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There are no assignments now. No clients dropping off trousers to be hemmed or dresses to be made. No orders from Tain—real or implied or projected—and his ilk, or from Starfleet. No, now there is just what remains, and his duty—as pressing as ever it was—to see to it.
The wandering comes first. It always did. On the eve of a new assignment, whether at home, or off-world, he would pace through these streets, from sector to sector, neighborhood to neighborhood, block to block. Not all at once, mind, but a piece at a time, sometimes more and sometimes less but always a piece, a puzzle to remind himself of…what? Why he did what he did? Who he was, even relegated to the shadows? The great organism that was Cardassia, of which he was one tiny cell, unseen and rarely acknowledged but vital? He’d often fantasized, in exile on that cold station lightyears away, about the walks he would take around this city one day, when he was at last reunited with his planet. But in those dreams, the streets had been alive, shops and restaurants and dwellings all buzzing with activity, people shouldering past each other on their way to wherever they had to be, parents chiding children to keep them away from skimmers and the tram in the road. Yes, in those dreams, the streets had been alive, and the people too, not dead dead dead like they all were now, not covered in a shroud of this aching and cloying and heavy dust.
There are no assignments now, but he must do what he can to aid in…what? What of Cardassia is there left to serve? To save? Even to avenge? In the two days since the end of the war and the sudden Dominion withdrawal, this has been the question he has asked himself, as he's moved, slowly, through what remains.
Today, it’s East Torr through which he wanders. Or what’s left of it. Always his favorite sector, Torr. A couple of his aliases had lived here, and he’d enjoyed that: that youthful fervor in debate, the street art, the taste of cheap gelat. Of course, it had also been the most physically packed part of the city—stories and stories of tenements atop businesses rather than single-family homes—which meant that the ruin was now piled even higher than elsewhere. And the people—the bodies, really—buried within, the number of them…it’s astronomical everywhere, but here…here it must be…
(He can see fragments—fingers, the occasional limb. But underneath, underneath, there must be…)
He stops, gasping, teetering on his feet, gripping a chunk of what had once been cement foundation for support to keep him upright. It flakes away, chalky, on his hand.
The voice, when it comes, is so unexpected that for a moment Garak thinks he’s hallucinating it. But then it cries out again, quiet and muffled, and his mind drags itself into focus. This, he will reflect later, is when duty makes itself clear once again.
“Help!”
Garak’s head darts around in a desperate attempt to locate the source. It sounded nearby, but he could see nobody, nobody alive. Under the rubble then, but which? Where?
“Help!”
“I’m going to help you,” Garak rasps to the air, voice hoarse with dust and disuse. “But first I need to find you. Keep speaking so that I can locate you.”
“I’m here! Help! I’m here!”
He follows the sound to a heap of large slabs behind him.
"Help me!"
"I'll soon be with you." Garak tracks the voice to the edge of the pile. Hunks of concrete mix with the paraphernalia of domestic life: fragments of ceramic drinking glasses, pieces of a steel bed frame, bent and warped.
On Tzenketh, it had been a lamp. A broken lamp. They'd liked curves in their aesthetics on Tzenketh, and as he'd laid there, pinned, the jagged edges of the shattered sea glass—illuminated by the thin strips of light that penetrated the debris just enough to be discernible—stood in stark contrast to the rounded parts of it that were still in-tact. He'd stared at that lamp for as long as he'd been there, unable to move his head, as the air became less and less, he traced the contours of that sea glass again and again and again…
"Are you there?!"
The voice yanks Garak back to the present. "I'm here." Grunting with effort, leaning against it with his shoulder and exerting all of his body weight, he pushes a large piece of the wreckage away, revealing a woman in a small gap beneath it. Her legs are contorted in directions that he suspects they should not be, and a deep gash paints her left thigh red.
The sudden light makes her squint. "I…I thought…" She releases a sob. "No one…That I would…"
"I'm here," Garak repeats. "I've found you. I'm going to get you out."
When he does, climbing into the pit and lifting her as gently as he is able, she cries out. Her legs, he imagines, in their current state, do not respond well to being moved. The wound is still actively bleeding, too, and deeper than he'd realized. Staunching it must be the priority. He sets her down and wraps it quickly with a fragment torn from his shirt, but that fabric is soon soaked too.
A quick glance around to orient himself reveals that Garak is not far from the Torr Free Hospital. Or where it had been. If he can bring her there, surely he will be able to find at least one functional dermal regenerator buried somewhere in the ruin. As delicately as he can, he lifts her form again, murmuring an apology and an explanation in response to her whimper, and sets out in that direction.
Garak had anticipated finding what is left of the hospital as abandoned as anywhere else. As he navigates the maze of rubble toward it, he is already stretching his mind back to what basics of first aid he’d learned by necessity throughout his Order career and in exile. A dermal regenerator, first, to stop the bleeding, is the top priority. Disinfectant, too. Pointless to prevent blood loss if she were to die of sepsis anyway. He doubts any of the equipment to heal broken bones survived the onslaught…Perhaps, then, something to set her legs—though if needed, he could likely scavenge that from outside the hospital…
What he does not anticipate, when he approaches, is a makeshift clinic.
The hospital building itself had been all but leveled, but the remnants of the ground-floor ward are half-preserved, half-resuscitated. A row of occupied biobeds, pulled into the center of the area. Some old-fashioned cots, too (this had been the free hospital after all, and, the politicians and guls had said, the denizens of Torr couldn't expect the State to cover every expense), with detached medical equipment. An awning crafted from tied bed sheets and fastened to the rubble shades those exposed portions of the unit.
And half a dozen people move among the beds, tending to the patients lying on them. Cardassian people move. One sitting in a hospital wheelchair herself, one on crutches and leaning against the frame of the cot as he evaluates, one with her arm in a sling and using her opposite hand to run a scanner over a man's forehead.
Another one of the attending caregivers—a tall, thin man—spots Garak and his charge as he approaches and turns toward them. Garak had prided himself, once, on his skill as an operative, and, though—or perhaps because—there were aspects of his work that he demonstrably did not enjoy (regardless of what impression he'd given Tain), he savored in what he considered to be his particular and unique competencies. They made him valuable. They made him useful. One such skill was that he never forgot the visages of any of the subjects who had, over the years, fallen under his gaze. And the man before him looks much the same now as he did when last they met. Older, certainly—not just that his hair is longer and gray rather than the jet-black it had been, but his face too is more lined and his eyes behind the spectacles deeper-set. Tain had said, after all, that he had been sent to a labor camp after Garak was through with him. And even if he hadn't…well, events of the past years had aged them all.
Kelas Parmak grows closer, and when their eyes meet momentarily, Parmak's widen for an almost imperceptible instant then flit quickly away.
Introductions, then, would be superfluous. Garak is not the only one with a commendable memory.
The woman, only semi-conscious now, groans.
"She was under the rubble," Garak says. "I believe her legs need attention. I was prepared to see to her myself, but perhaps…"
Parmak gestures to an empty cot, already prepping a tricorder. "Set her down, please."
Garak obeys. As he does, he notes that his own palm is painted red from where the patient had bled through her dressing while he'd carried her. The symbolism is admittedly overly blatant for his taste, the type that, if it had surfaced in a novel discussed with Dr. Bashir, he'd have chastised for a lack of subtlety. His hand, stained with blood. Next to this man…
Parmak, for his part, seems not to notice. He's engrossed, now that he's with a patient, seemingly oblivious to anything outside of the tasks associated with that. More symbolism, Garak thinks, almost as blatant: the doctor's spectacles—for myopia, if he recalls correctly. (He'd used that, back then, the last time he and this man were in a room together.)
(Garak's own eyes had never functioned like that; nothing he did ever quieted every other line of thought, no matter how intense his gaze.)
"She'll be alright," the doctor says after a fashion, still looking toward the woman. She's fully unconscious now, legs set in splints and the wound gone. "I've given her something to help her sleep through the worst of the pain." He turns his gaze toward Garak—his hands, not his face. Does he see the red, now? "A friend of yours?"
Garak shakes his head. "I don't know her." A pause. "I must admit, when I came here, I wasn't expecting to find…I thought I'd be lucky to recover a half-functional dermal regenerator from the ground."
"I was on shift when the Jem'Hadar started shooting. When they left, I went back to work."
"And them?" Garak nods toward the others tending patients. The man with crutches, his charge stable for the moment, retreats from the biobed and sits on a stump of cement to rest. Another reaches from her wheelchair to hold a compress to a child's forehead.
"Them too." A pause. "You're surprised?"
"Before I found that woman, I hadn't seen another Cardassian alive in days." And he hadn't. After the Founder's surrender, Ekoor left to discover whatever remained of the military, and Garak—consummate host that he was—liaised with Starfleet. Him, alone among aliens yet again. Admittedly, not the longest time he had spent as the only member of his species. Not by far. Before, though, he could console himself with the notion that somewhere beyond the airlocks that held him prisoner, a world—an empire—populated with his people gleamed in space. Now…
And then, Starfleet, too, withdrew to their ships. Even those who stayed in orbit didn't deign to remain on the surface of their world, and there weren't any of his countrymen among them, anyway. "I suppose," Garak continues, "I was beginning to think there wasn't anything but death left of Cardassia."
"There is an abundance of death, that's true. There is, and there has been. Here on Prime. Elsewhere in the Union. Elsewhere entirely. But…" Parmak risks a small glance to Garak's face—his nose, still not his eyes—and then returns it to his hands. "There's life here, also. We must remember that there is also life."
"I'd like to help," Garak says. "With your work."
It's not an order—he is long since past having the authority of giving orders—and he hopes it is not construed that way. But, as he has seen today, the small team here has done more to engage in practical service to Cardassia than has his witness-bearing and wallowing. Parmak, he imagines, would want little to do with him given the choice, but—what was that Earth expression? Beggars can't be choosers. And what are they, any of them, now, if not beggars?
The doctor glances up quickly from where he is sorting dust-coated bandages by size to look past Garak, before returning his gaze to his task. "I see."
"If I may."
Garak paces to his side and joins the organizing. There remain more small bandages here than large ones. Has there been more use for the latter? As a tailor, he always used the small buttons first—call it aesthetic preference—and needed to constantly replicate more, while the bigger ones languished in the box gathering what he thought of then—but now would hardly register—as dust.
Parmak retreats, relinquishing his task to Garak. He leans against the remnants of the wall and seems to consider for a moment. "I was planning to shift focus somewhat."
"Oh?"
"The patients here are more-or-less stabilized. While they need ongoing care, someone must see to the injured under the rubble. And trauma care is always more effective the sooner it can be administered, even if that means administering it on-site."
Garak takes a moment to parse this. Digging for bodies, then. No, not bodies—survivors. And then…dealing with that reality. He'd turned people into survivors, himself, once upon a time, and often. But rarely had he cause to handle the forms they'd been transfigured into, after. "And who will tend to the patients here?"
"My colleagues will manage." Parmak glances toward the professional in question, embodiments of calm competence. "Those who do not join me, that is." A brief hesitation, and then: "I cannot deny that another set of able-bodied hands would be useful."
And what right would Garak have to refuse such a request? When his hands—even drenched as they are and have been—are able, and those of so many on Cardassia are not? When whatever remains of his civilization needs whoever can help?
What right does Garak have, furthermore, to refuse a request from this man in particular?
"I will, of course," he says, finally. "Assist however I can."
And so they begin. The following morning—and for many, many thereafter—they gather: himself, Parmak, and two of the doctor's colleagues from the hospital, all four of them apparently, remarkably, by-and-large uninjured. Day after day, they pace Torr as a unit with the daylight, block-by-block, life-sign scanners in hand, impromptu digging materials and scavenged medical equipment secured on each of their backs.
They're quiet as they walk, listening for sounds of struggle, of distress, of any motion beneath the piles that once had been tenements, as they swing their scanners back and forth to extend their senses. Occasionally, one of them hears a cry or a moan—or else a scanner beeps. And then they snap into action, begin systematically rummaging through the relevant section of wreckage. They don't have shovels—nothing as dignified as that—but with repurposed brooms from the custodial closet of the ward, they leverage debris until they can shove it away, again and again, as many times as it takes to locate their target, and then one of them descends into the pile to get to them.
If they can, they remove them first—easier, they've found, to evaluate and potentially treat on more-or-less flat ground. But if the need is more urgent than that—or if digging them out will be a particularly long process—one of them sees to them where they lay as the other three work on extracting. And once an individual is stabilized, two of them carry them back to the clinic with a stretcher Parmak had found in the ashes of the hospital's ambulance bay before reuniting with the others.
They are, all four of them, diligent. Parmak, it seems, leans into his myopia, focuses entirely on each task at hand as it comes. Garak, for his part, tries to blink the sea glass out of his peripheral vision as he lugs concrete away and kneels in the grit to reach for the injured.
Sometimes, they see an in-tact body in or among the rubble, and, after checking for life signs, find a corpse. In such moments, they leave it where it is and continue on their way.
"Triage," Parmak murmurs to himself in these instances. "Triage."
The cry, on this particular day in North Torr, is high-pitched and muffled. Easily missed, perhaps, but Garak, hearing it first, freezes in the street and raises a hand.
"What is it?" One of the others stops beside him.
"I believe…" Garak strains to hear, then approaches a heap of what had been an older block of tenements. This had at one point been, if he recalls correctly (and he is almost certain that he does), the home of someone he'd observed early in his career. Not a likely dissident, true. But not quite as patriotic as someone in his class and position was thought likely to be, and who, therefore, merited an Order shadow to ensure that. Garak continues: "It sounds…I think, a child."
Parmak stiffens. They've found a scant few living children, and among those they have, not all have survived their attempts to stabilize and transport.
Scanners are quickly produced, but by the time they have verified life-signs, Garak has already begun removing debris. After only a few hunks of concrete are pried away from the side, he can see inside the destroyed structure, the gaps in the fallen pieces of the building aligned just so, such that, not only can he see the source of the cries—apparently a small boy, no older than five or six years of age—he also has a clear path to get to him.
The boy, trapped in that small space, howls. Some of the noises—echoing up through the wreckage—sound like they may be an attempt at words, but desperate and unintelligible ones. Without thinking, seemingly without his command, Garak's body moves, and he's moving toward the boy on his stomach, arms first, then head, then torso, propelling himself forward with his knees and toes…
"Garak, wait!"
But the boy is wailing. If he can crawl through the tunnel of the rubble, he can reach him. He continues inside. Further, just a small distance further—
Something shifts. Slabs crash, collapse. And suddenly what light there is from the pale sun is gone, and he is alone in the dark, pinned immobile by the concrete fallen on his back. The child continue to wail, and Tain will never let him go, never, because look what has all come of his work, look at the mess he has brought them all to, and doesn't he deserve to be buried here, in the ashes, Cardassia is dead, the Founder said, and he can't breathe, he can't breathe, and the boy is crying, and any moment the Tzenkethi will be here to extract him and bind him and nearly blind him and simulate drowning him again and again and again, and Tain will leave him for dead, dead, dead…
A hand grips his shoulder. The ruin on top of him is moved. Parmak pulls him back into the light. Squinting, Garak is deposited on his back onto the firm ground, the child next to him. Only air—extant but dusty and thick—sits on top of him, but it presses, it presses…
“Breathe,” Parmak says steadily, bracingly. He helps Garak into a sitting position, places his hand on Garak’s chest over his heart as though to make a clinical evaluation. “Breathe,” he repeats.
Garak, gasping, feels his pulse pound against Parmak’s palm. But as he forces his lungs to inflate and deflate in turn, it slows and gentles itself. He doesn’t speak, doesn’t meet the doctor’s eye—re-traumatizing him would be a poor return on top of everything else—but Garak hopes, as the air fills him and the world slowly expands again, the outcome reflects gratitude enough.
Parmak keeps his hand in place for a moment more, and before he moves it, murmurs just loud enough for Garak to hear: “There’s life here, also.”
When Garak appears at their detail's pre-arranged meeting point the following morning, Parmak raises an eye-ridge in apparent surprise. Garak can't blame him, he supposes; after yesterday's display, anyone in their right mind would assume his cowardice. But such perceptions don't matter—not when they have a job to do as vast as theirs.
"You do know," Parmak asks after a moment. "That there are other ways to contribute?"
Is the doctor giving him an out, Garak wonders, as he would if he had a physical ailment that prevented him from lifting debris? Or is this a dismissal? If it's the latter, he decides, the man will have to be explicit about it. He will not, for once, rely on subtext—not to be dissuaded from his duty. From his chores. "I do."
"And that they are equally as necessary as what we are doing?"
"Yes."
A glance at Garak's face, quick, another moment of consideration, then Parmak nods. "Shall we get back to work, then?"
When dusk falls, which, without a functioning electric grid, spells the practical end of their labors on this particular day, they four find themselves in the place which used to be Torr Park. A modest place, like much in Torr, hardly a park at all when compared to grander expanses in the Tarlak or Paldar sectors. Brown grasses rather than green, but nonetheless something for the service classes of the Union to hang their eyes and lay their backs on in between work and the gelata house, on that rare spring or autumn day when it was pleasant to laze outdoors. Garak had spent time here, once, like many places in this sector. It had, at times, even been a favorite spot to—for work or for pleasure—watch his countrymen go about their lives.
As they prepare to disband for the evening, Parmak seems to linger, looking out at a particular patch of scorched ground. Raising a hand in farewell to the other two as they turn to leave, intentionally shuffling his feet so as not to sneak up on him, Garak slowly approaches the man.
"There was a garden here," Parmak says as he does. "I would come, sometimes, after my shift."
There had been. The Torr Community Garden. An initiative started by students living in East Torr in the hopes of uniting the entire sector—North and East—in a shared project. The Order had, of course, been suspicious, and so Garak had naturally taken an interest. It hadn't achieved its goals; only a handful of East Torr residents worked to maintain it. But it had been beautiful. At least, it had been the last time he was on Cardassia, before exile took him away.
"My family had a garden at our home," Parmak continues, and Garak wonders briefly why the doctor is sharing this with him. Is it a test? A peace offering? He has very little to give in return...
Parmak sighs. "I was dreadful at tending to it. It was my father's project, really. Before he…" A swallow. "Eventually, my sister took it on until she moved to Lakarian City with her spouse. I should return and see what happened to it."
"The garden?"
"The garden and the house. I've not been back, since…"
Since when, Garak wonders? Since the Jem'Hadar? Or before? Since the labor camp, the removal of the elder Dr. Parmak, and everything that came with that sad affair?
"My father's house didn't have a garden," Garak hears himself respond. And it hadn't, much to Tolan's dismay. It had been a grand mansion, to be sure—large and not inconspicuous. But even in Coranum, vegetation and greenery at a private home attracted the type of attention Tain had discouraged. Now, though, without Tain… "Perhaps I will plant one."
The doctor glances in his direction, cocks his head slightly. "I should like to see it if you do."
"Yes?"
Brown eyes meet blue. Parmak steadily holds his gaze.
"Yes."