#yes in this au yoshi is kira’s bio child

[ds9-polycule-tales]

11 - 2375

Nerys put her head down on the desk for a moment, pushing the padd out of her way. It was an actual desk; a prefab, quick-to-replicate-and-assemble version of her own desk on DS9.

After nearly two months of hard, daily physical labour, sitting at an actual desk in an actual office again felt…weird. There were good reasons for it, of course, as both Miles and Keiko had quite bluntly told her when she questioned why assigning her the space had come to the top of the priority list – it wasn’t her space, it was the Project’s space. The Project would require her to meet with people from the local area and further afield to take information from them, which wouldn’t be appropriate in the crowded family living space, and even if her “bedroom” would be appropriate for that, you couldn’t physically fit two or three adults in it unless they were lying on the bed together. It would require her to call people on subspace and convince them to get involved with helping to locate missing people or their remains, and doing that in cramped domestic chaos or outside with dust storms whistling past probably wouldn’t help anyone.

It made perfect sense. It still felt weird.

And then there was the Project itself. She had been briefly involved with some of this after the end of the Occupation at home on Bajor. And she had hated it then. Even though she had always been capable of channelling all her energy into certain, very necessary particular tasks without rest or sometimes even bathroom breaks til they were solved – coaxing a crumbling Rider engine back to life, creating careful forgeries of ID documents, planning infiltration of a food plant or a mine – the patient, painstaking work of assembling and matching and interpreting mass amounts of data had made her want to scream. And at the time, with so, so much reconstruction work to do, listening to people pour out all-too-familiar stories of missing loved ones without being able to offer any guarantees or practical aid had been like someone dragging their nails repeatedly across her pagh.

She actually wasn’t bad at data wrangling by now – all Jadzia’s patient, passionate lessons in making numbers dance had made up some of the years that she had missed out of actual formal education while she was crawling through swamps being hunted by Cardassian soldiers – and she had gained some experience in what being listened to and reaching out in the hope of answers of some kind could actually mean to people. But it didn’t stop the feeling that she was somehow shirking in here playing with numbers when there was more immediate, practical work to be done. Or make the painstaking task of extracting and entering data from interview transcriptions any less brain-numbing or frustrating when she was already so exhausted from the long day’s work.

She missed Jadzia and Yoshi terribly. Even while having Miles, Keiko and Molly with her was wonderful. Yoshi was changing so much right now. She was missing so much she was afraid he might not recognise her when she saw him again. Whenever that could be.

She lifted her head from the desk, took the little display holo from one of the drawers and set it to a scene of Worf stolidly holding Yoshi while Jadzia was playing peekaboo with him. She gazed at the three faces – muted but undeniable joy, sheer mischief and delighted surprise – for a long moment, and put her hand gently out to them without quite touching the little figures.

She swallowed, wiping her eyes with her sleeve, shook herself, and turned back to her task. Even if some of her family wasn’t here with her right now, she knew they were safe, and well, and happy. Others deserved at least that much too

#deep space 9 #deep space nine #ds9 au #ds9 polycule tales #ds9 fanfic #cardassia #post canon cardassia #kira nerys #kira x jadzia #worf x jadzia #jadzia dax #kirayoshi o’brien #yes in this au yoshi is kira’s bio child #he’s also miles’ and keiko’s bio child #don’t tell me a society that can make hybrid babies can’t combine dna from more than two peeps