#v: in her one beholds his weaknesses and his dreams | main

[professortora]

a pleasant distraction

It’s something Naprem notices a little at a time - D’rorah’s in love.

Nowadays, she’s almost positive of it. She’d noticed the change in mood almost two months ago, back when she’d still been with her aunts in Musilla. There was something different about her - she was happier. The constant gloom that’d been draped over her shoulders since Naprem returned - and, Naprem now suspects, for quite some time before - had vanished, only showing itself in short, erratic spurts. She’d taken on her old glow. She was smiling more. Laughing more. At first, Naprem thought she must have told someone on the station her secret, something Naprem had been urging her to do from the start. But there’s something about the way she’s taken to staring longingly out the window, and waxing poetic at the strangest times, listing strange romantic hypotheticals in conversation without any real elaboration or cause. 

Naprem knows love when she sees it. She’s dealt with her own fair share, and she’s a mother - she can sniff out secrets quicker than a Cardassian riding hound these days. 

That, and Dr. Bashir had let it slip in casual conversation that D’rorah was seeing someone during his last call. Naprem had done the smart thing and acted like she already knew, though of course she hadn’t - it never helped to let someone know they’d slipped up and told you private information. Always easier to get the full story if you pretended you already had it.

And that, of course, is when the harassment began. 

Naprem could chalk it up to boredom - in fact, at her most honest, she does. Since she moved to the apartment in Tozhat to be closer to Ziyal’s university, her days have been frightfully boring. She tells herself she’s doing better now than she was. Here, the sunshine is impossible to avoid, as are the people. The city of Shara is emblematic of the entire province: bustling, beautiful, and crowded, with brilliant colored buildings crawling and scrambling over one another, tumbling together in a hundred thousand tiny shanties and shacks, all gaping wide-eyed at the crystal blue ocean far below. The streets are narrow and steeply-sloping, and more than half of them wind, labyrinthian and random, over the roofs and stairways of the apartments. Naprem’s apartment has a balcony that looks over the city, and neighborhood children come vaulting over it, laughing and playing. 

At any hour of the day, the city rings with the songs of street musicians, the heated arguments of neighbors shouting between their balcony, the whooping calls of vendors and merchants, and the raucous laughter of children. Colored lamps and bells dangle from wires that run over the roads, and the streets are always crowded. The city smells deeply of sea and trash, of summer and piss and dirty bath water, of fresh fried katarra and jungle wind. Naprem lives right up the road from the Tozhat Resettlement Center, and sometimes when she’s out walking, she’ll see the Cardassian orphans out with their caretakers, running errands or doing community service. Her local bakery is home to the only other Cardassian-Bajoran hybrid she’s ever seen - a stocky, dough-faced boys whose ridges give way to a patchy premature baldness he seems completely unashamed of. (Ziyal has told her, with a surprising reticence that he’s part of a hybrid support group that meets at the university - there are some thirty of them living in Tozhat, and every week they travel hours to meet in one of the university recreation rooms, to laugh and tell stories.)

But, for all the city’s constant activity, Naprem finds herself just as ill-at-ease here as she was in her aunts’ house. Her heartsickness has followed her here. She’s able, now, to force herself to go outside most days, if only to run errands. She makes Ziyal breakfast in the morning and dinner every night, and she doesn’t make lunch unless Ziyal comes home early. She spends a good deal of the time sleeping in the sun, regaining the color she didn’t realize she’d lost. She reads when she has the energy, occasionally in a coffee shop if she can find one, or at a bakery or sandwich shop if she can’t. 

But she doesn’t speak to anyone if she can help it. She avoids the gaze of strangers and the kindness of her closest neighbors. She keeps very strictly to herself, pursuing absolutely no company. 

It isn’t that she hasn’t had the opportunity to get out of the house, for lack of a better term. She has old friends in the area - colleagues who work at Ziyal’s university, who’ve reached out with offers of employment. She’s been contacted by a local archivist, a historian who knows her work pre-Occupation. She’s even been contact by the Resettlement Center to ask if she’d like to work with the children there.

But she doesn’t have an interest in going back to the work - certainly not as a teacher or an archivist. There’s something weighing her down, keeping her curled up in the windowseat near her balcony, making the sunlight sour.

She’s doing better, she tells herself. And if she isn’t, D’rorah certainly is. D’rorah’s life is evolving and changing, even as Naprem’s seems to resist any tangible improvement, no matter what changes she inflicts on it. So she pries and she pushes and eventually she outright demands that the next time D’rorah come to see her, she bring whoever it is with her.

@drorah-walks

[professortora]

like a deer in headlights

There was a point in Naprem’s life when she couldn’t foresee a use for her immense knowledge of Cardassian record keeping best practices. 

Suffice to say, that point is long past.

Naprem didn’t actually go looking for anything about D’rorah. That discovery was more of an unpleasant surprise. She should’ve known she’d be starting her term as Ambassador with espionage; whether they knew it or not, that’s what the people of Bajor hired her to do. She’s the expert they need, when it comes to Cardassian legal jargon and loophole closing. She’s the person they need in the field, chasing down loose ends.

What she was looking for, she found, but it doesn’t really matter now. All this was some time ago -- and now that she’s disentangled herself from it, there’s something that’s bothering her.

When she came back, D’rorah Philosophy cared for her. She watched over her. She held her in her darkest moments, watched over her, chased away her nightmares in both sleep and waking life. D’rorah was her constant companion through her depression; her counselor, her doctor, and her friend.

And Naprem can’t go another day, seeing her so isolated and hopeless on this station.

They’ve talked about it, obviously -- the ‘what ifs,’ the ‘maybes.’ She’s given it a try with Julian, and that, Naprem can appreciate. She knows it’s not always easy for D’rorah to understand the young and -- from what she knows of Julian -- she knows it’s not easy for him to apologize for how he acts when he’s embarrassed or overcompensating. The atmosphere in the infirmary is lighter, certainly. And D’rorah’s been able to come out with her when she’s on the station, been able to lead something resembling a more normal life.

But the lie that supersedes all of it is eating her alive, and Naprem can tell. D’rorah is a woman living in constant fear of discovery, forced to constantly mistrust others and hide herself, disguise herself, for fear of what might happen if she doesn’t. 

Naprem knows from experience that that life is not one worth living.

And so it is that she enters D’rorah’s quarters, turns around, and, just after the door has shut, announces:

“D’rorah Shoshanna Eisenberg Barimen Philosophy, today is the day you tell someone what you are, or so help me, I will walk you into Sisko’s office and tell him myself.”

@drorah-walks

[professortora]

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