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Julian watches Miles climb up the access tunnel, turn a corner, disappear. He takes a deep breath in, lets it out slowly. Calmly, deliberately, he makes a circle around the little node, closing the door to each junction in turn. He closes the port above him last. Then all at once his strings are cut loose, and he’s curled on the floor, sobbing, keening, his whole body shaking, the sound coming out of him a piercing screech, then dropping to a guttural moan. He worries, briefly, that someone will hear him and come running, thinking he’s been injured, but that was the whole point of doing this here, wasn’t it, that no one would know, and that thought brings his wail back into the higher octave.
Ever since Miles got back, Julian has felt him slipping through his fingers. The Miles who’d gotten off the transport - confused, disassociating, scared shitless, but still more or less the same guy Julian had played darts with last week - had been too good to be true, he can see that now. The way Miles had cancelled one holosuite booking, then another; the way he always seemed to be “just leaving” whenever Julian turned up at Quark’s; how it had become obvious Miles was actively avoiding him, to the point where Julian had to climb down five decks’ worth of maintenance chute just to talk face to face. Julian had pictured their friendship as sand; if he could just grip tight enough, hold his hands in just the right way, he could salvage the last few grains. Now, somewhere in the bowels of deck 11, he sees that it is a hollow, glass thing, already irrevocably shattered before Julian had made a grab for it.
Unless it had never existed at all. Unless, over the past four years, Miles had only ever been tolerating him, a charade for which Miles has now lost patience.
Well it doesn’t fucking matter now, does it? Julian feels his howl become a whimper. He focuses on breathing again, imagining his sense of purpose, his professional detachment, flow back into his fingers and toes, move up his limbs, settle in his skull. His first duty is to the patient. And the patient isn’t all right, even if it seems like Julian is the only one who can see that. He moves his hands across his face, relaxing his muscles, physically rearranging them into an expression that is engaged but emotionless. He climbs the five decks back to the habitat ring corridor. He stops by his quarters to wash his face. He goes to see Captain Sisko.
“It is the opinion of the chief medical officer that Chief O’Brien should be relieved of duty,” Julian says, staring unblinkingly at a point above Sisko’s left shoulder. He can feel Sisko’s eyes on him, sizing him up, waiting for him to continue. Julian swallows but, for once, keeps his mouth shut.
“All right, Doctor,” says Sisko. “I’ll take care of it.”
Julian circles over to Jadzia on his way out of Ops. “When O’Brien comes out of Sisko’s office -” Julian falters, feeling the calm draining out of him again. He centers himself, looks down at the computer terminal. “He’s - he’s going to be upset. If you could divert him, maybe take him to lunch or something-”
“Of course, Julian.” She puts a hand on his shoulder. He glances back at her, forces a stiff smile, then heads for the turbolift.
Julian is at his desk, chewing halfheartedly on a protein bar, when Jadzia hails him.
“You were right,” she says. “He was upset.”
“And?”
“And he wasn’t interested in a lunch date, Julian. What did you expect me to do, handcuff him to me and drag him to the replimat?”
Julian just barely bites back a Why not?
“Anyway, he ordered the turbolift to the Promenade, so I think he’s probably headed your way. Just a heads up.”
“Thanks, Dax,” he says. He glances out the infirmary door - sure enough, he sees the top of Miles’ head bobbing through the crowd. He finds himself gripping the edge of one of the biobeds. He steels himself, mentally checks that his face is arranged correctly. He cycles through all his rationalizations, his medical trainings, the fleeting thought that maybe giving Miles an object for his anger will help bring things to the surface, and then Miles walks through the door and the only thought in his mind is This is gonna suck.
Julian has seen Miles’ righteous anger before; he’s familiar with the way it buzzes under his skin, seems to pool between his eyes. This is new. This fury is detached; it forms a cloud around him and flares out, like plasma ejected from a star.
Miles doesn’t understand, of course he doesn’t. Perspective. The thing that Miles always claims Julian is lacking, that Julian now seems to have in abundance. It’s tearing them apart, again, now in the other direction, and Julian wonders if his supposed inability to see the big picture was ever really the problem. Whether it was more that no one likes what it is Julian sees.
Julian knows it’s a bad idea, knows he’s setting himself up, but he’s scared and Miles is pissed and Julian says it anyway: “I’m your doctor and your friend.” Julian winces internally as he says it, thinks of Dr. Sharva, the ancient medical ethics professor back at the Academy. Julian mostly read research papers under the table during that class. No time to regret that now.
And there it is, the confirmation of everything he’d feared in the maintenance junction - “You’re not my friend.” And what had he been expecting? That yes, twenty years of prison and torture had been terrible, but if Julian Bashir’s feelings are on the line, Miles would stand down, hug it out, decide to be well. Well. It simplifies things, certainly. Julian has nothing left to fear, and Dr. Bashir’s first duty is to the patient. O’Brien turns and leaves, and Julian lets him. He calls Keiko, lets her know O’Brien’s headed her way. He thinks bizarrely of racquetball; a game where everyone on the station is a player, launching his patient from one side of the court to the other.
Keiko calls him back half an hour later to say that O’Brien hasn’t made it home. Incomplete pass , Julian thinks. He locks onto the Chief’s signal and beams him directly to sickbay, fully expecting to be decked, but all he gets is a comm badge. “Computer,” he hears himself saying, before his mind has really caught up, “suspend all security codes of Miles O’Brien.” But now he’s in some kind of automated response tree, and the computer is blithely using words like “admiralty-level clearance” and “accordance with Starfleet protocol” and “triplicate,” and he almost screams at the disembodied voice that he’s the fucking chief medical officer, dammit, it’s his fucking job, but he senses he’s about to get his own codes frozen and he swallows the words.
And there it is again, the creeping panic, the feeling that he’s trying to walk through biogel. Julian pushes it back for the third? fourth? time that day. He lets his brain catch up. Work the problem. A patient could be in danger. To remove the patient from danger, he must first find the patient. He could scan for human life forms - the computer’s privacy settings would be a bitch to override, and there are too many humans on the station for it to make a difference. But it does give him an idea. He writes a short script on the infirmary computer, connects it to his comm badge, and heads for the habitat ring. He’ll work his way through every corridor on this station if that’s what it takes.
Julian jogs around the habitat ring, one level, then another, keeping a steady pace, pausing only to ask the random crew members and shopkeepers he encounters if they’ve seen the Chief. They haven’t. He calls Keiko and tells her to stay in her quarters no matter what until O’Brien gets there (“Where else do you think I’d go, Julian?”, exasperation barely covering fear). He calls Sisko and gets the missing crewman ball rolling. Some part of him - the part that used to be Miles’ friend, he supposes - knows he’s overreacting. The Chief is just taking a breather somewhere; is going to be profoundly embarrassed (not to mention pissed off) when he finds out Julian started a station-wide manhunt just because they had a little argument.
But it doesn’t matter what O’Brien thinks about him anymore. Julian picks up the pace.
He’s on his fifth deck when he gets a call from Keiko. “He was just here,” she says. “He left. Julian-” And he knows something’s wrong; he doesn’t know whether it’s what she’s not saying or the curtness, the detachment in her voice, but it’s making the hair on the back of his neck stand up, and he’s about to call the captain, reorganize the search party to fan out around O’Brien’s quarters, when he gets a ping from the infirmary computer. “Chief O’Brien’s access codes detected,” it says through his comm badge. “Cargo bay 3, weapons locker 47.”
Cargo bay 3 , Julian thinks, mapping the route in his head. Kira’s search party is the closest; he’ll contact her and then take turbolift 7 - and then the rest of the message catches up with him and he feels the deck tilting under his feet. He calls for an emergency site-to-site transport.
O’Brien had said that the man Julian had known as his friend was dead, and Julian had been prepared to accept that. He’s had some experience with burying past selves, after all. He knows that some things, once done to a person, can never be undone. But he’d never questioned the assumption that some form of Miles would always exist, somewhere in the galaxy; he’d believed it like he believes in object permanence. But if that’s true, why did you spend the past hour searching the bowels of the station? Had he known, from the moment O’Brien had stepped off the shuttle weeks ago, how nasty this could turn, and still watched it happen?
But now he’s materializing and he sees Miles (because he can’t help but think of him as Miles, it seems) pointing a phaser at himself and in that moment, before he can move out of the transport confinement beam, he finds himself unmoored.
Back during his residency, he’d had a classmate who would make life-or-death decisions with detached rationality and absolute confidence until the moment his shift ended and he’d collapse, crying and guilt-ridden, in the nearest bathroom. He’d told Julian once that he thought of being a doctor as a mask he wore. Julian’s known a lot of doctors like that, actually; people who see the utilitarianism of an emergency situation as part of the persona they adopt, not really theirs. Julian has never understood it. The person he is when he practices medicine has always been an extension of himself; maybe even a reassertion of himself. His best self. Someone stronger, smarter, more competent than Julian has a right to be. And if he loses a patient, it’s because he needs to learn more, work harder, be better . His own guilt is irrelevant.
He’s watched the deaths of comrades, friends, children; even stared down the wrong end of a phaser himself a few times, but this is the moment when his cool professionalism abandons him completely. He strains against the confinement beam, ready to run across the room, tackle Miles to the ground, bash the phaser to dust with his bare hands, and- No, Julian, that’s idiotic! He realizes, then, that he never called Kira for backup. No one knows where they are, no therapist or hostage negotiator is on the way, not even someone with higher qualifications than an intro to psych class eight years ago and the 15-minute “Recognizing Signs of Depression in the Workplace” certification he has to retake every year, and he wishes it could be anyone else here instead of him, because he never wanted this kind of responsibility. The power of life and death, yes. But never over Miles.
He waits another millisecond for his discipline to return. It doesn’t. And he knows, then, that he’s going to have to fake it, because if he can’t, if he watches Miles shoot himself in an empty cargo bay on a Thursday afternoon, he’s never going to find it again.
The transport completes, and he puts on his mask.