Odo had been thinking about what the Link had tried to teach him for weeks. He had shifted into every object in his new quarters, knew every sculpture intimately. He needed something new, something more challenging.
He wanted to shift into a new humanoid, one completely different from his comfortably vague facsimile of Dr. Mora. But, he refused to speak of it to anyone. Instead, he reasoned, he had to pick someone non-bajoran, non-human, non-cardassian, someone he had plenty of footage of and someone he had seen up close countless times.
There was only one choice, really.
The clothing was easy, ferengi covered up to their collars and wrists, so while Odo had to know the general shape underneath, he didn't need specifics. Still, it was fun trying to simply parse out colours and patterns for a while. Keeping one pattern and maintaining it before creating another. It was difficult, but when he looked at himself he felt very… eye-catching. He could only assume that was how Quark felt, how Quark intended to be.
For a moment, he just kept every layer of cloth consistent. He had chosen Quark’s purple suit, the one he always wore on bajoran holidays. It was one of Odo’s favorites - if only because Quark was always out to show off instead of hiding something when he wore it. The coattails just barely brushed the back of his knees. Once he had adjusted, he moved on.
Quark's hands were always dry. He was careful with his face, but through a bad combination of dry air and sonic sanitation making his ears bleed, he was always washing his hands and his dishes with soap and water that chapped his fingertips. Still, his nails were always carefully cut and polished. Odo had seen the painted claws the Nagus kept, it left him wondering why Quark never tried the same.
Odo looked down at his own hands, with dry skin and painted nails, and thought they seemed very practical for someone so gaudy as a rule. He'd seen those fingers drum on a bartop, he’d seen them pinch Nog’s ear and drag him across the promenade, he'd seen them effortlessly shuffle tongo cards. Maybe short nails did suit Quark better, so when he got his hands in everything they wouldn't snag.
Quark’s face, the most difficult part of the shift, Odo had saved for last. He found the lack of hair a short respite, as he studied every line in his face from one of his many mugshots. They carved into his face like scars from the expressions he held - lines around his mouth and eyes from smiling, little wrinkles between his brow ridges from anxiety, discolouration under his eyes that blended seamlessly with his eyeshadow. It all spoke of history Odo had never had written on his own face before. The way his expression sunk into the lines so easily intrigued him, like water gliding over eroded stone.
There was a certain fatigue in Quark's expression. It had been there for the nearly 15 years Odo had known him, and Odo had only really noticed it after Rom had appeared on Terok Nor, too friendly to work with the cardassians but not assertive enough to be away from his older brother’s protection. Even with a toddler on his hip, Rom had a levity to his expression that Quark had lost if he had ever had it at all. Odo couldn't picture him without it, so he didn't.
The ears were the part he had been dreading. Odo had never been good at maintaining the intricate helixes of the bajoran ear, or the ridges of the bajoran nose, and Quark had both on his ears. Still, he made an attempt. The ears came out as flat as the ones he always wore.
He sighed, staring at the contours on the picture.
Quark prided himself on his ears, Odo could hardly call a depiction of him accurate without them. He remembered countless smugglers taking advantage of them, most frequently Natima Lang, back in the day. Her long fingers would run over the details in a very practiced pattern and Quark would stammer out double-talk and misdirection only Natima would understand because he knew Odo was watching somehow.
She always started on the edges and worked her way inward. Odo took his own facsimile of an ear in his hand, moving his thumb the way she used to, making crevasses where there needed to be to allow the movements. He had been bothered by Lang when he knew her, she was a contradiction to every cardassian he had known, and he hadn't known how to react to the deviation. Still, she had a warmth one could sink into, a methodical gentleness that tore Quark to pieces when she left. Odo found himself leaning into his own hand for no real reason. He wondered if Quark could contact her again.
He dropped his ear, leaving every dip and ridge intact, mirroring it on the other side. They were startlingly accurate, better than Odo had ever done with humanoid ears. Odo smiled with a mouth full of jagged teeth, walked across the room and back with his coattails swaying, held out his hands to admire them. He was Quark.
The door to his quarters swept open, and Odo nearly collapsed into a guilty puddle.
Kira stood in the doorway, the one person he had given his security code to because he had thought he had no need for privacy from her until this very moment. How would he explain wanting to be Quark? How would he explain the amount of time he had spent thinking about Quark to achieve it? He had to have been gone for two hours just building Quark molecule by molecule. Odo opened his mouth to explain himself but Kira was faster.
“You little toad, how did you break in here?!” She stormed up to him, and she had never loomed over Odo the way she did now, not even when Odo was the size of a bird. Odo found himself frozen in place and in form like a child caught stealing ale. She grabbed his wrist - and her hand was large enough to swallow it - and dragged Odo out of his own quarters and through the halls to the promenade. His neighbours got a good eyeful of Odo trying to cough out words like stop and wait. Suddenly his suit felt like a neon sign shouting look at me and he didn't feel nearly as good about that anymore, but he couldn't change without alerting them all of what Odo was doing and while he may be able to explain to Kira, he could not explain it to the populace already wary of his existence. He settled for letting himself be dragged, humiliated, through the halls.
Kira marched him right through the crowded promenade, yelling about how indecent and slimy and horrible he was for breaking into his own quarters, and logically Odo knew she wasn't speaking to him, but the words crawled into his form despite it. Copying the physical form of humanoids without consent was, technically, illegal, in the case of holosuites. Did it mean what Odo was doing was illegal? He could not say for certain, all he could say is there was no security reason for it, no moral justification. He had just wanted to.
Kira shoved him into a holding cell, activating the field before he could get his feet under him. “When Odo hears about this, I swear, Quark. I don't know what you were doing but you're not getting away with it.” She spat, leaving Odo alone in the holding cell.
Odo sank into himself, shifting into a small vole that could stash himself in the corner. It wouldn't take long for Kira to realize Quark was still at the bar and Odo was nowhere to be found. When she did, he would have to explain himself.
He shifted back into his humanoid form to pace, but he found himself large and exposed and awkward in the bright and now much less spacious cell.
Quark could always find a way to seem smug when Odo had locked him up and he knew it wouldn't stick because it never did. He would splay himself over the benches, swinging his feet that couldn't reach the ground, and infuriate Odo to no end. He was confident, he could think straight instead of just spiraling further and further downward.
Odo found himself shifting the now familiar patterns of his suit, the wrinkles of his face, the paint on his nails. The cell lights were stage lights that only brought out the colour in his suit, and he felt eye-catching, in control, not out-of-place and strange like Odo always was.
He laid on the bench like Quark always did, and the cell seemed more spacious with the ceiling so far away.
He could justify this. He could feel the self-assuredness Quark exuded. Know thy enemy, as they say. Odo knew Quark, Odo was Quark, just as he was a rock or a vole or a bird when he so chose.
Quark can't say Fuck because Fuck is a valid ferengi name and he doesn't know what cousin Fuck did to the hu-mons that they say his name with such vitriol but Quark is proud of him for it
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