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Psycho-Medical Profile: Report of DS9 Chief Medical Officer Julian
Bashir, M.D.
Though Kira has always possessed the tactical and strategic skills to do
her job exceptionally well, it is in interpersonal communication,
self-assurance, and finding the imagination extinguished by a refugee's
atrophied childhood where she has grown the most since this officer
first encountered her in 2369. Having lived on the edge of life and
death for so long, Kira's emotions are always close to the surface and
they can be unusually strong: love, grief and anger being the most
prevalent. She has also slowly come to grips with both the violence of
her past actions and her strong anti-Cardassian disposition.
Young Kira Nerys faced the same terrifying and brutal life faced by many
of her Bajoran brethren: her father, a farmer or gardener by trade, was
killed fighting in the resistance while her mother, an icon painter,
died of malnutrition in the Singha Refugee Camp when Nerys was 3. She
had at least two brothers and apparently no sisters; all they had to
play in the camp growing up was Bajoran springball, but she had some
crafts such as finger-painting at age 4 in the camp school. Having
forsworn any artistic aptitude, she ironically would have been a member
of the artist J'barra of Ih'valla, had the ancient Bajoran caste system
survived the Occupation.
At the age of only 12, after working in the mines, the orphaned Kira was
recruited by Lorit Akrem into the province's Shakaar resistance cell,
named for its leader. A year later, after running errands and cleaning
weapons, the group finally accepted her fully when Shakaar approved her
replacing a missing member for a raid on a Cardassian skimmer. The
earring she wears today was made from the metal of the skimmer by
cellmate Lupaza, after Kira killed the entire unloading complement while
giddily trying to impress the group.
A year later, she helped to temporarily liberate the Cardassians'
notorious Gallitepp labor camp, and eventually learned to fly outdated
Raider crafts against her oppressors. She suffered during the winter of
2360-61, along with the rest of her cell in her native Dahkur Hills
caves, unarmed and hungry; her group evaded Cardassians for 10 years in
the area. Through it all Kira never served time in Cardassian prison,
but she was once rescued from a Cardassian interrogation center with her
fellow cellmates.
Her war for Bajor's liberation had to include murder as well, such as
when she helped plasma-bomb the home of Gul Pirak in Hathon, and when
she checked aboard the Terok Nor station in 2365 to kill a native
collaborator with the Cardassians; the latter took a toll on her soul no
amount of eventual victory could erase. Ironically, she met Odo and
Quark for the first time on that mission, and was almost caught, the
truth not coming to light until years later as the station's
post-withdrawal first officer.
She accepted a major's commission and the post as Bajoran military
attache to Ben Sisko and the Starfleet administrators on DS9 following
the withdrawal in 2369 — although she had initially turned it down and
opposed the Bajoran provisional government's move to invite Starfleet
in. As she and Sisko grew to work and trust each other while respecting
their own agendas, she was temporarily recalled early the next year
pending reassignment during the abortive coup on Bajor, just after she
risked life and career to rescue reluctant Bajoran hero Li Nalas. It was
then when she first truly met Vedek Bareil, then the front-runner to
replace Kai Opaka, and they fell in love.
Despite the coming of Bajoran independence, grief would continue to be a
constant for Kira. It was she who performed the Bajoran death ritual for
Opaka soon after, when the kai was trapped in virtual death in the Gamma
Quadrant. The next year Kira was at Bareil's side when a scandal in a
no-win scenario during the occupation dashed his chances to become Kai;
a year later she faced his death alone on the eve of his Cardassian
peace treaty that Winn would later take the credit for. But Kira had
some solace, blocking Winn's drive to be secular leader of Bajor as well
when she helped diffuse a crisis and bolster her old resistance leader
Shakaar to the post instead. She in turn fell in love with him a year
later, lending no less a figure than Gul Dukat to note her obvious
attachment to strong male personalities. In addition, Kira was also
attracted to Tom Riker despite her involvement with Bareil; after his
theft of the U.S.S. Defiant, she eventually talked him into taking Dukat
and Sisko's deal of surrender with a rare Cardassian prison term that
she vows she'll help him escape from some day.
Because of her initial thin-skinned reputation, Kira has had to convince
Sisko she can handle cases close to her heart and has a hard time
dealing with the fact that she can't always fight for the underdog
anymore. Her hatred of Cardassians tempered much faster than even she
would have thought, sympathizing with the amazing case of Aamin Marritza
and even becoming allies with her hated Gul Dukat on occasion, saving
his half-Bajoran daughter from Dukat's own hand to avoid the shame and
later taking her in to save her from a rogue marauder's life with him.
Even more so, she abhors Quark and all Ferengi, and is an infrequent
visitor to his bar. She feels that "Starfleet types" live too much by
automation and not enough by their wits, and still thinks the Federation
itself is "naive" — but her Cardassian experience has left her a strong
civil libertarian, opposed to unnecessary security crackdowns.
Though not overtly religious initially, she supported Winn as a "true
believer" until her treachery, once revealed, left her shaken and even
more an admirer of Sisko's character — despite never having been
comfortable with working under the "Emissary." Although she came to have
more faith and meditates daily in her quarters, she never sees the
prophets' will as Winn does. Her Spartan quarters feature a personal
Bajoran shrine — the standard icon behind an altar — with a couch and
endtable, a desk, and a table with two chairs in her living room.
Kira was kidnapped in 2371 and surgically altered to be Cardassian as a
pawn in an elaborate Obsidian Order plot to expose her alter ego's
father, a powerful legate, as a Cardassian dissident; after his rescue
they formed an odd bond. Later that year, she was chosen as Presider for
DS9's Gratitude Festival shortly before Bariel's sudden death and had
planned to spend the holiday with him but fell for Bashir instead,
thanks to Lwaxana Troi's Zanthi fever — which only acts in case of
latent relationships.
Kira stays fit and trim thanks to her lifelong affinity for Bajoran
springball: aside from following the local teams' standings, she allows
it as a rare personal holo-program diversion. Because she feels ill at
ease with idle time and her rough childhood allowed little room for
fantasy, she usually hates holosuites as a waste of time and prefers
instead the real thing — a trait Dax is trying to help change. Despite
that spare outlook, she does use feminine toiletries like epidellic skin
lotion. In music, she only knows Bajoran composers and doesn't feel
artistic at all despite her mother's career — an irony of Akorem Lann's
short-lived return to the d'jarra family castes. At times, she has
enjoyed Bajoran synthale, a Stardrifter, Bajoran ginger tea, and hot
coffee. She's never won anything before Quark's "prizes," but does know
how to play Dabo.
Psycho-Medical Profile:
UPDATE SD 50500, CMO J. Bashir recording
Since the last posting in the file, I have followed the effects of two
major events on subject Kira's life: her ongoing interaction with Gul
Dukat, and her serving as surrogate mother for the O'Briens' unborn
child.
The trip with Dukat early in 2372 to uncover the missing Bajoran prison
ship Ravinok set in motion a host of events for Kira. While finally
ascertaining the death of her fellow Shakaar cellmate Lorit, her
insistence that Dukat let his illegitimate daughter Ziyal survive cost
him his standing and he subsequently became a marauder against the
invading Klingons. In turn, Kira argued to let Ziyal remain at the
station, untouched by the chaos and under her wing. The entire episode
also revealed Dukat's affection for her — a move which Kira has
confessed she easily dismissed, even though the cross-cultural emotions
between two former avowed enemies troubled her.
More importantly, the emergency transporter transplant I performed to
save the O'Brien fetus when Keiko was injured has had all kinds of
repercussions since I determined Kira would have to carry the baby to
term, due to Bajoran fetal differences. Asking her to move in with them
was a good pre-natal move by the O'Briens for all concerned, but I
suspect the baby's birth finally allowed the Chief to relax over
everything from his concern over her raktajino caffeine intake to this
doctor's sneaking suspicion of a latent attraction between he and the
major at one point. Having the baby according to the traditional Bajoran
relaxation process I believe eased her port-partum syndrome, if anything
could have helped that; her reaction in this vein will be monitored.
Kira reported the typical Bajoran symptoms of sneezing, muscle spasms
and swollen feet, and despite her distaste for makara herbs she owes her
life to them now since they inhibited her system from a kidnapper's
poison serum injections. (I thought I had seen the end of the
short-fused Kira until this latter episode, when she took off after the
presumed stalker of her old resistance cell mates.)
As a sidelight, it also appears that both Kira and Sisko are becoming
more comfortable with his role as Emissary and as station commander
especially since the coming and going of his pagh'tem'far visions. On
the other hand, she has admitted to me her longtime trust in Odo was
truly shaken by his recent revelation of a rush to justice in 2366 in
helping execute three innocent Bajorans on Terok Nor during the
occupation — a highly atypical scenario for the constable.
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