#.shoutout to ectogeo and fatalism-and-villainy for giving me brainworms on this topic at the exact same time i hit s6 in my rewatch.

[dreamerdrop]

in much the same way that i feel robbed of sisko and bashir having a closer relationship throughout ds9 in general, it continues to plague my thoughts that seeds of mistrust and perceived betrayal are threaded between them more than a few times and it just doesn’t go anywhere.

it starts at not getting to see sisko react to learning bashir is an augment, or really hearing much of sisko’s thoughts on that at all ever. then there’s bashir’s actions in statistical probabilities, which then leads into inquistion with sisko being front and centre during the simulation, and then immediately we get in the pale moonlight and sisko twisting bashir’s arm for a restricted substance.

(and there’s the obvious thread here that as sisko and garak spend more time colluding and collaborating, bashir and garak’s relationship is largely tossed into the background, doylist reasons for that aside.)

but the episode i just cannot stop thinking about in regards to sisko and bashir’s… lack of any confrontation, and that’s IAESL. ross and sisko are shown to be on fairly good terms. ross is the one who tells sisko to encourage bashir to cooperate with sloan. as we later discover, ross himself is working with sloan, on a plan which ends up involving bashir being tortured during an interrogation by their very own mole.

and it will not stop gnawing at me that bashir never even asks how much sisko was aware of when he learns that ross was working with sloan.

is it simply that he assumed sisko was unaware and was also misled by ross? or does bashir think, pondering back on the biomemtic gel he was strongarmed into providing, on the way sisko and garak have been spending more and more time together, on the seeds of doubt planted by inquistion, on bashir’s own mistakes giving reason for sisko to doubt him, and does he wonder if maybe, maybe, sisko knew.

if maybe sisko encouraged him to work with sloan, knowing full well what was going to happen.

and it probably doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things, because it’s just another nail in the coffin of bashir’s idealism and faith in other people, but it still eats at me regardless.