Chapter Text
A man of science, Julian liked to predict logical outcomes with a simple hypothesis. They used this structure: If ___, then ___, because ___. It proved quite helpful at work, in meetings, and conversations with beautiful women. It even worked on Garak, even though he did not fit into any of those categories.
Garak had given Julian a book. If Garak gave Julian a book, then he would want to see Julian's reaction, because Garak liked to argue with Julian. But he hadn’t said a word about the book to Julian. In fact, in the week preceding their next scheduled lunch, he had hardly made eye contact with him.
Garak was mad at him. If Garak was mad at him, then Julian would apologize, because that was the right thing to do. And if that hypothesis was true, then everything was fine, because Julian apologized. But he had, and it certainly wasn’t.
If Julian were to kiss Garak in the middle of an intensifying argument, then Julian would not leave the room, because the room was his room. But he did leave. So, fuck the scientific method, or something like that.
Julian wandered onto the Promenade. The bright lights dazed him, walking aimless through the dwindling nighttime crowds. Not that it was ever nighttime, or daytime, or any other time than the number it was assigned. Their schedule was a humanoid creation, implemented for the beings that needed to sleep in cycles. There were plenty of beings on the station that did not, and Julian bumped into them, some in the literal sense.
There was an abandoned stretch in the hallway he'd wandered into, which was where Julian's shuffling came to a stop. He leaned back against the wall for a moment before sliding all the way to the floor. He fixed his gaze on a shiny part of the walkway and calculated the luster of the metal. This distracted Julian for a few minutes, numbers almost tangible in front of him, until his lip started to quiver, and he realized he was crying.
It was objectively pathetic enough that Julian stopped crying and started to make ugly little snorting sounds that felt like laughter.
It wasn't the fact that he was attracted to men, or alien men, or Cardassian men, or Garak. It wasn’t because he’d realized it only after ruining his relationship with the one man he had ever ostensibly been attracted to, with limited time to repair their friendship before the Jem’Hadar exploded them both. It was that Julian fervently, vehemently, more than almost anything else, did not want to be gay.
Homosexuality on Earth was decriminalized and homosexuals protected. Religion had morphed along with the law and changing social currents, and it was slowly and quietly deemed acceptable by the majorities as time passed. There was nothing separating a gay human from a straight human, or any variant thereof. Millions of lightyears away from Earth, the opinion on homosexuality was largely variable, but DS-9 was an entirely neutral space. Julian knew more gay people than he could care to count, but they weren’t gay people , they were just people to him. There was no meaningful distinction, not that Julian could see. He didn’t think that he could feel any functionally different from a gay person.
What it felt like was an error, something that should have been coded out of his biology. Maybe his father couldn’t afford to pay for Julian not to be attracted to strange grey men. In hindsight perhaps he should have scraped up everything he could find, because this felt like his downfall. Not Starfleet Academy, not Federation medical examinations, not Odo’s constant surveillance or the scrutinizing gaze of Commander Sisko.
A thought pounded in his head, over and over again: isn’t there enough wrong with me?
And then Julian really started to cry, because he remembered his conversation with Kira, Jadzia’s careful advice, that stupid novel. Dolar’s face, mild and unassuming in photograph, eyes boring into him like hypodermic needles. Garak’s face, like Julian had stabbed him through the heart with his own blade.
“I doubt seeing the Chief Medical Officer crying in the hallway is good for crew morale,” a soft voice above him said.
Julian jolted, more tears slipping from his eyes as he blinked, incredulous, at— “Garak?”
”I must say, Doctor, I thought you’d run out of ways to surprise me.” Garak’s tone was calculatedly soft. Through blurry eyes, Julian noted his rigid posture was gone; his cartilaginous shoulders relaxed in exhaustion. “How I underestimated you."
“Garak,” Julian wheezed. He drew his legs closer into himself. “How did you know I was here?”
Garak shrugged like it didn’t matter, like the reason they were both there didn’t matter. Like this was as routine as their weekly lunches, like this was as normal as breathing. Julian drew a sharp inhale as Garak took a step towards him. Some sort of hurried apology bubbled in his throat when Garak lowered himself onto the floor, his legs out in front of him. Julian deflated a little knowing that Garak couldn’t reasonably grapple him from this angle, almost sitting on his tail.
“I find it amusing that I have to be the one to find you,” snipped Garak.
Julian cleared his throat before he spoke. “I didn’t think you’d want to find me.”
A beat of silence passed between them. Garak tilted his head in thought, lips parted. His tongue wetted the corner of his mouth, traced the inside of his upper lip. A rush of something coursed through Julian. At first it felt like a copy of a copy of an emotion, but then he knew exactly what it was. He turned away, his cheeks burning. What the fuck.
“I think you’re trying to say that I should be mad at you,” Garak said.
“Are you?” said Julian, his voice haggard.
“Do you want me to be?” Garak’s tone was mild, like he was asking Julian about his day.
“I don’t know!” Julian snapped, his head whipping around. His eyes were full of tears again. Despite his best efforts to stave them away, one slipped down his cheek. “I don’t know what’s going on anymore, Garak.”
“Does it scare you?”
Julian was a doctor, a pioneer in multiuniversal frontier medicine, on a space station positioned next to a wormhole. His colleagues were mind-readers, bioluminescent, prophetic. He had met people who had destroyed entire spaceships, entire races, entire planets. There was a war around the corner whose soldiers would die before they ever reached his operating room, and many who would die even if they did. At the crux of it, Julian did scary things, had a scary job with scary people who also did scary things to other scary people. After doing that for a while, most things stopped being all that scary.
Except he was starting to think he might actually be attracted to men, and somehow he felt that it would be enough to kill him.
“Yes,” Julian whispered. He leaned his head against the wall and looked up at the ceiling, his throat bared. Julian felt Garak watch him.
“It’s interesting,” said Garak, breaking the heavy silence with a casualness only Garak could manage. “Cardassians sob when we’re sad, but we don’t produce tears. I believe it has something to do with evolutionary genetic water retention.”
“That is interesting.” Part of Julian hoped this was going somewhere, but another part of him wanted Garak to ramble on about benign Cardassian physiology until someone else found the two of them in the hallway.
“I’m sure it is, but that’s not the part I find particularly fascinating.” Garak shifted until he was facing Julian completely. “We don’t cry often, and we don’t cry alone. We learn to make noise as infants to alert others to our needs, so that they can take care of us. I have been told that this is also a Human behavior.”
He cleared his throat. “But, with Humans, they grow out of it, and we don’t. For you, crying is a silent, private thing, sometimes a shameful thing. You shed all these tears without making a sound, so that nobody knows something is wrong. It can provide temporary catharsis, but in the end, if you’re silent, all you’re really doing is wasting water.”
Garak reached out and wiped another tear from Julian’s cheek with his thumb, careful to keep his claws from grazing the sensitive skin. His touch lingered for a moment, then he withdrew, his hand hovering in the air near Julian’s face for another moment before it retreated to Garak’s side, and he shifted his legs to stand up. Panic seared through Julian’s heart, like he was struck by lightning.
“I-Isn’t there a line about—about the importance of saving water?” Julian stammered, panicking as Garak attempted to retreat. “In the book?”
Garak paused, rested back on his haunches. “I believe there’s several.”
“There’s one that I really liked,” Julian said. He swallowed, a thick noise that echoed inside his skull. “Something like, um…”
Remembering what it said wasn’t the hard part; it was remembering which one. There was a lot of metaphor about saving water, and even an entire chapter dedicated to the practices the farmers utilized to preserve it during the winter, when sandstorms entombed most of Cardassia Prime for months. There was one line Paras had said to Lakol, during what Julian believed to be a romantic scene. It was enveloped in so much allegory and symbolism that Julian was only half-sure.
“‘The rain you catch on your tongue will quench you, thirsty thing, and as the cloud-fall gathers in your mouth you will forget that it was ever dry,’” quoted Julian, watching closely for Garak’s reaction. He widened his eyes in that way he did when he was caught off guard. It was a millisecond of a microexpression, but it was those moments that Julian lived off of. “Or something like that.”
“I didn’t know that’s how that was translated into Standard,” said Garak, eyes fixated on the floor. “Interesting.”
“It was a very beautiful line, I thought.”
“It… is,” replied Garak slowly. He cleared his throat once, twice. “Very. Hm.”
Julian’s shoulders slumped. Garak’s barriers were back up, his defenses raised. It was like they were in the Replimat instead of huddled on the floor of some hallway near Cargo Bay, discussing literature like they always had. He knew now this reading assignment was more than an honest recommendation. It didn’t seem like Garak wanted to acknowledge it, taking advantage of the fact that Julian was too afraid to cry out.
“You’re scared too,” said Julian, all at once and far too harsh. Garak froze. “Of me. Of… Of us?” His voice turned into a squeak. One word had turned him and Garak into a unit, something inseparable, a dynamic, a pattern of shared behaviors that grouped them together. Something observable. There was not one moment that Julian could remember in their years of friendship where Garak wanted to be seen. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, Julian,” Garak sighed. Julian scrambled to wrap his arms around his wide, structured shoulders, their knees meeting where they were kneeling on the floor. Garak inhaled through his nose in surprise, so still beneath Julian’s touch that he wasn’t even sure if he was breathing. Julian’s eyes were wide open, staring at the ground behind Garak’s back, waiting for his response. Seconds passed, and they could very well have turned into minutes; Julian, for once, wasn’t counting in the back of his head. Everything was focused on Garak.
Hands, delicate and shaking, found Julian’s waist. Fingertips rested on the fabric of his uniform, a ghost of a touch. They applied more force on his skin until the grip was a vise on either side of him, squeezing until it hurt, but not so much that Garak’s claws pierced through him. Julian could understand this pain. Cause and response, aggressor and aggressed, the reaction to the action. This made sense. It wasn’t some nebulous heat undulating inside his stomach, doing nothing more than making him sick and confused. Garak gripped his skin so hard Julian could feel each point of pressure, each point where Garak didn’t want to let him go. He tightened his arms around Garak’s shoulders and kissed him, this time with a distinct lack of purpose. Julian kissed him to kiss him, because he wanted to. There was nothing else to say. They had exhausted all of their words.
Kissing Garak was like kissing a woman if the woman was a man and also an alien with saliva that was distinctly cooler than the rest of his mouth. It was fine, and maybe even pleasant. Julian had a feeling he was going to have to get used to at least a few parts of the experience at some point, so he leaned into it. He then realized that he had not once ever seen a Cardassian use their mouth to express affection, in fiction or real life.
“I am so sorry,” sputtered Julian, pulling back with a gasp. Garak’s eyes were open, his pupils dilated inside thin rings of blue. His arms shrank from around Garak’s body. “I completely forgot–”
He’d forgotten a few things, but chief among them was that Garak was combat-trained. In a series of swift motions that felt like one, Julian was on his back looking up at Garak, his breath knocked out of him. “What?” Julian wheezed, which did nothing more than blow his breath into Garak’s face as he leaned down to kiss him again.
“You always make everything so much harder than it needs to be,” Garak said when he drew back, muffled into Julian’s shoulder. He felt the curve of a smile form into his skin.
The newfound knowledge that Garak didn’t hate him had given Julian back some of his confidence. Julian wriggled in his grip. “I’m sorry? Me?”
Garak gave him a look that reminded Julian that they were currently on the ground, and this was because of him. “Who else could I possibly be referring to?”
“I don’t know, how about the one that literally altered records to keep me from vital information?” Julian’s grip on Garak’s shoulders turned into an open palm on his pectorals, or whatever the Cardassian equivalent was. “Got anything to say to that?”
“I wanted to have the conversation on my own terms,” replied Garak. Most of the bite had seeped out of his words; this felt like truth. And if it wasn’t, well, Julian didn’t feel like challenging his feelings any more. “You have a special way of mucking things up regardless.”
“I’m not apologizing for it.”
“I didn’t ask you to.” They both stopped for a moment. Garak withdrew, leaning back against the wall and looking anywhere but Julian.
“I don’t think—” Garak began his sentence but stopped short, his eyes darkening. He looked at Julian for a moment before looking away again. “The Warmth of the Worker’s Palm is more than just a piece of literature. I’m sure you’ve gathered as much by now.”
Julian didn’t say anything, forcing Garak to continue. “It’s… It’s like a code, almost. Well, it is a piece of literature. A good one, some might say. I wouldn’t, personally. I find the writing a bit trite, and quite bloated in some areas, though for the time period you must give it credit for—”
“Garak.”
Garak paused mid sentence, his mouth still forming the next line of deflection from Julian’s question. He sighed.
“It was a means of covert identification,” Garak said. It was as though Julian had torn the sentence from his mouth. “For those whose relationships weren’t encouraged by the Union.”
“Gay people?” asked Julian, genuine curiosity fizzing in his brain, the words coming out before he had time to process them. He and Garak flinched at the word for different reasons.
“Primarily,” he answered. He watched Julian warily as he said, “For Hebitians, too.” Julian opened his mouth to ask another question but Garak cut him off, saying, “But we–they’re not particularly relevant to this conversation.”
Julian cataloged Garak’s slip-up for later, along with many other instances that he couldn’t bring up under threat of his life. He liked to think about the possible answers while he tried to go to sleep at night, his mind wandering in circles until he was back where he started.
“So, it’s a code? ‘An ally of Dolar’? It means someone is….” Julian trailed off. Garak scoffed, a gentle rush of air from his nose.
“That’s one facet of… language that the piece created, I suppose,” said Garak, hesitancy dripping from every word. Even with his alien tongue having been in Julian’s alien mouth, he was still careful about what might happen if he said the wrong thing. “It was one of the first pre-Union works to be restored after its inception. Not completely, but enough. There were entire generations of Cardassians who couldn’t even read the Kardasi of the original manuscripts.”
“Has the language evolved that much in that time?” asked Julian.
“Of course it did. It still does.” Garak shook his head. “There were alterations made, on top of all of that. Once the Union had control, they weren’t going to let it become subverted because of a mediocre attempt at a political tragedy. Some say the book ended… differently. I maintain that even if it did, it doesn’t matter. The society we had then is completely gone now.”
“Do you know how it actually ended?” Julian said. He didn’t believe for a moment that there was any debate on whether or not the ending was changed.
Garak must have known that he wouldn’t. “They get married. Lakol moves to the countryside and they live out of Paras’ shack. Paras farms, Lakol becomes an artist. They raise orphans as their own, farm the land, and die.” He cleared his throat and pressed his lips together. “Trite, boring nonsense, if you ask me.”
“I think it’s beautiful. Simple. More realistic than Paras trying to kill Lakol’s family and getting executed for it, I’d say.”
Garak rolled his eyes, but his fond smile gave him away. “I would rather not have this conversation on the floor, Doctor.”
“What about in my quarters?” Julian lowered his voice to an unnecessary whisper into Garak’s ear.
“That depends. Will you stay for the whole conversation?”
“Will you stay after the conversation?”
Garak opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again. Finally, he grumbled, “If I had known how easy it was to get into your bed, I wouldn’t have bothered with any of this in the first place.”
Stars filled Julian’s entire chest and lit him up from the inside.
—
“Doctor Bashir, are you all right?”
“Hmm, Odo?”
“I said, are you all right? You look rather ill.”
Odo gestured to Julian’s wrinkled uniform and his slumped posture at the Replimat table. Bleary eyes stared back at Odo, blinking with what seemed like great effort. The bags underneath Julian’s eyes were stark against his dark skin, and his hair was out of place.
“Oh, please don't worry about me, Odo," said Julian. He smiled down at his pudding like they both knew something Odo didn't. "I'm doing fantastic."