Achoo

3: Jargaining

4: Jepression

Nori's "death" could happen exactly like canon. Khan is destroyed and left with a baby he doesn't really know how to care for. He doesn't even really know how to interact with Yeva at first, and probably doesn't. If he seeks her out, it would be her and her husband, and mostly asking for basic baby advice. If he wanted emotional support (which, knowing Khan, he would need but not ask for) he'd go to Doll's dad.

You'd have to play with the timeline so that V only killed Doll's dad, or he dies some other way before Yeva does. Maybe Khan saw V attacking them and tried to intervene, and only Yeva made it out. Yeva's falling apart. Her husband is dead. Her best friend is dead. She has Doll to take care of by herself.

The breaking point comes one night when Yeva's sink or something breaks and she doesn't know how to fix it. She's about to call Khan when her phone rings. It's Khan calling her. He's tried everything and he can't get Uzi to stop crying. He comes over to Yeva's at three am, and fixes her sink, while she soothes Uzi.

From then there's nothing romantic between them for months, just this growing dependency and deeper friendship. They help each other through the grief. They watch each other's kids. They make sure the other leaves the house. Sometimes they cook food for each other. They start having meals together with the girls once a week. Then twice. Then three times. Then almost every night.

It might take a year or two for them to realize they love each other, but when they do, there's no going back. Especially because really, for each of them, this is the only other person in the colony who understands and respects what happened, what their former spouse meant to them, because they loved them too.

Now. What heart core Nori returning does to this I have no idea. I have tried to understand the moral, spiritual, and ethical implications of that kind of situation and so far I do not. So I guess for now I would put this in a "V or smth kills Yeva later / before Nori is discovered alive" situation.

In either case though I feel like Doll and Uzi would actually get along fairly well as step sisters. If they drifted apart it would be after Yeva's death. Doll has now lost both of her parents, and even thought most of her life she's only known Khan, it still hits her a little differently than it does Uzi.

Khan would still consider Doll his daughter, but at this point he's lost not one but two wives, and he starts to retreat into himself like in canon, so Uzi and Doll are largely left to themselves, and start to drift apart.

I don't think Nori would be upset at Khan for marrying Yeva either. I think Nori would feel like she's intruding on something good that he got after she left, and Khan would feel like he abandoned Nori, even though everyone genuinely thought she was dead. They would heal eventually, it would just be slow. It would help that they both really loved Yeva, and yet still love and respect each other.