Chapter Text
Change was in the air.
Julian could feel it coming. It was hard to miss the signs. Kira had gone, for one thing. She gave as much information as she ever did, saying only that she had found another job down on Bajor. He shouldn’t have been surprised; security on the station was getting more and more restrictive, and the Resistance cell could only operate right under Dukat’s nose for so long before being sniffed out.
Julian had tried to ask, clumsily, if she had friends coming aboard that he should keep an eye out for. Predictably, Kira refused to name names.
Walk with the Prophets , had been her goodbye , and then- We’ll see each other again.
Julian wouldn’t have called her a friend in the traditional sense of the word, but he missed her all the same. She was intense and forthright, and she had no room in her world for uncertainty. He had admired her strength, her clarity of purpose.
He hoped they would both survive long enough to meet again, as she had promised.
The change was felt outside of the Bajoran Quarter as well. The Cardassians were on edge. In the bar, they gambled less and were more unwilling to speak to aliens. They sat around the tables having muted conversations with taut faces and rigid postures. Quark forbade his employees to talk about it (apparently, discussing how business was bad was bad for business), but his nephew Nog claimed to have seen Quark researching shuttle rides back to Ferenginar.
On Julian’s last visit to Bajor, Naprem had asked him about shuttle travel, and whether inoculations could be trusted to protect Ziyal if she was brought to another world.
Even Garak seemed affected. He had actually been sewing the last time Julian came to visit him. It wasn’t that Garak couldn’t sew- he had, ostensibly, made at least some of the products in his shop- but Julian had never actually seen any of them being produced.
Garak was also distracted, or as distracted as Julian had ever seen him. While they were talking, that piercing glance would sometimes go out of focus, and Julian would have to repeat whatever point he was making for Garak to disagree with. Garak always came back, and fixed Julian with the gaze that gave his stomach the swooping feeling of falling from a great height, but Julian still noticed the lapse.
It was disquieting, to say the least. Something was coming.
Julian just wasn’t sure what, or when.
Garak believed, whole-heartedly, in the superiority of Cardassia. He never doubted that his purpose was to be a tool in service of the glory of the Cardassian Union.
That said, he was not a fool. After half a century of time and wasted resources beyond reckoning, Bajor had proven to be unsuitable for colonization. Withdrawal was inevitable, as soon as the idiots at Central Command swallowed their pride.
The signs were there: less resources committed to the surface, denied requests for funding or personnel. Soldiers were transferred elsewhere and not replaced. Camps received more and more extreme orders; important prisoners were transported off-planet. Even the dullest gil could not miss that it was only a matter of time until all troops were recalled.
And if the fools in the lower ranks of the military knew, then Enabran Tain must have known for longer even than Garak.
Which begged the question: why had Garak not received his next set of orders?
Tain did not procrastinate until the last minute. He did like to keep subordinates uncomfortable, but that usually meant making them wait outside of his office, not in the field. Particularly not when they were in as passive a position as Garak currently held. He was an Observer, present primarily for intimidation rather than information, to remind Dukat that the Order was always watching.
Garak had been working on Prime for years, in the heart of the Obsidian Order, as an Inquisitor. This placement, although nominally a lateral move, had been a punishment for what Tain deemed insufferable impudence and what Garak considered healthy curiosity. Garak didn’t grovel well, but he had done his time. Surely now Tain would recall him?
Garak was useful. He knew it, and Tain knew it. As he sat and sewed to keep himself productive, ever the child of a housekeeper, he tried to remind himself that even if Tain was content to let him dangle, he would return to serve. It was only a matter of time