Disclosing

Posted on Thu Jul 23rd, 2026 @ 3:34pm by Lieutenant Axod Qo & Lieutenant Commander Emni t'Nai

3,686 words; about a 18 minute read

Mission: Port of Call
Location: Observation Lounge, Deck One
Timeline: Mission Day 23 at 00:00

When Axod reached out to Emni, he was careful in how he framed it, deliberately personal, deliberately informal. If it needed to become something official, they could navigate that later. For now, this was just… a conversation. He suggested the Observation Lounge on Deck One, a neutral space softened by the quiet expanse of stars beyond its windows. Beforehand, he made a point of programming the replicator with a Betazoid Darjeeling blend he’d come across, subtle, floral, with just enough depth to linger. It struck him as something Emni might appreciate.

Axod arrived early. The lounge was still, the kind of stillness that felt intentional rather than empty. He took his time setting up the tea service himself, arranging it with a quiet precision that gave his hands something to do, something to focus on. Steam curled faintly from the pot, carrying a gentle, grounding scent into the air.

Only once everything was in place did he take his seat. He leaned back slightly, then forward again, settling somewhere in between as he ran through the conversation in his mind, what needed to be said, what should be said, and what might be better left unsaid. Each version felt slightly different, none of them entirely sufficient.

Still, he waited, composed on the surface, the faintest tension held just beneath it.

The doors to the Observation Lounge parted with a soft whoosh that announced the arrival of a new occupant. To say that Emni had been curious about Axod's request would have been an understatement. There had been evident care taken when crafting the invitation -- a desire for informality and for her to understand that this was not an appointment. Not for her to see her counselor. Not for him to speak with his superior officer.

Though it was an open part of the ship, available for use by any of the crew aboard, the observation lounge was not a well frequented place. It was small and cozy and had the air of a library more than a social hall. Debbie's or even the Mess held greater appeal for those who wanted to socialize. Those who frequented this space often did so to find quiet. And so wit that in mind, the Romulan entered the room quietly. She regretted that she'd come in uniform. Her shift had run long and there hadn't been time to change. But still, she felt overly formal for the location.

Her eyes scanned the room quickly, tracking in the wake of her empathic sense to find Axod seated in a perfect viewing spot with a tea service laid out in front of him. Though he looked composed there was an undercurrent to his emotional fingerprint. Nervousness and even a bit of fear, but also a deep well of pride that nearly overwhelmed the other two.

Curious.

Emni crossed the space and settled into the open seat across from him. "Axod," she said with a nod of her head, "jolan tru."

“Jolan tru,” Axod said with a gentle smile, a quiet note of relief threading beneath the greeting. He was, perhaps selfishly, grateful Emni had already taken her seat, sparring him the need to rise and draw attention to the subtle strain he already carried.

“I’m happy we could find time to meet,” he added, his expression softening as he settled more fully into the moment. The rehearsed edges of his thoughts seemed to ease, just slightly. “May I?” he asked, lifting a hand to indicate the teapot between them. The gesture was small, but intentional, an offering as much as a question, inviting a shared calm before anything more complicated found its way into the conversation.

"Please," Emni responded, inclining her head slightly in appreciation. Her curiosity at the meeting only rose as the light note of relief wound its way through the emotional signature of the man across the table. Still, this moment had been at his request and so she held back the questions that pushed at the back of her mind. Whatever Axod's purpose in meeting was, he would reveal it, she felt certain, soon enough.

While he poured, she let her eyes linger on the starfield beyond them. From this vantage they were looking out and away from Pathfinder Station. The occasional worker bee hovered into the far corner of the viewport, but positioning had the advantage of making them appear as though they could be anywhere, not simply docked at the mouth of the Barzan Wormhole.

A thought threaded up through the low murmur of emotion and, feeling the intentional ease of the moment, Emni voiced it. "It is amazing to me how I can both never tire of this view and equally long for the familiarity of the constellations from home."

They had spoken of her home before. Qo was, in fact, one of the few with whom Emni had shared about her Sulli, Jori, and the lost spaces on Romulus that she had loved. Even now it would not be the same to view the stars in the system from which she hailed. With the planet gone, she couldn't imagine they would look the same. She sighed, shook her head, and turned back to the man next to her, accepting the cup of tea he offered and cupping the small vessel in her palm to enjoy the warmth of it.

“I feel the same,” Axod said, lifting his cup with a quiet deliberation. He took a measured sip, letting it sit for a moment as if weighing the taste, or perhaps the thought behind it. He’d selected this blend for its calm qualities.

“Especially now,” he added, softer this time.There was something in the way he said it that lingered, just beneath the surface, more implied than spoken, as though the words carried a meaning he was almost ready to share with her.

The shift would have been noticeable to someone who knew Axod well. The lowering of tone and the implied depth and dimension of meaning to those two words. Combined with Axod's emotions, to Emni it was unmissable. Still, though Axod was well aware of his tea companion's empathic abilities it was not lost on Emni how important it was to allow people time to reach for whatever it was that caused the anticipatory nervous spike in emotions that usually preceded something the teller felt was revelatory.

Still, it was hard for Emni to simply sit with such a comment. She searched through various and sundry details that might impact the counselor's life both on and off duty to see if there was some detail that she was meant to be aware of and came to the conclusion that, no, this was not a presumed shared understanding.

"Now?" she asked softly, still looking at the starscape before them, though one eyebrow crept up in the Vulcanoid expression that often signaled curiosity. She may not have been Vulcan, but then Karim's memories... She banished that thought quickly and focused in on the moment and the tea, and waited.

Axod took a hurried sip of his drink, more for courage than thirst, and quickly set the cup back down before his hands could betray the nervous energy running through him. He straightened in his seat, shoulders squaring with deliberate care, then closed his eyes for the briefest moment as he gathered himself.

“There isn’t exactly a delicate way to put this,” he began, his breath measure as he paused.

Though it was already arched, Emni's eyebrow crept ever so slightly higher as words, not-quite-concealed nervous energy, and a climbing anticipatory anxiety overlaid the moment.

“I wanted to tell you first,” Axod said, his voice careful, almost tentative. “But I needed to be sure, and… well…” He let out a small breath, the edges of nervousness beginning to unravel into something dangerously close to rambling. “Now I am.”

For a moment, he seemed to search for a more graceful way to say it, but eventually abandoned the effort altogether. “I’m pregnant.”

The words settled between them with a quiet finality. And with them spoken aloud, something in Axod visibly eased. The tension left his shoulders, his posture softening as though he’d finally set down a weight he’d been carrying alone. When he looked up again, there was relief in his expression, uncertain, vulnerable, but undeniably genuine.

For the length of a long drawn breath, the relief and vulnerability of the man across from her threatened to swamp Emni's own emotional makeup. Now that it was out, it was easy for Emni to track back the source of the counselor's swirling emotions. The corners of her mouth tugged into a smile and then broadened until she was grinning. "Congratulations," she said with a genuine warmth that molded itself around the syllables of the word. She half stood and then paused in doing so. "May I a give you a hug?" she asked, straightening, but not moving toward him.

In the back of her head she scanned the shifts in his emotional landscape looking for any signs that he felt negatively toward this change in his life's circumstances. The uncertainty remained, yes, and some fear, but nothing that gave her pause and she allowed herself to make the early conclusion that it was right to expression her happiness for him.

Axod almost beamed. “Of course.” He shifted carefully, opening his arms to return the embrace without hesitation. For a moment, he simply held on, warmth and relief softening the tension that had been wound tightly through him for days. When they finally parted, his expression had eased even further, the apprehension no longer sitting quite so heavily on his shoulders.

“I felt it all rather suddenly, we… Doosodarians that is, can feel the early stages deeply.” he admitted, a breath of nervous laughter escaping him. “And I really wasn’t expecting it, at all. I mean I didn’t know whether Xex and I were even compatible, you know, biologically.”

He glanced down briefly before continuing, his voice quieter now, though far less guarded than before. “Wishmore confirmed it for me… but Xex doesn’t know yet.” The admission lingered there, threaded with uncertainty—not regret, but the awareness that speaking those words aloud made the situation feel far more real.

Though she had returned to her seat, the hug they had shared lingered the way the warmth of a blanket can still be felt for some moments after it is removed. The counselor's emotions, though still threaded with relief, continued to shift and Emni felt the confession of parentage before the words were even out of his mouth. She nearly managed to school her features in time, but that damned Vulcanoid eyebrow quirk couldn't be helped.

Xex was the child's other parent.

Xex was the child's other parent and neither Xex nor Axod, himself, had reported the relationship to her which could only mean a handful of things. The temptation toward speculation was intense enough that Emni nearly missed the second shift in emotions when the weight of the admission, its reality and its complexity, settled on her companion's shoulders.

Drawing a slow breath, Emni shifted forward and rested her elbows on her knees. The leaning close was deliberate, evoking confidence and intimacy despite the public location. "I was unaware that you and Xex..." she began and then trailed off, letting the meaning of the half finished sentence hang in the air between them and providing an opening for Axod to offer his own context in place of anything she might conjure on her own.

That gave Axod pause. He blinked once, the implication of the question settling over him a beat later than it should have. In his focus on disclosing the pregnancy, he hadn’t fully considered that he was also revealing something else, something personal, something he had kept largely to himself.

A wry smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Yes,” he said. “Doctor Xex and I shared a very brief entanglement.”

The moment the word left his lips, he regretted it. His expression tightened slightly, and he gave a small shake of his head, searching for a better way to frame it. “Relationship,” he corrected gently. “A brief relationship.”

He folded his hands together, gathering his thoughts. “That relationship is over. That is, it’s been over for some time now.” The clarification came quickly, not defensive so much as precise, as though he wanted there to be no misunderstanding about the nature of things as they currently stood.

For a moment, his gaze drifted away before returning. “We remained friends,” he added quietly. “Or, at least, we’re finding our way back to being friends.” There was a complicated warmth in the admission, evidence of old hurt and genuine affection occupying the same space. “That part matters to me.”

The swirl of emotions that trailed through the Doosdarian’s explanation was so complex as to nearly carry weight. Emni pressed her lips together, taking a moment to process and place this new information in the context of the Sojourner's comings and goings.

She had to assume that Axod’s pregnancy was relatively new. Almost instinctively her eyes flicked to his midriff before quickly resuming his face. She offered him an understanding smile as her head automatically calculated timings. She knew only so much about Doosdarian physiology without looking up the details, but the entanglement – no… relationship – must have been before Xex’s recent hibernation. Before Subrek then, as well.

Questions crowded her head, the majority of them mere curiosity. She silenced all but one, taking a sip of tea to buy herself a moment longer. “How can I best support you, Axod?” She finally asked, reaching between them to clasp and squeeze his forearm before withdrawing to take another sip of tea.

“Moments like these,” Axod replied without hesitation, lifting his own cup slightly before taking a small sip. He cradled the warmth of it between his hands for a moment, gathering his thoughts. “Having someone to talk to, mostly,” he continued. “I’m the only Doosodarian aboard, and that can make all of this feel very lonely at times. Isolating, even.”

His gaze dropped briefly to the surface of his tea before returning, softer now.

“Back home, something like this would never be experienced alone. There would be family, community, elders, people who have been through it before and know exactly what you’re feeling before you even say it aloud.” A faint smile touched his lips, touched equally by fondness and homesickness.

“Out here, I don’t really have that.” He shrugged lightly, though there was vulnerability beneath the gesture. “So having friends I can talk about it with is beyond any other help. More than advice, more than medical scans, more than anything practical.” His smile warmed. “Just knowing I don’t have to carry it all by myself means a great deal.”

A pang of regret shot through the Romulan woman--there and gone before it even had time to register on her face. "Well," she said. Her voice was low, but open a mixture of thoughtfulness threading through the warmth, "I have never been pregnant, so I'm afraid I can't speak much from a first hand perspective," she said. "But before I was in Starfleet I had a medical practice on Romulus and have seen my share of pregnant persons of the years. So if being a listening ear or a sounding board or even just someone who can confirm that what you're experiencing is not crazy, I'm honored to help."

She lifted her tea for another sip, bringing it to her lips for registering that the cup was empty. Gently she settled it in the palm of her hand, the other cupped around the side. "Are there traditions you would like to honor as well? Things that are commonly observed in Doosdarian culture, I mean, when a person is pregnant or a birth is anticipated?" Her eyes twinkled slightly as she continued. "I know, for example, that some human cultures have a party to celebrate and help the parents prepare. And Bajoran culture focuses on relaxation as a cultural technique during birth."

Moving to set her cup down on the table between them she chuckled and plowed ahead before he could answer. "Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. But if there is, let me know? I'm happy to help there too. Perhaps there are things like that in Xex's culture as well..."

Once again she let the question linger, drifting off to create space that Axod could choose to fill if he liked. Even the little he had said suggested to her that things, while on a positive trend, were not entirely easy with Xex. She could only imagine the complication of a child. Had the doctor been happy when she had learned the news? Had she even been told yet?

Axod shifted awkwardly, guilt written plainly across his face. “I haven’t told Xex yet,” he admitted, his eyes dropping to the floor.

“Things haven’t been…” He trailed off, searching for the right words. “We’ve been through a lot of change, and I don’t know if she’ll even want to be involved.” He swallowed. “Which I’d understand.”

He hesitated before adding, more quietly, “She wasn’t really there… or she was, but as… him.” The distinction was difficult to articulate, and from the look on his face, it was one he was still trying to make sense of himself.

Emni nodded her understanding. She eyed her cup, now empty, and briefly wished she hadn't finished it so quickly. An extra moment of pause would have helped her gather her thoughts before speaking. All the same, she forged ahead.

"May I ask you a deeply personal question?" she asked, expression carefully open. She shifted in her seat to match her posture to her expression hoping to create as unthreatening a figure as she could.

Among Doosodarian’s very little was personal in the way that many species understood it. Their people were communal and with that comes a certain level of social openness. Axod nodded, “Of course.”

"I can imagine it feels quite different now when the physical attraction has abated. That connection, perhaps, feels harder to find. In many ways each species have developed similar neurological coping mechanisms for break ups. But one of the most deeply ingrained in many is the placement of the person into a category of other. Xex looks different and all of her body language is eerily similar to her male presentation, but also at the same time entirely alien. For someone who has been intimate with her and still navigating the way forward after the fact, I imagine the effect is jarring. Your brain wants you to look at her as someone entirely new."

She shook her head, bemused at her own line of thinking. "Of course I'm preaching to the choir with this information, but sometimes we practitioners need reminding of our own knowledge."

Offering an encouraging smile she sought Axod's eye contact. "What do you hope for from Xex? Not what do you think she'll do, but what would you like from her as your child's biological parent?"

The question lingered with Axod for a long moment. He had spent so much time preparing himself to do this alone that he had never truly allowed himself to imagine another possibility. The idea of having a co-parent, someone to share both the joys and the burdens, felt strangely unfamiliar.

“I guess…” he began slowly, choosing each word with care. “I want an equal parenting partner. Someone to help round out the raising of this child.”

Almost absentmindedly, his hand came to rest against his still-flat abdomen. The gesture had become second nature, a quiet reminder that he was no longer thinking only for himself. “I want my child to grow up surrounded by love and community, the way I did.” A small smile touched his lips. “That’s how Doosodarians raise children. Not as the responsibility of one person, but as something shared. Family, friends… everyone has a hand in helping a child become who they’re meant to be.”

Emni nodded, unable to help herself as her cheeks, once again, tightened with the tug of a smile. It felt as if all she'd done since Axod shared his news was smile. But then babies were, for so many species, such joyful things. It was hard not to do so. " I think that's beautiful," she said. "I can't say it's exactly the same for Romulans. But don't let the stereotypes rule out our ability to encourage and guide a child that isn't their own blood. Even if it is just myself, I'm happy to be amongst your community. And," she paused meaningfully, "I'm certain I am not the only one even as I say that."

Shifting in her seat she raised her eyebrows at the man across from her. "And," she continued, "perhaps approaching Xex with that same understanding and hope will help smooth the way to something that can work for you both."

Axod was touched by how much she cared. The concern in her voice was genuine, and it eased something inside him he hadn’t realized he was carrying. He lifted his cup to his lips, taking a small, thoughtful sip before lowering it again.

“I suppose you’re right,” he said, a warm smile softening his features.

"Now," the Romulan said without preamble, "what kinds of baby things do you think you'll need? It seems to me a shopping trip while we're here on the station may be in order."

“Oh… umm…”

Axod paused, giving the question far more consideration than it probably warranted. His brow furrowed thoughtfully before a sheepish smile spread across his face. “Everything, I suppose.”

A quiet laugh escaped him, warm and self-deprecating. “I guess that doesn’t narrow it down very much, does it?”

=/\= A Revelation By... =/\=

Lieutenant Commander Emni t'Nai
Executive Officer

Lieutenant Axod Qo
Ship's Counselor

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