Chapter Text
Blinding light was all he recalled from before and a dull sense of pain— colored ripples, mesmerizing, flashing and violent like a cartoon character from the twentieth century was being slammed on the back of the head.
Then?
The Universe lay bare— wide, vast, and eternal. Stars sprayed the black canvas of all around him floating like a freed satellite from its designated orbit. Washes of color— bold like streaks of tropical paint gleaming under half-closed eyes through eyelashes on a lazy paradise island— exploded from an inky eternity. Aquamarine, tangerine, magenta, pearly white, and resort sky-blue. Pillars like smoke plumed as though forever like dyed smoke bombs or truly poisonous gas, which from a distance looked so beautiful. Despite all the non-existence of beating hearts, he felt life of all around him. The pulse of the universe itself, and he…
What was he?
He recalled faintly the words of something he once knew, “I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then…”
But had he even known then?
He could not be sure. Nothing from the past was very clear and was more a dream to him now than the unreal reality of zooming through space like a sentient shuttle.
He almost laughed at the latter notion, but he did not really have a voice to do such a thing.
It might still be a dream. Dreams could be stark. They could trick the senses into believing just about anything, and yet never had he been in a dream so full of life. Perhaps he should feel dizzy. Should he feel the depths of nothingness? At least everything should be spinning if not simply making no logical sense in some manner, since he seemed to be thinking clearly. His toes could feel the blood’s buzzing tingles of the nothingness beneath, but it could just as well be that he was sleeping on them funny to strain the blood flow. This could very well be a hallucination. A holodeck?
He did not have long to ponder his own physical reactions anymore than to ponder the vibrancy of the life he felt from what should be lifelessness whether real or not, but things were picking up.
He felt those beating hearts he had recently desired to hear. He heard them all at once, in fact, and felt them just as true. He could see them all. Tangible things all across the endless universe of all space… all time. No holodeck, no induced brain manipulation was this thorough, this complete, not that he knew of!
And all those lives running along their bloodlines from that precious pump to the minds that sensed the worlds for the soul within! At first it was almost comforting, but the feeling began to grow like too much of any good thing. It soon became an overwhelming rush. Voices echoed, and he heard them. Voices of joy, voices or sorrow, voices of rage, terror, confusion, and of hatred and love. He felt all needs. He felt all lusts. He heard them all not as a babbling sea of voices in a crowd, but he heard and felt them within themselves or interacting with others as individuals. Every single one!
It was a burning, horrid, spine-crunching pain through every vein to every cell. A burning like his mind was on fire. His own heart began to race beyond belief. Emotion and thought of all around numbed his own feelings. He felt that he knew them all from every birth to every death; from the beginning of all time to the end of time as anyone knew it. To the far reaches of universal reality to the close corners of his own home and his own desires, but they were very faint when they were discernible at all from anyone else’s. One could almost say he often confused himself for other people.
Was he traumatized for life as that little boy watching his father be killed after the heat of an ancient battle during Vulcan’s volatile past?
Was he that old woman squatting on four legs in front of her hut on a planet Humanity had never come into contact with as she contemplated the feeling of the night breeze on her sightless face?
It felt like eternity, but how could he truly live that long and know? It was an impossibility no matter how one looked at it. The mind was incapable of holding such information no matter what physical being. The psychological imbalance alone would be enough to destroy a brain beyond repair.
The only anchor he had was one last thought that he wished he had a doctor, but then he remembered with a strange, almost giddy humor that made absolutely no sense with the giddiness of all the lively universe, I am the doctor…
The conscious thought of his own making seemed to break whatever was keeping the stability of this moment or non-moment or omnipresent moment.
Blackness shot him like a pulsing beam. Memory and perception vanished.
Eternity took him, and it felt so long. Though what happened in between he could no longer fathom. The benthic depths were at such a universal scale that it was beyond the calculation of neural energy.
But apparently… yes, apparently even eternity did not last forever…
He was washed up in a whirl like a survivor of an ancient shipwreck, washed ashore like a beached whale in a painful, cold spray in the blinding unforgiving sun only to smash into the coarseness of white sand, but he was not on that vivid beach with the sun beating white with all colors of rainbow might through shadow and leaves and crisp air or the sound of the crashing of soothing waves. Cold normality of Human perception at last set it. Stiffness overtook the flight of freedom. Metallic, hard, and unfeeling things were felt and smelt more than seen. Machines hummed. The artificial air traffic hummed louder. He heard it with more thought and care to its unnaturalness than ever he had before.
“Julian?”
The name startled him at first. He jolted almost in fright of it, but then he remembered. He remembered in a flash that seemed also somehow unnatural. More than a simple event of one’s life flashing before one’s eyes. Images fast-forwarded almost idiotically and yet still perfectly perceivable. Was it something to do with his enhancements? He had never quite had an experience comparable.
The away team. The illegal research. The spike. The near unbelievable rip in time and space. Rescuing the people unfortunate enough to have been involved in Dr. Glen Boraas’ project.
And as for Glen Boraas himself? Julian Bashir recalled even things he shouldn’t.
Had Julian seen the security or some sort of log that he could not now recall, because he felt as though he had been there when Boraas had done his research. What had failed and what had not. Who he had been and who he had become. A man who fought his whole life from his proud upbringing in an esteemed family to his inability to accept his father’s rival from not being brought to justice despite everyone involved knowing that he had stolen work from him. It was almost silly and yet it was one hundred percent tragic. Boraas had worked to better himself and be stronger than his father before him. He fought for the project with failure after failure and eventually coming to lie to himself about the ethical nature of his own research. He did not admit it even to himself, that Glen Boraas secretly desired to change his own father’s past and not truly so much out of love as much as deep and guilty pride for which he was contrarily ashamed at the deepest root of his being.
Not a new story.
Was it a fabrication of Julian’s own mind?
He could not be sure at the moment, and yet…
Something had happened to Julian himself when he had been struck by the spiking rip in reality. Had he been dragged in? That’s what his mind seemed to tell him. Could he trust it?
“Are you alright?”
He blinked.
Sickbay, of course.
On the ship.
Safe.
Apparently unhurt in the normal physical sense as far as he could tell.
Though, the equipment and the screens around him showed enough that he had very recently not been alright. If he had not had Emmaline Tenniel as a very bright young assistant doctor on this voyage, he was certain he would not be alive at all.
He looked upon her wide-eyed face, her black eyes inquiring from beneath her thick black kinky curls, her round face smoothed but her brow tightly wrinkled.
“That was a smart move,” said Julian despite himself.
“What?” Emmeline asked in surprise.
“Quick thinking and cool,” he added.
“What are you talking about?”
“How you stabilized the brain before I completely was beyond recovery,” said Julian as simply as one would compliment a new spice to fix a dish to perfection.
“But, Dr. Bashir, how could you know anything about it,” Emmeline tried to tease, but it took only the smallest amount of human knowledge to know that she was forcing it with that brow puckering all the more above her forced smile. “You were unconscious?”
The tingle he felt only had him staring back at her for a moment. Then he closed his eyes— not unconscious but thoroughly exhausted.