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It had been something of a shock, of course.
Over a month ago. Which amounted to a significant number of lunches, to say the least. Garak could recall the burn treatment conference, an outpouring of unbridled enthusiasm that had been all the more charming for its artless lack of effort to achieve any such effect—and the precise, deliberate effort it had required in return, to seem vaguely, benevolently disinterested. Detached.
Merely one of several opening moves in a protracted campaign on whose success he had been ready to congratulate himself. Disengagement, disentanglement, were unambiguously necessary; there was simply no other sane way forward.
He'd begun to look back on the old days with a grim, self-aware sort of nostalgia. Ah, to be so incautious! So obvious, so utterly unfettered by any need for restraint. There had been none, back then—he had looked at Julian, and he had seen a small entertaining challenge, a game with which he might amuse himself for at least a little while, as long as he was already trapped in exile on that too-cold too-bright station with its myriad of tiny everyday torments. A distraction, to engage in the attempt, and success would result in nothing more significant than an evening's physical pleasure; perhaps several evenings, if he had nothing more pressing to do.
How terribly overt he had been, even as the warning signs had begun to pile themselves up around him. The incident with the implant should've been enough in and of itself to make him aware of the problem—he had lost all composure, all patience, making that blatant invitation for Julian to join him in his quarters with a tremendous amount of kanar, even if he had also promptly ruined it by collapsing. And yet somehow the result had not been Julian in his bed. It had been him, prying himself open to the greatest degree he had been capable of at the time, breathlessly waiting to see whether Julian would flinch from even the vaguest half-reflected shadows of the truth. It had been him, giving Julian precisely as much information as required for Julian to find Tain; to touch, however briefly, however unknowingly, the raw heart of the wound.
That should have been enough to make him understand what he was dealing with, the breathtaking, dizzying depth of the danger he faced.
But it had taken several more years before he'd truly comprehended it.
He had, at least, belatedly begun to make up for his own unforgivable shortsightedness. He had, gently, gradually, reintroduced a reasonable measure of distance. Had agreed to meet Julian in the holosuites less often—had cited other appointments, other obligations, in ways designed to soften the blow, to make Julian think little of it. Had brought Ziyal to lunch, once and then again, again; at first, presented as simply a kind gesture to a young lady who had too few friends on the station, the kind of narrative Julian would readily accept. The kind of narrative that would allow Julian—and the rest of the replimat—to witness what would appear to be the natural growth of an emotional connection.
Much more effective than simply turning up one day to claim he'd fallen terribly in love with Ziyal; and nothing he would ever need to do anything about, given every excuse available to him in the difficulty of her position, her father, his exile, and so on and so forth. Even, perhaps, if he'd felt the need, the difference in their respective ages—a reminder, and one that would plausibly seem unintentional, that Julian had had only a handful of years on Ziyal when he and Garak had met. Another degree of distance introduced and gently reinforced.
The point was, it had been working as well as he could possibly have asked. Or he had believed it had.
Julian had returned from Meezan Four. He had accepted every careful shift in the balance between them without question, without disruption. Unbothered—Garak had been grateful for it, even as he had endured the needle-prick that went along with it, in the idea that Julian honestly didn't mind and perhaps even preferred Garak when held at arm's length.
And if the danger, as true and pressing and terrible as it was, had been as apparent to him as it had been to Garak, there had been no sign of it.
Except that hadn't been Julian at all. Julian had been here, in Internment Camp 371. With Tain, of all the unbearable realities to have to face—being tormented by the Jem'Hadar, no doubt, and doing whatever idiotically brave thing had caused him to be thrown into solitary confinement. Believing that at least his absence must have been noticed, that at least Commander Sisko must be looking for him, when the truth was nothing of the kind.
And how terribly obvious it had been, how immediately unmistakable the comparison. Over a month's cautious, wrenching labor, wasted on a Changeling to whom it had never been relevant; Julian had looked at Garak the same way he always had, had stood as close to him. Garak had found himself as inexcusably—open as ever; as confoundingly able to say, to that face as to no other he could imagine, something of what it meant to him to be confronted by the reality of Enabran Tain, in this place.
He should've known it hadn't been Julian. He should've known, for the simple reason that he could never have found it so easy to turn away as he had, if it had been Julian.
Frankly, I'm glad you came. Wry, exhausted, and yet there had been a foundation of truth in it nevertheless.
And he had been gripped, in that moment, with a sudden certainty.
Over a month's labor, wasted. If he didn't fix this now, as forcefully and unambiguously as it was possible to do it, there might never be another chance—this strange and terrible weakness, the greatest one of all, might well overcome him, and then it would be too late.
The only problem left had been that he hadn't the slightest idea how it could be done.
In a sense, then, it was pure luck that Martok should have come to them just then with word. Even if Garak had had the tools to hand, he might have found he lacked the will to use them; and even if he had the will, that might well have failed to save him. The implant: he remembered his own blatant foolishness as clearly as he remembered Julian's response. I forgive you for whatever it is you did. Unbearable, and all the more so because Julian had meant it.
But there was one truth worse than any of the others, worse by far than the lies had been. A truth even Julian Bashir would surely flinch from—and, better still, Garak would not even be required to figure out how best to wield it.
Father would do it for him.
"Everything's gone dark. I can't see you. Are you alone?"
Ah, how very many layers that question had, Garak thought.
He allowed himself to look. Foolishness, but—if Tain heard him do it, the soft sound of his hair against his shirtcollar, the shuffle of fabric, or felt the shift of his weight, he didn't say so. Perhaps it simply seemed as if Garak were glancing about the room to check, to make sure he hadn't overlooked a figure in a corner, or tucked into another bunk, besides the unmoving Breen.
He had already chosen his answer. It was the only way forward, the only way out, and the word had begun to escape even as he permitted himself to meet Julian's eyes. "Yes."
And the expression on Julian's face then was as grave, as tired and sober and shadowed, as Garak had ever seen it.
He made himself look away again. "There's no one else but you and me."
How very true that had once been; how true, in a sense, it always would be.
A litany of enemies. Garak said all the right things, offered every reassurance a dying Cardassian could possibly hope to hear. Humans probably didn't tell each other such things, at times like these; no doubt their deathbed murmurs were gentler, sweeter. What a charming thought.
A promise, next. One that Tain had hardly needed to ask him for. Characteristic arrogance, of course, to believe that Garak might be better motivated to live for Tain's reasons than for his own. But ultimately unsurprising.
An opportunity. Garak pressed it, chest tight, throat aching.
And however well he might have endeavored to brace himself, a cold weight gripped him, then, in the instant before Father said, "You have always been a weakness I can't afford."
"So you've told me, many times," Garak heard himself say.
"I tried," Father added, hoarse. "Tried to fix it."
Garak swallowed. It was unreasonably difficult to do it. His heart was hammering in his chest; his mind was oddly blank. He felt excruciatingly aware of Julian, unmoving, leaning against the far wall—of the weight of Julian's eyes on him. But he'd told Father they were alone. He could not tell him to stop, could offer no excuse for failing to respond as he must expect—
"Is that what you were doing," Garak said, very softly, and every word scraped its way through his throat like the edge of a knife.
"Such a sentimental boy," Father said, as if it bewildered him still that he had managed to sire a thing like that. "Had to teach you a lesson."
How peculiar. Garak perceived himself as both frozen, trapped within the limits of a body that would no longer obey him, and at the same time somewhere outside of himself, as if he were watching from a stride away.
"Interesting that you should refer to it in the singular," his mouth said, entirely without permission. "I seem to recall quite a number of lessons."
"Sentimental," Father repeated, breath short, barely over a whisper. "Kept—forgiving me. Foolish boy."
"Yes," Garak said distantly. "Yes, that was incredibly foolish, wasn't it?"
"Kept crying," Father said. "Always crying. Made it take longer, but you did it anyway. Took almost a year for you to learn—to wait until I was done. Stupid boy."
Garak shut his eyes. He couldn't quite feel his fingers anymore, but he was fairly certain he still had Father's hand clasped in his. As cool and dry as it had always been. He experienced a sudden powerful urge to hurl it away, or perhaps to crush it; to find something nearby with which to sever it at the wrist—
"Should've killed you myself," Father added; a handful of words to a breath, now, and the breaths shallower, slower to come. "Would've been—quicker. Safer." A pause. "Elim, do you remember that day—in the country?"
Ah, yes. Of course. The riding hound. "How can I forget it?" Garak said, quietly, very evenly. "It was the only day."
"I was very proud of you," Father murmured, "that day."
And then, as quickly as that, it was over.
Garak could hear it, first. The breath departing, the lack of another. And then he could feel it after all, in Father's hand—that unmistakable passivity, the last thread snapping, the utter absence of vitality that was left in its wake.
He opened his eyes. Father lay there, silent, unmoving, the barest gleaming crescent still visible beneath slack eyelids. It was only the inevitable relaxation of the body in death. Garak knew that. But Father's expression looked rather peaceful, and Garak wanted dimly to cut his face off, to make it stop.
He didn't do it. He didn't have a blade to hand, unfortunately. Shame this had happened in a Dominion internment camp, where every weapon he might otherwise have had had been taken from him.
He just sat there, for a pointlessly extended moment.
"Garak," Julian said.
The tone of his voice was soft, unsteady.
Sentimental, Garak thought.
He didn't look at Julian. He stood instead, rose from the edge of the bunk; Father's hand slid from his, and he let it, and then he took the blanket and lifted it from where it lay tucked over Father's chest, straightened it until he could cover Father's shoulders and head with it.
And then, naturally, the door opened. Martok, and Worf with him. Garak reassembled himself as best he could, distantly grateful for the years of long practice that allowed it, and turned around.
Julian must have composed himself equally quickly. But—imperfectly. Garak had a single stretching instant to absorb all that remained: the tension in Julian's jaw, the sick fixed look on his face, the odd bright sheen in his eyes.
He didn't dwell on it. There wasn't time for it, not now. He inclined his head, and addressed Martok, Worf, Julian, with brisk clarity.
They had an internment camp to escape from. The rest could wait.
It did mean, of course, that the eventual success of their plan was actually nothing of the sort. Not for him. The internment camp was, in point of fact, all that preserved him from the last and least bearable trial that awaited him.
He was grateful, at least intellectually, for the claustrophobia and the crawlspace. What a convenient excuse it was, to come apart a piece at a time in a way that had an objective explanation, that required the disclosure of a vulnerability so comparatively tolerable. And—
And in a way that gave him Julian, for at least a little while. Because Julian was a doctor; and whatever he thought of Garak now, whatever he had gotten out of the things Tain had said and whatever he believed he knew, that wouldn't stop him from doing what he could to care for Garak, in the midst of a protracted episode of medical distress.
Julian was gentle with him. Conscientious, attentive—firm, when he thought Garak had overdone it, and a stern overseer when it came to the length and frequency of the breaks he insisted Garak take. He touched Garak, without hesitation or fuss, to take his pulse or estimate his blood pressure or whatever else it was he thought he needed to do; and the further all the seams split, the more desperately Garak appreciated that solid warm steadiness.
It wasn't going to be enough. Of course it wasn't. Even Julian's compassion could only plausibly extend so far, and after this, Garak had lost any possible hope of enforcing sanity upon himself.
Sentiment. If only Tain had understood the true degree of it, that his—lessons—had made so little difference after all.
The only mercy was that surely it no longer mattered. However relentlessly driven Garak might be to cling to Julian, to grasp after every conscientious professional kindness Julian felt moved to extend to him, Julian himself would prevent any overreach now.
Garak was as safe as he could ever have hoped to be from making the error he'd meant to redress. If only he could find it in himself to be proportionately grateful for it.
Julian had absolutely no idea what to do.
It had all been such a horrible crushing rush, one thing after another so quickly it felt as if he'd barely had time to think—and twice as disorienting, after the long slow grind that had been solitary confinement, no movement or life or voice in the universe but his own for days and days. Just seeing Worf and Garak, in and of itself; the helpless rush of relief, thinking they'd found him, come for him, and then the understanding that they hadn't, the stomach-lurching drop of being told there had been a duplicate of him walking around on the station for—for weeks, the entire time he'd been imprisoned.
He could admit he'd been wrestling with a certain degree of petty resentment, after that. That apparently they hadn't even noticed; not that it would've been reasonable to expect any such thing from Worf, whom he knew and liked but did not, on the whole, spend all that much time with. But it seemed Miles hadn't noticed, either. Miles, Jadzia, Kira. It seemed Garak hadn't noticed—Garak, whom Julian would've said without an instant's hesitation was the most attentive, detail-oriented, paranoid person he knew.
But he hadn't been wrestling that resentment alone. Because he'd also felt a few other things, among them a great deal of helpless gratitude. All right, so apparently Worf and Garak hadn't actually mounted a rescue operation, with the entire crew of the station on standby out there somewhere, to come find him. That didn't mean it wasn't almost incomprehensibly good to see them. Both of them, of course—but Garak undeniably, inescapably more so, no matter how Julian had tried to shove the awareness down.
He'd already been—preoccupied. Even before he'd left the station for Meezan Four, that had been true. A certain odd tension had begun to creep into the air between him and Garak, a missed stair where there hadn't been one before, and he'd already been stuck on it, trying to work out why; trying to figure out whether it was him, whether Garak had noticed. Trying to be normal, whatever that meant. Trying to be reasonable, undemanding. Trying not to ask more than Garak apparently cared to give him.
But then, well. Then he'd gone to the conference, and he'd spent half of it thinking about Garak, helplessly wondering what Garak was doing, whether he was going to keep on having lunch with Ziyal while Julian was gone. Whether Julian would come back and find himself a third wheel on his own damn dates, and never mind that he'd been going on them for years without realizing that was what he wanted them to be. Tossing and turning until at last he'd finally fallen asleep; it was almost funny, now, imagining the Changeling who'd been sent to take his place forced to wait through all his shifting and sighing and replicated cups of chamomile tea before they'd been able to take him out.
And then there had been Internment Camp 371. Internment Camp 371, and Tain.
Tain had been there a long time already, of course—not quite since the failed Cardassian fleet, apparently he'd been held in some other much less pleasant facility first, but a long time.
Not that Julian would've had any hope of avoiding the thought of Garak in any case, naturally. But locked in the same ward, the same bunkroom, as Enabran Tain? He'd been sunk instantly.
The thought of Garak had become a natural touchstone for him. Every time he looked at Tain, for one; every time he had to insist on a checkup, monitoring the man's increasingly poor condition as best he could. Practically the only subject he'd had in common with Tain had been famous Cardassian novels. He'd never told Tain why exactly he was so familiar with so many of them, but he was fairly certain Tain had never forgotten being accosted on Arawath, nor why Julian had done it. The man had known Julian's replicator order, for god's sake. It was hardly a stretch to imagine he'd kept himself equally well informed as to all the rest of it.
And then, well. Then Tain had come up with the plan; then Martok had arrived and given them another accomplice who could be counted on to provide the occasional distraction, so Tain could actually begin the work. Of course schemes, schemes and stubbornness and dry cleverness, made him think of Garak.
Now, it was—it made him want to be sick, that anything about Tain had reminded him of Garak. But of course back then, he hadn't known that—he hadn't known. God.
And at least it had never just been Tain. It had been—oh, all the time. Whenever they were served their bland, unappetizing meals; Julian had lost any sense of day or night, he'd never had any idea whether it was actually lunch he'd been looking at, but that hadn't mattered in the least. Whenever he'd stained or torn his uniform a little more, it had been a brief pleasure, a small light in the dark, to imagine what Garak would have to say about his treatment of his clothes, or perhaps that something sturdier, better-tailored, would've held up much longer.
He'd thought of Garak to calm himself, to help him sleep at night. It seemed so silly, but it had been quite effective—picturing Garak in his clean little tailor's shop, smoothing and folding and measuring, the gentle humming tone his laser shears made and the soft shushing sound of the seam sealer. Just the thing to drift off to.
And in solitary—
In solitary, he'd needed Garak.
He'd talked to Garak, in there, for hours and hours, until his throat had been so sore and so dry he couldn't anymore. He'd imagined Garak sitting in there with him, all the wry, knowing, cynical things Garak would have to say about how he'd gotten himself into so much trouble, all the strategies Garak would probably know for keeping yourself sane. Even then, he'd had a clear enough picture of how things had seemed to work for Garak, in the Obsidian Order, that he could guess Garak had been forced into solitary confinement at least a few times—not even in any sort of detention, but as an expected part of his training.
He'd clung to Garak, and at the same time he'd been all too terribly aware that Garak wasn't really there at all.
Which was part of what had made it such an impossible shock, to be dragged out at last and shoved back into the bunkroom, and see Garak. Right in front of him, entirely real.
And then Tain—
Tain had asked Garak whether they were alone, and Garak had looked straight at Julian and said yes, and then Tain—
And before Julian had even been able to begin wrapping his head around the things Tain had been saying, the man had died. He'd died, and the only way to move forward with the plan had been to shove Garak into that damned wall instead.
One thing after another. Worf, getting himself beaten to death a centimeter at a time. Garak, working himself into a mental break because there was no other way for them to get out—putting himself back together after so he could do it again. The terror of being discovered, and the awful driving thrill of stabbing that Jem'Hadar in the neck and letting him drop, knowing he must be dead. And then the transporter engaging at last, except of course that hadn't been the end of it; they'd still needed to race into range to contact the station, to stop whatever it was the Changeling who'd replaced him was there to do.
Which had turned out to be to attempt to blow up a star, as if they hadn't had quite enough to worry about already.
All told, he'd barely had five minutes to deal with it himself, let alone to—to try to talk to Garak about it. It hardly seemed possible that he could. It should've been the worst thing that had happened to Garak in the past week, but instead it had only been the beginning; Garak had been horribly brave, over and over again, while Julian had stood there watching, meant to be there for him and look after him and utterly failing.
And he was only failing again, now, because—
Because he had absolutely no idea what to do.
It had never been his area of specialization, psychology. Psychology; trauma, the sort that was mental rather than physical.
When he first got back, he was off-duty, of course—until he could be checked over, and his identity reconfirmed. He was meant to rest, but he lay down for about twenty-five seconds and then got up again and found his PADD, so he could at least search for some useful literature. He couldn't—he didn't know how else to—
He needed somewhere to start. He needed a way to find his footing. It was too huge otherwise, too terrible, too sickeningly ugly. He could still hear it in his head, if it was too quiet, if there was nothing else to fill the space: Sentimental boy. Had to teach you a lesson. Always crying. Took you almost a year to learn to wait until I was done—
Done. That word had lodged itself with particularly sharp thorns, inside Julian's mind.
It could've been—it could've been beatings. Couldn't it? Beatings, verbal abuse. There were plenty of other sorts of torments that could've been heaped on a boy who was too soft, who felt too much. Who needed to learn the sorts of lessons that came naturally to the man who'd been the heart of the Obsidian Order: that no one could be trusted. That no one would help you. That it didn't matter what was right or just or fair, what was kind or unkind, only what people would and wouldn't do, what they wanted and whether they could make it happen, whether they could be stopped if they did. That anyone who was meant to have the power to care for you would inevitably use it for self-gratification instead—
Made it take longer.
Until I was done—
Julian let his PADD tip facedown on his chest, and put a hand over his eyes, helpless, wretched and furious at the same time. There was bile in the back of his throat, and he had to swallow three times in a row to get it back down where it belonged. His eyes stung, sharp and sore.
He needed to at least entertain the possibility. He needed to be ready. It was dangerous to go into any conversation with Garak unprepared, let alone the one that lurked ahead of him now. He would add a few keywords to his search string, and he would be exhaustive in his efforts, and if it turned out he'd been wrong, assumed too much, then that would be nothing but a relief.
After two days back on the station, he was feeling much better. He'd been dehydrated, showing signs of malnutrition and of course a significant amount of stress; being clean, and back in his own quarters, a replicator ready to make him functionally infinite amounts of Tarkalean tea, a re-nutrition plan worked up, was half the battle. Another day, and he'd be back on duty.
Which meant there would be no better time to track Garak down and try to—and try.
And that was how it became clear to him that he actually had a different problem than he'd understood.
He started off cautiously. Not a message, which would be too easy to ignore, nor lunch; too public, and it would be too tempting to simply drop back into routine without acknowledging any of it. Julian was already experiencing a certain sense of unreality—Deep Space 9 was so normal, so very much itself, everything almost exactly as he'd left it. It actually helped that nearly everyone he knew was giving him second glances, awkwardly trying to figure out how to joke or apologize or both for not noticing his replacement, because at least that was confirmation it had really happened. Internment Camp 371 felt so far away he could almost convince himself it had only been a nightmare.
Besides, lunch would give Garak an opening to invite Ziyal along again as a shield, which wouldn't help at all.
No, Julian was simply going to go to the Promenade for a while. Try to enjoy a bit of his time off-duty, because mental and emotional recovery from an experience like this was just as crucial as the physical—and of course it was going to take far more than a day of window-shopping to accomplish it, but there was no way to do it except to take it one step at a time. And he was going to make his way without any particular hurry toward Garak's, to see whether he was in. One step at a time: if he was there, Julian would be calm and warm and reassuring. He would check in, and he would create an opening, make it clear that he was ready to listen if Garak wanted to talk and that the offer wouldn't expire, no matter how long it might take. And then he would go on his way without exerting any undue pressure, without making Garak feel as if he had to surrender anything immediately. He would be there, and he wasn't going to pry, but he wasn't going to forget about it or make light of it.
Unfortunately for his game plan, he wasn't the only one he had to worry about.
It worked out fine, right up until the moment he was actually face-to-face with Garak. Who was, in fact, in his shop, holding up a span of cloth between his outstretched hands, tilting it into the light and making considering noises.
Julian wondered, for a bleak, wry half-second, whether he was back in the bunkroom, lying there trying to soothe himself to sleep in the middle of hell.
But then Garak turned his head, glanced at him with one brow ridge inquiringly raised, and Julian drew in a slow breath, and the world settled back into place, solid and real after all.
"Hello, Garak," he managed, and raised an eyebrow right back. "I assume you're here against medical advice."
"Oh, your staff seems to be quite thoroughly convinced that I ought to be off my feet for another two days," Garak agreed warmly. "Mystifying. As you can see, my dear doctor, I'm perfectly fine."
Julian blinked, and wet his lips. He'd have thought that was a warning, Garak guessing exactly what he'd come here for and steering him pointedly away, except—except it hadn't been said like one, not really. Garak could put such a sharp edge on his tone that Julian was sometimes tempted to think he ought to take it and use it as a scalpel. But this had come out without emphasis or undue weight, in the mild and gently patronizing manner Julian might've expected if he hadn't known any better.
"Are you?" he said after a moment, very quietly.
Garak looked at him, and the expression on his face was bland, relaxed. He took the cloth in his hands and drew it absently together, gathered it neatly and then threw it over his shoulder. "I'm certainly willing to admit I experienced a great deal of personal discomfort," he said, with a mild slant to his mouth. "But I'm not the one who broke half a dozen ribs fighting Jem'Hadar, am I? And it is such a pleasure, to work once again in a space where the walls stand at such a great remove! Why, just look at you, standing all the way over there, while I'm standing over here, and yet we are in the same room. Wonderful, isn't it?"
Acknowledgment. Of half of it, at least. That was a good thing, wasn't it? Julian took a cautious step closer.
"Yes, of course," he said, and then stopped. He felt it twisting up inside him, closing his throat, clenching like a fist around his heart: what a terrible, incredible thing Garak had done, and how much it must've cost him to do it. "I did mean to say, Garak—I don't know how to thank you. It seems almost ridiculous to try. I wish you hadn't had to do that, but I can't begin to tell you what it means that you did."
Garak had gone very still, for some reason, all the terribly casual lines of his body arranged as if he were a statue. He was staring at Julian, and his eyes were very bright. For a moment, Julian was sickeningly certain he'd misstepped
—I was very proud of you, that day—
but what Garak said, after a moment, was, "And I, in my turn, cannot begin to tell you how much worse I would do, my dear doctor." He paused, his throat shifting briefly, and when he spoke again, his voice was lighter, far less soft. "For Worf's sake, that is."
Julian laughed, helpless; half a snort through his nose, that was all, but it loosened the thing in his chest at least enough to let him breathe. "Yes, of course," he agreed. "For Worf's sake."
"And General Martok's," Garak added. "Fine fellow, for a Klingon."
Julian let his mouth tug itself into a smile, and shook his head; and then he let it fall away, and bit his lip. "But, Garak, about—about your father—"
"Hmm? Oh, yes. Dreadfully ugly business," Garak said. "I do hope you'll forgive me."
"Forgive you?" Julian repeated, bewildered.
Garak grimaced, though his mouth was still shaped into something not unlike a smile. "You shouldn't have had to sit through all that," he said, with an expansive gesture of his hand. "Terribly inconsiderate of me. But never mind, it hardly matters now."
"Garak—"
"I'm afraid I have an appointment," Garak informed him, and it was hardly subtle, but that only made it an even larger red flag; when Garak was unsubtle, that meant he didn't think he needed to be subtle, because he'd decided it didn't matter if he wasn't. That meant he had an exit he was about to use.
"Garak," Julian said again, sharper, and he let—he let something into it he hadn't quite meant to show through. The lingering shadow of the grim desperation with which he'd missed Garak, all that long more-than-a-month, and the frantic intensity with which he'd clutched at the Garak in his head, while he was in solitary.
Garak had pushed himself into motion again, to stow the cloth he'd been working with away, to put a few other small things in order, puttering busywork. But he paused for a moment, at that, and looked at Julian again—wet his lips, and then crossed the space between them, and touched Julian's sleeve very gently.
"A personal fitting," he said. "In other words, a—house call, if I may borrow a turn of phrase from your own profession. And it would be terribly rude of me to be late."
Apologetic enough, Julian thought, that it was probably real after all. Even if it was because—because he'd had someone at the other end of the Promenade alert him, the second Julian had been spotted on the deck, and gone and made the appointment right then.
He got a grip, and said, "Of course," and it even came out mostly level. It wasn't going to be any subtler than Garak had been, but then that was only fair, wasn't it? "I'll see you later, then," he added.
That earned him Garak's mouth pressing itself into a line, a briefly pointed glance.
"If you insist," Garak murmured at last, and then he let go of Julian's uniform, and stepped past Julian, and was gone.
As it turned out, that was by far the best he was able to do.
It went on that way for nearly two weeks. He would catch Garak, for anywhere from five minutes to almost an hour at a time—but it was always wrong, never enough time or else never just the two of them, or both. It was never enough to actually get him anywhere. Garak smiled and slipped through his fingers, every time.
He'd almost started to think that he needed to take the hint; that if Garak was asking him to leave it alone, to forget what he'd heard and what it meant, then that was what he ought to do.
Except he couldn't. Not just because it simply seemed wrong to, although that certainly didn't help. But because—
Because Garak had said it.
Forgive me.
Forgive me. You shouldn't have had to sit through all that. Terribly inconsiderate of me.
In the moment, Julian had been baffled. But the more he thought about it—the more he couldn't help but think about it, trying to make sense of it, trying to work out what else to do—the more he felt he was almost starting to understand it.
It was like putting his head on backwards, like looking at everything through an ionized distortion field; but what wasn't, with Garak? And the thing was, if you looked at it from just the right angle, Garak had made him sit through all that.
Because when Enabran Tain had asked Garak whether he and Garak were alone in the room, Garak had said yes. Garak hadn't asked Julian to leave, hadn't told Tain that he was there. Garak had lied, and in doing it had made it impossible for Julian to go, at the same time that he'd made it impossible for Julian to move, to make a sound, to do anything but stand there frozen and listen.
He hadn't had to do that. Julian couldn't imagine why he had, unless—
Unless, on one level or another, he'd wanted Julian there. And it was Garak, it was—he must have known there was a chance, even if he'd decided it was remote, that his father would say something. He must have known there was a chance, and he wouldn't have taken the risk unless he were prepared to deal with the consequences.
He'd wanted Julian there. He'd wanted Julian to hear that, even if he regretted it now, even if he'd thought better of it, even if it terrified him. If he'd wanted Julian never to know about it at all, if he'd wanted to avoid having to force Julian to drop the issue, all he'd had to do was say no instead.
And perhaps there was some part of him, the same part that had wanted Julian to understand this terrible, horrifying, painful thing about him, that wanted Julian to keep trying. That didn't want to be given up on, even as the rest of him tried to guarantee it.
Twisted up, self-defeating and self-punishing, tormentingly byzantine—
—but what wasn't, with Garak? It wasn't as if Julian had forgotten the implant, the way Garak had fed him a new set of lies each time; pushing him, testing him, waiting to see whether he'd wash his hands of Garak and turn his back.
He hadn't then, and he wouldn't now. No matter how difficult Garak intended to make it to do otherwise.
The trap was neatly set.
Garak could admit as much; indeed, he could have done no better. Not that Julian was subtle about it, by any means. But that was because he had cleverly embraced a more fundamental principle still—that of playing to one's strengths. Julian had never been one of the universe's born spies, though he was more than smart enough to get there in the end, if he wished to. But he was earnest. Earnest, and kind, and horrifically stubborn, when he'd put his mind to it.
The trap was neatly set, because it was barely a trap at all. Because Julian laid it out on the floor in full view, and asked Garak to step into it, and that was all that was necessary. Garak could not have imagined a method more devastatingly elegant.
Granted, the element of surprise still had its contributions to make. Garak saw Julian approaching him, in Quark's; he had taken a seat where he could face the main entranceway, precisely in order to make sure he would be able to see Julian coming. He drew a slow breath, and braced himself for much the same routine as they had jointly established over the last two weeks. Julian would begin tentatively, would construct some vague pretense from which to launch yet another attempt to circle toward the matter; Garak would steer him gently around it and off in some other direction, yet again, and then find some excuse to vanish.
It was, admittedly, unusual that Julian was coming straight toward him. More often, Julian would look directly at him, and then pretend his attention had been drawn away—wander off toward Chief O'Brien, or Dax, or Kira, and make some sort of small talk, and only then allow himself to approach Garak, as if that way Garak could not possibly suspect that Julian's true aim was to try to corner him, and had been all along.
But it wasn't as if Garak had any real complaints about it. However excruciating a strain he was finding this particular dance, it was, inevitably, a pleasure to see Julian, and a greater pleasure still to have Julian seek him out, even for such a reason. All the greater, when he had prepared himself never to experience it again; the sweetest price for error he had ever been required to pay.
So he sat, and made no move to flee, and by the time Julian had reached the table, a steaming Tarkalean tea with a truly revolting amount of sugar in it had already been deposited at the opposite place.
Julian looked at it, and then at Garak. His mouth was soft, his eyes intent.
Garak arched his brow ridges, and gestured gently toward it.
And Julian reached out a hand and touched the mug, trailed two fingers along the handle of it, and only then sat. "Thank you," he said quietly, and when his eyes rose from the tea to Garak again, there was a wry little slant to his mouth. "I know you must be getting tired of this."
"Why, whatever do you mean, my dear doctor?" Garak murmured.
It was intended as dismissal, rebuff; it insisted on coming out as reassurance, and Garak watched Julian hear as much, the line of his shoulders relaxing, and felt a warm resigned sensation that shouldn't have been as pleasant as it was.
As if Julian needed the encouragement.
Julian smiled at him, very small and very sweet, and picked up the tea, blew on it absently and then sipped from it. And then he set it down, and he sat there for a moment, still and silent, and then said, "I need to talk to you."
"I can't imagine what—"
Julian reached out with his free hand, across the table, and touched the back of Garak's wrist with his fingertips. "Please, Garak," he said. "I can't deal with this any other way. I'm sorry to do this to you, I know you'd rather not, but—I need to talk to you."
And there it was. So unflinchingly set out, offering neither shame nor excuse; and yet by the same measure, offering nowhere to hide, throwing no disguising shadows Garak could pick up and use in his turn. Breathtakingly simple, and yet it was a technique Garak couldn't have mastered if he'd had a hundred years in which to try.
Garak sat there, straining to strategize a counter for the utter absence of strategy.
And then Julian leaned in a little over the table, and said it again: "Please."
"All right," Garak heard himself say, and in that moment, it was over, though at least Julian didn't know it yet.
Julian's quarters. Julian had proposed as much, and Garak had accepted. He had no idea whether Julian's reasons matched his own—whether Julian understood that Garak would prefer by far to do this in a place from which he could retreat without undue cost, where his own quarters would constitute the only ground he legitimately held, nowhere left outside them to run to.
But it hardly mattered. Julian knew the worst thing there was to know about Garak, beside which every other vulnerability, every foible and quirk and excessive defense mechanism, must surely pale.
The Tarkalean tea came with them; it wasn't as though Julian couldn't return the mug to Quark later, even if Quark did try to charge him a rental fee. It was oddly reassuring, to have Julian carrying it with him as they walked. Julian had to keep his pace measured to avoid spilling it—he couldn't rush Garak to their mutual doom. It was still steaming gently, and the smell—
Well, the smell seemed to suit him. A trick of the mind, of course. By now, it was no wonder that Garak associated the scent with Julian, and specifically Julian when he was comfortable, sitting across from Garak in the replimat, about to spend a while being entertainingly wrong about Cardassian novels.
Perhaps after this was over, Garak would permit himself to order it now and then, to dump a tremendous amount of sugar into it and set it across the table from himself, so he could breathe it in for a while and pretend it was simply waiting for its drinker to arrive. What a lovely form of self-torment that would be.
They did reach Julian's quarters eventually, of course. The door opened for Julian—who did at least know Garak well enough to stand there beside it and raise his eyebrows, tilt his head, and wait for Garak to go in first.
And under the circumstances, Garak thought, there was hardly any point in being deliberately difficult about it. As if he were—
Unfortunate turn of phrase: as if he were a child. And a sulky one at that, who needed to be chivvied through every step of a necessary chore. Remarkable how terrible that would have sounded, if he had said it aloud and Julian had heard him.
Had to teach you a lesson.
A necessary chore. Impossible not to wonder whether that was really how Tain had thought about—
"Garak," Julian said.
Garak blinked.
He was inside Julian's quarters. How odd; he couldn't precisely recall actually stepping through the door. He was inside Julian's quarters, and Julian was touching his arm, very lightly, with the hand that was not holding the Tarkalean tea.
He managed to meet Julian's eyes, though he wasn't sure how he did it.
"Come on," Julian said, very gently. "Come sit down."
"This really isn't necessary," Garak said, though of course it was already pointless.
"Yes, well, I think it is, for me," Julian said.
How infuriatingly clever of him. If he'd said he thought Garak needed it, Garak could have refuted him a dozen different ways, could have laughed it off, could have argued himself hoarse. But if Julian needed it, well. That made the whole thing much more difficult.
Julian had a sofa, a chair, a low table between them. He set down his tea on the table, and took the chair. Another ploy? Giving Garak the sofa, the maximum amount of space, and never mind that this room was nowhere near small enough to prompt so much as an instant's claustrophobia. Still—hardly worth complaining about it.
And oh, Julian had set this up in advance, damn him. Because Garak sat, and it was oddly easy to sink into the sofa, to allow himself to lean into the back of it; crucially, he understood after a moment, it was warm enough to. It was warm enough to, and the lights were comfortably dimmed. Julian must've turned the temperature up before he'd even left for Quark's.
"The thing is," Julian said after a moment, "there's something I don't understand."
"Oh, I imagine there is considerable breadth to that category," Garak murmured, a reflexive petty jab in the face of the trap that had already closed around him.
Julian gave him a flat, wry look. "Granted," he said. "Look, Garak, you've been avoiding me ever since Internment Camp 371. And I'd leave well enough alone—or at least I'd try—except I can't figure out why you did it."
And petty was one thing, but that was entirely too much. "What an extraordinary statement," Garak said softly. "Strain your mind, doctor! Surely you'll come up with an answer, if you only think hard enough."
Color rose into Julian's face. But his chin rose, too, and his composure didn't crack.
"Not why you've avoided me," he clarified, tone carefully even. "Why you lied to Tain."
Garak went very still.
"There was no way you could be certain he wouldn't bring it up—unless you told him the truth. He wouldn't have said any of that if he'd known I was listening, would he?"
Garak wet his lips. "It's certainly improbable," he assessed, as if—as if it had nothing to do with him, as if it were merely a question of Enabran Tain's character, because that was the only way he could think about it. He had closed his hand on the arm of Julian's sofa, and he had done it so tightly that his fingernails were at some risk of marring the fabric, and yet for some bizarre reason he couldn't figure out how to stop.
"And you didn't tell him. You let him think I wasn't there." Julian paused, temporarily merciful. "You wanted me to know."
Garak closed his eyes.
"Except," Julian added slowly, "you didn't just want me to know. You wanted me to hear it from him."
"My dear doctor," Garak fumbled, but he was too slow; anything would have been too slow.
For all that Julian had planned this, he'd hit the end of his script already, and that hadn't been part of it. That had been the unmistakable sound of a brand-new piece falling into place for him, and the picture was already changing, inexorably coming into focus.
"Because if you'd wanted me to know, you could've told me. Five years—you could've told me. Oh, god. You wanted me to hear it from him so I would believe it."
Garak couldn't look at him, and had to—it was a fact, only a fact, but he sounded wrecked, wretched. And he looked it, too, stricken, eyes huge in his face.
"I took advantage of coincidence," Garak said at last, hoarse. "It was hardly intended to do you injury. I am—very much aware that I have lied to you a great deal over the course of our acquaintance, Dr. Bashir. You would have had every reason not to—"
Julian's mouth twisted, something close to fury flickering across his face. "I wouldn't have used any of them! Good god, Garak—I've believed every lie you've ever told me, and I've believed the truths, too. You didn't need to put yourself through that just to get me to listen."
Astounding. Bewildering. What an utter madman he was sitting here across from, Garak thought distantly. You didn't need to put yourself through that—as if that mattered at all, as if having had to sit there hearing things he'd heard a hundred times already, mere words compared to what had been done to him, were anything worth being concerned about.
Julian drew a sharp breath, and let it out again, and then rubbed a hand across his face. "All right," he said, more calmly. "All right, so you wanted me to know. You wanted me to know, and you wanted me to believe it, and never mind how you decided to do it. But I still don't—what was the point of my knowing, if you weren't going to let me—" He gestured between them, helpless, wordless. "If you were going to start avoiding me once I did, I mean."
Where even to begin? Perhaps by acknowledging the obvious. "I made an error in judgment," Garak said, as steadily as he could.
And Julian—Julian laughed, a soft breath through his nose, his mouth twisting just a little. "I'll say," he murmured.
Garak looked at him, and felt the tide of it rise in him, as it had been doing for years already, a helpless flooding wave; disaster.
"I didn't believe it would be necessary," he heard himself say.
Julian blinked, and then frowned at him, brows drawing down sharply.
"You didn't believe," he began to repeat, and then stopped short. "You—didn't believe it would be necessary," and he got all the way through it this time and then tacked the painfully obvious referent onto the end, as if in deliberate defiance of Garak's caution and precision in leaving it off: "to avoid me." His throat worked; somehow it had happened again, just as before, and never mind that nothing Garak had said was in any way an insult. He looked abruptly distraught, as if he were in pain. "You thought I'd do it for you. Is that what you mean?"
Garak allowed himself a moment to sit there, to attempt again to relax his hand where it remained so persistently clenched upon the arm of Julian's sofa; to breathe, and to try to work out the best way to explain this thing that felt as if it should already have been impossibly clear, mortifyingly so.
"Among Cardassians," he tried at last, "a disclosure of this kind would present a—difficult situation at best. Family matters more than almost anything, on Cardassia, except perhaps power. Children are valued profoundly. Treasured." He allowed himself a grim slant of the mouth. "How else do you think Gul Dukat could ever have been convinced to accept a half-Bajoran daughter? It was because, at least for a time, 'daughter' placed enough weight upon the scales to tip them against even 'Bajoran'.
"But family is also—complicated."
Something crossed Julian's face, so complex and so impossibly fast Garak couldn't have worked out what it was or what to name it if he'd tried.
"I'll drink to that," he said, very softly.
Garak raised a brow ridge, and then touched a knuckle unsteadily to the rim of Julian's mug of tea where it sat on the table: as if he held an invisible glass, and it were a toast.
"And parents," he went on, "are owed respect in their turn. Ziyal's refusal to bend to her father's will, as much as it may set my heart alight with joy, is—unusual. It tips the balance back against 'daughter'. Enough that Dukat brought her back here, and enough that he left her here. He could only be expected to tolerate so much.
"You might say that surely if children are so valued, so treasured, then shouldn't any offense committed against one's own child be considered proportionally heinous? Shouldn't it be unthinkable? But I fear that blade bears a double edge, as the vast majority of them do among my people. If children are so valued, so treasured—then a parent who harms a child must have a very good reason to do it. There must be something terribly wrong with the child. The child, no doubt, deserves—"
"Don't," Julian said, so sharply, so firmly, that Garak did in fact come to a halt, and without even having decided to. Julian had risen abruptly, half out of his chair, and he looked absolutely furious.
How fascinating, Garak thought dimly.
He meant to give way. He really did. He meant to let it go, to assure Julian he had simply been explaining the cultural logic behind the thing, the gut-deep assumption underlying the snap decision he had made in Internment Camp 371. And of course he knew very well that Julian wasn't Cardassian; but he knew it in his head, and his head had not been the thing making that decision.
Sentiment. He'd told Julian it was the greatest weakness of all, and he'd been more accurate than even he had understood.
But instead, somehow, he found himself smiling. Then again, it was almost funny. Wasn't it? It was almost funny, how thoroughly Julian had failed to grasp the situation. "Oh, you must understand," he said warmly, "in my case it was very much the truth. My father wasn't married to my mother—that was a weakness he couldn't have afforded either, you see, and to involve her too deeply in raising me would have created approximately the same problem he endeavored to solve. But he certainly hadn't intended to have to raise me alone. He was right, I think," he added thoughtfully. "He probably should have killed her, and he should've done it before there was any chance I could've survived it. Too late now, of course."
"Garak," Julian said, but it was thin and sick, far too breathless to have any hope of stopping the flood of words anymore.
"I was such a difficult child," Garak explained to him gently. "You have to understand that. I was such a difficult child, and so few of the things he tried were any help. He learned with time, of course, what was going to work and what wasn't. And it was my fault. That's the crucial part. I wasn't trapped. Of course I wasn't trapped. Not really. I knew he'd let me out as soon as I'd learned my lesson, you see. I knew he'd stop as soon as I—as soon as—"
He couldn't finish saying it, for some reason. Ridiculous. He was repeating himself, in any case. It was merely a fact. He should have been able to say it, and he would, as soon as he caught his breath, as soon as he figured out how to make it stop rushing out of him before he could get any use out of it.
"Garak," Julian said, as ragged as if he had had to tear it out of his throat, and suddenly he wasn't around the other side of the table anymore. Suddenly he was there, right there, and he was touching Garak—easily, readily, as if it were that simple. As if it were, in fact, not difficult at all, to touch Garak as if you liked him, and were uninterested in hurting him.
How fascinating.
Specifically, Julian had gripped Garak by the shoulder, and his other hand was touching Garak's head, curving as if protectively over the back of it, and guiding it somewhere. Guiding it to—ah, of course, to his shoulder, which was only the natural place considering the peculiar way Garak had begun to crumple into him. That made sense of it.
"You didn't deserve it, Garak," Julian said into his ear. "You didn't deserve any of it. Do you hear me? There's nothing wrong with you. There was never anything wrong with you."
Garak shut his eyes, and leaned into the warm sheltering curve of Julian's shoulder. "You say that with such wildly unjustifiable conviction, my dear," he murmured, hoarse. "How kind."
"It's not unjustifiable," Julian said, with charmingly furious stubbornness. "It's true," and he curled his fingers around the nape of Garak's neck, his thumb gentle against the curve of Garak's ear. "It's true, that's all." He fell briefly silent, just holding on, steady and firm and so delightfully, soothingly warm; and then he said, "But, Garak—you said it was inconsiderate of you, when you asked me to forgive you. I don't—"
"Oh," Garak said into his shirt. "Yes, well."
It could do no harm to admit it. At least, it could do no more harm than had already been done, he acknowledged dimly, and on so many levels that it beggared belief. He should have been horrified, he should have been—compensating for it, fixing it. He should have gotten up and left the room already, but he hadn't, and he still wasn't, and there was no acceptable explanation for it.
This should be intolerable. Absolutely intolerable. So much less bearable, so much less survivable, than any locked closet, than the weight of Father's hand on his shoulder or the understanding of what would follow it—to be seen, so inescapably. By anyone, let alone Julian in particular; confessions to those who were already too near the heart, who already possessed far too much significance and far too much ammunition, were traditionally reserved for the deathbed for a reason.
And yet he could discern within himself no urge to shove Julian away from him and run. He sat there, useless, idiotic, sheltered, and he felt only—a kind of blankness, a dim and numbed relief. A peculiar nothingness, where there should have been, had always been, a cold and immovable weight, and he could not say where that weight might have evaporated to, nor why.
"I wanted someone to know, I think," he said aloud at last.
He didn't straighten himself up, didn't meet Julian's eyes and smile. He didn't—he didn't want to.
And it seemed Julian did not expect him to, either. Julian's hand tightened fractionally, where it had closed across the nape of Garak's neck: a gentle urging to remain where he was, enclosed, contained, by Julian's shoulder? Or even—dare he think it?—less deliberate than that; a simple reflexive expression of wordless sentiment, Julian wishing not to be made to let go of him.
"It was a secret, you see," Garak elaborated. "To have it known that he should have found it necessary to make use of such methods, that some rot had progressed so far in his own son as to require such drastic corrective action—goodness, no, that wouldn't have done at all. No, it was only the two of us. It was only ever the two of us. I appreciated that, at the time," he added. "The housekeeper, Mila—I liked to imagine she might have cared. I liked to imagine she might have tried to stop him, though of course it wouldn't have worked. And it's for the best that it was never put to the test, you understand. He never had the opportunity to kill her for interfering, and I got to keep my daydreams—"
"Garak," Julian said, very soft, very strained.
"At any rate, the point is—it was my last chance. He was dying. And whatever it is that I told myself I was doing, however much sense I could wring out of it, I suppose—I suppose I wanted someone to know. If he died without speaking of it, why, then I would be all there was. The least reliable witness imaginable!"
And that, it seemed, was at last too much. Julian drew him from his shelter, though he was not entirely without mercy; he left his hand where it was, lifted the other to Garak's face, as he held Garak at only just distance enough to meet his gaze. His eyes were wet, though he wasn't making any particular fuss about it, as if perhaps he hadn't noticed it himself, and his mouth was twisted up in pain.
So overt, Garak marveled. Humans were so remarkably defenseless, physiologically speaking; one might think they'd have developed a greater sense of restraint, of the necessity for self-containment, as compensation. And yet they persisted in defying all sense and reason.
"Hardly that," Julian was saying to him, low and raw, and very firm.
That was enough. That should have been enough. But more words climbed their way up Garak's throat and seated themselves on his tongue, and when he opened his mouth to spit them away, they spilled from him instead. "I would have been alone with it," he heard himself say, to that sweet, agonized, undefended face.
Julian sucked in a breath.
"Would it have been real at all, then? If I were the only one in all the universe for whom it had even happened—what a tiny, insignificant thing it would be. How easily erased entirely. Memory can be so unreliable, you know. Perhaps it was always nothing. Perhaps it was only a nightmare I once had," and said that way, in a bright warm tone to test it out—why, it did sound awfully plausible, Garak thought. What a fuss he had made about all this. What a fuss he had made, over nothing—
"No," Julian said. "No, it wasn't. I heard him, Garak. I heard him."
Garak blinked. Yes, that was right. Julian had been there; Julian had heard him. Of course.
Julian had reacted with such distinct distress, when it had become apparent to him that there were cogent and compelling reasons why his overhearing Tain should have been preferable to his being asked to accept Garak's own word. But perhaps something in Garak had been aware there was more than one angle to that particular problem. Perhaps something in Garak hadn't simply wanted to provide Julian with a source he could trust more readily than he could trust Garak—had known Garak would need a source he could trust more readily than himself, too.
"Stay here," Julian said. "Stay here for a little while, all right? I'll get you something to eat, something to drink. We won't talk about it anymore, you can—rest, or read. Whatever you like. Just—please, stay here. Don't go back to your quarters by yourself."
As if Garak were suffering under the slightest temptation to do so. No, he felt quite thoroughly wrung out, emptied of every resource of willpower or concentration he would have required to accomplish such a thing. Julian's quarters were as warm as he could have asked, and as dim, thanks to Julian's efforts to prepare for this conversation in advance; and, most crucially of all, they contained Julian, an incentive no paltry personal comfort available to Garak in his own quarters could ever have matched.
"If you insist," he murmured.
"Oh, I do," Julian said at once. "Stay."
Garak did stay.
Not all evening, or at least Julian didn't think so. He'd done the best he could, but he was, inevitably, the first to fall asleep, and when he woke to the station's computer offering him a gentle alarm in advance of his first shift, he was alone. Slumped in the chair where he'd been trying and failing to read instead of looking at Garak too often, with a replicated blanket solicitously spread over him.
It took him a moment to put the pieces together. At first, he was just stiff, sore—dimly rueing the sad fact that he was no longer young enough to spend a full station's night in a chair and not pay for it.
Then he remembered, in a rush, and looked up, and found the sofa empty, the room likewise. He sat there, swallowing, clutching absently at the blanket, trying to contain the mixed lurching muddle of feeling in his chest.
He was almost late for his shift, in the end. Just sitting there, to start. And then he found himself freshly aware of the blanket, the way his hands were closed in it, and he looked down at it. Unfamiliar; Garak hadn't replicated it using any of Julian's most commonly-accessed templates, though they'd have been right at the top of the list offered to him on the console. And it wasn't hard to guess why. The blanket was actually rather lovely—Julian had never really bothered trying to customize anything of the sort, the system defaults were good enough for him, but of course if anybody could be counted on to have strong opinions about color, texture, and pattern, it was Garak.
Julian found himself almost smiling, one corner of his mouth drawing itself up without having asked permission. And yet there was a strange quiet pang in it, too; how nice the blanket was, how thick, how soft. How kind Garak could be, as long as he was sure you wouldn't catch him in the middle of it, as long as he knew he'd be able to deny it later—
Sentimental boy. Had to teach you a lesson.
Julian shut his eyes. His throat ached.
And then he made himself stand up, and he spread the blanket out between his hands, folded it up gently, and set it on the chair.
He had to rush, after that, once he'd asked the computer the time—he didn't want to be late if he could help it, not just out of a sense of professional integrity, but because he didn't want anyone to ask. For Garak's sake, he didn't want to give anyone a cue that anything in particular had happened yesterday evening, didn't want to make anyone curious; and for his own sake, he didn't want to have to work out a decent lie.
The trouble was, to be on time, if by the skin of his teeth, meant he didn't have so much as a moment to go by Garak's shop.
He couldn't do anything about it. He knew himself; he couldn't ask after Garak, or at least he wouldn't be able to do it with any subtlety, and that meant he'd better not do it at all. It was a wrenching, relentless effort, forcing himself to focus on his work. And he did need to, because there was quite a bit of it. Above and beyond all his own research projects, all the day-to-day injuries there inevitably were to deal with on a station of this size—it seemed as though every single person who'd had an appointment with what had turned out to be the Changeling had wanted to schedule another as soon as possible, and Julian certainly couldn't blame them.
He tried to pace himself. In the gaps between appointments, interruptions, complaints, test results, he let himself think about Garak, let himself worry. Whenever there was someone in front of him, something he needed to deal with, he pulled himself together and he dealt with it; and then the moment it was over, the moment he had the space for it, Garak filled his head again.
It felt like the longest day he'd had in a while, like that.
But inevitably, inexorably, his damned shift came to an end at last. And the moment it had, he left the infirmary at once, and walked to Garak's shop.
He didn't know what to think. He didn't know what to expect. Maybe he'd find nothing but an empty space on the Promenade, clean and bare, ready to be re-let, and discover Garak had left on a transport for—for Risa, or something, hours and hours ago—
But the shop was there, just as it had always been, and when Julian walked up to the entryway and stepped inside, Garak was there.
Garak was there, and he met Julian's eyes for a long speaking moment. Ushered a customer gently out, instead of using them, making himself seem busier than he was; and then he turned to Julian and inclined his head, and said, "Lunch, then?"
Julian felt the cool sweet sweep of relief all the way down to his toes. He drew a breath, and wet his lips, and said, as evenly as he could, "Yes. Yes, please."
And god, he'd missed this. He'd missed this so terribly—all those awful unreal weeks in the internment camp, and after, when Garak had been avoiding him. Just this: Garak beside him, as they walked to the replimat, and then across from him. Sitting with him, looking at him. Close enough to touch.
They didn't talk about it. Lunch was ordinary, unremarkable; painless.
But they knew. They knew, and they each knew they both knew, and neither of them was pretending otherwise, not anymore. Garak sat the same way he always had, spoke the same way he always had—asked Julian the same frustrating, leading questions about that last Cardassian book Julian had started reading before Meezan Four, and tutted at him long-sufferingly when he answered them, apparently wrongly. But there was something, some tentative, rueful, eloquently self-aware light in his eyes whenever he looked at Julian, that made all the difference in the world.
Julian could admit that had been the thing he'd worried about the most. Oh, it wasn't the only reason he'd asked Garak to stay, of course; he could never have sent Garak back to his quarters alone, not then. He couldn't have borne it. But he'd—he'd wanted it for his own sake, too. He'd wanted to make sure that it couldn't end there, that Garak couldn't tell him those things and then vanish, and come over as if it had never happened at all, the next time they saw each other. To make sure that even after Garak had left his quarters, he wouldn't—leave. Not the way he had been before, all those bland smiles as cover while he slipped out of reach over and over. He wouldn't leave—
Leave Julian alone in it, as selfish as that was to think. Just the way Garak had been saying: as if, perhaps, it might never have been real. As if it were only a dream Julian had once had, that Garak should have chosen to trust him for a while.
But that wasn't going to happen. Julian wouldn't let it, not if he could help it.
So he made sure no new distance opened up between them, and he closed what he could of the old. He extended invitations to Garak as often as ever, more often—at least once a day, that whole next week, to come to a holosuite and do ridiculous things that didn't matter at all, as much as to lunch, to dinner. With Ziyal; and then with Jadzia, because he'd always rather thought she'd enjoy talking to Garak, if she had the chance. And then with Miles and Keiko, which was awkward but not as awkward as it could've been, Miles unexpectedly and gruffly expressing his gratitude that Garak had got Julian out of Internment Camp 371 in one piece.
Because there were other people who cared about Garak, or would if he'd just let them. And it wasn't like before, the way Julian had fretted himself in circles about Ziyal, because—
Because of the secret of it. Strange, that it should be that way with something so terrible, but it was the same as any other secret in this one single respect: it pushed everyone else ever so slightly further away. Julian knew something about Garak that no one else did, and Garak had let him learn it, and that thread linked them, invisibly, continuously, no matter who else was or wasn't with them.
Julian felt conscious of it all the time. Of the weight of it, gift and responsibility in one—that Garak had allowed him to see such a thing, to understand it, and that the test it posed was continuous, unending. He had to prove he was worthy of it, that he could be trusted with it. That he wouldn't leave Garak alone with it, yes; that he wouldn't tell anyone else, either, wouldn't use it against Garak, in any of the myriad of terrifying ways Garak no doubt anticipated it could be used.
Which, of course, carried with it a corollary.
He'd realized it almost immediately, sitting there in his quarters with Garak crumpling exhaustedly into his shoulder, with his hand curling reflexively, protectively, over the vulnerable nape of Garak's neck. He couldn't ask, not anymore.
He couldn't ask, and he couldn't say anything, couldn't so much as imply there was anything in particular he wanted from Garak. Because then—what would Garak think? He could only begin to guess. Garak had exposed such a tremendous, terrible vulnerability to him, and no doubt would persist in thinking of it as such, even if Julian did someday convince him that it hadn't been his fault, hadn't been due to any flaw in him that could not have been addressed any other way.
Which meant there was now an inevitable, implicit degree of manipulation in asking anything of Garak. Would he feel able to refuse? Did he trust Julian as much as that—exponentially more than he already had, enough to believe he could turn Julian down without inviting resentment or retribution? Or would he decide he'd better keep Julian happy? That it wasn't too great a price to pay, to keep Julian from turning on him, using this against him. Nothing he hadn't had to offer up before, after all—
No. No, god, Julian couldn't stand it.
He thought about it. Of course he did. It wasn't as if it had helped him put it away, feel it less, to have—to have Garak fall apart in front of him, however briefly; to have been allowed to touch him, comfort him, help him even a little. To be relied on, by someone who found reliance so unutterably frightening, who was so resignedly braced for unreliability.
He thought about what he'd have liked to do. How much nearer, how much longer, he'd like to have held Garak. How thoroughly he'd like to have demonstrated that as far as he was concerned, there was nothing Garak could've done or had done to him, nothing Garak could've said, that could ever make him turn his back.
But he couldn't. He couldn't, and he never would. He had to set it aside, that was all; it was hardly too much for him to ask of himself, under the circumstances.
He could think all he wanted. He could imagine, he could dream. But he would keep it to himself, and Garak would never need to know.
They might have carried on that way, settling into a tentative new equilibrium, except it had only been a week and a bit before Julian realized Garak hadn't actually answered his question.
He'd started, certainly. He'd explained a great many things, and it wasn't as if it had been deliberate, the way he'd begun to crumble. Not even Garak could have planned that; if he had, it would've been—eloquent, measured, a quieter and more elegant sort of agony. He'd never have gambled on Julian finding his raw, unfiltered distress sympathetic.
Which was precisely the problem. He'd explained his error in judgment, as he'd called it: that he'd believed Julian would react to Tain's revelation by putting as much distance between himself and Garak as he could, and that Garak would've been left with the cold comfort of the reminder, Julian's avoidance continuous evidence that Tain had said it, that it had been real after all.
But he hadn't explained why that was the reaction he'd wanted to get. And it must've been—he'd conceded that it had been deliberate, that he'd made sure Julian would stay in that room and listen. He'd done it, while subconsciously expecting Julian to have the Cardassian reaction: dismay, disdain, wariness. There must have been a certain fatalism in it, even. Throwing the most upsetting secret he had in Julian's face, aware that Julian would be able to hold it over him or use it against him, that there would be nothing he could do about it. Even—even, perhaps, surrendering to the possibility. Deciding that if he were going to give anyone the ability to destroy him utterly, it would be Julian.
Which was certainly a declaration of a kind, coming from a Cardassian, even if it wasn't—surely couldn't have been—the one Julian wanted most.
Perhaps Garak was already taking his cues from Julian. Perhaps he'd come to the understanding that Julian wanted him to stay, in more ways than just the literal; perhaps Julian had, without intending it, already asked him for something he felt unable to refuse to give.
Julian didn't mean to bring it up. Not exactly. If he'd been thinking, he'd have done it differently, better. He'd have done it somewhere else, for god's sake, back in his quarters again, or—not in the holosuite, of all places.
But that was where they were. He couldn't even use Garak in a tuxedo as an excuse for losing his head; it was at least the fourth time he'd gotten that particular view.
He just hadn't been able to shake the thought. And in the middle of the program, watching Garak stand there looking out the enormous floor-to-ceiling windows of the top-floor suite above Club Ingénue, as a nicely dramatic thunderstorm raged, he blurted it out.
"You don't have to do this, you know."
"—and I take it we're meant to track down this—hmm?" Garak turned to him, brow ridges arching inquiringly, eyes sharp. "Well, of course we don't have to do it, although judging by prior experience with these programs of yours, I assume the world will end if we don't."
"No, not—" Julian stopped, and drew a breath. He was in it now; there was no way out but through. So he might as well give himself a moment, and try to say what he meant to say without mucking it up completely. "Coming here at all, I mean. Being here, with me. You don't have to."
Garak watched him for a moment, without moving. And then he tilted his head. "I beg your pardon, my dear doctor, but I believe you've had some portion of this conversation without me, and I may need a moment to catch up."
Julian almost laughed. As if Garak hadn't had part of every conversation between them without him; as if he weren't even now doing what he could to catch up. "I hadn't put it together properly before. I'm—I'm sorry if you've been—you did explain you were trying to get rid of me. With Tain."
Garak went very still all over.
"And I didn't think to ask why you'd wanted that to happen. I didn't think to ask whether you still were. You haven't seemed to be trying to get rid of me, since then. But perhaps you just didn't think it would work."
"Oh," Garak said, mild. "That. Well, that part is quite simple."
Julian blinked. "Is it," he said cautiously.
"Yes, it is," Garak said.
And then he stepped away from the windows, crossed the suite to Julian and took the lapels of Julian's tuxedo very precisely in his hands.
"Garak," Julian said, and he was—he was trying to be steady, level, reasonable. He was trying not to let the sudden pointless pounding of his heart, the heat in his face, get the better of him.
"Quite simple indeed," Garak said, and drew him in, but it couldn't be—there had to be some other reason he was doing it, something Julian hadn't guessed. It couldn't be what it seemed, Julian thought distantly, and he kept on thinking it, right up until the moment Garak's mouth touched his.
Garak didn't rush himself.
He meandered. He allowed his cheek to brush Julian's, and then the line of Julian's jaw, first. It might be the only opportunity he had; and it was such a fascinating texture, the skin soft and so utterly scaleless, and then the sudden startling prickle of stubble, of all things. So much pointless hair, always growing in and getting shaved off again.
And then, well. Then he was right where he had meant to be, and all that was left was to sway in the rest of the way.
All the explanation Julian could possibly need—he'd understand everything, no doubt, and whatever he wanted to do with the information, well, it was his. It didn't seem terribly important, somehow, compared to the rest of this mess.
It wasn't as if there were any other way forward, in any case. No doubt Julian would have worked this bit out on his own, if left to it, except that tack would have provided Garak no convenient excuses to indulge himself, however briefly.
He was under no illusions. Kissing Julian right now wouldn't fix this. Not that Garak would have any legitimate cause for complaint, if this was what secured him his original aim at last: if Julian stumbled back and shoved him away, told him to go and not come back. But even that wouldn't save him. Even that wouldn't be able to take this from him—Julian's mouth under his, and Julian's hands on his shoulders. Julian, this past week; Julian, that day, that terrible wonderful day, touching him so gently, and that sweet fervent voice in his ear, telling him such impossibly lovely lies.
Julian made a soft startled sound, against his mouth, and then broke away from him—holding him firmly, so he couldn't follow, but also comprehensively failing to let go; the same acutely bittersweet torment he had been inflicting on Garak for so long already, damn him. It was almost admirable. Garak wasn't sure any of the many varieties of deliberate torture he'd experienced had ever brought him so frighteningly close to the breaking point.
"But," Julian said, breathless. "What?"
"Hmm?"
"What? That doesn't—was that meant to be an answer?" Julian was staring at him, somewhere between utter disbelief and outrage, mouth fetchingly red. "You were trying to get me never to speak to you again because you want to kiss me? Garak—"
"I did tell you," Garak murmured. "The greatest weakness of all." And it was only a fact, but he perceived a strange too-telling weight in the words even as he said them: "A valuable lesson."
Julian's expression changed, abruptly stark and sick.
"And there can be no doubt my methods were effective," Garak added, "if not for the reasons I'd anticipated. As I said, an error in judgment. I should've known you'd—feel it. And yet it was not an error so grave, in the end, as to alter the outcome."
Julian blinked.
Garak smiled at him, widely, warmly. "Why, if there had ever been any chance, if you had or ever could have wanted me at all—what could hope to smother such a spark half so effectively as pity?"
Julian's grip loosened, where it had been closed on Garak's shoulders, fingertips catching on the fabric of the tuxedo's jacket; a spasm of stunned dismay that had gotten the better of him, to judge by the look on his face, but it was enough to permit Garak to take advantage of the opportunity. He let go of Julian, stepped out from under Julian's hands—extracted himself, as neatly as he could, and marveled distantly at how little it helped.
But then nothing had. All week, and longer still; since that day, in point of fact. He'd done his best to be reasonable, restrained. He had succeeded in his original aim, in a sense, even if it had taken none of the forms he'd expected. He must have, and he would resign himself accordingly to the endless gray doldrums of that uncompromised success. It was just—
It was just that Julian was so kind.
So kind, so determinedly generous. So close, and so persistently unwilling to be anything less. On one level, the effect was no doubt psychosomatic, at least in part. He knew, and Garak knew that he knew, and it was that awareness that made every touch of Julian's gaze, every brush of its gentle weight as it met Garak's, feel as if it sliced to the bone, as if it flayed him raw, over and over and over again. Illusion.
And of course it had been difficult to keep the facts in mind, to remember that he'd won. Of course it had been, when Julian had persisted in eating two meals out of every three with him, in inviting him for drinks with Chief O'Brien; in touching him at the wrist, the elbow, the small of the back, absent and unthinking and all the more searing for it. In looking at him, in that sweet speaking way that stripped the skin from him.
It was unbearable, that was all. It was unbearable, and he needed something, some reminder of reality, some force that could be counted upon to check him unambiguously. He needed—
He needed to be taught a lesson.
And undiluted rejection would surely suffice, if only Julian would give it to him.
But then Julian could be so kind, sometimes. Perhaps Garak was going to have to help him along a little further.
Julian was watching him, throat working, hands still open and half-extended, adrift where Garak had left them. "Garak," he said, soft and wretched.
"You are, of course, well aware," Garak murmured, "that I am a grown man; a traitor, and a spy, and a killer. That I have done worse things than were ever done to me, and to those who merited it far less than I."
Julian's jaw set. That was good. He straightened, allowed his hands to fall, and—ah, yes, even better: they curled in on themselves, half-formed fists. "Is that so," he said, almost levelly.
"Oh, yes," Garak agreed. "I fucked some of them, too." He paused, and then waved a hand, expansive. "Fucked them, let them fuck me—but we mustn't bog ourselves down in the sordid details, hmm? Whatever served the mission, the objective. Whatever got me what I wanted. Some of them thought I was serious. That I meant it. Can you imagine? And of course some of them were so certain they'd gotten the better of me, that I had no way out except to give them what they wanted."
Color was rising into Julian's face—not embarrassment, Garak thought, not in the least. He was a doctor; there were no realities of the body he was unprepared to discuss. No, it was surely frustration, anger, that dusted Julian's throat and cheeks with heat.
"None of that can possibly be a surprise to you," Garak concluded, and tilted his head. "And yet! Humans and their sentiments. So unpredictable, so relentlessly irrational. Tell me, Doctor, what is it that you see, when you look at me?" He smiled. "Some sad, bruised, pathetic little boy? Some helpless child, curled in on himself in a dark corner, eyes full of tears." He made a mournful face, clucked his tongue as if in sympathy; how cathartic it was, he thought distantly, to mock that boy, the boy he had once been, with all the viciousness he deserved.
Stupid boy. Foolish boy—
"Of course I do," Julian said.
And there it was: of course he did. Of course that was all that was real to him, now that he knew what he knew, and he could feel nothing toward that needy, tragic child but pity, just as Garak had suspected.
"I see him," Julian added steadily, "because he's part of you. But he isn't—he isn't more of you than the rest. Than the way you lie, or how utterly damned impossible you are to understand—how difficult you are, how difficult you make yourself, because you don't know how else to be, what to do except stand there being awful and wait to see whether I'm going to leave." He paused, wet his lips, and took a step forward; closing the distance again, again, and Garak was no longer as sure as he wanted to be that Julian's hands closing themselves into fists meant that Julian was going to use them the way he ought. "How clever you are, when you want to be. How charming you are—not even when you need something, not always, but when you're happy, too, when you want whoever it is you're talking to to have a good time. How brave you are, when you have to be, when you know there's no other choice."
No. No. Garak kept his eyes on Julian, wary, heart pounding in his chest, and took a careful step back. "Goodness, how thoroughly you've fooled yourself, my dear—"
"No, I haven't," Julian said, and stepped toward him again, quick, matching, a wordless refusal to let him slip away. "You're wrong. You're wrong about yourself, you always have been, and you're wrong about me."
"Am I," Garak bit out. Only a few more steps, and Julian would have him trapped against the window; he wondered dimly whether the holosuite's safety protocols would allow him to break it, to throw himself desperately out of it and into that damned melodramatic thunderstorm outside. The safer place by far, if only he could convince the computer to see it that way.
"Yes," Julian said, almost gently.
A rumble, distant simulated thunder, as if in warning. And then he moved, before Garak had quite figured out how to back away from him again. He moved, and he took Garak by the arms, and it wasn't the nearness of him, the awareness of what he must be about to do, that stole the breath from Garak then; it was his face, the look on it, deep and hungry and—and yearning, in the instant before he did it.
The last thing he'd expected, when he'd permitted himself to answer Julian's question the way he had, was that Julian would choose within two minutes to return the gesture. And yet Julian's mouth against his was warm, firm, inescapably real. His eyes inexorably fell shut. One of Julian's hands rose from his upper arm to his face, caught him by the jaw, and Julian's thumb skidded along the hinge of it, and whether he'd intended the touch to be coaxing or not, it was—Garak drew a sharp breath against the corner of Julian's mouth, and Julian wasted no time in taking advantage. A truly commendable show of initiative.
Julian was, in point of fact, relentless. Thorough. There was an artless, earnest, frantic greed in it; not the kiss of a man who was making a point, nobly throwing himself on a sword. Garak hung on blindly, and did what he could to survive it.
It could not have been the dazed heat-swollen hour, perhaps two, that he was tempted subjectively to quantify it as. No more than fifteen or twenty seconds, most likely.
And when Julian was finished with him, it was—it was hardly any less than the kiss had been, Julian's face against his, Julian's temple pressed to the side of one of his forehead ridges, Julian's breath hot and damp and quick across the width of his cheek.
"You're wrong," Julian said again, soft and hoarse, hardly more than a whisper. "Garak—Elim," and oh, Garak thought distantly, as Julian's hand slid into his hair, as Julian lifted the other and felt his way, with slow and sweetly fumbling fingertips, up the line of Garak's neck ridge, at the edge of the tuxedo's collar.
Oh. Well.
"Please," Garak heard himself say.
A moment's utter stillness. And then Julian's throat clicked, audible, as he swallowed; and Garak felt the first unsteady tug, another, a tightening and then a proportional easing, as Julian pulled apart the bowtie, one side and then the other, that held the collar of Garak's tuxedo so neatly in place.
It was a terrible idea, on every conceivable level. To do this here, in a holosuite—in one of Julian's ridiculous programs, no less. Like this, still dressed in these peculiar Terran costumes. At all, given that the fundamental danger that had driven him all this way remained, and was in point of fact considerably more pressing than he had understood, if Julian was—if Julian actually—
And yet he failed to stop it. He allowed it. Less forgivable even than that, he encouraged it.
Julian didn't remove the bowtie; he left it where it was, loose ends trailing, and caught the first button of the shirt beneath it, high against Garak's throat.
Garak could have smiled at him. Warmly, teasingly—even if he couldn't bring himself to ruin this the way he ought, he could at least have exercised some measure of control over it, demonstrated some degree of competence. He could have lowered his eyes, murmured some mild dulcet thing, countered Julian's artless and unprepossessing intensity with a well-practiced and finely-tuned show of seduction.
He didn't. He searched within himself, and found no trace of the capacity for it, if indeed he had ever possessed it. His head felt empty, and his body alive, alive and thoroughly present, inexorably drawing the sum of his attention as it never had before. His skin prickled, and his ridges felt soft and hot, the lines of scales loose and open, as if they were ready to be pried apart, to let the blade of Julian's touch sink between them.
His breath shuddered from him. And Julian heard it, and a sweet sharp spark came alight behind his eyes.
Julian undid that button, and then drew him in by the next and kissed him. A second, and a kiss; and then a third, the last of the small close-set line there that had still held the shirt's stiff collar closed. And when he had them open, he slid his fingers into the gap, trailed them into the dip at the base of Garak's throat and from there along the collarbone. Only as far as the rest of the shirt would let him, hardly more than a few centimeters. No real reward, but it was as if he simply couldn't help himself.
He opened the shirt further, another button and another kiss, but without half so firm a delineation between one action and the other as there had been, the borders smearing. He touched Garak again, and this time to guide him—away from the window, Julian backwards and Garak forwards. Toward one of the doors; ah, of course. Not his preference, at least not this time, to push Garak up against the surface of the window and have at it, or drag him to the floor. He wanted a bed.
There was one, naturally. Done up in much the same charmingly preposterous style as everything else in these programs, huge and lush and covered in silk, deep jewel tones, dreadfully garish. And Garak discovered, with a distant sense of resignation, that he wanted to be on it, wanted Julian to press him down into it, more than he'd ever wanted anything else in his life.
Julian drew him toward it. He'd—he had Garak's shirtfront open entirely, now. He must've kept pace, approximately, between the buttons and the kisses, and Garak had been undeniably distracted from the one by the other. Hardly an unfair trade, and yet he felt distinctly robbed of the experience. And, looking at Julian, he realized he was robbing himself of another: he'd been clutching Julian's tuxedo jacket uselessly in his hands, instead of returning the favor.
He got the bowtie dealt with, his fingers inexplicably unsteady, and almost half Julian's buttons were out of his way before the backs of his legs came up against the edge of the bed. And all right, he had—he had never particularly understood what was supposed to be so impressive about these tuxedos, for as long as they'd lasted in Terran fashion; he could appreciate a dramatic contrast as much as the next fellow, but black and white was hardly a particularly original combination. And yet there was something about this, Julian in front of him, the sharp dark jacket that fit Julian's shoulders so well and the crisp white shirt beneath it, the way the open disarranged V where it was unbuttoned parted to expose Julian's chest, that was—striking.
He swallowed. It was difficult; his throat felt unaccountably dry.
Julian's mouth was red. He was biting it a little, lip caught against the edge of his teeth. And then he shook his head, quick, and let out a breath through his nose, half a laugh. "I suppose," he said quietly, "I can't precisely claim I'd never imagined this. If anything, I've spent rather too much time thinking about peeling you out of a tux, since last year."
"Threatening to shoot me in the throat did that much for you?" Garak murmured. "How wonderfully Cardassian you can be, my dear."
Julian gave him a wry, sweet look. And then the amusement in it faded slowly, until Julian was simply watching him, dark-eyed, something strange and achingly tender in it that Garak refused to attempt to name.
"I didn't think this would ever happen," Julian said, very softly. "Not really. And I meant it, when I told you that you were wrong. I do want you, very much. I—"
He stopped. His throat worked briefly. And then he lifted a hand from Garak's hip, pushed one of the loose open sides of Garak's shirt out of his way and set it to Garak's chest, the central ridge, thumb smoothing over the shape of the scales that flared from it.
"I want this to be good. And if anything I do makes you—" A hitch. "—bothers you," he amended, after a moment, "then you must tell me."
Garak considered this proposal with all the care it deserved. "Of course," he lied, warm, without shame.
Julian tilted his head. Those gentle, settling strokes of his thumb went on without pause. "I mean it," he said.
As if Garak would ever have attempted to assert otherwise.
He preferred by far, under the circumstances, to lie to Julian when Julian knew he was doing it than to offer a genuinely believable promise he had no intention of keeping. But—but perhaps he could still offer Julian some meaningful assurance, if not the one Julian was looking for.
"It won't," he said aloud. "Nothing you do will—bother me."
It was the next-best thing to truth. And Julian must have understood it, known it, seen it, because he didn't ask again.
There were no guarantees; Garak refused to offer them falsely. He'd never had any difficulty with this sort of thing before—but then he'd never fucked Julian before, and his father had never been dead before, and he'd never let anyone find out before, never allowed any of it to spill out where it could be seen before. Little wonder, really, that Julian should worry it would surface again. And if by some chance it did, Garak had every intention of doing whatever was necessary to prevent Julian from realizing that it had.
But the odds were on his side, he had no doubt of that.
What was there here that could remind him? What was there, in this, that could hope even to approximate it? Everything was different, now. Everything. The texture of Julian's utterly scaleless skin—the warmth of his hand, as he pushed, there, against the center of Garak's chest, until Garak surrendered with all the grace he could muster and allowed himself to be tipped backward onto the bed. His palm, the sweat of it; such a fascinating adaptation. The smell of his body. The way he moved as he settled over Garak, the lean weight of him.
Even the bed, the room. A pleasing contradiction: the ludicrous objective unreality of it all only served to lend it greater subjective reality. Garak, too, hadn't thought this would ever happen, and if he had, he would not have expected it to happen here, of all places. Unmistakably Julian's creation, and no other, steeped in all this inexplicable Terran cultural detritus—even Deep Space 9 itself, its unmistakably Cardassian architecture and engineering, would have been more reminiscent of a Cardassian estate, if there were such a place anyone happened to be endeavoring to forget.
It was easy. It was easy to lie there, to let his hands follow the long lovely line of Julian's back—a tailor's dream, both figuratively and mortifyingly literally. Julian was kissing him again, deep and slow and lingering, pushing his suit jacket down his shoulders; he had to surrender one hand, and then the other, to Julian's wordless demands to push the jacket's cuffs and sleeves over them, before he could settle them at last on Julian's hips.
Julian shifted against him with a sudden urgency, gasping into his mouth. Goodness, Garak thought dimly, everted already, how forward of him—but no, wait, that wasn't how it worked, was it? Humans with cocks had them everted all the time, didn't they? Even there, Julian insisted on providing him with reassuring novelty, relentless contrast, without even trying.
In the end, the only moment that came anywhere near validating Julian's concern was very brief indeed, and had nothing whatsoever to do with Julian himself. A tiny, silly little thing. Certainly not worth kicking up any fuss over. It was only—
It was only that Julian got up, and stepped away from him. To shrug off his own tuxedo jacket, and to pry off his shoes. He was quick about it, clumsy and flushed, eyes dark and hot, but—but then he looked away, for an instant.
And in that instant, Garak became oddly, viscerally aware of himself. That he was lying there on the bed, alone, half-stripped. He shut his eyes, reflexive, defensive, which only made it worse; without Julian above him, the air felt cool against his skin, a shivering reminder that his shirt was open. He hardly ever had his shirt open. He'd never liked to, even during the hottest days of the summer. But he wasn't going to touch it, wasn't going to close it again, because that would only get him in trouble, that would only make it take longer, and that was the last thing he wanted—
"Sorry, sorry," Julian said, hushed and low, gravel-scraped, and as quickly as that he was back, touching Garak again. Warm, soft, sweating hands; Garak opened his eyes, and his heart was pounding, but that was all right. Julian tipped his face up and kissed him again, and the seeping pressure of half-formed memory was driven away as quickly as it had come.
Julian didn't appear to notice it, thankfully. If he had, undoubtedly he would have stopped, and that was the last thing Garak wanted, already far too likely as it was. Surely at any moment, Julian might regain his senses, might think better of all this, and once he did, Garak would not in good conscience be able to talk him out of it.
Granted, for the moment, he certainly seemed—focused. He'd settled right back into place, pressing in between Garak's thighs as if he belonged there, leaning in and sliding a hand into Garak's hair, with those long deep kisses, like he hoped to make sure Garak could never quite catch his breath. And with his free hand, he touched Garak's jaw, followed the ridge down the side of his neck to his shoulder, pushing the shirt absently out of his way; the sleeve formed a vague, gentle restraint around Garak's upper arm, like that, as if deliberately, as if Julian were telling him exactly where to be, exactly where Julian wanted him to stay.
His chest, next. The central ridge, the scales that fanned away from it, thinning to bare skin at his waist, over the curves of his lower ribs; Julian followed them with his fingertips, the bones and the soft dips between them, a knife more dangerous than any Garak had previously felt pressing there. And then, daring, a dip to the waistband of the slacks—so much less efficient a design than Cardassian trousers, but Garak might, if pressed, have conceded there was a certain appeal to the feeling of Julian's hand against him, endeavoring to work the fastenings backward, down down down—
"Ah," Garak said against Julian's mouth, quite involuntarily, as Julian went still.
"You like that," Julian murmured, tentative, and did it again: skimmed the backs of his knuckles gently over the lip of it, tiny thin barely-there scales that rippled convulsively under the touch, before turning his hand, pressing two fingertips there instead.
Garak meant to say—anything. That he would like whatever Julian happened to prefer, that he was flexible, that he could be convinced. If Julian would prefer him everted rather than inverted, he was on the edge of it anyway; he did love holding off, keeping his cocks trapped just as they were, feeling them swell helplessly from the inside out, but he couldn't expect Julian to instantaneously develop a taste for an anatomical arrangement that was surely unfamiliar to him, more theoretical than concrete.
But Julian was looking at him, intent, biting his lip. Shifting against him, as if—as if watching Garak's reaction, in and of itself, were somehow enough to rouse him further still. And then he pushed, with those two fingertips. Gentle, inexorable, sliding into the wet slick space between Garak's inverted cocks, and Garak sucked in a breath and squirmed a helpless counterpoint to the motion of Julian's fingers inside him, shuddering all over.
"Oh," Julian said, breathless, startled. "I knew Cardassians had two, but they're—spiny?"
"Yours isn't?" Garak managed. "Goodness, what a terribly dull textural experience that must be. And everted all the time, is that right? Why, no wonder your species has no true appreciation for the value of secrecy."
Julian laughed, soft, through his nose, and then shook his head, leaned in and blanketed Garak anew to kiss him again, firm and full of tongue, unrepentantly unsubtle. "Well, I'd hate to subject you to a dull textural experience," he said, when he was done. "If you like this—"
"No," Garak said quickly.
Julian went still, and looked at him.
"That is, another time, perhaps," he temporized. If there were another, ever; if by some wild chance this did, in fact, happen again.
"All right," Julian said, and then it was—it was almost hard to look at him. His eyes were very dark, and his face was very serious, and there was something terrible and raw and tender in it that it felt almost wrong to see exposed, as if too private to be rightly shared, too intimate, for all that Garak was the one on his back on the bed with Julian's fingers inside of him.
Julian did have only one cock, and it was very smooth indeed. He took a moment to wrestle Garak's slacks free and pull them away, but he didn't bother about his own, and there was something about it that jolted a shudder up Garak's spine—being as good as naked in front of Julian, except for the shirt that was still tangled loosely around Garak's upper arms, while Julian had his shirt open, the buckle and fly of those lovely fitted tuxedo pants tugged wide, and that was it. His cock looked wet, which was interesting considering it had nowhere to invert to, and it was so red Garak couldn't help but wonder whether it hurt. Long, too; an easier physiological trait to achieve when there was no need for it to turn itself inside out, no doubt, but it sent a deep hot shiver through Garak anyway, just looking at it.
And then Julian slid back between Garak's bare thighs, and held them apart for himself—pressed his thumb to the rim of Garak's cloaca again, and Garak clenched and unclenched helplessly against it, and then Julian took his odd long cock in his hand and set the head of it there.
"Oh," Garak said, rather more dazedly than he'd intended. "Oh, yes, please—"
"Shh, don't," Julian murmured, and pressed in deeper. "Don't beg. You don't need to. You're never going to need to," and oh, what a wildly improbable promise that was; how irresponsible of him to give it, when there were so many things Garak wanted from him, when there was so much worth begging him for.
But Garak had no opportunity to tell him so, because a moment later Julian thrust, as slowly and deeply and recklessly as he kissed, and every word Garak had ever known was gone from his head at once.
Julian fucked beautifully. You wouldn't necessarily think it to look at him, or at least Garak hadn't, for a good while; he'd amused himself often, in those early bitter days, by imagining exactly how clumsy a virgin he'd have on his hands, if he did manage to tumble nervous little Dr. Bashir into his bed after all. And then, well. Then he hadn't dared, either way—imagining it badly had helped so much less than he'd expected, hadn't stopped him from wanting it, and imagining it good had been far, far worse.
But perhaps he should've known better. Julian was a doctor; exceptional under pressure, however naive and stumbling he could be when he had no sense of the stakes, and naturally attentive to the body, its capacities and reactions. And, of course, he was also Julian—persistent, and stubborn, and utterly unwilling to compromise on the things that mattered to him most.
He clearly did appreciate what must have been a more than usually exciting textural experience for him, with his cock pushing between Garak's, the spiraling spines blunted while inverted but undoubtedly making themselves felt regardless. And of course all of it inevitably squeezed progressively tighter as Garak's cocks filled, as the delicious struggle to keep them from everting grew more and more pressing.
But for Garak—it was fucking and being fucked simultaneously, the pressure tight around his cocks at the same time that Julian was filling him, scorching and dizzying and almost too much to bear. He clutched at Julian mindlessly, dug his heels into Julian's thighs and his nails into Julian's back, scratching through the shirt because he couldn't quite work out how to get underneath it when Julian was—ah—
He might still have managed to hold out a while longer, through sheer force of will, if only he hadn't accidentally handed Julian a crucial clue. One particularly sharp, lovely thrust, and Garak gasped and shuddered, dragged himself up and bit down in gratitude on Julian's collarbone.
Julian sucked in a breath, and swore, and—oh, yes, that probably wasn't the done thing, Garak thought dimly, not for a species that was so soft and scaleless there. How dreadfully inconsiderate of him. He would have to find some way to make it up to Julian later, when he could form the words to ask how best to do it.
And then Julian said hoarsely, "Like that, is it?" and gripped him by the jaw, pushed his face to the side; he had an instant, perfect and crystalline, to understand that it was happening, to grasp what must be next, and then Julian pinned him to the bed, fucked into him and set his teeth deep in the ridge up Garak's shoulder at the same time, and Garak cried out, no option left but to allow it to take him.
He hadn't often managed to come while his cocks were still three-quarters inverted, the hot rush of it with nowhere to go, without any surface extended to flow along—it just spilled out of him and around Julian, undirected, obscene. Julian must have felt it; he jerked, shivering, and thrust again, once, twice, and oh, all right, he'd been close himself. That was reassuring.
He ought to do something reasonable now, he thought. Something that carried no particular weight of meaning. He ought to let Julian pull out of him, and he ought to say something bland and clever, something about—about how many extra fees Quark was going to charge them if he found out about this.
But Julian wasn't trying to move away from him. Julian was wrapped around him, clutching him back; lips soft against Garak's shoulder ridge, now, where there was still a hot heavy throb left from his teeth, deep under the scales.
"Well," Garak found himself saying instead. "That was counter-productive."
"Mm?" Julian hummed against his scales.
"That I may have all I want most, if I'm rude, unkind, arbitrarily endeavoring to find some way to hurt you even a little? Hardly the sort of behavior you ought to be reinforcing, my dear."
Julian snorted, breath quick and warm against the side of Garak's throat, and then lifted his head, met Garak's eyes. He still had a hand against Garak's jaw, where he'd pinned Garak's head before, and he kept it there, rubbed his thumb across Garak's cheek. "You and your goddamned lessons," he said softly. "I told you I didn't want to learn any of them. And I'm going to knock them out of your head if it's the last thing I do."
"Are you," Garak murmured, heart pounding.
"Yes," Julian said, firm. Stubborn. Unwilling, utterly, to compromise on those things that mattered to him most. "Yes, I am," and he caught Garak's chin in his hand and kissed him again, deliberate and sure: a promise.