Summary:
Odo has returned to the Alpha Quadrant for reasons even he himself doesn't understand—or, at least, doesn't want to admit. Kira Eeris has escaped Bajor and left the only life she's ever known, determined to carve out a new life for herself among the stars. And Miro Dax, self-proclaimed explorer and surfer of all fate's waves, may not be able to maintain his isolation for long.
But Odo is haunted by Nerys's ghost and his own guilt, Eeris can't see beyond the smooth planes of Odo's alien face, and Miro's convinced they're all better off separate and doing their own thing. Can these three manage even a shaky truce—before the Romulan Empress Viresa shakes the galaxy to its knees, along with all they've ever known?
Sequel to Figurehead—in which Kira Eeris risks everything to escape her destiny, and Odo sacrifices nine hundred years of peace in the Great Link to answer a call for help.
A/N: Welcome to the next installment of Trials of Peace! Sorry it took me so long to update. I had to splice and paste scenes from seven different versions of the story. (And I imagine that explains why it took so damn long to write it. Seven different versions!) Felt a little bit like I was bringing my own special Frankenstein back to life. But I loved writing it in the end, and I think what we've got here is pretty good, so enjoy :)
Just a heads up, I strongly recommend reading Figurehead first. Everything will make a lot more sense that way. (You can find it here on FanFiction at: s/12239676/1/Figurehead)
Thanks to Queenix for the awesome beta. Thanks also to my dad for being supportive as always.
3275
900 years following the Dominion War
When Odo stepped off the Rintoqua and into Deep Space Nine's airlock, he might as well have stepped onto another planet. There was nothing familiar about the exposed and sparking circuitry that lined the worn and broken metal walls. It looked like a kitchen cupboard might after being ransacked for everything that could be eaten. Odo waited for the chief's familiar grunting and cursing as he beat the station's innards into shape. When no sound came but the soft and foreign echo of Odo's boots against the floor, he felt a strange twinge of loss. Odd, that something as simple as the absence of a friendly face could upset him, when he'd come here knowing that everyone he'd ever known was gone.
The only familiar sight was the red, gear-shaped door at the end of the corridor. Apparently some things never changed. But it had faded from bright red to a sickly pink over the past nine hundred years. When it rolled aside to let Odo pass, it creaked and sputtered on its worn machinery. It had faded into disrepair, just as had everything else about Odo's life.
Odo's life, one might say, had been the Great Link. Until seventy years ago, if anyone had asked him where he belonged, that's what he would have said. He had, after all, spent nearly nine hundred years there, alternating between an existence as part of the collective and one as the humanoid individual he had come to see himself as. His people had never understood. He was, however, one of them, and since his loyalties were no longer in question—the assumption at the time had been that he would stay with them for the rest of his days—they let him be. They didn't complain when he would launch himself out of the living ocean he called home and take on the various shapes that surrounded him, except perhaps to offer a disgruntled murmur when he joined them again. It wasn't until Benjamin Sisko, a wormhole alien now, had sent a message straight to his subconscious and piqued his curiosity that Odo had begun to reconsider where he belonged.
Sisko had first tried to contact him soon after he joined his people, but at the time, his message had been unclear. He had shown Odo a one-armed, four-fingered Bajoran girl who was, as far as Odo could gather, back on Bajor and in some kind of trouble. Odo had seen no reason to give Sisko's message more than passing consideration. He had never put stock in the word of the beings that called themselves Prophets, and he hadn't intended to start then. Even when it was his own former commanding officer talking. But then, almost eight hundred years later, Sisko had sent him another of the messages he called "visions''—and this time, there was an urgency attached. Sisko had informed him that this mysterious Bajoran girl was actually Nerys's descendant, and that something had happened to Nerys—something that had altered the fate of Bajor for the worse.
Odo still hadn't seen a reason to interfere. Nerys was gone and Bajor was no longer his home. But he hadn't been able to shake that niggling sense of worry…as if somehow, just through a strange imagining during an encounter with the captain-turned-Prophet, he had begun to care for this nameless girl. And so, only a century later—time that flew by in the depths of the Great Link—Odo had given into instinct and heeded Sisko's request that he return to Bajor.
To his surprise, when he met her—Kira Eeris—over the comm just before arriving at the station, his care for her had been cemented. He had known, the instant he saw her in the flesh, that he would protect her with his life. Not just out of debt to Nerys, but out of some senseless attachment to this particular Bajoran girl that he couldn't even begin to fathom.
And so here he was. Eight-hundred-thirty years in the Great Link and seventy traveling on the Rintoqua later, Odo was standing inside the airlock of Deep Space Nine, the home he'd almost forgotten.
He stepped through the airlock and onto the promenade. It wasn't the promenade as he'd known it. It was dismal and dark. He blinked, peering as far as he could in the gloom, and found that he could only see about thirty feet in all directions. And what he could see, he didn't recognize in the slightest.. Where well-lit shops with flashing signs had once been, he saw only small, gray concession stands with cardboard signs that teetered on their hooks. Odo craned his neck to get a view of the second level, but he couldn't even make out the upper railing, let alone the activity above. He could barely see the atrium around him. He could have been in a cave, for all he knew—not the once-bustling promenade of Deep Space Nine.
Something deep in his liquid self churned uncomfortably. He closed his eyes and willed a deep breath through his facsimile lungs. It was…all right. He'd expected something like this, hadn't he? In fact, hadn't he pictured more violence than gloom, more terrors than shadows? So why did his morphogenic matrix seem to want to betray him and release the shape that confined him to the humanoid world?
Odo scowled at himself and took a determined step forward. His boot scuffed against the metal floor and stirred up a cloud of dust that took a moment to dissipate. He felt grime coating his toe and shed it quickly, restoring some measure of order to his form. It made him feel a little better. It wasn't much, but it was one demon exorcised.
He'd been trekking through the gloom and muck for a minute or two when he noticed that there were people passing around him. Not just people—crowds, throngs, dressed in dark colors that blended in with the surrounding twilight. It was no wonder he hadn't seen them until now. And then he realized the other reason he hadn't noticed them right away. They were quiet. No one was talking or chatting or even whispering to one another. There was not a single voice in the darkness. It was as if these people had unanimously decided to cut their tongues and utter not a grunt. There was no clearing of throats in the silence, or even a gruffly mumbled, "Excuse me." Nothing. They all filed in one direction or another, some heading toward the stands farther down the thoroughfare, others filtering up the spiral staircases whose steps creaked underfoot. The occasional squeak of the stair railings was the only sound to be heard. It sent a shiver down Odo's nonexistent spine. He'd been right before—something had gone drastically wrong with Bajoran society. Something had broken these people.
Was that what Sisko intended for him to fix, perhaps?
Odo needed to find Eeris and Dax. They'd agreed to meet him, and it was the only way he was going to learn anything about what had happened to Bajor. He couldn't help but wonder at the convenience of it all. Could it be coincidence that, so soon after returning home on Sisko's orders, he met up with the very two people who would know the most about what he wanted to learn? Dax, who had lived long enough to understand the context behind it all, and Eeris, who was—as far as Odo could gather—some sort of important figure on her homeworld. As a law enforcement officer and a lover of mysteries, Odo had never believed in coincidences.
Coincidences or no, he doubted the wisdom of the captain's plan. Maybe if Jadzia had still been around, it would have been possible to recruit her help. Or even Ezri, though she was more of a counselor than a hero. But Miro? This Dax might agree to fill Odo in on history, but they wouldn't be working together. There was nothing keeping them in the same room together.
Before Odo knew it, he was passing a familiar set of doors. He caught them out of the corner of his eye and whirled, expecting to see the shiny metallic surface of his old desk. He was completely unprepared for the sight that greeted him: office doors that gaped open like yawning jaws, desk cracked and thrown on its side, a single bad sitting abandoned on the floor, chair upturned and tossed aside. The other chair—the one Odo had come to think of as almost exclusively belonging to Nerys—was nowhere to be seen.
Well, he'd been a fool to think nothing would change in his absence. It had, after all, been nine hundred years. He'd made a choice, and he'd suffer the consequences.
Even that rationalization couldn't stop him from sucking in a gasp, his breath hitching. His office, to him, had never been just an office. It was a safe haven, a place that had distracted him from any temptation to engage in a personal life just as much as it had sheltered him from the chaos of the promenade. Before he'd found his people, it had even been the closest thing he had to a home—he'd literally slept in a bucket in his closet. Even after that, it had been the perfect place to hide when the pressures of leading his newfound social life became too much. He hadn't truly graduated beyond his office and into a fully functional, interactive member of society until his relationship with Nerys. After that point, he had spent a good deal of time formerly spent in his office in her quarters, instead, though sometimes in his own.
Even then, even once he had fully befriended Deep Space Nine's crew and had even begun to interact with them in more social settings, Odo had never been an outgoing man. It simply wasn't in his nature. And so his office remained his hiding place when he didn't think he could take another friendly wave from Dax or O'Brien, when he knew that just nodding in passing would be far too formal for the situation.
Odo shook himself out of his thoughts. He slowly, deliberately, brought his hands together behind his back, as if to try out the stance for size. Almost immediately, the remembered posture shored up his strength and he felt his expression stiffen into that of the impassive constable. Reassured, he moved on.
To his left, the thoroughfare seemed to disappear into such complete darkness that it couldn't possibly be a main route of travel. Odo stepped closer, squinting, and could barely make out a spiral staircase toward the back and a bar space cluttered with miscellaneous equipment and scrap metal. He stepped back, stunned. He'd know that architecture anywhere. He was looking into the entrance of Quark's bar.
Had he really been gone for that long?
The former bar was nothing but a dark cave, strewn with dark lumps of metal that jutted from the floor and walls at odd angles. Toward the back, it was piled high. Odo checked behind the bar counter, but of course its proprietor was long gone. He tightened his hands behind his back and turned swiftly away with a slight harrumph before he could feel the emotion that reached up to grip him with icy fingers. The Ferengi bartender didn't warrant it, even in death.
The thoroughfare—what little he could see of it—took him past what he remembered as the infirmary next. He walked straight past it, not even bothering to turn his head. He didn't want to risk being caught unaware by another ghost of the past.
"Odo!"
Odo looked up. Miro Dax's vibrant red hair had materialized not thirty feet in front of him.
"Long time, no see," Dax said. He walked closer.
"Dax," Odo greeted him with a slight incline of his head.
"It's Miro," the Trill snapped. "After nineteen hosts, 'Dax' doesn't differentiate me anymore. But as long as you don't slip and call me Commander or something, I'm good. And do me a favor, Odo—I know you're curious about, well, everyone else, but don't ask me, okay? I don't wanna talk about it."
"About Nerys, you mean?" Odo asked.
"Yeah, or Jadzia or Ezri, or really anyone," Miro said. "I've left that life behind me. I had just about forgotten all about it when you showed up. So I wouldn't dredge up the past, if I were you. My patience is running thin as it is."
"If you're so reluctant to see me," Odo said as he fell into step next to Miro, "then why did you suggest meeting me here?"
Miro shrugged. "No harm in getting this over with. If I just flat-out refused to talk to you, you'd be showing up at my doorstep every few days hounding me for information."
"I wouldn't be that persistent," Odo said.
Miro raised a brow.
"Well, I certainly wouldn't literally chase you down across the quadrant if I had questions," Odo said. "But I might try to contact you over subspace. You know you're the only source of answers I have."
"Well, that's a shame," Miro said. "Because you're not gonna get the ones you want."
"You mean the ones about Nerys and the others."
"Naturally." Miro glanced over his shoulder at Odo. "I'll fill you in on how the galaxy fell apart, but that's about it."
Odo nodded. "If you don't mind my asking, where are we headed?"
"Replimat," Miro snapped. "Eeris saved us a spot. I thought I'd come out here and get you myself. Don't know how good you are at seeing in the dark."
"And other people are?" Odo asked as he followed Miro toward the replimat.
"Bajor's been plunging into darkness for years," Miro said. "Literally. I don't even know how they breathe under that haze. They're practically a dead society, thanks to you. This is the kind of darkness they're used to. Honestly, I prefer to stay off the station. They don't see me around here much. But one of the best pawning shops I know is here, so it's one of my stops. Eeris and I were just about to take off for the Cardassian border when you came along." He scowled. "Founders always were a disruption to everyone's day, you know."
"I told you, I'm not here as a Founder," Odo said.
"And you expect me to believe that."
"I—"
"Oh, don't start. I don't wanna hear it," Miro said. "You've betrayed us all. It's your fault I'm even still on the station, I would have left by now. You're lucky I'm even willing to talk to you at all."
Odo sighed and clasped his hands behind his back. He evidently wasn't going to get a defense right then. Might as well let Miro's anger run its course—for all he knew, that was all his old friend needed. He tried to think of something else to say, something neutral, but his mind kept coming up with one thing: Kira. But he knew Miro wouldn't want to say a word about her. Instead, he opted for a more roundabout approach, his investigative instincts slowly trickling back to him.
"Tell me more about the Bajorans," he said. "How has Bajor fared since I left?"
"Badly," Miro said. "And you can pat yourself on the back for that. But that's all I know. Like I said, I don't hang around Bajor. Eeris probably knows more than I do. She was in line to be Figurehead, you know."
"Figurehead?" Odo repeated.
Miro grimaced and shook his head. "Be glad you chose the Gamma Quadrant."
"It's not just Bajor, is it?" Odo asked. "Something's gone wrong with the rest of the quadrant, too." Just like Sisko said, his mind whispered.
"No kidding. The entire quadrant's a quagmire of border disputes and meaningless grievances," Miro said. "I sometimes wish everyone could just get along, you know? Seems like I can't see one dispute through to its resolution before someone else halfway across the quadrant is complaining about the violation of some treaty! I hightail it over at maximum warp, only to find someone set up a colony on a planet they weren't supposed to, and someone else complained about it, and the settlers refused to back down, and it spiraled into an argument that never needed to happen. And that's not even the worst of it. Imagine if that happened, but at the same time, the Klingons attacked somewhere, and now, that matters in the grand scheme of things, but I would have been distracted elsewhere…"
"Sounds like a lot of work," Odo said. "And you take that all upon yourself? You don't call in any help?"
"Ha! What help is there to call in when everyone's at each other's throats but me?" Miro shook his head. "I swear, one of these days a good wave will come my way and I'll be somewhere else, resolving some minor dispute, and not even see it. That's what the galaxy'll do to me, Odo. Make me be everywhere at once and then I'll miss the opportune challenge of a lifetime."
"I take it you get some enjoyment out of all this," Odo said.
"Enjoyment? That's an understatement," Miro said, grinning. "And as soon as I get this business here taken care of and send you on your way, I'm warping far away from Bajor and sniffing out the next big wave, because I tell you, I'm gonna need it, if this goes how I think it will."
"You think I'll ruin your day," Odo groused.
"You're a Founder, Odo, and you're the one Founder I hoped I'd never see again. You've already ruined my day."
Odo sighed. "Sorry I'm such an imposition."
"And here we are," Miro said, stopping just a few paces before the replimat. "Look, Odo. I could be a pretty inconvenient enemy to make. I know you can't imagine us as being on opposite sides, and I don't really blame you—after all, you've only known me in two different lives, three if you count Jadzia's zhiantara, and I was a pretty nice guy then. But it's been nine hundred years, I've got the memories of eleven more hosts you never met, and I'm not the same Dax you once knew. So stay off my lawn, don't bug me, and we can both function on our own in this wide open quadrant and never have anything to do with each other, okay?"
"Fair enough," Odo said. "Can we join Eeris now?"
Miro gestured for Odo to lead the way. "Go on ahead. Enjoy my civility while you've got it."
In case anyone's curious, here's some ToP universe lore:
2375—Dominion War ends, Odo returns to Great Link
2378—Odo receives his first vision from Sisko
3165-3205—sometime in the early years of this time period, Odo receives his second vision from Sisko
3205—Odo embarks on the seventy-year journey to the Alpha Quadrant
3275—Odo, Eeris, and Miro meet