Work Text:
Julian never starts calling Garak by his first name.
“I’m not sure Elim is your actual first name, either,” he says.
“Ah, but how can you be sure Garak is real, for that matter?” Garak asks him, smiling.
“It’s the one I got to know you by,” Julian says, and that seems to be enough.
Garak, on the other hand, progresses from my dear doctor to my dear Julian quite seamlessly.
Deep Space Nine grows too small for them, eventually. Julian’s work moves from the clinical into pure research, just as easily done from the comfort of his own home and the occasional transport into a station lab, and Garak’s tailor shop—however much he grew to love it—was never more than an excuse, anyway.
They settle together, within easy shuttle distance of Deep Space Nine, in a small house down on Bajor. Neither of them have ever needed much. But it has a garden, and pleasant neighbours, and a kitchen where Garak can make i’danian spice pudding—although he’ll always say he can never replicate the station’s cuisine. Julian continues his work, and Garak takes on private clients for tailoring work. Their days may not be full of as many adventures as before, but they fill the space with literature and opera, growing a library together of modern poetry from all over the galaxy, and with long walks around the neighbourhood and vacations to nearby, verdant planets.
Their life becomes routine. Their neighbours are retired couples, and families with young children, and veterans from the Cardassian war who value peace over a bustling cityscape.
Garak still collects secrets, but they are softer, sadder ones now—a marriage on the rocks, a failed Academy evaluation, a fatal disease. He folds them into hemlines and hides them under mended patches, and as he adjusts the seams of shoulders, he lifts the weight off them, just a little.
He never tells anything he learns to Julian.
“You know that the secrets I know are not mine to share,” he says.
“Not even your own,” Julian says, an echo back to conversations held long ago, again and again.
“Especially my own,” Garak says, smiling, the reply rote by now, and Julian tells him he’s not nearly as enigmatic as he likes to pretend.
Julian eventually stops practising clinical medicine entirely, but he keeps his steady voice and hands, putting them to use for skinned knees and fevers and falls and all those other little everyday catastrophes that crop up in a neighbourhood of children and retirees. And when Garak’s headaches come back—as they do, and continue to do as long as he lives—he brings cold cloths and and non-addictive painkillers and sits next to Garak’s darkened bed, reading the latest volume of Klingon poetry while Garak spits and curses and says things he’ll apologise for, obliquely, later.
They have old friends to visit. Odo comes regularly when they first move down, first with fears about a risk for assassination now that they’re away from the security of the station, then about a possible spy ring in their neighbourhood and then, once his excuses run out, for regular dinners. Sisko visits every time he’s on Bajor for business, and so does Quark—although Julian and Garak have to stop him from initiating a pyramid scheme with their next-door neighbours. The O’Brien family, who still celebrate Christmas, invite themselves over every other year to spend the holiday with them during Bajor’s corresponding winter month. Garak is as wildly enthusiastic about the exoticism of crackers and wrapped presents every time, while Julian stresses over the traditional trappings of the holiday and decorates the fern in their garden with painstaking accuracy to old holo prints. And then of course there’s Ezri Dax—an old friend in a new form.
They grow to have a fine life, in this quiet corner of the world. It’s not the kind of life either of them ever envisioned—one of them saw a future only of glory, and one of only disgrace—but it’s both lesser and greater than either of them imagined.
Most of all, it’s a happy life.