Disclaimer: Not mine.
A/N: I really like Garak/Bashir a lot better then Ezri/Bashir, but I just can't imagine Garak at the beach!
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Seashells
"What are you doing, Ilanyal?" Julian Bashir asked.
"Collecting seashells." His daughter replied, in that tone children use when something isn't obvious to grownups.
Julian and his family were spending a week on Earth. More specifically, at the beach. His family, that is, being his wife Ezri, and their three children, Amsha, four, Benjamin, only twelve months, and his oldest, Ilanyal, seven tomorrow. Seven is an important birthday on Trill, like ten is an important birthday on Earth. Worthy of commemoration.
They'd arrived two days ago. The first thing Ilanyal wanted to do was buy a glass bottle.
"We can replicate a bottle." He and Ezri kept reminding her, but she always replied
"Replicators don't make things pretty like people do."
Now they were sitting in the sand on Fire Island, near New York. Benjamin was digging a hole in the sand with a spoon. Ezri and Amsha were asleep, with Amsha's head on Ezri's stomach, Amsha tired from trying to run into the sea, and Ezri tired from chasing her. Julian was sitting beside them, watching Ilanyal move from one patch of sand to the next, sifting through it, trying to find the perfect specimens.
She examined each one carefully, making sure that it wasn't too big, had no cracks or holes and more than one color, before placing it in her bag.
'Her fascination with seashells is a fantastic coincidence' Julian thought. Amsha had been named after Julian's mother, who died in a shuttlecraft accident a year before she was born. Benjamin was, of course, named after Benjamin Sisko. But "Ilanyal" was a Trill word.
Most people thought of it meaning something like "driftwood", but what it really meant was "Lovely, from the sea."
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Julian smiled as he sat on a chair in his living room, looking at the shelf. It had a few pictures on it, and Kukalaka sitting on the end, but it was dominated by bottles, each full to the top with seashells. Every beach trip, no matter where they went. had produced another one. There were ten bottles, all hand made.
"Replicators don't make things pretty like people do." Ilanyal insisted. Now 21, she was living in a small house, on Fire Island, writing poetry.
Julian had come to agree with her about the bottles. They were stunning. Filled with "Jewels of the ocean" as she called them. Lovely, from the sea.