She could never be just one. She could never be Cardassian, and she could never be Bajoran. She would always be the half-Cardassian daughter with the Bajoran name. She could never be both. To Cardassia she was something less. She was impure, tainted with weakness and failure. To Bajor she was something other. She was the enemy, a living symbol of their conquest and subjugation, their very being polluted to the point they could never be who they were before. She could never be seen as just Ziyal, a daughter.
So she painted. The careful movements of her hand and the soft glide of the brush formed harsh black lines against the stark white page. Those lines, as unyeilding as the heat of Cardassia, came together in a style born out of Bajor. In those lines a river curved around a rock ledge, water dissolving stone into a tiny mound of soft earth, and in that mound a flower bloomed. The flower's roots wound into the uneven edges of the stone on one side and trailed into the water on the other. Its stem split into three parts, on one a Bajoran lily, on another a tiny Cardassian frilled rose, and between the two a blossom that existed only in her imagination. Its slim petals fanned out wide, only to gently curl back in again to point to its own frilled heart, a tight inner cluster of smaller petals. It was both the lily and the rose, the Bajoran and the Cardassian. A hybrid.
If she used enough love and imagination, she could take this ugly word and make it something beautiful. She wanted to believe she could be this flower, something Bajoran and Cardassian, and all the more for both.