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Ezri wasn't sure what happened. One moment she was in a runabout and the next she was flat on her back, on the station, the familiar carpet beneath her fingers, the grim lighting and grey walls.
"You all right?" said a voice—familiar from making thousands of log recordings—sounding somewhere between concerned and amused.
Ezri tilted her head to see who was talking to her, and was only more disoriented by what she saw—the familiar black hair pulled back into a ponytail, the blue eyes; a tall woman with her hands folded behind her back, looking down at her with puzzlement.
"Oh my god, Jadzia!" Ezri blurted out, shooting up into a sitting position and then immediately regretting it when her head began to spin violently.
"Here, let's get you to the infirmary," Jadzia said, instantly kneeling at her side, supporting her with a hand.
"No, no, I'm fine," Ezri insisted, although she was definitely not fine. Something that shouldn't be possible had somehow happened, and of the two of them, only Ezri seemed to be aware of this fact. Ezri hoped this was a dream or an illusion, but something in her suspected time travel. Time travel was the worst—she always felt an oppressive sense of guilt that she might change something in the timeline even while constantly reminding herself that it was impossible not to change anything, and that maybe some alterations to the timeline were necessary or, if not necessary, perhaps harmless.
"I'm sorry, I don't recognize you," Jadzia said apologetically, looking down at Ezri, a trace of concern still in her eyes at this unknown, oddly-behaving lieutenant found lying face-up on the floor in a station corridor. Ezri could see Jadzia searching her memory for where Ezri might know her from. "...Did we go to school together?"
"No—yes—I mean, no. No," Ezri managed to say. She was finding it hard to concentrate, not just because of the headache and the disorienting experience of seeing Jadzia alive and breathing, but also because: no one had ever told her how wonderfully blue Jadzia's eyes were. Which was odd for Ezri to say as Jadzia's eyes weren't all that different from her own eyes—the eyes Ezri saw staring back at her in the mirror. But there was a brightness to Jadzia's eyes, a liveliness, an intensity, a playfulness, that wasn't present either in Ezri's own memories of Jadzia looking at herself in the mirror, or in Ezri's mental image of Jadzia. She had always experienced Jadzia from the inside, not the outside—if that made sense? Ezri wasn't sure if she was making sense.
"But you know who I am," Jadzia said.
"I know of you," Ezri corrected, her mind desperately rifling through memories to come up with a plausible cover story, trying to ignore the You're changing the timeline you're changing the timeline warning currently blaring through her head. "I'm, uh... a Trill initiate."
"Oh!" Jadzia said. "I didn't realize we were getting one on the station. Was everything okay with your travels? I wasn't expecting to meet an initiate passed out in a hallway..."
"Space sickness," Ezri said confidently, as if that would explain being passed out on the floor. "And yeah, this is more like an informal visit, you know? I was hoping to do a bit of shadowing, get some advice..."
"Well—Jadzia Dax," Jadzia said, holding out her hand for Ezri to shake.
"Ezri... uhhh, Tigan...?" Ezri said hesitantly, pausing to double-check whether that was indeed the right combination of names for her to use in this situation. After having spent months training herself to not blurt out "Ezri Tigan" or "Jadzia Dax" (or any of a number of combinations of previous names that floated to mind when introducing herself), it was weird to go back to one of those names from a previous life. "Right, Ezri Tigan—that's me!" she said more assuredly, taking Jadzia's hand in her own.
A somewhat perplexed, amused smile on her lips, Jadzia used their clasped hands to lift Ezri to her feet.
*
Ezri spent the next day shadowing Jadzia, being shown around the station and Jadzia's favorite haunts, and assisting her with work.
"Why did you decide to become an initiate?" Jadzia asked her conversationally as they worked.
Like with most questions that had been asked of her lately, Ezri had difficulty answering. She tried to think of family members and friends who had at some point considered applying to be joined, although most of them had given that dream up rather quickly; searched through her own memories from Dax's previous hosts, all their different motivations for joining, and some of their memories of people who had also wanted to be joined. "I guess... it wasn't much of a choice. My mother wanted me to be joined—and you don't really say no to my mother..." It was an embellishment—her mother had certainly not wanted her to be joined—but it felt believable enough. "But I do understand the responsibility of the role," Ezri was quick to add, worried that Jadzia would judge that as an inappropriate motivation for joining and chew her out for it. "All I want to do is be worthy of the Da—of a symbiont. I know it's a big responsibility."
Ezri bit her lip as she waited for Jadzia's response. She was already kind of aware that she wasn't the kind of person who would have been chosen to be joined with a symbiont, if the choice were available, but she wasn't sure if she was ready yet to hear Jadzia confirm it, and Dax was infamously harsh on initiates.
"You're hoping to be joined with the Dax symbiont?" Jadzia asked, picking up on Ezri's slip.
"Well, I—I guess... yes...?" Ezri said uncertainly. What she really wanted to say was just that she wanted to be a good host for a symbiont that she had never asked for, but that answer wouldn't make sense to Jadzia. It was odd—there were currently two Dax symbionts in this room; at this very moment, they were next to each other, mere inches apart. Couldn't Jadzia sense the truth of who Ezri was? Didn't Dax recognize itself in this other person? Ezri wasn't sure how exactly the symbiont would know such a thing, but it just felt odd for Jadzia not to see herself and her seven previous hosts in Ezri; Ezri felt like they were present all the time.
But no, Jadzia was treating her like an unjoined Trill initiate, a stranger she was still feeling out. Without looking up from her panels, Jadzia asked some more questions about Ezri's career and life plans—how long had she been in Starfleet and what subjects interested her and those kinds of things—before recruiting her help in setting up some computer analyses.
*
When it was finally time for dinner, Jadzia asked Ezri what kind of food she wanted to eat. Ezri had half-expected Jadzia to suggest the Klingon restaurant so had been bracing herself to explain that gagh made her sick. But instead, Jadzia was leaving it up to her and so Ezri decided to browse the station directory. It wasn't even a pretense—there had been a lot of turnover on the Promenade over the past few years, and Ezri didn't actually recognize most of the restaurant names.
"Umm... How about Benzite food? I've never tried that before."
"All right," Jadzia said with a calm smile. "Good choice."
Ezri found herself biting her lip. She felt like Jadzia was taking in every answer she made and adding it to an analysis, an assessment of her suitability for a candidate for joining. But so far, Jadzia hadn't given any indication of what her evaluation was going to be, which was making Ezri antsy. At this point, she wanted to just get it over with, somehow finding the suspense even worse than the fear of the worst case scenario.
At dinner, Jadzia was all social, charming—sharing amusing anecdotes, telling Ezri about little-known facts of the station. Ezri knew all of it already, although, admittedly, most of it was all jumbled up in there and hard to keep straight... But in any case, when Jadzia told the stories, she had a way of making them more entertaining and dynamic; Ezri found herself feeling like she and Jadzia were two friends catching up, reminiscing on old adventures.
Ezri felt her head spinning in wonder as they sat in the restaurant together—it was an unbelievable experience, actually getting to talk to Jadzia like this. She felt dizzy—a little out of her depth; a little starstruck.
Could she really be blamed for it, though? Everyone around her was always going on about Jadzia, Jadzia, the amazing Jadzia. Ezri would have given her left arm to meet Jadzia. She thought she would next have the chance at her zhian'tara, but this was even better than what Ezri had been hoping for—so vivid and intense. It was so much that she could feel her eyes tearing up a bit, and hid it behind a particularly enthusiastic laugh at a funny story about the time Torias walked into the wrong meeting and ended up giving a very dry speech about engine improvements to a bunch of increasingly-confused but polite ambassadors.
"Oh," Ezri said, wiping a tear from the edge of her eyes. "You know, you're a bit different from how I'd imagined you'd be."
"Really?" Jadzia said, taking a swig of her drink to hydrate after that long story. "What do you mean?"
"Well, you're..." Ezri wasn't sure what Jadzia was that took her by surprise. Young? Friendly? "I just thought you'd be a bit... harsher on an initiate. Based on..." Experience. "Stories."
"And you wanted to shadow me anyway?" Jadzia joked lightly. "Also, don't speak too soon—I can be harsh when an initiate needs some course correction."
Ezri lapsed into silence, not because she was chastened by Jadzia's warning, but because she was now certain that Jadzia was being gentle with her. Way more gentle than Curzon would have been, that was for sure, but she was fairly sure that even Jadzia would have had something to say by now about Ezri's lack of suitability for joining. But Jadzia was holding those thoughts back.
Jadzia took a deep breath. "To be honest, you remind me a little of what I was like, before I was joined."
Ezri blinked. "Oh... Really?" She wasn't sure if that was meant to be a good or bad thing. While she didn't mind being compared to Jadzia at all, was resembling Jadzia pre-joining really right for a joined Trill?
"Eager, nervous, quiet," Jadzia elaborated. "Bright, but... fragile. I'm sorry if this is a weird analogy, but you know how if you find a lashza trying to cross a road, your instinct is to pick it up and put it on the other side?"
"Oh..." Ezri said, her heart sinking. "So... So you're saying..."
"What I'm saying is that I know I should be giving you advice to make you competitive in the program and help you improve your chances of being accepted, but... I'm sorry, you're just too darn cute to criticize."
Ezri felt a lot of emotions then: relief that she didn't actually have to go through the Trill initiate program for real, because she was sure she wouldn't have made it. That familiar feeling of both honor and dread at taking on the responsibility of being joined to a symbiont anyway. A thrill at being called cute by Jadzia, and a feeling of disappointment too. The tears were coming back and Ezri rapidly blinked them away.
"I'm sure you'll be fine, but maybe you should find another mentor. Honestly, I'd rather just be your friend than your teacher."
Ezri started to force a smile, but then she realized with relief it was a real smile and it was accompanied by a heavy sense of relief. "Then... let's be friends?" she said hopefully.
Jadzia smiled. "Friends."
*
The two of them walked back to the habitat ring together after a long dinner together, Ezri's head swimming pleasantly. Some of it had to be the buzz of the drink, but synthehol didn't have that strong of an effect. Most of it, she thought, was just the intoxication of good company, of being the sole recipient of the attention of someone as attractive as Jadzia Dax, for hours at a time.
They arrived at Jadzia's quarters first—Ezri's quarters were a couple of corridors farther out from the center. By the time they arrived, Ezri was like a live wire—frisky; yearning for touch.
She desperately wanted to be invited inside Jadzia's quarters, and her somewhat tipsy mind decided that the best way to do this was by pressing Jadzia up against the wall of the corridor just outside and kissing her hard on the lips.
Ezri could tell she had taken Jadzia by surprise. Ezri got that reaction a lot—people just assumed she wasn't someone with a particularly high sex drive, or the type to seek out a one-night stand. But once Jadzia reevaluated the kind of person Ezri was, what Ezri was willing to do with an acquaintance fairly recently met on a space station, she raised a brow with an equally randy air.
"Invite me in," Ezri said breathlessly.
Jadzia hesitated for a beat, considering, but then pressed the button to open the doors and the two of them tumbled inside, lips locked, hands wrapping around the curves of backs and asses.
One part of Ezri was thinking this was crazy.
Another part of her was thinking it would be crazy to get the chance to meet Jadzia and not sleep with her.
"I'm sorry," Jadzia said, speaking a few words at a time whenever they came apart for air. "I swear—I'm normally a bit—more professional than this."
"Me too," Ezri said, pulling back, an equally chagrined smile on her face. It didn't stop her from continuing, though, leaning back to take off her shirt. Maybe it was that bit of Curzon in her—in both of them. Or maybe this was the fault of Dax itself, that symbiont somewhat famous for making impulsive decisions.
Whatever it was, it was impossible to deny there was something magnetic between them.
In hardly any time at all, Ezri was naked on Jadzia's couch, and Jadzia was kneeling on the ground, her tongue pressed against Ezri's sex. Ezri always knew she—Ezri; Jadzia—was good at cunnilingus, but she hadn't imagined she was quite this good. Ezri cried out as Jadzia's tongue slid around her clit before she drew it in to suck at it. Legs spread wide, feet curling in pleasure, Ezri gripped the couch behind her as Jadzia continued her ministrations. It wasn't long before Ezri was coming, waves of pleasure shaking through her in one of the better orgasms of her life.
It took her a while to catch her breath. When she was finally fully back in the world, she saw Jadzia looking at her with a rather self-satisfied grin on her face. Immediately, Ezri set about returning the favor. Pushing Jadzia back onto the couch, Ezri ran her mouth on a nipple while one hand cupped the soft flesh of Jadzia's other breast. Her other hand slipped down, a finger sliding into Jadzia's wet entrance. She had touched this body before, she realized. It was a bit of a different experience—the angles were different—but nevertheless, Ezri knew exactly what to do. She had brought herself to a climax a hundred times. Knew just what to say in Jadzia's ear to have her shivering with pleasure.
*
Ezri remembered falling asleep in Jadzia's bed, under the blankets and wrapped in her arms. It probably wasn't the thing that Ezri wanted the most from Jadzia—that would probably be to hear Jadzia tell her that she was a worthy host for the symbiont and that she would be fine. But Jadzia banging her enthusiastically? Well, that was pretty up there in terms of things she wanted.
Ezri drifted off to sleep blissfully... but when she awoke, she had another killer headache. Even with her eyes screwed shut, the lights were way too bright and she just wanted to sleep in some more, but despite her blind grasping, she couldn't get ahold of any blankets to slip over her head. Then she heard the familiar sound of a medical tricorder beeping.
Then Nerys's familiar voice. "I think she's coming to, Julian."
Ezri groaned but opened her eyes and took in the bright lights of a runabout.
"What happened...?" she asked blearily as the bulkheads of the runabout seemed to spin around her.
"You seem to have encountered some kind of time anomaly," Julian reported. "How are you feeling?"
"I... don't know. Disoriented. And my head is throbbing. Ugh, I hate time anomalies..."
Nerys brought her a glass of water fresh from the replicator, which Ezri gratefully took.
Julian took a couple more scans and then gave Ezri something for the pain, and then her runabout got towed back to station. Once there, Ezri had to spend a lot of time in the infirmary, getting checked out for any lingering effects of possible time travel, and answering some questions about her experiences. She kept some parts of her account private—inwardly remembering her experiences with Jadzia, she could feel her cheeks heat up, but she hoped no one noticed. She felt bad keeping it a secret, but it was both very personal and also an embarrassing lapse of judgment.
Finally, however, she was discharged from the infirmary and gladly went home to unwind in her own quarters.
That night and the following nights, however, she tossed restlessly. Her mind kept going back to the brief time she had spent with Jadzia. In the dark, Ezri's hands slipped down her stomach and into her underwear, reliving the memory, fantasizing about Jadzia kissing her thighs, caressing her.
Initially, Ezri thought she had no memory of Jadzia having encountered a fake initiate named Ezri Tigan, but now she thought maybe she did. She had a vague sense of familiarity about coming across a passed-out lieutenant in the hallway; remembered the bizarreness of the unscheduled visit of a cagey Trill initiate who was very unlike the typical initiate; the odd adventurousness that matched her own. Ezri remembered what it felt like, in the dim light of her quarters, to undress the woman in front of her; how it felt to eat herself out on the couch.
Ezri shivered. She ached, physically and emotionally, for a dead woman. Or for a woman who, if she lived, lived on only inside of her.