Chapter Text
The first thing Jadzia was aware of; her back was on fire.
She groaned, moaned, whatever the word in Standard was – attempted to roll onto her side, but eventually realised that she was trapped, pinned at the arm by something large and never-ending. That made no sense, surely, she hadn’t been trapped like this since the last moments of Torias, or not since Emony’s flirts with contortions. But, she wasn’t sure, the memories were all…jumbled. That frightened her somewhat, because again, the only things that had even resembled the way she was feeling was when things had gone really, really wrong.
Her eyes flickered open to dancing light, and she realised that the orange background hadn’t just been the backs of her eyelids, it had been the fading embers of fires in her surroundings. With this revelation striking a deep fear within diaphragm, and causing her brain to click somewhat into gear, the memories quickly flooded back to her, in a way that almost reminded her of her zhian'tara and when her other hosts had returned home to the symbiont. But, this time, there was no relief, no feeling like she was whole again.
Thrusters and impulse engine failure, the vibrant green of a planet rapidly approaching the runabout’s nose, the blood-curdling screams of Nerys seared into her head as it barrelled into the surface.
She groaned again, raising a free left hand to her forehead. It was peppered with dirt beneath her nails, fine shards of flaked metal pricking her fingers. She’d have to fix that, if she could ever get her mind together, to focus-
“J-Jadzia?”
Julian! Oh, that was his voice. If he was here, and he was close to her, there was some hope. He may have been a tiresome presence at times, with his pointless pining, but he was a damn good doctor, and he had more tricks with his hands and little resources than she’d ever known. But that stutter…
“Jadzia, d-don’t try to move.” A pause as she assumed he examined her. “There’s some debris on your arm, and it might be broken, but that shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Just let me-“ A scream, from far to her left, painfully familiar in its pitch. “Oh, dear, I’ll be back in a moment, I-I promise.”
She could feel his presence scramble away from her, bringing with the faded hope a sense of dreading cold. It almost trickled down her back, but she wanted to ignore it, to push past it – if there was anything she could do to help him.
“Julian,” She croaked. “Julian.”
But she could already hear that he was whispering comforting words to Kira, who was clearly more in shock than any of them with that she had tears pouring down her cheeks. Kira was young in comparison; it hit her with a jolt - for nothing truly surprised her anymore due to her many lifetimes. She’d been through so much as a child but had only been in a crash of a vessel once, on a planet where she couldn’t die anyway, let alone felt the deep physical effects or the deeper mental ones. Shock, the injuries, they would all be new to her.
Her eyes flickered again, the call of unconsciousness a powerful one, and she managed to keep them open. The light wasn’t just from the dying fires but also came from the white light of a medical tricorder, and she could hear its rhythmic buzz as Julian scanned the rest of them. From her limited angle, The runabout looked like it had a massive dent in its ceiling, a huge change from the smooth metal it had been the last she’d seen it, and looked like a giant had swung a large punch at it. There was no power, no environmental controls, and - she hazarded a guess – minimal life support systems as well.
“Julian,” She tried again,
I can help, if you give me a couple of minutes.
The scrambling, a loud clang of metal. “I’m here, Jadzia, hold on.”
The familiar tricorder moved over her face as he scanned her slowly, reading out the results for her benefit, as her senses and focus slowly returned to her due to a stealthily administered hypospray.
“Grade two concussion, two broken ribs, and a broken radius.” He closed the tricorder, leaned over her face with a watery smile. “Not as bad as it could have been. I think I’ve got an ossicula regenerator in the medkit, if you’ll just give me a second.”
He reached over the top of her and grasped a small case, flipping it open to rifle through its contents. A few moments later, “Aha!”
Pocketing the instrument, he moved to remove the rubble trapping her left arm. It was mostly metal, she analysed, bits of runabout that had collapsed with the impact, but she felt calmer when it had been released, even if the pain was worse now there was nothing keeping it together. Julian fixed the broken ribs with ease, and then set to work mending her arm with all the precision as if he was in the infirmary, and not in god-knows-where.
“You were good at moving that debris.” She complimented. “It would have taken two of me to move that.”
She slurred her words, she knew, but he didn’t seem too concerned. Concussion, ah. Maybe it was also causing her to see an uncharacteristically haunted look dart across his face for a second.
“Racquetball gives a lot of strength training.” He murmured, to himself or her he wasn’t sure.
“I thought racquetball was cardiovascular for Humans.” She said softly, smiling.
“It can do both.” He affirmed, jaw set. “Right, I’m going to sit you up now, and give you an injection which should help with the concussion. If you’re still this perceptive after ten minutes or so, I’m going to need your help with Kira and the Chief.”
Steady hands rounded her back and gently shoved her backwards, moving her body in one swift motion to be supported by a clear bit of runabout wall. The floor, she felt, shifted loudly with the movement, but again – Julian didn’t seem concerned.
Seeing his face in light, though, indicated to her that he wasn’t quite as uninjured as the confident impression he was giving. His forehead was speckled with the dregs of dirt from the bottom of the runabout, and his right cheek had a large – partly healed – gash stretching from just past his eye to the corner of his mouth. There were multiple superficial cuts to his chin that he hadn’t bothered to heal, and, most worryingly of all, he had his head tipped towards his right, trying to stem a deep graze under his hair with a haphazard piece of taped gauze that was still slowly leaking blood onto his battered uniform.
“Shouldn’t you be taking care of yourself first?” She asked, as he carefully removed his arms from stabilising her side, assured enough she wouldn’t slump to the side.
“I’m sturdier than I look.” He replied promptly. Indeed, there seemed to be no broken bones on him at all, and he deftly loaded a hypospray like he was back in the Infirmary. “I’m giving you some trianoline, that should help with the concussion. If you feel any worse, let me know.”
With that, he left her side – presumably, Kira and – O’Brien? He hadn’t mentioned him, but she hadn’t heard him, could that mean…?
With Julian huffing and groaning as he searched through piles of debris, she finally had a chance to survey her surroundings. She was on the right side of the main console, propped up near where its end edge was supposed to be, right below one of the portholes and the main science console. From this position, she deduced she must have been thrown backwards from her position next to the viewscreen when they crashed. The portholes showed no sign of stars or space at all.
The dividing screen between the back of the console room and the transporters had been ripped out, exposing the spaces to each other, and the cavernous space filled with debris. There were no chairs anymore, ripped into pieces of twisted metal and shredded fabric, and all of the consoles were dark. Rocks from the broken toughened glass of the porthole opposite her had also joined them before the emergency forcefields had kicked in, adding to the immense amount of debris. Straight ahead of her, she could see the pile that Julian must have struggled from, and in the left-hand corner she could see a characteristic shoe from Kira.
It was like she’d stepped into the apocalypse, or a war zone, not a…whatever mission they’d been up to, it certainly hadn’t intended to involved weapons. She knew immediately that they were stuck here, with no main power, and destroyed consoles, there was no chance of getting out without help. And with their main engineer currently buried, she could feel her endless hope start to falter slightly.
A breathed voice from her left, the tricorder increasing in pitch.
“Miles?” The tricorder opened up. “Miles!”
She could see Julian sit back on his heels as he read off the response, scrambling to reach the medkit as he did. “Five fractured ribs, fractured femur, tibia, and metatarsals. Lacerations to the spleen and stomach. Left kidney function down to 40%. Internal haemorrhaging.”
A fractured radius sounded far less serious than Miles’ continuing list of injuries. It almost sounded like a pizza delivery, she thought, in her slightly-delirious state. That man could never catch a break.
“Jadzia, I’m sorry, I think I need you to be my nurse for a bit.” Julian said, desperation lacing his voice as he tucked the tricorder away in his uniform. “Can you get over here?”
He was breathing heavily, and she could see the worry and fear in his expression. That was the proper stuff, the stuff that said, “I’m not sure if he’s saveable.”
Groaning as she moved, she struggled to shuffle through the makeshift path towards Julian and Miles, pressing a hand on the medkit.
“What do you need?” She said, painfully – the ribs may be healed, but that didn’t mean the adrenaline or pain left quickly.
“Two ccs of Triptacedrine.” He replied sharply. “Miles, I know you’re in pain, I’m going to give you something for it, alright?”
“Julian?” The man slurred. He really didn’t look good, his skin was almost pallid. “Is that you?”
“Yes, Miles.” He said gently. “You’re going to be alright-“
The floor rumbled again, causing a large crash as more debris fell in the corner – thankfully nowhere near Kira. A jolt of fear sent shivers down her spine.
“What was that?”
“I don’t know.” murmured Julian. “It’s been getting stronger since I woke up. It was only a small vibration when I regained consciousness.”
Shaking his head, he stuck out his hand for the vial of analgesic, the hiss of the hypospray bursting the returned quiet. Just how long had he been awake for?
“You’re not concerned?”
“My only concern is making sure that my patients are stable. I can worry about our surroundings later.”
She looked at him drolly, for that was just such a Julian response. “You can’t tell me that you’re not at least a little bit worried.”
“Of course I’m worried!” he snapped. “But there’s not enough time to dwell on it, Miles needs our help more than whatever lies out there.”
Huffing to himself, he closed his eyes and returned to his patient.
“Pass the Ossicula regenerator.” He told her, and held out his hand until it was pressed into it.
As he passed it over O’Brien’s bones, he began to speak again.
“Is there anything in the medkit that can help with internal injuries?”
She scanned her eyes over the contents, feeling herself to be a little out of her depth with the question. Her speciality was science, of course, but not medical science – chemistry, physics, exobiology, that was her forte, not the ins and outs of a medical kit.
“There’s a cellular regenerator, I think.” She hedged her bets, gathering it up in her palm.
“That’ll do.” replied Julian quickly. “His kidney and spleen injuries are too niche for a runabout medkit, but I can at least heal some of the haemorrhaging.”
She wasn’t sure if he was telling her this for his benefit, or hers, but it was helpful to have something to focus on. Indeed, he was almost telling her this to blind himself to the rest of the situation, even as another rumble shook the floor.
“What the hell is that movement!” called Kira, suddenly, causing Dax’s head to swivel towards her voice and to almost double over in dizziness.
“W-we’re not sure.” Dax said, raising a hand to her forehead as the world whirlgigged around her. “It’s something to do with outside.”
“That’s quite clear.” replied Kira briskly. “Is the Chief alright?”
“I can stabilise him, he’ll be alright for a little while.” said Julian. “But without specialist medical equipment, I can’t be sure of him lasting until we’re rescued. We’d need to get the replicators on.”
“Well, we can work on that later. Have we got a distress signal?”
Oh. That should have been her first thought, curses to Julian’s determination.
“I don’t think so.” Dax said, glancing over to the doctor – who nodded. “I’ll see if I can get one online.”
“Good. Then, at least, we might have some hope of rescue.”
Kira lay a few metres back from Julian and O’Brien, pinned down by debris but still as sharp as normal. Clearly, her head hadn’t been hit, given her eyes easily tracked Jadzia across what remained of the room. There were long, deep cuts across her face, however, and a worrying amount of blood staining the right part of her uniform.
Jadzia herself felt almost like the old film Bambi, barely able to keep her balance as she made her way across the rubble towards the back, where the distress signal lay. She pressed the button to record the message, a bright red button in the relative darkness, and as she pushed her hair back felt herself melt back into the chief science officer of DS9.
“This is Lieutenant Commander Jadzia Dax of the Federation Space Station Deep Space Nine. Our runabout has crashed, and we are in need of assistance. I repeat, we need assistance. We have injured. Our government will give suitable compensation if you assist us.” She glanced towards Kira who nodded in approval.
Tapping the low-lit console to the side, she set it to repeat on all sub-space signals for the foreseeable future, and sat back onto her heels.
Kira swallowed audibly. “If no one nearer comes to help us, h-how long until it reaches Deep Space Nine?”
The calculations were too complex for her concussed brain to quite comprehend, but luckily Julian was quick at hand.
“Five days, four hours and twenty-six minutes.” He said, the hum of the cellular regenerator pausing as he spoke. “Give or take a few seconds.”
The way he said it so nonchalantly, the way that the dread immediately settled in her stomach, caused her to sit back fully and star past the darkened viewscreen.
“Well, if that’s true, we’d better make ourselves at home for the foreseeable.”
Wherever they had landed, it was quiet. Far too quiet, for her liking. Without the steady hum of a ship, or a planet, or anything really, she could feel the echos deep within her bones of every movement she made. Humanoids weren’t meant to spend this much time on non-planetary bodies, especially strange ones like this.
Indeed, the only thing that made it not unbearingly quiet was the rumbles, shaking their bodies at regular intervals, each one a microscopic amount more powerful than the last. With the lack of power for PADDs, Julian had resorted to scratching the magnitude of each earthquake into a spare piece of metal – the precision of which was almost shocking, as the calculations just from her own observations took several hours to reach the same conclusions. Still, he kept plowing on with his task of stabilising O’Brien, leaving her and Kira to exchange quiet words about the situation, and strict instructions to inform him if she took a turn for the worst.
“I wish I knew what was going on.” She said, shifting her body and her expression creasing in pain. “Any sign of something outside?”
“The viewscreen’s still broken.” replied Dax, feeling like she was repeating herself. “If I had some tools I might be able to repair it, but the kit’s over near O’Brien.”
“I don’t like lying here!” Kira exclaimed, frustratingly. “I should be doing something, to help us get back on our feet, instead of lying here like some kind of…invalid!”
“You’re injured.” The best thing for when Kira was like this was to be measured. “Give yourself a break.”
Kira pursed her lips in her anger, then scoffed and turned her head away.
“At least give me the readouts for the oxygen in here. If life support is running on emergency power, we can brainstorm a way to get it running full again.”
“Right.”
Jadzia moved from her warmer spot near Kira’s head towards the only terminal that seemed remotely usable, tapping a few times through the basic stats it was giving her.
“Oxygen concentration at 17.134%. It’s set to the Earth baseline of 20.946%.” She read off. “Says there’s a small leak in the synthesiser in the back, but it can’t tell where.”
Miles’ strained voice piped up at the mention of his favourite conversation topic. “It’s most likely in the secondary replicating systems. That’s the weakest point.”
“You should be able to patch it up with a laser spanner.” Kira affirmed. “There’s one in my bunk, under my pillow.”
Jadzia’s brow furrowed.
“You keep a laser spanner under your pillow?”
“In case of emergencies. It’s perceived as a benign instrument, but it can do a lot of damage if necessary.” She replied, as if this was a completely normal thing to do.
“Right.” Said Dax, not entirely convinced. “I’ll check the synthesiser.”
“There should be a manual release of the doors at the bottom left side, and a battery-powered torch just to your right as you get in.” Miles told her from the corner.
“If you get dizzy, stop.” Julian put in, the disinterested tone of his voice indicating to him that his mind was still mostly focused on O’Brien. “We can manage on emergency life support for a few more hours.”
As Jadzia got to her feet, she looked over towards him – deeply in focus, and in his element. Despite his former immature behaviour, a little…reckless, to her aged eyes, he’d always been a steady pair of hands in a crisis. Everything that was a sign of his age fell away, and he became the mature and talented doctor she’d witnessed from his examination results and in small glimpses over the last three years.
Still feeling a little wobbly, she made her way over to the doors through resting her fingertips lightly on the remaining walls, and found the correct panel easily. Good old Danube-class runabouts, the transferable specifications did lend themselves well to muscle memory. Feeling Tobin’s knowledge around engineering flow through her mind like she’d always been born with it, even if it was around 100 years out-of-date, she the managed to apply the right amount of pressure to certain points to have the doors open with as little effort as possible – important, given she was still in a weakened state, and her arm still hadn’t quite settled from the ossicula regenerator.
“Are you in?” Kira called, the lack of mental stimulation clearly getting to her.
“Yes.” She answered, grasping the torch and turning it on.
Its light was dimmer than what she was expecting, and made to an old Earth design – Trill ones were more elaborate, and featured a side light as well – but it certainly did the job, and didn’t require winding up like many other emergency torches she’d seen. In her present condition, anything that required more than the minimum level of excursion was not a good idea, the trianoline could only do so much.
The shaking, and the impact of the crash, had sent the traditional bedclothes of their bunks onto the floor, along with most of the rest of their personal belongings. The structural damage to the runabout was clearer here, with the dents larger. It was a miracle that whatever they’d crashed into hadn’t torn any holes in their structural integrity. She shone the torch around, carefully assessing the damage as best she could – when O’Brien was in a better state, and Kira was able to move, they’d relay the information on and set about making sure the vessel itself was more stable. For now, though, she had no choice but to leave it.
Taking another step into the room, she almost fell forwards onto her face, and let out a large yelp of surprise that would have clearly been heard by her companions.
“Are you alright?” Kira shouted.
Jadzia leaned against the wall, catching her breath, then shone the torch down to see what had tripped her up. A small brown animal, her knowledge of Earth telling her that it was a comfort object known as a teddy bear, lay at her feet. Her lips stretched into a grin.
“I’m fine. I just caught my foot on a teddy bear.”
She could hear Julian’s head whip around. “Kukulaka?”
“He’s alright, he only fell off your bunk.” She called back, gathering him up in her hands and tucking him into the front of her uniform.
He was soft and warm, and she could see why Julian loved him so, for there was a certain endearment to him that was specific to their love of objects like this. And, she conceded, it was nice to have a companion along with her.
What confused her most, however, was that he’d chosen to take him along with him. He was Julian’s most prized possession, for reasons unknown, and he barely left the station. And, though it could be her concussed brain, she could barely remember the reasons for the mission in the first place. Something to do with long distance negotiations?
Locating Kira’s bunk, the laser spanner was the only object that hadn’t joined the rest on the floor – mostly because it appeared to be magnetically attached to the metal keeping the mattress on the bunk. It was a sturdy instrument, and felt good in her hands. She was finally doing something productive.
Crouching down onto her knees, she navigated the wreckage of the floor until she reached the panel in the wall. She felt for its edge, sliding the spanner in to assist in taking it out so as to not exert herself as much, and pulled it out. The wires inside looked a little fried, but still functional – she’d get the Chief on it later, when he was in a better place, as she suspected it was contributing to the failure of all power.
But, she wasn’t here for that.
O’Brien was right, the secondary replicating systems were completely shot. Or bolloxed, as he’d probably describe it as. It’s a simple fix, said Tobin, lie next to the module and I’ll take it from here. His knowledge tingled into her fingers, and she closed her eyes as the stability of it – something that was one of the only stable pieces from Tobin – warmed her injured body. It was simple, just grasp the bundle of wires, twist them half a turn anticlockwise, then use the laser spanner to…well, she couldn’t quite explain it, but she knew for certain it would work. And, indeed, it did.
“Got it!” She called loudly, feeling joy overtake her at the sight of the wires working in perfect harmony, and she realised that she’d just improved their chances of survival substantially.
She clambered to her feet again, the sense of vertigo overtaking her again and causing her to slump against the wall before she moved on. But, when her eyes flickered open again, she found the entire runabout darkened – not a sign of anyone else, and no chance of her eyes adjusting due to the lack of natural light. She walked forwards carefully, as though there was a path, there was still a significant amount of clutter, even if it was just bedclothes.
“Julian?” She called into the darkness. “Kira? Miles?”
She heard nothing. Nothing at all, but the black hole sitting in front of her eyes.
And then, she felt it. A creeping feeling, trickling down her spine, that she had someone behind her. She was stuck still, with the prescense increasing, and she felt hot air being breathed into her right ear.
“Jadzia. Hello, Jadzia.” It hissed. “So old. So beautiful, but so old.”
Her mouth fell open, there was no way to move from her position. Gradually, though, she became aware that there was something on her hands. With whatever strength she had left, she wiped them on her uniform, but it didn’t go away – indeed, it increased, until it almost felt like they were dripping.
Slowly, she looked down, holding her hands outwards from her in a claw shape. In faint white light, she could see its viscosity, its crimson colour, the way it stained and flowed over fingers.
Blood.
And then all she could hear was screaming.