Ninth Host
She wakes up at 0200 and stares at the ceiling. Cold sweat covers her skin, her heart beats far too quickly.
She runs over the last few minutes of the dream; losing a fight, a curved blade sliding into her stomach, tearing her skin, swearing in Klingon as she fell to her knees...
It wasn't her nightmare.
("The symbiont is dying. I hate to ask this of you, but you're the only Trill on board...")
A shattered version of one of Curzon's misadventures. She tells herself to calm down, those things never happened. She is safe, warm, healthy. There is absolutely nothing to worry about.
But her fingernails are drawing blood from her palms.
It did happen, to a part of what she is, if not to her precisely. Should the distinction matter to her?
It's been a year now. More precisely it's been eleven months, two weeks and thirteen days. Part of her is adamant that she shouldn't be marking off the days like this, but she isn't even sure if that part is really her.
It's easier now than it was in those first few weeks, but she still daydreams about being footloose and symbiont-free. Losing Ben didn't exactly help. Partly he was a reminder that the things she remembers really did happen.
Once upon a time, her name was Ezri. Ezri Tigan, not Ezri Dax. Her identity was not extended and truncated by the name of a symbiont, not a reincarnation of other names, other faces.
She has to stop sometimes and ask herself what she is doing. Why is she laughing at an in-joke she shouldn't know about, why is she singing along to a song she has never heard?
("Happy to be near you...")
She can never quite feel settled, she never really feels alone. The thing inside her watches and absorbs, alters her reactions in ways she can never really understand. Did she want to sit down here, did she want to read that book?
Her friends are... Are they hers? Do they like Ezri or do they like Dax?
She turns her head to one side and wonders if Julian is dreaming of Jadzia.
("When somebody loves you...")
She's picked up a lot since that fifteen-minute crash-course on hosting on the Destiny. It's become easier to tell which thoughts are Ezri's and which are Dax's. She worries that she doesn't always get the distinctions right, but it's something. It's a start.
If this is the beginning, what's the end?
There are too many thoughts in her head. And not all of them are her own.
He stirs in his sleep and a hand moves to cover her stomach, to cover the symbiont. An unconscious maneuver, the restlessness of sleep. But it disturbs her, makes her wonder yet again. She worries enough about whether her emotions are her own, she doesn't want to have to worry about the motivations of others as well. If they laugh with the wrong woman, if they sleep with the wrong woman...she'd prefer not to have to think about these things. She has so little these days, and she wants to hold on to what she has. What Dax has.
Sometimes, when Ezri slips through the others, she hates the symbiont. She imagines it slithering inside her, living through her, manipulating her choices. A parasite, a glorified tapeworm.
Central to all of this is the fact that this life was thrust upon her. A good deed gone wrong. (No, gone right, insists one of the dead voices in her head.) If she'd had time to think about it, maybe...maybe...
If she'd had the time, if she hadn't been the only Trill on the ship, she wouldn't have come to the station. She wouldn't have had the overwhelming need to find Ben, she wouldn't have felt the urge to catch up with old friends she'd never even met. She'd still be on the Destiny and she'd still be Ezri Tigan.
She closes her eyes and tries to will herself back to sleep. Her last conscious action before she drifts off into the darkness is to wonder if her dreams will be her own.