When Captain Elbon had asked to meet with Flavia about the allegations made against her, he only anticipated a conversation thick with deflection and devious wordplay. At best, he hoped Flavia might present him with a helpful riddle. At worst, she might toss the bitter illvian coffee back at him and rant about her diplomatic immunity.

He hadn’t emotionally prepared himself for Flavia to end up on a morgue slab. Aside from her sickly pallor and her dark hair being slicked back, there were few visual clues to the autopsy Doctor Nelli had completed.

Elbon had worked alongside Flavia aboard the USS Sarek only briefly. Even without knowing him, Flavia had whispered half-lies and assumed secrets about him to Kellin in the dying days of their divorce. Her motivations for meddling in his relationship were just as mysterious as her motivations for joining his mission to Kunhri III. Gone dark like the light behind her eyes.

On their thick motor limbs, Nelli lumbered closer to the body. They used two vines to unfold the sheet over Flavia’s body to cover her face, too. Elbon had always cherished Nelli’s keen sensitivity. Cut off from the natural world of their home, Nelli displayed moments of precognition in their ability to detect energetic, temperamental or vibrational shifts in the physical forms of their crewmates. As much as he valued Nelli’s perspective on the Reman medical mystery, he regretted they wouldn’t accept his offer to stay aboard Almagest as her chief medical officer.

Taking a step closer to the mortuary biobed, Elbon lay a hand over Flavia’s hand. He said a quick prayer. Her hand felt no different after the small ritual. Still cold, still clammy.

“My ancestors used to celebrate the first rain of the warm season,” Elbon said, speaking up.  He didn’t look directly at Nelli. “When they lived on the shores of Dekeen on Bajor, before the Cardassians ever came. The first monstrous rain of the season was a reminder for everyone in the village to dance to the Prophets.” –A single low chuckle escaped him– “I wonder if I should dance now?”

“What purpose would that serve?” Nelli asked. As usual, the voice produced by their vocoder balanced a healthy tension between matter-of-fact and wonderment.

Elbon rubbed the back of his neck, and he said, “A citizen of the Romulan Free State, on a mission of scientific diplomacy, is lying dead on my starship. This could put endanger all of the Federation and Free State’s joint operations: Constellation’s mission of exploration, or mining the Remus fragment in the Kovar System. It feels like the first crack of thunder, doesn’t it?”

“The autopsy results were less chaotic than a thunderclap,” Nelli said. A wave from another of their vines brought up a holographic display. “The body matches our records of Flavia. Perfectly matches. This is– this is impossible in nature. Aside from the loss of life functions, this Flavia is unchanged from a transporter pattern record of nine months ago, before the Dominion’s lost fleet captured her.”

“I reviewed Captain Taes’s logs when Flavia asked to join us,” Elbon admitted. He could detect no judgment from Nelli in that regard. “She only learned of Flavia being sighted once before she returned to Constellation six months ago. Trill’s security service caught Flavia trying to steal the technology that accidentally released those time-lost Jem’Hadar in the first place. Taes always doubted that to be the real Flavia.”

Nelli’s eye-stalks swayed in their approximation of a humanoid nod.

“Only by pulverising a tissue sample,” Nelli reported, “could I ascertain this to be the remains of a Changeling.”

With her eyes closed to the harsh overhead lighting, the room’s stillness was disturbed by the whirring growl of a hoverchair approaching. Flavia lay still as the grave, slowing her breathing to only the shallowest puffs. She braced herself for a pointed question or a gruff shove on her shoulder. She never expected the tines of a fork stabbing her in the lips. The prodding was joined by a wisened voice sputtering at her.

“Open, open. Open!”

When Flavia opened her eyes, she parted her lips to object. A forkful of a paste-like grain was shovelled into her mouth.

Leaning over the side of her hoverchair, an aged Romulan with a severe bob scooped up another blob from a bowl and forked it in Flavia’s mouth. She looked down at Flavia with a smile so pinched it looked painful. The traditional crown of tikrik grass that encircled her head didn’t match the severe shoulders of the quilted sweater she wore.

When the Romulan muscle had carried Flavia into this bedroom, she had heard them address the woman as Vrutil.

Flavia spat her mouthful of sludge all over Vrutil’s sweater. Unbidden, a memory of the wrong Flavia spitting up her Changeling insides came to mind, and Flavia suppressed a chill.

“What is that spice?” Flavia asked.

She made a performance of disgust, rolling her eyes as cover to examine the small, windowless room. The dusty rose bulkheads had unnecessary geometric protrusion and teal arches to make the space more claustrophobic. It harkened to the Romulan Star Navy decor of her youth. Perhaps a junior officer’s bedchamber, judging by the small bunk beneath her. If her Changeling counterpart had stayed here, Flavia couldn’t fathom how or why she was on a Romulan starship rather than a Dominion one.

“It’s boiled gresh, child,” Vrutil said. “During the Eitreih’hveinn festival, you’re only permitted to eat the seasonal harvest that would have grown in the valley of Chuda.”

Flavia didn’t recognise the elderly face from those among the Free State science ministry. Filled with more questions than answers, she studied Vrutil’s dialect, accent, personal hygiene, and fashion choices: If Vrutil was welcome in the Kunrhi system by the Remans, that probably meant she was aligned with the Republic? Except the Republic had allied themselves with the Federation against the Changelings at the Battle of Farpoint.

Never one to voice her genuine curiosity, Flavia instead asked, “Why are you force-feeding me?”

“The clerics will be cross,” Vrutil said, “if you eat anything different.” The timbre of her voice was particularly nasal, but there was a musicality to the cadence of her speech.

“Your clerics mean nothing to me,” Flavia insisted. She flared the back of her hand toward a festively decorated y’gora tree in the corner. Definitely Romulan; definitely not Dominion.

Lowering her voice, Vrutil remarked, “If you won’t listen to the clerics, then listen to me. I’m old enough to be your mother.” Her flat grey eyes bore into Flavia. Despite the intensity of her gaze, they revealed nothing of her thoughts, emotions, or being.

“So you say,” Flavia retorted.

Vrutil touched a control contact, and her hoverchair lowered, bringing her face closer to Flavia’s face.

“…Was I your mother?” Vrutil asked, seemingly genuinely.

Wincing, Flavia quickly replied, “I can’t imagine so.” She left some flexibility in her answer in case the Changeling Flavia infiltrated this Romulan faction as Flavia or itself. Either option posed tactical advantages.

“Eat. You must eat,” Vrutil said, offering no apparent reaction to how Flavia had answered.

Then, Vrutil smiled so tightly that her lower lip cracked. A drop of green blood swelled to the surface.

“Tradition requires I fatten you up before you die.”

Elbon took two steps back from the Flavia Changeling’s body. He wasn’t the greatest believer in borhyas, but he could not know precisely where the god-like Founders fit in the Prophets’ metaphysical cosmology.

“What killed her?” Elbon asked Nelli. He cringed, wondering if that came across as too glib.

The leaves across Nelli’s body rippled in what Elbon recognised as discomfort. For all Nelli’s desire for comfort and community, there was the soul of a perfectionist inside them, too.

“We understand the rogue faction of Changelings who infiltrated Starfleet this year underwent horrific bodily modifications,” Nelli said, “to fool our senses and sensors.”

Elbon remarked, “There were reports of them passing on these new abilities through their ability to link. Does that have any similarities to Phylosian mycorrhiza symbiosis?”

Nelli’s vocoder went all the more monotone when they said, “We don’t talk about that anymore.” Swiping through the holo-interface of her autopsy report, Nelli added, “This transformation was said to reduce their lifespan. With apologies, Starfleet research on genetic manipulation is so limited, I cannot ascertain if these modifications were the cause of death.”

Respecting Nelli’s swift change of subject, Elbon said, “The Changeling impersonated Flavia to infiltrate Constellation’s tour of the Delta Quadrant and now our mission to Kunhri Three. Meanwhile, the USS Meridian reports the real Flavia has joined with the Romulan raiders who kidnapped the Reman patients we sent to Caelum Station. …What do either of them want?  Are they working together?”

Snapping out the autopsy report, Nelli tapped at the holo-interface frame. In response, the morgue slab retracted into a stasis unit, sealing the body away.

“All living things simply want to keep living. Keep breathing,” Nelli said succinctly. They approached Elbon and draped a couple of vines across his lower back. With a gentle nudge, Nelli guided Elbon into the broader sickbay complex.

“One more discovery,” Nelli said. “In comparing my autopsy report with the sample Yuulik collected at the Kholara Observatory, I maintain eighty-three percent certainty this corpse is the same Changeling who impersonated Commander Kellin Rayco.”

Scoffing involuntarily, Elbon cursed himself for every praying over that bastard.

Sinking deeper into her bed, Flavia asked, “Tradition, you say? You can’t mean that. Eitreih’hveinn cannot reach completion until a fallen god is buried in the farmer’s fields.”

Vrutil squared her shoulders. “That’s why I need you fat, Founder. I notice you did not revert to your gelatinous form,” –She flicked the fork again, launching another glob of gresh onto Flavia’s cheek– “when you lost consciousness. Just like your last attack.”

“I never lost consciousness,” Flavia defiantly said. She didn’t blink. She held fast to a vacant expression.  She didn’t even wipe the gresh off her face.

“I was tired. I wanted to be carried by the boys.”

Dipping her head from side to side, Vrutil replied, “A hundred might call you a liar, but I won’t be one of them.”

Her lip curled viciously at her own joke. Vrutil discarded the fork and raised a medical scanner instead. Flavia noticed how naturally Vrutil’s bony fingers gripped the casing of the scanner. A hefty, durable Romulan scanner. That must mean Vrutil had training as a doctor or medical researcher.

“It was the same after your last three seizures,” Vrutil said with a sneer. “And still, the sensors foolishly believe you to be of Romulan biology.”

“Should it not?” Flavia asked.  Only now did she wipe her face clean with the pads of her fingers.

“If you would only explain your secret, I promise I could ease your suffering,” Vrutil said, her eyes softening. “Whatever the other Founders did to you, however your twisted cellular structure decays, you’re trapped in this form now.”

Flavia said nothing. She couldn’t risk further revealing herself as the wrong Flavia to Vrutil.

“Do you have it?” Vrutil asked.

“Have what?” Flavia answered the question with a haughty question.

When Vrutil raised the scanner to Flaiva’s face again, she was effortlessly condescending in asking, “Just how tired are you?”

If she was really the Changeling Flavia, she should have known her own purpose in beaming down to the planet. Pushing down the panic in her gut, Flavia committed to her thoughtless choice rather than drawing more attention to it.

“Very,” Flavia answered.

Vrutil’s eyes went flat again. “Flavia ir-Llantrisant’s security codes.”

“No,” Flavia said fitfully, twisting her fear of getting caught into the frustration of failure. “She resisted, so I killed her.”

With a slap on her controls, Vrutil jerked her hoverchair back from the bed.

“Short-sighted clown,” Vrutil spat at Flavia.

“Starfleet never trusted her,” Flavia said, and she swallowed hard. “She’s spent so much time in the Federation, she might as well be an exile of the Free State. She has no worth.”

Flavia braced her elbows on the mattress beneath her and sat upright.

“Now,” she said, “she can take my place in the farmer’s field.”

Vrutil swerved her hoverchair away from the bed and pressed onwards towards the exit.

“The Remans do yearn to eat,” Vrutil said.