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Less than three months into her stay on the station and she is already his favorite customer. Shared species aside, and that is a significant, weighty thing to remove from consideration, she has the gift of good timing his other visitors lack. She always arrives when he's engaged in some aggravating trifle and would rather be interrupted. A shopkeeper without his particular background might think it coincidental but she has survived much, and much of survival is a matter of timing.
Lately though, he has noticed her fighting a habit of hovering in doorways. Judging by the soft sound of shuffling slippers today’s battle is not going well. With some relief, he looks up and away from a layout of Quark’s latest eye-searing commission.
“Hello my dear, What can I do for you today?”
“Hello Garak,” she says, as if it is commonplace, as if she’s not one of a bare handful who would deign to greet him properly.
“Just some alterations.”
“Let's have a look, then.” He motions her inside. She’s comforted by physical cues, doubtless a carryover from her imprisonment and so he is careful not to overuse them.
She lays the garment bag on the counter and the problem is manifestly obvious as she draws out each dress. They are of good quality if somewhat uninspired construction. The colors are not ones he would've picked but they seem consistent with what a young unmarried woman of means would wear in the current season, and they are entirely wrong.
Tora Ziyal catches his eyes across the counter and smiles with a kind of pained fondness.
“Father bought these for me but I'm afraid breaking rocks for five years does not leave one with an ideal figure.”
It's true, the slender bodices cannot account for her strong back. The sleeves are too narrow for her muscular arms. When she had first walked into the shop that is what he noticed, how her work-roughened hands and her stately old-fashioned gown had been at odds with each other and at that moment a number of underused instincts had fired and he had felt pleasantly alive. Almost a pity that she hadn’t been sent to kill him. Now, if pressed ( and who would dare ), he might whimsically admit that he is quite glad that wasn’t the case.
“I don’t want to pry my dear, but frankly there's more to be done here than the back and the sleeves. So if you would just leave these with me for a day or two I could raise them up to your usual standard.”
Ziyal tilts her head down and to the side, a classic gesture but he can see that the curl of her mouth is a touch too wry to be girlish. Clearly, between them they understand how her father must have found them in some expensive boutique and, feeling his duty to his illegitimate daughter magnanimously discharged, must have forgotten the small matter of sizing. Though it certainly does not surprise him that Dukat can't be relied on in matters of taste.
This line of thought spins on, continues, and for a moment Garak can almost see his self-declared enemy, bereft of the usual dignified uniform and oozing oily ‘charm’ at some other poor clothier. A petty part of his mind immediately offers up a theory of what the former Prefect would consider appropriate casualwear. Leather pants perhaps, with some hideous blue and green tunic over a maroon shirt, maybe even with the ever-popular tassels and the image is so vivid that he has to bite down on a howling laugh.
In exile he has sometimes found himself regressing to flights of fancy - an old bad habit never quite stamped out in childhood. He remembers Mila would scold him for just sitting quietly in the garden smiling to himself. Back then, she always seemed to know what he was thinking about, at least when it concerned what happening to whom.
Carefully he selects his first victim; the more salvageable of the three, pulls the sonic scissors out of his belt where they nestle next to the emergency compact phaser, and motions Ziyal to the chair he likes to sit in on slow days. She has sometimes stayed to watch him work and it is a matter of quiet pride that here is one of the few spaces she will never be gawked at or whispered about until leaving is the only dignified option. After all, if any Bajorans find themselves low on their harassment quota, chances are they would be starting with him.
In two hours time she has brewed tea and in her own gentle way thoroughly destroyed the latest efforts of a certain playwright, but as she leans back, picking apart a sleeve with his spare thread puller he can sense that a melancholy has crept up into the spaces between their conversation.
“I worry sometimes,” she says softly. “that I’m wasting your time. I have other dresses and somehow I doubt these will ever see the capital again."
I doubt I will ever see the capital again.
A rank beginner’s attempt at subtlety but at least she doesn’t say it outright. Her body language is slipping too, and seeing those strong shoulders haunched over is suddenly intolerable. If he’s ever in a position to claw his way back to his old level of influence he swears the draconian legitimacy laws will be the thing on the chopping block. Well, first legal thing anyway, and not just for his own sake.
For now, he tilts his head to catch her eyes and slowly draws them upward.
“Nonsense!” he says with a good approximation of cheer.
“Our homeland is vast and while strict fashions may be followed to the letter in the capital, other cities, particularly those in the northern continent are much more accepting of a designer’s individual talents. I myself have spent some time in that region and while those I was stationed with moaned about how far away they were from ‘civilization’ I could not bring myself to agree.”
“Even though it was a shocking place where the great expansion was debated in the kotra parlors, men practiced the sciences and even those some would term undesirable could live and find employment without disclosing their status, it was still Cardassia. The capital is so very busy and so very glamorous but like many glamorous, sparkling things unfortunately rather rigid in its construction. And while I may be old-fashioned for thinking so, I can't help but believe that the homeland is ubiquitous and there are places in it where your penchant for combining raw wool and that silvery silk in a single ensemble might render you... exotic, but also rather charming.”
It’s probably the most unambiguous, hamfisted thing he’s said in months and it rings unpleasantly in his teeth like biting down on tin, but he's pleased to notice that she had held his eyes throughout and her chin has not dipped down again. Surely that's accomplishment enough to allow himself a small rest from pinning.
“I can even present some weighty literary backing for my strange notions. Didn't Komol say in the “History of the Fourth Flowering” that the Homeland is wherever two or more of us are in a position to sit down and argue?”
The cheeky girl takes perfect advantage of his speech to intercept his abortive motion towards the teapot handle and pours for him instead. Well mannered of her, though it makes him feel his age. When she hands him the cup the steam curls around her fingers and there is fresh life in her expression.
“Then..." she muses "according to Komol this workshop is part of Cardassia.”
With tea-warmed hands he looks out, gaze slipping through the empty shop, over the mannequins, the racks of idle fashionings; the meaningless frippery of an exile’s small, sad kingdom
“Perhaps it is my dear, but only when you are here.”