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“...That’s all well and good, doctor, but what I can’t bring myself to understand is why this magician -- this Prospero -- would willingly give up his power?” Garak asks, pausing to take a sip of his Tarkalean tea. He leers over the edge of the glass in that strange cat-and-mouse way of his.
“Really!?” Julian scoffs, pushing away his plate. Their lunch has long since been eaten. He gazes around the upper level of the Promenade in disbelief. “After everything he’s done, after all the ways he’s abused this power, you can’t understand --”
“Perhaps it’s another weakness of humans. If the hero did this at the end of a Cardassian play, this would be a tragedy! And yet you say it is not?”
“No! It’s about making amends , about realizing limitations. Haven’t the Cardassians done that in exiting Bajor and allowing the Federation and the Bajorans to man this station?” Julian asks, shaking his head in frustration. He leans back in his seat, nearly bumping into a short engineer pushing behind him with one of the dabo girls on her arm. He waves a quick, awkward apology without making eye contact; his line of sight is very much...occupied.
“Oh?” Garak raises an eyebrow, the grey of his skin made especially pale in the dim lights on the promenade. “The Cardassians walked away from this station with their pride intact, flinging their weapons to the bottom of the sea?”
He pauses, voice warbling slightly. He's unsure, the way Garak always makes him unsure. “Maybe not in that manner, but --”
“And it was all due to a softening of hearts among the Guls?” Garak presses on, maintaining a serene composure while still clearly in anxious pursuit of an upper hand. In short: he's enjoying himself. “An era of peace and sympathy swept across the Empire and made them -- what are we now? No longer an Empire?”
“Some of your compatriots choose to call your government a union , not an empire , Garak --” Julian is smiling exasperatedly now, he can't help it. Something about the roundabout nature of these discussions is...comforting, in its way.
“I could call my knife in a man’s back my sewing needle, but that wouldn’t make him less dead, would it?” Garak’s tone is light, teasing as always, but there is something hardening in his eyes. Julian’s mind has been expanded -- no, that's much too kind a word -- modified against his will, purposefully and disgustingly. Now, he leaps at the chance to turn over every puzzle set before him a thousand times in a minute, to find every possible angle and see how the light shifts around every object, every scenario.
He hasn’t yet found an angle where Garak makes sense. Or even any two angles where he looks the same.
“Yes, yes,” Julian sighs. “Alright, I see your point. Though I can’t tell if you’re praising Cardassia, or... damning them?”
To Julian’s surprise, Garak chuckles at that, good naturedly, and presses a large hand to his arm, half on the sleeve of his Starfleet uniform, and half on the bare skin of his wrist. He doesn’t know why he notes this contact, or why he freezes up at the surprising warmth of the touch, but he does. “My dear doctor,” Garak begins, still laughing. Their eyes meet and they both sober. “Neither can I.”
At that addition, Garak's voice is just half a degree softer; nobody would notice it unless they spent as much time studying the cadence of the Cardassian's voice as he has (out of suspicion that his lunch partner is a spy, of course).
Julian’s mouth parts at that, as if ready to pull out one of his smarmy replies, but no words come. His eyes dart down again to study Garak’s hand that is still on his arm. He wonders if the other man can feel his heartbeat speeding up. Certainly that's something they learned in the Obsidian Order, isn't it? Reading heartbeats. Well, if Garak ever actually was part of the Obsidian Order, and since it took so long to learn his first name, Julian has his doubts.
But, whatever the intent, that leaves the bare fact that Julian's heartbeat has sped up. He feels it hammering in his throat.
He shakes his head and smiles, trying to break away any part of this new and awkward tension in his chest and the air around them. “You know, there is one interpretation that Prospero giving up his staff and all his power is supposed to be William Shakespeare himself rescinding his own power as 'the Bard,' as this was one of his final plays.”
Garak pulls his hand away, placing it instead on his chin as he ponders. Julian reflexively pulls his own hand back, too, as though burned -- or worse, embarrassed. “Ah,” Garak says, “Painting his own words as a kind of magic. And perhaps it is one! After all, it has held many a captive over -- nearly a millennia now, in your Earth years, isn’t it?” He sucks in a breath. “There’s some charming human expression, I think it is called being ‘spellbound’? Although, that usually connotes some kind of feverish adoration or -- perhaps love?”
Now Julian's heart certainly is beating at a rather unhealthy rate; he could track it himself if he weren't so damn distracted. “It...has been used to describe one in the act of...falling in love rather suddenly, yes,” he replies slowly, tongue heavy in his mouth, wondering how they got here. The expansive windows on the upper level of the Promenade offer their shifting view of stars spread out in the distance like an alphabet he can’t read, or a medical scan of an anatomy he’s never seen before. Out of all the billions -- trillions -- of life forms in the Alpha Quadrant alone...how did he end up at this lunch table with this specific Cardassian? This Cardassian who seems to know how to press every button he has and yet leaves him, every week, with a sense that he knows nothing but also understands himself better?
“Love as a kind of magic is also something you’d never see in Cardassian poetry. Surely we are bound to it, though not in uncertain, mystical terms, but rather it is another form of duty, ” Garak muses, pulling Julian from his thoughts about the moment and back to being in it . "I wonder if that exclusion is one of our weaknesses. There is truth to it, after all."
Garak’s tense gaze lingers on his face with an emotion that Julian can’t quite pinpoint. He starts. "Wait, Garak. What...do you mean --?"
“How interesting, Prospero as Shakespeare.” He does it deftly, but it doesn’t escape Julian’s notice how Garak quickly pivots course. “Even with this new lens, that of course still leaves my ques --”
“Julian!” A gruff voice cuts in from the stairwell. Jumping slightly as though pulled from his reverie, Julian whips around to be met with the stern countenance of Miles O’Brien.
“Yes!? Sorry, Chief, is there something wro --” Julian pauses, half rising out of his chair. Then, he closes his eyes and dramatically pulls a hand down his face. “The holosuites,” he groans through his hand.
“We were supposed to be sailing in the English channel half an hour ago, Julian! The Normans could be attacking our settlement by now, for God’s sake!” The chief runs a hand still smeared with grease through his short curly hair. “Are you still coming?”
Alarmed, now standing awkwardly with a hand on the back of his chair, Julian looks from the seated Cardassian to the portly human beside him, and back again, guilt settling in his gut. “I forgot, Miles, I’m so sorry. We were having a discussion about --” Glancing back to Garak, whose face is suddenly half in shadow from this angle, as if half the lights in the station went out, and the words and emotions seem to slip away into that mysterious void of distant stars. Time seems to have contracted during this lunch, like that brief instant before warp sets in. He blinks. “ -- It doesn’t really matter what the discussion was about. We should still have the holosuite for another hour and a half, right?”
“Hour and a quarter by the time we get there,” Miles nods.
“Then you can’t let anything delay you, doctor,” Garak says calmly, politely pulling his napkin out of his collar and dabbing at the corner of his mouth. “I’ve stolen enough of your time as it is.”
“Garak…” Julian breathes, softer than he intends it to be. You know my time is freely given to you, he thinks. There is a twinkle in the Cardassian’s deepset eyes as his mouth twitches into his familiar coy smile that tells him he already knows...or knows something , anyway. Julian has to remember that nothing about Garak can be that easily known.
His mind returns to the comment about being spellbound. It’s like the word has hooked him somewhere in the middle, and he’s some stupid fish who took the bait he didn’t know was bait at all. Or, to use a comparison Commander Sisko would enjoy, it’s like he was running to bases for a home run when a meteor (or a meteorite? Damn it, what’s the difference again? He’s not an astronomer or a... geologist? No amount of genetic tailoring can account for Julian’s own boredom with the sciences of the unliving .) struck him down right there. But everyone keeps playing.
No words come up, so Julian does what Garak has taught him best, and pivots. “Same time next week, then?” he asks finally.
“Of course,” Garak nods, standing now himself. “Perhaps a half hour earlier, if you can spare the time, so that we don’t take any more of the Chief’s.”
O’Brien huffs a laugh, stubbornly not making eye contact with Garak; not even acknowledging him, truly.
Wiping his hands with nervous energy, Julian then claps Garak on the shoulder, quickly, before he can think too much about the touch. “I’ll see you then, Garak.”
Despite his rapidity, Garak's hand still covers his, firmly. Julian cannot help but look rapidly around at everyone in the vicinity, face stricken with guilt as if he has been caught stealing something. He pulls his hand away quickly, shaking it out to try to ease the burning feeling in his fingers and in his cheeks.
He and Garak hold each other's gaze a moment longer. The other man's eyes are wide, piercing but veiled as always, but there is something else in the dark depths. Something...soft. However, Garak blinks, and his eyes are placid and unreadable again, setting into his neutral, unassuming expression he done so often.
And then, he and Miles are practically running through the corridors, nearly knocking over Kira, who rolls her eyes at them as they avidly discuss battle strategy for the forthcoming simulation.
Although, even as he gets dressed in furs and chainmail, even as he practices warrior voices with his friend, even as he thinks about the hyperrealism of a holographic eleventh century sword in his hands that are too smooth and unblemished for true battle...Julian finds his palms, as though they have memory, remembering the shape and feeling of Garak’s broad shoulder.