TITLE: Pictures In The Sand
AUTHOR: Calicia
CODES: Z
SET WHEN: During ‘Indiscretion’
RATING: G
SUMMARY: Just before her father rescues her, Ziyal draws a picture of herself and 
her parents.
DISCLAIMER: She’s theirs.

***

The stick moved swiftly through the sand on the floor, using long, elegant strokes 
and smaller, finer ones to create three figures, drawn from the memories etched in 
her mind. Ziyal crouched in her favourite hiding-place, stick in hand. She started 
at every small noise lest it meant the return of her Breen captors.

She filled in the detail of her portrait first, details gathered from staring at 
herself in the small bowls of water allowed to her and the other prisoners. Each 
little stroke added more detail, completing the picture to show the tired, scared 
young woman that the happy-go-lucky child had become.

The figure that she filled in next was one that Ziyal had seen every day of her life 
until the crash. She had drawn this face every day since then. Tora Naprem’s eyes 
gazed up out of the sand as her daughter deftly added detail to her expression. Not 
her ‘public’ expression, presented to her lover’s associates -- a mixture of submission 
and hauteur. Not one of her ‘family’ expressions, presented to her lover and to her 
daughter -- whether it was happy, contented, or playful, or sometimes annoyed, angry 
or upset. Nor was it the expression she had worn when the Breen had shot down the 
‘Ravinok’, forcing it to crash -- an expression of pain and terror, which she had tried 
to conceal behind a brave mask for the sake of fourteen-year-old Ziyal. The expression 
Ziyal now drew for Naprem was the expression she had worn when she thought no-one, not 
even her daughter, was watching. That heartbreaking mixture of wistfulness, of sorrow, 
and of wishing that *somehow* things could be different.


Finally Ziyal filled in the third figure. Her father, last seen when he had sent her 
and her mother ‘on a holiday’. Some holiday. Ziyal clung to the belief that her father 
would be looking for her, that he would come and take her home. It was all that kept 
her sane in a place where not only did she still not belong, but where no-one at all 
accepted her. The Bajorans barely spoke to her -- she was half-Cardassian and her mother 
had been a ‘collaborator’. The Cardassians were civil -- barely -- because of who her 
father was, but they ridiculed her belief that he would rescue her. They told her that 
he would kill her because she was half-Bajoran and he couldn’t risk the shame she would 
bring to him. Ziyal didn’t believe them. *It’s because they don’t know him like I do,* 
she told herself, filling in her father’s features. The picture smiled up lovingly, but 
it was a pale shadow compared to actually seeing her father smile at her. *He would never 
deliberately hurt me.* Ziyal reassured herself. *They’re wrong.*

She contemplated the picture. Her, tired and scared. Her mother, wistful and sad. Her 
father, smiling, oblivious to the pain she and her mother were in. Ziyal shivered 
suddenly. Reaching out a hand, she erased the picture, then scrambled out of her hiding 
spot toward the bucket of water and the ladle as she heard heavy footsteps coming down 
the corridor.

END