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The roar of the bar seemed to dull as Quark looked down at the padd Odo held out. It bleeped the same colored letters, quite inoffensively mind you, but still the figures swam and spun like fireflies. Or like he'd had way, waaay too much beetle snuff.
It was a money order. An offer of payment for a product that had recently gone off the market.
A very ...personal... product. But not a 'personal product', in the usual sense of the word. Quark hopes. Does he hope so? Quark is babbling.
"Well, it's not as if I'm in any sort of a hurry," Odo blustered, his outline wobbling as he tried to draw himself up officiously and melt under a barstool at the same time. "In fact, the longer shipment is delayed the better. I simply don't fancy being outbid in the middle of the night should the offer... come back into stock."
"Odo, you can't be serious," Quark said, and set the bottle he was fussing with down on the counter with a delirious thunk.
Odo harrumfed voluminously, perhaps to cover the fact he'd squeaked halfway through. "I believe we've been over this exact question quite recently. I am deadly serious, I — eurgh..." He cut off with a wince when he realized what he'd said.
Punned himself into a corner, Quark laughed wheezily, and the fact that Quark found this funny instead of tart sauce was probably an indicator he'd gone punch drunk for gallows humor. What a hell of a week.
"Considering the... circumstances, I assumed it would be beneficial for you, as well as insurance for me, to receive payment up front," Odo continued, bravely fumbling into the breach.
Regular drunk might be an improvement, Quark thought, and fumbled the bottle open again. He yoinked two glasses out from behind the bar — ugly rhinestones glinting uglily in the light, and profits, Jadzia hadn't been kidding when she'd said they were tacky — and poured two shots, straight. He'd almost slid one down the counter to Odo, to clear his head out along with his sinuses, when he remembered no, nimrod, Odo doesn't blinking drink, he NEVER has, where have you BEEN these past umpteen years —
Morn sensed his trouble, and fished around Quark's elbow to retrieve the offending glass. Quark was so frazzled he even let him do it. He tried to say three things at once, shook his head to clear it, and when that didn't work downed the shot in a gulp. Ow. The burn did it.
"Whaddya want, all of me?"
"I'd take it." Odo's voice was as level as his eyes, and both contained a dangerous sort of softness bubbling to the surface. Quark spluttered and poured himself another drink, studiously not looking at the constable. He was afraid to find out if Odo's outline was blurring because Quark had started to tear up — from the liquor! thank you!! — or if the changeling had literally grown so hot under the collar he had begun to boil off. Out of embarrassment. Or...
Quark shoved his face in the spirits. If his eyes were going to water, they were damn well going to do it properly.
He gurgled. He choked. He tried again.
"How — how did you even get ahold of all this? I didn't think security paid that good. You been fencing contraband on the sly? Holdin' out on me?" Quark's laughter sounded like a desperate, reedy whine, even to his own ears. He trailed off before he embarrassed himself further.
But not before he embarrassed Odo, who stood there grumbling his besmirched honor as resolutely as a beige volcano. Of course he hadn't been skimming.
"Shit, maybe I shouldda been a dai'mon after all..." Quark turned back to the bar, hoping a third shot of kali'fal would clear his spinning head straight off into unconsciousness. And take this dratted hallucination with it.
This dratted, blessed, impossible, impossible windfall of a hallucination. There was really no sense tormenting himself.
Odo's hand slapped his wrist down and pinned it to the bar like a vice. A beige, tepid, faintly pulsing vice. Pulsing? When had Odo gotten flummoxed enough to slosh?
"I recently discovered Doctor Mora had taken out an investment portfolio in my name. He had been... using it as a tax writeoff for some years, which as I'm sure you know is minor fraud. I saw no need to press charges, and with some slight pressure Commander Sisko and Major Kira convinced him to turn it over to me. That is how I 'got ahold' of it, Quark."
And he still had a hold on Quark himself. The Ferengi looked dumbly down to his wrist, and then back up to Odo's fervently earnest beige face. He looked oddly as if there was something vitally important he wanted to convey. Other than that he hadn't been skimming funds, of course. Quark's ears were ringing.
"So, this... this is your life's savings. This is all you've got to go on."
"W-well, no." Odo swallowed, suddenly sounding uncertain. "It's the accumulated proceeds of the investments so far. I still have the stocks. They — they may earn more."
Quark put his head in his hands. Odo took his hand back.
"A-and I do have my wage here as chief of security. But as you mentioned that doesn't pay nearly as well." He rocked back on the balls of his feet and bounced nervously, desperately trying to look as if he was anything but. Quark wanted to shush him and tell him to sit down. The room was spinning enough as it was.
Fifteen hundred bars of latinum. For him.
That was half again as much as they had wanted for Zek's burial. Three times what he'd sold his supposedly-dying-but-not-yet-dead body off to Brunt for. Three times as much as what had ruined him. And Odo was hemming and hawing over there like he didn't think it was ENOUGH.
"Lissen. Buddy." Quark tried not to pay attention to how he was slurring, or the thumping headache forming behind his brow. Or how his ears were burning. "Take it from me. In an auction, you don't, you don't just start off and triple the opening bid." Or how his eyes were still watering. Strong stuff, Romulan ale. "You don't just up and triple the closing bid."
Odo stopped mid-bounce. "I was rather hoping there need not be an auction. We could just... finalize the sale. Unless you..."
No, nononono, not what he meant. No, stop that, no drooping. "I — I — look, I know I don't say this often, but you can't just come in here and spend it all in one place!"
"Oh? And why not?" Sweet rule-loving gods of fortune, thank you. Odo sounded peeved again. He drew himself up to his considerable puttylike height and rankled at the little lumpy figure sprawled at the bar. Quark was so grateful he could have cried. Actually cried, not watered. From spirits. Too much strong spirits. Yes.
Tell you one thing that strong spirits were good for, it was rendering Quark capable of producing no sounds closer to actual words than the backed-up garbage disposal Rom was getting around to fixing. Quark gargled forebodingly until he'd chewed up whatever piece of silverware had gotten stuck in his craw, and then he just spluttered. He gesticulated as best he could to convey how can you even ask me that, you innumerate fleece, and probably stumbled through directing the majority of a strafing run in Klingon semaphore. Words failed. Quark fell silent.
Odo just looked at him. And then he looked at him some more. He stopped rankling and drew himself up even taller, and stepped in to loom over Quark like the Tower of Finance itself. He took Quark's wrist again. No, he took his chin, and gently pulled it up to force Quark to look at him. Soggy-faced and bleary-eyed and all. His kohl was running down his face in streaks.
"What else would I need it for?"
...You did not just —
"Oh, that does it, that does it you, you—" Quark broke off a whine before it turned into a bawl. It got stuck in his throat again, but — no, no, fuck you! — he swallowed it down. "You can't — Odo, I'm not WORTH ALL THIS!!"
The shout echoed in the silent, auditor-ransacked bar. Profits, they'd be taking bets on this before the hour's out. If Quark kept his back turned and his vision blurry, he didn't have to see everyone staring, holding their breath. Several people had probably already won, but what he didn't know.
Odo was still staring, damn him. Boring into him with those tender, wobbly, watery eyes. Stripping him to the skin, flaying him alive and leaving him out to the stones and soggy vegetables of public humiliation. It was an interrogation. It was an outrage. It was a travesty. If Odo took his hand off Quark's jaw for even a second he thought he would just die.
Well, he didn't take his hand away. What he did was set the padd down on the bar — just set it down! just like that!! — and traced a finger round the hollow of Quark's cheek. He brushed the heel of his thumb up a tarry streak of mascara and liner, rubbed it between his two forefingers, and then vanished the paint away to wherever Odo put lint and other distractables that built up over the day. The fingerprint pattern on the bottom of his digits — Quark knew he forgot to put that on most days, or didn't bother — went soft and exaggeratedly terryclothlike, and he just stood there, silent as the grave, wiping Quark's face clean.
You could have heard a pin drop.
Odo worked his way up to Quark's poor, puffy eyesocket. He had gone blissfully cool and soothing, and if Quark leaned into him like a miserable haracat, well, he was very drunk. Probably dreaming, and very drunk. As Odo brushed his fingers across them, Quark's lids fluttered, perfectly involuntarily, thank you very much.
Odo swallowed as if he had something to say and thought better of it.
Then he steeled himself.
He lifted his thumb to Quark's brow ridge, and resolutely smoothed out the worry crease that had taken up permanent residence there. Simple as running a patron out of the bar after closing time: Out you get, we are done with you for today. Quark heard himself sigh, a feathery, shivery sound, and belatedly realized that it was indeed him who'd done it.
In one smooth stroke, without any further deliberation, Odo brought his strong fingers round the full helix of Quark's ear, brow to lobe. Quark heard the wanton moan as if through an echo chamber, and then — fortune, FORTUNE, sweet lady luck, that was HIM — he nearly fell out of his seat. The barstool wobbled violently, and Quark clutched at the first solid thing he could grab. Which, in a manner of speaking, was Odo.
Quark came out of his fog like a thunderclap, eyes desperately scouring Odo's face for any sort of tell. Quark had gotten him round the wrists and hung on like a pair of manacles, very aware that with his hands up like that he looked exactly as much like begging as he felt. Odo had his thumbs on Quark's tragus, fingers curled round the back of the shell. He had to be able to feel every skidding overworked lurch of Quark's heart, because profits, Quark could hear his pulse thundering in his ears.
It had... it had nearly been a year to the day since the last time... the last time Odo had touched his...
"Not worth it?" Odo scoffed. "Hah."
That! That was it, that was the tell. Odo's face, wholly his own this time, so reverent and so still, his eyes darting around Quark's own like he, too, was searching for any sort of sign. He was thinking about it as well. Still thought of the time when...
Slowly, with great, deliberate solemnity, Odo bent his head and finally answered.
"You let me be the judge of that," he rumbled.
And then he kissed him.