#if you need a visual just picture scruffy/longer-hair Patrick Swayze and you're halfway there

[batmurdock]

The Man Who Fell to Bajor

Heyyyooo. For those of you who enjoy @cineshemp ‘s delightful Vorta OC, Kieran - we have a treat for you! Behold the first few chapters of adventures between Kieran and his budding Bajoran pal [””], Kivak Fey. Below the cut are a couple chapters of original fic based off our concepts. Enjoy!

Chapter I:  It's a God-Awful Small Affair...

“Huh.”

There was a puddle of holographic material sprawled out in the center of the desert, and inside that puddle were streaks of incandescent gold, and beyond all that, crumpled up, was the most delicate-looking person Kivak Fey had ever seen. 

Shoving his goggles up to the top of his head, the Bajoran crouched down, all lanky limbs and wiry muscle under his layers of coverings, to better inspect the unexpected visitor. 

It wasn’t every day on Bajor that people came flying out of the clear bronze yonder. In the midst of a solar storm meeting a sandstorm head-on to create shards of glass in the desert, there weren’t a lot of people, period — especially people like this — who tumbled down from on high. 

At least you hoped not, otherwise, they were most likely quite dead.

A more spiritual person might’ve blamed — or praised — the prophets, but all Fey felt like doing was poking said person with a stick.

Not cruelly, mind - but he had learned long ago to keep most unknowns outside of artistic expression and exploration at arm’s length. Fey had absolutely no desire to get mixed up in things that might run the risk of him getting involved. With the Bajoran government or any other, with religious hypocrisy or - well, he could wander those thoughts all day, just like these dunes. Or he could actually set about to find a stick and try his hand [and improvised weapon] at defending his own curiosities.

He settled for a hand, softly nudging the shimmering shoulder till the being rolled over slightly with a groan. Fey froze, but nothing else followed. By all accounts, on their side in the little divot he’d made in the hushin grains, the little beast was very still. 

They were alien, Fey decided — not from any part of Bajor, that much was for certain; not even the unpredictable and unruly Outback. Not Cardassia, nor other neighboring worlds - nothing and no one so colorful came from those places. Not that he knew for certain, of course. 

But in wracking his mind for anything or anyone even vaguely-resembling his newfound friend-to-be [so Fey had, as he often did, idly decided], nothing came up. Never in his life had the artist seen anything along the lines of dainty purple ridges on the ears, nor ears of that shape, for that matter…not to mention a gently-lashing tail, the tufty end of which was nearly as purple as his ears — no. Darker, actually. 

Actually, in one ear, an earring glittered, which gave Fey brief pause - but the make was far from Bajoran, the design much less elegantly-flowing. It was layered gold, the very brightest Fey had ever seen, much less worked with - and positively glowed in the low light of the shifting sand. 

In scooting closer, Fey softened his touch as he moved away from the other’s shoulder, moving toward a pale throat — then hesitating. He didn’t even know what he’d be looking for. What if this traveler didn’t, y’know — have a pulse in their neck, or breathe through what Fey assumed was — 

“You’re overthinking it,” Fey chided himself, scrunching his ridged nose before the rest of his face followed, screwed up in concentration. All he had to do was look for some sign of life — actually, not even that. 

He didn’t have to do this.

His hand, still spattered with pigment, went still as he approached the other’s face. 

He could walk away from this, actually. Whatever it was. Sign of the so-called Prophets. Discarded space rubbish. Lost soul, sans soul. No — that wasn’t fair. It wasn’t Fey’s problem, was the thing. Could’ve not been a problem at all. Not his responsibility, either. 

But he hadn’t wound up here by accident, Prophets or no. When he’d lost everything during the occupation - at the tender age of eight or so - he’d wound up in this seemingly-barren wasteland, the Outback, after a labor camp escape went [mostly] not at all to plan. 

The artist-in-residence prior to him, Tivor Fareil, had passed him off as an apprentice before making good on his word. He knew places ‘round here that no solar, dust, or Cardassian storm could reach. 

Down below them by hundreds of leagues lay the secrets of a race of survivors, after all - massive caverns that stretched for leagues, long-abandoned for the sake of mining ore elsewhere. Where there was no ore, there was no point, so believed many a Cardassian. And thus life survived, culture survived - the only way it knew how.

By hiding in the darkness, gathering dust.

But Tivor showed Fey a world wherein he had stored priceless relics - art dating back several decades; centuries, even, all from a once-proud community of artists that had since either been taken by the elements, returned to the Prophets, or…worse things by far.

Against his will, somehow, sympathy twisted and twanged beneath Fey’s breastbone.

It wasn’t that they had anything in common, he and this strange little being - in clothes so garishly mismatched, upon closer look, that Fey wondered if they hadn’t hit every laundry line on his way down from the stars. 

It wasn’t that he was particularly young, either - small; yes, young, ish. He seemed - ageless in a way, Fey pondered, a finger slipping up and under bunched black curls. Tugging on one, almost on a whim, the Bajoran noted - speaking of stars, he supposed - just how littered with little marks the other was, all vaguely glimmery in the returning light that came as the Sister Storms departed.

In the settling dust, the sharp, curved wing of some wicked ship loomed in the distance. Its dorsal cut through the sandy grains, an elongated, obsidian thing that shone with steely indifference against Bajoran sunlight. The reddish hue of the sky had begun to dissipate somewhat, dulling back down from a burn mark to something much balmier and more welcoming.

In its peachy hues, the figure on the ground looked smaller than ever - spread against the sand, splayed away from a trail the dust had already dragged over, no doubt. 

“‘And so from the shipwreck came a sailor,’” murmured Fey idly, tilting his head and crouching back down to inspect the figure for - he was losing count of how many times it was, actually. Maybe that was why he related to the stranger. They were two people dislodged by circumstance, shaken out to find their way despite all odds. It would end, no doubt, when the visitor awoke and demanded swift exit from a planet still in recovery from its war-torn ransacking.

Till then, however - Fey supposed they had both come this far.

Delicate fingers tugged back his lapels to look for more answers, careful not to jostle him - who knew if he’d been flung, now that he’d found this ship, or - perhaps he’d been a flying thing, shot down in his prime before taking his enemies with him…

Fey’s impatient humming stopped as his fingers struck something cold.

It wasn’t much, really. Just a pin on his jacket, some symbol that rang a vague bell in the back of the Bajoran’s mind. It was something powerful - rigid, ritualistic, and controlled. A direct contrast, Fey thought, to the person it’d been attached to. Fey, after a beat further of deliberation, finally plucked the thing free to hold it up to the light better, sniffing through the settling grit on his skin. 

Up against the fading sunlight, the insignia turned out to be - 

“Romulan,” he realized aloud, squinting a little. What in the name of Akorem Laan would anyone from Romulus be doing out here? Another huh nearly escaped him again, before he realized two things at once, shortly followed by a third.

One, the person - who very much wasn’t Romulan, despite his shiny badge - had in fact been breathing, though it’d been shallow and softly raspy enough Fey had initially lost it to the hissing of the reshaped dunes. Two, their eyes were as bright and ultraviolet as the ridges of their ears and the faint flush the sun had left against their skin and their ten-million-odd freckles littering their features.

The third thing Fey realized was that he probably should’ve moved away just a bit faster - 

Before, with a snarl, the brightly-dressed trespasser whipped around, shook off a fine layer of Outback sand, and sank his teeth - sharp little teeth oozing with profuse amounts of slime - directly into his forearm.

Yeah, Fey decided in that instant, I definitely should’ve left well enough alone.

--

Chapter II: I’m the Space Invader...

There was a face above his face, and it was just a face to him. 

Two eyes, two nostrils under a crinkled bridge, and a mouth set in a grimace. Comely, the Vorta supposed, in the way that most bipedal faces could be - no doubt appealing to the person’s own species, much like the Vorta were meant to appeal to everyone.

At least, that was what Kieran had been taught, as his fellow Vorta in the cloning center adorned him with garments and spoke to him with the sweetness of deliberate genetic modification - machinery of any kind never ran so smoothly as when it did by means of Vorta “magic” - they wove a symphony on silver tongues that never once carried a tune, but did so by design.

And it was all meant to go so well, until they sent him to the coldest, grayest, and most unforgiving world Kieran could’ve imagined, had he been defective enough to dream of such things. Therein he was assigned a charge - a Romulan of the Tal Shiar variety; an unparalleled and ruthless intelligence agency meant to partner with the Dominion for - 

Things Kieran couldn’t have fathomed anyway. It was above his…pay grade, as one of the Terran visitors had put it - with a snide smile on his face and a little look of knowing in his cold blue eyes that had made the fur running down Kieran’s back bristle with unease.

But he only reported on what he had to report, which wasn’t much of anything. The Tal Shiar did this, the Senate did that, the days were slate-gray and structured to the point of teary boredom, but he didn’t know, exactly, what else he could’ve been searching for.

Service to the Founders had been written into his genes, after all - born to worship, made to serve, that alone should’ve been fulfilling. None of his other brothers and sisters seemed to struggle with it. They would detonate their implants at a moment’s notice if they had to, succumb to the mercy of their own brief tenancy of whatever planet they occupied, and protect the Founders. Uphold the Dominion. They would close their eyes, open their arms, and embrace the relentless phaser-fire of Jem’Hadar if they deemed them unworthy.

But Kieran couldn’t settle. He could do his job, sure, but he couldn’t [and perhaps…wouldn’t] settle for something so mundane and empty. 

That was what it was, it was empty. 

His Tal Shiar host – whose name he must’ve suppressed, or he was more rattled by his descent to an enemy planet than he’d previously considered – had been…bemused, Kieran thought, by his seemingly endless list of demands that he knew had to make no sense whatsoever to a being of such order, organization, and deliberate construct. 

He had a series of Klingon operas downloaded to his padd. He’d had every type of cushion available within the compound that served as his…associate’s house sent to his quarters. He’d had jumbo mollusks to gnash his teeth on, finding the shells more satisfying to whittle down with his mandibles than their slimy insides. 

And by night, when the debriefing was done and the screens black and glossy as places the stars couldn’t reach, Kieran, [redacted] of his Line, sat and stared out the window, fuming.

Fuming, because he felt like he still couldn’t get it quite right. 

And then, one day - a day both long before he met the face hanging over him in the desert, and indeed, a day like any other, as far as he could tell when he roused himself in a trashed room full of half-bitten mugs, shells, and other discarded ornamentation - 

Weyoun 6 defected.

It was chaos after that. Unpredictable, unbridled chaos the likes of which none of them had ever seen. Trusted allies began to shoot sideways glances at the Vorta who had been innocently attached at the hip to leaders all over the Alpha Quadrant. The window through to the other side of the galaxy was closed; well-sealed, even so, without so much as a shadow of negotiable entry in the foreseeable future.

Maybe by some inane, long-buried instinct, Kieran could feel the walls closing in. He refused to be cornered. He refused to be the first to fall, but similarly, he refused to be someone the Tal Shiar turned on and, in turn, tortured.

He had, after all, seen what they could do.

Which was why and how he’d wound up here, with his mouth wrapped ‘round so many filthy, leathery layers of fabric that he felt as though he might’ve bitten into nothing more than garbage - garbage adorning a man so tall he seemed to blot out the sun of the world he was on, all golden-rimmed and glistening. Sandy grit clung to him like crystallization, and for a moment, due to the hue and how the harsh glow still burned his sensitive eyes, the Vorta had wildly thought a Founder had, well.

Found him.

No Founder would’ve worn such rags, however - nor been half as solid when sunken into like this. He hadn’t managed to pierce skin, and hauled off to make an effort to do so again before the giant staggered back and made some kind of sound.

And then another, and a few more, and that was when Kieran realized more than just the name of his former accomplice had been knocked loose in his less-than-gentle emergency landing. 

On the contrary, it seemed his translator had - malfunctioned.

Fucking perfect.

“Boryhas?” The man asked, in a voice warm and low - only a little annoyed, apparently, as he inspected his now-slobbered-on sleeve. Kieran narrowed his eyes - the blazing sky hurt - and grit his teeth, back bristling. I will not be cornered.

“I can’t understand you,” he replied, annoyed - raspy voice made that much grittier thanks to the fiery descent he’d had, no doubt. How much of the fuel cell’s ejected and burned centers had he actually inhaled? “And if I have to take a wild guess, you can’t understand me.” One hand reached up, wiping the dust from his face as the planet’s occupant surveyed him. Kieran struggled upright, legs shaking profusely, and forced himself to remain so, tail lashing impatiently behind him.

“If you don’t mind,” he said, inhaling, “understand me or not, I must be on my way.” He took a single step, however, and sank in up to his hip with a squeak. There was a snort behind him, and with an indignant burn of lavender cheeks, the Vorta realized the crusty bastard was laughing at him.

“This isn’t funny,” he snapped, seething as he rounded once more on the taller man, “it hurts out here.” The laughter died away instantly, and Kieran had the wildest hope that perhaps he’d finally been understood.

“...Tas’veir?” The man asked, and Kieran’s shoulders sagged, lower lip protruding with a thrust of frustration. Pointy eyeteeth sucked the anatomy back into place, and, drawing in a breath, the Vorta raised clawed hands to stave off any further attempts. He didn’t need any other complications, frankly. He was tired enough as it was. 

“Veir Kivak Fey,” the man said - and placed both hands to his own chest. “Kivak Fey,” he said again, in that voice like a flickering flame. After a cold world of uneasy humming and steely indifference, it was a strange thing. Fire in a desert should’ve been far more unforgiving. Kieran shivered in spite of himself, shielding his face with both hands. The man was still backlit - and coming closer.

“Stay back,” he hissed warningly, one finger upraised, “the Dominion won’t be happy if–” the finger curled.

The old lie felt sour in his mouth, now. 

They hadn’t cared. They didn’t care. That was why Weyoun 6 had - left, wasn’t it? It wasn’t that he was defective. It was…it was…

Veering dangerously close to the truth, all Kieran could do was stand there in a daze - feeling the coolest little breeze rustle over him as, with a flinch, he jarred back to the present in time to find the stranger who’d discovered him unsheathe some sort of contraption from his belt - producing handheld shade in the form of an intricate bronze webbing which deflected the sun. 

In their pocket of darkness, under what most closely-resembled a parasol plant from a planet Kieran remembered only from distant readings - he peered up at the other with suspicion, teeth still slightly-bared. 

The man, he realized, up close and in the serenity of shadows, was a Bajoran. Bajor, one of their greatest threats, the jewel in the crown the Cardassians lost, and continued losing. Especially with Weyoun 6 performing what could only be considered a cardinal sin, perhaps as his clone’s direct reflection of the leadership he served - 

Speculation wasn’t Kieran’s forte. Anger was. Anger got things done. Deliberate, focused, driven anger which, with nowhere to go on Romulus, led to destructive tendencies.

Perhaps the golden Warbird smoking underneath the sand back there was his piece de resistance. Something he’d heard well before everything in his life had seemingly gone haywire, at any rate.

A gentle hand found his shoulder. Kieran shrugged it away immediately, a warning glare in one amethyst eye. The taller man sighed, then shifted around him, passing him the long-sticked parasol, pointing instead in the direction of a few tall dunes, in which - if he squinted; painfully so - Kieran could make out something of a geometrical structure. A hovel, perhaps.

A home.

“Bas’ra?” The man motioned with his head toward the house in the distance. “U balik?” A thumb jutting over his shoulder suggested they’d part ways.

Not liking either option particularly much, Kieran debated simply flopping over in the sand again. Self-destructively. 

But he was tired. He was wrecked. He had nowhere to go, no one to understand, and certainly not a species left in this quadrant he could trust.

“Fine,” he said under his breath, and felt the other man heft him out of the sand with a gentle nudge of his leg against the Vorta’s trapped own, “but don’t think this means I owe you anything.”

Though the man surely didn’t understand him, and though his eyes were bad, Kieran swore he caught him smiling.