Work Text:
In the bygone ages, before the invention of tricoders and penetrating radiation, Cardassian foremothers of medicine had a certain difficulty mapping out the different areas of the body. No autopsy could be performed on a cadaver not belonging to the scientist’s family, and even if it was – what good daughter would share the innards of her own father or mother with the strangers, wise as they may be, of the scientific community at large? Forced to make educated guesses based on the palpation of their own bodies and public executions, (the fleeting moments the criminal was still alive, the darkly-clad commissar already waiting to shroud them, crowd already dissipating) the pioneers of medicine attempted to imagine the Cardassian skeleton.
The end results have always looked to Garak like a bunch of wire clotheshangers that fell down the stairs. The femurs and the forearm bones, those were usually well-portrayed, although misshapen – it’s not very hard to get an image of a man with an open break – but the closer to the inside of the body, the more bizarre shapes the skeletal system diagrams took. Traverse ribs zigzagging away from the spine. The pelvis round and slanted like a fruitbowl. Every bone in the body pointy, barely fitting into one another.
Tired, aching, and too cold to shake, Garak begins to understand how they arrived at that conclusion. He feels like inside of him there is a bunch of wire clothes hangers that fell down the stairs.
“That’s actually quite interesting,” Doctor Bashir says, over comms. His voice sounds good, lively. It’s worth taking out a hand from under the blanket. “Do you have some of those vintage medical diagrams?”
“Interesting?” Garak hisses, more out of the unwillingness to fully open his frozen-stiff mouth. “Doctor, I’m going to freeze to death!”
“You’d be the first Cardassian to do so inside of a well insulated room,” Bashir seems to find the whole thing amusing. “Can I write a medical paper on that, or am I still considered an outsider?”
After Tain’s shri-tal, he means, and that depletes Garak, so he taps the commbadge he’s not supposed to have and hangs up with some half-humorous remark.
He doesn’t ask Bashir to come to him. It’s ridiculous, but he started taking him for granted, at that Dominion hellhole, the way he never parted from him, at most somewhere behind the next corner, the wall. When Garak thinks of the camp, he thinks of Bashir, a dark-eyed ghostly apparition, cheeks sunken, always at the next glance over.
And then they escaped, and he was gone.
He must have slept after they arrived, he thinks, and then there was the debrief – and after the debrief, Bashir went to his quarters, disappeared behind the door and emerged in the newly issued uniform, as if nothing had happened, and ran off to his shift, and back into the quarters, throwing himself right into work.
It was entirely reasonable, Garak thinks, pulling his hands under himself, shoving them into the miniscule amount of warmth between his body and the bed. He should do the same, get dressed, get up from under the blankets. There was little for him to do, but he should be reviewing the surveillance, or making sure nothing was tampered with (that shapeshifter, here, on the station, as Bashir), or preparing himself from the next unavoidable crisis, or do an exercise, or just anything that wasn’t laying on his belly and trying and failing to warm up.
And Bashir was in the camp for longer than you, Garak says to himself, another half of him wondering when did he get so old that cold felt this painful. Bashir was there for longer, and you didn’t realize it, and now he was at work, and you’re pathetic.
Garak promises himself to get up in the next thirty seconds. Then he doesn’t.
Really, it’s on him for believing that he was actually going to do it. How gullible. Alright, in the next thirty seconds.
It’s really, undeniably, fucking cold.
Garak pulls the blanket, the second blanket and two spare rolls of fabric that he decided would do in a pinch tighter around himself. It helps, somehow, but then with every breath, he feels them get heavier on top of his head, in a way that is completely illusory. But somehow reminiscent of walls. Or a lid to a coffin. Or a closet door.
It takes about three more seconds for the doorness of the situation to get very unpleasant, and he takes the covers off his face, at which point he arrives back at ground zero: also understood as the state of being far too cold.
He contemplates getting something warm replicated, a tea, maybe. That task entertains him for the next half a minute – maybe if he wrapped the coverings around himself, the cold air wouldn’t get to him, and he could carry the tea back to bed – and givs him something to think about instead of the fact that he’s weaker than a Human.
He doesn’t get up.
As much as he hears Tain’s voice—not cruel, never cruel, cruelty was a crude tool, a man like Tain wielded subtlety better—pinpointing his sloth, he still cannot bring himself to rise. He’s halfway into constructing another lie for himself, when the door slides open, regretfully bringing a cold draft into the room. And less regretfully, Bashir.
The new uniform is so dark, all the blue gone from it, Bashir looking like a grey, smeared inkblot someone didn’t wipe off a page in time. Garak blinks, willing his eyes to work better – the face that comes into focus is tired, but familiar. He watches Bashir walk in, then balance on one leg to take his shoes off – Human custom, one that Garak didn’t think he’d get to see again.
“You’re not frozen to death yet,” Bashir remarks. “Quark would call that false advertising.”
Garak looks at the shoes, creased leather boots now slouching on his floor, and finds himself struggling to bicker back. He tucks his face into the mattress and listens to the sounds of Bashir moving around his room, intruding, putting his hands where they don’t belong – it’s like a hallucination or a dream, the soft footsteps somewhere outside of the bed.
“You know, Human scientists actually had a very similar problem,” Bashir says. “The sourcing of the bodies. In some cultures, it was considered sacrilege to not let somebody rest in one piece, rest, that is to bury them in the ground– that’s how we used to dispose of our dead-”
“And what was the delightful Human solution?” Garak sets out bait.
“At night, the doctors would break into cemeteries, dig the dead up, and steal them for universities,” Bashir looks proud.
That gets Garak to raise his head. “That’s preposterous.”
“It’s true!” Bashir argues back. “You can look it up-”
“You’ve gotten better at lying, Doctor” Garak praises, truthfully. “But not that good. Surely even your people couldn’t be that depraved.”
That second part is a lie – Humans can be sufficiently depraved in all facets of life, not just the pleasurable ones– and even if this bizarre little story is certainly something the good doctor read somewhere and mistakenly took for truth, there is little he’d consider the Federation not capable of. Perhaps maybe taking accountability.
“Is this the sort of medicine that I tore you away from, just now?” Garak asks. He doesn’t really know why Bashir came. To offer pity? He’d take it.
The mattress shifts when Bashir sits on the edge of the bed, and maybe it’s a hallucination, but there is a sub-real warmth radiating from him, even at this distance, and the knot of wire and stiffness shifts inside Garak, like an ice cube slowly beginning to melt.
“Girani told me to go and rest,” Bashir sighs. “Under the threat of a medical leave. To be honest, I think she likes having the run of the place.”
“Ah, the neverending struggle for career advancement,” Garak smiles, if only to make Bashir bat at his shoulder lightly and bring the warmth closer. He wants to draw it out, the presence, the haunting, for as long as possible, but he doesn’t allow himself the luxury. “You should go rest then, Doctor.”
He wants Bashir to stay, obviously – a subtle want that could be used to describe the way a person drowning feels for dry land, or the way cattle wants the branding iron to be taken off its flank – but Bashir, despite having bathed, shaved, and probably bathed again, still looks worse for wear, skin dry and sallow, eyes tired.
Bashir taps his hand on the mattress. “Right.” He doesn’t move.
“You really are cold,” he remarks then, all of the sudden, and Garak wants to argue, defend himself, he’s not some malignant, of course it’s cold – but then, a hand comes to the back of his neck, and all else quiets. Garak breathes in, feels the pain disappear from his upper back, his skull, tension releasing.
“Well, I’m still on the clock,” Bashir says. “And your temperature is way too low. If you’re not in need of medical attention now, you’re bound to be later.”
The hand doesn’t move from Garak’s neck, fingers slowly shifting.
They held each other before, at the camp, shoved into a cot barely big enough for one man, always in silence. Tain’s profile in the next bed over, a dark lump finished off with his profile – like one of those mountains the locals always imagine to be a sleeping warrior ready to wake – and Bashir’s elbow always poking him at an uncomfortable angle, no matter the position.
Garak risks moving his head under the blessing of warmth, sees the expression on Bashir’s face – he needs to see it, to make sure. Bashir’s eyes are half-lidded and his mouth is slightly parted, and Garak knows this expression, has learned to recognize it in the dark, in chaos, behind a latrine, over foul-tasting food rations. Bashir wants to come close, by some quirk of the Human psyche, some disguised delusion that it would give him comfort.
Somebody needs to offer, and Garak is already pathetic, with nothing to lose, so he says:
“Perhaps you could be of assistance?”
It’s a seedy, unsubtle courtship, and it should ring comedic, absurd. But it doesn’t. They’re alone in the room, and when Bashir takes his hand off Garak’s neck, the shiver that sets in is almost painful.
They’ve done this before.
But not like this. Bashir is undressing, hunched over, like people did in the camp, on the very rare occasions there was a chance for a bowl of cold water or better clothing – easing his trousers down with his torso almost touching his thighs, so that he doesn’t expose himself to anybody looking at him from the front. Garak raises his orbital ridges, and Bashir takes it the wrong way, because he laughs awkwardly and straightens up, finishes undressing the way free people do.
Garak’s orbital ridge stays raised, or at least he thinks it does. He can’t feel his face.
“Skin-to-skin contact,” Bashir explains. “It will warm you up faster this way.”
“And you do this with all of your patients?” Garak asks. Bashir being there, just being, makes his blood flood to his neck and face, and thinking feels less like trying to wade through a pool full of freezing congealed tojal.
“Yes,” Bashir says, naked, standing in the room with that normalness of a ghostly apparition, and Garak has had enough of being pathetic, of being horrible, so he goes to rip his own clothes off, hands fumbling on the clasps under his stomach, shimmying out of his trousers. He kicks them further under the covers somewhere – Bashir is doing something to his own clothes, attempting to badly fold them, and Garak retreats back to the covers, to his funeral shroud and suffocating weight of his own body.
He slides into the covers without another word, the mattress barely indenting under his weight. Praise the State for high-quality material goods.
Garak remains on his stomach, face half-buried in the cradle he’s made for it with his own folded arms. The sudden press of Bashir’s body along his back is a shock of heat: skin to scales, chest flush with spine, narrow hips slotting neatly over the curve of Garak’s rear.
Garak supposes he should take it as a compliment that Bashir’s cock is already thickening. It nudges against the cleft of his rear. All it would take is a slight adjustment and it’d be brushing the sealed line of his ajan.
Well. His ajan that is losing its seal with every shift Bashir makes above him.
But that’s a thought he can barely hold on to, especially as Bashir’s legs are bracketing Garak’s, thighs covering thighs, calves pressed to calves. Garak’s own legs are still tightly pressed together, a lingering attempt at modesty or control. Garak tries to lower his arms, to give him the ability to push up and leverage in case he needs to turn, to fight, to flee– but the movement instead arches his back just enough to press himself more firmly into Juilan.
Bashir’s hands find Garak’s flanks first, fingers splaying wide over the transition zone where the fine, flexible scales of the waist give way to the broader, smoother plates of hip and thigh. He strokes upward in slow sweeps, doubtless appreciative of the shift in texture. His doctor is nothing if not opportunistic for anatomical knowledge.
Garak twitches under the touch, a small, involuntary wiggle that travels the length of his spine. A breathy sound escapes him—half sigh, half stifled moan—but he clamps his lips shut immediately afterward, determined not to give in so quickly. He will not be so desperate, so needy, so decadent as to give in to pleasure so easily. He may take pleasure like any proud Cardassian– as the many times he’s plowed Bashir into various surfaces have demonstrated– but to have it wrought from him, pulled from him like he’s a Eilora blossom, stigma plucked to produce the sweetest syrup…
No, no, if he is going to just lay there and receive pleasure, he will make Bashir work for every sound, every tremor– even if the evidence of his arousal is already gathering below his chuva.
His doctor’s hands– and yes, he has indulged enough in calling him his that the term slips out readily, even if it’s only in the confines of his mind– continue on their journey across the hills and valleys of Garak’s body: the dips of chuen and ranges of ridges, and even make a sojourn veering toward – but not close enough to– the wellspring where water raise forth. Yet just as they skirt the place where scales soften and inflame they are gone again, gliding up Garak’s ribcase to the undersides of his arms– triceps, forearms– until fingers close around Garak’s wrists. He draws them out from under Garak’s head in a smooth motion and pins them. Not cruelly, just firmly enough that Garak feels the stretch through his trapezii. The stretch, and the delicious illusion of restraint.
Then Bashir lowers his mouth to Garak’s scapulic ridge.
The first kiss is soft, confident, placed right on his kinat’hU.
Garak’s breath hitches.
Bashir works his way up as though Garak’s lapse was encouragement. He presses kisses– no, the first few are kisses, but then they’re nips, licks, mouthing motions that press Bashir’s warm, impossibly soft tongue against his scale seams. Bashir reaches his aural ridge, nips lightly at the softer microscales there, then drags the point of his tongue along to his jaw, wrenching a shiver through Garak that makes him jerk his hips down into the mattress.
He rides the wave, grinding once, then twice, into the yielding surface below, rolls meant to be subtle, to tease friction against his quickly-softening ajan. There’s heat building there: the growing, incessant pressure of his prUt beneath the seam, and wanting to emerge but held back by the last threads of his pride. Bashir may be wanton, already rocking against him, cock hard and slick along the cleft, nudging repeatedly at his ajan and pleading entrance through sheer persistence, but Garak is trained better than that. The thrusting is patient, maddening, but Garak knows the consequences of failing to have mastery over his will. Garak bites the inside of his cheek and keeps his breathing even and his ajan tight.
He can feel; it softens and drips regardless.
Bashir’s grip meanwhile shifts on his wrists, laces his fingers between Garak’s so the pin becomes an embrace. He turns his head fully so his cheek presses against Garak head, resting upon him, and Garak involuntarily thinks of the monumentals of Lakarian City: great statues depicting Cardassians working, fighting, upholding their duty side by side in mirror images of one another.
Bashir exhales, and the breath ghosts over Garak’s lips. “You’re shaking.”
“I’m cold,” Garak lies.
“Hmn,” Bashir does not call out the falsity. “Not for long.”
He follows the words with a long, slow grind of his hips. The head of his cock catches briefly at the furthest back point Garak’s seam—pressure, heat, promise that he’s never indulged himself in before, for a good servant of the State does not receive pleasure such as this—and Garak can’t stop the low, broken moan it evokes. His body betrays him completely then: hisajan flushes, softens, parts, and his prUt emerges in a wet blossom, smooth and ridged and already leaking, smearing slick against the sheets.
By the State, he’s soaked.
Bashir feels it– of course he does, there’s no way he could miss such a flood– and he exhales sharply, as though he can’t wait any longer.
And so he doesn’t.
He braces his feet against the mattress, cants his hips up just enough to slide his knees between Garak’s, then presses out and down, spreading Garak’s legs apart.
The motion forces his ajan wider. Glistening. Vulnerable. Bashir nudges forward; the head of his cock skirts it on the first push, then slides inside.
It’s thick, so much thicker than the tapered head of a prUt that Garak is squirming before he can register it. There’s a pull out, then push in, then another, and another, and then Bashir is finding a rhythmic push-pull until he’s barely withdrawing, gliding in to the hilt each time.
Garak shudders.
Because Bashir is everywhere: chest to back: hips to rear, thighs caging thighs. Arms are laid out along arms, fingers interlaced; even his face is pressed into the planes of Garak’s. If Julan had orbital ridges they’d be bumping against his; if he had a chufa it’d be rubbing maddeningly, tantalizingly against his. But Bashir has neither, only hectares of smooth skin, an entire peninsula of desert, the skins and sands of which he could lay upon and bask in until his scales have drunk their fill of sun and light and heat and his muscles finally release and relax, and his bones organize themselves into the shape of a good Cardassian rather than this wretched thing he knows himself to be.
Bashir is everywhere, and it should be suffocating. He’s above him, pressed into him, inside him. His body lines Garak’s; he is utterly pinned from toe to fingertip. Even his face is pressed against his to block from his view from everything except the small gap between the mattress and the plane of Bashir– of Julian. His cheek, absent of that curious scratch that had taken residence upon his face at the camp, presses into his aural ridge, his ear, muffling the world and putting it at a distant remove. The world has narrowed to the small, dark space carved out between body and mattress and blanket; to muffled breaths and the steady, unyielding press of flesh.
By all rights he should be panicking, thrashing, sweating and screaming for release from this prison of flesh that surrounds, traps, entombs him. But how could he, because this is Julian that has become his universe, his home.
Julian is everywhere, and it is Cardassia.
He continues to move above, around, within Garak, thrusts transforming into deep rolls of his hips that clearly take all of his effort to withdraw from. Garak’s prUt slides helplessly against the sheets with each thrust, friction building but secondary, almost incidental.
Julian rolls into him again, bottoming out and making every wire-hanger bone inside him finally, finally release. And why couldn’t every small space feel this welcoming and warm; sheltered and secure instead of oppressive and choking? Here, the dark is soft. Here, the pressuer is not punishment but presence. Here, the inability to move is not helplessness, but belonging.
And in this belonging the pleasure there is real —hot, insistent—and for all his strength, in all his weakness, Garak gives in. It is permitted pleasure. He can allow it, though it requires nothing of him but passive endurance. He may not be granting it, but he is also not chasing it, nor begging for it. He is merely… receiving the side effect of Julian’s generosity.
Garak tries to close his mind to the thought, but it sticks its foot in the door– the closet door, no, another door, one that does not close but stays open no matter how hard he tries to force it shut. It is indulgent, dangerous. To take comfort in being held is to admit one needs holding. To luxuriate in being filled is to confess emptiness, hunger. He has spent decades being trained out of hunger. Pleasure received is pleasure owed; pleasure owed is leverage lost. He directs pleasure. He wields it as a tool. He dispenses it: as favor, as a strand in a web.
He does not accept it; he is no supplicant at the altar of some Human’s mercy.
Julian murmurs something. Garak can’t make out the word, but he knows its tenderness.
What undoes him, in the end, is that word. The alignment of their bodies. The muffled whispers of the world gone silent until the only thing Garak can hear is the internal echo of their collision and joining, and the soft breathy noises Julian tries and fails to swallow.
Garak clenches around him once, experimentally. Julian groans against his ear, fingers tightening and hips grinding…
Again. Harder.
Julian falters–and what does that say about Human endurance to be undone by so little?-- and when he resumes his thrusts are more shallow. Desperate.
Garak bears down one last time– tight, slick, deliberate– and the tide rises and his waters flood. It’s not the friction in his prUt– barely even the steady rub of Julian utterly filling his ajan, so blunt and hot– but from being utterly enveloped.
His inner walls spasm hard around Julian, welling up from within and relentless. Julian’s breath catches against Garak’s cheek and his body curls as he chases the feeling.
Garak’s own release is first a crack deep under his chuva, then a rolling crest that spreads outward until his toes curl and his ridges flush. It is not sharp; it is deep. Not explosive but enveloping, stepping into the sun after years underground. His prUt pulses against the sheets, spilling in sluggish pulses that feel almost secondary to the greater, quieter flood inside him: his ajan clenching in rhythmic gratitude for the heat that Julian imparts so deep in his core. If he could keep that heat inside him, he has no doubt it would keep him warm to the end of his days, even if he never stepped off this damned station.
They stay like that, hovering, floating in an indeterminate state while the station around Garak floats away, exists in some hazy, removed universe of its own. It’s long minutes more until Julian– no, Bashir’s– grasp tightens slightly on Garak’s left side and he eases himself to the side. He doesn’t pull out, just shifts so they’re lying intertwined with one another.
Bashir’s arm drapes across Garak’s waist. His fingers play with the ridges of his chuva.
“Are you warmer now?”
The question is asked into his hair, and Garak presses his lips to Bashir’s cheek as a response. The difference between their temperatures feels slight now, almost unnoticeable, as if they were both hands of the same body.
Bashir yawns, a Human thing – he turns his head away to not show his face, the teeth showing in an odd grimace – and the cold air enters the space between them. Garak untangles his hands from the intertwined mess of their bodies and gently, as to not trigger offense, slides out his grasp. He goes hunting for his trousers throught he haze still in residence in his mind, finds them somewhere at the foot of the bed. He captures a handkerchief, a thin grey thing, and runs it down his thighs. Bashir’s emissions have the impoliteness of already begun the process of congealing– Garak knows from experience if he waits too long it’ll dry in an uncomfortable crust– but his thinner fluids require more time and attention to wipe away with any measure of satisfaction. Bashir makes a noise somewhere in the bed, calling him back.
Garak doesn’t bring back Bashir’s clothes— just crawls back across the covers, slides back into his place, the new barrier of fabric stiff between them. Bashir hums something, runs his hand across Garak’s shirt, fingers catching. He mumbles something else Garak can’t hear, then makes a dismissive gesture with the corner of his mouth when Garak raises his ridges in question. Perhaps he’d be able to read Bashir’s lips to tell what word he’d missed, if it weren’t for that strange blur that welled up from somewhere to cover the world. Garak blinks furiously. From the tone he can tell the word is smug, though, so he nips at Bashir’s ear, which makes him gasp and push him away playfully – but his doctor aborts the movement halfway and his arms instead fall loose between them, and Garak feels his head sink downwards too, the world dissipating.
On the doorstep of sleep, Garak takes in Bashir. Still warm, heart still beating, with the tired face and slim hands of a Human graverobber. He’s staring off into space – somewhere, not real space, the viewport is behind him—brown eyes fixed on some distance far away from this cocoon where they both reside.
Perhaps there is something he can give Bashir, to make even this debt created between them. Perhaps, when he no longer has need of his body, his opportunistic doctor may wish to use Garak's corpse to learn all the intricacies of the Cardassian body he's never been privy to.
Garak considers extending the offer, but Bashir’s expression is doing that woeful Federaji thing– the one that is so open and guileless that Garak can’t tell if it’s empty or worried.
Garak wants to reach to him, call him back, but he falls asleep before he gets to.
Or maybe he dies, it’s hard to tell.