A Collection of Julian Bashir One-Shots

Swampweed

"Enjoying yourself so far?" he asked.

"Of course," I chuckled. "You know my body language well enough to figure that out."

"Mm, yeah. I like to check in, though," Julian murmured, and I felt the soft wetness of his lips again against the skin of my neck, dappled with water.

I felt his foot brush against my calf, and I reached out to brush back—before realizing that curiously, that I could only move it a few inches. It was restrained. I tugged again, and something else tugged back, until suddenly, I was yanked out of Julian's grasp. Before I could comprehend the situation, I was sucked under the surface of the water and into a small cavern underneath the tree roots.

I couldn't see anything through the green cloud of algal blooms covering the water, and my struggling was only making things worse. I paused for a moment, despite my heart palpitations, and I looked up at the surface, hoping that stillness would allow me to see the sky. Normally, even through the murky water I would have been able to see the glow of the simulated fireflies and stars twinkling above the pond, but all I could see was white foam as Julian splashed about in a panic. I surged forward, then, convinced that if I just tried hard enough, I could propel myself out of the cave and to the surface, but the thing grabbing my leg tugged back once more with equal force. I was being sucked further and further into the cavern without a hope of escape. My lungs were starting to prickle, as if filled with needles, and my chest began to shudder without my voluntary permission. I needed a breath... just one breath...

Within minutes, my eyes began to droop and the world around me went fuzzy. I knew, before long, my body would take that breath full of water. And there was nothing I could do about it.

***

Coughing.

Body.

Breath.

That was all my mind registered at first. My first impressions upon waking up weren't even coherent enough for full sentences—just primal ideas, that after a moment of thought, I found myself able to ascribe words to. Coughing. Body. Breath. Coughing was what I was doing. Body was the person on top of me. Breath was what I was taking now, something I'd been deprived of for far too long.

"Oh thank god, [Y/N]," I heard at the edge of my perception, almost unnoticeable at first but then becoming comprehensible when I was no longer struggling for breath against the mossy ground. "You're okay. I'm so, so sorry. You're all right. Jesus. You're okay."

I shakily took in a more steady breath once I was stabilized, and the air rushed against the misplaced water still prickling in my larynx. Julian's voice. I squeezed my eyes shut a moment as he pulled himself off of my body. By god, I felt horrible.

"Julian..." I rasped. "I nearly... drowned. What happened?"

"Of course, you'd want to know," Julian said, now sitting beside me. "I'm so sorry. It was an oversight. I bought the program from a friend experimenting with a new form of holodeck program involving three dimensional vectors. It has some limitations, and I couldn't shut off the program on command while either of us were in the lake. The friend based the location off of a few different planets, not just earth... but it was supposed to reflect Terran swamplands the most. I wasn't expecting her to have programmed in Ravish swampweed. It sucked you under. Once I realized what had happened, I commanded the computer to materialize a knife I could cut you loose with. I managed it, but it took some time. We should go to sickbay, now—make sure everything is fine."

"N-no," I said quickly, and I reached up to rub my eyes. "I'm fine, I don't need to go to sickbay."

"[Y/N], I want to make sure your lungs are completely dry," Julian insisted. "I don't want you to get pneumonia."