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“Mmmm,” Ziyal groans, stretching her arms and legs out long.
Ezri’s face reddens, and not only from the heat rising from the sauna vents. She bites her lips as she stares at Ziyal, who is draped across the rock bed beside Ezri, lean and relaxed, less than a foot away. Slight ridges twist up Ziyal’s bare leg, slithering up the length of her thigh and disappearing beneath her thin shorts. Her light tank top is damp in places, clinging across her curves, and --
Ziyal glances over to Ezri. “Nice, isn’t it?” She says, eyes half-closed and wearing a small smug grin.
Ezri hurriedly looks away. She flattens her sweaty chopped-short hair and adjusts her sweat-soaked bathing suit, a frumpy one piece with solid coverage but a nice sapphire color that brings out her eyes. She hopes she looks better than she feels -- like a respectful and put-together friend, not a jumbled cave creature.
“What?” Ezri affects an airy unconcerned tone, like she hadn’t just been drooling over the refined young woman next to her. “Oh yes, very relaxing.”
The Dax part of Ezri had been curious about how the Cardassian sauna would compare to Trill’s Hoobishian baths, or the volcanic hot springs of Qo’noS. Now that’s she’s here, she can say that it definitely doesn’t disappoint.
But that’s probably more because of the company than anything else.
While the symbiont had been interested in the sauna for the cultural novelty, the Trill host body part of Ezri was more curious about the person asking her to the sauna. The flush of excitement running through her right now isn’t from comparing the traditional Cardassian cave-simulation to the time Curzon spelunked into the boiling springs of the K’tahth Mountains. Rather, it’s from Ziyal’s dancing eyes, her excitable smile, the breathy tumble of words that fell when she invited her...
“Mmm, I told you this would be nice,” Ziyal says and shifts so that she’s lying closer to Ezri on the rock.
“Garak’s missing out,” Ezri hastily adds, tensing up. She adjusts so that she’s on her side, propped up by her elbow as if to heat her other side and not like she’s trying to move away from Ziyal.
Before today, Ezri had been under the impression that the sauna program was specifically a Cardassians-only thing. Or even more specifically, a Ziyal and Garak thing, never mind the heat controls. Ezri doesn’t want to intrude on their connection -- however strange and uncomfortable many people felt about it. Ezri certainly doesn’t have room to judge about misplaced or ill-advised affections. (For a while after joining, she had even thought she liked men!)
She is, however, wary about intruding.
“He was busy. And besides, we want different things.” Ziyal frowns slightly, but then perks up again, a coy look on her face. “But I prefer your company anyway.”
Not wary enough not to accept Ziyal’s invitation to accept her invitation for this date.
Though maybe she should be (for reasons other than competing suitors who happen to be territorial former assassins):
The fact that Ezri Dax still thinks of herself as a series of conflicting parts with different drives (the symbiont’s curiosity, the host’s infatuation), not as one whole person, is enough reason for her steer this away from being the romantic date Ziyal intends it to be.
“Nothing going on between you then?” Ezri asks trying to keep the question neutral -- from the judgmentalness Ziyal gets from everyone else in her life, but also from any other implications. Like Ezri’s own eagerness to know.
She would be selfish to pull poor Ziyal, who has enough of her own to deal with, into Ezri’s own personal zone of chaos.
Not to mention the three-hundred year age gap.
Ziyal shakes her head, closing her eyes as she stretches out again. “No,” she says with a hint of bitterness. “Not at all. He’s old enough to be my father, he says. But he’s not my father.”
“I guess it’s lucky then that we’re the same age. Or, that’s not right.” A nervous laugh bubbles through Ezri. She feels twenty-one and forty-three and three-hundred-plus-whatever years old, all at the same time, though it was only a year or so ago Ezri Tigan had her twentieth birthday party, before all this. Disconcerting... “I’m old enough to be your great great great great --”
“I don’t mind,” Ziyal says, with a small smile, and Ezri can’t think of a response to that. “And you’re both. You’re the same age as me, and you’re ancient, and you’re everything in between. You’re Ezri Dax; that’s who you are”
There’s a swoop in Ezri’s belly.
Propped on her elbow, she gazes down at Ziyal, so close lying on her back beside her, at this young woman who at first glance looks like an amalgamation of misplaced parts, ridges and nose folds and pinkish-grey skin, but is who she is without flinching.
She’s both. Both of them are. Of course Ziyal would understand.
Ezri stares and stares, and Ziyal’s eyes meet Ezri’s without blinking.
The air is thick and heavy between them.
Now! Jadzia says within Dax. Go for it! Curzon says. Don’t overthink so much, just do! Torias says.
As if in a thrall, Ezri closes the distance between them, maintaining careful eye contact the whole way, as she leans down to press her lips to Ziyal’s, closed and gentle.
Ziyal’s breath hitches. She blinks several times then shuts her eyes.
Ezri kisses against her, slow and careful, barely moving. Ziyal’s lips are surprisingly cool, despite the heat in the room. They taste of salt.
Ziyal is still as a stone under her. A small sound “ahh” escapes.
Ezri fills with a buoyancy and kisses her again, deeper this time.
Ziyal relaxes. Her breath is soft out of her nose onto Ezri’s skin.
The lightness within Ezri expands like a balloon, into a more urgent excitement. She shifts her weight onto her forearm. Before she can think better of it, she places a hand on Ziyal’s hip, on the stripe of bare skin between her shirt and shorts.
Ziyal twitches slightly at the contact and brings her hand to rest feather light on Ezri’s arm.
Ezri slides her hand up under the damp tank top. The lizard-coolness of Ziyal’s skin only makes Ezri burn hotter.
They kiss and they kiss and Ezri feels untethered, like the steam swirling and undulating around them.
She traces a soft ridge along Ziyal’s side, higher towards her ribs.
“Oh!” Ziyal puffs. Her breaths come shallow but quick. Her hand on Ezri’s arm presses harder.
Ezri can feel her spots pulsing, and she’s not sure when was the last time she felt so in tune with the present, with the whole of herself.
But something about Ziyal’s girlish gasp shakes her from further pursuit of uncovered touches.
Ezri pulls away to find Ziyal watching her with wide struck eyes. Ziyal tracks Ezri’s slow deliberate movements away, as if unsure what comes next and trying to discern the clues.
It strikes Ezri all at once how still Ziyal had been, how hesitant as she waited to mirror what Ezri was doing.
How young.
Ziyal doesn’t know what comes next, Ezri realizes. She doesn’t know how this goes.
Ziyal lifts her hand to her kiss-struck lips, as if not entirely sure what just happened. “That, that was…” She starts, breathy, but trails off.
She doesn’t know anything.
“Was that your first--” Ezri sputters out, then pauses. She begins again, gentler this time, “Your first kiss?”
Ziyal shakes her head, two small jerks. Barely above a whisper: “Once, but it wasn’t like that,” she says. In awe? Uncertainty?
Ezri, who had been propped up over Ziyal, now shifts back onto her own side of the rock. Giving Ziyal space. A small furrow forms on Ziyal’s forehead, watching her.
Flashes of memories clash together in Ezri’s head. Ezri Tigan kissing her first girlfriend at sixteen, snickering and shushing each other as they revelled in their newfound hobby, hiding from her mother. Her first kiss as Jadzia Dax, as Curzon, as Torias, and so forth, a blur of various combinations of partners and circumstances, rippling back centuries.
A parade of firsts, but now as a joined Trill, none of them truly feel like firsts, none except as a long long distant memory.
And there Ziyal is, wide diamond eyes drinking in her every reaction, as if Ezri, with her racing tender heart, is the one in control of this situation. The experienced one.
(Ezri hasn’t felt in control of anything, since the joining.)
Ziyal, who never knew Jadzia, not really, and when she looks at Ezri she's the only one she sees.
Ziyal, forged in loneliness and pain and a variety of exiles, who still has the blush of Bajoran lilac in the morning.
And here she is, trusting in Ezri with what likely is a rush of overwhelming sensations.
(Ezri certainly knows what it’s like to be filled to the brim with a torrent of new feelings, to feel swept up in their current and unsure how to stay afloat.)
What Ezri would most like right now is for them to rip off the clinging soggy clothing restraining them, to press flesh against flesh, ridges to spots, a tangle of misfit pieces so that together the two of them will be interlocked like a pleenok puzzle set. She wants to make Ziyal scream in delight, to drink in the joy of her. She wants the two of them to fall apart, to make a sweaty mess of together, then to help each other put themselves back together again.
There isn’t much Ezri Dax wants, that she knows she wants -- at least, not as a crowd of confusing voices of the past all yelling over each other in her head, but as instead all of her, of Ezri Dax, all at once -- but she knows she wants this.
Oh how she wants. She wants and wants and wants.
But, it strikes her, she’s not entirely sure what Ziyal wants.
Dive into the deep feet first, until you realize the water will drag you under, now isn’t that just the Ezri way?
Ziyal watches her, like a ragnar lizard on the rock, motionless but tense like she’s readying herself to unknown stimulus.
Ezri takes a deep centering breath. Be slow, be gentle; think for once.
She reaches forward, slowly, to brush a few damp locks of hair that have fallen from Ziyal’s khyl’ar twist. Ziyal jerks in surprise, then relaxes under Ezri’s touch.
Ezri leans back over her, until she can smell Ziyal’s sauna-damp musk. Ziyal draws a sharp breath and parts her dew fresh lips, expectant. But Ezri hesitates a couple inches away, not yet closing the distance between them.
She whispers, “How would you like if I kissed you again?”
Ziyal swallows, then nods, short and quick then more pronounced, until she’s grinning wide and open. “Yes,” she says and clears her throat so her voice comes out stronger. “Yes I would like that very much.”
Ezri dives in, the heavy mist of the sauna pressing in on them, and finds solid ground in Ziyal.
Ziyal kisses back first with small unsure movements, hesitant like checking to see how hot a rock is before it steps. Then quickly she gains confidence, falling into Ezri’s rhythm, until she’s kissing deeper, harder, searching for more.
But Ezri holds back, restraining the situation to a leisurely pace.
Ezri drinks in each of Ziyal’s subtle reactions to nibbles on her lip, to grips at her waist, to entwining their tongues. Ezri is filled with a sense of power over the moment, over vulnerable innocent Ziyal, and this is so strange with how she’s usually the one that needs that extra delicate touch -- the one under pressure from past associations, from lost lovers, from coworkers, from Trill society, from everyone who couldn’t begin to imagine what this joining has been like for her.
But here, Ziyal’s eager rose petal lips under hers, for the first time since everything, Ezri knows what she wants and what to do about it.
The weighing damp of the sauna draws Ezri downwards, towards Ziyal, until they’re pressed up against each other. Ziyal’s coolness is a welcome respite and likewise Ziyal gasps at the Trill heat of her. Their skin is slick against each other. Ziyal rocks against her, welcoming Ezri downwards, and the length of her body against Ezri’s. Softness and bone and subtle ridges, each sharp breath melting into Ezri’s own.
It’s too much; it’s not enough.
Ezri moans, “Ziyal, you’re wonderful, Ziyal Ziyal.” She cups Ziyal’s cheek, she clutches her shoulder. She runs her hand down her soft side over her tank top, relishing the rise and fall of her, the valley curves and the mountain hip, the way she feels just right.
She leaves Ziyal’s mouth to kiss the dimples in her cheek, the curl of her ears, the lacy seams along her neck --
“Oooh,” Ziyal moans. “Oh. Wow.”
Ziyal grips Ezri, as if she could draw her any closer, as if there were more separating them than a thin sheen of sweat and damp fabric. She grasps at her, fumbling around searching for -- Oh. Searching for how to get under Ezri’s one-piece bathing suit.
“Uh, sorry, uh it’s a bit tricky,” Ezri says mouthing at Ziyal’s neck. “The suit. My mother always says it brings out my eyes, but it's hard to get into? And out of. Maybe I shouldn't have--”
Right. That’s exactly why Ezri had worn it. Because this date was never supposed to go this far.
Reassess, take it slow and easy, don’t jump in with the flurried confusion of the moment like always.
She wants more, you want more, Jadzia says.
You’ve got the opposite of a problem here. Curzon says. Lighten up!
But maybe she has been overthinking this. Curzon was over a hundred when he died, and still conducting jamaharon with Risian girls Ezri’s age. Live and let live, if two adults both want to make questionable decisions together, right? And they are both adults, even if Ezri feels hundreds of years older and her contemporary at the same time.
If Curzon had only told me how he felt about me, when he was my mentor -- Jadzia butts in.
But wait, how twisted had that situation been, anyway? Curzon had been decades older than Jadzia, an ambitious pupil under his tutelage, and then let that lust interfere with her career and self-esteem.
Listening to Curzon about relationship advice would be like asking Joran what to do with an enemy when you already had a knife against their throat. Not exactly the best insights on impulse control. Well, okay, Curzon wasn’t that bad, but still.
Oohh, you should show her that Klingon move, yiq’taK. Jadzia interrupts, and Curzon agrees. Start by using your teeth to --
Ezri tamps them down.
Ziyal fumbles at Ezri’s suit until she can unhook one shoulder strap from the neck clasp.
A peculiar sense of vertigo rushes over Ezri. All the sensations, from being on both sides of a familiar situation, fill her at once. She’s been off-balance since becoming Dax, sure, a multitude of conflicting desires and warring memories within her, until she’s been left with no clue about what she really wants or who she even is.
And yet, a cacophony of older men have pursued Ezri in some fashion or another, since this confusion began.
Now, with Ziyal, she's the one in the position of those men. Isn’t she?
“It looks beautiful,” Ziyal says. “You’re beautiful. I hoped you would see me and I wanted, oh! Oh-- right there, do that.” Ezri licks up Ziyal’s neck, at the point where soft Bajoran skin fades into the tougher ridges of cartilage and nerves knotted together.
Is Dax not only old, but creepy in this situation? Did Quark or Bashir have misgivings like this, when they started hitting on their dead crush’s decades-younger reincarnation seconds after meeting her, even while they were still mourning?
Their regard for her had seemed sweet, flattering even, and for that reason, and some misplaced sense of guilt that Jadzia had never given him a chance, she had flirted with Julian long past when Ezri herself knew that wasn’t what she wanted.
And what if Ziyal was just going along with this to please Ezri, because she doesn’t want Ezri to reject her completely? What if she’s only playing along to keep Ezri’s interest? What if she doesn’t know how to tell her what she does or doesn’t want?
How can Ziyal even know what she wants, when she has no experience with any of this?
Ezri pulls away from Ziyal again.
Ziyal, eyes closed, follows her upwards to find her lips for a kiss, confused when she realizes Ezri is now too far away. ““Ezri?” She flutters her eyes open, and frowns slightly at the look on Ezri’s face. “Where are you going? Come back to me.”
The steamy heat of the sauna suddenly feels less intoxicating and more claustrophobic, oppressive. Guilt boils in Ezri’s stomach, and she tenses her gut to fight the nausea that accompanies any strong emotion that wells up since her joining.
“Did I do something wrong?” Ziyal says.
She unfolds herself from the rock to sit up and watch as Ezri fiddles with her swimsuit top. A furrow settles between her eye ridges as Ezri untangles the straps until she can loop them in place over her shoulders again.
“No, no,” Ezri says quickly. “It’s me.” How cliche. “I should go.”
“I may not be the most practiced at this, but I thought,” Ziyal’s forthright tone wavers for a moment, but she pushes through anway, “I thought we were having a lovely time. I thought you wanted --”
“Yes.” Ezri’s eyes widen, aware that her abruptness has only made this situation worse. “You’re perfect. It was lovely.”
“Okay,” Ziyal says. She folds her arms over herself, hunching inwards a little, and it’s a foreign look on her. “I’ll see you again right?”
“Of course.” Ezri, now searching for her sandals, freezes. Of course she wants to see her again, how is that in question? Of course of course, but maybe she shouldn’t. “It’s a small station, uhh, I’m sure --”
Ziyal presses on. “I have a new recipe for hasperat souffle. I’ll cook for you, and we’ll have the place to ourselves --”
“We should -- we’ll have coffee,” Ezri hastily interrupts. “No, scratch that I hate coffee. I mean tea. Or is that what Audrid liked? Well, we can drink hot beverages and have pleasant conversation across a table from each other. In a public place. That’s what I mean.”
“But it will be a date? A romantic date?” Ziyal emphasizes the word. “I’ve drank tea in public before with people--” she sounds bitter now “--but what I want is for us to do this again.”
Ezri hesitates just long enough in her response for Ziyal's face to fall.
“If you don’t want to be with me, just tell me.” Ziyal says quietly. “I’m not going to break, you know, but I’m also not going to waste more time on false hopes.”
Oh right, Garak.
“That’s not -- That’s not it at all,” Ezri says, the words falling over each other in her rush to get them out. “You make me feel like… like Ezri. Like no one else. That’s rare.”
“So what’s the problem?” There’s steel behind Ziyal's tone suddenly. Ezri’s reminded who Ziyal is, of what she’s been through, and suddenly all of Ezri’s reasoned hesitations seem silly.
“You're young,” Ezri pleads, as if this is a persuasive argument. “You're so young.”
“So are you,” Ziyal says.
“I used to be, but now I'm not. I’m three hundred years old and you should be with someone your own age.”
“You know what I like about you? You don’t patronize me. You never treat me like I'm a child who doesn't know any better before.” Ziyal’s lip wobbles but she clenches it firm. “What did I do to change that?”
“Nothing, it’s me. I shouldn’t have let myself get out of control. My mess, you don’t want that.” The more Ezri keeps talking, the less she feels like she’s making sense, and Ziyal’s unimpressed stare only confirms that.
“This isn’t just about you! I’m here too. I want us to be together, and I don’t understand why you don’t.”
“But I do! It’s just that… You don’t know what you want yet and you’re in over your head.”
“After surviving Breen prison camp, surviving Dukat as a father and his death, surviving a war, you think that now I’m in over my head? Like you could spoil me, like I’d allow you to do that? As if I’m meant to be polished and protected and put on a shelf to admire, never to be touched.”
“No, of course… I --” Ezri scrambles across the rock as Ziyal’s eyes burn into her. She’s overcome with all too familiar confusion. Had she been hesitating for Ziyal’s sake, or her own? Was she concerned that Ziyal was overwhelmed, or herself?
“I thought you saw Ziyal. Not a naive victim, or the adolescent rescued from the desert, but me, as I am right now.”
Ezri swallows. Ziyal’s eyes are two stones that have been baking in the sun -- hot, inviting, intense. Ezri’s stomach seizes and she’s awash in a tumult of voices inside her, warring with advice with conflicting emotions and desires, and she can’t make sense of any of them.
“I… I don’t know who I am,” Ezri admits finally, looking away. “I want this between us, I do. But… I don’t know how to trust myself.”
“Then trust in me, and I will trust in you.” Ziyal reaches out to take Ezri’s hands in hers, cool and strong. “We can take it slow.”
Ziyal smiles, and Ezri can feel the ground beneath her again.
“We can discover ourselves and our desires together.”
When they kiss again, it's the morning sun warming the earth for a fresh day, unbeholden to any that came before it. It's the taste of new beginnings, the first of many.