It was a bit too much to think about now. Dax rubbed her own eyes. She knew she should take the advice she had given Julian, and get some rest herself. It had been a long shift, with longer ones before it. Whatever sleep there had been, for anyone aboard the station, had been filled with dreams more arduous than anything encountered while awake.
The lab door slid shut behind her, as she headed for her quarters. She doubted if there would be any dreams at all, in this long-delayed night.
Sleep would claim him, if he let it. He only had to close his eyes and lean back against the cushions of the sofa.
But not just yet. Sisko turned his head slightly, to regard the wooden crate that still sat in one corner of the room. Next shift, he promised himself, he would have it taken away and sent back down to Bajor. The objects inside, the mementos of the Kai, could be more properly taken care of by her own people. He had no need of them. He had his own memories of her.
Prophecies and blessings, thought Sisko. More than anyone else knew; more than he himself had known. So much had been changed within him, in ways that he was only beginning to understand.
The need for rest weighed heavily across his shoulders. He knew why he put it off, why he tried to forestall its inevitable approach.
When he had been down there, in Moagitty . . . in that city and world that McHogue had created . . . there had been the smallest possible glimpse, as he had passed through the doorway between one false universe and another. A instant that had been both remembrance and eternal non-time: for just that flash of consciousness, he had seen again that which had been shown him, so long ago, inside the wormhole.
He closed his eyes, willing himself toward that memory again.
He had seen his wife, Jake's mother, inside there. In that time, in that lost universe, when she had still been alive. She had turned toward him, one hand reaching back to his, smiling as if she were about to say something. . . .
There hadn't been time enough to hear what her words would have been. The vision of her face had gone as quickly as it had appeared; he hadn't even been conscious of it when he had found himself wandering in the corridors of a nonexistent Deep Space Nine. Only now, when he could allow his thoughts to sort themselves out, had he remembered what he had seen. What had been granted to him.
He wondered what it meant. Perhaps nothing; perhaps a gift, a blessing. He slowly shook his head, smiling in rueful acknowledgment. It would have been just like the Kai, to have given him something like that, something that would enable him to go forward and accomplish what he had to.
Falling now; he let himself fall. Toward that bright world, the other one inside him. Where he might yet hear those tender words that had been—and always were—about to be spoken to him.