Story rated PG for mature themes. No sex, no violence. Hell, it's practically a "G". :-) Obligatory disclaimer: Characters, places, etc, belong to Paramount. I have merely borrowed them for this little story, with thanks. DO NOT FORWARD. DO NOT ARCHIVE. DO NOT POST ELSEWHERE. You can keep one copy on your hard drive or other data storage media, and print out one copy for your personal use. This one's for Da Man ... Enjoy! C. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ COLD COMFORT by Carolyn R. Fulton It didn't occur to Kira for a long time, not until one evening when she sat holding Yoshi and chanced to look up and see her lover's face. She had been lost in a happy daydream, one where her own children laughed in Bajor's sunshine. Thoughts of children naturally drew her eyes to the one she loved, the one who shared her bed whenever they could snatch enough time alone together. Then her dream was overwhelmed, drowned in a summer cloudburst, as she caught the look of bleak despair that Odo was too slow to hide. *No children.* Kira wondered why the realization was so startling, and so devastating. She must have known, somewhere in the rational, logical portion of her mind, the part that had told her for so long that she wanted no children in the first place. Odo wasn't Bajoran, he wasn't even humanoid, he was liquid and light, a laugh in the face what humanoids had for so long considered the laws of physics. He had no means by which his life force could join with hers. He was, as he had sometimes said, ultimately alone. *No children.* No new lives entering the universe through the channel of her body, there to be welcomed into her arms and the arms of this being she had come to love with all her heart and mind and considerable passion. No children. Kira looked away, but not fast enough to avoid the scrutiny of one whom members of at least two races considered to be no less than a god. Odo quickly turned his stricken gaze to stare at the doorway that led to the corridor outside Kira's quarters. "What time did the O'Briens say they'd be back?" "Any time now." Kira kissed the top of the sleeping baby's head and shifted him in her arms. On the sofa, Molly O'Brien also lay asleep, boneless as a rag-doll, with her head resting on a pillow that had once been Odo's hand. Confronted with her lover's infinite patience, Kira felt the knife of her newly realized pain take an extra turn in her vitals, and closed her eyes against the sight. "What is it, Nerys?" Odo spoke softly, mindful of their slumbering visitors. There was no real curiosity in his voice, only a formality that needed to be observed. Kira's mouth twisted in a rueful grimace. "I just never realized before how -- how hard it might be for you and me to have a child of our own." She refused to use the word 'impossible'. For Kira, 'impossible' was simply an added degree of difficulty, no matter how much despair seemed to creep from her very bones. "Hard? I think the word you're looking for is 'inconceivable'." Odo let out a low grunt of humorless laughter at his own ill-placed pun. The doorchime sounded a welcome interruption. The limp bundles that comprised Molly and Yoshi were handed over into the arms of their parents, with hellos, thanks, and good-byes whispered in quick succession. After they had gone, Odo remained standing to hover near the door. "I should go, too." Kira's eyes widened in surprise. Their schedules frequently denied them the chance to spend an entire night together, but this was one time when she had been looking forward to the pleasure of waking in her lover's arms. Now she peered at Odo, startled, and caught the expression on his face. "No, don't." Kira patted the seat beside her, the knot of fearful determination that cramped in her stomach not unlike the feeling that had frequently accompanied the former resistance-fighter into battle. "Odo, we need to talk." Odo refused her invitation. "What's there to say? We know that this will never go anywhere further than it has." "If by 'this' you mean our relationship, what's wrong with where it is right now?" Odo stared at her, and dared to edge a little closer. "You want children. Your own children. I can't give them to you." "All those samples Bashir took of your DNA -- back when the Founders changed you into a humanoid --" "No good. They reverted to changeling protoplasm. I checked." "How could that happen?" "Who knows?" Odo shrugged. "Bashir just throws up his hands and says that he's resigned himself to my defying all known laws of biology and physics." "But you checked --" Kira thought about the world of meaning hidden in those words. "You've worried about this before. You want children, too." "No, not really. I just knew that *you* wanted them. I knew that you'd realize it someday -- I so hoped that somehow I could give them to you. But I can't. And that's the end of it." "I see." Kira bowed her head and considered his words. "That still doesn't explain why you don't want to spend the night." "You deserve children, Nerys. You deserve every good thing that life has to give you. I can't keep you from that." "Odo --" Kira's eyes widened, and she got slowly to her feet. "Odo, are you breaking up with me?" "Wouldn't that be for the best? After all, it's bound to come sometime." Kira lunged across the space that separated them and seized Odo by the arms with sudden, raptor-like fury. "Don't you see, you -- you -- don't you have any idea what all this means?" "What does *what* all mean?" Odo's look of pain was such that Kira wondered if she was bruising him with her grip, before she remembered one of Odo's kind could not be bruised. Or at least not bruised by anything so tangible as her hands. "Odo, there's something I need to tell you." Kira wasn't sure where the words came from, although she knew instantly where they were going. "What difference can it make?" The words came with a sadly gentle calm. "I can't give you what you want, Nerys." "You *are* what I want, dammit! Odo, don't you know that I'm in love with you?" Kira thought for a moment that Odo would turn to liquid in her grasp and melt away forever, his very substance disappearing in the fiber of the carpet. "How could I?" he rasped. "You never told me." "I know," Kira whispered. "I didn't know I needed to -- but I did." "Nerys --" Odo's arms moved easily beneath Kira's fingers, which had gone from steel to butter. Kira gasped as she felt those arms close around her in a close and tender grip. She could feel the tears begin a stealthy advance down her cheeks, but she disregarded their approach as she pressed her face into the curve between Odo's neck and shoulder. "I've been so afraid." Kira whispered her confession. "Afraid of what?" Kira could feel the words like the brush of warm velvet against her ear. "You know that I love you." "I don't know -- afraid of the war, afraid of the Founders -- afraid that I'd lose you." "Lose me?" Odo stepped back, and Kira felt her heart break as his wide, puzzled eyes peered into her face. "I don't understand." "I've never loved anyone without losing them, Odo." The words were forced out through a throat gone dry as ash. "Why should you be any different?" "Nerys -- you won't lose me." Odo raised his fingertips to touch Kira's cheek, stabbing her with his sadly resigned expression. "I'm the one who's going to lose you. I know that. I have to live with it." "You will not lose me!" Kira stepped back, suddenly angry. "Why can't you believe how much I love you? That's why it hurts so much to know that you and I can't have children -- because you're the only person I ever want to have them with! Don't you see that?" "I do believe how much you love me." Odo reached out and cupped Kira's face in his hands. "But Nerys -- my people live for hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of years. I'm a very young changeling. I *will* lose you, someday." "Oh." It came as a bare murmur, as Kira suddenly caught a glimpse of what it must be like, to know that everything one knew and cared for and loved would vanish in what was, for all practical purposes, little more than a heartbeat. The sadness that permeated the core of Odo's being suddenly made sense. So did something else. "That's why you don't care," Kira whispered. "About not having children. Because you'll lose them, too." "And their children, and their children's children." Odo's voice rose in sudden, sharp anguish. "I'm doomed to mourn children who won't be born for another thousand years." Odo stepped away from Kira at last, to go stare out the viewport at the wealth of stars beyond. "That's why the Link -- why it was so important to me. It was a constant, one thing that might be there for as long as I wanted it -- as long as I needed it. But now the Link is dying, too. Soon the only constants will be me, your Prophets, and those stars." The totality of such alone-ness slammed into Kira's very _pagh_. "How can you stand it?" she whispered. "How can you live, knowing that --" She flailed her hands around aimlessly as she searched for words, and finally let them fall helpless at her sides. "I try not to think about it." Odo shrugged as he recollected himself, and then carefully straightened his facsimile of a uniform tunic. "There's nothing I can do about it. Why dwell on it?" "Odo --" Kira stepped across the distance that separated them as though she navigated a mine field. She finally placed a tentative hand in the crook of his elbow, and turned her own gaze to the glimmering starscape. "It makes it hard to know what hurt you most -- all those years I didn't love you, or finally knowing that I do." "I wouldn't --" Odo groped for words "-- I wouldn't give up one minute of the time I've spent with you." Odo reached out, not to Kira but to the smooth pane of the viewport. "Those minutes -- they're like those stars. All that blackness around them -- it just makes them brighter." "I love you," Kira whispered. She felt a wild urge to say the words over and over, little talismans against the darkness to come. Odo reached up to cover her hand with his. He spoke only two words, but they formed a battleground for joy and despair. **"I know."** -end- All comments welcome, private or public.