A/N: Natima Lang and Tora Ziyal never interacted onscreen; but their appearances were sparse enough for a fanfic writer to make it work. For those with scratchy memories in these two characters, Natima Lang is Quark's Cardassian ex from "Profit and Loss," and Tora Ziyal was Gul Dukat's half-Bajoran daughter.

I have better fics I'd like to be working on but they're at home. I wrote this oneshot on my phone to pass a very slow night shift.

I don't own "Star Trek."

Natima Lang sat at her desk in her cramped study, staring at the empty document on her monitor. Her dark eyes moved once again to the clock on the desk, and she realized she'd been staring into space for an hour now. For maybe the tenth time, she began typing. Still at a loss for ideas, she tried once again to start with the name.

Tora Ziyal

The Cardassian woman quickly shut her eyes, as if that would stop the tears from coming. Natima felt the scales around her eye sockets swelling, and her forehead crest heating up, as they often did when she was under stress.

It wasn't unusual for Natima to tear up during an article. Professor Natima Lang was a member of the Cardassian dissonant movement. As such, she had taught political ethics on Cardassia until she and her students had been forced to flee for their lives. Natima had spent the last several years in hiding, living as a Cardassian civilians on the Orion home world (which had a sizable population of Cardassian immigrants living in one continent), where she and her students had been granted amnesty and fake identities. Natima now wrote articles on her beliefs, Cardassian history, and current events, for a number of publications. People all the way back home on Cardassian read her teachings, albeit illegally in many cases.

At one point, she'd been invited to lecture at a university on Bajor (under extreme protection). A small handful of students were Cardassian/Bajoran hybrids. One of these was Tora Ziyal, daughter of the despised Gul Dukat. Ziyal, though blinded by naivety about her father's true nature, shared none of his qualities save the scales and crest she'd inherited from him. Ziyal had a wide-eyed innocence, a desire for Cardassians and Bajorans to accept each other as she so desperately longed to be accepted, that impressed and saddened Natima.

"Do you like it?"

Natima examined the painting Ziyal had handed her. A fantasy palace, or temple, adrift in swirls of rolling aquamarine cloud. The structure was both Cardassian and Bajoran: black iron supports holding up colorful domes, walls lined with Bajoran crenellations, Cardassian spikes interlaid at intersections.

"Like it, Ziyal it's gorgeous!"

"I'd like you to have it."

Natima was leaving Bajor the following morning. She and Ziyal both knew they'd likely never meet in person again.

"It reminds me of an old Cardassia," Natima said. "The one I grew up in. Or thought I was growing up in."

"What you said in your lecture Professor Lang, about how there are two Cardassias, I was clueless...I had no idea the citizens and the government were so...different."

not clueless, Natima thought, sheltered.

"We were an enlightened species once," Natima said half to herself. "This style of architecture, the iron colors and the clawed spikes, they were originally meant to represent the sharpness of the mind. The claws of the ac'taar, an animal associated for centuries with wisdom. We were a people of learning. Now these spokes and claws just stand for our species' viciousness, to outsiders. For us, our rulers' viciousness. We-" Natima stopped herself. "I'm just repeating one of my lectures."

"it's okay," Ziyal said. "I like to listen."

"You have a bright future as an artist," Natima complimented. "And in turn your art will help shape the futures of both Cardassia and Bajor."

"It's good to know a rape-child can be good for something," Ziyal muttered.

Natima looked at Ziyal sharply.

"Well my mother wasn't...but that's what they call us here on Bajor, the children of Cardassian occupiers."

"It's the hybrids like you who are our two worlds hope for peace," Natima said. "However you got here. My father always told me, good can be found in the rubble of even the worst tragedies."

The smile Ziyal had flashed in response to this, lasting only half a moment, was now frozen in time in Natima's mind.

Natima ran her hands down her gray face, breathing in deeply. How grim those words of her father's sounded now. It would be so easy now to just throw her monitor against the wall and scream that she was done with it all. Ziyal's murder was like a symbol for any hope of Cardassia and Bajor's peace being stamped out. But Natima couldn't allow that, she hadn't come all this way to be stopped by one death amidst millions.

And then someone else flashed through her mind. Quark. How many times had she and Ziyal laughed over the irony of two women with such strong ideals falling for Quark and Garak, men who seemingly lived to serve only themselves, and certainly avoided taking any side in the cause Natima and Ziyal were fighting for. It's because we need a break from the fight, Natima had surmised. That's why we freedom fighters are drawn to these man-children.

What Natima wouldn't give for one of Quark's Samarian Sunsets now.

Wiping her eyes, Natima began once more to type.

"In the rubble of any tragedy can be found some good," my father used to say. Early this month, a young woman named Tora Ziyal was killed in cold blood.

A/N: On a lighter note, Natima Lamg was played by Mary Crosby, who was Princess Karina in"the Ice Pirates!"