ten_fwd | (no subject)

"Oh, shut up Joran."

Ezri mumbled to herself. He had never been this vocal before, well, before the Rite of Emergence. Which wasn't a mistake. He did help her catch the killer, not that Benjamin or the others would ever know. That would not be a fun conversation. 'Why no, Ben, I didn't use what I learned in Forensic Psychology, I just used Joran.' It would go so well. But now? Now she had to be vigilant. Ezri wouldn't be able to bury his personality as deeply as Curzon or Jadzia. And Ezri didn't have training in the first place. She didn't want to accidentally almost stab someone with a butter knife again. Talk about embarrassing. Benjamin hadn't been exactly understanding when that happened. Thank goodness Odo had come along, and taken the knife out of her hand before something really bad had happened.

Ezri had intended to take a walk along the Promenade, clear her head. That was until she wasn't in the Promenade anymore. She was in a bar. And it wasn't Quark's. It was....Ezri took a few steps toward a console. The U.S.S. Enterprise? Oh and they were at warp. The Trill put a hand on her stomach and another on her temple trying to fight back the wave of nausea and flashes of Torias' shuttle accident. Dying. Crashing. Oh no.

"Okay Ezri, you can figure this out. Just start by not barfing all over the security guard eating his lunch. He wouldn't appreciate that at all."

Ezri talked to herself.

"One. Wormhole aliens? Two. Spacial phenomenon? Three. I could just be going nuts. That's my clinical assessment of myself."

Ezri closed her eyes, trying to sort through eight other lifetimes of memories to remember if anyone served or visited the Enterprise D. That was....Curzon or Jadzia's time? Maybe she was just hallucinating memories. Did that happen? Maybe she should qualify that. Did that happen to her? It probably didn't happen to another other Joined Trill. That's Ezri, nothing easy for Ezri.

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Ezri turned to the nice, polite guy in the strange uniform. It wasn't that he looked out of place, it was that she didn't recognize the uniform. Maybe he had just come from the holodeck and that uniform was the equivilent of Miles and Julian's viking programs. Or the spy one. She gave a little laugh at the thought, remembering.

"In my world, we call it rude." Dax went over to the replicator to order a cup of Tarkalean tea, hoping it would settle her stomach, and sat down next to the man. Didn't anyone else feel that?

"I take it you're going to tell me my diagnosis is incorrect? I'm not stark raving mad?"

"Yeah. We call it that too."

Some days, it seems like a hell of a long time ago he'd stood in Command while the Than shot up his ship and complained that it would have been nice to meet somebody in space with some manners. The same definitely applies to Q. Hell, the Than at least had a good reason that they'd figured out in the end, while Q has no good reason anyone's been able to find for what he's doing.

The woman seems quite at ease with the Enterprise and its technology; unsurprising, because though she's just arrived here, he recognizes a Starfleet uniform. Not the one current in this time, but the one he's seen Julian wearing, down to the color denoting science or medical staff.

When she comes over to him and settles down with the cup she's got herself, he returns to his seat, eying her collar before he speaks again. Two pips, one of then hollowed in the centre.

"If you're basing your diagnosis on suddenly being aboard the Enterprise in what seems to be your own past, then no, Lieutenant, you're not."

Though he can hardly blame her for thinking she is. He'd thought the same when parts of the past started showing up on the Andromeda, had thought the strain of the past year and a bit had finally gotten to him. That was no more the case now than it is for the young Lieutenant, junior grade, sitting next to him.

"Though I ... don't deny you have reason for thinking you are."

"So which one was it then?" Ezri gave Dylan a smile and a wink. " Rude wormhole aliens? Spatial-Temporal phenomenon?" Taking a sip of her tea, she looked Dylan over, still not understanding that he was from a completely different universe, not just another world possibly outside Federation territory. She reached out to offer him her hand.

"I'm Ezri. Counselor Ezri Dax. You don't happen to know what year it is, do you, or what system we're in?----I'm sorry, I don't know you're rank. The costume is brilliant though. What holodeck program were you running?"

Ezri was taking this all in stride. This wasn't Dax's first pass through a temporal event, but it was Ezri's. She memories, feelings, urges that weren't her own--like that memory of Jadzia trying to get Ben to let her visit Doctor McCoy on the original Enterprise. It wasn't like he would have recognized her in Jadzia's body! It would have been so much fun to see him again. With his clothes on. He had become such a historic figure, and she'd like to think Emony Dax has a little something to do with that.

Edited 2014-10-17 17:50 (UTC)

"Spatial-temporal phenomenon caused by a very rude alien called Q." He smiles, wryly. "I don't know about wormholes."

She talks fast, the questions chasing each other like shots from a force lance, one after another too quickly for him to be able to reply to one before another is voiced. He pauses, considering them for a moment, picking up his coffee cup and turning it idly in his hand.

"It's 2366. The last system we visited was the Alemar System."

The question about the holodeck makes him pause, but she'd said 'costume', and that must make it a reference to his uniform, which he'll admit is very different to the Starfleet ones all around them, particularly in the black and blue jacket he's wearing tonight, two-thirds buttoned over his turtleneck.

And, of course, the rank insignia that she won't recognize the way he'd known hers.

He shakes his head.

"I wasn't. This ... is my uniform. In my time and my reality." His smile twitches a little higher on one side, his eyes warm. "And it's Captain. But not in Starfleet. Captain Dylan Hunt of the High Guard starship Andromeda Ascendant. But Dylan is fine."

"2366. I'm nine years in the past. I'm not even me yet! I'm going to screw up the timeline. They never covered this in the academy."

Yup, she was sure that made absolutely perfect sense to Dylan. Right? She looked at Dylan, anxious, concerned and a little queasy.

"Nice to meet you Captain. It's quite a nice uniform. I'm not familiar with the High Guard. I don't exactly get to visit alternate realities often. It's not exactly in my job description."

"They never covered a lot of things in the Academy, if yours was anything like mine." There'd certainly been nothing in the High Guard Academy to cover procedures for being caught in the past, or in an alternate reality. Starfleet, he's learned, has rules about it, but not the High Guard.

He takes a moment to study the Lieutenant. She's young, very young, and in some way, she sounds even younger than she is, in her uncertainty. She has the spots around her face and neck he's seen before, on Lieutenant Commander T'Karr, though hers are a little bolder, more obvious, than his.

"I didn't expect you to be," he tells her. "But I'd never heard of Starfleet before I found myself here."

"Well, now that you're here, how are you liking it? I hope we've all been wonderful hosts, although I really can't imagine the stress this has put on Captain Picard. Can you imagine? Random people popping in from all over the universe and time and space?I'm stressed about it and i'm not even in command. Maybe that's why I'm stressed about it."

Ezri tilted her head toward her new friend.

"Do you think?"

Curzon was always one to take command. Jadzia as well. Even Joran and Tobias. But Ezri had more Tobin in her than the other Dax hosts. She worried and second guessed herself. Hopefully she wouldn't start biting her nails like Tobin.

Ezri noticed him looking at her spots and she smiled, and ran her fingers over them. "I'm a Trill. I imagine there are a few of us on the Enterprise."