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Cardassians measure in epochs, but also in the time between storms. Cardassians measure in the time between the planting and the blooming of given flowers and by the phases of the moons, eternally winking at one another and eternally out of sync.
Reluctant Castellan Elim Garak has taken to measuring his days in data PADDs. He manages to send some out of the office and to sign off on the contents of others, but it seems that no amount of labor or concentration will clear his desk. In dark moments, Garak imagines that even his assassination would fail to liberate the surface of his workstation; the PADDs would live on without him, multiplying like tribbles.
He stretches the pain from his neck as best he can. There is a spot at the base of his skull that is capable of transmitting pain up and over until it lightning-strikes his temples, while simultaneously sinking thick, black, strangling roots into his upper spine. He knows what Kelas would say - that he needs to find someone to sit with him through the pain, or, better still, someone to stroke his shoulders and rub his neck until the pain lifts. Kelas never mentions a name, of course, but somehow they’re both perfectly clear about who he means.
Garak allows his eyes to close. He pictures Parmak in the garden they have nurtured together, his long-fingered hands guiding coil-strikes and disciplining rows of thirsty sedge as they strike out for territory properly belonging to the roses. Down-faced jewel roses , Garak thinks, remembering the clouds that had risen in Kelas’s too-knowing gaze. Well, he hadn’t exactly been subtle, had he? What use did such ornamental plants have, after all, outside of an enjoinment bower?
Garak does not allow himself to picture Dr. Julian Bashir.
“For you shall build no bower now,” may not be the saddest line in the Cardassian canon, Garak reflects, but it does possess a certain flavor of melancholy that is hard to resist. Further, the poem goes on to deny the doomed lover clemency or a place to nest; it is, to a sad heart, as Delavian chocolates to a gourmand.
The Castellan sighs. He cannot sanction chocolates for himself while his people labor to rebuild. He cannot think of the home he will never have when fully one-third of the population remains in refugee camps, their meals and shelter provided by a coalition of Federation, Bajoran, and Klingon relief organizations. Cardassia can never repay them. He can never repay them. All that he can try to do is perform the office to which he was elected to the best of his capabilities. If those he tortured leer from his nightmares and Tain’s ghost chuckles from the corners, he deserves these punishments no less than he deserves his headaches.
Garak returns to his chair and chooses another PADD. After a moment, he blinks at it in confusion, willing the words to rearrange themselves. He tries to scan backwards. Perhaps this is part of some educational proposal? The schools are yet running; the education of their children is a priority for the Cardassian people that ranks alongside the safety of those very children. But there is no lesson plan or justification for a change in curriculum. There is just a poem.
They flee from me that sometime did me seek , reads the opening. With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.
The memory hits him like the fire from an entire bank of phasers. His feet hadn’t been naked, but Bashir’s had. If Garak had hoped to see more than the flash of a clavicle, enticingly framed by a night shirt pulled askew, that is his secret. His sin. And, sinner though he might be, Bashir had accompanied him to Bajor anyway.
As for flight… the most recent flight from the possibility of them had been Garak’s. I had no choice , he thinks. He’d had to redeem himself, to aid Cardassia.
But he could have returned with Julian at his side.
The poem goes on:
“I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themself in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual change.”
A knife twists, plunged right through his thoracic crest, shattering the “mirror” scales there. Julian had been all those things when Garak had met him: gentle in all of its senses - noble and kind and soft-hearted - tame, because he was one of Starfleet’s kept hawks… Meek… It is wrong. He’s even confided as much to Parmak, but Garak had enjoyed how intimidated the young thing had been, how caught up in his stories and his experiences, his aura of danger. Garak still has little love for Shakespeare, but when Parmak has asked (too knowingly, again, damn him) if the situation had not been tinged with shades of Desdemona and Othello, it had been difficult to entirely dismiss the allusion.
And can his darling - for is he not permitted to think of Julian thus in the sacred bone vault of his own mind? There is no wire now - be called wild ? Certainly Ch’ulian (if he is going to break one rule, Garak decides that he will break them all, down, even, to looking at the man’s stolen picture, later) has spread his wings. Section 31, of all fool things! The realization of every spy fantasy! And to think, Julian had once considered him dangerous!
“And now they range,” the Castellan murmurs.
He doesn’t know what planet the doctor is on. He doesn’t know what quadrant he is in. He has sacrificed even news of Julian. Cardassians value sacrifice. But Julian would not see what he is doing as a tribute, Garak knows that. How does one lay absence, even loving absence, at another’s feet? I love you. Please forget me forever. It’s hardly fodder for a greeting card or a poem. He returns to the words on the screen of the PADD.
The next stanza looks back to a time when things were different. He reads:
“When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small;
Therewithall sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?”
He has caught dear Julian in his arms, perhaps not “twenty times better” as in the poem, but he has had occasion… and been grateful for every one. Julian, too, has held him, but Elim has never been entirely certain where the doctor’s oaths and professionalism had ended and where friendship (and more?) had begun.
They have never kissed.
Stop this. It is a piece of literature, only. It need not lead to a complete recitation of your every failure!
But, in the vast and calculating mind of Elim Garak, literature will always equal Julian Bashir. The doctor had been the ideal companion with which to share ideas and trade texts. If Garak had imbued such things with far too much sentiment, well, that, too, is a failure. He hears Julian, almost as if the dear thing were just behind him, just out of sight, say, “… a lesson I’d rather not learn.” He remembers Julian arguing over a line in another text - “no sorrow will live in me as long as that joy, save one, and I thank you for it,” - and being aghast at the idea of being grateful for pain… but here he is, years later, and grateful for the way that books and Julian are entangled in his affections, grateful for the love and the pain and the wonder he feels.
Alright. He will allow himself to think of Julian Bashir.
At least for a few sentences longer.
What can that hurt?
Rather, what is left to hurt? When it comes to Julian, his heart is pale with scars and the ghosts of their predecessors… and Garak doubts that, in most cases, the good doctor had even known he was holding the knife.
A few more sentences. A few more moments to imagine those eyes. Then he will leave the office and have tea with Kelas and try not to cherish his regret (regret, too, is a bond).
The poem concludes:
“But all is turned thorough my gentleness
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodness,
And she also, to use newfangleness.
But since that I so kindly am served
I would fain know what she hath deserved.”
Garak rubs the ridges around his eyes. What a peculiar poem. What a peculiar night. But even as he tries to move on to something else, he’s drawn back by his own fierce, ingrained curiosity.
Turned through gentleness , Elim thinks, re-reading the words. Obviously, the phrase is the narrator’s attempt at self-exoneration while indicting his lover who has “ranged” astray for seeking out “newfangled” entertainment. But the concept is interesting. The lover is saying, “I have lost you by being too gentle,” - with “gentle,” Garak thinks, meaning noble, moderate, and good all at once.
So much for assigning the lover’s part to himself. There are so many ways he’s lost Julian, so many things he’s done to make himself an improper match (even if Julian wasn’t Terran and Starfleet and lovely and young), but he has certainly not been too good .
Just a poem after all.
Maybe a data error. Maybe one of his aides is actually improving themself.
And the less he thinks about that last line and what he deserves, the better.
Wait.
The last line isn’t actually the last line at all. After the poem, there is a series of coordinates.
Castellan Garak sits up. Elim Garak, former Obsidian Order agent, takes over.
A poem as a treasure map? As a lure? If the sender intends assassination, Garak can think of no stranger way to arrange for his end. Keying up the data network, he searches out the location.
In exactly .17 seconds later, he is leaving the office behind.
***
As the sun sinks, the Saltburn Marches glow pink and orange. Dormant volcanoes brood over them, grumbling to themselves in their sleep. The hot, sparse gusts of wind cause the walls of the tent city to waver and snap as they are drawn taut. Garak leaves his security behind. This journey belongs to him alone.
As soon as he reaches the medical station, a young Cardassian woman gives a slight bow, elongating her neck to show regard. Garak returns the gesture. For years he had counted on being unrecognizable, unknown, unremarked. To be known on sight… he will probably never become easy with it.
“I have your prescription all ready, Castellan,” she tells him - as if it is normal for a man of his rank to come here for medicine.
Still, he takes the parcel and thanks her, thinking: a treasure hunt, then.
There is medication in the bottle - and a curled note that reads: for your headaches; I know you still get them! - and one more set of coordinates.
Garak trusts that the pills are safe, but he doesn’t move to take one.
***
His next destination is a terribly modest one. There is a walk that is little more than a path marked by soft stones and reclaimed from the creeping sands. What charms him most, perhaps, is the evidence of an attempt at brightening the place. At the start of the path, two gold gauge flowers have been “borrowed” from the surrounding landscape and replanted, one on each side. Garak’s fingers brush their petals as he walks by. He thinks, You were always as gold to me - softly shining, light-gilded, radiant, valuable beyond all things.
The door hardly looks like it will hold up to knocking, let alone a determined party of the raiding dune’s birds that live in the sands, so Garak settles for tapping at the windowsill.
The entire world seems to be holding its breath.
But when Julian Bashir appears, stepping onto the fast-darkening sand with stars beyond his shoulders, Garak cannot help but feel that it couldn’t have happened any other way, truly.
“I told myself that if you came, it meant that you could forgive me.” He laughs softly at himself. “Silly, I know, to imagine trying to script anything for you. But do you think that you ever could, Elim?”
“My dear doctor, for what could you ever require forgiveness?” His eyes move hungrily from the starlight in Julian’s hair to the stubble on his cheeks. He does so hope that the dear thing hasn’t been working with his collar cut as low as that! There’s nothing to be done about the thin, fine waist (a Cardassian ideal) or the lovely long legs. Garak wonders just how many propositions Julian has received, planetside, likely without even recognizing them.
“Everything. For losing you over and over in different ways. For letting you slip through my hands. For letting you come here without me.” His breath shakes in the column of his throat. “I think you know that I joined Starfleet because I was hoping to find a place to belong, a surrogate family. It even worked to some extent, better , probably, than I ever deserved. But the only times in my life that I’ve ever felt what people mean when they say ‘home,’ - Elim, every one of those was with you. I should have realized sooner. Given you more. Fought for you.”
Cardassians love with their minds and the motions of their mouths as much as they do with their hearts. “Your friendship was more than I ever deserved.”
“No. You’re just used to thinking of yourself that way.” His eyes say: I can fix that .
“Why that poem, my dear?”
Julian shrugs. “It could have been any poem, I guess. Anything to get you to read to the end. I’ve always enjoyed Wyatt and we never got around to reading him together. He was a spy you know - nearly got himself executed for it. And he wrote love poetry almost exclusively, in a court setting where everyone would have been speculating as to whom the poems were referencing. There was a time, Elim… there were times when I was afraid to put love poems in your hands.” When I was afraid to put my heart in your hands.
“And now?”
“I suppose that I’m terrified, now that you mention it, but not of you.”
“How did you get the PADD onto my desk?”
Julian chides him with a flash of green eyes; that look has a thousand literary debates behind it, a thousand conversations. “Still playing the interrogator?”
“Only in answer to your role as secret agent, I assure you.”
Julian snorts a laugh. “Coming to you hardly took espionage, Garak! You gave me up, remember? Told me to ‘be well’ and ‘do great things,’ without even trying to find a way to keep in touch. Fortunately, your new position made you easy to find. I’m sure it irks you to no end that you didn’t know that I was on that transport or that I’m part of the relief effort, but you have had other things on your mind.”
It more than irks him - it’s a form of personal devastation, but Garak has ever been good at compartmentalization. “You, my dear doctor, have always, ah, managed to exist alongside my every other thought.”
“Whether I was welcome or not?”
“My dear,” he is choked.
Say it, Julian wills him. Go on, you stubborn thing. Lower your shields. You can do it.
“My dear… Ch’ulian… whatever I have said, how ever I may have acted at times, you have always been most welcome.”
Julian walks into his arms. “I’m treating that as an invitation to stay. With you.”
“I find myself somehow much more than certain that Kelas has already unfolded an enjoining blanket atop my bed.”
“See? You don’t need me to tell you things at all! Don’t worry - he refused to tell me anything fun, Elim. He just let me give him the PADD.”
“Yet you took the chance just the same?”
“If my heart could still belong to you, I reasoned that the reverse might be possible. Besides, if you told me ‘no,’ Kira offered to help me hop universes. Gul Garak has always sounded a lonely chap.”
Castellan Garak growls a warning. He more than suspects that his mirror universe self may have stronger arms and a slimmer waist, but this Julian Bashir is his.
Julian laughs into his shoulder ridges; the warmth of his breath and the joy-filled motions of his body are the most intoxicating things Garak has ever felt. “Take me home, won’t you? Or say you’ll stay?”
Garak’s answer comes in the form of practically dragging him to his ship. He’s wanted to give Julian a home since he had first seen the lovely thing; now, he’s finally in a position to do so. The trip passes quickly, Julian’s fingers unfolding to scrape his palm in enticing ways. Garak leads his rediscovered best friend up walkways and staircases; the air is heavy with the smell of flowers. “You got your garden at last,” Julian murmurs.
Elim blushes. In his language, a water garden is a very particular type of metaphor!
Now they stand in the doorway to a modest bedchamber. Julian smiles to see that his picture has pride of place on the nightstand and wonders just how Garak acquired the image - and when.
Garak gives him a look in which hope and fear are not only married but celebrating a significant anniversary.
But Julian has somehow always been perfect for him. He carefully draws Garak down to sit beside him on the bed and joins their hands. Then, he arranges things so that they lay facing one another. “It’s more than we’ve ever had before,” he reminds the Cardassian. “Holding each other.”
Another line of the poem echoes through his mind: It was no dream: I lay broad waking. “Yes, but I do not think that I will sleep.”
“I’ll be here, Elim. In the morning. Tomorrow night. As long as you want me. No more fleeing - I promise.”
“We can read the other poems, perhaps? Together?”
“Mmm-hmm.” Julian snuggles into his neck, giving him his warmth. “We have lots of literature to catch up on, my love. Lots of lunches.”
Lots of life, Garak thinks.
He will do all that he can to ensure that it is a good one.
End!