The Replimat was hardly the most likely place for Bashir to be at this early point of mid-afternoon. Even less surprising was to find such a sparse and quiet crowd. Tables were still spread evenly around the semi-open space, some occupied by scattered groups of no more than two or three. The level of ambient noise remained at a steady, not unpleasant murmur, as though kept down by some unspoken consensus on the part of the diners.
Head aching, as it had for much of the day, Bashir scowled down at the padd he had brought with him, at the parallel lines of text that covered only half of its screen. Irritably tapping the stylus against a corner of the table, he found that he had lost all further notions of precisely what he had wanted to say.
His thoughts turned as though tracing their own particular path, to the emptiness of the quarters he had left behind. And to where Kukalaka remained, abandoned - and unmended. Not much of a healer, are you? thought Bashir with a bitter flood of self-reproach. Another idea came repeatedly to his mind: of going back to his rooms - to the same lonely, half-lit silence. Just as Captain Sisko had wanted him to.
I'm not in Starfleet any more. No orders. The captain's advice had been exactly as his own would have been in the same situation. But there was an additional problem, for which Sisko had failed to account. Julian Bashir would find no rest. Not here, and certainly not in his quarters. Not while everything he remembered was still trapped deep inside his head. Undefined, unspoken - and unable to find escape.
So he had gone instead to the Replimat, to the one place where these thoughts would not resound like a sonic boom inside his own mind.
He looked up, suddenly realising that he was no longer alone at the table. Julian blinked, confirming after only a momentary delay that the man before him was really who he suspected him to be. "Chief?" Garak might have been able to slip into the opposite chair without making himself immediately noticed, but O'Brien's unforeseen presence was still more of a surprise. Bashir found that he had tilted the padd automatically towards himself, far enough to hide its contents from view. He held his breath, half afraid that the Chief would attempt to keep him from his task.
"I was putting something together for Captain Sisko," he explained, and set his ongoing endeavour face down upon the table. Both of his hands pressed hard against the padd's reverse side.
But the throbbing in his head was doing more to halt his progress than anything O'Brien or the others might have said. The Chief's expression had changed from the quietly congenial mask he had worn since joining Bashir at the Replimat. But it was difficult not to take note that he had not yet procured himself any food or drink.
"I didn't mean to interrupt." O'Brien noted lightly. "But you were looking as if you could use a break."
Don't you start, now… Bashir's right hand reached up and rubbed the back of his tense and aching neck. But the smile remained on the face of his companion, who lifted something in one hand, just high enough for light to bounce off the slim, golden surface. "Up for a game?"
"A…" Julian stopped, all protests and accusations dying in his mouth. "A game?"
One corner of O'Brien's mouth twitched upward into a knowing grin as he nodded to his left - across the Promenade to where a cluster of lights was flashing rapidly above the entrance to Quark's Bar. "So. How about it?"
Bashir held the dart in one hand, twisting it slowly and watching as a blinking shard of light flashed across its tip. He frowned, quietly troubled, unsure of how his own hand could connect the needle-sharp projectile to its target. His legs had barely strength to take his weight. "What do I need to throw again?" He did not know what bothered him more, the distraction as his thoughts took on a thousand conflicting currents, or the fact that ache it left behind was no longer unexpected. Then, was it a twelve? Or double?
"Could be… fifteen or so." But O'Brien did not sound any surer of his answer. Perhaps they should both have been paying more attention to the game. Slowly, Bashir lowered his right hand back to his side.
"We could go for a pint, if you'd rather."
O'Brien's voice was at his ear, but he struggled to focus long enough to notice, glancing again from the dart's point to the black, red, and gold-leafed edge of the board. But what response could any man give, who could barely even trust his own voice?
One drink, he commanded himself, and glanced over his shoulder towards the bar. You can stay for just one drink. If nothing else, he owed it to his friend.
"Excuse me." A gaudily clad Bolian manoeuvred herself between the two men and continued on her way from the dabo table. Bashir jumped as she touched his arm. Glancing back to watch the scene, O'Brien found that queasy anxiety was moving slickly through his blood.
"You all right?" He could not stop the question from passing between them.
Julian barely seemed to have heard. He had said very little to O'Brien since arriving on the station, and followed him through the crowd without looking at the customers, the Ferengi waiters, or even the smooth, elongated form of the nearest dabo girls. As though no more than the form of a man, travelling through the unreality of a holographic scene of which the two of them were barely a part.
"Had enough?" commented Quark, and wiped a silver cloth around the interior of a tall octagonal glass. "Already? That was quick."
He bobbed his oversized head, blithely ignoring the ferocious glare that Chief O'Brien had shot in his direction. "Tough crowd," he muttered, and set the drinking vessel down upon the top of his bar.
"Alright then - what can I get you?"
"What do you reckon - synthale?" The Chief glanced sidelong at Bashir, who nodded distractedly.
"Sure."
His anxiety lingered, even after hearing his friend's soft, whispered reply. He glanced briefly at where Bashir had locked his hands together over the bar top, and was looking down, even now - at some place just short of anything worth seeing. Even with the background reverie, this moment was as heavy as though silent, and even more solid than the surrounding furniture. Even Miles jumped at the arrival of two clear, medium-brown drinks.
He had mentioned nothing of consequence in his most recent contact with his wife. Keiko Ishikawa had realised long ago that the man she was marrying would have to put himself in danger on multiple occasions, and the coming of the Dominion War would do nothing to change that fact. If anything, the potential risk to her husband was even greater than anything that either had encountered since their wedding day on board the Enterprise. But Keiko O'Brien had determined that she would face whatever challenges should befall their family, with the same resolve as they had faced so many others.
Miles knew as much about the subtleties of Keiko's expressions as she claimed to know of his. There was that slight tension around her brow - and there again, at the very corner of her mouth. It was for the safety of their children, not her own, that she had agreed to separate from her husband of nearly seven years. But there was no call for Keiko O'Brien to know how he had endangered himself - no need for her or their family to know more than the barest details. And little Molly, her father had discovered, was growing to be as brave-faced as her mother.
He had been peculiarly proud to see the confidence in his child's dark eyes. As she grew, it would hold her in good stead. But the idea of either of his children going through some of the things he had seen. It scared him, more than any other fear that he could name.
The shouts of the crowd behind them swelled in volume, voices jostling over each other until they had reached an infinite number of layers in a barely differentiated ocean of noise. Quark opened his mouth as though to make some additional comment, but turned away with a sigh and a wordless shake of his oversized head.
"Cheers," ventured Miles, holding up his drink, although the touch of awkwardness still coloured his voice.
"Oh," Julian muttered in response. Looking up again, he allowed his own glass to come into contact with O'Brien's. "Cheers."
Another sudden noise came from the opposite end of the bar, causing him to flinch and jerk around to stare at the customers. Julian's hands had tightened around his empty glass. His knuckles stood out - sharp and pale. With his back to O'Brien, but the shock was still plainly visible across his shoulders. But he threw back his synthale, and flashed O'Brien a hastily constructed, far too heavy smile.
It faded just as quickly. "Miles… What if I…?"
He shook his head, with his gaze fixed worriedly at some insignificant point, directly ahead of him. "Sorry - no, forget it. It doesn't matter."
"What?" asked the Chief, prompting more gently than he was usually inclined to do. "What were you going to say?"
Bad move, O'Brien, the Chief thought harshly. He had thought to distract his friend from whatever burdens still weighed him down. But any place in the universe would have been a better distraction than this overcrowded bar. A riotous cry sounded from behind them. "Dabo!" And immediately afterward, a sound of glasses dropping from their tray and scattering over the hard black floor.
Staggering back as though scalded, so suddenly that even his own bar stool tripped him up, Julian righted himself to stand at the centre of a crowd of staring faces. His eyes found Miles' first, then Quark's, and finally the open-mouthed faces of the dabo players. "Do you have to be so loud?" he demanded before spinning on his heel and hurrying for the exit.
"Captain." Odo was waiting as the doors opened onto the central hub of Deep Space Nine, as if he had known for a long time before that Sisko would be the one who stepped from the turbolift into Ops. He dogged Sisko's heels from the precise instant when the captain cleared the line that marked the Operations Centre's true entrance. "May I have a moment of your time?"
A moment shouldn't be too much to ask. Sisko nodded, and turned to climb the stairs towards his office. All that Bashir had told him remained disturbingly fresh in his memory - but doubtless his anxieties would not be forgotten with the passage of so little time. He had intended to contact Starfleet at the first opportunity. Two Bajoran crewmen followed the pair with fleeting sidelong glances. But neither man said anything further until the reinforced, transparent doors had slid tightly closed behind them.
"You have something for me?"
The face of his Security Chief carried no promise of better news. "I discovered some evidence of an unknown chemical compound that had been injected into the atmosphere of the holding cell," he confirmed. "Similar in composition to anaesthizine, but many times more powerful. I sent a sample to Dax for analysis. It would only have taken the smallest amount to have had the same effect."
"Somebody tapped into our life support system?"
A disturbing thought, Sisko mused, and the loaded silence at either side of Odo's answer resounded as clearly as any words. "I believe so," the Constable responded finally. "There were only trace amounts remaining, and being unknown, the Security systems were unable to detect it before we ran an active scan. If this tells us anything, Captain, I find it highly doubtful that Davies would have willingly left the station."
A wave of electric anxiety crept all the way down Sisko's back, making the implications all the more difficult to banish from his thoughts. For a prisoner to have escaped from Security was troublesome enough, especially as the details were still a mystery to him. But an abduction… It bothered him all the more, that he could not say exactly what was so much more disconcerting about the idea.
"How much should we tell… other people?" Odo asked, interrupting the captain's moment of unsettled contemplation.
It took only the slightest movement of Sisko's head for him to turn directly towards the changeling Constable. The decision was wrenched from him, but it had to be made. "Nothing. For now. I think we had better hold off on sharing too much information, at least until we have enough to do some good." He hoped that it was not some lingering after-effect of his encounters with the Bajoran Prophets, telling him now that whatever choice he made, he would regret.
The Constable's meticulously constructed impression of a humanoid face showed little sign that he would react to the other man's choice. But his attention remained for a longer time than usual on that of his commanding officer. Sisko shifted his own focus to a distant constellation, somewhere beyond the single ovular view port, unwilling to show the conflict now closed away behind his dark brown eyes.
It was the Runners, he realised, which were only now coming into view with his station's unceasing and ponderous rotation. Strange, that his gaze always seemed to be drawn to this one particular point. And stranger still, that sometimes even the stars could not set aside their burning need to run.
At one time - so long ago that his recollections had drifted back into shadows of the distant past - he might simply have crossed the floor to close himself away inside his office, dimmed the lights, and narrowed his focus to the soft hued, artificial glow of the computer. But it wasn't his office any more. The station's Infirmary was no longer at the centre of his world, and no longer somewhere he could think of going without aversion. Feeling a blunt ache in his throat - different to that of swollen glands and yet so very much alike - Bashir doubled his pace and marched straight towards the nearest turbolift.
Looking down to conceal his face, he rubbed the moisture from his eyes. No. Oh, God - not now.
At the sound of doors closing, he was alone in the grey-walled space - but was stopped by a sudden wave of cold dread. He would have to speak to tell it where to go. He would have to open his mouth, and give the directions aloud. But how? The sobs pressing for release from the prison of his mouth would swarm to the surface like a flood of hot plasma.
Clenching both hands into two tight fists, he brought them up all the way to his face. He curled his fingers as though from a sudden cramp, gripped handfuls of his own dark hair. It was longer than he remembered it being. He fell against the wall - overbalanced, and slid to a crouch on legs that would no longer allowed him to stand. His mouth opened painfully to cry out to the tiny space. Because… What else could he do? It made barely a difference that his cries would never reach beyond the walls. In his mind, they were loud enough to fill the station, and every sector of the airless space beyond.