Work Text:
The world is not simple.
Anyone will tell you.
But have you ever washed a person’s hair
over a tin bucket,
gently twisting the rope of it
to wring the water out?
At the end of everything,
dancers just use air as their material.
A voice keeps singing even
without an instrument.
You make your fingers into a comb.
- Jenny George
—
The heat of the shower refuses to dissipate completely. It clings to him like the water had, and the stale sweat before that. He had washed with whatever he could reach. Use anything you need, Garak had told him, and so he had. Except he had needed more than soap and water and the steady thrum of a silent washroom.
He had needed like need was an open wound of a thing, a knife in the back, the shoulder, a shot to the stomach. Like sitting on the wrong side of a desk, alternate lifetimes spinning like fractals out and away from his grasp, stunned into silent fear by a simple question, ”You’re supposed to be dims. But you’re not, are you?”
And then Garak had hoisted him up and off the tiled floor, up and out of the still-running shower. Julian had stared at the arm he’d drenched in the process, tunic soaked from sleeve to clavicle and pretended not to notice Garak’s other hand, the one tracing soft, soothing patterns onto his back. Garak had pretended not to notice how he cried, soft and incessant tears that refused to stop.
Small mercies, he isn’t crying now.
He isn’t feeling anything other than brittle, and raw, and cracking at the edges.
The water from his hair drips down his shoulders and to the bed below.
While he waits for Garak to return, he catalogues the bruises winding their way up his torso by size first, then colour. There are seventeen in total, including one holding the perfect impression of the toe of a boot between his fourth and fifth rib.
Gabriel Bell had taken a knife to the back for his troubles. Julian has a pulse that beats in double time.
He hears Garak before he sees him, and has enough mental clarity left to know that that is no accident. He must look a wounded thing, an easily-startled thing, like a stray dog at the side of the road, wrong-footed and wary and one sudden movement away from bolting entirely.
It prickles at his skin, tightens and tugs into gooseflesh. He wants to open his mouth and show his teeth. He wants to straighten and harden and click back into place until Garak forgets he ever saw this sad display of a man, this broken and caged thing he is usually so good at hiding.
Grief makes an anchor of his tongue. How many people could he have saved, in that place? How many had died anyway? How many like him?
“The replicator assures me this is Federation standard,” Garak says, dropping a wide-toothed comb onto the bed. A towel, fresh and folded, is set beside it a moment later.
Julian gathers the strength to look up at him. He’s greeted with a mug held in his face. Held by a hand that doesn’t move, or waver, until Julian forces his own to reach out and take it.
“Drink,” Garak orders, and begins to clear up the wet towel abandoned on the floor, the pile of clothes — not Julian’s but the ones he had worn after trading away his own — filthy and torn and strewn across the room — Garak’s room.
At the time, Julian had wanted them off. He hadn’t cared where they landed.
Because in another lifetime, he never made it out of the twenty-first century. Never escaped the stench of urine and smoke and acrid desperation; the bodies lining the streets, crammed into the processing centres, stacked up high and wide around every street corner, every alleyway, every building and staircase and overhanging porch, faces dirtied and hands bloodied.
In another lifetime, he was those bodies. Nameless and shapeless and drifting from thin blanket to thin blanket, similar enough to know that there was something like a lack at his centre, different enough to not know the shape of it beyond how it ached.
In another lifetime, he was small, and trembling, and clinging to his mother’s perfumed neck as he was carried, not out of a shuttlecraft, but out of a car, or a bus, or a train. Left, not at a medical facility with chirping, whirring tools and walls lined with more blinking lights than stars in the sky, but in the middle of the street, open-mouthed and wailing as two men dragged him by each arm and sat him in a hard plastic chair, a label slapped like a brand against his name, dim.
But here…
Here and now, in this moment — and he repeats those phrases like language is a thing with roots, a tethering thing — he sits, naked, save for a pair of fresh standard-issue boxers, and swallows a mouthful of guilt with each sip of tea.
He cannot do much, but he can do that.
For Garak, he can do that.
—
Later, once he has finished his tea and dragged a soft, too-large shirt over his head, he lets Garak manoeuvre his limbs up and onto the bed. Lets his body be dragged and positioned, his back to Garak’s front, caged on either side by Garak’s knees, bent so as to better hold him.
For the most part, he holds himself steady, but he does splay a palm over each of Garak’s knees, idly petting at the soft fabric of his trousers where it falls down towards his shin.
“Is your hair always this stubborn?” Garak sighs, easing the comb through a particularly bothersome section of Julian’s hair.
“It depends,” he manages, because Garak might not be expecting an answer, but he wants to give him one. Wants to give something back. Wants to feel like he has earned this, like he deserves this soft touch, this patience, even after everything.
At the sound of his voice, thick and dry, Garak’s hand falters but doesn’t stop. Julian drags his thumb across the rounded bone of his knee in short, stilted swipes.
“Well, I dare say I’ve managed to offend it, somehow. It won’t stop curling at the ends.” He works the comb through again. “Although I suppose it might have something to do with the fact that you somehow mistook scale oil for shampoo.”
It’s such a silly thing, such a small thing, but it snags at the haze of Julian’s mind like claws on velvet. Forces a hole open, wide enough for the light to trickle in.
He thinks about the scent of it — the oil — in his palms, earthy and deep, a familiar musk he couldn’t place until now, now he knows what it is. He thinks about Garak, shining his scales in the same shower, using the same bottle.
And then he is smiling. Big and wide and unrestrained. Something in the line of his body must change because Garak is leaning over his shoulder to glance at his face. Julian’s smile grows until he feels like he is splitting with it all.
“I’m glad you find it amusing, Doctor,” Garak says. When he presses the tips of his fingers to Julian’s scalp, it feels like a kiss of a touch. “But you may want to withhold judgement until you catch sight of it.” He tugs lightly on a strand.
“It’s been worse.”
Refusing to give up on his efforts, Garak focuses on wrestling the comb through Julian’s hair. Julian can feel his concentration as if it were a tangible thing. “If you say so, dearest.”
“I do,” he says, because he remembers the summer he turned fourteen and refused to have it cut; when he tried to grow it out and coax it to the sides like the surfers he’d watched from the balcony of a holiday villa on Cilmeon IV. Then softer, almost shyly, he adds, “Say that again?”
“Hm?”
“What you said just now. What you—” Julian squirms, grateful for the fact he is facing away from Garak. From the heat in his face alone, he can only imagine what colour his cheeks have flushed. “What you called me.”
Garak stills behind him. They’re close enough that Julian can feel the tension as it winds up Garak’s body, spills into each muscle, locks every relaxed joint into something rigid and immovable.
There is a terrible plummeting sensation in the pit of Julian’s gut. Idiot, his mind spits, in a voice not unlike his father’s, Just look what you’ve done now!
The drag of Garak’s fingers through his hair is stilted, at odds with the airy, casual tone of his voice. “I wasn’t aware I called you anything, my dear.”
On another day, in another lifetime — and he does not think of desolation and death and other D-words being spat like slurs, he doesn’t, he doesn’t — he might have dug his heels in and refused to be dragged away from the path he had set off down.
As it is, he baulks at the first hurdle and turns back the way he came. “It’s nothing, never mind.”
By some miracle (or a sudden disinterest, or a lack of precision, or care, or—), Garak must find a way to work with his hair, because his hands are combing through the remaining sections at twice the speed.
An ache spreads low and cold across Julian’s chest, drips down his arms to pool in his fingertips, clenched hard around the sphere of Garak’s knees. Garak’s knees, which have fallen away from his sides just enough for the absence to be noticeable, for Julian to feel too big and small all at once, like he is cracking and spilling and something which cannot be contained by anything or anyone.
He craves being held like a cramped muscle craves being stretched. He wishes he were something that was easy to love gently.
Somewhere inside himself, he is a screaming thing.
Somewhere inside himself, he is four and clutching his haboba’s fingers so he can stand in her garden, in the waist-high grass where the boom of his father’s voice can’t reach him, and he can stare at all the small, buzzing things flitting through the air.
Somewhere inside himself, he imagines Garak is pressed flush against the column of his spine, fingers feather-light at his scalp, voice soft and calling him dearest and darling and beloved even as he screams, or cries, or breaks from the shape he has forced himself into.
He breathes, in and out and in, because he must. Because he has survived fourteen years fractured and hollow at the centre. He can’t very well stop now.
His gaze roams, unfocussed, over the quilted duvet; the bare dresser across from the bed; his hair and Garak’s hands silhouetted against the opposite wall, stretching and shrinking like shadow puppets.