Asset is motivated by her loyalty to family and state, further investigation suggests that the former does not outweigh the latter.
Preka skipped after her older brother, her short legs working overtime to keep his pace as they moved along one of the narrow hamlet walkways. He was too old to want to walk to the district school with his younger sister, but he did so anyway.
Such was his duty.
She didn't know why he tried to evade her. Their morning commute always took place in the pre-dawn, before the local factories started pumping their smog and soot into the atmosphere. The inky darkness prevented anyone from watching, so none of the other students in his grade would be around to mock him for it.
"Lemit, slow down!" she called, already running out of breath.
"Seske," little rodent, their father used to call her that with his gentle voice when he still had one, "you need to learn to keep up."
The nickname made her huff, but Preka rushed forward only to fall behind again. It was no fair. He was eight years ahead of her, only months from leaving for his vocational training, which meant his legs were so much longer than hers. She didn't have to learn to keep up, she had to grow to.
"I'll give you my sampa roll if you slow down."
Lemit smiled down at her, his expression indulgent as he shortened his strides. He could be difficult in the mornings, but he was never unkind to her, "All right."
It wasn't a fair exchange — Preka hated the spicy fruit, and she doubly hated their aunt's baking — he always got her sampa roll.
"Have you studied for your exams?"
She turned up her chin and preened, "I've memorized the entire sheet of derivatives."
Lemit sighed, "Rote memory isn't everything, Seske."
"That's not what Instructor Pagat says.'Perfect recall leads to perfect solutions.'"
"Instructor Pagat is an unimaginative bore."
Preka scrunched her nose and batted at his arm in feigned despair, "Not so loud! I'll have to memorize more if anyone tells her you said that."
"She would punish you for my mistakes! Miserable taskmaster."
Lemit laughed as he said it. He laughed so rarely these days, now that he'd started spending time with his new friends. The ones who looked so serious all the time and stopped talking whenever she drew near enough to eavesdrop.
Well, she supposed she could memorize more things, if making fun of her maths teacher made her brother happy.
...
Torres was staring at her like she feared Seska might erupt into a fit of violence. If the engineer had come to her a month ago and stood in the doorway of her quarters stiffly, reluctantly, and asked, 'Are you okay' in that stilted tone, Seska might have.
After all, isn't that what Torres had done, when they all learned what had become of the Maquis at the hands of the Cardassians and the Dominion?
Perhaps that's why she'd come here. Perhaps Torres remembered that Seska had found her throwing a pity party and taunted her until she broke. How long had it taken the other woman to realize that Seska wasn't there to punch back but to soak up the abuse? Before or after she'd broken her nose and three of her teeth? Before or after half-Klingon stopped raging and commed sickbay.
Was that why she was here? To repay the favor?
Well, she'd be disappointed. Seska had let Torres beat her bloody as a gift — as a truce — as the only olive branch she knew how to give.
"Have you come here to tell me we deserved it?"
Seska's tone was light, conversational, as if the Dominion hadn't destroyed her home world and with it nearly a billion Cardassians. The ones who had earned it — the many many more who hadn't.
"You haven't left your quarters in over a month."
Zero points to the engineer for stating the obvious. What would she say next? That Seska hadn't let anyone see her, besides the captain, in that time? That the room smelled stale? That she looked like she'd forgotten what the inside of a sonic shower looked like? Well, whatever. Torres could leave here happy in the knowledge that Seska's period of mourning was officially over.
It had been since that morning — since Neelix quietly left her the only message she'd received from the Alpha Quadrant since Pathfinder found them with MIDAS array. Since she'd read the curated files that Obarit had sent her.
"Tell me, Torres, why do you think anyone join the Obsidian Order?"
Seska picked up a pair of slacks and scowled — she'd used the wrong tense, the Order didn't exist anymore — then tossed them onto the pile she needed to put through the refresher.
When she looked over and saw that Torres was confused, Seska couldn't help but roll her eyes, "Is the translator broken?"
"No," the engineer looked around, clearly unsure of where this is going, but decided to play along, "To serve the Empire?"
"'To serve the Empire,'" Seska barked out a single laugh, then felt her eye twitch at the hysterical sound of it, "Sure. Every Cardassian is the same. We just can't wait to die for the state."
This time, it was the engineer's turn to roll her eyes. Good. Seska didn't want her pity; she wanted her to understand.
"Fine. Why did you join the Obsidian Order?"
"To serve the Empire," Seska said snidely, before tossing a jacket on the pile.
Torres let out a humorless laugh of her own, "Great. I'm glad we cleared that up."
"Everyone serves the Empire. Only the deluded convince themselves that's why they want to join the Order," Seska was too tired to explain it, so she dug around her couch cushions until she found the PADD she needed under a tunic.
Without giving any warning, she tossed it in Torres' direction, "Page ten."
Seska had memorized the words. They'd be burned in her mind's eye until the day she died on this miserable ship, or until the day she found the man who'd written them and slid a knife into his gut for the crime of reading a report written by a provincial school teacher detailing the concerns of a little sister who didn't know any better. For pulling on that thread until he uncovered petty crimes and called them treason. For labeling a group of young adults who'd formed a bookclub to discuss subversive literature a sect of terrorists. For executing a boy who'd been an adult less than a week before committing the crime of asking too many question.
For finding that little sister, the daughter of low class plant workers, and turning her into a weapon of the state.
Seksa twisted the silk chamise in her hands until it tore.
"Your real name is Preka?" Torres asked when she finished skimming details about the moment that had changed Seska's life. Her tone was careful, like she was trying to be kind, like this wasn't the question she really wanted to ask, but she knew her true curiosity was too cruel to put into words.
Oh, how she'd grown.
"I joined because I wanted prove myself," Seska decided to answer the question that wasn't asked, "I wanted to pull my family out from under the scorn of their neighbors and the careful eye of the secret police. I joined because it made me feel proud, powerful, useful. I joined because I didn't know how else to find his killer," her voice broke, but she ignored it to continue focusing on the menial task of sorting her clothes.
Torres looked uncomfortable with the knowledge that Seska wasn't some poor soul whose crimes could be explained away due to trauma — uncomfortable with the understanding that the desire to absolve her of her sins now that her home planet had been reduced to rubble was just another all-too-common human folly.
Seska hadn't been fooled into joining the Order. They'd torn apart her inconsequential family and she'd never not known that and she'd wanted to be one of them anyway.
It wasn't the genocide of her people that Seska was grappling with today, or the fact that she no longer had a home beyond the hulls of this ship.
It was the single act of her unwitting childhood betrayal and its consequences.
It was the continuous nature of Obarit's.
"He's taunting you," Torres said at last, holding the PADD like it was a burden, "because he found out you allied yourself with Captain Janeway."
"No."
Obarit had never taunted anyone. He certainly hadn't survived the collapse of the Order and the Bombardment of Cardassia in order to start doing so now.
"I don't underst-"
Seska turned her full attention to Torres and let the other woman witness the full brunt of her feelings, "I'm going to kill him. If he dies before we make it back, I'm going dig up his bones and crush him to dust beneath my feet. He isn't taunting me, B'Elanna. Obarit knows me. He's giving me a reason to live."
The venom in her words and manic glint in her eyes weren't want shocked the engineer into silence, it was the way the Cardassian woman folded into herself the moment she finished speaking and began to sob in earnest.
Author's Note: Voyager Week, Prompt 5: Home Away from Home. This chapter only loosely addresses this prompt -- how one might feel when they no longer have a home beyond what could be considered a flyinh prison.
Set between 7x2 Imperfections and 7x3 Drive
Woof, the Bombardment of Cardassia. Seska isn't good, not in the way that any of us would recognize, but I can't imagine coming to learn that your world has been functionally destroyed.
I'm sure I have a a essay in me about how our library of moral philosophy doesn't apply to Cardassiana at all, because their brain structure and chemistry specifically doesn't produce remorse in any way that we'd recognize. Those who do express it in any way that we would (e.g., Marritza in Duet:DS9) are not normal. In every head canon I have for Cardassians, their own moral philosophy doesn't provide a framework for remorse but for obedience. I write Seska as if she feels its in a very abstract sense but doesn't understand it the way that a human would. That said, I do believe they feel grief, as intensely as any species that has shown it in the series, and I do think Seska wouldn't be able to push that feeling away.
I never set out to justify her actions as an Obsidian Order member. From my perspective, they are foul. What I have set out to do is create a characterization of her that is complex and might, with some work on her behalf, allow those on Voyager to see (some) decency in her.