Work Text:
"A lady physician might be inclined towards belief in many impossible things."
- Sherlock Holmes, The God of the Hive, Laurie R. King
"I don't know if you've heard," Garak said conversationally, "but I'm going to Cardassia with Major Kira. They've asked me to act as her guide."
"Oh," said Julian, eyes wide. He reached for Garak, almost blindly, as if seeking any contact he could get. He ended up with one hand on Garak's chest and another curled around his upper arm. "I suppose you're glad to be going back in any capacity you can, but please, Elim, be careful."
"A permanent state of affairs, Doctor, I assure you," Garak said lightly.
"Of course," Julian said, nodding. "But I'll still worry. If I'm going to keep myself from giving us away, not to mention keeping myself sane, I've got to keep myself distracted."
"I'm sure the young Lieutenant Dax would be willing to help in that regard," Garak suggested gently.
"No," Julian said with a sigh, "she's been avoiding me. I don't think she wants me to know she and Worf are getting back together." He frowned thoughtfully. "You know, I think it's time I started on the organ regeneration project I've been playing with. That ought to keep me occupied."
"If it's that absorbing," Garak asked, "why haven't you started work on it already?"
"Because," Julian answered, "it requires me to do some rather invasive tests on Odo."
"Actually," Garak told him, "I believe Odo's coming to Cardassia too."
Julian blinked as he processed that, and then slumped. "Drat."
"You could always ask to borrow some Changeling," Garak suggested with a shrug.
"What, just say 'terribly sorry to bother you, Odo, but can I borrow a cup of goo'?"
"Well," Garak said, "can you think of an approach that would work better on Odo?"
"Perhaps not," Julian agreed.
They both lapsed into silence for a minute.
"Are you going to stay on Cardassia?" Julian asked at last.
Garak could only give one answer. "If they'll have me, yes."
Julian's fingers traced the scales on the outside of Garak's elbow. Then he drew himself up, looking Garak in the eye.
"I can't believe this is the end," he said. "I won't. If you stay, I can find a way to join you."
Garak patted the doctor's other hand where it still rested on his chest. "I'm sorry to say that the rare few who may welcome me will still most likely not welcome you."
"I don't care."
Garak sighed. "Don't make any hasty decisions. You belong in Starfleet." He read the angry look on Julian's face. The man rebelled at limitations. "You don't belong on Cardassia," he corrected.
"How do you know?" Julian asked.
"I do have hope for you, Doctor," Garak said, "but until you can read The Neverending Sacrifice and have it touch you the way the rare piece of Earth literature touches me, you won't survive there."
Misery bloomed on Julian's face. "I don't know how well I'll survive here without you." He lowered his head until his hair brushed Garak's scales. "God, I feel like I'm being ripped in half."
Garak hummed sympathetically, knowing the feeling all too well, but his reply was uncompromising. "Promise me you'll give your life here another chance. Read Federation books with Federation friends. Do brilliant medical research. Be Doctor Julian Bashir, healer of all species that visit Deep Space Nine. The man you're meant to be. The man I fell in love with. I couldn't bear it if he ceased to exist."
Julian sighed, one of Garak's hands in both of his, clearly contemplating that. He looked sideways at Garak's face for a moment.
"If I am going to build a life with someone," he said, "I'll need to be honest with them. Eventually. About you. You're too big a part of my life for anything else."
Garak thought. It was Julian's fate at stake, and Julian's responsibility to keep himself alive, if they were going their separate ways. The best way Garak could think of to reduce the risks to Julian was to let him have what he needed to make a relationship with someone else work.
The doctor would choose his confidante well. The things they'd been doing were hardly about to become common knowledge.
Garak's chest creaked with pain as he took a breath to answer, to give Julian a way out of their safe, comfortable circle of secrecy. "I understand."
The war raged, and fire rained down out of the sky, and death was everywhere.
The war ended, but at what cost to Cardassia?
Julian came to say goodbye. They had no chance for privacy, but Garak didn't know if he could stand the force of unfiltered Julian Bashir at the moment, anyway. The doctor did his level Federation best to be comforting, but comfort wasn't something Garak could accept right now.
"Cardassia will survive," Julian insisted.
"Please, Doctor. Spare me your insufferable Federation optimism. Of course it will survive, but as not the Cardassia I knew. We had a rich and ancient culture. Our literature, music, art were second to none. And now, so much of it is lost. So many of our best people, our most gifted minds." He pushed, because he knew if any non-Cardassian could understand how he felt right now, it would be Julian.
"I'm sorry, Garak. I didn't mean...." There were so many things that Julian put into his expression, then, so much he left unsaid because they weren't in the little bubble where words could flow freely, but Garak thought he knew what his Julian would have said.
"Oh, it's quite all right, Doctor," he said. "You've been such a good friend. I'm going to miss our lunches together." There was so much more than that he would miss, and they both knew it.
The doctor spoke with determination. "I'm sure we'll see each other again."
"I'd like to think so, but one can never say. We live in uncertain times." Garak squeezed his shoulder, hard, a goodbye full of affection and good will, and left.
Julian turned and went after him, but only long enough to press one of those now usual but still remarkable isolinear rods into his hand.
It was a quick and subtle way of saying that this particular struggle wasn't over.
Garak curled his fingers around the rod, and thought ruefully that he really should have known his doctor better than to think it was.
It was weeks before Garak had the kind of leisure that meant he could focus on a book.
The one Julian had given him this time was called The God of the Hive, and it started in a flurry of activity that followed the fallout of the adventure in the previous book. There was a lot of fleeing, and a lot of secrecy, and a lot of injuries that needed medical attention but that couldn't be tended to openly.
Frankly, it reminded Garak far too much of how he'd been spending his own days. But in another way, it was good to be able to feel the resulting emotions while he was safe in his shack, and not while he was searching precarious ruins for survivors or bodies and he had to have his wits about him so as not to be crushed by a further collapse.
Then Holmes found a doctor for his current companion, a fiery, defiant, unusual sort of doctor for the time and place.
"Yes," she said tiredly, "I'm a girl, but yes, I'm a qualified doctor, and no, my cousin won't return for two weeks or more, so unless you want to take your problem to Golspie or Inverness, I'm your man."
His first reaction was to think of Dr. Parmak, defending his choice to enter the medical profession despite his gender just as insistently, just as tiredly.
But then he couldn't help but picture Julian, fighting to be allowed to help people on Cardassia, fighting people's perceptions of both his gender and his species.
He would do it. He would make Cardassia accept him, and he'd shine like the stars in his fury if anyone tried to stop him. Garak didn't know why he hadn't been able to see it before.
But then, that had been months ago. The Cardassia that existed today was too weak to crush Bashir for the attempt.
Through a good three-quarters of the book, Holmes and Russell were separated, in the midst of their own adventures, only knowing that the other was alive and well when they read each other's coded messages.
BEEKEEPING is enjoyed by thousands, a reliable and safe hobby, practiced on week-ends alone from Oxford Street to Regent's Park.
And:
BEES may thrive in foreign lands yet, lacking protection, meet peril close to home on Saturday.
As long as they knew the other was safe, they could act with confidence, almost as one. Even separated by a stretch of choppy sea and the prying eyes of powerful enemies.
They both found new acquaintances to help them on their separate journeys, but they both gravitated in towards home, towards family, towards each other.
Garak saw the message in that, and yet he told himself firmly that there was still time for Julian to escape the tragedy that was having Cardassia as a home, and feeling all that the Dominion had done to the world like black, rotting marks on his heart.
But then, Russell's London had been decimated by war, buildings leveled and a generation of soldiers sent out, never to return. She had other places she could call home - she'd lived in Boston, and in California, and in other places that were not the capital of the British Empire. She'd had other directions she could have gone with her life. And still, London and Holmes kept calling her back.
Julian had grown up in London, and Garak wondered if even now, four centuries later, the inhabitants of that city still carried some of the scars around with them on their hearts.
They must, even just a little, if Julian still came back to these books over and over again, and still chose them over so many other stories of so many other eras.
Holmes and Russell met again, in London, after a funeral (and for a moment the description of that occasion reminded Garak vividly of a story that had been relayed via Julian's synthetic pen pal aboard the Enterprise), and the two of them were again immediately as they always had been.
Flirting outrageously, and wildly in love, but never too distracted to manage the task at hand.
He commented on the effectiveness of the disguise, examined me for sign of injuries, berated me for driving away our foes before they could reveal their leader, and chided me for reducing the obsequies to a shambles - all of which were his way of expressing his pleasure in seeing me.
They worked, despite all their differences, despite everything standing in their way.
Garak dared to hope that what he and Julian had really wasn't over. But there was so much to do. To build a new Cardassia. Not just the infrastructure that would keep the people alive, Garak was already doing everything he could to those ends, but the culture, the art, every part of what Cardassia had been needed to be rebuilt.
If Garak was to be a part of that, he had a lot of work to do, yes, but he also had many decisions to make.
Garak loved so much of the literature that had brought them as a species here, to this point, but in the end it had failed them. To rebuild, to make something that might work for Cardassia going forward, they would need a new kind of literature.
He didn't know if he was really the man for the job. He put pen to paper, but every time he tried, he could only think of all the things he wanted to tell Julian.
Was that so bad?
Julian had written to him, several times. The secret was kept, the missives only hinting here and there that something beyond friendship drove their connection.
Whenever Garak sat down to write back, he was struck by the feeling that there was more to do here, that Cardassia needed his labor before he could indulge himself this way.
But what was the goal? What direction should he be pushing? Garak thought of the Cardassia that could be, rather than the one that had been, or the one that now struggled to keep breathing through its injury.
If Cardassia was going to be different, could it become a place where a man like Doctor Julian Bashir would be welcome?
Could he do both at the same time? Weave a story of Cardassia that held everything he wished Julian could know about the place Elim called home?
He took old fragments of journal entries and stitched them together with aborted fragments of letters, pieced them together into a cohesive form as he might do with scraps of fabric to make a suit.
Elim Garak was very practiced in constructing a compelling lie.
The lies he wove drew from his own life, of course - the substance was true - but the form drew on what he knew of human literature, what they valued, what engaged them in a story.
One of the books that he and the doctor had discussed had been Ender's Game. It had struck Garak at the time as both horribly alien and horribly familiar. It had a texture as unforgiving as the stone of Cardassia, but a heart that was very much human.
He picked and chose his influences carefully, but in other ways he let the story grow the way it willed. He had been a gardener, after all, long before he had ever been a tailor.
It would tell Julian how he hurt, but that he was not alone. That things were starting to change, but that there was a very long way to go.
It would say, this is my home. If it's your home, too, then come home.