Chapter Text
Using all her expertise as a counselor, Starfleet officer, and nine-times joined Trill, Ezri writes a long and meticulously worded report to the Symbiosis Commission, detailing the situation in a manner that is -- if she does say so herself -- impossible to refute. She may not be as clever as Jadzia, Tobin or Lela, but nobody grows up a Tigan without learning some craftiness along the way.
The reply from Trill is as swift as it is short: request to delay zhian'tara denied.
Throwing the PADD across the room, Ezri wonders if they even read her report at all.
The official decision is sent along with a document detailing updated guidelines for the ceremony, with paragraph 147, subsection 4b highlighted on the screen. Non-Trill individuals are not recommended for the ritual, according to the highlighted text, which goes on specifying that all non-Trill species must be verified by Symbiosis Commission before chosen to participate. Warning, the next section reads, no Changeling life-forms will be currently considered for the zhian'tara, due to the unpredictability of results.
Odo would probably have been amused at that.
A third document contains permission for Dax's zhian'tara to take place on DS9, and the stardate for when the appointed Guardian is set to arrive. For a brief moment, Ezri contemplates taking time off and being on the other side of the quadrant that particular stardate, but she has a sinking suspicion the Symbiosis Commission would manage to track her down wherever she went.
She goes through the process of making decisions and asking her friends one after the other in a daze.
It's much too soon, she thinks, and is immediately bombarded with seven memories of previous Daxes going through the same thing. Lela was lucky, being the first, with no one but herself and Dax in her head. Meanwhile, Ezri is pretty sure most of the time that her head just isn't big enough for nine people and a symbiont. She still has a holopicture of herself with her name in big letters attached to the wall by the foot of her bed, because waking up confused about whether you're a hot-shot pilot man-child or a mother of two got really tiring after awhile.
(Not that it always helps; a few times she's woken up thinking she's still Torias and gotten half-way through a fantasy about that hot, vaguely familiar, Trill girl in the picture before suddenly remembering and having to go scrub Torias away with a high-pitched sonic shower.)
*
Being on Deep Space Nine feels, more often than not, like walking around in someone else's (much taller) shoes, and sometimes Ezri wonders whether staying was the bravest decision of her life, or the stupidest. Maybe other Trills, ones with more training, who didn't get thrown into a joining with no time to prepare, don't struggle with this, but being on the station, Ezri finds it impossible to keep from getting entangled in emotions that aren't her own. Talking to Jadzia face to face might be a good start to getting all of that sorted out, which doesn't mean she's particularly eager to do it.
She asks Kira to lunch and spends the entire forty minutes talking her ear off about the reproductive cycle of a type of Trill snail that absolutely decimated Audrid's garden three years in a row.
She asks Kira to dinner only to end up doing a nervous monologue about shoes.
She asks Kira to join her for a game of springball, and while unable to stop talking about the last holosimulation Julian had convinced her to try out, she trips over her feet and whacks herself in the face with her own racket.
While Kira conjures up some holographic ice and a tissue, Ezri sits on the floor, keenly aware of the three hundred years of Dax hosts judging her from inside her head.
"I'm sorry, I'm usually better than this," Ezri says, holding the tissue to her nose and ignoring the somewhat skeptical look Kira gives her. Sure, Kira pretty much always wins by seven hundred million points or so when they play, but Ezri does usually manage to avoid bleeding all over the court.
Kira gently presses the ice-pack to Ezri's eye. "I think you're going to need a trip to the infirmary," she says.
Leaning over her, Kira's hair falls forward -- longer on the left, braid nestled behind her ear -- and something inside Ezri that's not her at all jolts at the unfamiliarity of it. "Will you be a part of my zhian'tara?" she blurts out, before she has the time to second-guess herself.
She does regret the words when they're out, though, because Kira goes very still. She should have found someone else, someone of her friends who'd never met Jadzia at all -- someone who doesn't sometimes look at Ezri as if she's someone else entirely.
(If only there was such a person.)
"The Guardian is coming here tomorrow," she says, and feels like the biggest idiot in the quadrant. "I was going to ask you earlier."
"You want me to be host to Jadzia," Kira says, a statement and not a question.
Ezri can't bring herself to do more than nod.
*
In the infirmary, Julian puts on his doctor face and makes a great speech about the importance of helmets and safety gear while engaging in athletics. Sitting on a biobed, legs dangling, Ezri elects not to tell him that the injury occurred before any actual athletics had had a chance to take place.
Her cheek aches when she talks, anyway, so she settles into a somewhat sullen silence, while Julian runs a dermal regenerator over her face. It's not really the bruise that hurts the worst, though. It's not even her pride, which has gotten used to being battered on a daily basis.
"Your springball opponent seemed to be in a hurry," says Julian, who at some point had finished his monologue about safety practices without Ezri noticing.
Ezri blinks against him. "Huh?"
"Colonel Kira," Julian clarifies, frowning as he looks at her eye. "She left in a hurry. You might have a concussion."
"My brain is fine," Ezri says. "I'm just... distracted."
"Oh." Julian gives her a look that's probably meant to be sympathetic, but comes off looking more like pity. "I see."
Sometimes that super-brain of his makes him really annoying. Shooting him a hard glare, Ezri snaps, "No, you don't. It's not your business to see anything anymore." At Julian's raised eyebrows, she adds, "Maybe I do have a concussion..."
"You could ask someone else," Julian suggests. "Ferenginar isn't that far away, if you want Leeta to--"
"No, it has to be Kira." Swinging her legs and staring down at her shoes, Ezri cannot articulate why it's so important. Leeta is her friend, and she would be happy to do it, but it wouldn't be right.
"It just has to be Kira," she mumbles.
*
Moping at Quark's is definitely the Jadzia in her.
It should make her feel closer to her, the way standing on her head makes her feel like Emony is right there with her, and how every time she steps into a runabout she wants to reach back through time and slap Torias over the head, but apparently it's not going to be that easy. Finishing her cocktail, she leans over the bar disk.
"Bloodwine," she demands of Quark, with as much Klingon in her voice as she can muster.
(It's not all that much.)
"Didn't think you liked the stuff," Quark says, giving her a suspicious look. "You still have to pay for it, whether you finish it or not."
"Less talking, more drinking."
Quark rolls his eyes -- something he never used to do around Jadzia. "Whatever you say." Handing her the cup, he continues, "But don't go and blame me when you get all sour-faced and grumpy."
"I don't get sour-faced," Ezri says, and grimaces as she takes a sip.
The bloodwine is terrible. She drinks it anyway, and then another one. If nothing else, the taste does have a decidedly Klingon effect on her disposition.
Making her way to her quarters, she searches through the wardrobe until she finds Jadzia's bat'leth, shoved far into the back of it. Worf had given it to her -- taking it off the wall, where it had hung together with his own while they were married -- when he had left the station. Holding it in her hands, Ezri vividly remembers wielding it, but she also remembers her limbs being somewhat longer while doing it.
The first casualty is a blue vase that once belonged to Curzon, a gift from some woman or another -- between Jadzia, Curzon and Emony, it sometimes felt as if she'd bedded half the galaxy. Second, she rams the bat'leth into her bedside table, chopping it in two, along with three PADDs that fizzle, sparkle and finally power down and die.
Next, she drives the bat'leth into a painting -- one of her brother's, depicting a New Sydney landscape -- and into the wall, where it, unfortunately, embeds itself with some permanence.
Ezri staggers back, out of breath, and then, she runs.
*
It seems to take forever for Kira to open her door. When she finally does, she's wearing pink pyjamas and a distracted look on her face.
"You're not wearing shoes," Ezri blurts out, staring at the bare feet in front of her. It seems like a very important fact to note.
"I was... praying."
"Oh. I didn't realize you had to take your shoes off for that."
"I don't, that's not... I couldn't sleep."
"I had bloodwine."
"Yes," Kira says, crossing her arms. "I'm familiar with the smell of it."
"I broke my wall with a bat'leth."
"All right," she says, with a sigh, "come in."
Ezri has been in Kira's quarters before, but not at night. Not since she was someone else, anyway. Jadzia used to walk in like she owned the place, day and night, and Kira had grumbled but never seemed to mind all that much.
Lead by memories, Ezri stumbles through the living area, through the open door into the bedroom, and flops down on Kira's bed, face down.
After a moment, she feels the bed move as Kira sits down next to her.
"Why are you drinking bloodwine?"
"I'm Dax," Ezri mumbles into Kira's duvet.
"It would seem so," Kira says, and Ezri can hear the smile in her voice.
"I was trying to feel closer to Jadzia, but I just ended up breaking stuff and now I feel sick."
Ezri keeps her eyes pressed closed against the duvet, as she feels Kira put her hand on her shoulder, fingers stroking the short hair at the nape of her neck. Ezri stays very, very still.
"Okay," Kira finally says, softly as she exhales.
Turning her head to the side, Ezri looks up at her. "What?"
"I'll be part of your zhian'tara." Kira's smile is somewhere between tender and resigned, and Ezri can't take her eyes off it. "I'll take care of Jadzia for you."