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Once—a lifetime ago, now, it seems—when he had initially embarked on the ship that would come to define his career, Picard had noted with annoyance a sound that was new to him in Starfleet: the din of children. It had been an unwelcome distraction from the purpose of his work, the siren song of those distant stars, until it hadn’t, until he realized that they represented the reason why exploring those strange new worlds was important in the first place.
After that, he longed for that noise. Sought it out. Took every opportunity to visit the school onboard the Enterprise, or always graciously accepted Chief O’Brien’s invitation to a family dinner. And when it wasn’t there—when, for instance, they evacuated all civilians from the ship during the Dominion War— he found himself desperately missing it.
On the Verity, though, the children make a different sound. They cry more, laugh less. And some are numbed into silence. Once, he might have chalked that up to species differences—these children are Romulan after all, and despite what he might have liked to believe about himself as a younger man he is not free from bias. He knows better now. The destruction of one’s homeworld or its imminent threat, the sudden transformation into a refugee, would be enough to transfigure the laughter of any sentient being—much less any child—into tears. He tries to help where he can.
The first time he does is after he stumbles back to his quarters exhausted after Commander Musiker relieves him for the evening. Picard finds a girl slumped against the wall immediately beside his front door. Sobs rack her small frame. A quick glance in either direction reveals nothing of this child’s guardian, so he tentatively kneels beside her.
“Hello,” Picard says softly.
The child freezes and looks up at him with wide eyes. “I want to go home,” she whispers.
“I know,” he sighs, wishing for something to say to this child that would be a comfort. The cold and clinical facts—that the Romulan star was going to go supernova in a matter of weeks, that to stay on or return to Romulus would be a death sentence—would be of little use now.
Suddenly, the memories come to him as they have not in years, buried under years of cynicism and willful forgetting: his father, in a rare moment of affection, telling the type of story that the Academy would one day teach Picard to disdain. Friday nights when they had braided loaves of sweet bread to accompany their wine that glistened in candlelight and his parents would place their hands on his forehead and whisper hopes of peace. His thirteenth birthday, chanting ancient words, wishes of congratulations…
“May I tell you a story?” Picard asks. “An old Earth story that my parents often told me?”
The girl hiccups and nods.
“There was a people on Earth, once, who also had to leave their home. They had no choice; their home—as they knew it—was destroyed. And they were scared. How could they go on? Where were they to go? But…”
The girl’s eyes widen.
“But they did go on,” Picard continues. “They didn’t have a home on the planet anymore, so they built a home in each other. All over the Earth. And they flourished. From their scars, they built beautiful things that enriched not only their people but all of humanity. And once the human race found their way to other worlds, what that people built enriched the whole galaxy.”
Something in the child’s features settles then, and she is altogether calmer as he grips her hand to walk her back to where one of the Romulan leaders on board can help her find her guardian.
He will think of this exchange often over the next several years and repeat the story almost as frequently. It will be the first time in his life of cynicism toward it that its true power will strike him. On Earth—at least the Earth that he grew up on—he couldn’t possibly understand the desperation that would have given rise to such tales. But now…
Sometimes, Picard learns, resilience can be captured in the words and transmitted lovingly from one generation to the next in the telling. The Vertity’s walls echo with it, and Vashti’s after that. For decades, all over the Quadrant, wherever the Romulans go, they will speak of this exiled group of humans, what they lost, and what they built.
And, perhaps for the first time in his adult life, Picard holds his heritage lovingly in his arms like he always has the wonder in the night sky, and wonders at it too.