Deep Space Nine: The Pleasure (OT3 | Nerys/Jadzia/Julian | R | 2,000)
Date written: February 11 and 13, 2007
Word count: 2,000
Rating: R
Characters/Pairing: Kira Nerys/Jadzia Dax/Julian Bashir.
Genres/Plot summary: OT3/Romance/Slight angst/Fluff. This begins shortly after Lenara has left the station, deciding not to stay with Jadzia. Nerys and Julian help her cope.
Author’s Note: Written for the Femme Fuh-Q Fest. Kind of... not my best quality, but a way fun to explore these characters.
The Pleasure
“I can’t believe she’s gone.”
Nerys ran her hand softly over Jadzia’s hair. “Me neither.”
“After all… after everything we had… how could she just…?” Jadzia’s voice wavered, bottomed out, as if it couldn’t contain all the emotions that were spilling out.
“Shhhh,” Nerys said, brushing back the hair from Jadzia’s face. “Just let it out.” The truth was, she had no explanation. She didn’t know how Lenara had been able to turn and walk into that shuttle. She’d only been on the outskirts of Jadzia’s passion and even from that distance, she’d been singed.
Jadzia looked up at her, and for one heartbreaking second, still struggling to hold it in, to keep it from spilling up and over. Nerys put her hand on Jadzia’s cheek, smiling gently to keep the stinging in her own eyes at bay.
“It’s okay, Jadzia. I’m here.”
And then she did cry, in relief, when Jadzia curled up against her and started howling her grief.
*
U.S.S. Defiant, onboard
Julian shivered again, trying to keep his arms from trembling around Jadzia. His breath was short, and he knew that there should be enough air for him to be breathing normally, but he also knew that trying to repress the psychological stress effects of being trapped in this room wouldn’t help matters, either.
Jadzia craned her neck up at him, “Julian.”
“Hmmmm?”
“This is no time to be worrying about being proprietary.”
“What do you-”
She scooted closer in his arms, pressing them together from hips to chest. “I don’t know about you, but I’m freezing.”
He swallowed. “Yes, right. Sorry. From here on out, no proprietary behavior.”
She dropped her head against his neck. “Much better.”
He stopped trying not to tremble and let himself breathe her in; if they had to go, he took some consolation that at the very least, it was together.
*
“Have you heard a word I’ve said?” Nerys set down her Raktajino and raised an eyebrow at him.
“I’m sorry, Major.” Julian laughed, shaking his head. “It’s just… I keep picturing you speaking with a Russian accent.”
“A what?”
“Well. You remember the transporter accident we had when your neural and physical patterns were stored in the computer and all of you appeared in my holosuite program?”
“How could I forget?”
“Well, you appeared as a Russian intelligence agent.” Seeing that her expression was no less confused, he continued. “It’s a period program; on Earth, there used to be a country called the U.S.S.R. that was in constant competition with another country called the United States. Your character, well-she has a very thick accent. Quite enchanting, actually.”
He proceeded to try and do an imitation for her, but was cut short by the laughter that bubbled up between them. By the time they were done with lunch, both their faces were flushed from mirth.
“Call me Nerys,” she said before they got up to leave, putting her hand over his.
“Nerys, then.” He smiled, already devising a plan to get her back into his holosuite program.
*
“I replicate a mean Earth wine,” Julian said, bringing over the bottle and presenting it to Nerys.
“I can’t tell that stuff from Andorian ale,” she said, looking at it skeptically.
Julian made a disapproving face. “Trust me, this is much better.” He filled their glasses with sauvignon blanc before sitting next to her, but halfway down to his seat, the console behind him beeped.
“I’ll just be a moment,” he said, getting up to answer it. Jadzia’s face appeared on the screen.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, taking in her appearance. She looked terrible; her skin was completely drained of color and her eyes were red, as if she’d been crying.
“I… I’m sorry, Julian. I’m interrupting something, aren’t I?”
“Perish the thought. Nerys is here, but I can go into my bedroom if you’d like to speak privately.”
She laughed a little. “So that’s why she wasn’t answering.”
Nerys came to stand next to Julian, worry etched in her face. “What happened?”
Jadzia took a deep breath, making a feeble attempt to smile. “Guess who decided to respond to my last letter?”
Nerys put a hand on her chest. “Oh, Jadzia.”
Julian’s lips thinned. “You stay right there. We’ll be right over.”
*
It became a bi-weekly (sometimes tri-weekly) ritual, an unspoken agreement that all three of them upheld without ever needing to discuss it.
Julian and Jadzia took Nerys to the holosuites. They took her climbing through the Ugelian Mountains on Trill, sand-surfing through the Mojave on Earth, wind-skimming across the lower atmosphere of Bajor, and ended every session with a “mandatory” visit to every hot springs program they could find. They persisted, insisting that developing imagination would be good for her character, and shared secret smiles as she forgot herself more and more and learned to have fun.
Nerys taught them about her culture. She showed Jadzia prayer rites that had helped her honor Bareil, knowing that mourning Lenara was similar to what she’d gone through. After a few rounds of blood wine (Jadzia could be very persuasive when she put her mind to it), she sang camp songs at Julian’s request, and nearly cried with laughter when he blushed at some the more graphic verses.
Jadzia beat both of them one-handed with bat’leths, grinning and saying that Worf had taught her a few tricks since he’d come to live on the station. And as time went on, she told them about Lenara; about how, even as she came to know Lenara as just Lenara, she couldn’t forget Kahn, and a part of her knew Kahn would never be able to do it. There was a reason that the Dax host had gone from Torias to Curzon to Jadzia. Whether the Committee admitted it as official policy or not was beside the point; hosts all had something in common that strung them together. And in her gut she’d known that no Kahn host would be able to face exile.
“We’ve agreed not to write each other anymore.” She said, looking down into the glass of white wine. “It’s just too painful. It’s better this way.” She gave them a shaky smile. “I know it is.”
Nerys put a hand around her shoulder. “Better isn’t always easy.”
Julian placed a hand on her back. “But you’re not alone. No matter what happens.”
“Thank you,” she said, too overcome to find any other words.
*
What had started as a tourniquet to a wound grew into something else as the wound healed and scarred over. Jadzia was still sensitive, but time and distance gave her strength and determination. She, more than most, knew that no matter what life went on. And, almost indiscernibly, life threw her a slow surprise. The long nights talking with Nerys over candlelight were soon filled with more laughter than sorrow; the jaunts into primitive flying machines in the holosuite with Julian became something to look forward to instead of a chore, and the dinners that the three of them had touched a place inside her that even Lenara never had, that Kahn never would.
Nerys and Julian weren’t just different from most joined Trill because of their species. They were Star Fleet, through and through, as much as Nerys resisted it. Jadzia felt at home with them, and Dax’s experiences showed her exactly how lucky she was to have them.
“A toast,” Nerys said, as if reading Jadzia’s thoughts. Her hair shone fiery in the candlelight, accentuated by the dark green dress she’d worn. Jadzia had coaxed her into trying out some new styles, and (as with most things) once Nerys had given in, she actually quite enjoyed herself.
“To what?” Julian asked, smiling without a trace of teasing. His endless fount of optimism had clashed with Nerys, at first, but now she tempered it with her own brand of hard wisdom. But at moments like these, when it was perfectly appropriate, Jadzia couldn’t help but bask in it. It was like being a first-time host all over again, ready to go out into the world untested and untried and tackle it head-on.
“To us,” Jadzia said, rising out of her seat and coming to crouch between the two of them.
“To us,” they chorused in agreement, the delicate flutes clinking.
Jadzia didn’t take a sip of hers, though; instead, she tasted it by proxy, giving Julian and Nerys very quick but very thorough kisses as they were still letting the last of it trickle down their tongues, caught off-guard.
“I…” Nerys put two fingers to her lips, her large eyes open even wider than normal.
Julian looked at Nerys and then at Jadzia, who had a half-smile on her lips. “Oh.”
“Don’t look so surprised,” she said, letting her hands roam up their necks and caress their scalps. “You think I didn’t know I was interrupting something that first night?”
“Oh, well-” Julian looked upward, always a sure sign that he was trying to think of something to say.
“That was really nothing-” Nerys broke eye contact-but didn’t move away from where Jadzia was touching her.
Moving her hands down their arms, she drew them up from the chairs and onto the couch.
“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate all that you two have done for me.” She continued to touch them gently, running her hands down their backs and over their arms until their spines relaxed and they sank back onto the couch with her. “I don’t know how I would have made it through these months without you.”
Nerys sighed a little as Jadzia became bolder with her hands, curling them up around her shoulders and brushing her nails against the hollow of the other woman’s neck. Julian’s eyelids lowered when she feathered soft kisses on his cheek.
“I’d be lying if I told you that the reason I kept coming back was for the scintillating dinner conversation.”
Nerys’s head dropped into the crook of her neck, and it was Jadzia’s turn to inhale sharply when Nerys bit her lightly.
“And don’t call it nothing,” Jadzia whispered, looping one of her legs through Julian’s, “I recognized the way you two were looking at each other…” Her breath came even shorter as Julian ran his hand up her leg, his thin fingers tracing paths of heat up curve of her calf. “Because that’s the way I’ve been looking at the two of you since we were first stationed here.”
Nerys took Jadzia’s face in her hands. “Eight lifetimes and you couldn’t tell we were looking at you the same way?”
Julian bit her ear, his breath tickling. “You’re one of the few things Nerys and I had in common.”
They kissed, caught up in the rush of sudden emotion, the awareness that they all wanted this. That the nights they’d tossed and turned in bed, trying to push away thoughts of what were supposed to be their friends were turning into more, were not unique experiences. There was an element of giddiness to the way they touched each other, how their fingers wove together and apart again, a freedom from the uncertainties and hesitations that had weighed them down before. Jadzia laughed against Nerys’s lips and arched up to meet Julian’s warm and strong hands on her waist, and before she knew it, they were maneuvering her to the bed, limbs tangling and bodies tumbling until they were all lying down together-close.
“You don’t have to-” Jadzia started breathlessly, to give either of them a chance to withdraw; she wasn’t anyone’s charity case.
Julian smiled. “You’re absolutely right, Jadzia. We don’t have to. But the pleasure…”
“…is all ours,” Nerys finished, and silenced Jadzia’s feeble attempts at rationality with a long and very promising kiss.
Word count: 2,000
Rating: R
Characters/Pairing: Kira Nerys/Jadzia Dax/Julian Bashir.
Genres/Plot summary: OT3/Romance/Slight angst/Fluff. This begins shortly after Lenara has left the station, deciding not to stay with Jadzia. Nerys and Julian help her cope.
Author’s Note: Written for the Femme Fuh-Q Fest. Kind of... not my best quality, but a way fun to explore these characters.
The Pleasure
“I can’t believe she’s gone.”
Nerys ran her hand softly over Jadzia’s hair. “Me neither.”
“After all… after everything we had… how could she just…?” Jadzia’s voice wavered, bottomed out, as if it couldn’t contain all the emotions that were spilling out.
“Shhhh,” Nerys said, brushing back the hair from Jadzia’s face. “Just let it out.” The truth was, she had no explanation. She didn’t know how Lenara had been able to turn and walk into that shuttle. She’d only been on the outskirts of Jadzia’s passion and even from that distance, she’d been singed.
Jadzia looked up at her, and for one heartbreaking second, still struggling to hold it in, to keep it from spilling up and over. Nerys put her hand on Jadzia’s cheek, smiling gently to keep the stinging in her own eyes at bay.
“It’s okay, Jadzia. I’m here.”
And then she did cry, in relief, when Jadzia curled up against her and started howling her grief.
*
U.S.S. Defiant, onboard
Julian shivered again, trying to keep his arms from trembling around Jadzia. His breath was short, and he knew that there should be enough air for him to be breathing normally, but he also knew that trying to repress the psychological stress effects of being trapped in this room wouldn’t help matters, either.
Jadzia craned her neck up at him, “Julian.”
“Hmmmm?”
“This is no time to be worrying about being proprietary.”
“What do you-”
She scooted closer in his arms, pressing them together from hips to chest. “I don’t know about you, but I’m freezing.”
He swallowed. “Yes, right. Sorry. From here on out, no proprietary behavior.”
She dropped her head against his neck. “Much better.”
He stopped trying not to tremble and let himself breathe her in; if they had to go, he took some consolation that at the very least, it was together.
*
“Have you heard a word I’ve said?” Nerys set down her Raktajino and raised an eyebrow at him.
“I’m sorry, Major.” Julian laughed, shaking his head. “It’s just… I keep picturing you speaking with a Russian accent.”
“A what?”
“Well. You remember the transporter accident we had when your neural and physical patterns were stored in the computer and all of you appeared in my holosuite program?”
“How could I forget?”
“Well, you appeared as a Russian intelligence agent.” Seeing that her expression was no less confused, he continued. “It’s a period program; on Earth, there used to be a country called the U.S.S.R. that was in constant competition with another country called the United States. Your character, well-she has a very thick accent. Quite enchanting, actually.”
He proceeded to try and do an imitation for her, but was cut short by the laughter that bubbled up between them. By the time they were done with lunch, both their faces were flushed from mirth.
“Call me Nerys,” she said before they got up to leave, putting her hand over his.
“Nerys, then.” He smiled, already devising a plan to get her back into his holosuite program.
*
“I replicate a mean Earth wine,” Julian said, bringing over the bottle and presenting it to Nerys.
“I can’t tell that stuff from Andorian ale,” she said, looking at it skeptically.
Julian made a disapproving face. “Trust me, this is much better.” He filled their glasses with sauvignon blanc before sitting next to her, but halfway down to his seat, the console behind him beeped.
“I’ll just be a moment,” he said, getting up to answer it. Jadzia’s face appeared on the screen.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, taking in her appearance. She looked terrible; her skin was completely drained of color and her eyes were red, as if she’d been crying.
“I… I’m sorry, Julian. I’m interrupting something, aren’t I?”
“Perish the thought. Nerys is here, but I can go into my bedroom if you’d like to speak privately.”
She laughed a little. “So that’s why she wasn’t answering.”
Nerys came to stand next to Julian, worry etched in her face. “What happened?”
Jadzia took a deep breath, making a feeble attempt to smile. “Guess who decided to respond to my last letter?”
Nerys put a hand on her chest. “Oh, Jadzia.”
Julian’s lips thinned. “You stay right there. We’ll be right over.”
*
It became a bi-weekly (sometimes tri-weekly) ritual, an unspoken agreement that all three of them upheld without ever needing to discuss it.
Julian and Jadzia took Nerys to the holosuites. They took her climbing through the Ugelian Mountains on Trill, sand-surfing through the Mojave on Earth, wind-skimming across the lower atmosphere of Bajor, and ended every session with a “mandatory” visit to every hot springs program they could find. They persisted, insisting that developing imagination would be good for her character, and shared secret smiles as she forgot herself more and more and learned to have fun.
Nerys taught them about her culture. She showed Jadzia prayer rites that had helped her honor Bareil, knowing that mourning Lenara was similar to what she’d gone through. After a few rounds of blood wine (Jadzia could be very persuasive when she put her mind to it), she sang camp songs at Julian’s request, and nearly cried with laughter when he blushed at some the more graphic verses.
Jadzia beat both of them one-handed with bat’leths, grinning and saying that Worf had taught her a few tricks since he’d come to live on the station. And as time went on, she told them about Lenara; about how, even as she came to know Lenara as just Lenara, she couldn’t forget Kahn, and a part of her knew Kahn would never be able to do it. There was a reason that the Dax host had gone from Torias to Curzon to Jadzia. Whether the Committee admitted it as official policy or not was beside the point; hosts all had something in common that strung them together. And in her gut she’d known that no Kahn host would be able to face exile.
“We’ve agreed not to write each other anymore.” She said, looking down into the glass of white wine. “It’s just too painful. It’s better this way.” She gave them a shaky smile. “I know it is.”
Nerys put a hand around her shoulder. “Better isn’t always easy.”
Julian placed a hand on her back. “But you’re not alone. No matter what happens.”
“Thank you,” she said, too overcome to find any other words.
*
What had started as a tourniquet to a wound grew into something else as the wound healed and scarred over. Jadzia was still sensitive, but time and distance gave her strength and determination. She, more than most, knew that no matter what life went on. And, almost indiscernibly, life threw her a slow surprise. The long nights talking with Nerys over candlelight were soon filled with more laughter than sorrow; the jaunts into primitive flying machines in the holosuite with Julian became something to look forward to instead of a chore, and the dinners that the three of them had touched a place inside her that even Lenara never had, that Kahn never would.
Nerys and Julian weren’t just different from most joined Trill because of their species. They were Star Fleet, through and through, as much as Nerys resisted it. Jadzia felt at home with them, and Dax’s experiences showed her exactly how lucky she was to have them.
“A toast,” Nerys said, as if reading Jadzia’s thoughts. Her hair shone fiery in the candlelight, accentuated by the dark green dress she’d worn. Jadzia had coaxed her into trying out some new styles, and (as with most things) once Nerys had given in, she actually quite enjoyed herself.
“To what?” Julian asked, smiling without a trace of teasing. His endless fount of optimism had clashed with Nerys, at first, but now she tempered it with her own brand of hard wisdom. But at moments like these, when it was perfectly appropriate, Jadzia couldn’t help but bask in it. It was like being a first-time host all over again, ready to go out into the world untested and untried and tackle it head-on.
“To us,” Jadzia said, rising out of her seat and coming to crouch between the two of them.
“To us,” they chorused in agreement, the delicate flutes clinking.
Jadzia didn’t take a sip of hers, though; instead, she tasted it by proxy, giving Julian and Nerys very quick but very thorough kisses as they were still letting the last of it trickle down their tongues, caught off-guard.
“I…” Nerys put two fingers to her lips, her large eyes open even wider than normal.
Julian looked at Nerys and then at Jadzia, who had a half-smile on her lips. “Oh.”
“Don’t look so surprised,” she said, letting her hands roam up their necks and caress their scalps. “You think I didn’t know I was interrupting something that first night?”
“Oh, well-” Julian looked upward, always a sure sign that he was trying to think of something to say.
“That was really nothing-” Nerys broke eye contact-but didn’t move away from where Jadzia was touching her.
Moving her hands down their arms, she drew them up from the chairs and onto the couch.
“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate all that you two have done for me.” She continued to touch them gently, running her hands down their backs and over their arms until their spines relaxed and they sank back onto the couch with her. “I don’t know how I would have made it through these months without you.”
Nerys sighed a little as Jadzia became bolder with her hands, curling them up around her shoulders and brushing her nails against the hollow of the other woman’s neck. Julian’s eyelids lowered when she feathered soft kisses on his cheek.
“I’d be lying if I told you that the reason I kept coming back was for the scintillating dinner conversation.”
Nerys’s head dropped into the crook of her neck, and it was Jadzia’s turn to inhale sharply when Nerys bit her lightly.
“And don’t call it nothing,” Jadzia whispered, looping one of her legs through Julian’s, “I recognized the way you two were looking at each other…” Her breath came even shorter as Julian ran his hand up her leg, his thin fingers tracing paths of heat up curve of her calf. “Because that’s the way I’ve been looking at the two of you since we were first stationed here.”
Nerys took Jadzia’s face in her hands. “Eight lifetimes and you couldn’t tell we were looking at you the same way?”
Julian bit her ear, his breath tickling. “You’re one of the few things Nerys and I had in common.”
They kissed, caught up in the rush of sudden emotion, the awareness that they all wanted this. That the nights they’d tossed and turned in bed, trying to push away thoughts of what were supposed to be their friends were turning into more, were not unique experiences. There was an element of giddiness to the way they touched each other, how their fingers wove together and apart again, a freedom from the uncertainties and hesitations that had weighed them down before. Jadzia laughed against Nerys’s lips and arched up to meet Julian’s warm and strong hands on her waist, and before she knew it, they were maneuvering her to the bed, limbs tangling and bodies tumbling until they were all lying down together-close.
“You don’t have to-” Jadzia started breathlessly, to give either of them a chance to withdraw; she wasn’t anyone’s charity case.
Julian smiled. “You’re absolutely right, Jadzia. We don’t have to. But the pleasure…”
“…is all ours,” Nerys finished, and silenced Jadzia’s feeble attempts at rationality with a long and very promising kiss.