Author's Note: I was sick, I was bored, and this is the end product. PLEASE tell me what you think!!!!
Ezri Dax stared listlessly at the silver-grey bulkhead of her quarters, trying desperately to forget the voices that played in her mind - their longings, memories brushing against her thoughts with a grace and gentleness of a butterfly's wing. If only it were that easy to brush away the troubles she was having in adjusting to her new lifestyle.
"Well, this obviously isn't helping," she said aloud, though only to reassure herself that she was, in fact, still herself. No matter how much she meditated on ridding herself of those voices, if only briefly, they didn't seem to want to cooperate. "This is getting really tiring really quickly!"
She wasn't used to sharing herself so much, wasn't used to having her thoughts invaded by opinions that seemed her own only to be, in reality, someone else's. It just wasn't who she was, or at least what she thought she was. The girl really didn't know any longer.
"I just have to keep everything light," she kept telling herself. "If I joke, however misanthropically, perhaps no one will notice how incapable I have become." She knew that he noticed, though.
Benjamin knew just exactly what was going through her head. He hadn't hung around Dax through three hosts without picking up a few signals that something wasn't right. Ezri just hoped that no one else was aware.
Starfleet was her life. Her career had always been important to her and she was not about to let this little "set back" ruin her professional life just as it had begun to blossom.
Sitting down on her sofa, the girl brought her knees to her chest, hugging them tightly like she did as a kid. Whenever she was upset as a child she would squeeze up as tightly as she could and try her best to disappear behind the long evening gowns that her mother kept in the back of a wardrobe.
To this day, Ezri still couldn't understand why her mother just didn't recycle the old things. She certainly didn't wear them more than once and they only created clutter in her closet.
"What a shame," she would tell her little girl, "to be caught in the same dress twice."
Of course, between her mother's eccentricities of fashion and her father's involvement, or lack thereof, in her life, she wasn't surprised that she was having trouble getting used to being integrated in other's lives.
They had been so disappointed in her as of late. It had been bad enough to learn that their baby wasn't going to be joined with a symbiot but to have her move so far away from them had "broken their fragile hearts".
Ezri hadn't spoken to them since graduating from the academy. She was sure that they had heard of her "minor" surgery. It had been major news back on Trill. But her parents had the tendency to be tenacious when it came to holding grudges.
"May the gods of the universe strike them down first before they ever get it in their minds to send me a message."
Before this, she had never really considered herself cynical. She supposed that taking on such a responsibility was getting to her. Though she had, at the time, considered it an honor, Ezri was thoroughly unprepared for the road that lay ahead of her. And what a rugged and difficult road it was, too.
She was sure that every one of Jadzia's friends considered her at least a little crazy. Hell, if she were in the same situation she would probably feel the same way.
It made her feel . . . somehow rejected, though. Dax carried so many recollections of Kira and Julian, Odo and Worf. They were her friends, no matter how much she tried to dissuade herself.
"Agh! I'll never get used to this! I might as well retire to some far away planet and live the rest of my life as a hermit."
Gods know it would make things a whole lot easier! No more dodging Worf every time she turned a corner. That was more than a little troublesome. Not to mention the fact that over half of the staff on Deep Space Nine felt some sort of loyalty towards that man and avoided her at all costs. No one likes an angry Klingon!
Ezri sighed at that, recalling all of the times she . . . that is Jadzia and Worf had gotten into a fight over one thing or another. It seemed that they were at each other's throats more often than not. Fighting fell only second to the times they made . . .
This caused her to sigh even more. "Let's try this again," she once more spoke aloud, plopping herself down onto the now hardly formidable sofa. Another round of not so "agreeable" memories and another round of fruitless meditation. "It just always has to come down to that, doesn't it?"
The End! :-)