Chapter Text
For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.
When we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.
–Excerpt from “A Litany for Survival,” Audre Lorde
*
“I’m sorry I’m late.”
Garak was seated at his desk when Julian came in. He was scrutinizing a PADD. He swiftly slipped it into a drawer and stood with a broad smile.
“My dear Doctor! Any time you choose to grace me with your presence is the perfect time.”
They knew each other’s passcodes now; it saved time. They had both spent too much effort breaking into each other’s quarters over their first couple of years together.
Together?
Together.
Julian felt himself smiling too; he couldn’t help it when Garak was sweeping toward him, arms outstretched, no questions asked. No questions ever asked, not really, and no questions permitted.
“I had to do a little babysitting, actually,” Julian said, still feeling an explanation was necessary. Nearly forty minutes late, and he knew Garak well enough to know that he fumed and fussed at any delay – waiting on a shipment, waiting in line at a restaurant, waiting for a customer to pick up a finished piece, intolerable all, for the simple tailor – that his serenity in this moment was studied, strategic. It was a part of the dance, the careful practice of keeping himself separate, independent. Proof that Julian was enjoyed but not needed.
“Hm! The O’Brien child, I presume.”
“Molly, yes.” Garak’s arms were around him now, strong and firm. Their noses hovered a millimeter apart, Garak’s piercing eyes blurring and melding together in his vision. He always felt like a fainting damsel when Garak held him like this. He was stronger than the Cardassian, certainly, but Garak had an iron sort of musculature that felt secure and somehow all-encompassing. Julian could pretend that he was a frail thing in comparison, and there was something reassuring in the fantasy.
“Children are a delight, aren’t they?” Garak said, and Julian felt fear surge through him. They had never discussed children. They had never discussed anything, really. Nothing of a practical nature. Spies and philosophy and books and treason. Ideas. Culture. Their conversations were so lofty at times it seemed cheap to turn it to mundanity. The sorts of questions couples were supposed to ask each other – where you do see this going? What do you think of marriage? Do you want children? – always felt off limits. Because they weren’t a couple. They weren’t. But Garak’s arms were around him and their bodies were pressed together, and now their noses brushed, and their lips, and then Garak was opening, deepening, one hand was twining through Julian’s hair, and Julian didn’t want children, but Garak said they were a delight.
“Garak,” he said, pulling back just slightly. He was already breathing more heavily, his fingertips tingling. “Do you want children?”
Garak’s laughter was sharp and mirthless. It reminded Julian of the time he’d asked the tailor if he and Gul Dukat were friends; as if the idea was so palpably ridiculous, the only reasonable response was to laugh and laugh hard. Garak cut off his laughter as if with a knife and tilted his head, that sly smile spread across his face, the one that always said “My dear Doctor” in a condescending tone.
“My dear Doctor, what would I do with a child? Would I tuck him into a desk drawer at night? Teach him to sew and scrounge for a living? If it’s children you’re after, there are far better prospects than me.”
“I don’t want children, believe me,” Julian said, relieved. It it was only after they were entwined again that he realized that Garak hadn’t actually said no.
*
When they dug up Mila’s body it was crushed and desiccated, crumbling bones laced together with a loose web of fragile tendons. Her hair, strangely enough, was almost perfect, flattened but preserved. Only a year had passed since her death, but already her hair was a relic of a past time; no one wore such careful styles anymore. It would have been beautiful had it not been for the cracked, eyeless skull it adorned. As it was, it was grotesque.
The minute he saw her body emerge from the rubble, the instant that last shovelful of refuse sloughed away and her eyeless gaze caught him, Garak wondered why he had bothered. What were they going to do with her? Just bury her again?
She did her hair the day she died. Of course she did; she always did. It probably took her an hour. He didn’t know how long it took, but it couldn’t have been easy. She did her hair that day, though, and she made them food, she brought it down, she eyed Damar with a hungry look that warmed Garak’s soul just a little – she had life in her yet, vibrant life, ready to burn – and her hair was flawless, and then they knocked on her door and they killed her. An hour to do her hair, maybe another hour to cook, and her whole life gone in an instant. How beautiful, how unbearable that her hair remained as it was, her one monument in a world too shattered to spare the stone for graves. The beauty and the pointlessness of it was staggering.
How intolerable that she was dead. Her absence left a hole in the universe, like a broken window in a vacant house, gaping deep and black. How intolerable that so many were gone. He thought of people he’d killed to save himself, the mUra he’d killed to feed himself, the bodies, the endless mountains of bodies piled like grains of sand in the dunes, every one of them a universe – as the Federaji had it – and every one of those universes gone, extinguished.
He thought it was a greater sacrifice by far to live the human way, the way Julian did, to believe that everyone was a universe – and when had he started to believe that himself? When had the weight of death begun to pull him down?
Empok Nor, he thought.
Mila.
He tried not to think – Damar.
He thought of Entek, whom he had liked, and Amaro, whom he had barely known. How easy it was to obliterate his old colleague – dare he say, old friend? – to blast him down and watch him evaporate, death a wide-eyed look of shock in that familiar face. How horrific, meanwhile, to stab that soft human flesh of Amaro’s, a human he had spoken to once, or maybe twice. At the time he’d thought it was only because of the senselessness of it, that Amaro had done nothing to warrant his death, and Entek would have killed him. Or perhaps that Amaro was human, and Entek was Cardassian, and Cardassians understood sacrifice while humans clung to life like moss on a tree. But it wasn’t about the circumstances, and it wasn’t about their races; it was about Garak, something had changed in him in those intervening years, and even as death was essential in war it became harder and harder every time, until Weyoun’s body, crashing to the ground – and with good reason, very good reason – undid him finally. Mila’s body in the cellar, Damar’s body in his arms, his own life so tediously teetering, his planet blown to pieces, and one more body, one more lifeless gaze, and he was finished. He couldn’t kill again, and he couldn’t bear the weight of all the killing he had done. He couldn’t bear the weight of Mila’s death, either; he had killed her too, by taking refuge with her, and all those years that he had lost with her in exile could never be replaced, and all those years he could have had later could never be reclaimed. She was only bones now, bones with strangely perfect hair.
As he stared at her, he felt a hand on his shoulder. He jumped, turned, his hands raised in defense – and felt foolish at once. Bashir, of course, sweat and dust smeared across his brow and his cheek, dripping from his hairline, his sleeves rolled obscenely above his elbows, a shovel in one sun-darkened, calloused hand, his bare wrists burnished. The sweat had plastered his thin shirt to his chest; Garak could see right through it. Any other time the elbows and the wrists and the wet shirt and the dirt might have made him –
Any other time.
“I’m sorry I never had the chance to meet her.”
Garak snorted out a laugh. “She wouldn’t have wanted to meet you.” She would have seen the way Garak looked at Bashir and it would have turned her stomach. She would have looked away, frowning.
How could she be gone?
“Oh no?” Bashir’s answering smile was gentle, weary. “How could that possibly be true? Don’t you know how charming I am?”
“It’s simple, Doctor. She didn’t approve of… dalliances with aliens.”
Bashir’s brows rose. “She was one of those?”
“You forget we were never of the enlightened Federaji! Not too long ago, ‘those’ were as common as vole kits on Cardassia. The bombardment ended a lot of them. The Federation aid helped changed a lot of minds.” He stared down at her again, her bones, her hair. “She also wouldn’t have approved of an alien seeing her corpse either, but you know, growing up I rather made a habit of undermining her traditional views. She would probably expect this from me.” Bashir stirred as if to speak, but before he could Garak turned to him – feeling wild and strangely free, as if he had been wrapped around with ropes all his life, ropes that had suddenly fallen away, snapped and fallen – and said, “You know the worst part, Doctor? The absolute worst part? Mila was a woman of secrets. She was a fathomless, untapped well of secrets. All those years she was raising me, pretending she wasn’t, all those years we couldn’t be family, those years I couldn’t be her son, couldn’t know her, not really, I comforted myself with the thought that I would someday take her shri-tal. That, on her death bed, I would learn her secrets, and I would finally know her. But it was all so fast; she was dead by the time she hit the cellar floor, and her secrets died with her, and I will never know them. And there are nine hundred million people buried in this rubble of Cardassia, and all of their secrets died with them.”
He had his hands on Bashir’s shoulders, he realized. He didn’t know when they had found their way there, but the warm, damp skin, the sharp bones he knew so well, he needed them, needed his hands to be pressed against this man. An image came to mind – drowning, clawing above the waves, grasping some floating debris. His hands tightened on Bashir’s shoulders. He leaned in, his forehead pressing against the human’s, that skin so smooth.
“I can’t imagine how this planet can stand up under the weight of all those untold secrets.”
Bashir was quiet for a moment, his eyes closed, his forehead pressed against Garak’s. At last he brought his hands up and cupped them around Garak’s face, his fingers resting in the grooves of Garak’s aural ridges.
He said, “I don’t think you needed to take her shri-tal, Garak. I think you already knew her deepest secret. I think the only secret she kept that really mattered was the same as Tain’s: that despite everything, despite their mistakes, and their weaknesses, despite even those cruelties that are truly unforgivable, you were their son, and, in their limited way, they loved you.”
Love. It always came back to love, for humans. What point was love, really? What did it achieve? If love wasn’t enough to make a person care for their child then–
But it was a comfort, strangely, to hear those words, because Garak did want to be loved. He did. He wasn’t certain, really, if he could call anything Tain had ever felt for anyone to be love, and he wasn’t certain if Mila would have called her feelings love either, but with both of them dead anyway, did it hurt to believe it?
He wasn’t sure.
“I’m not certain if you’re talking about my parents or yours,” Garak said, deflecting out of habit. But still.
Bashir snorted, stepped back, broke contact, shook his head. The entire universe rippled, as though it floated just below the surface of a pond.
“All right, Garak, let’s not get into that again.” Somehow, Bashir’s features grew murky, the pond’s waters muddying. His voice was growing faint. “We’ve found her. What do you want to do with her?”
“She liked sunsets,” Garak said, but he wasn’t speaking, not really. He wasn’t speaking and he wasn’t standing quite there. The universe faded, overlaced with a different place, a different time. He heard himself speaking, somehow inside himself, but also far away. “Let’s bury her in the Western corner of the property.”
Garak blinked.
Mila’s grave stretched before him, covered in a blanket of flowers, every shade and hue Garak could find. That was years ago, that day they found her body.
Years ago, yet he would often be there again when standing at the foot of her grave. If the sun was going down and he let himself stand at the grave, the flowers he had planted over her body would flash away to be replaced by a bare patch of dirt or an open hole, and he would live it again and again until he could wrench himself free.
“Don’t break your memory over it,” Mila would have said, her arms crossed, her foot tapping.
He was supposed to report these incidents to Julian, who would soberly note the time and length of the event in his PADD. Julian had a theory that krat ol’lo could be progressive, and he wanted to monitor the frequency and duration of Garak’s episodes to determine if more involved treatment was necessary.
Julian had never been good at drawing that essential line between his professional and personal lives, so Garak only reported about one third of his episodes. Garak thought they were decreasing somewhat anyway, since he had become better at avoiding triggering situations and trains of thought. That was why he rarely looked at Mila’s grave, only visited to tend the flowers, and never at sunset.
Today was different. The risk had been necessary. Sunset, because he had only just returned home from his office, and because he had a very short time before Julian was due home himself, and Mila’s grave because it was the only part of the property where he had planted flowers; every other spare inch of dirt was reserved for crops. And the flowers were necessary because it was a human tradition to give your spouse flowers on special occasions, or in troubling times.
Today was both. Troubling because Garak had some news from that day’s Council meeting that would deeply disrupt their lives, and special because it was their anniversary. Their third.
Cardassians generally liked flowers – Garak had always kept vases of flowers wherever he lived, resorting to dried ones on Terok Nor – but they didn’t give them as gifts. Gifts were supposed to be valuable, for one thing. They were supposed to be impressive, carefully planned, painstakingly suited to the receiver. It galled him a little to present a handful of flowers to Julian, but Julian was always mystifyingly delighted to receive them, despite the fact that they grew on their property and cost nothing. This was fortunate, because, the state of Cardassia being what it was, Garak had very few options for gifts.
It gave Garak a kind of perverse pleasure to pick Mila’s flowers for his human husband. Her disapproval of every aspect of this scenario would have been legendary.
Julian liked to say that Garak was still a rebellious child. Sometimes, he said it with a smile, and sometimes he said it in desperation, his shoulders tight and the whites of his eyes glinting.
Leaning over Mila’s grave, ducking his head so that he couldn’t see the sunset, picking her flowers and smiling to himself, he thought Julian was probably right.
Mila would have hated this.
Garak had loved her. He had. Adored her, even. As a child he had tilted toward her like a flower’s head tilts toward the sun, following her every movement. Even so, there had always been an irreparable rift between them, a chasm of empty space that neither could ever figure out how to bridge. It was called Tain.
A young woman had loved Garak once, and he had never figured out why. Another young woman once fell in love with Enabran Tain, and loved him fiercely, and no one would ever know why, perhaps not even the woman herself. He had hoped, once, that Mila would explain it to him, explain everything, why it had all been this way – but of course, he had also hoped that Tain would forgive him, bring him home. He had hoped for many things, impossible things. The wrong things.
He had never thought to hope for this, but here it was, all the same: a black-haired human, graying slightly at the temples and throughout his neatly-trimmed beard, strolling down the road. His lanky arms were swinging carelessly and he chatted with spritely animation to two Cardassian women, both doctors, colleagues from the Third District Hospital. Garak couldn’t hear what they were saying yet, but it didn’t matter. It would be hospital chatter – medical stories, treatments, research, talk of other colleagues and their intricate personal lives. Julian loved to expound on all of those topics; his grin as he strolled was evidence enough.
With a wrench in his chest, Garak wondered if that smile would be gone for good soon. Everything about their life was so tenuous, always had been, and now it seemed a shroud was pulled down over them. Perhaps the worst part was that when the new law passed – the new law that he would have to tell Julian about as soon as possible, consequences be damned – when the Council held the final vote and it came in at almost a landslide, Garak had smiled. He had been happy. There was some part of himself that had never dared to hope for this – this law that Julian would despise. Shame burned within him now, because it was worse than that, worse even than that. Worse because he himself –
Garak slipped away from Mila’s grave, his carefully selected bouquet hidden behind his back. The two Cardassians – Doctor Fannet and Doctor Mohina – lived nearby, and they would continue on after Julian arrived home. If he stood obscured by their little house, they might not even see him.
Why he felt the need to hide from them, he wasn’t certain. There was a general uneasiness, he supposed, in being approached from the road as he worked in the yard. His back bent, flowers in his hands – it was too vulnerable. He felt more vulnerable than usual because of the news he was holding, the news that would wipe that smile from Julian’s face. Sliding into hiding felt secure. He was in control. They would see him only if he wanted them to.
He had hoped for many impossible things, but never this, this most impossible of all, this warmth, these arms in the night, this bright smile growing brighter by the day, every moment as the war creaked farther and farther away into their past. Never this, most impossible, to gather flowers for his husband, to celebrate an anniversary, to watch him stroll home, to their home. He might as well have hoped to sprout wings.
He pressed his back into the rough wood of their house’s western wall. The wall felt hot, absorbing the sun’s final rays. He held the flowers down by his waist now, his body hiding them from the three people approaching on the road. The angle was correct; they would not see him.
He didn’t want Cardassians to see the flowers in his hand. Again, he wasn’t certain why. They wouldn’t ever imagine that they were supposed to be a gift, or worse, an apology; they would simply think he was bringing them in to the house – oh, but when Julian saw them, he would smile, of course, and he was trot over and say, “Oh, thank you! They’re beautiful!” or something like that, and then they would know–
And why did it matter if they knew? What purpose did this secrecy serve, exactly? His discomfort reminded him of their wedding, exactly three years earlier, and how intensely miserable the entire event had made him.
Julian had loved it. He always loved eyes on him, appreciation, attention. Julian’s joy had made it worthwhile, but Garak himself felt that he belonged in shadows, sliding down alleys, slipping beneath sand. It felt dangerous to attract attention – but again, how was it dangerous, now, here? Wasn’t he the Third District Councillor, anyway? Wasn’t he Tain’s son? Wasn’t he the only Cardassian enjoined with a human? Didn’t he already attract attention simply by his existence?
And wasn’t he supposed to leave his old ways behind? Not just the violence, but the lies, the secrecy. There wasn’t room for such things in the New Cardassia, or so he wanted to believe.
There wasn’t room for them in a marriage. That was what Julian said. Julian had many opinions on what constituted a marriage, and what marriage required. They were all very human and very strange considering humans divorced so eagerly. For Garak, enjoinment was duty. You cared for your spouse. You honored them and defended them. You were faithful to them. Simple.
Not so simple with a human. A sick wash of fear coursed through his stomach; humans could divorce each other. A human husband could decide that he was done with his spouse and leave, and their legal and familial bond could be severed, and there was nothing the other party could do. How unbearable to imagine a family just… dissolved. Garak felt dizzy.
Julian could do that to him. When he heard his news, when he heard about the new law, that could be that. Done. Ended.
Garak was trembling, he realized.
It would have been easier to marry a Cardassian. Family is family forever. Even if they hate each other, they are enjoined for life. Longer than life. The security of it was attractive. It would have been easier.
Ah, but that depended on the Cardassian in question, didn’t it? He thought of Tain, of Mila, of family that wasn’t family, family that was dissolved.
Garak had never been drawn to what was easy anyway, not really. He’d been drawn to a handsome young doctor once, drawn irresistibly, and though he had seemed easy on the surface – a fine face, a nice body, a wide-eyed innocence – he had been far more complicated than Garak had ever anticipated. He had been a puzzle that Garak had to piece together, a problem that he had to solve, and, gradually, a kind of sustenance that he had to devour.
And it could all be gone in an instant.
Garak sighed and stepped away from the house. Julian was hovering at the end of their walkway, rushing to finish his conversation with his friends, and he jumped when Garak emerged from his hiding place.
“Oh! Garak!” he said. “I didn’t see you there! I was just telling Mohina and Fannet about a new treatment Parmak and I have been – Oh!” He pointed, his face lighting with joy, just as Garak had predicted it would be. “Are those for me?”
Garak felt himself crumple a little inside, sorrow and embarrassment writhing together within him. Julian should not be so delighted to see him holding a mere handful of flowers. If Cardassia were not a smashed pile of rubble, Garak would have gotten him holosuite programs. New books. Beautiful fabric for a new suit of clothes. Chocolates. Anything that was actually worth something, not flowers pilfered from his mother’s grave.
“Who else would they be for?” Garak asked.
He could almost hear what Tain would say. “Elim, you pathetic–”
“Elim, you wonderful man! They’re beautiful!” Julian was bounding down their walkway now, his colleagues seemingly forgotten. The women were watching from the road, their heads cocked. They were the modern type, both of them, wearing long tunics and pants, their hair cut shorter than Garak’s. They were friends with Julian; they came to dinner sometimes and the four of them talked into the night. He had nothing to fear from them. They found humans interesting, human customs charming. They might not understand the flowers – well, neither did Garak – but they would enjoy Julian’s pleasure in them.
He breathed deeply, tried to steady his pounding heart. It was all right. This was all right.
Garak held up the flowers wordlessly and Julian took them. He smelled them, his white teeth gleamed, struck by the sun’s last dagger. “You always make the best bouquets,” he said. “I could never arrange them this well.”
Again Garak felt a flutter of humiliation. A handful of plants, yanked from the dirt. Julian’s compliments felt ill-fitted. Unearned.
“Happy anniversary,” Garak said, in Federation Standard. He didn’t say, I’m very sorry to tell you this, but–
Julian kissed him, a quick, gentle touch. One warm hand lay lightly on his cheek; the other held the flowers between them.
“Happy anniversary,” Julian replied, in Standard as well. He pulled away, turned toward his friends. “It’s the third anniversary of our enjoinment,” Julian explained to them in Kardasi. “It’s a human tradition to give flowers as a gift on such occasions.”
The two doctors glanced at each other. Doctor Fannet frowned slightly and said, “But the flowers are from your own property. How is this a gift?”
My sentiments exactly, Garak didn’t say. He didn’t say it because Julian’s laugh was too swift, too loud, too jovial. “I know Cardassians think gifts should be expensive, but on Earth we don’t really have that concept. We have no currency – I think you know that – so for me, a gift someone made is far more valuable than a gift that was purchased. Garak grew these flowers, so they mean more to me than anything he could buy.”
As the other doctors nodded in understanding, Garak felt a kind of understanding blooming within himself. Somehow, hearing Julian explain it to someone else made it sound more sincere, more plausible, than it had ever seemed before. A warmth grew in his chest; the steel cage of humiliation melted a little, though the fear remained.
“Now, if you will excuse us,” Julian said, and the two Cardassian doctors nodded again, bowed their heads slightly, said their goodbyes, and left, resuming their conversation as they went. Garak and Julian watched them as they walked off, the road taking them around abandoned piles of rubble, hiding them in the encroaching darkness, their voices fading. Julian’s hand found his in its easy way, his fingers lacing through Garak’s with comfortable familiarity.
“I have something for you, too,” Julian said, squeezing his hand. “Come on, let’s go in. I’ll get these into some water.”
Julian said that every time Garak picked flowers. Every time. It was strange how the same trait could sometimes be charming and sometimes irritating. Tonight, with the sunset fading, and the sun’s last light tinging his black hair just slightly red, and the unguarded happiness of the man as he grinned at his fistful of flowers, Garak thought it was the most beautiful sentence he had ever heard.
Julian was striding toward their little house now, his fingers still linked with Garak’s, and Garak had no choice but to be pulled along, pulled along as he had always been from their first meeting. As they both had been, somehow equally helpless.
Julian pushed their door open with a shoulder; in his distraction, Garak hadn’t closed it all the way. They entered the small kitchen and Julian released him, crossed to the pump, took the tin can they used for a vase off the table and filled it with two cranks of the pump’s handle, then slipped the severed stems into the water and placed the bouquet in the center of the scarred wooden table that dominated the center of the cramped space. The table had been Tain’s. It had been in the entryway of his mansion, and it used to hold a large black bust of the founder of the Obsidian Order. That was its sole purpose before the bombardment. They had found it about two years earlier, flattened and scored but reparable, during their excavation of the rubble of Tain’s house.
It had taken Garak perhaps two evenings to piece the legs back together and get it standing again, and now it was the center of their lives. Surrounded by three mismatched chairs, all scavenged from various ruins, it was where they prepared and ate their meals, read their books, drank their tea. It was where they laughed, and argued. It was where Garak laid out his fabrics – when he was fortunate enough to recover some – and carefully cut them and sewed them into the clothing they both wore. It was where they ground their grain, and sorted their harvests, and bagged them for the dry season. It was where they slumped in exhaustion after their work details. It was where they leaned against each other, hands intertwined, and watched the shadows grow. And now, it held their anniversary flowers.
What would Tain have thought of this?
They had found the bust too, scratched, its nose snapped off. Garak had tossed it in a trash heap. It’s only purpose had been intimidation, and there was no room for that in their house.
Julian’s energy was high. He was smiling and humming, bustling from corner to corner, getting out strips of smoked meat and fresh vegetables, pumping water into a pot, lighting the stove to boil. Normally Garak would help, but there was something in his air that made Garak just want to sit in his usual chair and watch him.
It was good to see Julian happy. Not that he wasn’t these days, but there had been a time, in the darkest days of the war, when smiles had been rare. That was true for all of them, really, but Julian was the one he’d cared about. He remembered lunches at the Replimat, remembered Julian’s eyes circled dark from exhaustion, his knuckles pressed into his forehead, whatever book they had meant to discuss forgotten as he told Garak of their latest mission – the unclassified parts of it, anyway. He remembered other lunches in the Defiant’s mess hall, surrounded by weary soldiers – and they, weary soldiers themselves – when the old back and forth of their conversations broke down into silence, or irritable half-sentences and grunts, and Garak didn’t know which was worse. He remembered also those nights in the Defiant’s tight bunks, when Julian – Bashir, then – would fall asleep with his face pressed into Garak’s chest, one hand twisted in Garak’s shirt, the other practically strangling Kukalaka, nights when Julian couldn’t say a word and couldn’t –
With a click he was there, his left shoulder hanging out into the cold air, his right buried beneath a trembling doctor, a stuffed toy creature pressed against his chest with a human’s hand crushing its bizarre face into a bulbous lump. Bashir was weeping, he realized. The tears were seeping through his shirt and dampening the scales at the nape of his neck. For a moment he lay frozen in horror, no concept at all of what he should do, but then he remembered weeping himself once, and Bashir’s hand reaching out to hold him. Mimicking the memory, he wrapped his free arm around the man collapsed against him, held him tight, absorbed his tears and his tremors, and presently the little sobs coalesced into words, and Bashir was saying, “Garak. Oh, Garak. Garak.” Whatever this suffering, it could bear no name but his own, no other words could capture or dispel it. All Bashir could manage with his feeble voice was, “Garak.”
Garak’s throat ached. This could all be gone in an instant. A Jem’hadar ship could appear and blast them to pieces, and they would die here, torn to shreds in their bunk, twined together, ripped apart, hiding in their bunk with their love and their secrets, and no one would ever know, not a single person, that this strange miracle had occurred, that this beautiful person had clung to him – to Garak – in his grief and his terror and his war-weariness, and had found comfort in his embrace, in his name. How could the universe bear the weight of so many secrets?
“Elim.”
“Garak.”
Bashir’s face burrowed into the fabric at his shoulder.
“Elim?”
Julian’s face peered into his, worried, frightened.
“Oh, Garak,” Bashir wept.
“Elim? Elim!” Julian shouted.
He heard a sharp crack, and he was back at the table in their little kitchen, his head swirling slightly. Julian was standing in front of him leaning forward, his palm still resting on the table where he had slapped it. His brown eyes were searching Garak’s face, his bottom lip caught between his teeth.
“Elim?” he said again, “Are you back?”
Garak nodded.
“Where were you this time?”
“The Defiant.”
“Bridge or bunk?”
“Bunk.”
Julian nodded. He straightened himself again, and that smile Garak had so been enjoying was gone. “What do you think the trigger was this time?” He was reaching for his shoulder bag, for the PADD inside. “What did I do? What were you thinking?”
Garak raised his hands. “Please, Doctor, please.” The title was deliberate. Julian noted it with a frown. “We are not going to cure this tonight. Let us put it out of our minds, just for now. I know you had something planned. I want to see what it is.”
And there it was again, just the hint of a smile dawning in that precious face. “It isn’t much, believe me,” Julian said, placing a plate and a steaming mug between Garak’s hands, limp on the table. It was their customary supper: a strip of dried meat and some boiled vegetables, as well as a cup of tea from the Red Leaf bush that Garak had successfully transplanted into their garden the year before. But then Julian’s other hand slipped into a side pocket, and he dropped a small box next to their can of flowers. It was about the size of the palm of Garak’s hand, and it had some human name written in Human letters across the top. Smithson.
Garak looked up at his husband. “What is this?”
Julian’s smile widened as he took his own seat, and his thin fingers slipped the box open. Inside where five brown balls.
“Genuine Earth Chocolate,” he said, with such joy and pride he might have been announcing the birth of his first child. Child. Garak cringed at his own poorly chosen metaphor. “I paid to have it shipped from Earth on the last supply transport.”
“That must have cost a fortune,” Garak breathed.
“Heh, well, it wasn’t as bad as all that. That is why it’s so small, I’m afraid. The captain let me ship it for a reasonable price on the condition that it weighed no more than three ounces. It came in almost a week ago and I’ve been keeping it in my locker at the hospital. I was worried this entire time that someone else would find it and take it, but I knew if I tried to hide it anywhere in the house you’d find it during one of your sweeps. I’m glad to see they haven’t melted too–”
It was crucial, Garak realized as Julian prattled on, that he did not think about another time that Julian had given him a box of chocolates. If he did, there was a real danger that he would be taken there, trapped in his broken memories, and he wanted desperately to stay in the present, to be here with Julian, his smile, his gentle voice, his graying beard and his narrow hands, the little box of chocolates and the tin can of flowers. It was unbearable to think that this moment could be swept away, lost in the jumble of memories that clogged his brain.
“Happy third anniversary, Julian,” he said, because he had never said that exact phrase before, and its uniqueness would anchor him here in the present. He took Julian’s hand in his. It could be gone in an instant, all of it.
They both held tight.
And then, because important information must not be withheld, because Julian deserved to know as soon as possible, even if it kicked up the sand on what could have been a clear and pleasant day – and because they could have been blasted out of existence on the Defiant, but they weren’t, and because Garak could have died in the Resistance, or the Bombardment, but he didn’t, and because Julian could have decided to stay on Terok Nor, to remain with Starfleet, but he hadn’t, because they had survived all these grave dangers, and more, to find themselves there, together, on their third anniversary – Garak said, “I have something to tell you.”