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Occasionally, she can get away with asking Kira these things directly.
“Do Bajorans have cloacae?” she wonders. “I have one, and I was wondering if I take after the Cardassian or—”
“No,” Kira answers abruptly. “We’re different there, anatomically, even if we’re able to…” But she always trails off and gives Ziyal a strange look. “Why are you asking me this?”
“Just wondering,” Ziyal will always say, because she can’t really tell Kira the truth, can she?
That at night, Ziyal will stare up at the ceiling in her new quarters, quiet as a mouse but trembling as she lets her fingers delicately dance across her folds, pretending it’s someone else’s…
And thinking about….other things. Using other parts of herself to explore her anatomy. What could it be if not a cloaca? Ziyal wonders, imagining all manner of different configurations, scouring Federation databases to get ideas—are they like humans’? Vulcans’? Andorians’? Trill’s? She’s not even sure how accurate a lot of what she reads is—some of it is clearly fantasy material for people suffering through their own lonely nights—but it sparks her imagination? What if she has tentacles—
She wonders if it’s worth asking others, if she can do a better job of disguising it as scientific curiosity. Perhaps Dr. Bashir. Perhaps Garak. Jake Sisko? Definitely not her father—he’d get the wrong idea…
Or precisely the right one.
But sometimes, it’s more fun to just follow her imagination. See where it takes her.