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The problem, Nerys thinks, is the same thing it always is: she’s no good at this.
It’s something she’s noticed several times and regretted an equal number. But it hasn’t changed, the way that Jadzia’s lofty superiority had settled into a distant confidence in breaking the rules, the way that Sisko’s steel-edged tongue had redirected itself in defense of her home. The way that Julian himself – a thought that, now, almost drew a bitter laugh – had had his rough edges sanded down, humbled and humbled again until his ego almost fit in his own head.
She knew the look to look for. She’d seen it in so many people, and lost most of them – Miles, most recently, and she counted herself lucky that ‘most recent’ was so long ago.
And that he’d had Julian, the way she can only hope he has Miles now. The problem struck her, again, the things she knows how to look for but never how to treat. That hadn’t been her purview. She'd told herself a lot of things, in the days since then. That she'd have socked anyone who tried to get too close to her after something like this. That he had enough going on, with the interviews, and refeeding, and rearranging his quarters with Dax, to get rid of that feeling that everything was off. It hadn't put out that fire in her, that always told her to do something, but it'd put a blanket on it, enough that when she passed him in the halls she could share that thin-lipped smile unhappy Humans seemed to insist on giving people even when they clearly felt terrible.
So it's both a surprise and not, when she’s preparing for dinner with Keiko, dropping Molly off with Jake, and Miles doesn't come back on time. Instead, there’s a brief message to Keiko’s comm that has her furrowing her brow, and a few minutes later – more than a few, but the alternative was noticing just how many – he comes through the door with an exhausted-looking Julian Bashir. She’s relieved in two parts: one, that he had someone, so she didn’t have to take action about the whispers spreading up to Ops, and a larger, stronger one (that chides the first as a coward and as cold) that her hope was correct and it’s Miles O’Brien he has.
“Julian,” Keiko says, warm, concerned, and not at all unprepared, stopping what she's doing long enough to pull him into a brief, tight hug.
“Sorry to intrude,” he replies, his voice deep and a little rough, and she only shakes her head.
“Not at all,” she starts, before Miles’ hand rests on her shoulder.
“I thought…” A long look passes between the two of them, Miles' eyes flicking to Julian but not lingering, until all of a sudden Miles seems to shake himself out of it. “Well. Just that there’s someone Julian–” a careful avoidance of Jules, which Nerys had only heard sparingly but figured she might never hear again. “–hasn’t met yet, isn’t there?”
It hits Nerys at the same time as Keiko. She had seen Julian holding Kirayoshi, after Nerys’s midwife was done with her checks. He’d been handling him harsher than she’d ever seen a newborn handled, injecting him with things she didn’t know he needed. Pushing him to cry.
At the time, he – and Keiko – had assured her it was normal for human newborns, that the cry was essential, that all these new sensations helped the baby realize he had been born, remind him that he should start interacting with the world around him. But the timeline is not adding up. It had been a changeling – a Founder – rubbing at his skin with that terrycloth, coaxing him to open up his lungs. Giving him some drug that now she feels could have been anything, some latent virus or poison with enough plausible delay that they wouldn’t trace it back.
And in that moment, sitting at the O’Briens’ table, something in her screams to take the kid and run. Where, she doesn’t know. But anywhere other than here.
But then the tension bleeds from Keiko’s shoulders, too smooth and casual to be natural, and she takes Julian by the arm and leads him to the cradle.
She watches him cross the rooms where she used to live, approach the child she’d grown in her body. The reaction is immediate, and as complete as it had been with everyone who had seen him so far: Julian is transfixed. Humans have a term for it – Deja Vu – and it hits her like a phaser blast. She searches, desperately, for something in his expression, the wrinkles by his eyes or the set of his mouth, that will give away that this Julian is real, that will help her if, Prophets save them all, there is a next time.
There’s nothing, she realizes. The illusion had been that complete. Julian’s awed, lovestruck expression looks exactly the same on his face as it had that very first time, when they hadn’t even washed off the afterbirth.
She doesn’t feel very much like dinner, anymore.
Keiko – Keiko who’s good at this, she thinks – takes Kirayoshi from the bassinet, bundled in layers and layers of thin, tight blankets in that strange Human tradition, and places him soundly in Julian’s arms before he has time to decline, shepherding him to the couch. Some words are exchanged, things Nerys ignores, before Keiko brushes past her in the direction of the refresher, looking distinctly close to tears.
Miles gives him a squeeze on the shoulder, looking for the life of him like a thousand words are trapped behind his teeth. That’s what she’d learned, living with them. He wasn’t good at this either, except when it came to Keiko. Even Julian and Nerys were one step too removed for the vulnerable, open side of him they all knew must exist.
So when he lets go, and follows Keiko, Nerys readies herself, the spark of disquiet flaring back up in the pit of her stomach. There’s something to it, she thinks. Leaving him alone with the baby, after that awful reminder, is a sign of a deep, deep trust.
But. Even being bad at this, she still thinks he probably shouldn’t be alone, period.
There’s an awkward few seconds where both of them just sit. Awkward for her, anyway. She doesn’t think Julian has the energy to focus on anything except Kirayoshi, right now. Then she stands, and takes soft, quiet steps to the living area.
The look on Julian’s face is a look Nerys would recognize anywhere, one she gives Kirayoshi every time she can reasonably pretend she’s alone with him: a desperate longing for him to be the thing that saves her, something that hangs on to every coo and cry like a vision from the Prophets. She’d spent a long time just staring at him, often in Keiko’s arms, sometimes in Miles’, but not in her own, not often enough. Watching him take in the world, uncomprehending of the war raging just outside the four walls he had barely left, threatening the life of his father and...aunt, every time they got on board the Defiant.
But Julian isn’t just staring. It’s a small comfort, but a comfort somehow, that he is doing what he always does, and talking to him, too.
“-first to hold you,” he says, a forced joy in his voice, quietly enough that she knows he doesn’t know she’s listening. “I was going to be the first to introduce you to your parents, to put you in their arms, show you this…this wonderful world.” He hesitates enough on wonderful that Nerys knows it wasn’t the first word that had come to mind. “I wanted…” his voice cracks, and he pulls Kirayoshi that much closer. Nerys has to strain her ears to hear what he says next. “I wanted to come home. I wanted to. I tried.” Something drips from his cheek to the baby’s, and Kirayoshi, wonderful, sweet Kirayoshi, only blinks, his tiny face refusing to screw up in that particular pre-cry babies across most species are known for. “And instead…”
It comes down to this: there is precious little that connects Julian and Nerys. They have the same friends, to be sure. They live, for now, in the same place. They have seen many of the same things occur, at the same time. For a long time – several years now – that had been it.
In a half-destroyed runabout, with a half-dead woman between them, that had changed. Full sedation had been too dangerous, and so Nerys, numbed and hazy and vulnerable, had watched his hands as he cut her open and put a baby in her stomach. Bajor had tilted off-axis on that runabout, the Prophets’ voice gotten just a little louder. Between takeoff and docking the entire world had become something different.
So then she had come to the infirmary, voluntarily, for nothing more than the scan of a wand and a cocktail of hormones. Trusted what he'd told her, allowed him to touch her and examine her in places she had never let a doctor so much as look at, when so many doctors had been Cardassian.
It wouldn’t have been enough. The baby would have been born, and they would have gone back to the same distant – warm, open, even pleasant, but distant – companionship.
But now Julian has been held at an enemy camp, with no real sense of who he can trust and no certain idea that he’ll ever be rescued. Starved and beaten, if the reports that hit her desk were true, and she has no reason to believe they weren’t. Walked that knife’s edge between self-preservation in the short term and the long.
And he, too, has been robbed of Kirayoshi.
It’s uncharitable to think. She knew the arrangement when it was first presented to her: it wasn’t her child. But still, when the Bajoran midwife had pulled him from her grasp, she’d given her the look that Bajoran doctors across the planet were used to giving, that patented blend of soft and sharp that said at the same time I’m sorry and let go.
So instead of leaving him to his exhausted rapture, she crosses the room and sits down, at the other end of the couch where they neither have to touch nor look at each other. He goes quiet, and if he turns to her she doesn’t see it, staring carefully at the crayons Molly left scattered across the coffee table.
“It- he-” she begins, and closes her mouth. “The Founder,” she decides, forcing the iron into her voice, “wasn’t the first to hold him.”
Julian doesn’t respond, but she feels him shift his weight through the cushions, and takes it as an excuse to go on. If she doesn’t, she might never start this conversation again. “I did the birth the traditional way. With a Bajoran midwife.”
“That wasn’t our plan,” Julian says, his voice scratchy but neutral in that careful way he’s gotten about Bajoran traditional medicine.
She shakes her head. “No.” An awkward pause. Julian clears his throat, but not conspicuously – he’s still recovering from the air, she thinks. The asteroid had been a mining operation, too, once. “About two weeks before the birth, I started-I don’t know exactly. Y- the Founder,” and she knows better than to think he didn’t catch that slip, “said it was only normal to want things that were familiar. That my hormones were probably going a little haywire, with everything so close, and I didn’t argue. I just changed the plan, and talked to Keiko and Miles, and it all seemed fine. So it wasn’t the Founder, who held him for the first time. It was her. The midwife. He didn’t even get into the room until almost an hour or two after it happened.”
There’s a silence that hangs in the air. It lasts long enough that Nerys feels distinctly stupid. She’d plucked one detail out from that whole thing and spun it out into this – this story, that was true, but did she really expect it to be comforting? She knew as well as anyone there was no fixing a person, after war really got ahold of them. Not without a faith she doesn't think Julian has, and maybe not with it, either. She’s almost prepared herself to stand up and go back to the table when he speaks.
“Two weeks,” Julian says, in a wild departure of anything she’d expected him to say. Somehow, it is his tone that shocks her more – empty and hollow, in a way she knows by now is to prevent any hope from leeching in. “Do you know…”
She thinks back, wracks her brain for when that uneasy feeling had crept in. “It was just after the baby dropped, while you were at-”
Another revelation, no less important but infinitely less horrifying than the first. She turns to him, that old, familiar fire stoking in her chest, and for the first time she feels like she knows just what to say. “The baby dropped, while you were away at that conference. And I made an appointment, for the first day you were back, and when you – when he was talking to me, something didn’t feel right anymore.”
Julian is looking at her, too. Maybe he has been the entire time, she isn’t sure. In an odd role reversal, she thinks he might be speechless.
He’s crying, still. Maybe again. She doesn’t know if he notices that, but she isn’t going to be the one to point it out. She's bad at this, but not that bad.
There won’t be any big moment, she thinks. Neither of them are going to come right out and say it, that Nerys had realized, collapse sobbing into each other in a flood of catharsis and companionship. It wouldn’t be entirely true, and it wasn’t really their way besides. But she moves a little closer, until her shoulder, bare in her civilian clothes, touches against the stiff fabric of a Starfleet uniform. It’s the old uniform, she realizes. He’d forgotten to wear the new one again, hadn’t had enough shifts back to fully change routine. Dax had done the same thing, but weeks ago, when everyone else had done it. Now Julian's the odd one out.
“He’s beautiful, isn’t he?” She says, instead of commenting on it, running a finger over the smooth bridge of Kirayoshi’s tiny nose. It’s the only thing that separates him, visibly, from a Bajoran baby, since he wouldn’t have gotten an earring until he was five and could be presented to the Prophets properly.
“He’s growing well,” Julian says, hoarsely, and when she risks looking at him again there’s a soft smile on his face. “Up five hundred and ten ounces, from when he was born. That’s what we want.”
“Did he have a checkup today?” Nerys asks, confused. That hadn’t been the number she’d heard last, and the idea that they’d stopped telling her – well. It would have to happen sometime, but it was disconcerting, still.
But Julian shakes his head. “I reviewed the records, every report, every appointment from when I was gone. I know how much he weighed when he was born, how much he…I just know.” What would have normally been the beginning of a long tangent fades away now into that despair that’s clung to him since he’d gotten back, and she remembers the newest thing she’d learned about him, the one everyone in Starfleet seemed so concerned about for no reason, no reason at all.
She’ll probably never understand the way that every human flinched, when they first found out he was engineered. The only difference it had made to her was to wonder what it must have been like, to have parents with that kind of drive and money growing up. If it was better to have parents who loved you and lose them, or parents who didn’t you couldn’t seem to shake.
But there had been a war, she knew. They wouldn’t understand, either, the way she would always hesitate to take the word of someone without ridges on their nose. It was the way of war: to leave everything shattered, with very few who understood where or how the cracks had formed. They could only wait to see what new prejudice the end of this one would bring.
The silence they leave between them doesn’t hang the way it has been. It’s interrupted only by their breathing and Kirayoshi’s occasional hiccup or coo. Even in the small period of time he’s been alive, he hasn’t been the easiest baby, Nerys knows, but somehow, here, now, he’s calm. Peaceful. Fading already back into the sleep that Keiko had interrupted by plucking him from the bassinet.
The thought that springs up in Nerys’s head makes her laugh, before she can stop herself, in pure joy and surprise. It’s only when Julian jumps she realizes that he, too, had almost been dozing, and she’d pulled him back to waking.
“You were the first one to hold him,” she says, giving him a real smile. “You held him before I even got a chance to do it, back on the runabout. He was in your hands.”
She can’t tell, entirely, where his mind goes when she says that. She doesn’t think about it very often, but his hands have held countless things that she tries very hard not to remember can see the light of day. Had Kirayoshi felt different, she wonders, than a heart or a kidney? Could he feel that the life he was holding was separate from the patients on the runabout floor or was it all just so much meat?
She knows better than to ask, and doesn’t really want an answer regardless, not from anyone other than a Vedek. But moreso she doesn’t want to interrupt the way one of his somehow-steady fingers brushes the lock of hair Kirayoshi still has across his forehead, the little ray of light – the ray of a Julian that existed five weeks ago – shining in his eyes.
Nerys isn’t sure how much longer they sit there, just looking, watching him sleep. She could do it for hours, for days. But eventually, as babies do, Kirayoshi begins fussing, and the sound summons his parents almost as fast as he makes it.
“He needs to be burped,” Keiko says, sounding tired and frazzled and more than a little emotional, and Julian hurriedly wipes his cheeks with his shoulders, smiles something that looks a hundred times more real than anything he’d walked in the door wearing.
“I can do it, if you’ll give me a towel.”
So Nerys gets up, and helps Miles clear away the crayons and toys and set out plates, watches Julian pat Kirayoshi’s back with an expert hand and not even mind the sour milk he spits down his back. He has his own dinner, and goes back to sleep, and when Julian takes what’s usually Molly’s chair and talks – not as much as before, but more than she’s heard, since he’d stumbled back in on Garak’s shoulder, and more animated and louder – Nerys doesn’t think he feels quite so out of place.