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The first time Elizabeth Lense invited Julian to lunch, he declined, citing his prior appointment with Garak.
(Kira was furious about Garak’s continued presence on the station, of course, but—as expected—the Federation contingent refused to make him leave. He had as much right to be on the station as anyone else, they declared. Privately, Julian thought they would change their tune if they knew more about the man, but he wasn’t telling. Garak had respected his privacy; it was only fair to return the favor.)
The second time she asked, he claimed a headache. It was only partly a lie; the lack of sleep was finally starting to catch up with his body. The hours spent awake each night pondering the questions he could ask, now that he had access to functioning computer terminals, but was too afraid of what he would find.
The third time, he didn’t offer a reason, and after that she did not invite him again.
It wasn’t her fault. She was friendly, polite, and most importantly didn’t pry about the missing years of his life. But he still found himself on edge around her. They had orbited the same circles in medical school without becoming close, and he understood her even less now than he had then. She represented everything he had failed to achieve, and he couldn’t understand why she appeared to trust him. After all, he was the rogue fugitive. Wasn’t he dangerous, in her eyes?
At least he had finally figured out why she had offered him a position in the infirmary. He had overheard a conversation between two Bajoran civilians on the Promenade:
I’m not letting one of those aliens anywhere near me.
You don’t have to see an alien, you can ask for Doctor Julian .
The ease with which his own alien nature was ignored made him smile. And it explained why he was being allowed to work alongside Starfleet. He was supposed to be the bridge that would make a population wary of potential invaders accept help, even if that help came from smooth noses or spotted skin.
He would have been happy to continue interacting with Lense as little as possible, but when he saw her leaving her office red-eyed after a call with Starfleet Command, he couldn’t stop himself from approaching. There were some things he was reluctant to ignore.
“Everything all right?” he asked cautiously, half-expecting her to tell him not to ask questions. Federation candor still caught him off-guard from time to time, after so long primarily interacting with Cardassians and the Bajoran Resistance.
“It’s fine,” she said, and he should have taken that and left her to it, but he had not yet figured out how to walk by someone hurting without offering to help.
Instead he asked, “Do you have any lunch plans today?”
Despite her red eyes, her answering smile was sunny.
There were plans to create a Replimat on the Promenade, a gathering place where people could come and eat together. The station replicators still only worked on occasion, despite the engineering crews’ best efforts, but it was a bright, clean space, and not a bad place to spend one’s lunch hour, even if only a few of the items on the menu could be relied upon not to turn poisonous.
Julian ordered oatmeal, which had an inexplicably fishy taste but was otherwise palatable. He scanned the crowd as they made their way to an empty table. It still felt odd, being surrounded by human faces. He sometimes caught himself searching for nose ridges that weren’t there. How long would it take to feel normal around his own kind again?
“Everything really is fine,” Lense assured him after they had seated themselves. “I’ve just had more of these calls than I can handle.”
“Checking up on you?” Julian suspected that, if anything, they were trying to covertly check up on him. Sisko had to have told his superiors about the existence of the exiled augment.
“No one anticipated the wormhole. Suddenly the station is the most important strategic post in the sector, so there are admirals coming out of the woodwork to remind us all how to behave,” she explained before taking a bite. She had decided to risk the strangely grainy tuna sandwich.
“I’m sure you’ll do well.” He tried for a reassuring smile and got a rueful chuckle in response.
“I’m sure they’re wishing they hadn’t given me the position. They only sent me here because it was as far from Earth as they could get me.” Lense lowered her tone confidentially. “I’m blacklisted, you know.”
No, he hadn’t known, and his eyebrows shot up in surprise. All he had really known of her was that she was a bright and dedicated student, and went to Bruce Lucier’s parties. Nothing that would result in attempts to limit her service.
(Wasn’t that kind of thing reserved for the likes of him?)
“Why?”
“It’s a long story.”
Julian tried to suppress his urge to pry. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
She wrapped her hands around her mug of tea. (For some reason, the replicators were reliable when it came to Earl Gray.)
“I do, but it might make you uncomfortable. It sort of involves you.”
Julian did not know what ripples his exile had caused among his fellow students. Had Section 31 caught others in the crossfire?
“What happened?”
That was the question that kept him up at night, the one from which all others sprouted. He tried not to consider it in daylight. What if the truth was worse than he imagined? What if there had been unintended consequences, ones for which he couldn’t forgive himself? History was full of examples of humanity’s worst side being brought out to play when they had a scapegoat to blame it on.
There was a kind of safety in ignorance.
“After you were arrested, the Federation news service was running non-stop stories about the danger of genetic engineering,” Lense began. “But none of the science made any sense. It’s not as if there’s a megalomania gene that can be activated or suppressed, and there’s no empirical, peer-reviewed research about it. The Khan-era augments all elected to undergo enhancements as adults, and came from homes that espoused eugenics beliefs. There’s no data at all about children who are augmented and raised in modern Federation cultures.”
She had been going with the confidence of a scientist, but paused then, her eyes flickering away from him before she continued. “And then, on top of that, well, it was you. I didn’t know you that well, but others did, like Erit and Felix. All of your friends agreed that you wouldn’t hurt anyone. Even when you ran away—the news outlets kept saying it was a sign you were dangerous.” Her eyes traveled back up to meet his. “But I think it’s very human to try and escape an unjust imprisonment.”
Julian tried to swallow past the enormous lump in his throat.
Then he tried again. It hadn’t worked the first time. Funny, how humans could breathe and swallow and complete so many processes automatically, but as soon as one became conscious of it, one forgot how.
“Are Erit and Felix blacklisted too?” he managed to ask. It was easier than any of the alternatives ( what else were the news outlets saying, did they say who was imprisoning me, how I escaped? ).
“Erit is doing a nutritional study with the Vulcan Science Academy,” she recounted. “Felix dropped out to concentrate on holoprogramming. He said he’d be a rotten engineer, anyways.” A corner of her mouth curled into a smile. Julian tried to reciprocate, although he suspected on his face it looked more like a grimace.
“He was right.” Felix had never really had the discipline for Starfleet, but he was a brilliant programmer. Even before Julian’s departure, he had been prone to dramatically declaring that he was going to drop out this time, really, don’t think he wouldn’t.
I could call him , Julian realized, and nearly choked on the force of the realization.
He could contact Earth.
None of his old friends would want to hear from him—why would they, when he had lied to them all and apparently ruined their career prospects—and Section 31 would probably jump on the chance to trace him down, to turn any contact against him.
But the thought still lingered. It was a possibility that had not existed for years, not since his arrest.
“It was my speech that really did it for me,” said Lense, who had been continuing to eat and was apparently oblivious to the giant metaphorical hammer that had whacked Julian over the head.
“Speech?” he repeated numbly.
“I was Valedictorian, and I had to make a speech at graduation. I talked about you. About how you deserved to be there, graduating with us, and that if you had been able to finish, you probably would have ended up valedictorian instead of me. That Starfleet had lost a good doctor. They didn’t like that. I was supposed to be on the Lexington after graduation, but they withdrew the offer, and I got sent out here instead.”
She said it plainly, matter-of-fact, no grief or remorse.
That did nothing for Julian’s guilt, or his anger.
“I’m sorry.” She deserved better than to have her graduation and the promising start of her career tainted by him.
“It isn’t your fault. If the Federation wants to drive people out, it’s entirely on them.” Then, as if that was not enough of a bombshell to drop, she added, “Your mother sent me a letter. She watched the graduation ceremony.”
Julian had not looked up his parents’ sentences. They remained frozen in time in his memory, awaiting trial.
Even before the public revelation of his enhancements, he had never been able to think painlessly about his progenitors.
“How is she?” he forced himself to ask.
He couldn’t hide from the information forever, he knew. It would find him somehow, and Lense was at least a friendlier source than Section 31.
Unless she was working for them. It wouldn’t do to forget that possibility. He should still do his research, corroborate her story, figure out how much she could really be trusted.
His head ached.
“Both your mother and father were sent to a penal colony for rehabilitation. She said that they were probably going to separate once they were released. He was planning on going back to England, but she was going to try to reconnect with family in Sudan.”
It didn’t surprise him to learn of his parents’ decaying orbit. They had long been tied together by their pet project, their love for each other wound up in a codependent cycle of mutual assurance, we did the right thing for him . What was left to bind them, in the absence of the tool custom built for that purpose?
Maybe it stung a little. So did his childhood.
“Are you still in touch?” If the answer was yes, Julian would make sure this was their last and only lunch together. The last thing he needed was his mother knowing anything about him.
Perhaps in the future— long in the future—he might be able to stand contact with her. But he wasn’t ready yet.
“No. I sent her a message back, she wrote a little note thanking me again, and that was it.” Lense drew a finger through the crumbs on her plate. “Does she know you’re here?”
“No,” he said curtly.
“Julian… I’m sorry. For what was done to you. You don’t deserve any of this.”
He exhaled and then, appalled by the shake in it, scraped his chair back to stand.
“I’m going to get some more tea.”
It wasn’t running away, not when he would have to face her again, day after day, as long as he was on the station and working in the infirmary, coping with the fact that she knew both more and less than he did about his own life.
It was not a retreat. It was strategic regrouping.
And if he would go back to his own quarters to stare at the computer terminal, caught between the compulsive curiosity and the deep-rooted fear of knowing, it was no one’s business but his own.