Ninth Host - by nostalgia

She is no longer entirely sure which of her thoughts are her own. [PG, Ezri]

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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.

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.



“The symbiont is dying. I hate to ask this of you, but you’re the only Trill on board…”



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. Aside from anything else 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. She has a better idea of 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.

There are too many thoughts in her head. And not all of them are hers.

His 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. Sometimes, when Ezri slips through the others, she hates the symbiont.

Her last thought as she drifts off to sleep is to wonder if her dreams will be her own.



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