Alone Again

***

She stayed. For many years, she stayed and called the overly warm, oppressive Cardassian station home. She made a life for herself, took over a small shop front on the Promenade, and counseled those who needed it. Fought back the memories, denied the voices and lived in the now, with her lover, and husband.

She watched as his life came crashing down around him-- his greatest research ignored. There would be no Carrington award, no medical starship for the genetically enhanced. An example would be made, although unspoken. And all the time, it whispered, 'the sins of the fathers...' in her mind.

They grew unhappy as they watched Julian, consumed by despair and rage at being held back, against his will and all that had been well-meant. No one had ever forced his hand at pretend before, it had always been his choice to reveal or not. Save for now. She ignored his jealous looks the night of the ceremony where she received her third pip, but Dax didn't. Dax knew, even then, that things were falling apart around them.

So she wasn't completely surprised the afternoon he told her he had taken a job by the side of the former Tailor, a cushy government thing that would pay well and give him the renown he had lacked. A one-way ticket out of her life, and he was terribly sorry, but it had been over for some time, hadn't it?

That very next week, she resigned and Dax went home.

***

Mar'kala was crisp, even in the summertime, but they appreciated the cool weather as they sipped chai at the outdoor cafe. Overhead, the stars shone brightly before the largest of the lunar fragments rose, shining dimly enough to obliterate their fragile light. Ezri had only come here once before, the day they let her loose for the first time from the Commission's high walls. But for Dax, it was yet another homecoming in a life time of travels. Down the street, musicians played and their haunting music-- here a strand of Vulcan, there a bit of Klingon Opera, welcomed them and chilled them to the bone.

It was at the cafe she first proposed the deal-- they were stuck, for another eighty years or more, so instead of the constant battling, the torn wills over who, what, and when, they would draw up a schedule and share. From within her, it quickly agreed-- it hadn't ever had a mobile body, like other, more privileged symbionts.

***

Ezri decided to settle in Mar'kala, which suited the symbiont well, and she found a lovely apartment overlooking the main fjord. She was offered a job at the Commission, to counsel newly joined pairs, and she accepted it quickly. She found that ironic, but the job was one of the few times that they were forced to share, for proprieties sake.

Life crawled on, as it will, and she found a semblance of happiness in the ability to buy flowers without consulting nine other wills, and hundreds of years of weddings and funerals and other moments, or on the difference between Trill zrails and Terran daffodils. She always bought the zrails, the flowers of her namesake.

She also learned not to mind 'waking' up as she dressed, from a dip in the clammy underground pools, or in a lecture hall on Vulcan during her vacation month. She could indulge it in its passions, so long as she never woke up with the clammy taste of coffee in her mouth, or a stranger in her bed. And she could live with the curious stares when she stopped in mid-sentence, and began speaking entirely different, or when someone grew upset that she forgot their name. She hadn't known it, after all.

And she was Ezri Tigan, alone again.

The future seemed bright with possibilities.

***