Sisko. Bashir rises to his feet. The always generous, always noble, ageless Captain Sisko. The man of action. Of adventure. Of authority. The man that everything else revolved around. The man he'd wanted to be when he was young.
The man you trusted. The man you ran to; who was always willing to at least listen to your story no matter how incredible a tale you told him.
The man who'd give you a runabout at 4 o'clock in the morning; who'd recommend a Ferengi to the Academy and have a Changeling for his Chief of Security. Who'd seek out Starfleet's only Klingon as a Commander and keep an Augment who lied for his doctor.
The man who'd constantly defend your right to be there and do it so quietly half the time you wouldn't even notice. The man who Bashir wants to be real; needs to be real. Gone for twenty years. And now, conveniently, coincidentally, stood in front of him…
"Look at you," beams the ghost from his past. "Doctor Julian Bashir: alive in the universe."
Bashir doesn't trust this, at all. "Where am I?"
"The Celestial Temple." Sisko looks over the unkempt, unshaven man who's just washed up with pride. "Zero space. The existence outside of time."
He takes a wary step toward the Captain. His boots, caked in a clayey layer of Cardassian mud leave footprints on the immaculate, white ground. Under the guise of performing a medical exam, he reaches for the apparition's wrist.
"Are you alright?"
Sisko shrugs. "Do I look alright?"
A pulse: Bashir can feel the steady, human beat. "Yes."
"Then I am."
But the doctor isn't satisfied. He doesn't quite feel like the Captain. He struggles to put his finger on it. Something is off. Something has changed.
Or rather…
… nothing has. Sisko is the same as the last time he saw him. Still in uniform; still fifty years old. Held outside of the passing of the years, while the doctor has grown up and grown old.
That's what feels different. That's what's changed.
We're the same age now.
The lines on Sisko's face are mirrored on his own. Bashir looks his Captain over with older eyes. Noticing more, understanding more. Seeing the tiredness in his expression; the grief. Recognising the determination and the confidence.
"You aren't a ghost," he half whispers.
"No," says the Captain patiently, "I'm not."
This is Sisko. Undeniably the man who was his hero. Undeniably human. Reassured, Bashir drops his guard.
"I've started an interplanetary war sir," he blurts out, "and I don't know what to do."
Sisko raises an eyebrow.
"I need help, I need guidance," he continues, slightly hysterically. "The Romulans found out about the Vreenak Assassination; found out about the gel, the fake data-rod; everything. So Starfleet sent a ship to silence me - oh and Garak too but he staged his own death; only the Cardassians detected them and thought it was an invasion and - "
Sisko grabs him and pulls him into a hug. The kind of hug he used to give Jake, no matter how tall he grew. Bashir shuts up out of sheer surprise.
The seconds pass.
Outside of time, outside of space and inside a hug: Julian finds something he should have had but never did. Something he'd spent a desperate childhood trying to get. Given now so easily he finds it hard to understand.
He clings tighter.
Suddenly, the ground beneath Bashir's feet quivers, freezes and splays out in several unexpected directions, knocking him down. A bulge in the fabric of space-time swirls nauseatingly around him; and only around him, in a way he can't help but take rather personally…
Sisko holds his temples as if fighting off a headache. "He's my officer. He's under my protection."
The ground of white space settles and stills again. Sisko helps Bashir back up.
"What the hell was that?"
"Some of the more vindictive Prophets."
"Now see here!" He addresses his irritation upwards in as polite an English manner as he can manage. "I'm sorry about the mud on your floor but I hardly think it merits -"
"You're a temporal being," says Sisko. "They don't want you here."
"Why not?"
"You progress, you change. They don't." He grins the grin of a man delighting in breaking the rules and shaking up eternity. "It unnerves them."
"You brought me here?" clarifies Bashir slowly.
"Yes."
"You pulled me out of four dimensional space-time?"
"Yes."
"To annoy the Bajoran gods?"
"I can't think of anyone better qualified."
"Sir!" exclaims Bashir. He pauses. "You're joking?"
"Partly," says Sisko.
As if it was the most natural thing in the galaxy, he raises his arm and places the baseball into mid-air. It hangs there, stationary.
"The Prophets live…I live…in the Past, the Present and the Future. For them that mud has always been there; will always be there… even after they've wiped it away. It is part of this existence now. Niggling away at their consciousness like an itch they can't scratch."
Sisko tugs down the shirt of his uniform. All business, he cuts to the chase.
"I was in command Julian. I gave the order. I'm responsible."
"I can't accept that sir."
"No. I know you can't."
"There must be something we can do." Bashir glances at the suspended baseball. "Something you can do. If…if you pulled me out of time, you can put me back. Back during the war, back on the station."
Sisko is already shaking his head. "It won't work," he says gently.
The doctor however continues to grasp at the only straw he can find. "Maybe I can stop myself following the order; I can change what happened..."
"A day once lived can't be altered."
"But youcould send me back? You could do it?"
He doesn't answer. Lost in thought, he reaches toward the ball suspended in space. With a light tap, he sets it spinning. "It isn't linear," he murmurs.
"What isn't?" says Bashir. "Time?" he guesses.
Transfixed, Sisko watches the sphere rotate.
"Captain?"
Coming back to the here and now, he plucks the ball out of the air. "I can make you a shadow in the Past. YourPast. A whisperer in the dark. But there are no lines between the years. No markers to separate one day from the next. I'd have to splinter you across your whole existence, alongside every moment. "
Bashir jumps in with eagerness. "I understand sir."
"No," he says sadly, "You don't." Sisko looks over the determined man in front of him. "Alright," he sighs, "the Past." He stretches his pitching arm.
"The Past," echoes Bashir. "Okay; time travel." He psyches himself up for the unknown. "No big deal. I can do this."
The Captain is throwing the ball into the air now.
He's warming up. That's odd. A terrible suspicion pops into his mind. Oh no. "This process of going back to the past…this…" He swallows and tries to find the courage to voice his fear. "This isn't going to involve us actually playing baseball…is it, sir?
Sisko's expression widens into a delighted smile.
"Right, yes," says Bashir with resignation. "It is."
That's why you backed off! In his father's study, Garak finally has an answer to a twenty year puzzle; one he's turned over again and again in his mind, never quite able to solve. That's why our relationship ended!
He leans over the unconscious Bashir, willing him to wake up.
I was a weakness you couldn't afford…
"Garak?" says Molly. "You were telling me about Elim? About the other Augment and what happened to him."
"Elim wasn't an Augment."
"He wasn't?"
"No. He was… a Cardassian. I killed him."
"You did? Why?"
Garak takes hold of his patient's hand. "To save myself. Why else?"
"But I thought…" Molly pauses. She tilts her head. "Elim was Julian's lover; wasn't he?"
"Perhaps. I was never sure."
"He was. The way he was talking about Elim; about how he felt. He was."
The first rays of the Cardassian dawn creep through the balcony windows. They dance brightly over Garak's face, chasing away his masks along with the shadows of the night. Warm tears swirl up in his eyes. He quickly blinks them away.
Molly's mouth falls open. "Julian is a man who divides the world in two: the good and the bad. How ever did he begin… to comprehend you?"
"He didn't try. He just trusted me."
"Why?"
Garak pauses. I don't know. I can't think of a single reason. "Maybe," he says, "because I've never injected him with Erbium Pentothal."
Molly looks at the ground. She shakes the medkit. "There's no hypospray in here," she says, still not meeting his gaze. "I'll go see if I can find one in the bedrooms."
Garak's attention returns to the doctor. He waits until the door shuts.
We're alone. It's safe. He clasps Bashir's hand tighter.
"I forgive you," he says.
In the blankness of White Space, Sisko warms up at a make-shift pitcher's mound. A Cubs cap on his head and a mitt on his hand, he's in his element.
Bashir however, is not. Stepping up to the outlined batters plate, he scrambles through everything he learnt at the Academy about temporal mechanics. Einstein; Hawking; Mallett: I read them all.
And not one of them ever saidanything about playing baseball.
"This is how we time travel?" he asks as the Captain hands him a bat. "You throw, I hit?"
"Just one pitch after another," says Sisko, "and the game begins to take shape."
"But I don't see how -"
Bashir breaks off. Because around them, things are beginning to take shape. Forms and hues coalesce out of the ether. They run across White Space, spreading like watercolours over a blank page and filling out the scene to the horizon.
A baseball field! He spins about. The grass is green. The sky is blue. The Federation flag flutters in the breeze. It's a peaceful image. A simple image. Of a world he hasn't been back to in half a lifetime and can sometimes scarcely remember anymore.
"Earth," says Bashir. Or close enough to pretend. He gazes up at the eternally cloudless sky and basks in the sunlight.
"Paradise," says Sisko.
Stay alert, warns the voice in his head. They see you as a threat here. The rules and the laws don't apply to you; not in the same way as everyone else. He warily scans the field. There are no other players, no spectators… at least, none he can see...
But there is an umpire: Agent Sloan is stood by first base, fastidiously wiping the sand away. Bashir tightens his grip of the bat.
"Something on your mind Doctor?" asks Sisko.
"No, no," he replies with a slight, ever-pleasant smile. "Ready when you are sir."
Sisko goes into his wind up…he pitches. Bashir keeps his augmented eye on the ball. He swings. He hits. The ball soars away into the blue endless sky.
"Strike One!" calls the umpire.
"I hit it." The Englishman gestures politely in the direction the ball took. "Didn't you see?"
The umpire gives him an icy smile. "Strike One," he repeats.
Swallowing his anger, Bashir returns to the plate and raises his bat. Sisko pitches. He hits.
"Strike Two!"
Far beyond center-field the ball bounces down the empty stands.
Bashir has this game figured out now. The rules don't apply to me. Not in the Federation. No matter what I do, no matter how perfectly I play… I'm going to lose. He has the urge to hit the last ball directly at Sloan's face…
No, says the voice in his head. Don't hurt anyone. Don't give them an excuse. Stick to your rules; even if they ignore theirs.
He raises his bat for the third and final time. "Throw the damn ball again."
"Doctor, maybe I should-"
"Fucking throw it." He catches himself. "Sorry, Captain. Go ahead please. I'm ready."
With a nod, Sisko pitches again. Bashir swings wildly, he spins: the wood of the bat makes contact with the ball and…
His entire consciousness splinters. Shards of himself… whoever he was…fall across time.
Too many sounds. Too many lights. Too many sensations. Everything streams in at once. Too much… existence. All the days, all the seconds. Too much. Too many.
Like looking up and trying to count every raindrop falling in a storm.
Everything. Everything is happening at once. The bells of St Paul's. Laughter in Quarks. Sobs in a hospital. 3.1415926535. Phaser-shots. The war. 3.1415926535. Two drunken men singing Jerusalem. Music. Voices. Too much.
"Captain," says someone. "Bio-memetic gel is an extremely dangerous compound as you know. I can't release it without some idea of where it's going."
"Perhaps I didn't make myself clear Doctor. This isn't a request, it's an order."
It's all…together! The Englishman in Lakat. The Patient. The Doctor. The Young Lieutenant. Julian. Jules. One life. My life. He sees himself, follows himself, talks to himself on every day, in every minute, at every age.
I'm there. I've always been there. Alongside every moment. Scattered across time. Unseen, unheard. A fractured phantom whispering in the dark.
2374. The height of the Dominion War. Doctor Julian Bashir, Chief Medical Officer, DS9 exits his Captain's office. In the young man's hand is a PADD: an order in writing, which he can do little about.
"Say something!" The older Bashir trails behind him, unseen and unheard. "Go back in there and tell him you won't do it. Tell him he's wrong. Tell him to go to hell. Tell him anything!"
But his younger self has reached the turbolift now. He punches the call button.
"People will die because of what you; because of what we do today." Bashir follows him onto the lift platform. He hovers at his shoulder; a tired, dishevelled un-angelic angel. "For fuck's sake! You have to fucking hear me! You have to fucking listen!"
"Promenade."
The lift lurches and descends into the gloom of the turbo shaft.
The levels chug by. The younger Bashir closes his eyes. Confused, conflicted; he seethes with silent anger and silent doubt. Lights from the passing corridors flicker and shadow across his face.
Beside him, the older Bashir whispers into his mind. "This is wrong."
The younger man's fists clench.
"You know it. You do."
"Hold."
The lift shudders to a stop.
"Sisko is a good man," says the younger Bashir to himself and to the dark. "I trust him. He saved my career. He let me stay. I owe him my loyalty. I owe him everything."
"No, you don't!" Bashir throws his arms up in exasperation. "Not like this. You have to hear me. He wouldn't want you to -"
"And I have to be careful," the younger man continues with increasing agitation. "I have to be the model officer. Blend in." He runs his hands through his hair. "If I step out of line again; if I go around questioning orders…"
He stops. His fingers are resting on the back of his skull, tracing over the scar left by Section 31's neural implant.
"They can do anything to me," he whispers.
They'd been inside his mind: recording his thoughts, testing his responses, picking him apart. The older Bashir hesitates.It was only last week for him. He suddenly feels very protective of this lost young man, alone in the dark, desperately struggling to understand what had happened to him.
"It's alright," he says gently. "You can be angry. Julian: you're supposed to be angry. They tortured you."
"No," the younger Bashir argues back. "Torture doesn't happen in the Federation. On Cardassia; on Romulus yes, but not in -"
Bashir blinks. "You canhear me."
"Leave me alone; please."
"You have always been able to hear me."
The younger man concentrates and tries to block out the voice in his head.
The voice in his head that questions; that dissents; that he just can't get to bloody shut up.
The voice that's always been there, keeping him alive. The voice that raged against the nonsense spouted by his father and filled the silences left by his mother. That angrily pointed out all the other things in that family which didn't quite measure up.
The voice that told Jules stories to make him feel safe. Impossible tales about aliens and distant planets and a man who ran away and spent a lifetime living in the stars.
The voice that convinced him to be a doctor. That audibly cringed every time he made a pass at Jadzia and nudged him toward the feminist section of the database.
The voice that told him to trust Garak, right from the start.
The voice of experience. The voice of compassion. Guiding him, unwinding across time like Ariadne's thread through the Labyrinth. The voice of the man it'll take him half his life to become.
"It isn't linear," says the older Bashir. "I'm not changing anything."
"Please," whispers the young man in the dark at what he thinks is his conscience, "this is the only place I have ever belonged. Let me have a home. Let me have that chance. Let me blend in. Just… for a little while. I need a break…"
"Alright." He backs away from him, unsure what to do next. "But when you want to talk about it; I'll be with you, I'll be here."
"Promenade," calls the younger Bashir.
Resuming its journey the turbolift staggers downward for a few more seconds before coming to a jarring halt. The doors open.
And the sights and sounds from twenty years in his past hit the old doctor like a burst of Gag'h Blood Liquorice in the mouth.
I'm on the Promenade. I'm home! The latest infestation of Klingon Mugwumps swoop past him and up into the rafters. He laughs. Everything is exactly as I remember it!
Alien shoppers ooze, swarm and slither about the stalls. At the docking-bays, Ferengi hustlers unload goods shipped in from all corners of the known galaxy.
And the stench! Christ. He coughs. Now that, I had forgotten. Too many lifeforms, in too small a space, emitting too many gases… not to mention, Morn.
That overwhelming Promenade smell; a thick bouquet of persistent, grubby life. Like pickled fish rusting. And the chlorine of the air filters. And the alien spices! And the honeysuckle scent of a Triffid in bloom as Lieutenant Vilix'pran goes past.
He walks on further.
The shops. The Klingon restaurant. My old surgery. And there's Quarks! He laughs again. Merry cries of 'Dabo!' echo invitingly from inside. Constable Odo doing his rounds… and the Replimat, packed full with lunchtime diners and…
"Garak." The younger Bashir freezes.
"Garak," repeats the older Bashir. "Still in exile from his homeland, still sat alone at a table for two." Quietly sipping a Rokassa juice, the Cardassian watches the lunchtime rush with a probing, chameleonic gaze. Observing. Searching.
His younger self bolts behind the nearest pillar.
Invisible to everyone but the Prophets, the older Bashir stays where he is.
Garak looks… lonely. Next to a vase of irises, the Replimat's usual choice of table decoration, is a cup of Tarkelean Tea. Ordered in hope, it's now gone cold. He's brought along a book too. Bashir moves to read the title. An Enigma Tale; the kind where everyone is guilty. Translated into English and waiting to be lent.
Garak traces a reptilian claw over the cover before putting it away in his tailoring bag.
"His friend hasn't shown up again." The ageless Captain Sisko stands next to Bashir.
"No," he whispers.
"And he doesn't know why."
Unseen and unheard, the two men outside of time watch Garak move the vase of irises closer. He studies the Earth flowers, as if somehow, somewhere, deep in their tangled swirls of violet and yellow, they hold the answer to his puzzle.
The younger Bashir peaks from behind the pillar to check he hasn't been spotted.
Sisko nods in his direction. "You aren't going to try and convince him to have lunch?"
"No," says Bashir.
"Why not?"
"Because I remember this. I remember hiding, I remember being him. And he's right. It isn't safe. Not for him. Not for Garak. We were being watched."
His younger self makes a clumsy dash across the promenade, taking refuge behind a barrow of logically stacked, logically shaped triangular Vulcan watermelons.
"They'd already accused him of being a Dominion spy. How could he carry on having weekly rendezvous with a former member of the Obsidian Order? With the son of Enabran Tain! How would that have looked? Section 31 would have crucified him."
There's a dull splat from behind the barrow.
"Watermelon. Elbow," he remembers with a flush of past embarrassment. A large, porpoise-like, literally green greengrocer bears down on his offending younger self. Bashir turns his attention back to the lunch table.
"He waited. I never showed up." He watches Garak reach out and gently touch the petals of the irises. "I couldn't tell him… I couldn't." He's speaking directly to the Cardassian now. "I couldn't say. It wasn't safe."
"There's an empty chair," points out Sisko.
"He doesn't even know I'm here."
"Does that matter?"
"It wasn't safe."
"It is now. It is for you."
"But it wasn't then." He turns his back on Garak to lessen the temptation. "It wasn't safe. It wasn't okay. It should have been; bloody hell, we were only having lunch - but it wasn't. And I won't sit down with a man who can't see me and pretend that it was."
The younger Bashir has escaped the grasp of the greengrocer now. Apologising profusely and mumbling vague assurances he'll 'stop by with some Latinum, later', he hurriedly mingles into the rush and is lost in the world of twenty years ago.
"It should have been," repeats the older Bashir in a whisper. He closes his eyes to imagine. To make-believe. To allow himself the consolation of a decades-old daydream for one last time…
He'd wake up in the morning and the first thing he'd see, would be Garak.
That was it. That was his daydream. That was the fantasy. No romantic gestures; no grand declarations of love. No wild adventures on exotic planets; no spy games. Whether he was waking on Earth or Cardassia made no difference. London or Lakat; it simply didn't matter.
Garak was with him and they were about to spend their day together. That was enough.
The Englishman takes a deep breath. That's the fantasy that isn't allowed. A story that can't ever be true. A pretence. Alie. I've had enough of them in my life.
He lets his breath, his daydream and all of his pretences go.
"Nothing's changed," says Bashir quietly. "Twenty years later and it still isn't safe. Where would we go? Where would we belong? I can't stay on Cardassia, not anymore. And I doubt either of us would be welcome in the Federation."
"You can't be sure of that."
"Can't I? It was never paradise sir. Not for me. Not for a lot of people. We were never quite let in. If I went home, if I went to the Earth, tomorrow…would it really be any different?"
"That's a good question," says Sisko. "There's only one way to find out."