Chapter Text
"Tell me a secret," she asks him, "Something no one else knows about you.”
Like a treasure, a pearl kept hidden beneath the waves. Where only the oysters know how bright and ethereal it shines. Tucked away and cherished, too brilliant for anyone else to see.
Tell me.
"Secrets," he tells her, "are tricky things.”
Once they’re brought to the light it's like fireworks. They burn high and bright, draw gasps and wide eyes. But once they burn out they’re never a secret again, and they’ve lost their magic. Their luster.
“And sometimes, if you aren’t careful, people get burned.”
"I’m not afraid," she tells him. "I’m not afraid of the fire. Or the depths. Or the burn."
"Is there anything you’re afraid of?" He asks her. She’s so fearless, so bold, so effortlessly commanding. As if she’d stare down the gallows without blinking an eye.
"The nothingness," she says quietly. "The emptiness. I’m afraid of never feeling anything again."
He thinks back on all the times she’s run first into the fray, all the moments she’s stepped forward instead of back. Is that recklessness, that bravery, just an effort to feel something real? Something sharp and gripping that cuts through suffocating layers of the uniform to the skin that’s beneath.
Does she need to bleed, sometimes, just to remember she’s flesh and bone under the uniform?
He’s felt it before, the overpowering desire to comfort her. Reach for her. With his body and his words and greedy hands.
But she doesn’t want comfort, as they sit in the quiet of her quarters, drinking away the last vestiges of a long day.
She wants his secrets.
He has plenty to spare.
Dark, twisted, pitted secrets that taste bitter in his mouth late at night. The ones where he hunts and takes and fights without purpose. Where the only things he feels are blinding, burning rage and grief so deep he can’t see the bottom of the abyss he’s sinking into.
Some of them are too sharp for his tongue, clawing at his throat as he tries to choke them out. Even with her, there are some he can’t say out loud.
But because she’s staring at him, eyes stormy blue and demanding, he chooses one. Plucks it from the branches of his past and holds it up to the light, feeling its weight in his chest.
"I’ll tell you about why I joined the Maquis," he tells her. "Not the reason in my file, the statement I wrote when I resigned. It's true enough, but it's not the real reason."
"Why did you?" she asks him, leaning forward, a wine glass balanced between two pale fingers, twined around the stem. The blood red liquid shimmers as she rolls it in her hand, the movement making him remember the lakes, the rivers, on his homeworld
The sound of his mother’s singing. The smell of his father’s workshop.
The color of another woman’s eyes.
"Her name was Leana," he tells her. "She was my sister's best friend, three years my junior. She danced like the wind, laughed like the ocean. Everything about her was like a life force that flowed through you."
"You loved her," she says.
"I did," he answers.
In the way young people love each other. That wild, reckless, painful way that makes each heartbeat seem like it depends on another person to ever echo again.
"What happened to her?" she asks, though there's something in her eyes that tells him she already knows.
"The Cardassians," he tells her. "They took her. She was so beautiful, so fierce, and she fought for our people. The night before she was captured she came to me, telling me about the plan to sabotage the Cardassian fighters just west of the river. She asked me to go with her."
"And you said no?"
He expects to see judgment, reproach. But there isn't any. It's just a dark truth she sees through the marred surface of his soul.
Maybe she understands imperfections more than he realizes. Maybe she too has a secret that still cuts her open, like a wound that won't heal.
"I did," he tells her. "I was Starfleet, home for a visit before a mission. There was too much at stake. Or, at least, that’s what I thought back then. I could have been a captain soon, had my own ship."
She nods. She knows all too well the way ambition can cloud a person, take away the human edges until there’s only the soldier remaining. That’s what Starfleet wants, demands, of them. Unconditional loyalty. Sacrifice for the sake of the Federation.
"The word came fast to the village the next morning. The raid had gone badly from the start. They expected it had been faulty intelligence, though no one really knew."
He’d tried to find her. Searched, bartered, pleaded. For a while it was rumored she'd escaped, gone underground.
Then it was said that she died.
That might have been easier.
Instead, a year later, he saw her. The day he came home to bury his father. As he tells about that day, he remembers the sunken cheeks, the haunted gaze that met his, the second when he didn’t recognize her.
The agony when he did.
Hollow and empty, rescued from a Cardassian prison with especially horrific forms of torture used on rebels. She came to the field where they spread his father's ashes. After everyone else drifted away, she came forward and stood beside him.
She was worn away, so thin, her eyes dull and distant. Somehow, he knew she never danced anymore.
"I'm sorry," she had told him.
"I looked for you."
"It doesn’t matter. I was already lost."
She stood next to him in the field where they had played as children, and he'd never felt more alone.
"You're home now?" he had asked her.
"No. Don't tell anyone you saw me. I need to keep fighting. "
"Why?"
"Someone has to."
When she had walked away, a limp in her right leg, her face to the bitter wind, he knew this time he'd never see her again.
"She was killed a week later, her ship crashing on a moon no one knew the name of. In a battle that wouldn't be remembered."
He resigned the next day.
And he never told a soul. He let her family believe she died quickly, painlessly. They never knew what she became, what was taken from her.
But now another woman is staring at him, those blue eyes seeing everything. There's no pity, just an understanding he doesn't expect. Death, ugliness, the unfair pendulum swing of tragedy, these things she knows.
"So you fight for her."
"Yes and no. I fight because she was right. Because someone has to."
"Someone has to," she repeats.
There is a grimness in her voice as she says it. And suddenly he imagines this brave woman in front of him, broken and defeated, worn down by the fight. Vacant eyes. Empty hands.
But this time, he swears, it will be different.
This time, he fights beside her.
Not just because he has to, that part is a lie. The only one he's told so far tonight. A lie he knows he'll tell her again.
He fights for her. For this woman. His captain.
Because he loves her. And because she stands for something other than fear and greed and twisted hate.
And because he knows she still dances like the wind.
"So that's my secret. What about you? Do you have any secrets?" he asks her, his mouth bold from his own confession.
When she answers, her eyes are midnight blue, and the look makes his pulse roll to a drumbeat in his ears.
"Just one."