Work Text:
It started with the moon
That turned an inexpensive room into St. Peters.
There's a parabolic story, but it's boring
And it ends how you'd expect.
It’s a poor pretense, stepping out onto the terrace to get some air. It’s a poor pretense, but it works, because Julian follows him outside not five minutes later. He looks handsome in his abominable Starfleet dress whites, tugging at the bottom of his jacket, a touch of silver hair at his temples. He moves differently now, a kind of surety in his long limbs that didn’t exist before.
It’s been a long time.
Julian smiles, joining him at the railing overlooking the overly-groomed gardens. They’ve been half looking at each other all night, their tables close but not neighbors, their focus drawn to their respective heads of state on the dais. It was a seven course meal of stolen glances.
“How long has it been, Minister?” Julian asks, voice low, hinting at a spark of something that Garak can’t quite put his finger on.
Not for the first time, he curses the Cardassian memory. Their history crashes into the present, and it’s all too much, all at once. One flash of that old familiar grin and he’ll be completely lost, all goals for the evening abandoned with no recourse.
Clearing his throat, he tilts his head. “Do you want the unforgiving arithmetic?”
“If I wanted to be unforgiving, I would have reminded you immediately that you said we’d never meet again,” Julian replies, giving him the barest glint of that grin. Uncertain, Garak corrects him mentally. But he knows Julian remembers, Julian must remember in the same way that he remembers. “Right after rebuking my insufferable Federation optimism.
“I said that it was unlikely that we’d ever meet again, right after I said that you were a good friend and that I would miss you.”
“You said you would miss our lunches.”
“For a while, I just missed lunch.”
Julian huffs a laugh. “But here we are.”
“Here we are.”
On the terrace outside of a ballroom in Paris, at a state dinner honoring the renewed relations between the Federation and Cardassia. Hungrily, he watches the lines of Julian’s body as he leans on the railing, looking up at the few stars twinkling down at them dimly through the light pollution, the silvered crescent of the Earth’s moon. Ravenous, he wants to know the name of Julian’s tailor. He’s been out of the profession in any official capacity for nearly a decade, but he attributes his examination of the nip of his waist, at the slope of his shoulders and thighs to old habit.
Inescapable, really. He’d once known Julian’s measurements by rote, even if he insisted on taking them every time he came in to have something made.
“Close to ten years, if we’re rounding up,” Julian says, eventually and all too lightly.
“Oh?”
“Nine years, eight months, three weeks and… two days. Earth measurements, of course. I’m not sure what the conversion would be to Cardassian units of time.”
“Not due to any deficiencies in your mathematical talents, I must assume.”
Deep Space Nine had run on Bajoran time, naturally, once they managed to override the Cardassian computer systems.
“No, I just never bothered to learn the conversion from stardates to Cardassian standard time, outside of one folly made of attempting to figure out your real birthdate.”
“I’d have to know it myself,” Garak replies, because it’s the sort of thing that used to get a reaction out of Julian. It’s half true. He did find the entry in the Central Archive, eventually. Just not under the names or in the place he thought he find it filed under, but Mila had always been an overly cautious forger. “Why?”
Julian gives him a little half shrug, and a winsome smile. “Curiosity.”
Curious.
“I’d lie and say I didn’t know you’d be attending tonight, but I know you’d protest any assertion that I hadn’t seen the guest list and all associated dossiers.” He hopes that Julian would still protest his assertions, would still fight him on every point, and conjure up a witty rejoinder for every building argument he presents.
“If you’re asking in a roundabout way if I can still tell if you’re lying—”
“I’m not.”
He thinks.
Straightening up, Julian folds his arms across his chest, leaning back against the railing. He tilts his head upwards towards the sky once more, the line of his neck long and smooth from his collar to the tip of his chin. “I’d remind you that you’re often in the news, even Federation news. But as you might guess, I’m not just reading the Federation news services these days. But regardless, I haven’t quite lost my touch in detecting when you’ve embellished the truth.”
Even before the dossier landed on his desk, he had heard of Julian’s promotion from Kira.
“Fishing for congratulations?” he retorts. “How unlike you.”
The crinkle at the corners of Julian’s eyes does something devious to Garak’s heart in his chest. “Fishing for your approval? Perfectly like me.”
And oh—that does something else to his heart entirely. Without warning, Garak is too aware of his pulse in his ears, too aware of how Julian is meant to be observed in the flame and in the half-light. Or maybe that’s just his Cardassian eyes, finding jewel tones and angled lines in every shadow.
“Then… congratulations,” he says, eventually. “President Bacco couldn’t have chosen a better Surgeon General. Though from what I’ve heard and read, you weren’t the apparent candidate to many in the Federation’s political sphere.”
Which is to say that it surprised him when the announcement was made.
And not many people get to surprise Elim Garak.
“I also wasn’t a very popular one, though that’s a sentiment that’s familiar to me,” Julian says, his tone taking a turn towards wry. With a jolt of shame, Garak is reminded of why he chose Julian as his entryway into Starfleet all those years ago—he was eager, but so ever alone, and very unpopular among the staff.
He didn’t know. He didn’t know.
“I thought you had no interest in politics. Though I will admit—”
“It’s been ten years since we last spoke?”
“That,” he answers, almost laughing. There are pieces he doesn’t know, pieces he knows that would slot into place if he had them. But until now, he’s never had the resources to pursue them. “I wondered, you know. When I was serving as the Cardassian Ambassador to the Federation. I did wonder where you were. But whenever I made inquiries—both delicate and indelicate—I was rather given the brush off.”
Julian makes a humming sound, letting his head loll to one side. “I was in the Gamma Quadrant. Working on the cure for the Jem’Hadar addiction to ketracel white. That’s—no, I suppose that’s right. That’s where I got my start in politics.”
Immediately, Garak can think of ten different reasons at least ten different people and governments and agencies would be reluctant to free the Jem’Hadar from an easy shackle to keep. But he knows Julian’s righteous fury, the strength of his moral indignation. He wouldn’t have stopped unless someone stopped him.
But regardless, he knows the Jem’Hadar are free now.
So he still wonders.
“How unorthodox,” he replies primly. “Starting a career in Federation politics millions of lightyears from home.”
Face wearing a careful calm, Julian turns to look at him.
“You really didn’t know?”
How could he? He wants to remind Julian of the hunger, the sickness, the searing pain of those early years. Of the projections of Cardassia as a state on the brink of collapse, loping onwards towards her final end. The reports that said that Prime would have to be abandoned if they couldn’t find a way to revitalize the soil and clean the water. But Julian was gone—they were both gone, to the back of their own beyonds.
“There was much I didn’t know,” he says gently. “My dear doctor—my information network was decimated by the Dominion bombardment. And international espionage wasn’t high on Cardassia’s priorities when we couldn’t feed or clothe ourselves.”
Julian winces. Then hesitates.
“I was… recruited. During the war. And after the war. Unsuccessfully, I might add,” he finally says. Face pinching slightly, he fixes Garak with a penetrating stare. “You really didn’t know?”
He didn’t. He’s not sure if he wishes he did, if he wishes the universe had put him in the position to decide if he was going to step in as Julian’s protector or not. Or if he was going to allow him to be—
For many reasons, he is not the arbiter of Julian’s fate.
“Recruited?”
“Three hundred and fifty people in this room—how many intelligence agencies do you think are represented tonight?” he asks, nodding towards the passing, blurry figures beyond the glass of the window panes.
Idly, Garak realizes that the dance floor has opened.
“The legitimate ones or the illegitimate ones?”
Starfleet Intelligence, Klingon Intelligence, Tal Shiar, V’Shar, the Bajoran Network, at least one operative from the new Cardassian outfit… but that’s not the end of the list. It never is. They’d been warned, as Obsidian Order trainees.
“President Bracco knows the tendency for the cabinet to be… infiltrated.”
Is he shocked that Section 31 came calling to Deep Space Nine? Not particularly. By the start of the war he’d been out of the game long enough that all those he had known to be agents of the Federation’s dirtiest little secret were dead. The long term survival rate of your standard operative at that level of intergalactic espionage has always been dismally low.
He would know.
But Julian? They came for Julian? The soft, smiling boy who played secret agent programs in the holosuites and went wide-eyed at the mention of the Obsidian Order as if it was all a game to win or lose?
“Ah. And you have experience in turning down advances, so to speak.”
Julian’s face hardens into stone, eyes set into the distant past. “I have experience in—in more than just turning down their advances, after Deep Space Nine and four years out in my little research station at the dead end of the Gamma Quadrant. I know the beast quite intimately. And it knows me. But with the protection of the Office of the President—well, not that they haven't removed a President before. But they’re not as powerful as they once were. I’ve made sure of that.”
For a moment, a single precious moment, Julian allows a hint of lethality to break open on his countenance. Garak’s seen it before, never for more than a minute or two at a time. But like it was yesterday, he hears the whizz of the bullet and feels the twinge of pain in the side of his neck and the hinge of his jaw.
Absently, he presses the heel of his palm to his throat.
What has it cost the Doctor to show his country this measure of devotion? More clearly now than ever, he sees how broken Julian Bashir was by the end of the war. More clearly now than ever, he can see what they both lost far too young.
“There’s not a single glimmer of that insufferable Federation optimism in your eyes, Doctor,” he says, hearing the ghost of his snide comment in the back of his brain. There is a time and place for idealism, and the Doctor’s more than once served him very well when what he wanted most was to quiet the pain and slither off the mortal coil.
“No, not after twelve years of being in this line of work. Captain Sisko asked me to not rebuff their attempts to befriend me at the height of the war. He thought it would be more useful to have someone on the inside. It was useful to have someone on the inside,” he adds thoughtfully. Then, with a laugh that speaks knowledge of misery, Julian looks at him again. “It was around the time I stopped asking you to make me costumes for the Bond program and switched to the Alamo instead.”
It had seemed dire in the moment, that obsession with a tragic battle full of mythic figures and terrible losses. As if Julian was only preparing himself for the inevitable.
In the end, it was Cardassia who lost a billion of her people.
“How many of them are here tonight?” Garak asks.
“Two that I know of, for certain,” Julian answers, bracing his hands behind him on the railing. “I’m sure they’re apoplectic that we’re speaking. Privately, even.”
“Do they suspect you of collusion?”
They would be stupid not to. You don’t spend seven years in the company of a high ranking member of one of the most feared agencies in the Alpha Quadrant, the natural heir to the monster who made things go bump in the night, and not acquire a trail of reports and paperwork behind you.
“There were rumors, after the war,” Julian muses, and then smiles, staring down at his polished shoes. “When we were writing each other novels every other week. I’ve read the report myself—the agent thought they were unsuccessful in making an asset out of me because of you , Garak.”
“Because of me? I don’t follow.”
Julian’s face is inscrutable.
He should be seething with anger, but instead he just finds himself captivated.
“Well, at first the agent thought that the Obsidian Order had acquired me, and that you were my handler,” Julian explains. Contorting his face into a charming facsimile of bashfulness, he licks his bottom lip. “But then they thought it was something quite worse.”
Garak feels his orbital ridges furrow together. What could be worse than being acquired as an asset to a hostile foreign power?
“And what was that?”
Shaking his head, Julian fights his mouth to form the right shape to sound out his response. With a sigh, he answers:
“Love.”
Oh. Oh.
“Ah,” Garak finds himself responding, half-dumb. Sensation flees from his extremities, all the blood in his body making itself known in his face. “Hence the apoplexy.”
“Hence the apoplexy,” Julian repeats, voice trailing off. For a long, silent moment punctuated by the orchestra in the ballroom shifting from a waltz to foxtrot, he worries his lip between his teeth. “I’ve wanted to explain why I stopped writing for years. But written communication, as you know… anyway, I am sorry that our friendship was a casualty to the game I decided to play. At the end of the war I needed it all to mean something so badly—and I still may prove to be a hubristic idiot, but I want the Federation to live up to its ideals. I want to live up to my ideals.”
Oh, you beautiful boy.
“No need to apologize, doctor,” he says, feeling disconnected from his own mouth and brain.
“Even if there is no need, Garak, I’ve wanted to. For years.” He’s beseeching now, face wide and open and full of all the angles that have always called him to stroke the pad of his thumb along his cheekbone. And now, with all these years and miles come and gone between them, he is nearly run out of reasons not to. “Our friendship was very dear to me, and your forgiveness is important to me. You were fighting every day to rebuild Cardassia, and I stopped writing you back. Which either makes me a self-centered man who abandoned his friend, or a self-centered man who thinks too highly of his impact on your life.”
As if he could begrudge him a little selfishness.
But instead of all the ways he could bear for Julian to be selfish with him, he says, “Doctor… I was very happy when I read your name on the guest list for tonight.”
Slowly, as if afraid that he will startle, Julian reaches between them for his hand.
“So was I.”
In shock and not hiding it anywhere close to how well he would like to, Garak’s tongue darts out to wet his lower lip. He is too aware of his teeth and his tongue and the curve of Julian’s smile. “Would you perhaps… how would you feel about raising the blood pressure in the room? Just a little bit.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“A dance.”
Julian’s smile takes root again. “I shouldn’t encourage bad behavior,” he says, and the unspoken second half: but I suppose I always have, with you.
“I should think you would encourage diplomatic relations with the New Cardassian Republic,” he replies, feeling his voice turn to gravel in his throat. He’s too old for this, he wants to tell himself that he’s too old for this. But how can he be too old for it when he never got to indulge in it in the first place? And certainly not during the reconstruction. And not now, sleeping in his office multiple nights a week.
“Relations?” Julian asks, sweeping his thumb across the meat of his palm, the sensitive lines portending love and fortune. “I think that would be cause for myocardial infarction.”
“Well I’d hate to be the cause of someone’s demise.”
Chuckling, Julian shakes his head. “No you wouldn’t.”
But still—Garak wrenches himself out of the moment. He may have not heard from Julian these past ten years, but he is not so far out of the loop. “Aren’t you a married man, Doctor? You are well acquainted with how seriously Cardassians take their marriage vows.”
“Hardly at all, once they acquire a certain amount of power and prestige,” Julian grumbles in response. With an awkward grimace, he squeezes Garak’s hand. “No, ah, Ezri and I aren’t—she needed a cover, for her relationship with Lenara Kahn. And I needed a reasonable excuse to extract myself from the Gamma Quadrant while I still could leave with my brain and body intact, and her posting at the time allowed spousal transfers. She was my means to get back to Earth, and I was her way of deflecting scrutiny towards her relationship with Lenara. We’ve been legally divorced for five months now.”
Another piece slides into place.
“Ah, the shake-up with the Symbiosis Commission. I heard something about that, but the Trill can be so insular. Not that I would know anything about that,” Garak says, as if he didn’t read Ezri’s name in an intelligence report six months ago and comment, if only to himself, on her meteoric rise in the Symbiosis Evaluation Board and its near-immediate dissolution. As if he didn’t read the entirety of the report, looking for Julian’s name, or the merest hint of his involvement, his presence on Trill. “Congratulations then, I suppose. To you both.”
He could write this moment off on the wine he’s been drinking all night, some French vintage that’s meaningless to him but was better than the poor kanar they’d stocked on the bar. The wine, and the cool air, and the sudden appearance of an old dear friend from a chapter in his life he thought would be forever left unfinished.
He could.
But he doesn’t want to do that. He’s written off so much in his life.
“We’re both… free. Freer that we’ve both been in a long time to be who we want to be. To be with who we want to be with,” Julian says, somehow both daringly opaque and charmingly see through. “What I mean to say is, I’d love to dance with you, Garak.”
It could just be the two of them in this garden, among the hedgerows and the surveillance cameras, and it would be more than he could have ever hoped for in this life. Julian tugs on his hand, drawing him closer, until they’re standing chest to chest—just one deep breath apart.
“Do you know the name of the agent who wrote the report on us?” Garak murmurs. Untethered from any concrete thought, his free hand does lift, cupping Julian’s cheek.
“I do.”
“Are they here?”
Julian’s resultant smile isn’t bright, nor does it resemble any sun in the galaxy that he’s ever seen. It’s like the rosy-hued twilight, like the scatter of a sunset on the water. “Do you want to give them something to write about?”
He does.
He really, really does.
And he doesn’t care on whose desk or whose PADD or whose computer the report will end up on. Because it will , a blurry photo taken with a button camera, accompanied by a five hundred word summary. This is a weakness he can afford. He has the savings. He’s made a lifetime of deposits.
“The Cardassian delegation has a block of rooms here, in the hotel,” he says, dangerously close to saying what he means; he wants to feel Julian’s warmth against his own skin and scales. “One dance, and then… it could be as simple as two old friends catching up at the end of the night.”
A delightful blush colors Julian’s cheeks. “But once the door closes…”
“I have a really quite delightful little machine in my suitcase that kills any listening devices dead,” he says. Leaden with desire, his voice is almost unrecognizable to him. “They’ll have no idea what we could possibly be doing, once the door closes. All in the name of diplomatic relations, of course.”
He’s spent a long time convincing himself he doesn’t want this. But even if their future is only made out of ballrooms and state dinners and dedication ceremonies strewn across the quadrant, he wants this. He wants interminable government affairs always seated at different tables, driving intelligence agencies mad as they share furtive looks over the rims of their glasses just as they once shared plates of denial at the replimat. He wants one dance, he wants as many nights in as many gardens and hotel rooms as he can steal.
Elim Garak is a thief in the night. He always has been.
“Well, when you put it that way.”
Slowly, telegraphing every move, Julian leans in to slant their mouths together.
In the parliamentary houses
There'll be talk of what this is
With inexpert witnesses and evidence against us
But I'll take my pound of substance
From those insubstantial men
"Gethsemane," by Dry the River