The Casualty «Dukat/Damar & OFC» 🔞 ✔️

8. New order

It was a long trip home. Long and grim. Most of the crew sat quietly, contemplating in the light of the recent defeat. The ones who talked did so in low voices, their faces cheerless masks.

Nyran stared at a bulkhead, numb. Damar left her in the first vacant quarters he could find and joined the rest of the officers on the bridge. She sat where he had put her and had yet to find enough motivation to move.

She replayed her last ten minutes on Terok Nor over and over in her head, but any way she looked at it, the conclusion remained the same: this was the definitive end of her engagement to Dukat. His eyes full of hatred, piercing her heart, stalked her every thought. He did not want her there, he did not stop Damar from taking her away. She tried to tell herself that he might have just been confused, so trapped in the pain of losing the station and his daughter he was unable to summon the love he had for his bride*...

...but the truth was, her instincts had been trying to relay a different message to her for a long time. She just refused to listen, hoping those were her insecurities talking.

The door chimed, but Nyran did not move a muscle. After a few more unanswered attempts she heard the door open.

Nyran knew who it was and she expected him to fume over her failure to answer the door, but he remained silent as he came in. The things he had done and witnessed back on the station must have shaken him just as much as her. He sat on the bunk bed across from her and fixed a blank stare in an undisclosed direction.

They sat like that for some time; it might have been minutes, it might have also been hours. It felt like an eternity, yet still not long enough.

Damar spoke up first.

"I don't expect you to talk if you don't want to," he said, voice hoarse, "but I feel like I need to say it out loud."

Nyran gave him a tiny nod, just as far as her wooden muscles allowed her.

"I was so angry at Ziyal... I was angry at everything. I wasn't even aiming at anything important, I didn't mean to kill her. I just wanted her to hurt." His tone filled with pain, guilt and disbelief. "She cost us the station, but not even that gave me the right to be the judge, jury and executioner**."

Nyran felt like a giant hand reached into her chest and squeezed. They were not exactly close, but Ziyal did not deserve to die like that. He was right about one thing, though: what she had done was insanely stupid, it was betrayal and it resulted in them losing Terok Nor. No one in the Cardassian military would expect Damar to do anything less than what he had done. But thinking of doing something this final and actually doing it... must have been incomparable. And, apparently, it left a mark on Damar.

"She chose her side," Nyran whispered. "It was just her rotten luck that Dukat made her confess while we were within earshot. She could've been alive and well back on Terok Nor now, with her new friends and family, and we'd still have a leader."

"I just can't understand how he could have forgiven her," he spat, bitterness creeping into his voice. "Just like that... He left her to die there once, when she disobeyed him, saying she'd betrayed him. And now this?"

"She was his last chance at a true redemption," she said blankly. "The only person close enough to him who still loved him and stood by him, the only one he loved with all his heart — and half Bajoran. It all makes sense to me now. Because for some time I thought it was me, that I was his ticket to heaven. But..." she smiled joylessly, "that must have been just a line to get what he wanted. He didn't care about me enough to really change. I was just a pretty doll to put on display for the rest of the world to see. To make him look like the good guy he wanted to be, to help him achieve the level of admiration he craved. Just a means to an end."