to blanket miles of the tundra, one single living thing iterated and multiplied out to the horizon.
She pulled up her data and adjusted the settings on the specimen chamber: more acidity for the soil, more moisture in the air, less nitrogen, a few degrees cooler. She wondered if this project would ever work, if they'd ever figure out how to make the tundra bloom again.
It had been a bleak place when Keiko had seen it: cold winds scoured the rocky, gray soil, glinting with trace metals and mottled with rough patches of lichen. Cardassian mining, her colleagues told her, had poisoned the soil and driven the aldan nearly to extinction. (Her colleagues did not tell her who had worked those mines and what they had suffered, but Keiko understood that silence all too well.)
Keiko looked up at the quiet kitchen. Their quarters were dark. Miles was working late and Kirayoshi and Molly were both with Kira. Keiko wished, for a moment, for the noise of her family, even if she so often wished for precisely this kind of quiet. Tonight, it was too much like the silence of the tundra, where the night sky was lit with ribbons of light from the wormhole but the earth offered nothing in return.
But she thought of Yoshi and Molly hearing Aunt Nerys's stories or learning old songs, filling the space with raucous warmth. She smiled. She understood, maybe for the first time, that if you made the space for it and gave it what it needed, family could expand infinitely, send its tendrils out and set worlds ablaze.
(2)
"Miles, remember when you were going to go to Bajor with Kira?" Keiko asked as they sat down to dinner the next day.
He looked at her like he'd been cornered by a Cardassian vole. "That's a way to start a meal!" He regained some composure. "I mean, yes. She left without me. Why do you ask?" He eyed her suspiciously.
"Well, I've been thinking about it," said Keiko calmly. She felt a little bad putting him through this, but she had a plan, and subtlety wasn't going to work this time. "I miss having her around, and I miss having us all together."
"But the two of us? On Bajor? What's that got to do with it?" he asked. "It's really better I didn't go. I'm... not sure you'd understand."
"I think I do understand," answered Keiko, "and I liked seeing you two together. I liked how you looked at each other." She smiled mischeviously. "It reminded me of how you look at me, and I liked getting to see that look twice as much."
"What? It's nothing like-- I mean, she doesn't compare--" sputtered Miles indignantly before trailing off into confusion. "Wait, you said you liked it?"
Keiko waited for him to catch up, then went on. "I'm saying, Miles, that when I said not to stop anything on account of me, I meant it. And I'm saying that I miss her, too." She reached for his hand across the table, and after a moment of dazed thought, he took hers. "Look, I'm sorry I sprung this on you. But I've been thinking about it, and I'd never understood what happened after Yoshi was born. I mean, I thought we were all-- I don't know, that there was really something between us all, but then you both pulled back. And I finally got it!"
"Got what?"
"You two are both so noble," she exclaimed. "You're so self-sacrificing that you'd do anything to spare my feelings without even telling me what you were trying to protect me from! So I realized that you two were never going to risk it unless I told you to."
"In another life," said Miles quietly. "That's what she said to me, in the shuttlecraft. So-- do you mean--"
"I mean maybe in this life, right now," said Keiko. "The truth is, I felt the way you did about her. I still do. So what do you say?" Keiko grinned conspiratorially. Miles, slowly but surely, smiled back.
"You know," he said, "it's a shame you never joined Starfleet. I think you have a real calling in Command."
"Is that a yes?" asked Keiko.
"I-- I suppose it is," he replied, still dazed. "Yes. But you're going to have to be the one to talk to her. There are some risks that even you can't convince me to take."
(3)
Keiko had to admit that Miles was right: the prospect of saying all this to Kira was terrifying. She'd invited her to share raktajinos and take walks around the Promenade, and they had talked about plenty--about Kirayoshi's latest fascination with Kira's earring, about the threat of a Dominion invasion, about Quark's latest schemes--but Keiko never knew how to begin.
She was a scientist, she thought to herself late one night as she and Miles took turns trying to convince Yoshi to go back to sleep. Scientists need method; they need experiments they can replicate, results they can quantify.
But the next day, when Kira happened to stop by with some gifts for the children, Keiko remembered how much science owed to chance, and she asked her to come sit with her and talk.
"Nerys," she said, "I'm just going to be blunt because I have something important to say."
Kira tensed her jaw. "Of course. Have I done something to upset you?"
"No! Not at all! This is a good thing, Nerys!" She smiled sheepishly at Kira. "It's just, well, the kind of thing that might make me feel like I've made a real fool of myself if it turns out I've guessed wrong."
Kira smiled and leaned towards Keiko on the couch. "Believe me, I've made a fool of myself more times than I can count, so you'll find no judgment here. What's on your mind?"
Keiko took a breath, and thought of rare blooms, and spoke. "You had our baby. You were part of our family, for a time. I don't think that needs to end, and I don't think we need to hold back in quite the way we've been doing." She was going to stop and let Nerys speak, but she knew that if she didn't just keep going, she'd never get the courage back, so with heart racing and cheeks flushed, she went on. "What I mean is-- I've been wanting to say for so long that I loved how close we all were before, and I wanted to say what I felt about you, and what if we tried it again, the three of us, but didn't hold back this time, and... have I made a fool of myself yet?"
Kira looked just as breathless as Keiko felt. Slowly, a little stunned, Kira leaned closer, let their shoulders touch, gingerly at first. When Keiko leaned into her, she felt Kira's shoulder relax, felt her allow Keiko to take a tiny bit more of her weight. "I don't know what to say," marveled Kira.
"I know," said Keiko. "It's a lot. I didn't know what to say either, for a long time. But then I talked to Miles--"
"You talked to Miles?" Kira laughed in disbelief.
Keiko shot her a sly smile. "He's not as traditional as you think! Just shy."
Kira shook her head. "All this time, I just thought I'd have to forget about it. That we couldn't be more to each other than-- what are we, anyway?"
"That's what we get to decide," said Keiko.
(4)
They decide. They keep deciding. When there aren't words for what they want to be, they invent.
They learn how to be together and how to be apart. They learn, shyly at first, but then more easily, how many ways the three of them can touch. Even as war approaches, there are moments of respite and light: the three of them, laughing so hard they forget the joke that started it. After Tekeny Ghemor dies, Nerys doesn't say much, but Keiko understands, and Nerys can sleep for the first time in days when she's cradled between the two of them. When the war begins and Keiko brings Kirayoshi and Molly back to Earth, the only thing that brings Keiko any comfort is remembering that Miles and Kira are on the front lines together, and that if there's anyone she'd trust to protect the people she loved, it was Kira Nerys.
Years later, after the war, Keiko can finally return to Bajor. She's living on Earth now, but she hasn't forgotten her research in the tundra. She joins her old colleagues, beams down to the surface, and is astonished to see her work thrive beneath her feet.
The low hills are dusky gold with the tiny leaves of the aldan, and shoots are beginning to emerge and sway in the chilly wind. They're going to bloom soon, sometime this summer.
She and Kira speak over subspace that night. Keiko says she's going to stop by the station on her way home, and that she'll have to come back with Miles this summer so the three of them can go to Bajor together.
They talk. Kira tells Keiko how grateful she's always been for her bravery back then. "I've been thinking about that a lot lately," she tells Keiko.
She tells her it's what she tried to call up the other week when she'd asked Kasidy if she wanted to live with her a while. It's what she remembered, she says, when she started to wonder what else she and Kasidy could be for each other.
Keiko smiles. Her family keeps growing, she thinks to herself, across solar systems and beyond the stars.