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Alarm klaxons are blaring shrill and insistent, and the shuttle is shaking -- the inertial dampers must be shot. Attitude control is out, thrusters are out, primary and backup power are both offline -- this landing has officially become a crash. There’s no controlling the descent or the angle of entry anymore; the only thing left to do now is to protect the symbiont. There’s always another host. There will never be another Dax symbiont.
She thinks of her wife. Nilani always said she was too reckless. She suspects being proven right will be cold comfort.
Dax will live though. She knows it somehow, deep in her bones the way she knows her mother’s voice or the shape of her own hands. The planet below rushes up to meet her and she closes her eyes.
She remembers dying.
--
Ezri Dax comes awake with a ragged, gasping breath and the acrid taste of panic on her tongue. Her heart is pounding a staccato drumbeat in her chest, too loud and too fast, and the shuttle is still shaking so hard it threatens to tear her apart.
No, not the shuttle -- it’s her body that’s trembling, great wracking jerks like an earthquake under her skin. There’s a pit in her stomach, and she can’t breathe, can’t do anything but gasp and shake. She did not die that way, she tries to tell herself. Those were not her final moments. She isn’t Torias anymore, the memories are not hers. She is Ezri, Ezri, Ezri.
The name clatters around her head, just more noise in the screeching static in her mind. Torias wasn’t scared when he died; Torias had faced his end with grace, knowing his memories would live on.
Ezri isn’t Torias.
--
The thing about having eight lifetimes of memories all clamoring for attention at once is that she also remembers how all those lives ended.
Ezri remembers dying eight times.
Some of the memories are hazy, the ones from very long ago or when she lived to be very old and her mind had started to go. Some are scalpel-sharp, drawing blood whenever she touches them. Torias’s death is a white-hot poker, drawing terror that is all Ezri’s (sometimes she thinks it’s the only thing she knows for sure is hers).
Jadzia’s death is the fall of a blade. To one side lies Jadzia’s life, her friends, her lovers, her deeds. On the other side is blank space. It’s an endless darkness, all the places where Jadzia is not.
Ezri thinks she prefers Torias’s death.
--
It turns out that a station in deep space on the front lines of a cross-quadrant war needs a lot of counseling.
It’s barely been an hour since she formally accepted the position of station counselor, and already, people are lining up at her office door to make appointments. One success notwithstanding (and she’s not even sure if Garak was a success), she’s not sure she should be counseling anyone with her head as mixed up as it is. Ben’s confidence in her is encouraging, but she can’t help but think it isn’t her that’s inspiring it.
She muddles through the best she can on three centuries of intuition, a couple of years of formal training, and a few month’s hastily interrupted practice in the shadow of a counselor who was actually qualified. Another time, in another place, that might have been enough -- Starfleet covered all the situations that were likely to come up on routine space travel.
Deep Space Nine is anything but routine.
She asks questions and gives her advice and she listens. She tries to ignore Joran’s voice in her ear, whispering that everyone who comes to see her will probably be dead in a few days or weeks or months anyway, so it won’t matter if she ruins them.
It turns out her 350-plus years haven’t taught her very much about war.
--
Kira’s hand is on Ezri’s face, her touch like a tether. “Just breathe”, she says. Her voice is gentle and firm, and Ezri latches onto it, the only raft for miles in the middle of an endless ocean. “That’s it,” Kira says, “I’ve got you.”
Most days, Ezri doesn’t know who she is until she opens her eyes in the morning. In the hazy place between waking and sleep, she is all of her memories at once, Curzon and Lela and Tobin and all the rest. She gets lost in the swirling fog of lives, convinced some days that she’s still someone else until she sees the wrong face in the mirror. Worse than that are the days she wakes up as no one, just a cacophony of voices vying for dominance.
“Just keep your eyes on me,” Kira says. They are lying together in Ezri’s small bed, still sleep-warm. “You know who you are.”
“I know who I am,” she repeats. Some days those words alone are enough, but this morning is particularly bad. “Tell me again.”
Kira leans in to rest her forehead against Ezri’s so when she speaks, Ezri can feel the words on her own lips. “You are Ezri Dax. You are a joined Trill. You are a counselor on Deep Space Nine.”
The fog at last begins to coalesce. “I am Ezri Dax.” There’s an uncertain twist in her lip, the one that Kira says is so endearing, begging to be kissed away.
Kira kisses her forehead instead. “Yes, you are,” she says. She sweeps the pad of her thumb across Ezri’s cheekbone. “Do you need another minute?”
I am Ezri Dax, Ezri thinks. It shouldn’t feel like such an accomplishment to remember her own name.
“No,” she tells Kira. “I’m good.”
“Good,” Kira says, and draws Ezri close for a kiss as slow and sweet as Sunday morning.
--
She knows when they look at her, they see Jadzia. Or more accurately, they see the absence of Jadzia. She can’t really blame them -- sometimes when she looks in the mirror, she sees Jadzia too. The whole station is awash with Jadzia’s memories, pulling her in like a riptide when she catches a whiff of Quark’s cooking or touches the railing on the promenade. The memories are her and not-hers, visceral and real and someone else’s.
She tries to hold onto what’s hers. The Destiny. Tyree. Her counseling training. Benjamin still calls her Old Man, and that’s not hers -- but it wasn’t Jadzia’s either at first, so maybe that’s okay. Worf isn’t her husband, but he is her friend. Kira is something different too, and it’s all Ezri’s.
--
In the dark, Ezri listens to Kira breathe.
They are skin-to-skin beneath the blankets, Kira pressed up against Ezri’s back and giving off heat like a furnace. Kira fingers trace idle circles on Ezri’s bare hip; she’s drowsing, but not asleep quite yet.
Ezri’s mind is too full of thoughts that refuse to settle. “Did you know,” she says, turning her face up toward Kira, “that every face you see in your dreams is someone you’ve seen before? Even strangers are just people you’ve seen in passing. The humanoid brain is incapable of inventing faces.”
“Hmm,” says Kira noncommittally. Her breath stirs the short hair at the nape of Ezri’s face.
Ezri waits, but Kira doesn’t say anything more. Her breathing is deep and regular, and the hand on Ezri’s hip has stilled.
Ezri has seen a lot of faces.
--
The message light on Ezri’s comm panel blinks a warning in red. Her mother keeps calling, and Ezri keep not answering, in no mood to listen to yet another passive-aggressive guilt trip denigrating all of her life choices.
She knows she should call. She remembers the aching, empty sadness when Audrid was estranged from her daughter Neema. She remembers Tobin’s soaring love for Raifi despite their differences. She remembers all of her children (Dax’s children, hers and not-hers), sees their faces in her dreams and hopes they were happy.
She just keeps saying the wrong things.The wrong name, the wrong memories, the wrong family. Every time she speaks to her mother, any sense of self she’s managed to build on the unsteady ground of her life collapses underneath her and sends her hurtling downward in free fall. She’s always been wrong in her mother’s eyes -- why should being joined change anything?
Having eight whole lives of memories in her head isn’t nearly as complicated as her relationship with her mother.
--
When Ezri kisses Kira, she closes her eyes and it doesn’t matter who she’s supposed to be.
--
The way it happens is this:
Kira tips her head back against the side of the holographic hot spring and a sigh escapes her lips, her eyes drifting closed. Relaxation looks good on her -- Ezri remembers that pinched, uncomfortable look she’d worn on their (hers, not-hers) holosuite trip to the Hoobishan baths all those years ago.
Jadzia’s attraction is a crackling, electric thing in Ezri’s stomach, but there is something else there too, something fluttering and new and hers. This isn’t raktajino or bloodwine or standing on her head -- this is real, it has to be, and it’s all Ezri’s.
It is Jadzia’s confidence and Tobias’s recklessness that propel her forward through the water toward Kira, and for the first time, she thinks oh, this is what joining is supposed to be. Hers and not-hers, all together but still distinct, her wishes and their experiences. She’s so used to being Not-Jadzia that she’s forgotten to be plus-Jadzia.
“Nerys,” Ezri says, her voice a little hoarse, and Kira meets her gaze with wide, soft eyes. Ezri’s heart is pounding, but it isn’t nerves -- she has seen the way Kira looks at her sometimes, like she’s latinum and sunshine and summer rain.
Ezri Tigan might have hesitated, but Ezri Dax has three and a half centuries of memories, and she knows life is too short to wait.
When her lips touch Kira’s, all the voices in her head fade away.