Chapter Text
When Ezri Dax first saw the portal, she thought she was hallucinating.
What with seeing her brother Janel, who was there negotiating some contract for the family company (lots of awkwardness and drinking) and then running into old friends from the Destiny (less awkwardness, more drinking), it had been one of her stranger visits to Bajor.
Not to mention the ill-advised stroll down to the beach by herself after she’d missed the 1900 hours shuttle back to DS9.
So there she was, enjoying the view of the water sparkling under the two largest moons, trying not to think of Janel and the rest of her family, when suddenly she became aware of voices to her left.
Before she could even think about whether to grant these other beach visitors some privacy, she realized they were speaking Cardassian – and what they were saying made no sense at all.
“You dare to talk like this while standing on the very soil of our beloved homeworld?” – was what she thought she heard. “You dare besmirch the name of Cardassia and of all who belong to her? You are nothing but a –” Here, the universal translator gave up.
Ezri frowned and started walking towards the opening in the cliff that the voices seemed to come from. As she approached, the conversation turned into shouting.
“You are blinded by unconditional loyalty to our erstwhile leaders! We must be reborn and become something new!”
Ezri had entered the cave and was walking towards a shining light at the end of a narrow corridor.
“Preposterous! This is Cardassia Prime! We do not question our race! We are who we are!”
At the end of the corridor, she turned left.
Two Cardassians in civil clothing, a man and a woman, were facing each other, barely six inches apart, shouting their heads off. They were standing in a small pavilion, which was located in a pretty, if slightly overgrown garden.
All of this, Ezri saw through a kind of wavy liquid window, about seven feet high and fifteen feet wide.
She shook her head slowly. Julian had warned her that Bajoran springwine had a much stronger effect on Trills.
Backing away, she tripped over a rock and fell over, making a lot of noise in the process. Conveniently, she had done so while the Cardassians simultaneously drew breath before the next shouting match, and as she looked up, she was convinced they would be staring back at her.
They hadn’t heard, however, and were already back to yelling at each other.
“Hello?” she tried. “Can you hear me?”
They didn’t, even when she shouted louder than them.
“Silly Ezri,” she said aloud, and giggled at how slurred her speech was. “Hallucinations can’t hear you, you know.”
And when the large wavy mirror in front of her finally dissolved, but not before briefly turning into three very discernible words written in old Trill script, Ezri was sure that she was just very, very drunk.
HELLO OLD MAN.