Work Text:
“This. Isn’t. Working.” Ezri groans, tearing off the most recent page on her sketch pad. She balls up the thick paper and throws it into the slowly growing pile of discarded attempts on the floor.
Ziyal blinks up from her own easel, as if from a trance. No doubt Ezri’s frustration disrupted Ziyal’s next perfect beautiful brush stroke. The painting she’s currently working on has a network of delicate Bajoran lilies on vines interconnecting with and superimposed on an overtly Cardassian geometry, all swooping arches and sharp angles. The contrasting styles seem like they should clash, but each element only serves to highlight the strengths of the other, and the overall effect is one of aching grace, of hopeful innocence. With talent like that, Ezri shouldn’t be wasting Ziyal’s time with her own selfish quest to make sense of the storm of lifetimes warring inside of her. But hearing Ziyal talk about her art, about how she wove together disparate techniques to form a more beautiful whole, it had been a sudden burst of clarity for Ezri, that maybe this could help for her own problems.
Now, ankle deep in clunky sketches of a person that keeps ending up with some combination of Jadzia’s nose and Tobin’s chin and Emony’s pattern of spots, by accident every time, it’s all too obvious that this was a terrible idea.
Ezri turns the mirror on its face then sits down, burying her head in her arms folded on the table. “If I have to stare at one more self-portrait, I’m going to be nauseous. I thought my own face looked like a stranger’s before I did this, but now I’m sure of it.”
Ziyal sets down her paint palette and walks over. She picks up a couple of the balled-up papers, flattening them out on the table. She stares at them, probably judging how terrible they are, then clears her throat before speaking, her voice slow and gentle. (As a counselor, Ezri can recognize careful tact when she hears it.)
“I know you were set on doing a self-portrait--”
“Which clearly isn’t working.” Ezri fills in, muffled by her own arm.
“--but it’s not what you want. You need to lose yourself in the act, to let it flow through you and not be so self-conscious.” She tilts her head, and traces the outline of one of the sketched faces. “I think maybe you’re considering ‘self-portrait’ as too literal a concept.”
“That sounds like a nice way of telling me that my ‘art’ sucks. I’m not an artist; Ezri Tigan wasn’t an artist; Daxes have never been artists, well visual ones anyway... This was a stupid idea.” Ezri groans and hits her forehead on the table several times.
“Well,” Ziyal says, in an uncharacteristically sharp tone, and Ezri jerks up from the table. “I may not be a counselor, or a teacher, but I still offered to try, to help you. So you can do the same.”
“Of-- of course!” Ezri squeaks, mortified. “I’m so sorry for wasting your time; I shouldn’t have bothered you. I’ll just be going now--“
“No, no that’s not -- you’re not bothering me -- I’m quite flattered that you would --” Ziyal says then clears her throat again. She breaks eye contact, glancing around the room, a rosy flush in her cheeks. Ezri stares at her, wondering.
“And here I thought I was the babbler,” Ezri quips, hoping to lighten the moment. It works -- Ziyal lets out a delicate snort of laughter and gazes back at Ezri, smiling.
“What I was saying is: you don’t need to be a professional for art to be a worthwhile practice, just like a friend doesn’t have to be a counselor to listen. There are a range of end goals. If what you’re doing isn’t working, you just need to try a different approach, that’s all.”
“And… what’s your approach? On a personal instead of a professional basis. Because clearly I’m in over my head here.”
“Art helps me center myself.” Ziyal considers for a moment, thoughtful. “Through it I can express how the different pieces of me fit together, particularly for those who have a hard time understanding.” She takes the paint-laden brush (the bristles are Cardassian riding hound hairs, but the handle is Bajoran nyawood) from behind her ear to play with in her hands while she speaks. Flecks of green paint splatter across her ridged nose, and Ezri is briefly distracted by the adorable constellation it forms.
Ezri turns away from Ziyal’s patient, open face to the blank canvas stretched waiting for her on the easel beside the table. “But I don’t know how I fit together. How can I express something that I don’t even know? You’re always so confident, but half the time I forget my own name.” She kicks at the balled up sketches at her feet.
“Well,” Ziyal says, undeterred by her student’s exasperation. “It’s about process. Even if I think I know exactly what I want my piece to look like, sometimes by the time I’m done it ends up completely different. Or sometimes I realize it has an entirely different meaning than what I thought it would. Art is an act of discovery; the choices you make along the path of creation are what you’re expressing about yourself.”
Ezri sighs. “By that definition, every painting is a self-portrait.”
Ziyal laughs and shrugs. “Maybe, maybe not. Here, why don’t you try the paints.” She picks up her own paint palette, and Ezri tentatively takes it from her outstretched hand. “Do the first thing that comes to mind. Don’t even use a brush, focus on the colors and the movements of your hand.”
“Okay… Here goes nothing.” Ezri scoops up a glob of paint on her index finger, mixing blue and green to make teal like her Starfleet uniform. “This… is Ezri Tigan. This is who I was,” she says and dabs the teal in a fat round oval off-center of the canvas. She draws in a crude smiling face and a few of her favorite spots. Ezri glances back at Ziyal, waiting for her to laugh.
Ziyal nods and watches.
Ezri wipes off her finger then dips her hand in the primer paint, white and thin like the milky pools in the caves of symbionts. She smears it horizontally across the whole of the canvas. Some of the Ezri face blurs, dulled by the overlay. The primer makes a wet canvas, so that the white will mix with everything she adds next. “And this is Dax.”
Ezri looks up at Ziyal again for a reaction, but her face is blank, patient and waiting.
“First there’s Lela.” A green rectangle, like the podium she’d speak from at the legislature. Like new growth, like her indomitable spirit.
“Then Tobin.” A short equation from a mathematical proof of his -- contained in the corner for his timidity, bright yellow for his brilliance.
“Emony.” Swirls of pink, like the ribbon she would use in her favorite gymnastics routine, tumbling from the bottom left corner to the upper right.
Ezri smirks up, now immersed in this simple act of transferring color to the canvas, then dips her finger in the black paint. “This is where it starts to get interesting. Audrid.” She cuts a black jagged line across, for the rift between Audrid and her daughter, for before and after when she let her husband die. The angry angles bisect the Ezri-face and disrupt the neat shapes of the previous hosts.
“But that’s not the worst of it, oh not by far, because next up is Torias!” She squirts orange into her hand, messily, then throws it at the center, a large glob that hits with an impact and drips down. An explosion, cockiness, death.
“Joran! Remember him? Well, you wouldn’t, but I do. Every day. I almost killed someone because of him, the murderer inside me.” She takes the bottle of red and squeezes it violently at the canvas so that it splatters like blood, mixing with all the other colors, corrupting them to ugly browns. The blue Ezri face is still visible, but the childish grin is almost sinister now.
She doesn’t put any more paint on her finger, but writes the next name over and over again in Trill letters, smearing other paints when it comes in contact with it. “Curzon, Curzon, Curzon. Playful, fun-loving. Quick with a joke, willing to mess with other people’s lives, but no one could ever hold it against him. Everyone knew Curzon, everyone loved him.”
“Last but certainly not least, everyone’s favorite -- the beautiful and inimitable Jadzia. She can swing a bat-leth and solve a scientific anomaly and fall in love, all without batting an eye. Who could ever compare,” Ezri says bitterly. She mixes a drop of deep blue with a cup of clear lacquer, then carefully layers it on to cover the canvas completely. All the previous paint is still visible, but underneath a transparent blue tint. The melancholy of loss, coloring over everything so that that’s the first thing anyone sees.
Ezri’s eyes blur, and when she wipes them her hand comes away wet, and before she realizes it she’s crying.
Ziyal places a gentle hand on her shoulder. Ezri can’t bring herself to make eye contact, so she stares at the painting. Ziyal points to a small concentrated pinpoint of teal peeking out from the layers of other color, one eye the only visible trace of the smiley face. “That blue dot is Ezri Tigan ,” Ziyal says slowly, then recites the other names one by one, pointing at their piece. Ezri concentrates on the soothing tones of Ziyal’s voice, the straightforwardness of her attention, and takes a few deep breaths.
Then Ziyal reaches the end of the list, and there’s a moment of pregnant silence, an ellipses and Ezri realizes what she’s going to say next.
“Where’s Ezri Dax?”
Ezri stares at the ugly painting, no semblance of order or coherence, no emergent meaning to be found. The outer world falls away as she searches, so that now it’s only Dax and the canvas and the loud colors, all swirling together in a maelstrom of emotion. She can remember everyone’s name, everyone inside her, but can’t remember which one is her at the moment. Decades of memories and experiences flash across her mind, and a cacophony of conflicting voices shout at her -- Do this! No do this! What about this other thing, do that instead! -- until she doesn’t know who is saying what and why.
She’s confused and sad and bitter and in love and heartbroken and a hundred other emotions, all at once.
But most of all… she’s angry, that Dax was forced into such a desperate situation. She’s angry that now naive and unprepared Ezri has to struggle every day to stay present, to fight through the overlapping colors all vying for focus. Ezri’s insides flip flop and her heart’s beating too fast and any second now she might burst. There’s too much inside of her, too much for one person to contain, and she has to let it out.
Ezri screws up her face, concentrating for a moment, then still staring at the canvas grasps for the brush in Ziyal’s hand. She takes it in her fist, wooden end out first, and jabs it straight through the center of the canvas. She stabs several more times, until it’s enough, and she can almost catch her breath.
Some of the paint is pulled towards the gaping hole and drips through.
Ezri’s head swims with light-headedness, and her stomach churns, and -- oh no now not in front of Ziyal - she bends over and heaves onto her shoes.
---------
Some time later -- after frantic apologies and hastily replicated cleaning supplies -- Ezri and Ziyal sit side by side on the couch, admiring their paintings on easels positioned across from them.
“You know, I think it has a certain… something. A… post-bay’al-ist, pre-tezkanque…. something.” After the emotional tumult, Ezri now feels lighter and a bit giddy. She gestures grandly towards the swirling mess of her canvas with one hand and grips a mug of hot tea (for her stomach) with the other.
Ziyal raises an eyebrow and tilts her head. “Those are… Trill art movements?”
“Mm-hmm.” Ezri smirks. “The way the blue mixes with the red mixes with the green -- it calls to mind the muddled complexity of renowned artist Khiyazta during his…” She snaps her fingers, trying to help her think. “His confused phase,” she concludes, then bursts into laughter at the perplexed look on Ziyal’s face.
Ziyal joins in, amused by Ezri’s jovial mood, but a look of concentration remains on her face. She glances back at the painting and twists her mouth. “I like it.”
Ezri smiles and rubs Ziyal’s arm. “Oh I was joking. Khiyazta was my family’s nanny growing up; he would always complain about how we would smear food everywhere instead of eating it. My painting is complete shit. The only thing it’s reminiscent of is the Risian fruit salad I puked up.”
“But you feel better now,” Ziyal prompts.
Ezri cocks her head. “Yeah, I suppose I do. Like I took everything that was inside of me and--”
“And you put it on the canvas.”
“--puked it onto my feet,” Ezri says at the same time.
Ziyal smiles fondly. “Not was I was referring to. Your painting -- it’s an expression of yourself. The process was painful, but I think perhaps an important step. Now you can see yourself from the outside, at arm’s length.” Ziyal smiles, sly and toothy, because of course this was the plan along. The knowing smirk with all the veneer of innocence -- dangerously sweet, deceptively naive, secretly wise -- takes Ezri’s breath away. “And I’m grateful that you let me be present for this. I’m grateful that I get to see you.”
Ezri gulps and forces herself to redirect her attention away from the soft pink of Ziyal’s lips. She grasps around for a change of subject. “The flowers on your painting, how did you get them so… white? I feel like the flowers are popping out of the canvas, like I could pick one and put it in my hair, but they’re so delicate I’d be afraid of killing them. But the white, it looks brighter than the paint in the tube.”
Ziyal leans in closer, and Ezri holds her breath. “I’ll tell you a secret… See the dark shapes in the background?”
“They remind me of the station architecture,” Ezri blurts out. Ziyal smells sweet and spicy and intoxicating .
“Yes,” Ziyal says excitedly. “It’s a reference to a Cardassian style. The way the arcs interact with the shapes of the flowers -- the darkness of the color and the harshness of the angles bring out the brightness and delicacy of the flowers. Your eyes are drawn first to the flowers, popping out as you said, but it’s only because of the contrast. You can’t have one without the other.”
Ziyal glows as she discusses her painting, truly a professional suited to her vocation, and Ezri can’t tear her eyes away from her. This girl of contradictions, of pieces that don’t go together. This woman who is both too innocent in age and too experienced in life. This survivor who has known only pain and imprisonment, hate and betrayal, but who despite all of that emerges as kind and whole and radiant as the lilies in her art, growing towards the sun.
“A beautiful whole, just like you,” Ezri says and leans her head on Ziyal’s shoulder.
Ziyal takes her hand and squeezes it -- like you as well and yes now you understand and thank you .
They sit together, immersed in color and thought and each other's presence.