Chapter Text
“You are throwing it all away! All of you!”
The strident tones reached Commander Sisko’s ears before he caught sight of the woman he had been equal parts anticipating and dreading meeting ever since receiving his orders to report to Deep Space Nine.
“Well then, don't ask my opinion next time!”
Sisko paused in the threshold of his new office, brought up short by the violence with which the young redhead slammed the controls on the console display, cutting off the video link to Bajor. She looked up at him and for a moment he froze; she was beautiful, all fire and fury.
“Yes?” she demanded.
“I'm Benjamin Sisko.”
Her entire countenance changed at his words. Her mouth opened and closed, and she drew herself up straight, tugging her uniform jacket down, as if faced with an unexpected inspection from a military general.
“Sir, I…I’m sorry I wasn’t expecting you just yet, I…” she swallowed and look down at herself before looking back up at him with a slight flinch. “I’m not supposed to be alone when we meet.”
“I’m aware there’s a ceremony later. Chief O’Brien was just showing me round and I wanted to take a look at my ops center.”
Her jaw set. “I suppose you want the office.” She appeared to be biting back annoyance, but enough leaked through that Sisko got the message. Apparently in addition to her role in saving Bajor from Cardassians, she had also been running the station.
He tried for a smile and a light-hearted tone rather than the clipped put down he might have used if she was merely his first officer. “Well, I thought I'd say hello first and then take the office, but we could do it in any order you'd like.”
She didn’t smile back. “Hello,” she managed, fidgeting under his steady gaze. A small frown added creases to her nose ridges.
“Is something bothering you, Major?”
“You don't want to ask me that, Commander.”
“Why not?”
She blew out a breath and it was only then Sisko realized she had been barely breathing since she realized who he was.
She lifted her chin. “Because I have the bad habit of telling the truth even when people don't want to hear it, sir.”
“Perhaps I want to hear it,” he offered softly. “And there’s no need to ‘sir’ me, considering what we are to each other.”
She stared at him, some of the color draining from her cheeks. “I don't believe the Federation has any business being here,” she blurted out, then stepped back, folding her arms in front of her defensively.
Sisko regarded her for a moment. The Federation, or me? he wanted to ask. “The provisional government disagrees with you.”
She gritted her teeth. “The provisional government and I don't agree on a lot of things, which is probably why they've sent me to this god-forsaken place.”
And to me? he wondered, but she was still talking.
“I have been fighting for Bajoran independence since I was old enough to pick up a phaser. We finally drive the Cardassians out and what do our new leaders do? They call up the Federation and invite them right in.”
He spread out his hands. She was angry, but he was beginning to suspect a lot of it was also nerves. “The Federation is only here to help—”
“Help us. Yes, I know. The Cardassians said the same thing sixty years ago.”
His sense of unease was growing by the second, and the comparison to the Cardassians hit him like a sledgehammer. He had balked against an arranged marriage to begin with – such archaic traditions were thankfully rare in space-faring races, but the occupation had disrupted a lot of Bajoran culture’s natural evolution. The Federation anthropologists’ profile had been extremely detailed and persuasive however, so in the end he had gone along with it. But if his bride-to-be had such serious misgivings this was never going to work out, no matter how many experts insisted it was the only way to bond Bajor to the federation and thus protect them from the Cardassians coming back.
He took a deep breath, wishing that he had waited after all for the introduction ceremony that afternoon. “Major, when I was ordered here, I requested a Bajoran national as my first officer. It made sense. It still does, at least to me. Now, you and I are going to have to—”
He was interrupted by a bleep from the console. Her shoulders dropping in apparent relief, Kira focused all of her attention on the sounding alarm, then moved her shaking hand to open a comm link through the console.
A strangely-featured alien face appeared on the screen. “Yes, Major?”
“Odo, are you reading something at A-fourteen?”
“My security array has been down for two hours. I'll meet you there.”
She looked up at Sisko then, a tightness around her eyes and a stiffness in her posture. “We've been having a lot of break-ins lately. No need for you to come along, Commander.”
She didn’t move until he stepped back, clearing a path to the office door.
Sisko exhaled and set out to follow Kira, careful to keep a respectful distance between them. His worst fears had been confirmed: she was young, beautiful, clearly forced into this arrangement against her will, and almost certainly a victim of Cardassian violence her whole life if the way she flinched under his gaze was anything to go by.
This first meeting had not gone as he had hoped either—in his head he imagined an informal chat, just the two of them. A low-key introduction, putting her at her ease, giving him a chance in private to assure her he wouldn’t expect anything from her. Instead he had been stiff and formal, and in turn Kira was dismissive, angered by his very presence, and clearly distrustful. He was also worried her anger was in part a cover for underlying fear—that with the Federation they were facing just a different kind of occupation. So what did that mean for her if she was to be married off to the highest ranking Federation officer here?