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“I'm sorry, Garak. I didn't mean…”
“Oh, it's quite alright, Doctor. You've been such a good friend. I'm going to miss our lunches together.”
“I'm sure we'll see each other again.”
“I'd like to think so, but one can never say. We live in uncertain times.”
It’s been close to a year now since he’s heard from Dr. Bashir.
A little over six months since he sent him… whatever one would like to call his last message to the good doctor. Letter doesn’t carry enough heft for the length of the missive, or its contents. His memoirs, Garak supposes, flung out into space in the hopes of reaching the one person left in the universe who might still be capable of understanding him.
Who might still be capable of forgiving him.
Garak is a man of very few hopes, and even fewer friends. Even in this brave new Cardassia that he’s been able to carve out a role for himself on, enemies are numerous and allies can only afford to do so much.
He’s never been allowed to have friends before. His dear Doctor is an aberration. Off the top of his head, he can list at least six things that Bashir should have, by Federation standards at least, refused to forgive him for.
It's hard not to read Bashir’s silence as damnation. To not assume that he has stretched, overreached, and overextended the doctor’s capacity for mercy. Perhaps silence is the most gracious kindness that Dr. Bashir is capable of extending to him right now. Perhaps, Garak thinks on the nights where the darkness and the hunger and the wretched pain of the creation of a new Cardassia do not manage to consume him—perhaps the Doctor is struggling himself with the aftermath of the war, tucked safely away on Deep Space Nine, and hurting. Perhaps as he lies on his cot in the hours after the power grid has been shut down for the evening, Dr. Bashir is languishing in his office as his overnight shift winds down, haunted by the specter of his idealism and naivete.
Other nights, the nights when the darkness and the hunger and the pain edge out rational thought, he imagines Bashir and Dax in bed together, laughing at the contents of his letter. The Doctor and the Counselor, mocking him in his hopelessness.
He has never been capable of getting better before. Why would he start now? Why not just give up, allow the disease and malnutrition take him? It would be easier, certainly.
Maybe kinder.
Maybe some people—maybe Elim Garak isn’t the kind of man who can come back. Why should he be allowed to try? He has killed more people than he cares to say, or remember. He’s ruined careers, ruined families, ruined lives. He’s taken and taken and taken in service of a father who would never love him.
Not Cardassia.
He knows that now. He knows that his actions done in service to Tain were not actually performed in service of Cardassia.
On other nights still, he wonders if his mangled attempt at a goodbye precluded him from access to Dr. Bashir’s life. He remembers the look on the dear Doctor’s face as he worked through the scope of the casualties of the Dominion bombardment. He turns the moment over in his mind, searching, searching— was he too cruel? Too brusque? Should he have tried to soften himself, tried to cry, scrounge up a performance of vulnerability? Garak is not practiced at keeping people in his life. Dr. Bashir had said that they would meet again in this life, and he had almost laughed in his face. He would have, if the words had been spoken by anyone but the Doctor. From the Doctor, he almost believed them.
Believes them.
He wants to believe them.
It’s Kira who checks up on him the most, a fact that would be infuriating if she didn’t write to him with an earnest, albeit clumsy and bare, sort of kindness. Kira writes to him about Quark and Morn and the other inhabitants of the Promenade, about Kassidy and Jake Sisko, about his former customers.
But she writes nothing about Dr. Bashir. And Garak doesn’t dare ask. He’s old enough to know better than to ask questions he doesn’t want to know the answer to.
The answer comes anyway.
Early one morning, before the sun even rises, there’s a new message waiting for him in his inbox. A new message, a letter, a—he still doesn’t know the word to describe what they’ve exchanged, he thinks, downloading the message’s contents onto his PADD.
The file size is large, almost alarmingly so, but the body of the message itself is brief.
Garak, Bashir writes. I’m sorry for the delay in my reply. As I imagine it has been for you, the past eight months have been an exercise in survival for me. An exercise in which I have questioned myself what it means to do more than just survive. What it would mean for me to actually, really live. And I think I’ve finally figured it out. Or at least, figured myself out.
Please see attached.
Opening the attached file, Garak’s pulse leaps in his throat, heart beating against the cage of his chest.
We have not grown apart, dear friend, it begins. We are still two literature lovers. We are still two unfinished men, challenging each other to consider the universe in new ways. We are still under the same stars.
Garak reads the next two hundred and thirty-seven pages voraciously, sipping red leaf tea and eating stale ration bars as he consumes the contents of Dr. Bashir’s life. His scant memories of his life before Adigeon Prime, the false idyll of his childhood, the moment the fabric of his life frayed and came undone when he found the paperwork in the attic of the London townhome and chased out all the secrets into light. His manic days at Starfleet Academy, the people he never let too close, the homes he never had. Meeting and leaving people behind. Leaving places behind. Leaving the truth behind. Leaving no trace of the true Julian Bashir.
His arrival on Deep Space Nine.
His departure from Deep Space Nine. (What? When? Garak thinks, stopping himself from flipping ahead. Stories are made to be consumed a certain way, and he knows that his dear Doctor has crafted the tale of his life with a surgical precision, with unrelenting care.)
Their first meeting.
Their last meeting.
And then the war in between. Garak stands, truly alarmed this time, when he reads of Dr. Bashir’s encounters with Section 31. Of his final encounter with Section 31. The end of the war. Their last meeting, their parting, again. And then:
I wish I had been forthright. But I was exhausted, battered, and diminished. I should have told you that you were strong. That you would survive this. That Cardassia would survive, because you would hold it together stitch by stitch, seaming the fabric of Cardassian society and culture and art and literature and music back together by yourself if you had to. That you were Cardassia’s most gifted mind.
I should have told you so many things, but I couldn’t even say them to myself. I didn’t recognize them in myself. I’ve always hid the most important truths from myself, in order to most effectively conceal my deepest, darkest secrets.
I’m in love with you, Garak.
Garak has to sit on his bed, his legs going numb as his knees melt out from under him, his fingers losing feeling where they close in around his PADD.
And… after reading what you wrote to me, I know you’re in love with me too. But I’m old enough to know that love isn’t enough. It never has been, for men like us.
If there’s anything I’ve learned from the Dominion War and from you, it’s that. I finally understand what you meant back in the prison camp, when you said that sentiment is the greatest weakness of all. Maybe it is. Maybe we love each other and it’ll never be enough. Maybe we love each other and it makes the universe we live in less safe, less navigable, less secure. But after everything that happened to us and to our friends during the war, I think we’ve both learned the lesson that refusing to give into sentiment does not give us a pass to any kind of certain future. It does not spare us from sorrow or pain. But giving into sentiment might allow us to find meaning among the devastation. To find any amount of joy among destruction. It makes it so that survival does not have to be a kind of death sentence.
I came to Cardassia six months ago with a Federation convoy.
Garak has to stop reading to check his own pulse. His thoughts immediately begin to dim and blur, setting his mind spinning like a whirligig. Or perhaps his mind is sent running like a racing hound, or perhaps his thoughts are twisting in the wind—he’s not certain. All metaphors are ripe for the mixing. How can he commit to one, in a moment like this?
Is he hallucinating? Is he hypotensive? Hypertensive? Forcing his breaths to remain even, he counts his heartbeats as they thrum against the pads of his fingers, continuing to read.
I know that I could not say that I love you and not also love Cardassia—it wouldn’t be fair to you. I have always known that once you returned from Cardassia, you could never be parted from her again. So I took a leave of absence from Starfleet to volunteer with the Federation Disaster Relief Corps, an option extended to all Starfleet medical personnel after the end of the Dominion War in order to staff the aid efforts.
It was Ezri’s idea, honestly. We didn’t last very long after the end of the war. Not even a full Bajoran month. She’s gone on to command training now, chasing her new dream, allowing herself to fully integrate with the Dax symbiont. I think with Sisko and Worf gone, she’s learned to let go of Jadzia and her own past. And so have I. We cannot regain what we have lost. There is nothing we can do to have what was taken from us returned. We can only move forward, as simply and as gracefully as possible.
You’re the only person who’s ever tolerated the real me, anyway. You’re quite possibly the first person who ever got to meet him.
I’m running a pediatric clinic in the Sedlak neighborhood of the Torr Sector. Every morning I half expect to awaken to you having broken into my apartment overnight, smirking as you ask how I expected to be on your Cardassia without you knowing. But I imagine that you’re quite busy running the interim government, or so I hear on the radio and from my patients. Well, my patients’ grown ups.
The address to my temporary housing is attached to this email. Today is my first day off in eighteen days. I’m not afraid to learn something new about myself. I’m not afraid to keep listening to what you’ve learnt about yourself. I think, if you’re interested, I’d like to keep doing that for the rest of our lives.
Yours,
Julian S. Bashir
Calmly, Garak sets his PADD onto the cot that he calls a bed, in the shack that he calls a dwelling, on the plot of land that he calls a home.
Cardassia. Dr. Bashir is on Cardassia.
Dr. Bashir has been on Cardassia for six months and somehow he did not sense it the moment the soles of his shoes touched sandy Cardassian soil.
That feels suspect. Garak is suspicious. So suspicious that he dresses himself quickly, and if his fingers tremble as he fastens all the hidden clasps and buttons, he doesn’t notice. He knows of the clinic that Dr. Bashir has been working in, in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the poorest sector of the city, staffed by a mix of Federation optimists and unflinching Cardassian cynics. He knows of the clinic, he thinks while tying the laces on his boots. He’s even read reports from the clinic. Did he not recognize his dear Doctor’s words when he read them? Or has Dr. Bashir been trying to present him with a challenge, trying to make it difficult to root out his presence here among the other aid workers?
He just barely catches the skimmer heading towards that part of the city as it departs, flashing his government worker ID card as he hoists himself on board. The card isn’t even fake. He hasn’t needed falsified papers in close to a decade now, and it still feels strange, especially back here in the capitol.
He’s rarely been himself here, since he was a child. The Son of Tain, come home to… do what, exactly?
Survive? Garak has always survived, even as an injured riding hound, backed into a corner, blood oozing out onto his skin and scales. He has always continued, a loping, limping beast. The only instinct he has ever honed has been to keep moving.
He thinks about Bashir’s words on the ride through the morning heat, the piquant smell of ozone filling the air. A dust storm is on it’s way, followed by an electrical storm, and rain if they’re lucky. There’s not much luck to be had on Cardassia these days, and Garak blithely wonders if he’s used up the planet’s daily allotment already. He thinks about Bashir’s words, turning them over and over again in his head like a piece of fabric before cutting it to a pattern. I’ve always hid the most important truths from myself, in order to most effectively conceal my deepest, darkest secrets.
Allowing the possibility of it all to settle over him, Garak thinks he understands what the Doctor is talking about.
The skimmer drops him off a block from the clinic and the small, rundown boarding house adjoining it where its workers reside. As his feet carry him towards it, he realizes for the first time in his life, he’s not certain what to say. He could bluster, or prevaricate, or quip. He’s almost certain that the Doctor expects it, if he’s expecting him at all. What about this day made him send his response, finally?
A hundred yards from the boarding house, Garak sees a familiar figure with dark hair and tanned skin and long limbs sitting in a windowsill three stories up, looking out into the pink hues of the morning light as he sips from a familiar blue mug.
And then the figure sees him, and smiles.
Julian half expected Garak not to come, to not respond to him at all. If anything, he expected that naming the thing between them, half-formed and ill-advised, would give Garak cause to never speak to him again.
But here Garak is—probably in spite of himself.
Or maybe not. They’ve both changed immeasurably in the year since they parted. He just hopes that they’ve changed into people who can grow back together. But as always, he must remind himself that his heart has a tendency to go one step too far. How many times has he disembarked into the abyss of instability, into obsession, into monomania? How many times has he read the situation wrong, said the wrong thing, made a critical misstep and ruined it all? How many times has he had to let a relationship run its course because they came too close, the risk became too large, of his secret being uncovered?
Somehow, whatever is between him and Garak is the most stable, most long lasting, most meaningful relationship he’s ever had. This thing that has always had secrets and lies and obfuscations, games with no real winner or loser, where no one keeps score and no one is ahead and no one is behind.
It would be a terrible thing to waste it.
Setting his purloined mug down on his nightstand, he eases himself down from the windowsill, taking stock of the contents of his small rectangular room. He has a bed just big enough to fit two grown adults, a nightstand, and a dresser. A table that fits four chairs around it at a squeeze holds a hotplate and small convection oven. A sink with a Federation-issued filtration system screwed onto the spout. A Federation-issue metal locker holds pantry staples, pots and pans, his clothes, and a safe with his limited valuables. Money, mostly, and his ID. A dingy mirror, the silver peeling away from the glass, hangs over the sink.
Two doors side-by-side lead to a closet, and to a refresher. The shower is hydraulic, not sonic. The building is a few hundred years old and it shows, but the strength of its foundation is what’s kept it standing through the bombardment. The coverlet on the bed and the threadbare rug on the floor are patterned in a traditional Cardassian geometric design. The overhead light doesn’t give off much of a glow, bathing the room in a deep orange light, but the desk lamp Julian brought from Deep Space Nine that sits on the table next to his hot plate and oven makes charting at night possible.
It’s not much, but it’s more than most people have.
Including Garak.
Should he offer to cook, he wonders as he hears the intercom chirp, crossing the room to press the button to admit Garak to the building. He hears the buzz of the electronic lock three stories below, hears the creak of the hinges as the door swings open.
Should he offer to make a late breakfast? He’s not a particularly good cook, but necessity has made him decent at the basics. In his locker is a ten pound bag of rice and a five pound bag of lentils, and he has more spices than he knows what to do with. His patients bring him fruit and vegetables from their plots in the community garden and eggs and salted meat from the market, even when he assures them that Starfleet is compensating him for his time.
And tea—he has tea, two mugs he stole from the replimat, and sugar.
They can have cups of tea.
He opens the door just as Garak clears the last step up onto the third floor landing, crossing the tiled floor stretched out in front of four different boarding rooms in only a few long steps. Julian’s never seen Garak wear an expression so bewildered or intent in his life, and he has his mouth half opened to say something understated and cool and calm when Garak reaches him in his doorway, pushes him inside, and kicks the door closed behind him.
“I see you got my letter,” Julian manages to get out, his voice feeble in comparison to the emotion rising in his chest.
When Garak grabs his waist and backs him up against the closet door, he does nothing to stop him. The rightness of how it feels to wind his arms around Garak’s neck is an anesthetic to his anxious thoughts and bone-deep weariness. Their bodies slot together, and it feels like some dislodged piece of his brain has been jostled back into place. Making a small noise at the back of his throat, Julian fists his hand in the hair at the nape of Garak’s neck and pulls him forward until Garak’s mouth is slanted over his. He comes willingly, pressing all his weight against Julian, fingers digging into the fabric of his shirt.
“You’re infuriating,” Garak mutters between kisses, nipping at Julian’s bottom lip before soothing it with his tongue. “Infuriating. Idiotic. Dramatic. Who else would come here for six months to the same city and not even write—”
“You would, don’t pretend you wouldn’t,” he replies, running his thumbs along the ridge of scales on Garak’s jawline before dropping his hands down to the sides of his ribcage. “You blew up your shop instead of telling Odo about your suspicions that an assassin was coming after you. You broke into a holosuite instead of telling me you were frustrated I wasn’t paying you enough attention. You would absolutely—”
Garak counters by grinding their hips together. “ Life isn’t a Bronte novel, dearest. All the Earth literature you’ve read has made your brain rot.”
Barking a laugh, Julian lets his head knock back against the closet door. The sound chokes off into a moan when Garak slides a leg between his, pressing a strong thigh upwards into his hardening cock.
“No, that’s the infernal summer heat,” he manages to respond, getting his hands under Garak’s jacket to stroke at the dense musculature covering his torso. He’s gotten lean since Julian last saw him, but no less powerful. “No wonder Cardassians are so aggressive, it’s the bloody temperature.”
Garak smiles, and it’s all teeth. “And yet you seem to be the hothouse flower, dear.”
“If I recall, you have a fondness for them.”
“They are a treasure when they bloom,” he rasps, ducking his head to fix his teeth on the side of Julian’s neck.
Fitting a hand between them, he flicks open the button on Julian’s trouser, dragging down the zipper. Gasping, Julian widens the stance of his feet, letting out a small moan when Garak wraps his fingers around his length. Julian wonders if he should be protesting—are they moving too fast? Should they be doing this without some kind of conversation? Garak holds his gaze as he jerks him off with short, exploratory motions. Maybe, after a friendship of glancing touches to shoulders and collarbones and lower backs, this is as honest as Garak is capable of being.
In a losing fight with the hinge of his jaw, Julian lets his mouth drop open as he folds his hand around Garak’s, showing him how he likes to be touched.
“I’m glad to see some life behind that smile of yours, Doctor,” Garak says, voice dropping to an even lower register. “You’ve gotten some of your boyishness back.”
“Only some?” Julian croaks.
He’s good. He’s very good. He’s a natural, really, for someone whose genitals are retractable and share no erogenous zones with the human penis. Julian moans—half a prayer, half a filthy invocation—when Garak discovers the sensitive knot of tissue just below the glans.
“Only some. No one quite so delicate or innocent can survive on Cardassia for very long. Perhaps it’s all an illusion, with you. After all, you’ve never been all that delicate or innocent, have you?”
“You like it that way,” he says, trying to rally.
At some point, he’s going to sink his teeth into Garak’s neck ridges and put all the medical literature about Cardassian erectile tissue to the test. And despite Garak’s best efforts to inculcate him to Cardassian language literature with Preloc and Iloja of Prim, he’s been on the planet long enough to have read his fair share of erotica and bawdy romance.
The fantasies he gets off on after the power grid shuts down for the night have been many and varied ever since one of his Cardassian coworkers first showed him how and where to find the Cardassian equivalent of a tawdry bodice ripper. Which is to say—showed him how to get past the remnants of the Empire’s censors and get to the books that weren’t written in service to the uh, State. And while Julian is certain that, like in human erotica, there are some things that don’t translate from the written word to reality… he’s spent many months imagining what would happen if he rolled the pad of his thumb over the divot of flesh just above Garak’s vent, or slid his fingers into his ajan and curled them upwards until he reached the sensitive irllun.
“I do, don’t I?” Garak asks, his scales flushing deep charcoal. “We do enjoy our trade in secrets. No one’s ever managed to surprise me as you have. It’s quite delightful. There aren’t many good kotra players left on this planet. You’d have the mind for it, I should teach you.”
Julian imagines there’s a great many things that he’d be amenable to Garak teaching him. Feeling arousal coiling hot in the base of his spine, he starts on the work of getting Garak out of his clothes.
“I think I’d like to apply my mind elsewhere for the time being, if you don’t—”
“Your mind or your—” Garak’s hips jerk when Julian parts the halves of his jacket and slips his hands back under his undershirt, then rakes his nails down his chest to his belly, then the waistband of his trousers. “Your body?”
One thing at a time, Julian thinks.
“I thought Cardassians considered the mind a sexual organ?” he retorts, finding the hidden clasps in the inseam of Garak’s pants.
He fixes him with a stare that can only be described as: bed, bed now.
Like many first times, theirs is half-improvised, half-compromised, and while not spectacular, is satisfying enough to leave them both more than a little breathless. The question of who will be on top is negotiated with their bodies rather than with words—but not silently, per se. Julian finds the air knocked from his lungs when Garak flips and pins him effortlessly, bracketing his hips with his knees as he secures his wrists over his head.
“Am I about to be ravished?” Julian asks, arching a single brow.
“Is there anything I need to know about before I commence?” Garak asks, nipping at his collarbone as he starts to rock his hips into his, allowing Julian’s cock to slide through the parted and swollen, dripping lips of his ajan. “Any unique qualities to your physiology to be… sensitive to?”
Julian fights not to plant his feet on the mattress and thrust up into him.
“I trust you to be sensitive to my physiology,” he says, fighting back a moan.
Lowering himself down onto his forearms, Garak slides his tongue into Julian’s mouth, allowing his fingers to play with the ends of his hair. The kiss is slow and seering, and Julian finds himself quickly overwhelmed in a singularly pleasing way. Eventually, Garak pulls back, their faces inches apart.
The look on his face is almost predatory.
“Your mistake.”
Minutes later, Julian finds himself biting his bottom lip until it bleeds trying to be sensitive to the boarding house’s paper thin walls and his neighbors.
Afterwards, they talk. Laying side by side, bodies arcing towards each other under the covers, they talk about everything and nothing of substance. They talk, and wonder if it shouldn’t come so naturally to them, after not seeing each other for a year.
They talk about Julian’s work on the interim government’s pediatric nutrition program and Garak’s position in the new Ministry of Foreign Affairs. About the newest book releases on at least four different planets, and the grain crop on the Northern continent. About Kira and the Siskos and even Ezri, and Kelas Parmak and Natima Lang and the emergent political parties on both Bajor and Cardassia. About the latest drama with the Federation Disaster Relief Corps and the anxiety over the weather and climate change and the new hospital rumored to be going up near the Imperial Plaza.
They talk until the temperature begins to drop and the wind shifts, then help each other off the bed and back onto their feet to pull the window closed and stop up the gaps with wet rags as the dust storm blows in.
As they enter the second summer since the bombardment, it feels almost routine—a massive storm cell will form over the ocean and as it blows in, sweep up all the dust and sand from the desert and force the city into a standstill for a few hours as visibility dwindles to zero. And then, once the dust clears, the heat rises again and the electricity begins to crackle, lightning strikes cratering concrete, lashing down onto the rods atop the remaining spires before finally: the rain.
Slowly, the Sedlak neighborhood disappears from view, replaced by a swirling darkness.
With a sigh, Garak wraps his arms around Julian’s middle, pulling him half a step backwards until Garak can press his nose into Julian’s shoulder blade. With his own answering sigh, Julian brings his hands to rest over Garak’s, lacing their fingers together, knowing fully what it means in Cardassian culture to do so.
Garak says nothing, but presses his lips against Julian’s shoulder.
“You’re cold,” Julian murmurs.
Garak holds him more tightly. “Do you mind?”
“Of course not.”
As the wind howls around them, they settle side by side on Julian’s bed, not bothering to dress before they crawl back in under the blankets. They both have cups of sweetened red leaf tea—and when Julian hands Garak the mug without the chip on the rim, it hits him like a bomb going off that this must be what love is, giving someone else the better mug. Wrapping them in the warmer blanket. Asking them if they have the extra battery pack for their PADD.
Julian has loved him for so long that he missed the language he was speaking entirely, because Garak never learned to speak it at all.
Gently, carefully, tentatively—he pulls the hand Julian isn’t using to drink his tea into his lap, running his thumbs over the pressure points in his palm. With a gratified sound, Julian lets his head drop onto his shoulder.
“How did you know they hurt?”
“I know everything, my dear,” Garak answers, because he knows Julian will give him the smile he reserves for when he knows he’s lying flagrantly. Staring down at the fine lines of Julian’s hand, he locates the next pressure point down near his wrist. “I know you’re doing stitches by hand nowadays, when the batteries in the dermal regenerators run out.”
Julian’s grin is bright enough to replace the sun. “And I imagine you know something about doing stitches by hand.”
“Just a little something,” he replies blithely.
Side by side, they drink their tea. And if in the distance there is thunder, they pay it no mind.