4

Odo watched Kira stride across Dax’s bedroom toward the closed door. As he stood up from the storage container, he recognized the set of her shoulders, the quickness of her movements. He knew that she intended more than simply to leave this room. She wanted to get away from him, and not for just right now.

“Nerys,” he called after her a second time, the solitary word an earnest plea for her to stop. It seemed to have no effect on her as she reached for the panel in the bulkhead beside the door. But then she hesitated, her hand hovering before the control, poised to open her route of escape.

He waited. He didn’t move, didn’t speak, afraid that going to her or saying the wrong thing would fracture whatever delicate balance had been struck, would bring her hand down on the panel and send her fleeing from him. He stood motionless, gazing at her back, hoping that she would turn to him, hoping that they could put all that had happened behind them and resume their friendship.

Kira knew that he loved her, had known for months now. She did not reciprocate his feelings. Both facts had hung between them at times, awkward realities with which neither had seemed to know how to cope. For the most part, though, they had been able to ignore those emotions and continue on, as if the revelation of Odo’s love had never taken place.

Yet as Odo waited now for Kira either to leave or stay, her reaction to his disclosure that he had slept with the Founder leader struck him as curious. Although Odo and Kira had never been romantically involved, she appeared hurt, her almost reflexive flight from him seeming like the response of a lover betrayed. He harbored no illusions that she had come to share his feelings—especially after the events on the station during the period of Dominion control—but he thought that perhaps it upset her to think that his love for her had been lessened by his actions with the Founder leader.

“Odo,” Kira said, a multitude of emotions seeming to color her tones: frustration, disappointment, even yearning of a sort. She dropped her hand to her side and turned around. As she did, the hem of her dress flared outward momentarily, just above her red-stockinged knees, a graceful movement that somehow caused his deeper feelings for her to flare as well. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I have no right…” She dropped her gaze to the floor, letting her words trail into silence.

“No, it’s all right,” Odo told her. “I want to explain it to you.”

She looked up at him again. “No,” she said, “that’s not necessary.”

“I don’t know if it is or it isn’t,” he said, “but I want to explain.” He gestured toward the vanity in the closet, toward the small stool she’d been perched upon during their conversation. “Please come sit back down,” he said. She nodded, then walked back over and took a seat again. He leaned across the doorway and worked the controls beside it, sending the closet door sliding closed.

He turned to face her, but did not sit back down himself. “I…” he started, and searched for the easiest way to refer to his liaison with the Founder leader. He decided to employ Kira’s own vernacular. “I…’slept’…with the Founder,” he stammered, uncomfortable even with the euphemism, “not so that she and I could grow closer, or share something special, but so that I could try to teach her about sol—” He hesitated, choosing to rephrase the end of his sentence. “About humanoids,” he concluded.

“About solids,” Kira said, emphasizing the word he had been about to utter.

Odo nodded, admitting to the term. “I don’t mean it in a pejorative way,” he said. “It’s simply a means of distinguishing changelings from those who can’t shapeshift.”

“That’s just it,” Kira said. “I have no interest in distinguishing between us. You’re my friend, and it’s not important to me what species you are.”

“I agree,” Odo said. “And that’s the sort of thing I was trying to convey to the Founder…my relationships with humanoids, my closeness to some of them. She didn’t understand how I could sustain such feelings.” Odo paused, wanting to isolate for Kira the words he would say next. “What I want you to know is that my…experience…with the Founder was not about intimacy, not with her. I wanted to bring her to an understanding of humanoid relationships, and to an appreciation of my feelings for some of them.”

“I don’t think it worked,” Kira observed, a hint of sarcasm in her voice.

“No, it didn’t,” Odo agreed. “It only made her pity humanoids for their inability to link with each other, for the inherent isolation of their relationships. I think it also cemented her view of changelings as superior beings.”

Kira laughed once, sharply and without humor. “I don’t know why you expected anything different.”

“But I did expect something different,” Odo said at once. He sat down on the storage bin again. “I expected to be able to demonstrate to her the joys that humanoids can share among themselves, and that, even if not in quite the same way, we can still share in those joys as well.” Although Odo had never had a romantic relationship with Kira, he had been involved with a woman named Arissa. “I wanted the Founder to know what…completed me…as an individual,” he went on, “just as she showed me what helped to complete the lives of changelings. My relationships with humanoids…with you, for example…are important parts of my life, and something I need.” He stopped, unsure if his words accurately expressed his feelings. He leaned forward, his hands on his knees. “Do you understand?” he asked Kira.

“I don’t know if I do,” she said.

“What is it that makes you whole?” he asked. “What is it that helps to complete your life in a way that you could not do without?”

“I lived under the brutal oppression of the Cardassians for most of my life,” she said. “I can do without a lot of things.”

“I know you can,” Odo acknowledged. He sat back up, automatically giving her space with her memories. “But what would you prefer not to do without?” he asked, knowing what Kira’s response would be: her faith in the Prophets. Devout without being judgmental of those who did not share her beliefs, Kira attended Bajoran shrine services frequently, and prayed to her gods in private even more often.

But she surprised him with her answer. “For a time, it was Bareil,” she said, obviously speaking of her romance with the Bajoran vedek, a romance that had ended with his death several years ago. “And then Shakaar,” she said, naming the Bajoran first minister with whom she’d subsequently had a relationship.

Startled by the response, Odo felt an anxious surge of anticipation. He both dreaded and relished the opportunity to talk with Kira about love. While discussion of such personal matters had always been difficult for him, he also knew that it could be different with Kira—he could be different with her. But in addition to whatever normal risks attended addressing issues of the heart with Kira, doing so now could derail the reason they’d come together to talk in the first place: to deal with what had come between them, and still stood in the way of their friendship. He needed to explain to her why he’d done the things that had consequently caused the rift between them, and he could not do that by speaking of romance or the deeper feelings he had for her.

“I thought you would mention your faith in the Prophets,” he told her.

“You asked what I would prefer not to live without,” Kira said. “But my faith in the Prophets is something that couldn’t possibly be taken away from me.”

“What if you learned that the Prophets were not gods?” he asked. “That they were simply alien beings with an interest in the Bajoran people?”

Although he’d seen it displayed often, it still awed him to witness Kira’s sure knowledge of the divinity of the Prophets, and her unwavering belief that they would always take care of Bajor and its people. She had lived the first quarter-century of her life during a military occupation of her planet, had been robbed of a childhood, had seen family and friends tortured, maimed, and killed, and she now functioned as a soldier in the massive, devastating war with the Dominion. And yet through all of that, her trust and faith in the Prophets had not only endured, but flourished. She’d been right to contend that her beliefs could never be taken from her, but that also reinforced the point that he wanted to make: that her faith contributed to who she was, to what defined her, and to what made her life complete.

Odo did not share Kira’s beliefs in the godhood of the aliens that existed within the Bajoran wormhole, but he surely recognized their influence on her life, and those of other Bajorans. And for the first time, he wondered why the Great Link had no such beliefs, and what it would mean to them if they did.