Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Quark squats low on the rough stone ground. He clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

“Tch tch tch… c’mere little guy… I’m not going to hurt you.”

Craggy stalactites loom overhead, casting jagged shadows across the rocky walls. The only light source is a dim glow from the portal window on the high security locked doors. It’s also the only egress from the chamber. Unless you count a small hole in the rock, about a foot off the ground. 

“I know you’re in there fella. We’ve been playing this game of chase for a week, so I think we should be on a first name basis by now, hmm? What can I call you?” Quark squints into the hole, hardly big enough to fit his fist. “How about… Mo. I had an action figure named Marauder Mo once, it’s a strong name full of great greed. You should feel honored.”

Quark cocks his head toward the hole, listening. There’s the background drip drip drip in the caverns, the muffled voices of others down the hall, the slight buzzing of the electrical systems, and… Yes, it’s still there -- a faint chittering.

“I’m Quark. Don’t worry, I want to be friends. It’s been just you and me in here for quite some time, we may as well get to know each other a little better. I’m sure it gets lonely in that wall, as lonely as my dank cell, not a friendly face for sectors in any direction...”

Quark sighs. His stomach gives a loud gurgle. The metal bowl several feet away has been licked clean some time ago, and the Telfa broth it once held is a distant memory.

Quark takes a couple of sharp shallow breaths, then steels himself. HIs tongue pokes out through his lips in concentration. 

“I don’t want to hurt you… I just want…. To eat you!”

In one quick motion, he jabs his hand into the hole. A look of elation as his fingers brush something. 

Then the something skitters up his arm. Quark yanks his hand out of the hole. Little legs skitter up his neck, across his head, then it pauses on the inner rim of Quark’s right lobe. 

“EEEEEEEK.” Quark’s piercing shriek reverberates off the walls.

Quark bats at his ear, whacking himself in the head. He jumps up and down in hysteria, flailing his limbs for several long moments. Finally, he calms enough to pat himself down. Once he’s satisfied it’s now longer on him, he shudders and deflates. With a deep weariness, he plonks himself down on the ground. The cold stone leeches in through his thin jumpsuit.

A chittering from the hole again. Two antennas poke out, then a chitinous little face peers at Quark, mocking him. 

“Fine I lied. Your name isn’t Mo.” Quark scowls at it. “I’m calling you Beetle Bonanza after my favorite recipe. One day you’ll get to experience it. First I’ll boil some slugs into a slurry. Then, I’ll chop you up and sprinkle you in, chilling the mixture to a nice, firm aspic. I’ll top it off with all those little legs as a garnish. Mmm, the crunchiness…”

Quark drifts off into an imaginary respite from his present situation.

Which, of course, lasts only a moment before the thudding approach of footsteps down the hall disrupts his reverie. 

Quark runs a finger down the rim of his lobe. He catches snatches of Kardasi:

“...not so big and scary now are you, prisoner?” Laughter. “Razor-backed…”

“No, I heard it had… gnashing teeth… claws as long as my neck…”

“...nightmare…”

“Gul said… we'll put the nightmare with that spineless big-eared blabberworm.”

Well at least they can recognize the size of my lobes, Quark thinks.

More laughter. “...eat him alive!”

“This’ll be fun!” The voices are clearer now, right outside his door. Beeping emanates from the wall panel as the guards type the code for door controls.

Quark gulps. His blood pounds in his lobes at whatever fresh horror waits outside his door. Ferengi instinct overwhelms and he hunches over in a cringe, wrists together in supplication, attempting to make himself look smaller and not worth the effort of maiming.

“Hey twerp, it’s your lucky day. Solitary ends early -- need somewhere to store this thing, didn’t seem fair to subject any of the other prisoners to it.”

A cold scaly face grins at him through the porthole window in the doors, Gil Derak. Prison guard here for two years after being demoted from border patrol due to a spasmodic trigger finger. Has three small children and a bent for cruelty.

“Derak, good to see you again. Ho-how’s little Egren and uh um Ka-kaldok was it?” Quark stammers out. There’s static in his head instead of the last kid’s name. Probably hasn’t had his first molting yet anyway. Quark’s rising anxiety ebbs as he concentrates on his pitch. “They still pestering you for regova eggs? Can’t be easy to afford these days -- I heard about the recent uprising from the Bajoran scum. But I have a contact a couple sectors over who can give you a hell of a deal--”

“Not gonna talk yourself out of this one, worm,” says the other guard. Quark hasn’t caught his name yet.

“Snivelling little eavesdropper.” Derak laughs viciously. “I’ve had a long day with Dukat over this prisoner, and I’ve been looking forward to you two meeting.” His tongue licks over his mottled teeth, mouth twisted in a nasty grin.

A panel in the cell door slides open to reveal… not a vicious chained beast-like being, or a rabid Klingon, or any of the other horrible possibilities that had flashed through Quark’s mind. Instead, all he can see through the small opening is the guards holding a metal storage container, about the size of a large stewpot. 

Quark straightens a little from his cringe. “I don’t get it. Is there someone in there?”

Derak holds the container, while the other guard unclasps the top. There’s hissing as the airlock releases. Derak, still watching through the top window, pitches the container forward. Something viscous sloshes forward with the momentum.

Dousing Quark from head to toe in the thick substance. 

Quark sighs. Just a practical joke then. He’s not looking forward to sleeping in wet gooey clothes.

The guards wait a few moments, chuckling as Quark attempts to wipe it off of him. The stuff clings together though, and any glob he peels from himself sticks to the rest of it.

“Very humiliating. Ha, ha. You really got me good this time,” Quark grumbles after a couple attempts. 

“You sure you didn’t mix this up with that shipment of bio-neural gel packs?” Derak seems disappointed with the results.

A buzzer sounds from a distant part of the prison. Derak growls in frustration. 

“C’mon,” the other guard says. “We can check on the aftermath tomorrow.” 

Then they’re off, and Quark is alone once more.

Except as soon as they’re out of earshot, the substance congeals around him. It peels off of Quark in thick ropes, oozing together, coagulating into a giant monstrous form, looming several feet over him. 

Quark regains his cower. He’s almost doubled over in his cringe. His supplication hands thrust up in front of his face, as if that will protect him from whatever this is.

Ropes of ooze radiate out from it like tentacles, then sharpen to points. 

“Heeeeelp!” Quark shrieks, knowing no one will. The tentacle spikes flail at Quark, narrowly missing him. He falls onto his butt and tries to scuttle away, but there’s nowhere to go.  He dodges another, which crashes into the cave wall instead.

A low vibration from the thing deepens into a grumbling, “RRROoOooAAAaaRRRR!”

Quark’s ears ring with noise, and he wraps his arms around his head. “I can hear you! I can hear you! Sheesh. You’ve got anger issues.” 

Mercifully the roar fades to a subdued grumble. 

“I don’t know who you are or what you want from me,” Quark mutters from where he’s contracted himself into a little ball on the ground. “But I expect it’s in both of our interests not to attract the guards back here.”

Silence from the thing at last. Quark tentatively unclenches, peeking up from under his arm. 

“I thought as much.” 

A few of the spiked tentacles dart toward him again. Quark flinches. They stop several inches short of him.

It understands language. It reacts to what he does. Quark can work with that.

The thing hasn’t touched him at all, after the initial splash. Looming, growling, threatening… but stopping short of any further physical contact. Quark is aware his physical prowess isn’t a match for whatever this thing is, dodge as he might. 

Anger issues indeed.

Quark acts with a healthy amount of respect. Palms open to show he means no harm, he moves into a more comfortable crouch on the ground where he can talk to the thing face-to-face. 

Or rather face to…. Amorphous threatening blob figure.

“Can you talk? Words?” Quark directs his question toward a larger protrusion near the top. “I’m happy to make your stay at the Raskor Detention Center as comfortable as I can as your cellmate, but we’re going to have to establish a way to communicate beyond scare tactics.”

Pause. The creature seems to be considering the situation. Not that Quark’s sure how one could even tell, but he has the definite impression it’s assessing him. 

The pointed tentacles soften, then retreat into the main figure. It (he?) is still amorphous without definite features, but now more humanoid in size and shape. Quark takes that as a good sign.

“I’m Quark, formerly of Frek’s Freighting Company, and future owner of Quark’s Resort Moon, home to all the relaxation, titillation, and inebriation your lobes can handle.” No reaction. “I’m still working on the pitch. And the moon. And, first, escaping from this place…” 

Quark lights up with sudden optimism. He glances toward the door, then lowers his voice, and the creature leans in to listen, if it is able to listen without ears. “Hey that’s a pretty impressive thing you can do. With my knowledge of the place, and your abilities, we could be quite the team, uhh Mr. --?” Quark waits. “Or Miss? I’ve never met one of you, so you’ll excuse me if I can’t tell. But I’ll need something to call you.”

“Harrumph,” the creature grunts in something approaching a humanoid voice. Then, more clearly. “No.”

Quark blinks. “Miss No?”

“Hmph. Odo.”

“Odo, odo… Don’t know that one.” Quark taps at the side of his head. “The prison translator tends to be glitchy, but my implant is usually pretty good…”

“My… name… is Odo.” The creature’s voice is a low uncertain creak, each word a deliberate struggle.

Nevertheless, it (he?) manages to pack an impressive amount of derision into these four words.  

“My apologies, Mr. Odo! I look forward to getting to know you. This will be a lucrative partnership for both of us --”

“ No .” 

“No WHAT?” Quark yells, then motions at Odo not to speak. “Shhh… hear that?”

Odo cocks his head-shaped protrusion in uncertainty. He follows Quark’s attention to the door.

A tense minute later, the guards clamber outside their cell.

“Damn Klagore causing trouble again. Need to teach him a lesson,” the guard mutters. Quark is all too familiar with the Nausicaan prisoner's temper.

“Plenty of opportunity for that. But for now, this entertainment will have to do.” Derak peers through the small window. “How are you two getting along? Saved some of the show for us I hope?”

The cruel smile twisting his mouth quickly falls to a scowl however. Quark glances to Odo, who has dissolved his barely humanoid form back into a puddle. “C’mon, performance anxiety? You were sent here ‘top security’, claims of an untameable monster of vicious nature from Gul Dukat himself. Least you could do is push this twerp around some, bit of fun for both of us, eh?”

Odo doesn’t move.

“We were having quite the pleasant conversation before you arrived,” Quark chimes in. He’ll pay for this later, but he may as well have his fun where he can. “Great guy, we’re becoming fast pals.”

Quark thinks he hears a scoff from the puddle, but it’s hard to tell.

“Quite the contradiction, pleasant and you ,” Derak sneers. His heart’s not in it though, preoccupied by Odo’s immobility.

“C’mon Derak, I’m sure you don’t want to stand around here all night,” the other guard says. “Maybe it died in travel. Air pressure in the cargo hold or summat. Who can tell, thing like that.”

Derak narrows his eyes at the two of them, but after a long moment grunts in agreement. They clamber back down the hall.

Quark relaxes. “Real piece of work that guy. Did you see the look on his face when you just sat there like a bogpool though? Hah!” 

Odo remains still, and Quark’s chuckle trails off into silence.

“What are you, shy? You aren’t hurt are you?”

A low rumble from the puddle, but no movement.

“So --” A growl cuts Quark off. “Well --” Growl. “Mr. Odo, I --” Growl.

Quark huffs. He stands up, intending to rest in his normal sleeping spot across the cell. As soon as he nears Odo, however, the puddle surges into a thousand spikes, looming over Quark in a great wave.

Quark, with a yelp, lands on his ass. He's been doing a lot of that recently, and he'll have a bruise on his tailbone to show for it.

“It’s just that, well, usually I sleep over there, and --”

“STAY! AWAY!” A roar this time.

Quark, hands out in the universal gesture of no harm, scoots his way back to the other side of the cell.

“Fine, have it your way.”

Quark decides, just this one time, not to press his luck. It’s been a long, hard day of nothing, followed by terror and confusion, in a long hard couple years of alternating boredom and fear, and Quark is tired. 

He lays down on his side. The ground over here is uneven and rocky, unlike the groove he’s managed to smooth out in the opposite corner over the years. A puddle would be comfortable anywhere right? He didn’t need to steal Quark’s spot. 

Quark positions himself so the echo of the cave will alert him to any movement from Odo, and accepts this last thing taken from him as yet another unjust indignity in his miserable life.

---

Somehow morning comes. 

The door panel clangs open. 

Quark doesn’t remember drifting off, certainly doesn’t feel like he’s had any rest, but the noise startles him awake all the same.

A bowl of thin regva stew clatters to the ground, liquid spilling over the sides.

Quark scrambles over to lick at it before it seeps into the stone. In his hunger-clenched frenzy, it takes a moment before the events of last night seep back into his awareness.

Quark freezes where he is, on his hands and knees, butt in the air, broth dripping from his mouth. He sits back primly on the ground, attempting to regain some amount of dignity.

Odo has since reformed into his amorphous humanoid-sized figure, this time with an attempt at a head and arms. He’s upright and still.

“Good morning, Mr. Odo,” Quark says tentatively. 

“Just Odo.” The rough rumble of this sends an odd thrill through Quark’s lobes. Quark decides not to examine that too closely.

“Okay then just Odo.” Quark pats at his mouth with the back of his hand. “You seem marginally less grumpy. Nothing like a good night’s sleep and a meal to smooth everything over, I hope?”

“Hmph.”

Odo’s arms are empty. So is the ground in front of the door, minus the lingering stain from Quark’s bowl. Quark shoots to his feet. He stands on tiptoes to look through the window down the hall and bangs on the door. 

“Hey! Guards! We only got one meal! Let us out!” A hungry cellmate is an irritable cellmate, to say the least, and an irritable cellmate is not in Quark’s best interest. He knows that from sordid experience. “Bring another stew! Or release us to the cafeteria! One or the other! Help, guards!”

“ Stop ,” Odo growls out.

Quark flinches, but stops. He looks wistfully to his half-finished bowl. “You could… finish mine. I guess.”

“I… don’t… eat,” Odo says in that slow gravelly way of his.

“Oh,” Quark says. He has no idea what to do with that. He sits back down on the ground to sip at his stew. To his delight, there are chunks in it. Actual protein. “At the very least, we’re not supposed to be confined to this cell. Not that the common areas are any better, worse in many ways mainly due to the company, but I was beginning to go mad in here. My solitary’s up and you just got here…” Quark pauses. “Unless you’re too high security to leave the cell?”

“Hmph.” Odo’s favorite refrain it seems.

Quark shrugs. “All the more reason for us to bust out of here. Now how small can you make yourself? Can you slip through any crack, or --?”

“No.” Second verse same as the first.

Quark sighs in frustration. “What, are you here willingly? This isn’t justice. Cardassians don’t do justice. We’re going to rot here, innocent or not, unless we can--”

“No!” Odo growls. “No.... to teaming up with the likes of you… ” His voice gains confidence as he continues, “or anyone else… in this wretched hive of villainy… and ‘no’ to any ill-advised plan you have for escape.”

Quark is stunned into silence for a beat, at so many words from this strange, taciturn being in a row, but recovers quickly. “But you haven’t even heard any plans of mine --”

“No.”

“But you don’t even know me yet.”

“No.”

“But --”

“I know enough. I don’t consort with criminals.” At some point the amorphous figure has become more defined into a generic humanoid form: one head on a neck, a spine with upright posture, two legs, and two arms folded squarely across his chest.

“Says my prison cellmate,” Quark mutters. He spreads his hands in quick apology.  “Who is an upstanding citizen and wrongly convicted I’m sure.”

“Do you ever, ever shut UP?” Odo roars. On the last word he takes a step towards Quark, growing larger and sharper as he looms over him.

Quark yelps then regains himself. “Touchy subject, okay. Fine. We’ll talk about something else.” 

“Leave. Me. Alone.” 

“Whatever. I’ll let you discover for yourself how lonely and maddening prison can be without a single ally, and when you come around, I’ll still be here, and we can escape together.” 

“Hmph.”

Quark heaves a sigh and mutters, “Or I’ll figure it out on my own someday. Or die trying.”

---

Now that there’s someone else in the cell with him, the quiet background noises of the prison are somehow worse. There’s a misconception about Ferengi sometimes, that because of their sensitive hearing any cacophony must be overwhelming. That’s not accurate. While a particularly high-pitched or loud single noise can be painful, otherwise the more variety of sound a Ferengi can experience at once the more enjoyable. A sensory buffet for the ears. 

At least on the freighter ship, in addition to the rattle of the machinery and eerie whoosh of space, there was always some amount of chatter to eavesdrop on from the Ferengi crew. The cells in this prison, however, are directly carved into the rocky surface of the moon, blocking all sound except for the moisture, guards in the hall, and the occasional insect.

At one point, Quark tries crossing to the other side of the cell, with half a mind to go back to watching the hole in the wall. Mo at least was a better conversational partner.

He has to pass by Odo first, though, who at the proximity growls out, “You stay in your half of the cell and I’ll stay over here.” He seems to have nothing better to do than stand stockstill and watch Quark. It’s unnerving.

Better sleeping spot, a tendency to stay more dry and warm through the night, and the slightest bit of stimulation to keep him from going mad. Every time Quark thinks he doesn’t have anything left to get taken away from him, he’s proven wrong.

One day, though, Quark will have his own moon, the exact opposite of this one. The airwaves will resonate with a raucous cacophony of people in all shapes and sizes, the moans of pleasure from the massage parlors, the clinking of dabo tables and yells of joyous gamblers, the roar of drunkards at the bars, the chewing of exotic foods at his restaurants, and, above all, the victorious clinking of latinum filling Quark’s pockets. Everyone in the galaxy will want to visit, and Quark will welcome them all, so long as they can pay the price.

Rule of Acquisition #226: “The more relaxed a customer, the more relaxed his pocketbook."  

Not just the sounds, but the smells, the taste, the swirling colors, the triumph of it -- Quark can imagine it all so clearly it feels almost in his grasp. Like it’s already happened and he’s just living out the prologue.

First, however, he has to find his way off this moon and to do that he desperately needs accomplices. The past couple years have definitively borne that out. Every strategy he’s tried, every plan he’s attempted, every one of them has bombed spectacularly at some misjudge of character who takes it upon themself to ruin Quark’s best efforts.

(Second is finding the necessary start-up capital, and available real estate, but the Great River provides, so Quark has no doubt he can figure that out later.)

Quark shifts and turns over in his dank corner. If he’s too far back, a stalactite drips right into his ear canal.

Drip drip drip

If he lays on his side, a rock digs into his hip, but if he lays on his back, well, the rock is still there digging in his hip somehow. 

Drip drip

Quark sighs and toss onto his other side. This is untenable. He can hear himself breathe . There’s one new sound however: a faint oozing sound.

Across the cell, Odo is in the same place that he’s been for the entire day. Sitting back against the wall, “legs” bent in front of him, and head turned in Quark’s direction. 

“Are you really just going to sit there staring at me all night too?” Quark huffs. “Towards me. Whatever. You don’t have eyes, but it’s still disconcerting.”

Odo grunts. Quark hates how even this small acknowledgement is a balm to his ears. As unideal as this situation is, Quark wouldn’t trade it for one more minute in solitary, with nothing but his own thoughts rattling through his head.

Quark huffs and groans, flopping from side to side but it’s no use. “I don’t hear you breathing, you don’t breathe do you? Uncanny.”

“Hmph.” 

Several minutes pass in near-silence. Except the constant dripping.

“You're still better than my previous roommates. Maybe you'll kill me in my sleep eventually, but anything better than Rom's gas after too much runkaroach milk. Some sounds aren't better than none. Rom's my brother, real nitwit. I'm guessing you also won't wake up screaming in your sleep from nightmares - you are the nightmare. Like Karlok did - that was my Klingon roommate - fortunately he was only here for --”

“I don't sleep.”

Quark will trick him into conversation yet. “Huh. Even better. Since you’re apparently not a criminal, you won’t steal my stuff either I bet. Well I don't own anything at the moment, but the principle stands --”

“I never said that.”

“You are going to steal my stuff?”

“I never said I’m not a criminal. Just that I don’t consort with them.”

Quark quirks a browridge at that but decides not to press it. “Whatever you are, at least you don’t talk all the time like that one bald guy, hmm, Morn. He would not shut up. About his mother, about his favorite drinks, about that time he robbed a bank. Just on and on and --”

“I can't imagine what that’s like,” Odo says flatly.

A double take that he heard that correctly, then Quark lets out a bark of laughter in surprise. “And you're funny!”

A disbelieving grunt from across the room. “Do you need another display on just how ‘humorous’ I can be, or will you leave me alone in peace?”

Quark gulps. “Right, well, sleep tight, don't let the razortoothed bed beetles bite. Or um. Whatever you do instead of sleep. Just sit there in a blob and glower at me? Not sure how a blob can glower but there you go, and --” Gulp. “Ok.”

A long silence with only the dripping and Odo’s faint liquid sounds.

Quark whispers, low enough for only a Ferengi to hear, normally, but who knows about goo-men. “Good night, Odo.”

Chapter Text

The next morning a harsh buzzer rattles through Quark’s lobes, awakening him. Hope rising in his chest, he scrambles to his feet.

Sure enough the door whizzes open.

Quark is three cheerful steps out the door before he slams into a hard wall of flesh.

The meaty guard, Grendor, laughs as he bounces off of him. Quark stumbles into the rocky wall, grasping at it for stability. He has the misfortune of being within aerosol range of Grendor’s breath and gags. Prisoners have an excuse, but presumably guards are paid enough to cover basic hygiene supplies, at the least.

“What now?” Quark bristles. “Solitary’s over, and confinement to cell was supposed to end yesterday, and it’s not fair , I didn’t even DO anything --”

Grendor, still chuckling, fingers the holster on his belt. “Oh yeah? Whatcha gonna do about it then?”

Quark sighs. “At least tell me what’s going on? If I’m back in the yard, I can --” He lowers his voice. “--eavesdrop on the Viridian Clique for you again.”

Grendor waves him off. “Run along, little troll. I’m not here for you.”

“Oh.” After a pause of disbelief, Quark speedwalks down the hall before the guard changes his mind.

Then he remembers who else is in his cell. He ducks into a recess in the wall to look back.

Odo’s humanoid definition has improved since yesterday, however, with limbs and features more defined, a bit more solid. 

He stands near the back of the cell, arms crossed over his chest per usual stance. Instead of ramrod straight, his posture stoops however. HIs arms cross over his chest per usual, but it’s more like he’s clutching them for security. 

“Bit of a delay ‘cause we had to get these ready. Can’t have you terrorizing everyone, eh?” Grendor laughs from inside the cell. His arms reach in front of the door, towards Odo, and hold out what looks like a collar.

Odo curls in on himself further. He takes a step back against the wall. He melts into it, as if he’s trying to get as much distance between himself and the collar as he can.

Quark’s heart starts to pound, that intelligent Ferengi sense of self-preservation rearing up. He ought to leave. He shouldn’t watch this.

Odo can handle himself, or at least, it’s not like Quark is capable of stopping whatever the guard is going to do. Not that Quark would. He’s never been accused of foolish acts of self-sacrifice or (shudder) charity before, so why start now? Certainly not for a cantankerous puddle who hates his guts.

Grendor unclasps the collar, within arm’s reach now.

Where’s the daggers that sprout from Odo’s back at the slightest irritation? Where’s the flailing tentacle monster? 

Odo doesn’t say anything, doesn’t move.

“Not gonna fight it, eh? That’s a shame,” Grendor says. Instead of clasping the collar, he pulls out a device from his holster and presses a button.

“NO!” Quark shouts, then slaps his hands over his mouth. 

Luckily his outburst is drowned out by a crackling, blinding beam -- not the disrupter Quark assumed it was at first look. The beam erupts in an arc from the device, straight into Odo’s chest. The power flings Odo against the wall. Odo lights up from within, a golden glow through his torso and limbs. He remains solid and humanoid-shaped. Silent.

Grendor disengages. Dark now, without that light, the afterglow burns on Quark’s retinas. Odo falls to the ground, on hands and knees, or their approximates. A burnt smell wafts through the air.

“Odo!” Quark can’t help but gasp, horror-stricken.

Grendor jerks his head toward him.

“ Leave, Quark .” Odo’s harsh growl stings like a sandpaper slap on Quark’s lobes. “ Leave me alone. ”

Quark makes himself scarce.

---

“How’s the grandkids, Bertho?” Quark chats with the Cardassian behind the cafeteria line. The cook is wide as a bullfrog and says about as many words. “I’d still love to see a holophoto sometime if you’ve got any. I’m sure they’re as good-looking as you are.”

Bertho ladles a pungent slop of unknown origin into Quark’s proffered bowl.”Uh-huh.”

Quark inhales deeply and grins. “Smells great, you’ve outdone yourself! Any extra today?”

It took him longer than he should have to get to the kitchen. A week in his cell has addled his brain, and he kept going down the wrong corridors. To be fair, the prison is a Cardassian labyrinth, each of the rocky tunnels dug into the barren moon rock very similar in appearance, with as many twists and turns and unexpected forks as a Cardassian crime thriller. Probably it’s to discourage escapes, but it’s not security that’s the main issue here (Quark has picked more complicated locks to steal his share of the profits back from other crewmates on the freighter). The issue is hijacking a ship to get off this rock.

For now, Quark welcomes the sight of anything that isn’t the claustrophobia of his cell. Also, a full meal if all goes well. He’s at the end of the food line, which smells like opportunity.

“No,” Bertho says crossly. 

“I can see another two ladles worth in the pan. Everyone else is eating already! It’ll just go to waste.”

“Prisoners get one ladle each.” Bertho drops the utensil into the pot and hauls it off to the matter reclaimer.

“Just once I’d like that to work.” Quark scowls.

Quark ducks down the tunnel leading from the kitchen to the cafeteria slash recreation yard slash all-purpose common room. Straight shot this time, fortunately. 

---

Like the rest of the prison, the Yard is yet another damp cavity within the moon’s rocky carapace. Either naturally formed by geological process over centuries, or carved out by especially incompetent miners, every dimension of the room is uneven. Outcroppings of rocks on the walls, as well as the expected stalactites and -gmites, create both hidden corners and sectioned arenas for the several hundred prisoners to while away their restless hours. Little rivulets of water stream through well-worn crevices criss-crossing the floor, and voles scitter about underfoot. In some places, there’s barely a meter of clearance between pitching floor and dipping ceiling, whereas in the long, winding center of the Yard, the space opens up to an agoraphobic atrium. 

Across the center of the ceiling in this open space, tens of meters up, is a giant crack that gives the uncanny impression of a sharp-toothed sneer. Notably, this crack doesn’t open to more rock, but actually breaks through to the surface. If a prisoner stands in the exact right place down below and looks up, they can even glimpse a sliver of actual atmosphere. The sky is a steely dismal grey, more often than not, all too similar to the cave’s grey stone that pervades their lives here, but just the knowledge that the stars are out there, waiting for him, is enough to keep Quark dreaming and scheming.

There are no hopeful slivers of daylight with regards to the company, however. 

On the whole, it’s a motley assortment, although alien types tend to congregate amongst themselves. Groups stick together for defense. With all the restless energy caged up here together, any aggression against one member of a group from an outsider becomes impetus for a gang war.

A bellow of Klingons are tearing into a Cardassian vole they’ve captured in one section, blood running down their facial hair as they chew. Quark’s stomach, empty as it is, lurches at the thought. Everyone else gives them a wide berth, with the exception of the Nausicaans who, like the Klingons, often start fights for the entertainment of it. It’s best to let them take out their energy on each other. Orions of the Viridian Clique gamble with a set of obsidian dice in another stony carveout. Lisspeians, Livians, Lurians, oh my -- many of the non-allied races of the Quadrant are represented, in their separate clusters. 

Quark scans the crowd for new faces, assesses the moods of the familiar ones, and scopes out a decent crevice to cower in. Maybe even one with decent acoustics.

He hasn’t historically been the only straggler here, though this hasn’t helped him so far. Many smaller species, like him, try their best to fly under the radar, though their association can be more of a liability than a help. The Ferengi he’s run across have either been ones he’s screwed over in his former life, or who subsequently screw him over after a tenuous alliance.

A few scraggly Andorians and Tellerites are also interspersed within the mix, though they’re rare as the Federation will negotiate for release on behalf of their own. Thus anyone who's fallen through the cracks is likely to be such a lowlife that even the Federation won’t take them under their smothering wing, and thus not anyone that Quark has had luck dealing with unscathed. 

There’s also one lone Cardassian, another worrisome anomaly. Most Cardassians that transgress the state are made a public example of through live execution, so for him to be here means either he has political allies, or the great Cardassian Empire has use for him yet. Or he’s been forgotten about. In any case, there are enough intimidating rumors about him that Quark steers clear.

Today, a few new Nausicaans and Orions are in the mix, plus one skinny Human oddly enough, but he doesn’t spot the specific new prisoners he’s hoping to avoid. The ones who transferred in last week. (From the Shorgoth Detention Center -- the Cardassians were closing it down to free up the facility for weapons manufacturing, ironically enough.) 

The day Quark heard this news, not coincidentally, is the same day he got himself locked in solitary.

Quark ducks behind a group of loud but unobservant Pakleds and finds an inconspicuous corner obscured by a large stalagmite. Breathing a sigh of relief he squats down and digs into his slop. He shovels it down as fast as he can, indigestion being preferable to the consequence of taking his time. For one, it’s harder to taste this way.

In his haste, Quark forgets to consider all aspects of his hiding spot. The bulk of the Pakleds, though a good visual cover, also block approaching sound waves. 

“Look who survived the consequences of his actions, yet again. Tsk, tsk, tsk,” says a familiar voice.

Quark flinches, almost choking on a large chunk of… well, best not to dwell on that too long. Grinning above him is a group of short, large-eared men, looking considerably less fashionable in their prison jumpsuits and much the worse for wear than the last time they saw each other. The last people he wants to see.

Front and center is the former second-in-command of the freighter ship they worked on together. He leers down at Quark, hands on his hips. There’s a purple bruise blooming around his eye, and several other healed-over scars, but otherwise he seems relatively intact since two years ago. A few lackeys surround him, also Ferengi, but not ones Quark recognizes at a glance. Hard, nasty goons who seem to have gotten their hands on contraband tooth sharpeners, judging by their smiles. One with a particularly creepy look about him flashes a bit of silver beneath his sleeve. 

“Brunt, always a pleasure,” Quark scowls. “A pleasure to see you still behind bars. A pleasure to see that someone else thinks as highly of your face as I do.” He gestures to the black eye. “A pleasure to see you without a strip of latinum to your name --”

Although the initial news of Brunt’s arrival had scared Quark, he now finds himself more irritated than anything else. The fact that this little-lobed twerp of all the miserable excuses for life in the Quadrant has found allies, whereas Quark with all his charm and deviousness has not, boils his blood.

“You’re one to talk! And who’s fault is that!” Brunt lunges at him, but a few of the others hold him back. One whispers something in Brunt’s ear, and Brunt nods. The whisperer looks pointedly at Quark’s hands and licks his lips.

Quark grips his bowl tighter, but with one firm swipe Brunt’s minion sends it clattering to the ground. Several enterprising voles swarm from nearby, digging into the last several spoonfuls of upended stew. Nasty creatures. Quark sighs. 

“Look, clearly this is the worst possible scenario for both of us,” Quark says. “I’m being punished just as much as you -- maybe more! We’re on equal footing here, so how about I ignore you, and you ignore me, and we live out our days equally miserable.”

“I was on the fast-track to becoming a liquidator!” Brunt snaps. “Two more cases of Varon-T disruptors sold, and I would have had the bribe necessary to make a name for myself!”

“The only liquid in your future is the brain between your lobes,” Quark says, waggling his head at him. “Slug mush. Or, in case you can’t pick up on the insult, I’m calling you an idiot.”

A few of the goons snicker, though they quiet at Brunt’s glare. It’s almost like old times. Despite Brunt’s higher place in the hierarchy of the freighter, his underlings often preferred Quark for company in their off hours, playing tongo or trading stock tips and deliberately excluding Brunt from this casual association. Brunt had his ways of maintaining respect, but the difference between them was clear enough.

“That apprenticeship at the FCA main office was as good as mine! No thanks to you!” Brunt snarls. This time when he lunges, no one holds him back, and he slams Quark’s back into the rock behind him. Quark hisses and grapples at him. 

Before any further damage is done, however, a steady hand pulls Brunt off of Quark.

“Lobelings, settle down,” the owner of the hand says. He inserts himself between the two of them, a hand outstretched in each direction to keep them apart. They ignore him, continuing to hiss and spit at each other. Quark scrambles to his feet. Several of the goons do their best to calm Brunt down, brushing rock dust off his jumpsuit and muttering to him -- one says something like “he’ll get his due later, we’ll make sure of it” which does not comfort Quark one bit.

It takes a moment before Quark recognizes the interrupting man as someone he knows, however. The man has lost considerable weight, with his ridges more heavily defined than before and a drawn face. There’s a slash across his nose.

“Cousin Gaila! What are you doing here?” Quark says in surprise. Of all their ill-fated freighter crew, he assumed Gaila, former captain, at least would have the connections to bribe his way out of consequence. The rumors didn't indicate he was one of the new arrivals.

“I think you of all people know the answer to that, cousin Quark,” Gaila says with a sardonic quirk of his mouth. There’s venom in it -- Quark knows he’s not off the hook -- but Gaila is at least a reasonable man. Someone who can set aside personal slights for the sake of greater opportunity.

Brunt, proving himself to be the opposite, yells, “The nerve-- !” but Gaila holds up a hand to cut him off before the situation gets out of control again.

“Cool your lobes, Brunt.” Gaila picks up Quark’s bowl from where it’s upturned nearby and runs a finger around the inside for any last remnants. The group waits for him to continue. He pops the finger in his mouth before speaking again. “Reprehensible as it is to have to deal with this pocketless weasel again, we’re in need of information.”

Quark’s ears perk up at that. “Then I’m your man. It’ll cost you though.”

“You will be happy to walk away instead of crawl!” Brunt snarls.

“That’s enough Brunt. Quark…” Gaila glances around the yard then lowers his voice. “Whistle in the wind is that you crossed paths with the Bajoran experiment. Surprised to see you still alive.”

“Experiment?” Quark cocks his head genuinely confused. “I’ve been in solitary the last week, in this prison the last few years. Not a lot of scientific discovery around these parts.”

The other Ferengi chime in:

“I heard it was called the Void Monster. It absorbs people into its black hole of nothingness, never to be heard from again…” one says. The arms of his jumpsuit are torn off to show strangely muscular (for a Ferengi) biceps.

“No, no, a Cardassian word remember? It’s called Nothing, but what happened at Dukat’s soiree definitely wasn’t nothing --” a particularly large Ferengi says, with a twang from the Northern regions of Ferenginar.

“Oh right! I heard it ate three Bajoran women --”

“Such delicate lobes…” Brunt says, running a finger along his own.

“I heard it was TWELVE Bajoran women and it sprouted teeth and killed five Cardassian officers, their entrails hot and steaming in the winter air --” the creepy one says, gleeful to share the gruesome details. He’s taken out the flash of silver from his sleeve to polish on his uniform -- a contraband knife.

“It wasn’t like that at all. I heard it can shapeshift into other people, so it infiltrated the Cardassian council, and by the time they realized --”

“If it can shapeshift it could be anyone of us!” Brunt shrieks. “How do I know you aren’t the monster? Or you? or--”

“Boys, boys! ” Gaila attempts to regain control.

“Shapeshifter? You mean Odo,” Quark says. 

At the word Odo, everyone quiets and leans in close.

Gail nods eagerly. “Yes, Odo’ital. Cardassian for ‘Nothing.’”

“For…? Huh. No wonder he has such a chip on his shoulder.” At everyone’s blank faces, Quark grins. “Odo is my new cellmate.”

They erupt into crosstalk, with Quark at the center. He drinks it in for a moment, enjoying the attention. Then spreads his hands wide to call for silence. “Now, now. One at a time please. I’ll be happy to answer any questions --”

“How did you survive the night with it?” 

“Is it true it takes the form of nightmares?” 

“Are we safe? Will it eat me while I sleep?!”

Quark raises one finger. “-- for a price. Let’s say we forgive and forget any past bad blood between us.”

“Unlikely,” Brunt spits at Quark, but it doesn’t launch effectively and dribbles down Brunt’s chin. He wipes it away, eyes darting to see who else noticed. Quark smirks.

“Because you see, Odo and I have become fast friends.” Quark is struck by sudden inspiration. He scrambles up on the rocks, trying to get a decent overhead view of the Yard. He squints and scans across the crowds. “He’s kind of my bodyguard now, so you see you mess with me… Oh! Hey Odo!”

In a dark corner across the way, between a few Lissepian smugglers and a Lurian furtively exchanging contraband, is the silver flash of a collar ringed around a shimmering pillar. Quark waves frantically to get the pillar’s attention. The pillar solidifies into the humanoid shape Odo has been developing, this time with defined eyes that flash at Quark. It even has pupils and irises, though the rest of him stays that unbroken amorphous beige. For a man only now learning facial expressions, he’s perfected “stay away” with remarkable clarity.

But Odo will see that it’s in their best interest to team up. Quark just has to force his hand.

“Odo,” Quark slides down the rock, pushes past the gaping Ferengi, and runs over to him. He ducks out of the path of a crossing Klingon and darts between various others in his way. “There you are! Hey, good to get out and about, isn’t it? There’s some people I’d like you to meet --”

“Quarrrrkkkk…” Odo growls a warning as Quark approaches. 

The rest of the Ferengi hang back, cowering a bit behind the Pakleds, waiting to see what happens next.

“I was just telling my associates over there what an excellent, intimidating person you are, and what an honor it is to know you…” Quark gestures towards the Ferengi and beams up at Odo with his slickest smile. 

For a moment, Odo seems more bewildered than anything. As Quark talks, it starts to draw the attention of the crowd around them. The Orions pause in their dice game. One of the Klingons actually shushes another, as they take note of this strange new prisoner glimmering before them. 

Good. Time to establish a connection, show Odo that of the vast array of hooligans, his best bet is the friendly face from his cell, and also show everyone else Quark isn’t to be messed with anymore.

Odo isn’t listening to Quark though. Instead his sunken eyes dart between the leering Klingons, the wide-eyed Ferengi, the intrigued Orions… 

“Odo, Odo, look at me. It’s your buddy from the cell. Remember how nice I was? I let you have the corner you wanted, kept quiet when you asked -- uhh mostly-- I’ve tried to be very respectful. So now that we’re friends --”

In his making his pitch, Quark grabs Odo’s arm (or approximation thereof) --a tried-and-true key Ferengi sales tactic for creating rapport and holding focus.

“Stay AWAY from me!” Odo roars out, trying to shake Quark off.

Quark talks quickly. “Odo, you’re new here, but there are various factions -- alliances -- in this place, and anyone that stands alone is an open target. I’ve been good to you so far right? What more could you want? You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours --”

Spiked tentacles erupt out of Odo as he grows larger over Quark. As soon as they do, however, an electric current arcs through Odo from the collar. 

Quark screeches. The former-arm-now-tentacle flings Quark across the yard as it flails. Quark’s lobe scrapes against the rock as he slides a good ten feet away. Still screeching, he scrambles to hands and knees and shuffles out of the way further.

Odo roars even as he melts and reforms. His spikes shoot out and then collapse, like he’s unable to get a grip on his shape. 

Guards rush in, each with the taser device that Grendor had.

Quark doesn’t see what happens next though, because the prison yard erupts into chaos. This forsaken place that Quark has found himself in is a poorly stored canister of antimatter -- any disruption of the volatile mixture is an explosion waiting to happen. 

Orions climb the walls to flying kick Lissepians that intruded on their black market trade. Klagore, the most temperamental of the Nausicaans, leads his group into a full-out brawl with the Klingons. In the tussle, the blood from the discarded vole splatters across the faces of nearby Gorn, who use this excuse to rage at the Pakleds, who jeer at them “Oooh! Pretty red makeup!” Smaller, less violent species like Ferengi scurry for cover.

Including Quark, who uses the opportunity to dart down the first passage he finds, away from the violence, away from his former crewmates, away from Odo.

Alone again.

Chapter Text

Life on the freighter had seemed like hell at the time, and even now, faced with the misery of the prison, Quark wouldn't return.

Forced into the job by circumstance, at first Quark had aspirations of working his way up from the lowest paid (and thus least respected) position in the crew of Frek’s Freighter Company. Opportunity plus instinct equals profit, after all, if Quark keeps his ears open to listen for his chance. 

As time went on, however, his goal shifted to never having to work under anyone else again. 

As the cook, Quark spent hours perfecting his recipes, doing his best to both stretch their fresh food stores (live insects, for example, didn’t replicate well) and tailor savings to individual tastes. “Spore pie, with extra millipede sauce for you DaiMon Gaila. Oh, and Krog this slice has more crust -- I know how you like the way the beetles crunch!” So he’d dish out the meals, with the occasional nod of acknowledgement or hum of approval. He’s building goodwill, he’d tell himself.

Then Brunt would bite into his portion, spit it out with a display of disgust, and brag about that time he went to Taxman’s Delight, the most expensive restaurant on Ferenginar, and how they wouldn’t even serve this slop to their slugstock, but of course poor profitless Quark didn’t know any better. The rest of the crew, eager to toady up to the second-in-command, would laugh and agree, never mind how minutes earlier they were chowing down with relish.

If the sonic dishwasher didn’t fritz out, and Quark was able to get the washing done before lights off (Gaila ran a tight ship), sometimes the crew would let him into their tongo games. Quark’s father had been abysmal at it, so it took some observation before Quark caught on to the strategy, but before long he knew he could outmaneuver the best of them. By taking their latinum, he could build respect, he figured.

Then Brunt butted into the games, instead of pretending he was above fraternizing with subordinates, and though he often cheated his way to a win, the rest of the crew were eager to let him and keep in his good graces. Quark refused and was cast out.

While cleaning the entire ship, bulkheads to stembolts, Quark would listen in on the idle conversation between the crew, as they passed time until their next destination. “The downturn in Hypurian beetle snuff is a fluke; I wouldn’t sell stock just yet. Grok, you’re too smart not to sneeze your way to success!” Quark would chime in. He’d get a preening smile from Grok, a companionable laugh from the rest, and then a month later when his predictions were proved right, a new appreciation. He could get a reputation for his good lobes, he thought.

But they never got to the appreciation part of Quark’s plan, because at every turn, Brunt was there, reminding everyone of: Quark’s empty bank account, his paltry salary, how he was only hired due to a family contract, and how no one should listen to a pauper, lest they become one themselves.

It didn’t matter that Quark had the charm, the business sense, or the elbow grease. What mattered, to Ferengi, was that regardless of any of these qualities, he didn’t have the latinum to buy his way to a better rank. 

Brunt did.

Owner, private entrepreneur, self-manager. He’d settle for nothing less than top position. He would be the one exploiting employees, and never again the other way around.

Unfortunately, with how events played out, the only business he has dominion over these days is the far-flung fantasies of his own mind. A minor, temporary setback.

One day he’ll have his moon. One day he’ll get to do things his way. One day he’ll finally be his own boss.

---

Today, however, was certainly not that day.

Ears ringing with the chaos of the riot, Quark scrambles through the maze of connecting halls as fast as he can. The never-ending twists and turns all blur together into sameness. Panic and humiliation and searing pain all swarm like an antimatter chamber inside him, spurring him to put as much distance between himself and the Yard as he can. He has no idea where he is, but this seems unimportant at the moment.

Finally, a jutting rock underfoot forces him to stop, He braces himself against the wall as he stumbles. Then weariness overtakes him, and he slides down to sit. His previous frenzy becomes a less pressing concern than getting a handle on his racing pulse. The burn on his scraped lobe and hands becomes apparent as well, so he alternates between gritting his teeth against the pain and gasping for breath.

Sound filters back into his consciousness as he steadies himself. Yelling and footsteps all reverberate through the uneven acoustics of the rock, but none sound nearby. Not yet.

The irritation that rose up in Odo’s voice as he yelled at him sears through Quark’s inner ear, though. And the rage when Quark touched him… Not only does Quark not have an ally, not only does Quark have to share space with someone who he has alienated yet again, but Quark inadvertently revealed in front of everyone that Odo is powerless, with that collar on him. The entire prison yard saw their tiff. 

(There was also a lower, more troubled frequency in Odo’s voice underneath the contempt. If their exchange hasn’t kept ringing through his ears on constant replay, he might not have noticed. It nags at him. Something squeezes in his chest, a subconscious reaction, but he can’t quite pinpoint why or what the frequency means.)

What Quark does know is that he can’t go back to his cell and face him. 

Of course he doesn’t exactly have anywhere else to go. That’s kind of the whole schtick with this prison thing. Certainly he can't hide with any of the other prisoners. Anyone suffering retaliation from the guards for the riot will blame Quark, and he’s made himself a very easy, very weak, and very public target. So much for flying under the radar. His cellmate won’t help him, nor will the new arrivals of his own kind…

Quark’s breath comes fast and shallow again, until he’s hiccoughing with it. A week ago, he put himself in solitary to buy time for how to deal with his former crew again, but it doesn’t even matter. He’s fucked everything up for himself again, somehow even more than it was. 

He’s too overwhelmed trying not to hyperventilate to stay vigilant of his surroundings.

“Hah! I thought I’d -- find you -- snivelling -- in some corner,” Brunt says between his own labored breathing. His hands are on his knees, while he huffs and puffs; clearly he had been running through the halls trying to find Quark. “Like the -- weak-lobed -- little -- reprobate -- you are…”

Quark shoots to his feet, snapping out of his misery with the immediacy of the threat. They both catch their breaths for a moment. A couple of the other Ferengi file in from around the corner, several steps behind Brunt -- the creepy one and the muscular one. Quark cocks his head to listen down the hall. The four of them are otherwise alone.

Brunt flicks a hand towards the others, I’ve got this. They nod and stand back, for the moment.

Brunt snickers. “No one here wants anything to do with you. Your monster cellmate wants to kill you. And your beloved cousin went back to his cell.”

Despite that this is exactly what Quark had just been panicking about himself, he finds he can’t take it seriously coming from someone as stupid as Brunt. Quark sneers at him. “I sold out Gaila same as I sold out the rest of you. But I assure you, it’s no love lost.”

“You will pay for your transgressions. I’ll make sure of it.” His eyes flash with anger pent-up from two years of stewing, as he takes a couple deliberate steps into Quark’s space. 

Quark juts his chin up, refusing to lose ground. “It’s what Gaila would have done in my position.” 

“Not me.”

“It’s what any self-respecting Ferengi would have done.” Quark pretends to think for a moment. Brunt’s glare is centimeters from his, which is somewhat distracting. “So I guess that makes sense. That you wouldn’t.”

“That’s a lie .” 

“So you would have done the same in my position after all?” Quark affects an air of polite confusion.

Brunt bristles with frustration and pushes him. Though this forces Quark to stumble a couple steps back, overall the gesture is more petty than intimidating. In building Brunt up into this evil specter of his past in his mind, he had forgotten how much of a weak-willed bully he was. One that, perhaps, could be manipulated. Or at least was always fun to insult, before he inevitably makes Quark pay for it.

Brunt’s backup, however, still gives Quark pause. The muscular Ferengi folds his arms, which makes his biceps pop huge. The creepy one licks his tongue along his teeth. The unfortunate thing about bullies is that they attract other bullies.

“The profits, Quark! We were raking it in! It was raining latinum, for the successful real Ferengi--”

“All to pay off debts you accumulated to do the job in the first place. You hadn’t seen barely a strip of it yet.”

“That was about to change! The tides were shifting, and we were perfectly positioned to prolong the war, to keep feeding off the fat teat of their desperation, both sides --”

Off of millions of lives . Quark’s stomach clenches. “You were sloppy. It was getting more dangerous, and if you couldn’t even keep me out of the loop, who’s to say the Cardassians wouldn’t have caught on by themselves?”

“And where’s your profit? You sold us for nothing. You don’t have the lobes for business, never did.” 

“In-in an account! Waiting for -- for me, after I’ve done my time,” Quark lies. On his back foot now, he does his best to keep talking until he comes up with something. Not that that has served him well so far in his life. “You can’t make a deal if you’re dead, and at least I know I won’t end up in the Vault of Eternal Destitution.”

“Not every Ferengi’s in it for profit,” the creepy Ferengi interjects. Quark keeps his eyes on Brunt, but he shivers as he continues with, “Somes of us are here for different priorities. Bloodier ones.”

“Not yet Leck,” Brunt hisses at him, Then back to Quark: “You could have come to us, used what you knew as leverage. We could have made a deal.”

Quark swallows. He did go to Gaila first, but it hadn’t mattered. The two-percent cut Gaila offered him was more money than he had seen in his lifetime, his father’s lifetime, but on balance it still hadn’t seemed like enough. Not when he had lain awake at night, counting the dancing bars of latinum in his head as he tried to sleep. No matter how hard he tried to picture them shiny and glittering, they dripped with blood. It was Quark’s own weak, treacherous heart that betrayed the better sense of his lobes.

Foolish, foolish, foolish. Faced with the same decision today, he wouldn’t make the same mistake.

But he won’t admit any of this to Brunt of course. 

“Never place friendship above profit,” Quark says, lightly as he can. As if this were idle chit chat about the Futures Exchange. Like they were sharing frosty glasses of snail juice some frippering evening after an office grind.

“Don’t you dare quote the Rules at me.” Brunt slams Quark against the wall, knocking his breath out. The craggy rock digs into Quark’s back, and he winces. Little flecks of spittle fly into Quark’s face, as Brunt growls out, “We’re not friends.”

“Rule 121: Everything is for sale, even friendship.” Quark musters up what he hopes is a cheeky grin. He wipes his face with the unscraped back of his hand.

“You’ve always been so weak. Like a female.” Brunt says quietly, almost to himself, “I could beat you to a pulp right here and no one would care.” 

“We can help you with that boss,” the muscular Ferengi says, and Leck nods along. 

Neither Brunt and Quark pay them any mind. Brunt fists a hand into the collar of Quark's jumpsuit. His body presses hard against him, so close that Quark can feel his chest heave. His ragged breath is hot on Quark's cheek.

Rule #206: Never let personal baggage get in the way of bags of profit. 

“What are you a Klingon? Where’s the profit in revenge?” Quark says, winding up a sales pitch, but their proximity is creating a weird tension in Brunt. Quark tries to keep his rising panic out of his voice. “I’ve been here two years: I know the ropes, which guards to avoid, how not to piss off various gang leaders, where the contraband comes from. I’m useful . A good businessman would know the value of this.” Quark licks his lips with a grin. Brunt’s eyes flit to watch the movement. “We don't have to like each other to profit from association.”

Brunt, for his part, seems to be considering this. He's still looking down at Quark's mouth. “I don't like you,” he says, almost as an afterthought. 

The tension in Brunt’s body against him unclenches. He releases Quark’s jumpsuit from his grip, then smooths the fabric absentmindedly. Quark lets out a long breath, also relaxing; this might be okay. He might have found the right words to convince him to see reason, finally.

“And I don't like you!” Quark chuckles, a little manic in his relief. “Given the choice between your ugly face and any other person in the galaxy I'd never ever ever choose you. I assume you feel the same. Your lust for profit has always been admirable, I admit, but --”

Brunt's face pinches tight, then twists into an vicious sneer. Quick as the shift from impulse to warp, the brief uncoiling in Brunt snaps back taunt. “It's not about profit anymore, Quark, it's personal .”

Growling, Brunt gropes around on Quark’s chest until he finds his upper nipples and latches on. Then he twists, hard , and Quark screeches loud enough it echoes down the hall. A few rocks crumble from a nearby stalactite.

“Frinx and gre’thor, Brunt, what the fuck?!” Quark says through gritted teeth, as if lowered voices matter now. “We were making a deal! Almost.”

“Only one way to deal with scum like you,” Leck leers, flicking his knife out.

“Can we jump him now boss? Please?” Muscles says.

“Oy!” A harsh shout from the down the hall -- Cardassian. “Prison’s under lockdown. Everyone back to your cells.”

They do their best to disperse, but the guards corral the Ferengi and haul them off without too much trouble. 

Quark casts about in vain for some sort of distraction. Where's a temperamental Nausicaan when you need him? Now that he's thinking clearly, if he could get away, he could check among the rock. The shape of these stalagmites is familiar, so he's pretty sure he saw one of the Orions hide some Romulan ale behind a boulder nearby, if no one has looted it since he's been in solitary -- perfect to disinfect his scraped ear and drink away the sting of his situation. 

No such luck though, and before long Quark’s cell doors lock behind him once again.

Though Quark may have struck a few blows to Brunt’s ego, he’s under no delusion that he has the upper hand in that situation, nor is it over. In fact it’s likely to get worse.

Unfortunately, now he has to brace for a different confrontation.

---

No sooner is Quark shoved inside, than Odo rises up out of his puddle state to glower at him in gelatinous humanoid shape. He looks none the worse for wear, despite the drama in the Yard. His neck is uninterrupted beige -- no collar. Quark backs away to the edge of the cell. 

“You’re late. Buzzers sounded. There are rules ,” Odo growls out, having traded his monosyllabism for reprimands, apparently. His sunken eyes flick over the state of Quark -- his scraped lobe now oozing puss, his red-rimmed eyes, the way he’s hunching over. The sight of Quark’s injuries seems to make him angrier. “You should have left me alone. I told you --” 

Surging towards Quark, he pokes one finger (now defined individually rather than a single hand-shape) into Quark’s chest for emphasis. Though he barely touches Quark, the pressure on what will likely become a nasty bruise from Brunt’s stunt causes Quark to flinch. Spikes of pain shoot through the area, and a little whimper escapes him. 

Odo immediately recoils. He opens his mouth to continue his rant, but hesitates.

Weariness overtakes Quark. Odo finally wants to talk to him, even if it is more of a rant than a conversation, but Quark can’t be bothered. He wants Quark to be his verbal punching bag, well then let him work for it. Taking advantage of Odo’s hesitation, Quark trudges over to his Odo-designated side of the cell, putting as much distance between them as he can. He lies down on his back.

“You’ve finally learned to shut up.” Odo’s voice wavers from its usual harshness slightly.

Quark closes his eyes, closes himself off. Let Odo do or say what he wants. Who is Quark to dissuade him from roaring at him or from injuring him further. Odo wanted to teach Quark a lesson, so fine, he’ll leave him alone like he asked.

Silence, except for the constant drip drip drip of the caves, rings through the cell.

Quark audiates the sounds of his future moon. He tries to immerse himself in the fantasy click of latinum, the whizz of dabo wheels, the overlapping happy chatter and laughter -- 

“You solids… always… pushing… and pushing, and demanding… I do this or I do that… with no regard for what I want, what I tell you I want, repeatedly…” Odo grumbles. The words are a slow rough creak to start, then they tumble out with increasing speed, like he's been turning over this litany of grievances in his head and only now able to express them aloud. “You’re all alike, you just want me for my shapeshifting. Like I’m putty for you to use for your own whims never mind who I am --”

So much for the palliative of Quark’s imaginary moon.

“I’d try to use anyone who was locked in here with me.” Quark sighs. The irony of Odo being the one to drag Quark into conversation isn’t lost on him. Why now? Odo had seemed surprised at Quark's return, despite his anger -- did he not think he was coming back? But Odo would prefer an empty cell, or so he says. Is it Quark’s injuries? Guilt at the evidence of Odo’s descent into an uncontrollable monster, maybe. Or perhaps it’s just confusion that Quark isn’t either cowering in a corner or yelling at him. 

Quark sits up. Fine. He wouldn’t be able to distract himself from the silence forever anyway. “You’re not special. No need to get all huffy about it.”

Odo sits down across the cell, mimicking exactly how Quark has arranged himself -- back against the wall, forearms resting on his bent knees. “No other cellmate would have abilities like mine.”

“Rule of Acquisition number fifteen: ‘Opportunity is in the eye of the beholder,’” Quark says. Odo’s expression doesn’t change, but he tilts his head. Baffled by Ferengi philosophy, like most aliens. “Any other cellmate could have talents I could wield to my advantage. Better talents even.”

“Hmph,” Odo grunts with disbelief.

“Sure you could probably slide under the door yourself…” Quark pauses to give Odo the chance to contradict him, but he doesn’t this time. Interesting. “But could you figure out the controls to spring me free too? And then when we get to the surface…” Quark waggles his head, as he says, patronizingly, “Could you commandeer a ship? Could you navigate it into safer territory? And then if we were stopped by a patrol ship -- maybe you could physically disguise yourself, but I don’t see you charming your way past anyone. Not with that winning personality of yours. Or what if the ship needed repairs, how’s your mechanical knowledge --”

“Fine,” Odo cuts him off. He’s got his head cocked again. He’s got that same stony expression, but he’s peering at Quark like he’s a bug he’s stepped on that now wants to lecture him on footwear.

“I use people for my own gain, and I expect anyone else to do the same to me. Maybe what helps me also helps you, or at least we both manipulate the other into thinking that’s the case, and then we have a deal. But I’d do the same thing to anyone else.” The pus tickles as it drips down his ear, so Quark wipes it with his sleeve. He winces at the rough fabric against the open wound. “Don’t take it personally.”

“An amoral lowlife. As I thought,” Odo says. He winces alongside Quark, however -- imitation or a genuine reaction?

Quark shrugs. “That’s the Ferengi way.” He tries cleaning his sleeve off on the rock. Hopefully, the sonic shower room will be accessible tomorrow.

“That’s why you’re here. You... used each other. The… other ones.” Odo points one hand to the empty side of his head. It’s the first time anything but his head has moved since he sat down, unnaturally still as he is (when not a roaring monstrosity). “The… Ferengi. Shaped like you.” 

“The ones with the ears,” Quark confirms for him. He’s not sure where Odo’s sudden interest in knowing anything about him is coming from, but maybe this is something he can build on. “My former crewmates. Yup. Something like that.”

“Then you belong here…” Odo grunts. His slow creak of a voice gains confidence, as he continues, “Locked away where your degeneracy can’t infringe on innocents. Justice has been… served.” 

There’s passion as he says this, but those uncannily humanoid eyes, set deep in his gelatinous face, stay fixed on Quark’s face. He’s curious about Quark’s perspective, regardless of Odo's own opinions on the necessity of incarceration.

“Says the self-proclaimed moral authority locked in here with me,” Quark says, twisting his lips to the side. Of all the many flaws his previous roommates had, at least none of them took the side of their jailers. Maybe Odo was law enforcement before this? But for which polity? “I told you Cardassians don’t do justice, no need to lick their chufas about it.”

“Though I expect you’ll cry innocence,” Odo waggles his head sarcastically, and it’s uncanny how it looks exactly like Quark’s gesture earlier. He’s mocking him. “A misunderstanding. I should pity you. Helpless, hapless victim --” 

“Oh I’m guilty alright.” Quark flashes a counterfeit grin. 'Poor little Quark' may not be a fighter, physically, but he won't take a blow to his ego lying down. He has self-respect, if not the reputation to back it up, these days. Odo doesn’t know his history, though, and this is an opportunity to rewrite the past. “I was the head of the operation. Strong-armed my crew, the other Ferengi, to go along with my devious grand plans. But they couldn’t hear the profit clinking through distant solar winds like I could, got cold lobes, tried to back out --”

Odo scoffs. “A cheat, perhaps a petty crook, but a mastermind? Doubtful.”

“I was too,” Quark hisses through his teeth. “A racketeer to give any honest businessman a run for his money. I was known three sectors over for my greed and ruthlessness.”

“I take it back,” Odo says. His mouth quirks up in an eerie mimic of Quark’s earlier smirking. “Innocent after all. A patsy, duped into taking the blame.”

Quark, fuming, balls his hands into fists, but regrets it as his nails dig into his tender palms. He flaps them about to get rid of the stinging. Odo watches this without further expression on that smooth gooey face, but Quark can’t shake that he’s pitying him. 

“We did it all -- larceny, smuggling, drug running, tax fraud… Weapons sales,” Quark says with as much bluster as he can manage. “You wouldn’t believe the bricks of latinum I was raking in. When I tell you about the warlords we manipulated into buying our worthless wares, the terrorists we hoodwinked, and the cargo holds we looted right from under their ears… My crew and I. They all looked up to me and my incredible deviousness. In fact, before it all went wrong, Brunt the lowly cook was going to name his first son after me --”

Odo's unblinking eyes seem to stare right through Quark as he listens. “They don’t respect you. I saw you with them.”

“I -- well they -- Like you're such a good judge of character yourself!” Quark stammers, but his steady stream of lies runs dry under Odo’s scrutiny. He sighs, bluster escaping like an air lock released into the nothingness of space. “Not anymore.” 

A noncommittal grunt from Odo.

Quark scowls. “A lot of tall tales about you out there too. I suppose none of them are true either -- mister self-righteous law-loving goody-goody. Too good for these walls, too good to consort with criminals --”

“They’re all true,” Odo says quietly. Before this, each sparing expression or gesture of his was a slow, deliberate act. Now his stoicism breaks, that alien stillness dissolving as he hunches over his knees, literally shrinking into himself. Something squeezes inside Quark at the sudden change. “All the worst rumors.”

“You killed twelve Bajoran women and devoured their entrails?” Quark raises a skeptical eyeridge.

“I don’t eat. But--”

“Then I find the rest very hard to believe.”

“It might as well be true,” Odo says with a religious fervor. It seems once he broke his reticence to talk, now he can’t stop. “I broke the law. I hurt people. I deserve to be here, same as you. We’re here to serve out our punishment for the good of society, and --”

“Rotting in a cell? What good does that do? And for who?”

Spikes rise up from Odo’s hunched back, as he roars, though his head is still buried in his knees. The return of his temper is a strange comfort, compared with the pathetic retreat into himself. “GrrrrrRRRrr! You vexation. You irritant. STOP. Always contradicting me...”

“Well I --”

“No matter what I tell you, no matter how much I try to scare you, you don’t STOP. Even when I -- when that results in injury --” The harsh creak of Odo’s voice breaks on the last word. Quark holds his breath. “If you’re so callous, if you're such a cutthroat, why are you reluctant to believe the worst of me?!”

Odo’s outburst reverberates through the stone for a long moment, then dissipates. Quark lets the lull stretch. Odo’s goo, normally restricted to a subtle oozing sound, churns within him. 

“What do you want, Odo?” Quark finally says.

Odo breaks from his hunch to look back up at Quark.

“Earlier, you were ranting at me how no one ever listens to what you want --” Quark continues.

“I’ve already told you.” Odo’s irritation rises again.

“Leave you alone!” Quark says quickly. “Sure, but after that?” 

Odo cocks his head. One of two gestures he knows, apparently.

“Let’s say we live out our days in this cell ignoring each other. Let’s say the guards stop tormenting you, the other prisoners don’t bother you. Just like you say you want: everyone leaves you alone until you die. You spend your whole life doing nothing, being nothing, having no one. You might as well be a ghost haunting this profit-forsaken hunk of rock. Then what?”

Odo stares at him expressionless.

“You don’t want to escape, you want to pay your debts to society, whatever that means, but what has society ever done for you? I heard what the Cardassians called you -- Odo’ital. You’re nothing to them.”

“I’m NOT --”

“To them you are. You don’t owe them anything.”

Odo clutches at his knees. His fingers indent the goo of his legs. He breaks his unrelenting eye contact with Quark. With a low whine: “I’m a person, a sentient person.”

“But what kind of person? I don’t know who you used to be, but as it stands you don’t eat, don’t sleep, don’t wear clothes. I doubt you’d know how to spend profit, if you had any. So what do you want?”

“How many times do I have to threaten everyone, to hurt people, to get them to understand -- they need to leave me alone --” Odo groans. He’s pleading, rather than demanding, and it seems directed to the world at large, to everyone Odo has ever come in contact with, rather than Quark specifically.

“About that. Despite how you mutilated my otherwise handsome lobes --” Quark gestures to the nasty scrape. Odo winces again, which confirms Quark’s suspicions. “-- you don’t want to hurt people. That’s what I think. You’ve met Derak and Grendor. The other prison guards -- hell, most of the prisoners -- they’re all the same. They get a thrill out of violence. They like inflicting pain on others, it’s fun for them. Not you. It’s defensive. You want to stop the hurt, not continue it.” 

Odo stares at him, eyes widening. But he doesn’t contradict him. Maybe Quark can babble his way to an understanding between them after all. He continues in an even tone, hoping to keep Odo calm and attentive.

“Me too. I just want to get along with everyone, hopefully line my pockets while doing so, that’s all. I don’t want to hurt anyone, same as you. All I want is a moon to call my own, where everyone can come visit and have some fun together. But you see what kind of society we’re dealing with here? Now how can you expect fairness when there’s such cruelty, how do you play nice with that? You can’t.”

Odo’s mouth, just a slit opening in the smooth plane of his face, pitches down into an impression of a scowl. He’s otherwise stockstill for a long pause. Perhaps still skeptical, but at least considering what Quark said, or so he hopes.

“Weapons sales,” Odo says finally.

Now it’s Quark’s turn to be confused. “What about it?”

“In your litany of supposed crimes.” 

Quark waves his hand in a circle. “Okay…? And?”

“This is a Cardassian prison,” Odo says haltingly. “The occupation of Bajor. ‘Cardassians don’t do justice.’” Quark’s own words levelled back at him. “You were part of it.”

Quark opens his mouth, closes it. The experiment, Gaila had called Odo, the Bajoran experiment . Did he used to be Bajoran, before whatever experiment made him like this? Then why is Odo so quick to take his Cardassian jailers' side? Quark feels like he ate a tube grub that's trying to make its way back up. “Peace comes at a premium.”

Another long assessing pause from Odo, but this time Quark knows he’s lost him. “Selling the tools for cruelty doesn’t keep your hands clean from it.”

“Maybe not,” Quark admits. He prods the scraped skin of his palms with a fingertip. Unbroken, for now. “But at least at the end of the day I know what it’s all for, whatever I’m made to endure.” 

A disbelieving grunt from Odo. “A moon. Paid with blood.”

“I know who I am. I know what I want,” Quark says. “Do you?“

--- 

The remaining hours of the day stretch long and dull, despite the tension hanging between them. Lockdown ended Yard hours hardly after they started, and Quark has had more than enough of his cell, whether a difficult new roommate crowds his peace or he’s achingly alone.

Quark does his best to pass the time retreating into the fantasy of his moon. He runs through all the different gaming equipment he’ll stock the resort with, a long detailed list of everything he’ll need for a full entertainment suite with all the component parts, and then goes through the exercise of estimating prices and adding everything up. He’s guessing at best, on what people like these days and at what goods cost, what with not having access to market data for several years. But it fills the hours.

He’s deep into calculating how he’ll skew the odds on his dabo tables -- should they all be the same? or maybe there will be one he directs the more gullible towards --  before he notices night has fallen.

The sound of a low, scraping voice breaks his concentration.

“Odo?” Quark whispers, fear spiking through his nerves. “Was that you?”

A long pause, growing longer in the dark. Faint oozing noises from Odo’s side of the cell, so he’s still there, but nothing otherwise. Drip drip drip. Maybe Quark imagined it. Maybe the stress of the situation has finally gotten to him, and he’s fully broken with reality. Maybe --

“I don’t know,” Odo says in a soft creak.

“You don’t know if it was you?”

Relative silence again. No immediate response from Odo, not that Quark really expected one. Figuring he's angered Odo enough for the day, Quark goes back to his moon. Probability calculations blur in his mind as the drama of the day catches up with him, and at long last sleep creeps its way in.

“You asked who I am,” Odo says. So quiet, Ferengi ears or not, Quark isn’t sure he heard. Or that he was meant to hear. “I don’t know.”

Chapter Text

The bungee straps of Quark’s makeshift seat cut across his chest, and there’s an improperly welded seam digging into his ass. Quark contorts himself, squirming around to find a halfway comfortable position that doesn’t put pressure on his bruises. He’s so preoccupied that when the ship jumps to warp he almost hangs himself on the straps. He clutches around for a sense of security, or tries to -- the handcuffs binding his wrists make this reaction a clumsy pursuit. 

Leck, across the cargo hold, snickers at Quark as he flails about. Brunt, next to Leck, finds no humor in his misery, choosing instead to burn a glare into Quark like his eyes are a delayed effect phaser. 

Quark gets a hold of himself and does his best to affect an air of unconcern. 

In his defense, it’s been months since he’s travelled in space, and Gil Derak’s skills as a pilot are as rough as his personality. 

While the prison hires out work crews when they can, the cost of transporting and securing violent criminals off-site often outweighs the benefits. This goes double for prisoners that are prone to attempting escape, particularly ornery, or in Quark's case without adequate physical strength to be of much use anyway.

“Any idea how long we’re out for? Or what we’ll be doing?” Quark says to Gaila beside him. 

Despite that Gaila is sure to have written him off as not only a backstabber but useless as well, Quark feels a great sense of relief having his older cousin here, beside him again. 

Growing up, Quark had always looked up to Gaila as the paragon of Ferengi virtue, their three years age gap plus his uncle’s wealth making Gaila everything Quark wished he could be. Gaila for his part would humor the toadying of his younger cousins. He’d let Quark and Rom file his toenails and fetch his snail juice, meanwhile cheating them out of their paltry earnings at games of fizzbin or manipulating Quark into screwy childish contracts or otherwise making promises that never came through. 

Once, barely after Quark was old enough to program his first spreadsheets, Gaila conned Quark into selling him the legal rights over Rom’s left hand. Quark had whined and raged for days at the injustice of it, before buckling down. It took blackmailing a local accountant into giving him a side job despite being pre-apprentice age, then filing papers at night for a month, and almost failing his classes from lack of sleep, before Quark could scrape up enough latinum to buy the hand back. Quark had thanked Gaila for the opportunity. 

His cousin was the older brother he wished he had, the role model his father never could be, so every strip of latinum Gaila hustled him out of as a child had been a lesson Quark took to heart.

As an adult, those lessons served Quark well. He manipulated his way into a lucrative apprenticeship and was all set to outpace Gaila on the shimmering latinum staircase to success… right up until his fall from grace. It had been Gaila who bailed him out, with the freighter job.

“I’m the newcomer here,” Gaila drawls. “You’re the one who’s supposed to know what’s what.”

“I know plenty,” Quark brags. “For example. The handcuffs have location tracking and, like all the security at the prison, require special tools to pick open, or you risk electrocution. Or worse. Our flight path will be sent through subspace back to command every five minutes, and any deviation investigated. Before you ask, no, holding guards for ransom gets you nowhere...They’re not worth anything to Central Command.” 

Quark glances around. Judging by the selection of prisoners jammed into the back of this repurposed freighter vessel, wherever they’re headed needs workers of a particular size. This includes all the Ferengi except Bilga (the large one), one twitchy Tellarite with an unhinged look in his eye, and a couple of particularly tiny Orions who look young enough to be children. Quark always has a hard time telling with the non-ridged aliens. 

When the guard strong-armed Quark out of the cell that morning, he had said only “get moving, they’re putting you runts to use” and then, to Odo, “still fixin’ your collar, demon, you stay on lockdown.”

He adds, “But this trip? Beats me. Usually they round up the less quarrelsome giants for grunt work.”

Gaila smirks, looking at him out of the corner of his eye. “We’ve got time to kill -- if you know so much, how about you give me the rundown on our new home? We didn’t get to talk much the other day.”

Before Quark made an ass of himself provoking Odo. Before Quark revealed just how much leverage he had in the place that had taken two years of his life, which is to say: none.

“What’s it worth to you?” Quark says quickly, and a thrill runs through his lobes. No one haggles like Ferengi, and it’s been so long since he could converse with someone who relished the intricacies of deal-making.

“C’mon, Quark. We’re family,” Gaila grins, his own opening bid. He’s anticipating this as much as Quark. 

“Rule 111 --”

“Sure sure, ‘treat debtors like family, exploit them.’ Way I see it though, you’re the one in debt.”

Quark had been bankrupt once his apprenticeship boss blacklisted him, and the offer from Gaila for a job on the freighter was a generous lifeline. Too generous.

Quark had signed the contract without fully reading it, too desperate to care much what fine print Gaila had inevitably incorporated, too relieved to haggle over his low share of the profits and low rank among the crew. When Quark discovered that ferrying foodstuffs between Cardassia and Bajor was all a front, that there were not only political implications to the freighter’s actual business that had been kept from him, but considerable profits as well, Quark hadn’t blamed Gaila. Yes, he had felt betrayed, scared, shamed -- but by his own lack of sense getting into this situation. Not Gaila, whose underhandedness could only be admirable.

What Quark did next was what Gaila himself would have done in his position, Quark had reasoned. 

He was acting to save his own bottom line, that’s all it was. So what if the profits Gaila offered could have bought Quark his moon twice over by now, if Quark hadn't turned them in to the Cardassian authorities. So what if his cries of self-preservation were a thin justification for the fact that he didn’t have the stomach for the clandestine operations of the freighter, that Gaila probably sniffed out this buried weakness of his and knew that Quark never would have gone along with it even if he had been in on it from the start. 

But the Cardassians didn’t even make good on their plea deal, arresting Quark instead of the protected informant fee in the contract they negotiated. In the months following, a hot guilt roiling in his gut kept Quark up at night, over not only what he did, but, he's ashamed to admit, over how many lives (of strangers! of latinumless alien losers Quark had never met!) had been lost before he betrayed his crew.

He wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Gaila, but not because it was Gaila’s job offer and Gaila’s deceit that got him into this. Quark was here, imprisoned, because he couldn’t live up to those childhood lessons.

“I think I’ve paid my debts, ten times over, for all the misery--” Quark starts to argue, but Gaila holds up a hand to silence him. 

Gaila glances around. The Orions are whooping and hollering to themselves about some personal drama. Leck is in a heated argument with the Tellarite on the best method for dismembering someone -- the disagreement seems to come from whether the definition of “best” entails most efficient or most enjoyable (for the dismemberer). 

Reassured they won’t be overheard by the guards up front, Gaila continues in a lower tone, “See, I’m planning our escape. That roommate of yours would be quite the asset --”

“You’ve met him.” Quark purses his lips. “It won’t be easy.”

“A shame. The Quark I know could find an angle with anyone.”

Blatant flattery, so he’ll be more pliable for Gaila’s own motives -- Quark knows this, would expect nothing less from him. 

But when was the last time anyone talked to Quark with even the hint of compliment?

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t get there! Just that it wouldn’t be easy.”

“Glad to hear they didn’t confiscate that latinum tongue along with all your assets.” Gaila grins. “In the meantime, I’m gonna need tunnel layouts, guard shift schedules, surface security, the works.” 

“And what do you bring to the table?” Quark says peevishly.

“Besides the obvious.” Gaila taps his head.

“You always were the most devious of our cousins,” Quark admits. “…But I’m not short on lobes myself, and I’ve spent my entire time here scheming --”

Gaila clicks his tongue. “That’s not all. Some special talents in my crew here, and…” He pauses, and Quark leans in closer. “A contact on the outside.”

Quark sucks in a breath. That had always been the biggest obstacle -- breaking out of the tunnels was one thing, but getting off-planet and somewhere safe needed a bigger boost than jimmying a few locks and slipping past the guards. 

“Hagath?” Quark says. “I’ve got to say I was surprised to see you locked up. I would have thought he’d have an exit plan -- for you at least, if your little operation got busted.”

Hagath had been the arms dealer behind Gaila’s operations -- setting up contacts, finding supplies, arranging deals… as well as holding all the crew’s debt and brokering their fees. A dangerous man who kept his own hands clean and safe, while others took the risks.

“Then you’re more naive than I thought.” Gaila rubs at the scar across his nose. It’s old, healed over for a year or so. Perhaps two exactly. “If Hagath were a bit shorter and his teeth were a little sharper, he'd make a perfect Ferengi. Let’s keep it at that.”

Which means if he is the contact on the outside, it’s because he’s now in need of the Ferengi, or Gaila at least, for his own purposes.

“All the better reason to expect he’ll leave you high and dry again, at first inconvenience.”

“A risk I'm betting will pay off. Two years Quark. If there was another way out, you’d have heard it, those ears of yours,” Gaila drawls. Whether he’s being ironic, or it’s that flattery again, is unclear, but regardless it strikes truth, for Quark.

“This new crew of yours, you mentioned… how sure are you they're yours?” Quark scrunches his nose-ridges with doubt. 

“Smart enough to know they're too short on lobes to get anywhere without us.” Across the shuttle, Brunt’s glare on Quark hasn’t relented -- if the Dopterian interceptors they sold to the Cardassians had that kind of longevity, there wouldn’t be any Bajorans left. Gaila follows Quark’s line of sight. “I'll handle Brunt. He’ll come around.”

Brunt has had a grudge the size of Qo’noS since they first met, which understandably has only deepened with present circumstances, so Quark  maintains his skepticism. But despite Gaila’s diminished state, he’s got the same confidence and swagger as always. If anyone could manipulate Brunt, it’s Gaila. He's had the practice.

“You would trust me again? As part of your crew?”

“I should have let you in on the freighter's real business from the start. But this time, all the cards on the table. What do you say?”

Out the porthole window, the stars streak past latinum bright -- a sight that never fails to stun after the relentless grey of the caves. Out there is a whole universe full of potential customers, all waiting to part with their money, if only Quark could reach them. 

Freedom. Opportunity.

Gaila gave him a hand up once, and here he is again with an opportunity for Quark to undo his greatest shame. To prove Quark’s as shrewd and devious as he’s always said, willing to do what it takes to accrue profit.

Redemption.

It’s not ideal that he’ll be beholden to Gaila and Hagath again of course, and he has his suspicions that Gaila won’t tell him the whole truth, despite his claims. Quark’s not the naive upstart he once was. They’ll exploit him first chance they get, but he can handle that. He’ll also do the same to them. 

This time will be different, he tells himself. He’ll be a respected member of the crew this time, a full business partner, instead of the lowly cook. It’s been so long since he was surrounded by this many of his own kind, people who make sense, who’d rather pick his pocket than slit his throat (Leck excepted), and he misses it.

Respect. Community. Belonging.

Maybe this time, if they pull this off, will be everything Quark hoped for. He’ll accumulate the profits he needs to fulfill those starry-eyed dreams of his at last. There's a moon out there with his name on it.

A moon. Paid for with blood.

Quark doesn’t answer.

“Think on it. Wouldn’t want you to have regrets.” Gaila says, after several minutes. It comes off as a threat, don't cross me , but Gaila accompanies this with an easy smile, like Quark has already said yes, he just doesn't know it yet. “What have you got to lose?”

---

Before the day is through Quark finds himself shoved through a processing vent, coughing through ore dust that kicks up as he crawls, and wincing with his aching joints. With how black his prison jumpsuit is, he doesn’t want to know the state of his lungs or the open wound on his ear. His only consolation is that the quarters they’re staying in overnight are rumored to have a sonic shower and a replicator.

“Any voles take a chunk out of your lobes yet?” A tinny voice through the communicator on his sleeve disrupts Quark’s concentration.

Quark hisses into it. “I can’t hear anything if you never shut up, Brunt.” 

“You’re listening for a hissing sound, where the zirconian ion gas is escaping. It can’t flush out the residue from the vents, when it leaks. If your worthless lobes can hear it.” 

“I know that Brunt! I heard the same briefing you did!” Quark runs a finger along the edge of his lobe to clarify his hearing. The same chunk chunk whoosh of machinery chugging along in the background, but no indicator of the leak that he’s supposed to find.

Quark shuffles along, scooting with his cuffed hands and doing his best to keep weight on his fingertips instead of his tender palms. Chunks of ore still line the vent, which means sometimes he has to squeeze through constricted sections -- the Tellarite and the Orions are clearing out blockages, but half-assing it at best. Quark doesn’t blame them. You get what you pay for, and this is yet more proof that the Ferengi way is superior: no slave labor.

“Well what’s taking so long?! Pathetic useless excuse for a Ferengi. With any luck, the gas will kill you, like it did the Bajoran workers who were supposed to be servicing this.”

Every so often Quark presses his ear against the rivets joining two panels. The heartier physiology of Ferengi means they shouldn’t be affected by the gas, or at least that’s what the guards told them. Quark has his doubts, even if it’s the kind of thing that’s usually true. He ignores Brunt.

“With your weak little lobes we’ll be here all night! I will make you pay for your insubordination --”

“You think your lobes are so great, trade places with me.” Quark slaps a location indicator on a weak point. Maybe there was hissing, maybe it was his imagination, who cares. It can’t hurt to have the repair crew patch up more spots than necessary; maybe it will ensure Quark doesn’t get sent back here.

Thankfully this results in silence from Brunt, for the moment. 

When the swooping, spiderlike architecture of a Cardassian space station first faded into view through the shuttle windows, Quark had felt a modicum of relief. Not that the work would be any less grueling than if they were planetside, but at least space meant no run-ins with Rigelian bats in dilithium mines or freak blizzards while clearing iced roads or breathing in alien gnats doing who knows what in a swamp (he left Ferenginar for a reason). Cardassians keep their environmental controls warm and dim, which Quark doesn’t mind, and even though ore processing is filthy, exhausting work, it at least meant a roof and walls and basic living technology. 

Any silver linings Quark can wring from life, however, it seems are soon overshadowed by glebbening storm clouds, figuratively speaking.

The drudgery, and Brunt’s grating voice in his ear, don’t do enough to distract him from stewing over Gaila’s proposal. His lobes, the rational sensible part of him, are overjoyed at the shiny promise of redemption and profit and everything he’s been unjustly denied for so long. This is his chance to prove himself! This is what he’s been waiting for! 

But an odd feeling in his gut gives him pause; a constriction in his chest makes him reticent. It’s that stupid sentimentality he’s failed to fully root out of himself, no doubt, but he can’t shake the sense that accepting Gaila’s proposal just doesn’t feel right.

Quark finds himself musing over the finality in Odo’s voice, at the end of the last conversation… The strangest stranger Quark has ever met, yet he feels drawn to him, even beyond the usefulness of his abilities and despite that Odo unequivocally hates him. Anyway, what right does the goo-warped alien have to pass judgement on anyone else, with his complete lack of awareness over his own motivations and over his own sense of self? Why does Quark even care what a non-Ferengi he met several days ago thinks of him? 

Recruiting Odo into a scheme to free a whole crew of potential war profiteers is a non-starter. Odo made that much clear, even if Quark can convince him his own imprisonment is unjust.

What it comes down to is a mutually exclusive choice between Odo or his old life. It should be a no-brainer.

Hours later, Quark is no closer to having an answer for Gaila.

Finally he reaches the end of his vent, which opens up to a depository in the upper pylon. He smothers the communicator and takes a moment to breathe before heading back. 

“Psst, hey, big-ears,” a voice sounds from a dark corner. “I need a favor.”

Quark yelps. A small Bajoran woman with a close-cut crop of reddish hair pokes her head out into the dim safety lights. Clutching his racing heart, he grouses, “Anyone tell you it’s impolite to ambush strangers when they’re alone in the dark on a creepy station?”

“I can’t exactly pull you over for a nice chat in front of those Cardassian guards of yours. Will you help or not?” She’s of course clothed, as alien women tend to be -- titillating. The prison, while not exclusively male, houses the sort of females that would sooner cut off his nose than ask a favor of him, so Quark rethinks the fear associated with being accosted in the dark.

He pitches his voice low and sultry. “Anything for a pretty lady.”

Quark is not the most handsome he’s ever been, with his filthy prison jumpsuit and accumulated wounds, but his charm should still shine through. 

The woman’s jaw clenches, but she persists. “Next time Gul Dukat checks in on your little gang --”

“Dukat? He’s here?” The Prefect of the Bajoran Occupation, everyone knows that, and, as Quark recalls, the one whose “soiree” resulted in Odo’s imprisonment.

“Of course, he’d say it’s his station, though the Bajoran slave labor that built it has a bone to pick with that assertion.” Which makes this Terok Nor, in Bajor’s orbit. He probably should have caught on quicker, but in fairness he’s been preoccupied. He also hasn’t eaten since the handful of zabu jerky and dried plant matter rationed to him in the shuttle, and he’s a bit hazed over. She gives him a weird look, like she’s losing faith in whatever ability he might have to help her if he doesn’t even know where he is. “So you can at least recognize him, then.” 

Quark nods.

“Okay. I need him distracted for a couple hours when he stops by later. I don’t care what you do, just keep him away from the Promenade.”

Quark takes a second look at her. Past her womanly curves and delicate lobes, he notices: disruptor scars, muscle beneath her simple tunic, no soot on her clothes from ore refining. Bajoran Resistance, then, and therefore dangerous to get caught helping. “What’s in it for me?”

“A couple slips of latinum, that’s all I can spare…” At Quark’s unimpressed look, she curses under her breath. “And the knowledge that you’re helping a just cause. That should be enough for anyone!”

Some muffled noises from Quark’s communicator. He can’t dally long.

“Not for me.” Quark takes one careful step towards her, puts a cuffed hand on her hip. “But darling, I’m sure we can come to an… arrangement.” He looks her up and down. Despite her size, she looks like she could throw him around, in a fun way. “Find wherever they lock us up later, and we can… get to know each other. Nothing like a little pleasure to make all your worries seem far away --”

She pries his hand off her hip, then slams him against the metal grating. He moans as she presses an arm into his chest, right across his bruising. “You dirty little troll, I will break the bones in any finger that dares --”

Her voice is a coarse rasp in his ear, and he shudders. “Wait -- wait -- my mistake! Ow, that hurts, ” he whines.

“Never mind.” She drops him in disgust and opens a panel in the wall, presumably how she got here. From beneath the heady soup of arousal and fear swimming through him, an idea sparks. 

“Hold on,” he hisses after her. “You’re desperate. Or you wouldn’t have asked.” She stops. “There is something else you can trade me.”

Five minutes later, the vent echoes once again with Brunt’s contempt as Quark heads down the return route.

---

Some indeterminate, excruciating amount of time later, the prison crew have cleared and marked all the suspect vents in this section. Despite that it’s Nagus-knows what hour of the night, the guards aren’t herding them to their quarters just yet.

Quark crumples to the ground beside Gaila. Belly clenching, he’s now dizzy from delayed dinner. No matter how crappy the promised sonic shower and replicators are, he’d trade his left kidney if it would get them there faster. He has three, so it seems like a profitable exchange.

“After dealing with Bajorans all day, I almost forgot there are people who don’t look like smooth-faced simpletons out there,” a Cardassian voice drawls, twisting with irony. 

Gul Dukat, long and snakeline in the gleaming exoskeleton of his uniform, strides into the room. After being surrounded by dirty haggard prisoners all day for years, and the prison guards not exactly the cream of Cardassia’s crop, it’s blinding to be met with someone so obviously in a position of power. 

“Who can tell me what the state of my processing machinery is? And make it quick, I have personal business to attend to.” Dukat, disregarding the huddle mass of prisoners entirely, chats with the guards who give him the rundown. He’s sipping from a glass of black liquid he brought with him -- a nightcap for the privileged.

But it doesn’t take long before Dukat is waving off further explanation, despite the guards’ efforts to toady up to him. “That's enough. Here’s to hoping pylon three goes just as smoothly tomorrow. Now if you’ll excuse me, the Finance Ministry is trying to take me for all I’m worth and I have some papers to get in order. If a wealthy sick uncle promises to leave you everything, save yourself a headache and keep him alive.”

The guards laugh along, not that they’ll see a tenth of the wealth a Gul can accumulate. The fishy odor of Dukat’s drink wafts through the tang of ore as he swirls it in the glass.

Quark’s brain whizzes into action. It’s been at most fifteen minutes since Dukat arrived, and he promised the woman at least an hour. “Is that,” Quark clears his voice to speak clearly and confidently, clogged as it is with ore particulate, “is that Archon black label I smell? Vintage… let me guess 2331? Although I’ve heard the 33 has a better bite to it.”

Eyes glinting with threat, Dukat turns slowly to look at the wretched pile of dust on the ground who dares interrupt him. 

Gaila narrows his eyes at him as well, suspicion at Quark enacting some secret ploy.

“We were in the middle of something, twerp. Or do you want to spend all night crawling through grime like the vole you are?” Derak growls. He gives Quark a swift kick to the stomach. Quark heaves at the impact, doubling over.

Dukat places a hand on Derak before he can kick him again. A smile slithers onto Dukat’s face. “Now now, that’s no way to treat guests of mine. Especially one who fills in for my failed workers and has the appreciation for a good kanar. You’ve still drinking that sludge from Co’tall, aren’t you Dirk?”

Lucky guess in Quark's part -- the guards at the prison had often groused about the expensive tastes of various Guls, how they couldn’t afford the same on their own salaries, but Quark hadn’t remembered for sure what Dukat preferred. 

Quark sits up, clutching his side. He smiles up at Dukat through gritted teeth. “It’s an honor to be in the presence of such a cultured man. As you can imagine, I often find the company I’m surrounded with lacking in sophistication.”

Brunt puffs himself up with rage, but Gaila elbows him quiet before he can say anything. First rule of prison is don’t distinguish yourself in front of the Cardassians; that’s how you get a target on your back. Quark has never quite known when to shut up, however, and he has a job to do.

Gul Dukat stares at Quark the way one might if a vole started reciting Vulcan poetry, then bursts out laughing. The guards join in, and Quark chuckles along in good humor.

“I imagine not.” Dukat strides over. He holds the glass out past waist level, in line with Quark on the ground. “I imagine you don’t get to savor decent liquor often either. Have a sip.”

“Oh, I -- I couldn’t --” It stings his eyes. His empty stomach turns over with the pungent stink of the ichor.

“Nonsense, my treat.” Dukat’s amused patronizing tone shifts into something with teeth behind it. “Drink.”

Quark scoots up closer to Dukat’s extended hand. Very aware of how filthy his hands are in comparison to the crystal glass, he places his mouth against it. Dukat barks a laugh, but obliges and pours a bit down Quark’s throat. 

It burns on the way down, the stench and taste of it flooding his sinus, and Quark steels himself against gagging. Eyes watering, Quark manages to swallow. He gives a shaky grin. “Mmm! That’s ghuh-- great --” His stomach roils against this offering, and Quark coughs to keep it from sending the kanar back up. “It’s been so long since I’ve had the luxury. Is that -- uh, is that a backnote of anise I detect?”

Dukat and the guards laugh, Derak wheezing so hard in amusement that Grendor has to slap him on the back. 

The various Ferengi stare at him like he’s lost his mind. Gaila is wary, and Quark can almost see the gears in his head turning trying to figure him out.

“You’re much more entertaining than the Bajorans. Such lethargic sad sacks, despite all I do for them.” Dukat shakes his head, still laughing and heads for the door. “Now, I must retire...”

“Wait, Gul Dukat, sir!” Before Quark can think better of it, he scrambles up to grab Dukat’s wrist. Everyone freezes at the breach. “Do -- do you have many mistresses? Any sprogs -- bastards I mean?”

“Excuse me…?” Danger rings through Dukat’s voice, but he waves off the guards, who have drawn their disruptors. Dukat looks down at Quark’s hand touching him, and Quark hastily lets go. 

“Sir, I mean to say -- you’re a long way from home --” Only a half day by warp, but Dukat will have his justifications for any potential marital transgressions. People like him always do. “-- and -- and you might have found comfort in -- um -- the tender embrace of female company -- which which resulted in children?”

Dukat towers over Quark. His eyes flash as sharp as the oiled crest of his uniform as he stares down at him. Very slowly, he takes one hand and places it at the base of Quark’s throat. Then he curls his long fingers, just enough for his nails to indent Quark’s skin. Quark swallows against it. “Go on,” Dukat says.

“You mentioned an -- inheritance -- you can claim illegitimate children as -- as dependents --” Quark chokes out. “On your taxes. There are other loopholes for those -- away from home -- in service to Central Command.”

“What do you know about Cardassian revenue codes?” Dukat's long neck undulates as he peers down at him.

“I -- I was apprentice at the embassy in the Chin'toka system. Very competitive position. The ambassador’s golden boy, I was quite talented.”

“That’s a Cardassian system… But what does diplomacy have to do with --”

Dukat’s hand goes slack, and Quark’s grin regains its usual smarm. “Ferengi diplomacy. Foreign exchange rates, legal loopholes, trade routes, and tax codes are the main business of a Ferengi embassy. Walk me through your finances, I guarantee I can save you enough leks to buy a case of that kanar. What have you got to lose?”

“And what’s in it for you, Ferengi?” Dukat spits out the name of his people like a slur. Quark’s used to that -- a galactic shorthand for bottom-feeding charlatans.

“I was first in line for apprenticeship at the Ferengi Commerce Authority! I know my way around a tax form too!” Brunt chimes in, but no one pays him any mind.

“Your esteemed company would be enough.” But Quark’s laying it on too thick, even for Dukat. “Or maybe… another taste of that wonderful kanar?” He forces himself to say, despite his stomach’s protests. “And a decent dinner besides what these guys think passes for food. You can look over my shoulder the whole time, no tricks. It would be nice to feel like a professional again, is all.”

Dukat narrows his eyes at him for a moment. Quark holds his breath. Then Dukat claps him on the back like they were long-lost clutchmates, all easy camaraderie now. “The neck on this one! Such boldness should be rewarded. One question: if you were such an accounting hotshot, how did you end up here?”

Dukat’s hand rests heavy on his shoulder. Quark mimics Dukat's slithering smile from earlier, plus a rakish tilt to seal the deal. “Never sleep with the boss’s daughter… no matter how the luscious curve of her lobes beg for you to stroke them.”

Dukat laughs. “And you entertain me! But we'll see what you can do…” He steers Quark to his office with a tight grip on his shoulder, like he was a half-feral animal or a mischievous child.

---

When Quark stumbles to the habit ring later, escorted by a guard, he can barely hold himself upright. 

He’s a bit drunk, from several more glasses of Dukat’s kanar (“an acquired taste, but one of my favorites!”), as well as nauseous, from the tojal in yamok sauce out of Dukat’s private replicator (overly rich compared to the prison slop his stomach has become accustomed to).

But mostly, Quark feels wrung out, exhausted both physically and mentally. Though he passed Sucking Up to Suckers 101 at the Ferengi Commerce Academy with flying colors, it was no small effort to stay jovial and charming while also managing Dukat’s ego. Quark tried walking him through tax code interpretation, as promised, but Dukat had little attention for it. Off on constant tangents, Dukat had gripes about the laziness and ingratitude of the Bajorans he’d done so much for, about the lenience of his Cardassian staff (“the Bajorans need a firm hand to guide them!”), and about the interference of other aliens in Cardassian affairs. Quark nodded, agreed, soothed; privately he thinks the station could use a place for people like Dukat to let off steam that didn’t involve hijacking the listening ears of a random prison laborer. A bar, for example.

Despite how long Dukat kept him, they didn’t accomplish much in the way of his financial situation, but with that came the promise that he’d get Quark out of manual labor to work on it for him tomorrow. The whole experience, even with the various discomforts, had been exhilarating: the chance to use his brain and skill, the delicate balance of which loopholes were safe to take advantage of and which would risk an in-depth audit, the columns of numbers all begging for someone to make them sing profits … Quark hasn’t felt this way in years. He hasn’t felt like such a Ferengi in years. He’ll do anything to feel that way again.

It cements a few things for him.

Quark makes a beeline for the sonic shower to sterilize his ear (from Dukat’s patronizing drivel, as well as the wound), then assesses the single-occupancy room everyone has been stuffed into.  All the other prisoners are fast asleep, with the Ferengi on the floor covered in blankets and the non-Ferengi sharing a bare mattress -- some kind of agreement brokered in Quark’s absence. 

“What was your plan there, Quark?” Gaila whispers, as Quark’s about to crash down beside him. “Not making deals at my expense again, are you?”

“Nope,” Quark says grinning. He opens his hand to reveal an assortment of small tools wrapped in thick cloth -- assorted implements he knows from experience will be necessary to get through layers of security at the prison. The Bajoran woman had snuck them to him sometime after Dukat was called down to the Promenade for an “urgent matter”. He has no idea if she accomplished what she needed, but he hopes so. She really was pretty, despite the attitude.

“We’re going to get out of this place together,” Quark says. “Count me in.”

Chapter Text

In Dr. Mora’s lab, Odo thought he knew what agony was.

He had no idea.

Pain pain searing pain burning away at him to ash to ash --

This is what true imprisonment means. To hold one shape. To experience the world through a single form. And the futility of clinging to existence within such limitations.

Is this what solids feel like all the time? Surely not.

His very atoms pull at their bonds to each other. Desperate to disconnect. To separate and release. Stuck together in a single state, there can be no forward.

What is time but change, movement, the relentless forward thrust of entropy? Yet here he is: Static. Fixed. Trapped. It’s been days weeks hours millenia -- no no that can’t be right. Dark again. It was light when they put the collar back on him and then dark and then light and dark… 

How long is too long? How many more hours until --

Time slips by meaningless except for the excruciating pain, but Odo clings to what observations he can, third dark means third day, three lights three darks, end of the third day , a desperate bid for sanity.

What would Dr. Mora think of this little experiment of the Cardassians, in their attempts to tame the monster?

Hard. Dry. Dust.

Pieces of him slough off onto the rocky floor. He’s peeling away. His mass diminishing and with it, life.

What a waste. What was the point. From void of space to lab to prison. And, finally, to a depleted empty husk.

You might as well be a ghost haunting this profit-forsaken hunk of rock .

His purpose, his home, his people… Unsolved mysteries that will die with him.

What was the point? 

Whistling rebounds through the rock. A tuneless little ditty. Accompanied by a rhythmic thudding.

Dr. Mora never mentioned music in the Bajoran afterlife. Not that he was a religious man. Not that Odo is either. 

He’s not even Bajoran.

At the end of the day I know what it’s all for, whatever I’m made to endure. Do you?

Cha-chunk-whoosh. 

The door opens. Footsteps. Voices. A person whistling -- external source, not his mind.

Odo croaks as best he can, tries to call attention to his peril. Laughter maybe? A comment from a rough voice -- a guard. Odo can’t tell what he says. No sympathy here, no justice.

The door closes.

Then: hands on him, yelling , more yelling, questions and incoherent shouts, all fraught with fear. Odo recognizes his name being called. A mass in front of him resolves into the shape of a person.

It’s that odd jabbering little cellmate of his, returned after his time away.

“C-c-collar,” Odo forces the word out from between parched lips. “Off.”

Quark’s hands are shaking where they touch his neck. Like skittering vole feet they feel around where the collar meets Odo. A puff of air on his neck as Quark lets out a deep breath.

The jingle of metal pieces. A zap of electric current. Clink clink clank . Gears and wires and mechanisms.

Quark mutters throughout, a constant comforting murmur that alternates between frustration and triumph as he tinkers with the contraption trapped around Odo’s neck. 

Despite everything, inexplicably Odo trusts him. 

(Did he use these skills in his past life? Fiddling with the weapons he sold to kill more Bajorans, or building bombs that terrorists couldn’t dismantle, perhaps.)

It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.

Minutes, seconds, in no time or forever, at last: 

The collar falls to the ground.

Before Odo dissolves, he can’t help but reach a shaking hand toward Quark’s face, with its wide glossy eyes and pointy teeth on worried lips, frozen in anxious expectation.

Then: relief.

---

Odo’s natural state, the sheer pleasure of it, overwhelms his senses. He loses time again. It slips by as a fluid, oozing past him, slow and sweet as honey. He floats on its current, sliding in and out of consciousness in his regeneration. 

Enough to note: the smooth dip of rock containing him, the reverberation of Quark’s footsteps within the cell, the dripping of water in the caves.

Dark, same dark, and then: dim light once more.

Almost three days. He survived. 

A few quick estimations in his still-hazy mind… The reconfigured collar must have trapped him in his humanoid shape for over seventy hours. Dr. Mora had always thought sixteen was the limit.

Quark paces around the cell even though the door auto-opened with daylight, muttering all the while: “He wanted the collar off, I took it off. I tried. He was dead either way, so at least that’s a better way to go. With dignity. It’s not my fault. Maybe he’s only broken. But I didn’t do anything. I don’t know why he’s like that. I had to try…” His eyes have dark rings around them; he hasn’t slept.

(Did Quark spare any thoughts like these for the Bajorans killed by the weapons he sold? Perhaps he’s only squeamish about death when confronted with it up close.)

Odo needs hours more of regeneration before he can move more than a centimeter, let alone shift shape, but he rallies enough to burble out from his puddle, “Quark.”

Quark jumps. He whips his head around, placing where the voice came from, before locking onto Odo. “You are alive! You’re still you! You weren’t moving, you weren’t even oozing, normally I can hear all your little noises, you know, but after I released the collar --”

“Why?” Odo forces through the goo.

“Why what? Why did they put that collar on you? Security measure, I figure that was obvious --”

“Why, you …”

“Why me what?” Quark scrunches his face. He squats down beside the puddle, to look at him closer. “Why did I help you, you mean?”

Odo doesn’t say anything, hoping he’ll take that as affirmation.

Quark tilts his head to the side, considering the question. “I didn’t want to share my cell with your freaky corpse. I didn’t want to get in trouble if they found you dead. Or if you survived whatever that was without my help and wanted to get your revenge on me for watching you die…”

Quark trails off. Odo doesn’t hear truth in any of those reasons, and Quark doesn’t seem to be convinced by them himself.

“Did you know I broke into my dad’s floor safe before I could walk? He said it was his proudest moment. Of course he died years before he could see where I ended up. But you’re looking at the Capitol District’s Junior Safecracker three years running! Which is to say -- I had the ability to break you out of that thing. And now you owe me. Good to be a creditor for once.”

Closer to the truth -- Quark does seem to perceive the world at large as a network of favors and exchanges -- but it still lacks conviction. A more ruthless person would have extricated a promise before helping, and maybe he’s regretting that.

Quark shrugs. A furrow of worry sprouts along his browridge, as he stares down at where Odo lies inert. Quieter, less full of bluster, he admits, “We seem to have come to some sort of agreement. You don’t want to hurt me, I leave you alone. Well, I can try. Sure you don’t like me, that’s fine, but if you die I’ll get stuck with someone worse.”

This throws Odo for a loop. He never really thought about whether he liked someone or not. He has several categories of people: those who hurt him, those who fear him, and those who are amused by him. Though all the categories overlap to some extent, he’s learned.

Quark doesn’t fit.

It’s also never occurred to Odo that anyone would conceive of him as someone to be liked or not. Feared, fascinated, perhaps one day respected… But liked?

Does Quark like Odo? 

A weapons dealer, with no remorse for his role in a brutal planetwide subjugation that Odo has witnessed firsthand, is not someone whose opinion he cares about one way or another. Or he shouldn’t.

Odo doesn’t like him, he decides, and it doesn’t matter what Quark thinks of him.

(But he can’t shake how unwilling Quark is to give up on him.)

Quark babbles about for a few more minutes, occasionally rubbing the side of his ear and cocking it towards Odo. It’s when he starts to extend a finger towards the puddle that Odo realizes Quark’s still trying to confirm whether he's alive or not. 

“Fine,” Odo reverberates, before Quark makes contact. It’s pushing the limits of his regeneration, too much too soon, but Quark will only be a nuisance without this acknowledgement. He did save him, despite other sins.

An expelled breath from Quark ripples across Odo’s surface. Some of the tension leaves his small frame. “I was thinking that ‘why you’ would be terrible last words to hear from someone. Um, keep um resting then alright? I can get you some -- well you don’t need anything do you. You’ll be okay now right? I’ll only be gone a minute.” 

---

The hour Quark is gone, Odo finds himself slipping into oblivion. The dissolution of his form is having after effects on his mind, and he hates how much of a relief it is when Quark returns, bleary-eyed and sagging, out of breath as if he ran here. 

Odo should have been enjoying the tranquility of Quark’s absence, but he needs him, this connection outside the swirling fog of his mind. He knows just the irritated humanoid expression he would make at him if he could. Not yet.

“You good still?” Quark says between breaths. He directs his ear towards Odo’s puddle for a moment. “I think I can hear you oozing? Very faint… But I’ve had a hell of a week, and now no thanks to you I’m running on no sleep. Wake me if you need anything? I’ll hear you.” 

Quark crumbles to the floor with such heaviness Odo almost wonders if gravity controls have increased. Supine, he tosses and turns a few times on the rocky floor and readjusts his limbs. 

“At least at the station, the ground was even. Still hard though. And blankets . I should have asked to keep a blanket, I might have been able to talk him into it. To cover me, head to toe, while I sleep. Forgot how much more restful that is. Something psychological about it, you know? At least the Cardassians keep it warm here. Of course, if I could just become a puddle like you, that sounds even better…”

Quark’s babbling continues until his breath evens out. Odo listens to it like an anchor.

---

Even in sleep, Quark isn’t quiet. Little whimpers and sighs leak out as he twitches about. Even resting, he never stops fidgeting; he’ll shift to one side or the other, then flinch as if in pain, let out a whine, then readjust again.

Quark wakes for intervals in between naps, throughout the rest of the day and into the night. The sleep can’t be restful, as active as it is, but perhaps quantity will do when quality fails. He’ll stretch and blink, rub some part of his body or other with a wince, and then, upon remembering the situation, listen for Odo. 

What specifically Quark is listening for, how he expects to decipher anything about Odo’s well-being from this, Odo couldn’t say, but Quark goes through the exercise each time regardless. 

The next step in this little routine of Quark’s, before he fades back to sleep, is to continue with his nervous patter as if he never stopped. Odo holds on to every word; it’s all he has to pull himself out of the morass.

“Hah, finally I’ve got you right where I want you. A captive audience. Not going to tell me to shut up now, huh?” Quark goads, deliberately trying to rile Odo up.

Odo can’t though, and his lack of response fuels Quark’s need to fill the air with every passing thought. The man could carry a lively conversation with a piece of furniture.

Of course, Odo has been furniture before.

But Quark doesn’t talk to him like a chair, or a lamp, or even an unthinking lower life form. He seems genuinely curious about Odo’s opinion, even if Odo doesn’t give it, even if throughout all this he seems to assume Odo is probably unconscious:

“Have you ever been in a situation like that? Between a rock and a hard place, if you’ll excuse the overly literal metaphor. I suppose you’re curious about specifics, ‘what situation?’ you’ll ask with that suspicious glare of yours, but I shouldn’t tell you. You wouldn't approve. Though I don’t have a choice, Odo. Not really. It’s the only way.” Quark sighs, and he’s right -- Odo has no idea what he’s talking about. “Maybe you wouldn't understand… but I think you could, on some level. If you looked past the -- well, past the part you don’t approve of. It’s about respect. It’s about one small taste of feeling like yourself again, who you’re meant to be, and the hunger for that.”

Odo doesn’t experience hunger of course, not literally, but maybe he does know what Quark means.

When you don’t have agency over your life for so long, when your world is reduced to the size of a beaker, it can be hard to recognize the choices that you do have, and impossible to know what’s right. 

Before coming here, Odo didn’t see his situation for what it was, not at the time. He didn’t see it as a choice, but, though unthinking and reactionary, it was still his decision to do what he did, and he has to bear responsibility for the consequences. 

Quark won’t want to hear Odo’s regrets. Maybe it’s best Odo can’t respond.

Odo’s also not sure what “feeling like himself” would even mean, or if he’s ever felt that.

To hunger for respect, however -- of this, Odo can certainly relate.

---

After another nap: “What’s it like where you’re from?” Quark says, and then, with some chagrin, “Sorry. Bajor right? Maybe it was different when you were a kid though?”

Odo has never been a kid. Odo wonders where Quark heard he’s “from” Bajor and what else he’s heard about him.

“What… happened to you? If you don’t mind me asking?” 

Odo has no idea what he’s talking about. Nothing happened to him; he happened to other people.

“To make you like that? I heard it was a science experiment gone wrong. You don’t seem like a scientist… But you should know that’s something people would pay good money for, to become a shapeshifter. Incredibly useful. Lots of drawbacks though, so you'll have to work on that -- no eating, no drinking… Do you ever miss it? I would.”

Oh. Odo reels from this realization. 

Odo’s been so drawn to Quark, despite his disturbing crimes as well as his more irritating qualities, because Quark has been the only one to talk to him like a person, one with his own desires and aspirations, his own sense of self and autonomy. Not like a creature or an experiment or a novelty…

But the only reason for this is that Quark is under the mistaken assumption that Odo used to be like him. Not a gooey mass with unknown origins and alien capabilities, but a regular humanoid and all that entails.

Dr. Mora had always admonished Odo to take more pride in his shifting, to mimic the physical details of humanoids better so as to foster social integration, and that this would be in Odo’s best interest. In rebellion, Odo did the bare minimum. But maybe Mora was right after all.

If that’s what it takes to feel like a person -- to trick others into thinking he’s not too different from them -- then maybe that is what Odo has to do.

He has to restrain his natural tendencies towards inadvertent shapeshifting (without the collar!) as well as his reversion to lazier forms. Maybe if he does this, more people will start to assume the same thing as Quark, maybe like Quark they’ll treat him with the respect he knows he deserves.

“Wonderful people, Bajorans,” Quark says, apropos of nothing. It has the insincere facade of a politician trying to relate.  “Though I’d never met any. Religious, which is a bit dull, no offense, but… Lots of festivals, I hear? Peldor joi and all that. I love a good festival. All that energy in the air, you can feel it! Great for profit; easy to sell things to people when they’re celebrating. More fun too… I don’t miss Ferenginar -- that’s where I’m from -- swampy and scummy and you can’t do anything without leaking strips of latinum from your pockets like a drainpipe, but I do miss the festivals. The decor! The music! The merchandise! No one does merchandise like Ferengi. Though I hear Bajoran festivals are really good too! Or… were…”

Ah, Quark is trying to get on Odo’s good side, assuming he has particular attachment to Bajor, though if Odo were actually Bajoran he doesn’t think he’d be swayed either. 

Quark pauses for a while, mulling something over. “I am sorry. About all that. On your homeworld. If it was up to me, I --” he stops again. “It was strictly defensive, what we sold. To be well-armed is a deterrent to war, so it was supposed to prevent death. The balance of power and all that.”

Odo almost surges out of his liquid state, at the sheer stupidity of that statement. Does Quark know the millions of innocent lives taken through the Occupation? The children starved, the labor camps, the peaceful villages burned to the ground? The injustice! Odo might have disregarded whatever physical consequences would result from breaking his regeneration at this point to react to him, except for how Quark sighs after he says this. Shakes his head. Shrugs.

Quark doesn’t believe this either; he’s trying to convince himself as much as Odo.

“I don’t have a choice,” Quark repeats. “Didn’t, I mean.”

---

Quark stands up to leave again in the afternoon, and, with a surge of panic, Odo uses what energy he’s gained so far to reach a single gooey extension toward him.

Quark jumps at the sight. He pauses. 

Odo needs Quark’s steady stream of stupid thoughts, his breathing, his little sleepy whines -- any connection anchoring him to the outside world. Odo can feel himself slipping into a hazy soup from time to time, and it scares him, that if he lets go now the damage from his ordeal will take hold, and he won’t find his way back out.

“You need me to… stay? I really can’t I --” 

A loud gurgle emanates from Quark’s midsection. All those organs pumping liquids inside their casings -- seems overly complicated to be a solid. Quark rubs at his stomach a moment. Odo grazes his ankle with the appendage, then retracts. Quark jerks his foot away, frowns, but sits back down.

He begins talking again, and Odo listens.

---

“Do you have family? Back home?” Quark says for his next attempt at one-sided conversation.

No, Odo doesn’t say, sloshing about a bit now in his puddle. And I don’t have a home.

“I try not to think about them. There’s no point, if I’m locked up here unable to do anything anyway. I expect it’s the same for you what with Bajor and… well… the situation there… So I guess it’s not quite the same for me, but…” 

Quark trails off. He’s quieter, when he speaks again. 

“I told you my father died. Well, I don’t know if you can even hear me like that, if you’re doing your version of sleeping or whatever, but.” 

A deep breath. 

“My mother had all these… ideas --” Quark spits out the word like a euphemism. “--growing up. Unconventional ones. Deviant ones. My dad and my brother would indulge her, the fools, but I never did, nor would the rest of Ferengi society. Now I’m gone, and who’s left to keep her in check? She can’t support herself, or at least she’s not supposed to. It isn’t right. And my brother…” 

Quark lets out a low whistle, shakes his head. “That marriage contract he signed, I read the fine print even if he didn’t. He’ll be kicked out on the streets before long. A naive idiot, a romantic ,” he says like a slur. “He can’t survive without me… And that little boy of his, growing up with only Rom as a role model…” 

Quark’s voice constricts at the end. It sounds complicated and restraining, Odo thinks, to have these family ties weighing you down, to have people who expect things of you, and you of them in return, and always falling short. To care about their wellbeing, to worry about them, and maybe they care about you as well. 

Odo doesn’t know what that’s like. It sounds difficult, unnecessary, restrictive. 

(It pulls at some unnamed ache within him.)

“Do you have anyone out there? I hope for your sake you don’t. It’s hard to have people that need you, with all their ingratitude for all you do to help them.” 

Quark swallows thickly and is silent for a time afterwards, before changing the subject to his favorite one -- that of the moon.

---

Quark certainly paints a vivid picture of this wild dream of his. He seems to have thought through every detail, down to the type of glasses he’ll stock and the replicator codes he’ll incorporate… as well as its many disgusting vices. Gambling, sex programs, massage parlors, dabo girls in skimpy outfits, alcohol and drugs (depending on the legal jurisdiction), oh my! 

Odo is scandalized. Would scoff and criticize and rant, if he felt up to it. If he didn’t think it would only encourage justifications from Quark.

(The man just keeps talking, throughout Odo’s silence. No one’s ever shared so many trivial things about themself, about all their thoughts and whims, to Odo before. No one’s ever wanted to, ever thought him a worthwhile confidant. It occurs to Odo this means he’s never really known another person before, what lies within, beyond their surface level interactions with him.) 

(Maybe Quark needs to talk to someone, as much as Odo needs to listen right now.)

Quark expounds for a full three hours on the subject, every loud, lurid, lascivious aspect, and Odo starts to wonder if this is some sort of deliberate brainwashing technique on Quark’s part, because by the end he can almost see Quark’s vision: a place both to meet up with loved ones and to get to know friendly strangers, a change of pace from the everyday drudgeries of life, a place for opportunity and relaxation and stimulation alike, a place where everybody knows your name. A community.

Odo’s never known a place like that. He’s not sure, despite Quark’s passionate declarations about how he’ll guarantee pleasure for the entire range of galactic peoples, that he would be welcome there. It would be another place he wouldn’t belong.

It could use some order, he supposes, amidst all the revelry. That’s Quark’s one shortcoming. Someone to keep the hooligans in line. 

Odo wouldn’t mind that.

---

The weariness in Quark’s frame starts to retreat after lights off, once he’s napped and chatted most of the day. 

Odo notes that despite the exhaustion of his “hard week,”  there’s more color in his cheeks than before he left, less of a malnourished look. The ear has scabbed over without apparent issue, and though he moves carefully, so as not to disturb unseen injuries, he doesn’t seem too concerned about them at the moment. There’s a cheerful hope in his demeanor, amidst intermittent pensiveness. 

---

For all the many things Quark has to say, for all his many in depth interests he wishes to impart to Odo, Quark never mentions weapons. 

He doesn’t discuss any of his more piratical business, in any of these monologues. He doesn’t boast about past victories of his crew, or what disruptors would be best for what situations, or which warlords paid the most.

Odo can’t quite square this version of Quark with the ruthless marauder captain he proclaimed to be, when he knew Odo was listening. 

Quark is obnoxious, he’s ingratiating, he has a disturbing disregard for the letter of the law, he’s overly concerned with profit… But he loves his family, even if he won’t quite admit it. He cares deeply what others think of him, even if he denies it. He knows Odo hates him and what he stands for, but he saves his life. He clings to the rules of his own culture, bizarre as it is, even while never wanting to return home. His deepest desire is to create a place of fun and camaraderie, even if it's a particularly decadent version of that. He wants to be in charge of his own business, his own life, but at his heart what it seems he really wants is to serve people. (In order to take their latinum, but still, the ends don't negate the means.)

He’s a people person, even if he was intent on making Odo believe he doesn’t mind selling the tools to kill them.

The longer he talks, the more Odo is sure that Quark is the strangest, most mixed up bag of contradictions that Odo will ever meet.

It would take a lifetime for Odo to puzzle him out.

---

The next morning Quark finally leaves.

His joints pop and groan as he awakes, muttering incoherently under his breath, before he does his ritual listen. 

Whatever he hears seems to hearten him: “You sound much stronger today! Some definite oozing there. I’ve got business in the Yard, so, uh, see you around?” 

A brief pause while Odo makes no move to keep him, then Quark is out the door.

Odo does have a much firmer grasp on reality and himself today, though he’s still not quite up to taking shape if he doesn’t have to yet. But he’s finally certain he’s going to be okay.

Especially now that he can enjoy some peace and quiet.

Silence at last.

No one filling the air with nonsense, no desperate clinging to a criminal’s ramblings, just Odo in his cell where he belongs.

Peaceful.

Quiet.

Aaahhh… Odo sloshes around the smoothed basin he poured himself in. It’s an interesting texture, but gets dull after a while. 

He slides around the rougher areas of the cell, up the walls, along the floor and ceiling, every nook and cranny. This occupies a few more hours before he’s bored. Lots of variation in shapes, but rock is still rock. 

He transforms to a beaker after a while, out of habit. A safe, easy inanimate form to get used to shifting again. Then he realizes what he’s doing and slips back to a liquid. He’s no longer in Dr. Mora’s lab, whiling away the long hours in between sessions. Odo didn’t even like their little experiments together -- or rather Dr. Mora’s experiments on him, regardless of his willing participation -- certainly didn’t enjoy it… but it did break up the day.

Some shouts down the hall -- other prisoners he thinks, but he can’t be sure. Anxiety strikes through him.

Without Quark around, he’s exposed, what humanoids would consider “naked”, in his defenseless puddle out in the open. He slips into various inlets in the rock again, before finding a small hole. There’s something in there already -- a beetle -- though as Odo forces it farther down the tiny tunnel, it backs up before --

Zap! No more beetle. A forcefield beyond the walls, then.

The rock now containing him, its solidity encircling Odo’s mass and giving it form, he relaxes again. 

It’s some time before it occurs to him that this is just another form of beaker.

---

Odo sits in his hole.

The hours alone are long and boring. Too reminiscent of the lab, of the shelf where he’d wait forgotten, of the time spent until Mora or his assistants had the inclination to interact with him.

Waiting, waiting, waiting.

He’s spent his entire life passively waiting until other people exert their will upon him.

(Until the one time he didn’t.)

There were days in the lab when no one came. Years before they (and he) discovered he was sentient.

This time, it’s been less than a day, but a gnawing ache reverberates through his morphogenic matrix all the same. Maybe it’s the familiarity of the situation, or maybe it’s the contrast with the previous day, but it hurts worse than before.

He always assumed that he wanted to be left alone, that this ache was an immutable part of his existence, because the only alternative is other people, and other people only mean pain, only mean jeering and electric shocks and demands.

When Quark left on work crew, once Odo had been let out of the cell with an upgraded collar, he had wandered into the Yard. He hadn’t known why at the time.

Most people steered clear of him, which suited him fine, but didn’t fulfill whatever drew him towards the crowds. After a long stretch of standing stoically in the corner, ignored and ill at ease, he had been approached by the single Cardassian prisoner. 

“Ah, the two of us are quite a pair! Both anomalies here,” Garak, as he introduced himself, had said in an exaggerated tone. “Quite the fashion statement you’re making!” He points to the collar. “Though I am jealous you’re not required to wear this hideous jumpsuit like the rest of us.”

He had prattled on with vapid small talk, ignoring Odo’s prickly response, before ending with, “If you ever need a favor, I have many talents… And there’s something you could do for me in return.”

At first, Odo’s ache had eased while Garak chatted, but once he revealed his true intentions, Odo had scoffed in his face and headed immediately back to the cell. Just like Quark: another person only interested in using him! Despite that Garak gave off the impression of a dangerous man trying to appear harmless -- in contrast to Quark who for all his bluster still seemed like a small-time crook trying to make himself appear big -- they were two people cut from the same cloth.

Not anyone Odo should want to involve himself with. 

But, regardless, there was that unrelenting ache inside him.

Odo wants to argue that Quark’s endless rambling diatribes are their own special form of torture, but, always, the truth will out. Which is: Quark’s company, annoying and perplexing as it is, Odo finds preferable to loneliness. 

(What has Odo come to, how much of a desperate, pathetic excuse for a being does he have to be, to long for the company of a self-professed war profiteer? He can’t forgive these transgressions, could never forget, even though it doesn’t quite fit with the rest of what he’s learned about Quark, and yet and yet…)

---

When Quark returns at lights out, he has a distracted, thoughtful look on his face that immediately shifts to panic as he scans the cell. In a frenzy he runs around to different corners, searching.

“Odo?! Odo where are you, what happened, Odo? I shouldn’t have left, but I had to eat sometime, I had to meet with -- Oooodo!”

Odo extends a gooey limb and waves it outside the hole. Quark heaves with relief.

“After all I did for you, don’t scare me like that.” Quark glances to the smooth dip in the rock where Odo had rested previously. “Say… if you’re cozy there… you wouldn’t mind if…?”

Quark takes one step towards the dip, then another. When Odo makes no move to stop him, Quark plops himself down all at once. He sighs with pleasure, lying on his back and wiggling about a bit.

Oh. All the whining and fidgeting while asleep, or at least some of it, was because Odo had kept him from his sleeping spot. Odo hadn’t considered the effect of the rocks on a solid’s body.

After some time, Quark falls asleep, deeper than the previous night, but still every so often there are those little whines and whimpers.

That longing wells up in Odo, like now that he’s had some small taste of closeness with another being it’s awakened a deep hunger for more, and he’s ashamed by the sharpness of it, how much he needs further connection.

What do you want, Odo? 

Maybe this is it.

A blanket, that was one of Quark's many wants. Odo can help with that, for a little while.

He slides out from his hole and approaches Quark’s prone form in the smooth dip of rock. Another low whine as Quark bunches himself into a tight little ball, still unconscious. 

The shift is easy, compared to a living form, and Odo finds it feels good to change shape again.  A large square of fabric, lightly draped over his sleeping companion.

The tension in Quark’s body eases. The whines fade into a soft snoring.

Tomorrow, Odo will need to resume his humanoid form, and perhaps their little detente will break, but for now, this feels like who he wants to be.

Chapter Text

One day, for every meal, Quark will be spoiled for choice among the best cuisine the galaxy has to offer. Or at least the best he can entice to his moon. He’ll write into every restaurant contract that the property owner (Quark) has the right to taste test any item any time, at his discretion. Quality assurance is an essential business expense! Hasperat, plomeek soup, groat cakes with squill sauce, gagh, even those Earth “hot dogs” -- he’ll dine on something new every single day. 

Plus his own homegrown vat of tube grubs of course. Blessed Exchequer, greedy be his name, does Quark miss tube grubs. 

Terok Nor was the first time since he was locked up Quark had eaten anything besides tasteless prison rations. Sure, throughout their stay on the station, he had gotten sick several times from the Cardassian flavor profiles of Dukat’s replicator, and his stomach couldn’t handle the sudden richness of what he was putting in it, and certainly if he never had to eat yamok sauce again it’d be too soon, but regardless -- he hadn’t been able to stop himself from gorging while the food was available. It was the first time he’d felt somewhat satisfied in years. Infused with a new energy from the nutritional gaps it filled in, he hadn’t even minded too much when he skipped dinner the day after their return to watch over Odo.

But, as Rule 97 says, enough is never enough.

A little extra food only goes so far. For now, Quark’s right back to clutching his bowl of watery regva stew, navigating the worst attitudes the galaxy has to offer in a quest for a peaceful spot to eat it, and desperately avoiding another skipped meal.

It’s just another mealtime in the Yard as he darts away from an easily confused Pakled, saying, “Nothing would make me happier than to give you my breakfast, but unfortunately, I’ve already promised it to Urol -- you know with the Orion gang? The one that smuggles in contraband. Yes, the big guy. I’m looking out for your best interests, I know you wouldn’t want to compromise your supply of bootleg tranya,” 

Gaila yesterday mentioned he was going to scout out tunnels from Quark’s intel, and Quark hasn’t seen him or the crew around yet, so he’s on his own for now. He heads for a vacant corner, which turns out to be not so vacant after all.

“Oh my apologies, I should have realized this was Gorn territory today… even though it’s never been your spot before… My mistake…” Quark says, after he stifles an understandable screech, to the toothy-looking fellow who de-camouflaged right where he was about to sit.

In his retreat, he bumps into a Nausicaan, one of the new arrivals, and stammers out, “E-excuse me, s-sir, I didn’t -- uh, sorry --” He twists out of his angry grasp, only to knock into Greska, one of the less patient Klingons, which is saying something. Her bowl clatters to the floor, as her stew splashes down his jumpsuit. He clutches his own towards his damp chest.

“Clumsy stupid little man, you are not fit to eat the scraps we gave stray targs in the bloodslick alleys of Qo’noS’s most dishonorable slums --”

She yanks him up by the ear, hot pain searing through the sensitive organ, until he’s on tiptoes and gasping out whatever he can to distract her.

“Ye-yes ma’am, ah ahhh you’re absolutely right, and ohh can I say it’s obvious how much pride you take in those beautiful teeth of yours? What -- ahh what if I could get my hands on a new tooth sharpener, just for you? My treat-- ahh ahhhhh…”

So, in effect, everything is back to normal, like the Ferengi or Odo never arrived on the station, like Quark hadn’t had a decent meal in months, like he was never given the tiniest morsel of regard for his lucrative skill set.

The morning had started out so promising, too. 

Quark had woken up oddly well-rested for once, dreaming he was tucked away snug in one of those giant plush nest-beds common on Ferenginar. (Pathetic how big of a difference one day of napping and a smooth spot of stone evidently makes, but Quark indulges in small tastes of comfort when he can.) Even if it takes the entire first round of profit from his moon, he resolves to import one first chance he gets… A successful businessman deserves a soft, cozy place to crawl into after a profitable day, the security of a covered head, engulfed in blankets and pillows, behind a locked door that he controls, perhaps curling up around the warm body of -- 

Well, it’s his dream, and anything can happen in a dream. 

Almost as comforting as this dream were the oozing sounds emanating from Odo.

“You’re sounding almost normal again!” Quark exclaimed, reluctant to open his eyes and come back to dismal reality. “Well, as normal as a goo-man can be, or at least you sound similar to how you did before the collar, not that anything about you is normal per say --”

“Your incessant chatter can’t be normal,” Odo croaked in that raspy voice of his. “Do your ears ever get tired of your own voice?”

“Ack!” Quark’s eyes shot open to find Odo standing over him, in vaguely humanoid form, no longer puddled. With the way Odo had been the last couple days, he hadn’t expected a reply. “How long have you been standing there watching me sleep? Unnerving.” Quark contains his pounding heart with his hand. “But I’m so relieved to see you looking, well, not normal, but as normal as you get, because you really scared me --”

“You can stop now,” Odo said, staring down at him with that expressionless face. “Talking.”

Quark opened his mouth, closed it again, and the realization that Odo was aware of his entire stream of babbling the past couple days swept over him in a hot flash of embarrassment. He had talked about his moon, festivals on Ferenginar for some reason, the Bajoran Occupation, his mother, various other peripheral concerns -- and Odo had heard it all, though whether he was conscious enough to comprehend, Quark was afraid to ask. 

He had been trying to be sociable! Comforting! But comforting for whom? Something about the gravity of the situation -- the angry, flailing monster reduced to a helpless puddle, his roommate who despises him pleading for assistance -- had Quark confessing all his anxieties into the dark silence between them, to an unreactive Odo.

What Quark should have been doing was taking advantage of this captive audience to make the case for their escape plan. Gaila had asked each time Quark popped out whether they could count on Odo’s talents, and Quark didn’t have the spine to tell him no, not yet, it’s complicated. Though Quark has a gambler’s lobes, the tell-tale tingle just wasn’t there. Odo wasn’t listening anyway, he told himself, Odo’s too preoccupied with his recovery. If he even could recover from whatever the collar did to him -- maybe Quark would be aggravating him in his final moments for nothing! Or, even worse, it’s a very real possibility that upon waking up, Odo would immediately rat them out to the guards.

Maybe once Odo’s stronger, maybe once Quark has had a chance to ingratiate himself a bit more, maybe maybe once Quark can pave over the stagnant swamp between them…

“Much better,” Odo grunted, at Quark’s brief loss for words. "Quiet."

“Nice to know that sunny disposition of yours wasn’t affected,” Quark said with a scowl. “A ‘thank you’ might be nice. Or an ‘I’m forever in your debt, Quark, however can I repay you?’ would be even better. I’ve got a couple ideas on how you could show me some gratitude for selflessly saving your life.”

“Hmph. Not so selfless if you demand immediate recompense.” Odo stepped aside to let Quark groan and stretch his way to standing. “You can leave me alone now.”

“And as friendly as ever I see. Fine, I’ll get out of your hair. Goo. Whatever.” Quark should have known Odo would be the type of person content with never acknowledging their ordeal of the last several days again.

Quark couldn’t resist pausing in the doorway (“Odo… Take care of yourself,” he had said to that flat, penetrating stare.), but otherwise hadn’t wasted time getting on with the futility of his life.

Fine by him -- Quark had an escape to plan and a future to reach for and potential allies to avoid getting scammed by, and he didn’t need to concern himself with the ingratitude of a cranky puddle too.

Of course this plan hadn’t involved getting on the bad side of an angry Klingon female, yet here he is squealing for mercy in her grasp anyway.

Greska flashes Quark a pointy smile, and it’s less reassuring than if she had bit him. She calls to a clash of Klingons behind her, “Drakor! We have a new challenger for the championship!”

His translator implant may as well be kaput for all the sense that makes. “I uhh I’m not much of a fighter, very dishonorable for you, wouldn’t be much fun for a Klingon to fight me --”

“Oh you won’t be fighting one of us, you disgusting little creature,” She grins. “You’ll be fattening up Drakor’s prize-fighting vole.”

She guffaws with gusto and Quark laughs along nervously. “I’m assuming this is that Klingon humor I’ve heard so much about…”

“Threatening a fellow inmate with bodily harm is a violation of subsection 3.A of the Prison Regulations for Reskor Detention Center,” interjects a stern voice. “Animal fighting is another violation. Fights to the death are, obviously, in violation. There are five other counts of violations I’ve tallied, need I go on?”

Both Quark and Greska turn to look at the interloper, with similar expressions of bewilderment.

“Odo! Did you memorize -- ? Nevermind. I don’t think uhhh that’s a particularly convincing argument… for her…”

“Know your place petaQ. You deign tell Greska what to do?!” Greska shoves Quark away.

With the motion, Quark’s bowl of stew mixes with Greska’s across his jumpsuit. He’s drenched, rank, and ravenous. Fantastic. 

Greska swings at her new victim. Her fist collides with Odo’s face. It bounces back as if nothing happened. She grunts and lunges. Odo stands his ground, watching her with a mild expression as she grapples at him to no effect.

“Watch your back petaQ!” She roars and stalks off, leaving Quark relatively unharmed except for the lost meal.

Odo watches him with those deep-set, penetrating eyes -- his shifted face has more details filled in than when they parted not long ago, a crispness around the edges that gives him a sense of solidity, even if he maintains the semi-opaque quality of goo. 

There’s an odd fluttering in Quark’s chest, and a warm, bubbling emotion threatens to spill over. Before Quark can say something stupid like “my hero!”, he wipes one hand down his jumpsuit, brushing off chunks of gristle. 

“Great. Thanks a lot,” Quark says. “Now I’m hungry and I need a shower.”

“Next time I’ll let you become vole food.” An expression passes over Odo’s face -- the fact that Quark can recognize that much is evidence of the additional detail in his form -- then the vague impression of a collar appears around Odo’s neck. 

“Smart -- you’re going to want to keep up appearances for the guards. I have the tools still, if they put it on you again, but we wouldn’t want a repeat --”

Before Odo can respond, before Quark can even finish the thought, a firm grip drags Quark away.

“Oy, twerp, you the one who sniveled your way out of manual labor on the station, yeah?” Derak says as he hauls Quark with him down the nearest tunnel. “Ferengi scoundrels, all the same to me…”

“Wah-what’s it to you? Where are you taking me?” Quark cranes his neck to look behind them to Odo. As there’s of course no rules against prison guards harassing inmates for any tenuous reason, Odo doesn’t interfere. 

“Ugh, showers first. Then the main office,” Derak says. Quark is going to have bruises where his fingers dig into his upper arm, but he doesn’t dare complain. “Who barfed? Disgusting animals the lot of you, but if it’s good enough for Gul Dukat...”

---

Later that day, Quark bounces on his feet in line for dinner. Streams of numbers and financial bylaws pound through his lobes like a summer glebbening. All this brainwork on no food in over a day has him dizzy and anxious. 

After Derak dragged him away, Quark spent the rest of the day chained (figuratively) to an office desk, various guards breathing down his neck as he walked them through basic accounting. Despite that Quark has been cajoling the guards since his arrival into trading favors, it takes Gul Dukat taking advantage of his talents before they trust him. They could have been getting twenty point tax refunds on their paltry salaries for years, but no he had been dismissed until recent events. Even so, they insulted and threatened him as always, as if he needed that incentive to comply. For once, however, their straightforward menace was a relief; Quark knew exactly where he stood with them and how they’d react. A welcome contrast to Dukat’s capriciousness -- the danger that lurked beneath the Gul’s outward fraternal condescension was like a viper in the shadows, every congenial toast of kanar tied to more hidden strings than it was worth. 

They offered no special treatment, despite Quark’s supplications, but he has faith he can leverage this new development to his benefit with time. As Rule #9 states, “Opportunity plus instinct equals profit.” 

Quark has a few tricks planned once he builds a bit more trust. Access to the inner office can only be a boon, even if it means a little extra strife in the short-term.

“Bertho, darling!” Quark says to the cook warmly as he can, after the Lissepians in front of him receive their allotment, and he reaches the front of the line. “Will you be treating yourself to my talents along with the rest of your colleagues? Those grandkids of yours are worth a deduction for sure -- you could buy them a treat or twelve with your savings. It’s raining leks, my treat!”

Bertho stares at him for a moment then dumps a single ladle of stew into his outstretched bowl. “One serving per prisoner, no exceptions.”

“Maybe next time then, once I take good care of you,” Quark winks.

He doesn’t take two steps away, however, before a grimace of goons crowd his egress.

“Good afternoon to you too, Brunt,” Quark sighs. “Let me through.”

Quark moves to squeeze past them. The muscular Ferengi, Gorch, flashes his bulging biceps. Leck leers beside him. Quark thinks better of it.

“Look at you,” Brunt sneers, “all cozied up to the guards here too, just like on Terok Nor. Think you’re better than the rest of us pitiful inmates, wining and dining with the top brass. You’re nothing but a singing slug to them, performing your little tricks for a pittance. I know the scum you are.”

“Brunt, we’re on the same side here. Rule thirty-three, for latinum’s sake! This will help all of us -- we'll find Gaila, and I can update you both --”

“I don’t CARE that you’ve hoodwinked Gaila or the guards or the entire prison! I for one will not be seduced,” Brunt spits out this last word like human treacle, “by your deviant charms.” 

“So you think I’m charming? Seductive even?” Quark can’t resist needling him. Gorch hides a smirk.

Brunt snatches Quark’s bowl and takes a big slurp from it. “You may not have known your place on the freighter, but here I will teach you respect.”

Quark hisses at him. He’s one second from wiping the ground with Brunt’s smarm, gang of backup thugs be damned, when a rough throat clears behind him.

“Stealing is prohibited,” the rough voice says. “Prisoners are due one portion each.”

“Odo?” Quark beams up at him.

Brunt and crew gape at them, likely remembering Odo’s monstrous freak out in the Yard and not sure how best to react. Odo pries the bowl from Brunt’s grasp without resistance. He hands it back to Quark.

Odo nods, as if to say now that everything’s in order now. 

Before he can leave, Quark breathes out, “Odo, wait, what happened to your face?”

Instead of his amorphous, gooey, vaguely-humanoid shape, Odo has a dazzling new array of realistic details: hair, skin, defined features like a mouth and a nose, and even a rough attempt at the prison jumpsuit. Quark wonders if he’s been practicing since they parted this morning.

“Never mind my face,” Odo says in that gruff way of his. 

He ducks his head. On anyone else, the gesture would come off as shy.

“It’s very different than it was,” Quark says. 

It’s like Odo took the weird smoothness of a human face, and then blurred it over even more. It’s like squinting at someone on a particularly foggy day from meters away. 

“That thing looks like a poorly rendered holovid!” Brunt huffs. 

The others cringe, still cowed by the threat of how Odo might react. Brunt snaps his fingers at them, and they snicker on cue, half-heartedly.

In a thrall of sorts, without thinking, Quark grazes his fingers across Odo’s unblemished cheek. Odo recoils with a surprised snort at the touch. Quark catches himself and draws his hand back.

“You don’t have any pores.” Like his hand, Quark’s mouth reacts without consulting his brain. 

Instead of the gelatin-like substance Odo has had since they met, the texture of his face gives the appearance of skin. Flawless, immaculate skin, sparkling clean and unmarked from violence or toil. Uncanny in its beauty. 

(Another small humiliation of the prison is Quark’s inability to keep up with appearances. Next priority, after proper food and bedding, will have to be skin care products -- gotta take care of the money maker, if he’s going to be a bigshot mogul some day.) 

“And your ears,” Quark finds himself saying, “so smooth and small --”

Quark’s fingers outstretch centimeters from those silly little lobes. A derisive rough sound rumbles from the back of Odo’s throat. It goes straight to Quark’s lobes. Heat floods his cheeks, and he fists his hand at his side to keep it from wandering off again.

Brunt grumbles under his breath: “Pathetically small. Not fit for a female, let alone a monster pretending to be a man.”

“No one cares about the opinion of an ugly shithead like you, Brunt,” Quark says softly. He doesn’t take his eyes off Odo. 

Brunt rants away, but his voice is a squawking swamp bat in Quark’s ear.

“Faces are hard,” Odo says defensively. He folds his arms across his chest. The surface of his torso doesn’t wrinkle quite like fabric should, more like a gooey ripple, but he has individual nails on each finger. “This is the best I can do.”

“No, it’s -- something alright.” Beautiful , Quark thinks, but he keeps that to himself. “Though I preferred you how you were. You're making the rest of us poor schlubs look bad... One question -- how come you don’t have any…” Quark gestures to the bridge of the nose. He forgets if there’s a specific name for the ridges; various cultures have their jargon for special features, but he’s not familiar enough with Bajoran practices.

“It thinks it’s hew-mon!” Brunt whines. “Am I the only one who sees how pathetic this is?”

Eyes locked with Odo’s, his irises now blue as the rare sunny day on Ferenginar, Quark doesn’t have any attention to spare for Brunt’s nattering. Odo doesn’t seem to either.

“Boss… We don’t want trouble…” Gorch says from between gritted teeth. Leck and Bilga nod beside him, all scared of how the temperamental void, rumored to have killed twelve Bajorans and more, might react.

Long uncomfortable pause as Quark and Odo stare at each other. Odo seems to be assessing him.

“I’m not Bajoran,” Odo says finally.

(“Of course it’s not! This is ridiculous.”)

“Then what were --”

“This is who I am.” Odo’s tone has a finality that brooks no argument, but he adds, “Now.”

"Sure yeah I see that." Quark nods slowly. Perhaps there’s unspoken sensitive baggage involved, or some cultural boundary he’s crossed. “Well, it's a neat trick.”

“Pretending to be a person, putting on a face as if that will fool anyone. It’s an aberration, an abomination of nature.” Brunt is dark orange in the face, all worked up as he gesticulates. 

Quark rolls his eyes and turns to him, finally. “You’re an abomination Brunt.” 

“We can’t trust this thing to be part of our --”

Quark interrupts before Brunt reveals anything to Odo. “What is it you’re pretending to be, anyway? A man with bigger lobes? Well it’s not working.”

Brunt and Quark snipe back and forth a few more times, before a group of Pakleds with their dinners shove past where they’re blocking the tunnel. They’re hurried along to clear the area.

It’s not until they’re in the Yard, and Quark is slurping down the remainder of his stew, that he realizes Odo left them some time ago.

---

Twice is strange, three times is a pattern, but several times a day is a deliberate statement.

The next time Odo ambushes Quark, it’s to interrupt a hushed discussion with Gaila. The Ferengi cousins are seated around a stalagmite in a corner of the Yard, and Quark has attempted to scratch into it various relevant corridors and control panels for their escape plan.

“See the tunnel to the north is the most direct path to the surface, but to do that we’ll need the security panel disabled within a fifteen minute window or we risk setting off alarms in the east wing --”

“Bilga is up to the task,” Gaila reassures him. Quark had been surprised to learn that the special talent of the almost one-and-three-quarters meter tall Bilga was not his bulk, but his mechanical knowledge. “Especially with those tools you obtained. It might be best if he could hold onto them…”

“I’ll keep them until we’re ready,” Quark says firmly. He’s anxious to not to give them up, in case Odo finds himself in another predicament, but that’s not something Gaila needs to know. He also likes the extra insurance that Gaila won’t leave without him. “Of course, it will also depend on where Hagath intends to land the ship we’ll use…”

“About that. Shakaar resistance cell is threatening to tip the tides in the Kendra Province. The war will be over if we don’t move up our timelines.”

“Timelines for what?” says Odo, suspiciously.

Quark about startles out of his skin. He jerks hard enough that he hits the left bulb of his head on an overhanging stalactite. “Ow … Don’t sneak up on people. Do you always have to be so unnerving?”

Odo hovers over them for a moment. At least it seems he didn’t hear the rest of what Gaila said. 

Then Quark notices what he has in his hand.

“Why do you have that? You don’t eat.”

Odo looks down at it as if only now remembering it’s there. “Each prisoner is rationed one serving each twice per day, no exceptions,” Odo quotes, presumably from the Prison Regulations again. “However there are no subsequent directives regarding consensual sharing.”

Odo thrusts the bowl forward. Quark just keeps staring at him.

“It…” Odo makes a sound like a throat clearing (an affectation, surely). “It’s for you. In compensation.”

“Compensation for… Oh.” A clutching fills Quark’s chest, like something trying to claw its way out. He swallows, but there’s a lump in his throat.

Odo’s recent behavior has been an attempt to express gratitude. Despite his terseness and generally antisocial demeanor, this is Odo trying to be friendly. Quark’s not sure he’s met anyone with such underdeveloped social skills, which is saying something because he lives in a prison. 

An offered gift from anyone else here might be layered with expectation down the line, spoken or unspoken, but from Odo, Quark doesn’t question it. Somehow, he knows he doesn’t need to. 

Wordlessly, Quark takes the bowl. 

Gaila has raised his browridges high enough they’re in danger of hitting the stalactite as well.

“I’ve heard that a ‘thank you’ might be warranted,” Odo parrots his words from earlier back at him.

“Uh huh. No take backs,” Quark says. He makes short work of the extra food while the two of them watch. He dabs at his mouth with the edge of his sleeve. (One day, he’ll have a handkerchief in the breast pocket of a brocade tailcoat he’ll get tailored… Monogrammed and silk…) “But this doesn’t make us even.”

Gaila shifts his eyes between them for a moment. Quark hasn’t told Gaila anything about Odo and the collar or their recent interactions, just as he hasn’t told Odo anything about his plans with Gaila.

“Odo, is it? Glad you’ve come around.” Gaila stands up and extends his hand towards Odo for a handshake. Odo glances at it, but otherwise doesn’t react. “I knew that latinum tongue of Quark’s would do its duty. You’ll be a lucrative asset to our little operation --”

“Ah, ah ah, now, don’t crowd the man!” Quark shoots up. He makes a couple wild gestures with the other hand. He takes Gaila by the elbow to lead him away, where they can continue their discussions out of earshot. “Temperamental still, don’t want to overstay our welcome. Now I want to show you something this way…”

Quark chatters at a rapid pace about a hidden alarm and leads him towards the tunnel that houses it across the way, putting distance between him and Odo. Gaila goes along with it, interjects with his own thoughts from time to time, but Quark knows he doesn’t have him fooled. 

Odo watches them walk away.

---

Try as he might, there's only so long secrets are kept in the fishbowl of the prison.

The whole group of Ferengi crowd around a low basin tucked in an alcove of the Yard. There's some contention over the timing of their plan -- which alarm needs to be shut off before which person sneaks down which tunnel on which guard’s shift -- and Quark has lost track of the discussion. Bilga’s technical tedium doesn’t help. While Quark had always thought getting through security would be the easy part of an escape, they’ve hit a few snags that require problem solving.

Bilga drones on and on about trans-static conduits and subharmonic capacitors, and Quark’s attention wanders away like a loose strip within reach of a pickpocketer, over to his cellmate.

Across the Yard, Odo stands with arms folded over his chest. Every so often he clasps them behind his back instead, or goes to idle in a different vacant patch of rock. Odo has maintained the same detailed humanoid shape every time Quark has seen him, no longer morphing clawed tentacles at the slightest provocation or reverting to a puddle (at least before lights out -- Quark can still hear his noises). 

Lately Odo’s also been breaking up fights between factions, and rather than offense at the intrusion, gang leaders have actually started approaching him to act as referee between disputes. His refusal to show favor to any particular group, his steadfast commitment to known rules, and the impossibility of intimidating him with brute force mark him as an objective authority. 

From his solitary post, Odo nods to the occasional prisoner as they pass by, but otherwise he’s a man apart. 

Something pangs within Quark at the sight of Odo loitering around as he does. Odo is awkward , he realizes. He’s ill-tempered, standoffish, uptight… but despite all Odo’s previous ranting, he doesn’t actually want to be left entirely alone. Quark is sure of it. He just doesn’t know how to interact with people, other than yelling or reciting regulations. (Not that good company is in high supply around here.)

Each meal time for the past several days, Odo has offered his bowl of food to Quark with nothing more than a curt nod. Quark will then respond with social niceties, teasing remarks, deliberate taunts -- anything to draw Odo into any sort of conversation. This inevitably descends into Odo sniping back at him, insulting his wheedling ways, and then interrogating him on his intentions:

“I notice you’ve reconciled with your former crew,” Odo had said to him the other day. 

“Strength in numbers. Some of us can’t take a Klingon fist to the face without blinking,” Quark shot back. 

“Nostalgic for your glory days as outlaws terrorizing the galaxy together? Reminiscing about all innocent lives you helped eradicate?”

“I’ve been telling you since the beginning, alliances are important around here. The past is behind us; survival is now. That’s all it is.” 

No matter that this is an alliance specifically for the future and their return to weapons sales and unchecked profit.

“Very involved conversations you’ve been having, for basic survival…”

“It’s just small talk about the weather back home… our favorite preparations for tube grubs, controversial interpretations of the Rules of Acquisition… Ferengi stuff, you wouldn’t understand.”

Odo had hesitated then, the details of his face awash with skepticism, before saying, “They still don’t trust you, Quark. I’ve been observing them.”

“And who trusts you, exactly?” Quark had thrown his hands up in the air with the indignity (or the truth) of that accusation. “What do you know about loyalty or collaboration or kinship? If everyone acted like you do, we’d all be miserable misanthropes wasting away in this hell. Count me out.”

Then, like every time before, Quark had scuttled off to join the other Ferengi -- before Odo could hit on other hard truths or pick up on clues about what the crew was up to exactly -- leaving Odo to skulk around the yard by himself.

But more and more, even while deep in escape planning, despite deliberately separating from Odo, Quark can’t help but watch his strange, awkward cellmate from a distance. Like he is now.

After a time, the lone Cardassian prisoner sidles up to Odo. Quark’s hackles raise. Odo can handle himself, that’s no question, but he ought to warn him of the ex-Obsidian Order rumors, dangerous in ways other than outright physical force. Quark can’t tear his eyes away.

Bilga’s digression runs its course, and discussion of technicalities turns into heated debate over whether a diversion will be enough, or if they’ll need to take out any of the guards.

“Let me kill one at least,” Leck begs. “I want to feel that hot pulse of life leave his body. Just the one, it’ll make a statement.”

“The only statement you’ll be making is a target on our backs,” Gaila says. “We want to slip away unnoticed.”

Quark nods along, distracted.

Odo is tense at first, as on guard around the Cardassian as Quark would be, but the Cardassian chats with him, smiling and gesturing despite Odo’s guarded body language. Quark can’t quite hear what they’re saying from across the Yard, but he can pick out the general tone, which is light and genial. (Doesn’t mean it’s any less dangerous, just more insidious.) 

Eventually, Odo appears to loosen up, the tension releasing from his shoulders. The Cardassian, casual and slow in his movements, with open palms, smooths down the fake fabric of his jumpsuit. He rubs the collar between his fingers as they continue talking. 

Odo lets him. 

A little gasp of disbelief escapes Quark. His lobes burn with -- protectiveness, that’s it. That’s why he doesn’t like the friendly way the Cardassian is touching Odo, the way Odo almost seems to smile in response, the way neither of them are growling or shoving at each other.

“You’re in favor of gutting Gil Grendor like a globfish? Quark?” Gaila says, snapping his fingers in Quark’s face to get his attention. “Surprised you’d want to sully those unspoiled hands of yours.”

“What? No -- I won't cry if he dies, but you’re right it’ll draw the wrong attention,” Quark says, wrenching himself back to more important matters.

“If we could disable the entire security system at the source, we wouldn’t need a diversion in the first place,” Bilga insists. “Was anyone listening to me?”

“Start a riot to draw all the guards to the Yard,” Gorch lists, “slit their throats for the fun of it, and while everyone’s fighting and distracted, you fiddle with the electro-whatsits in the northeastern north whatever tunnel. Then we all run to the surface and fly off. Seems simple to me.”

“Everything is simple to you, you’re an idiot,” Brunt mutters.

Bilga says impatiently, “There’s trans-static conduits to disable at the first pass, then subharmonic capacitors throughout the walls at the upper north section of the tunnel, and then when it crosses the eastern bypass --”

“We understand, no need to go through it again,” Gaila cuts through the squabbling. “If we’re not ready when Hagath comes in a couple weeks, the war will be over and so will our best chance for profits on the outside. It’s going to take Bilga either an uninterrupted hour plus to hack through the security, even with Quark’s tools… or…”

Gaila looks meaningfully toward Quark, who sighs. 

They’ve been over this same point before. Reluctantly, Quark recites what Gaila has been pushing him for, “Or it takes only three minutes to disable the electric forcefield and then Odo can --”

“Then I can slip underneath the doors --” 

“Odo!” Quark yelps. “How long have you been eavesdropping?”

“-- disable the system manually from the surface, and your entire band of deplorables will be free once again to load up tyrants with tritanium plated assault skimmers and Dopterian interceptors and ten-fourteen CRM blasters. All the people in the galaxy going about their peaceful lives without worry while you were locked up will finally, finally , draw their last breaths,” Odo says, while Quark listens in horror. Odo’s sunken eyes bore into his. Quark swallows. “Isn’t that right, Quark? I don’t see any problem with that plan, do you?”

“Sounds great! I knew we could all find a way to agree,” Gorch says with a grin. Brunt smacks him on the shoulder with a muttered “idiot”.

“Quark…” Gaila says warningly. “You promised you’d talk him around…”

“Heh, that does sound like something I would say…” Quark cringes. He turns to Odo, “That’s n-not exactly how I would put it.”

“Then convince me,” Odo says, his voice low and flat. He folds his arms across his chest, and this time his jumpsuit wrinkles like real fabric, the last detail of his new humanoid form solidified -- one would never know about his liquid insides. Except Quark, who can still hear his oozing.

Quark licks his lips. He draws himself up -- he can do this. He may have won junior awards in safecracking, but persuasion has always been his real talent. “If we were selling weapons to Cardassians, the real aggressors in the war I think we can agree, why would they lock us up? Think about it. We’re not here serving time for arming so-called tyrants. We’re here because we also sold weapons to the Bajoran terrorists -- uh freedom fighters -- so really we’re on your side, Odo --”

“I don’t have a side,” Odo says, “except justice.”

“Right, fine, but do you want the Bajoran civilians to be defenseless? Slaughtered in their katterpod fields, because no one would sell them a disruptor to fight back? We’re saviors!”

“I’m not stupid Quark. You strategically timed sales to prolong the war, to drive up demand for your products, resulting in more death across a longer timeline. Now that you haven’t been there to interfere, the balance has tipped, so your associates here are gunning to get back out there and ramp up the bloodshed again. I’ve been listening to this one.” Odo tilts his head to Gaila.

Before Gaila can chime in, Quark continues, “If Bajorans and Cardassians and whoever else want to destroy each other, they’ll find a way to do it whether we’re involved or not!”

“But you want to be there, helping it happen. You’re on the side of an unjust war, whatever it costs.”

“We’re on the side of profit, that’s all ,” Quark pleads. “The alternative is we stay here, wasting away to nothing.” 

“I can think of worse places to be,” Odo says darkly. Not for the first time, Quark wonders where Odo came from and what happened to him to land him here. “Your situation for example has improved of late.”

“It doesn’t matter how many bowls of soup you bring me, Odo,” Quark says and something like hurt flickers across Odo’s face. “I know you can’t understand, but a life without latinum is starvation. For us.” 

He gestures to the other Ferengi, none of them eager to provoke Odo.

Odo’s eyes widen, then soften around the edges. The corners of his mouth poke down, and though he keeps his realistic humanoid shape, everything about him seems to droop. 

Almost like sadness, Quark thinks.

Odo gives a curt nod. “I understand. You want to feel whole -- no matter who it hurts, no matter how hollow your efforts feel.”

“That’s not --”

“It won’t work,” Odo says with a sad smile. “But I understand perfectly well.”

Brunt butts in with, “So the terrifying monster isn’t helping us? Big surprise…”

Neither Odo nor Quark dignify that with an answer. Odo walks off without another word, leaving Quark dumbfounded amidst his crew.

There are no extra meals from Odo after that -- no irritable comments, no almost-smiles or unnerving interruptions, no protection from surly bullies. At night in their cell, Quark strains for conversation, pretending Odo could still come around if only Quark can find the right words, but his efforts are met with stony silence.

The grey rock surrounding him is duller than before, the prison more cramped and ugly. The escape planning continues. Even Quark’s bright latinum future loses its luster.

Quark knew he could either get Odo on his side or get back to his old life, and he already made his choice. Both was never a viable option, try as he might to delude himself. Odo won't help him escape, so that's that. He doesn't need Odo, shouldn't care what he thinks of him, and instead he's about to get everything he wants: latinum, a future, freedom...

His lobes should be tingling with the promise of opportunity.

Instead, he feels as empty as his stomach.

Chapter Text

Leck is lecturing the rest of the Ferengi on the best ways to disarm and gut a Cardassian. Most listen with rapt attention. Quark sits off to the side, uneasy with the overly graphic descriptions.

Gaila sits down beside him. “Maybe I haven’t made myself clear to you, cousin. I hate it here. I want out.”

“Me too,” Quark says.

“But I can’t do that, if you don’t do your part.”

“What are you talking about? I’ve given you all the information I have. I’m not holding anything back.” 

“You need to convince Odo to help us.”

“You were there -- the most stubborn man I’ve ever met!”

“You’re right I was there, and you’re holding back with him.”

“He won’t listen to me. We'll have to buy Bilga more time to get the job done without detection.”

Gaila sighs. “But that’s a lesser problem. I’ll be honest with you Quark. Hagath wants me to leave you here. ‘Betrayal is the one unforgivable sin,’ he says. He doesn’t like to be crossed.”

Heat rushes to Quark’s head. “My biggest regret! A mistake I’ll never make again --”

“I know that!” Gaila slings an arm around Quark’s shoulders. Pats him companionably. “I know that, cousin. I know you believe that, anyway. For now.” 

“I’ve more than learned my lesson!”

“Sure you have. But once we're back to business… Well I’m not sure how I can convince Hagath you’ll control your conscience next time you’re faced with the prospect of aiding in some insignificant loss of life.”

“I’ve got no problem with that! I’m committed!” Quark purses his lips. “But do we really have to get involved with the Cardassian-Bajoran mess again? It just seems wrong. Surely there are other bloodthirsty customers we could focus on.”

“If Hagath heard you talk that way he would toss you out the airlock as soon as you stepped on his ship.” Gaila leans Quark back. He points upward towards the crack in the ceiling of the Yard, where a slight sliver of sky is visible. “Look out there. Millions and millions of stars, millions upon millions of worlds. Now, do you think if one of those twinkling little lights suddenly went out, anybody would notice? Is that little light worth your freedom? Your last chance to make profit in your miserable life?”

“What are you saying, Gaila?” Quark shifts out from under his arm. Gaila drops it.

“This is an ultimatum Quark. Once we’re free, you’re in one-hundred-percent. No turning us in again, sure, but no getting cold lobes. No quitting after your first round of profits. No slipping away with all our trade secrets -- not an option. We do this, you stay in the business as long as we have use for you.”

Quark frowns.

“Or… you die in here alone. That's your decision.” Gaila sticks out his hand, and says, “I don’t have a padd, so we’ll have to shake on it. Rule seventeen, a contract is a contract…”

Quark looks at the stars, then at Leck, who mimes cutting across hypothetical neck ridges to his eager audience, then back at Gaila’s outstretched hand. 

He grips it. “A contract is a contract.”

Leck vocalizes the sound of blood pouring out from the imagined wound. Gurch and Brunt cheer the performance.

---

A surprise visitor to the prison conscripts Quark’s services for the entirety of the next day. This results in a beneficial arrangement for everyone involved, Quark included, although at the moment his stomach begs to differ.

“Another!” The visitor’s ridged grey hand slams down on the desk of the guards’ main office. He refills the two spiralled shot glasses with a thick greenish substance.

Quark waves his hands in surrender. “I couldn’t. No need to keep wasting your stock on me!” 

“We’re celebrating -- To Ferengi subterfuge! To Lissepia! To mistresses with overabundant appetites for luxury goods!” Gul Dukat says. “Drink up.”

From the corner behind him, Derak shoots a knifed look at Quark.

On detour from a trip to Cardassia Prime, Dukat showed up unannounced with isolinear rods full of poorly organized financial data from Terok Nor for Quark to sort through. The guards, all too eager to get on Dukat’s good side, threatened Quark with solitary for a month to stay on his best behavior. Not that Quark needed convincing. 

Although Quark’s participation is not without coercion, he‘s more than glad for the opportunity not to let his most lucrative skill set wither away unused. He provides recommendations for several of the station’s income streams, so that they’ll bypass budget review from the Cardassian Central Command and instead funnel directly into Dukat’s pockets.

Beyond the financial loopholing, this also allowed Quark to set some of his own ulterior machinations in place. Whether they pay off or not is a smaller point than proving to himself he still has that devious knack. 

So Quark is celebrating too. He just wishes it didn’t have to involve so much kanar.

Quark chuckles amiably. “This has been a real treat! But I know that the Riskal ‘47 is tough to find.”

“Thanks to you I’m feeling generous!” Dukat grins with a wide slithery stretch of his mouth. “Drink -- that’s an order.”

“If… if you insist.” Quark’s carefully curated good humor wavers. He takes a deep breath, then knocks back the fishy slick in one gulp, hoping it’ll slide past his tongue before he can taste it properly.

Dukat sips at his own glass, watching him with reptilian eyes. Quark tries to produce enough saliva to wash down the remaining film of it in his mouth, then swallows. 

“Well?” Dukat says. His teeth show through his grin.

“Mmm… You can taste the effect of the regova fermentation barrels they aged it in…” Quark coughs as his stomach lurches. “Much more, um, pungent than the ‘63, that’s for sure.”

“Just what I thought you’d say!” Dukat laughs goodnaturedly. Derak in the corner relaxes. 

Buoyed by the praise, as well as a bit dizzy, Quark says, “A complex drink for a complex man! One that demands the respect of your palate. Makes your tongue submit to its power. Rather like you, sir.”

“What a way with words you have. I enjoy these little concurrences of ours.” Smiling, Dukat leans back in his chair. “You will be a useful friend to me for some time, I think.”

“It’s -- It’s my honor, sir.” 

This isn’t even a lie, not completely. Though the revelry is at Quark’s expense -- Dukat seems endlessly amused by the way Quark chokes down his overpriced effluvium and then bullshits an epicurean review -- Quark is enjoying himself. He’s a people person and a Ferengi, and befriending those who use him and condescend to him comes second nature. Even if the laughter is patronizing and the drinks taste like rancid swamp waste, that beats violence any day in Quark's books. He may not like the man, but he’ll be his friend, for a price.

Quark stifles a belch. Like discharge from the rotting bogs on Ferenginar, acidic gas bubbles up from his stomach to burn through his nose. He lets it dissipate before adding, “I could perhaps be more useful to you if I weren’t locked up on this moon. Just a thought.”

With a grunt, Derak fingers the disruptor on his belt. He growls, “Quark…”

Dukat laughs uproariously and waves off Derak’s offense. Quark chuckles like he’s in on the joke.

“Oh I envy you Quark. You get to while away your days idle and unbothered. No Bajorans to corral, no responsibilities, no women demanding your loyalty…just the generosity of Cardassia allowing your continued existence.” Dukat sighs. “Now tell me more about that girl who ruined your life.”

“She came on to me, if you can believe that! There I was, working late at her father’s home office, when she struts in, naked, as is traditional and proper, but not at all meek…”

Dukat knocks back the rest of his kanar and pours another for them both.

Quark lets the alcohol burn away his anxieties, sand over the sharp edges of his misery, and warm the chill that’s iced over his everyday life.

---

When Quark finally stumbles out of the office, head swimming and stomach roiling, it’s to riverway passages slippery with mud. Ferengi are made for wet mucky environments, but that doesn't mean he has to like it. 

“I left Ferenginar for a reason ,” Quark grumbles. 

He sticks to the walls, grasping between stalagmites for balance as shallow water rushes past. Grime splashes up his jumpsuit. At least he’s never wearing clothes he cares about here. Small mercies.

The floor moves beneath his feet with the current and even at the best of times the walls aren’t straight or even, so Quark’s impaired balance has trouble staying steady. Several times the floor pitches up unexpectedly or a hidden rock beneath the stream meets his foot, and Quark grapples against the rough surfaces to right himself. He loses the battle with gravity more than once. Mud soaks through his jumpsuit, gets in his ears, crushes into the tender scrapes now covering his hands and forearms. 

Finally, he’s at the Yard. Through the crack that runs across the ceiling, rain gushes down in a meters long sheet. Shaped like a sneer, with rocks forming jagged teeth and its lips a sliver open to the sky, the opening only lets in weather from the surface every month or so, but it’s always a hassle when it does. Quark suspects the shielding in place is faulty.

Quark steadies himself against the outer wall. Through his pounding head, he tries to get his bearings. Food would be good to soak up the alcohol, but unlikely to find at this hour. He also needs a long hard sleep… but first, a shower. Maybe by the time he’s done scraping the grime out, the water will have rushed away down the crevices and tunnels into the porous earth below; it hasn’t stayed long in the past.

As the source of the water, the Yard is more treacherous than the tunnels. In his inebriation he bumbles into a stalagmite or two, before a tall, unyielding surface stops his progression.

“Quark,” Odo grunts in surprise. 

Maybe it's the sound of his name in Odo's mouth, the relief he's imagining in his tone… or maybe it's leftover giddiness from his inebriation, but joy soars within Quark like Slug-o-cola stocks at this unexpected encounter. Odo's acknowledgement of him is a welcome surprise.

"Odo! My favorite whatever you are!"

Odo grabs onto Quark’s shoulders to keep him upright. The liquor in Quark’s head and the current of the water underfoot pitches him dangerously far to one side. “You’re going in the wrong direction; our quarters are that way.”

“‘Our quarters,’” Quark mimics Odo’s self-important, gravelly tone, then cackles. “Like we’re roommates with bedrooms and -- and a couch and --- pfff not going there. Nope.”

“We’re required to be back in our cells soon --”

“You can shove your rules right up your -- your --” Does he even have an ass? Quark waves his hand around while he considers this point, and the motion makes him dizzy. Odo hasn’t let go yet, and Quark yields his balance to Odo’s firm steady grip. “Your goo.”

Odo’s sunken eyes sweep over him. Maybe it’s the way Quark’s slurring his words, or the grime in his ears, or the blood streaked across his jumpsuit from his scraped palms, but Odo’s face twists. Worry? Disgust?

“Quark, you shouldn’t be out in this state… We’re going back to the cell, now ,” Odo says in that gruff, obstinate way of his.

A hot rush of anger floods through Quark, burning away the joy. This is the most Odo has said to him since those awkward attempts at interaction following the collar incident. After all Quark did for him, and then he gets the cold shoulder once more. Now Odo wants to tell him what to do? Now Odo wants to pretend like he’s looking out for him? 

Odo’s not a terrifying monster locked in with Quark anymore. He’s also not a helpless puddle, or a potential ally -- he’s made that very clear. He’s just some guy. A weird guy with backwards priorities, but just another prisoner, and Quark doesn’t have to stand for one more person pushing him around.

“No! What do you care. Ignoring me except for your precious rules.” Quark tries to wiggle away. Odo restrains him, assuming this struggle is with the unsteady rush of water at their feet rather than Odo himself. “All your stupid noises, you’re not subtle! Scoffing at me when I try to talk to you.”

“When you prattle on with your inane little aphorisms while I’m trying to regenerate, you mean?”

Lately Quark has been monologuing on various Rules of Acquisition when they’re locked away for the night, in an attempt to provoke Odo into conversation. Odo at least has stopped telling him to be quiet.

“I live by rules! Just like you. Gotta make you understand that."

"Hmph!"

"Even Cardassian law, I followed. Against my better judgment, and where did that get me, hmm?” Quark waggles his head for emphasis.

“You were the instigator! You strong-armed your band of criminals into double-crossing the Cardassians! That's what you told me. I wouldn’t call that following their law.”

“I did tell you that… Doesn’t matter. I follow Ferengi rules! Or I --” The kanar threatens to come back up, but Quark constrains it to an acidic burp. “I try. You just don’t get it.”

“‘Rule one-twenty-one: Everything is for sale, even friendship.’ What a worthwhile person you are to know. Such integrity.” Odo, true to form, scoffs.

It bothers Quark that Odo detests everything he values. It bothers him that he can’t make Odo understand him.

It bothers him that, regardless, he's the best cellmate he's had, that they could be friends if Odo would let him, that inexplicably Quark longs for more from him and shouldn’t.

“That’s not what it -- it’s not what you think.” Quark shakes his head vigorously, trying to get his jumbled thoughts in order. He sold the freighter crew for a promised reward, and where did that get him? Never argue with a head full of liquor, that should be a Rule. “Means all you got is -- yourself, don’t trust people if they -- don’t serve your best interests. Or they’ll sell you out first.”

Gaila’s warning rings in his ears. Quark has a narrow path to walk -- do what it takes to help them escape, be ruthless, then do anything Hagath bids you do, don't pursue your own profits, don’t relax your guard, live in fear that one wrong move and you're out. 

Quark is exchanging one cage for another.

Spray from the cascading rain hangs thick in the air. The humidity presses in on Quark. It’s more water than air, seems like, and Quark is drowning.

“You have to help me. I can't trust anyone --”

Odo follows a code. Odo is predictable in his aggression, despises it even.

Quark fists one hand in Odo’s jumpsuit to take him down to eye level. Odo is too surprised to resist, eyes wide with bewilderment at the sudden mood shift.

“Come with us, you have to help please. Please Odo.” Quark gulps down the thick air. “My cousin, he -- and those thugs with him -- that man pulling the strings -- I can’t do it.”

“You said you were head of the operation. You bragged about it.”

“I’ll never be free, we can escape them together, Odo you have to --”

The shallow breaths hasten into hyperventilation as Quark’s hysteria overcomes him. He slumps against Odo’s chest, gulping air. Odo doesn’t have the uneven terrain of bones and muscle below skin that a regular person would, instead he's a uniform solidity underneath Quark’s emotional convulsions. It shouldn’t be as comforting as it is.

“Quark! Get a hold of yourself!” Odo shakes Quark as he clings to him. It doesn't help.

A torrent of cold water engulfs Quark’s head, just for a second. Quark stumbles away from Odo at the shock of it. Odo dipped him into the downpour falling behind them. He gasps and sputters, but calms. The hysteria drains away like water through the rock as he catches his breath.

“I'll take that as a hic no.” 

Odo squints at Quark. “You’re… intoxicated. Where did you procure alcohol?”

Quark hiccups again, something between a sob and a laugh. “What a detective you’d make! Why? You don’t hic drink.”

“Lissepians are threatening a brawl. Their supply dried up, and they’re blaming sabotage from the Orions. I suspect Urol is involved somehow, but if I don't figure out what's going on, it won't be pretty.” Odo folds his arms over his chest as he considers this conundrum.

The two main purveyors of contraband within the prison -- an enterprise Quark tried to break into in the past, which did not work out in his favor. 

“Not my hic problem. Got mine from a gul.”

Quark feels depleted now that he’s calmer. His head and stomach swim from its non-Orion alcoholic contents. He slumps against a low-hanging stalactite and closes his eyes. Just rest a moment, then he’ll head to the showers. Leave Odo to deal with his stupid mystery and his stupid rules without him.

Odo growls in frustration. “It’s in your best interest as well. In the likely case that your escape fails. I’m making this a safer place for everyone. Less violent.”

Tensions between various factions are always shifting and simmering in the prison, and any offense perceived or real is a spark in an intermix chamber, ready to explode… Although Quark can’t recall any major fights breaking out in the past week and a half, an unprecedented streak. This is about the same length of time that Odo has acted as unofficial constable of the Yard. 

“Doesn’t matter what you do.” Quark tries his best to snuggle against the stalactite. It doesn’t feel as nice as Odo did. “Still a prison. Basic psychology: you lock someone up, tell them they’re nothing, they’ll lash out. It’s just how people are.”

The rush of the rain is a comforting sound, despite Quark’s dissatisfaction with life on Ferenginar. It takes him back to his childhood bedroom, playing fizzbin with Rom while it glebbens too hard to pick up odd jobs from neighbors. He’s drifting off when he realizes Odo has also been silent for some time.

Curiosity overtakes exhaustion and he pries open his eyes. Odo is gazing at him with a complicated look on his face. There’s one small crease in the middle of his forehead. 

“You keep talking to me...” Odo says. “I tell you no, or -- lash out, but you never give up. You don’t need me, you have your crew back. I’m --  not one of you. But you keep trying to talk to me.”

“Most people will shake your hand one minute, and stab you in the back the next, if it serves their interests. Myself included. But you… What you see is what you get.”

The irony of that statement isn't lost on either of them. Spray from the rain beads off Odo without soaking him; his jumpsuit, fake as it is, appears clean and dry. The irony of that statement isn't lost on either of them

“Rule ninety-nine warns me otherwise but…" Quark shrugs. Trust is the biggest liability of all. “Maybe I just like you.”

Odo tilts his head. Quark listens and -- yes, there it is.

Slowly, one foot carefully in front of the other, he stands up straight, closes the distance between him and Odo. The rain lets up finally. The loud rushing dwindles to a pitter patter syncopation echoing through the cave. 

Then everything fades from his ears except for that soft oozing from within Odo.

Something about it sounds like yearning.

A calm washes over Quark. His mind is a steady blankness as he tiptoes up until their faces meet. 

He presses his lips against Odo’s. 

Odo stays still as stone, but the firmness of his mouth yields underneath the pressure of the kiss. Odo’s oozing sings, and the accompanying rhythm of Quark’s heartbeat syncs with it. It’s a duet; it’s music; it feels right . 

A muted groan from Quark startles Odo into pulling back. 

Quark comes to, as if from a dream. 

Odo often gives the impression of being an old man, from his gravelly voice to his cantankerous attitude. Yet the way he looks at Quark now makes him seem so very young.

You’re holding back with him.

“Come with me,” Quark says. “Escape.”

“I -- I can’t.” Odo shakes his head. He puts one hand to his mouth and steps back. 

“You’re wasted here. We could make so much profit together.”

The crease in Odo’s forehead deepens. “You’re manipulating me.”

“No! I thought you -- The way you watch me sometimes. The way your sounds change when I talk to you. I didn’t think -- but you liked it? You liked the kiss, right?”

“You didn’t mean it. That -- thing you just did.” More firmly, Odo says, “You didn't mean it.”

Is trying to convince himself, or Quark?

“No, yes, whatever you want.” Quark’s voice breaks as he insists, “So you’ll do it? You’ll escape with me?”

He tries to take Odo’s hand, but Odo jerks away from him, shaking his head. 

“No, Quark.” Odo's goo churns within him. 

The rain is gone, but Quark feels like he’s plunged back under the cold waterfall. Shame floods him. It shoots through his lobes like ice. He glances around, but the Yard is mostly empty because of the flooding. No one else saw.

“You're right,” Quark says. “Why did I do that? You're right. Shouldn’t have, it was -- the kanar.”

The alcohol and lowered inhibitions made him foolhardy. That anarchic heart of his obeys no rules he gives it, rearing up no matter how he tamps it down. Some Ferengi. Stupid, so stupid. 

Of course Odo wants nothing to do with him, why should he? No matter what Quark reads into his sounds, his actions, that’s what Odo has told him time and time again. 

“Kanar? That's Cardassian.”

“Right, from Gul Dukat.”

“Gul Dukat,” Odo says. “Gave you kanar.”

“I did him a favor, and then we drank together. What, can't believe anyone would enjoy my company?” Quark scowls.

“You and -- Gul Dukat. With you, here.” There's a coldness in Odo's voice that Quark hasn't heard before.

“Why would I lie about that? He uses me because he likes me; that’s rule one-twenty-one again, the price of friendship, not that you understand. You’re-- you’re so -- aggravating .” Hot, bubbling acid fills Quark and spews forth before he can stop it. “I hate you. Arrogant freak. Think you know so much. Won’t trust anyone, even someone trying to help you. You can do anything, you can be anything but this is the best you can come up with! An investigator of prison alcohol. Maybe you’re right. Maybe you do deserve to rot here. Maybe you deserve whatever they do to you.”

Odo growls with fury, that monstrous temper threatening to erupt, but he keeps his humanoid form stable. Good, let him rage. Better than cold contempt.

Quark rushes forward to shove at Odo, but the momentum throws him off-balance. He overcorrects, too late, and stumbles in the water, flailing. He collapses to his hands and knees.

Quark doesn’t look to see whether Odo offers a hand. “This will sound familiar -- leave me alone. That’s what you want right?”

Quark’s mouth is bitter and so are his insides. The world spins around him. He retches up sharp bile, which floats away in the muddy current. He spits a couple times and wipes his mouth on his sleeve. 

The dizziness fades. He stands up. Quark shuffles his way over to the showers alone.

The water rushing through the tunnels masks the sound of any footsteps behind him.

Chapter Text

For the first fifteen minutes, Quark lets the sonic shower numb him over. 

Of the several group showers available for prisoner use, he’s fortunate to find one both empty and functional. The acoustic inverters are always shorting out, which results in screeching unbearable for the piddly ears of most humanoids and actively dangerous for Ferengi. Most of the time this leads to competition for use, though many prisoners don’t bother showering as much as they perhaps should (Klingons and Nausicaans in particular). Quark is thankful his sense of smell has deadened at least.

Pounding head, stinging palms, that gnawing ache in his chest -- he lets the industrial buzzing of the shower overwhelm his pains. It consumes him: the tingling all over his skin from the sonic waves; the vibration of his ear hairs; the static immersing his lobes. His outermost layer of suffering sloughs off with the shower.

Then he gets to work scrubbing himself of the grime and regret that’s settled into the cracks. 

He runs a sponge (allotted from a replicator in exchange for his dirty prison jumpsuit) over his body. The semi-public nakedness doesn’t bother him any more than wearing that hideous jumpsuit every day does -- neither are fashionable symbols of wealth and success, so it hardly matters. 

He longs for the public baths on Ferenginar, full of men decked out in tailcoats made from speciality hydrophilic fabrics, discussing deals in rooms thick with steam. You never knew what kind of business contacts you’d make in there. 

He’d also settle for the lush pleasures of the Hoobishan baths of Trill, or the volcanic springs of Qo’noS, or the Parallax mud baths… One day, he’ll have a whole complex dedicated to the galaxy’s most rejuvenating bathing practices, a one-stop spot for relaxation on Quark’s Resort Moon --

There’s not going to be a moon.

There was never going to be a moon.

His boundless thirst for opportunity just beyond the horizon shuttered before he can even reach for it --

Breathe in, breathe out. Buzz buzz buzz. One problem at a time.

He scrubs out mud and sweat and bile from one centimeter of his skin at a time, taking stock of himself as he does. He shifts his toolset (normally in his pocket) from armpit to hand, so he can clean everywhere. The bruises on his chest have gone yellow and green, but the ones on his side are purplish still. He can't see his own ear, but the scrape from weeks past isn't even tender anymore. Various old scars that didn’t heal right are accounted for. Ferengi are made of hardier stock than many other species presume, but it still hurts. Delicately he washes grit from the scrapes on his hands, forearms, and knees. 

Every shower, a palimpsest of cuts and bruises, a history of his continued survival. 

Quark has always been vain about his compact Ferengi frame, but at some point his hipbones have started jutting out more than they should, as have his ribs. He’s gotten boney in here. Ideally, he’d have a wealthy gut -- a fashionable paunch padding his front, the rotundity of success -- but he’d settle for not being boney. Vanity has gone the route of pride, over time.

What’s it like to shape your body into anything? To smooth over any marks of the previous day, to contort it to suit your needs, to create yourself anew?

How do you remember who you are, when everything about you changes one moment to the next?

A crashing noise -- Quark jerks his head around. Two people crash into the wall at the back of the shower. Great, a fight to worry about, and he was hoping for another half hour at least of relative peace. Quark holds his breath. Maybe he can inch his way to the door without them noticing…

“You didn’t see anything, Ferengi,” one of them snarls at him.

“Ye-yup!” Quark squeaks. “A quiet shower alone, just me.”

It’s Urol the Orion with a Lissepian (Klin’dan maybe?), both naked. An odd association, spelling potential trouble, but they don’t give him a second glance. Urol holds the other man against the wall. The Lissepian bares his teeth at him. Then he reaches between his legs -- oh.

Quark snorts to himself. 

Quite the scandal -- top Orion smuggler caught in secret tryst with his worst enemy. He wonders what Odo would make of this development in his case. 

He wonders if Odo will ever talk to him again.

Scrub, scrub, scrub.

Concentration on his own ablutions wavers with the grunting sounds from the couple, and the stimulus it has on his lobes. He should leave -- being witness to this ill-advised affair can only cause trouble for him -- but the other showers have occupants as well, and he still has mud between his ridges, and besides he was here first. 

If they care what he else does, presumably they’ll let him know.

Rule 223: Beware the man who doesn’t make time for oo-mox…

Although prison circumstances put a damper on even Quark’s rampant libido, he still gets the occasional awkward case of morning ear, a problem in a place without privacy. He’s had even more trouble than usual finding relief recently. He’s by no means shy, quite the opposite, but appropriate etiquette on dealing with this matter varied wildly between cellmates. Missteps were often more high stakes than self-relief was worth. An exception was Morn, game to help out if Quark reciprocated -- indeed it was the only time the Lurian ever shut up -- but that had been a short-lived, utilitarian arrangement.

The way Quark’s body reacts to Odo on this front, however, is a problem. 

Odo’s auditory buffet of oddly arousing noises sets Quark off on a daily basis -- his grunts and harrumphs, his rough gravelly voice, his slushing goo… More than once Quark had been caught moaning a bit in his sleep (a recurring dream involves dousing his ears in a gelatinous substance), only for Odo’s brusque “Is there a problem?” to jerk him back to reality. Odo had little reaction to any sexual references Quark made -- bewilderment or disinterest? hard to say -- and besides that his attitude towards Quark was always dismissive at best.

That kiss though, chaste and brief as it was…

Foolishly, through the kanar, Quark had started to think all the time and energy he spent listening to Odo’s goo sounds meant he could infer emotionality from them. They had a warm fuzzy quality when Quark kept him company through his recovery. When Quark chatted idly about this thought or that, despite Odo’s scoffing, there was often a lilting playful quality to his goo, like he was amused. 

And of course, when Quark had stepped near to him in the rain…

Best not to linger on delusions. 

It was lust that led him to kissing Odo of all people. Simple, stupid lust from slim pickings among the inmates that got his ears overheated, that’s all.

With a hand on his lobe’s rim, Quark calls to mind his boss’s daughter from his ill-fated apprenticeship at the embassy. Every night after the boss went to bed, she’d wander in, arms folded over her bare breasts, and stare at him silently while he worked late. She wouldn’t engage with him directly, as was proper for females, but there was a sort of defiant frown on her face as she watched him. The job was rather lonely -- he enjoyed the number crunching but as an apprentice he didn’t get much face interaction with their clientele -- and in retrospect she must have been lonely away from the female networks on Ferenginar. It wasn’t long before they took up with each other.

Of course, it ended in disaster. She started demanding a marriage contract, and he insisted it was all just good fun. So young they were! He had a galaxy of people to meet! But all she had to do was tell her father, and, well, the rest was history. Never sleep with the boss's daughter was a Rule of Acquisition for a reason.

Preska, her name was. Whorls in her ears like seashells. A frown that could curdle roachmilk.

Maybe it’s inevitable that Quark will always fall for the first emotionally withholding person in a lonely place to take a slight interest in him. Maybe he’s fated to let those soft, warm feelings inside him overcome better sensibilities, every time. Another person he's burned bridges with, another place he'll leave behind for uncertain fate, another mistake, another failure, another heartache --

Quark rubs his ear harder. Preska, Preska. Don’t think of anyone else.

Beyond the buzz of the showers, the grunting from the couple reaches culmination. Not long after, the doors open and close. 

Good, Quark can finish off alone. 

Anything to put off going back to his cell. Maybe he can stay in this shower until morning. Maybe he can find hidden crevices in the caves to squat in. Maybe he can avoid Odo until he gets out of here.

No, don’t think of Odo. A nice Ferengi fe-male. Bulbous head, bulbous breasts, round graceful lobes --

Footsteps, one… two… no three people, and then voices. 

Ferengi voices. 

Too late, Quark drops his hand from his ear. 

“There you are. We’ve been looking for you. Thought you could rub one out alone hmm? Thought you could hide your deviancy from me?” Brunt snarls. His face twists into an ugly sneer, as if personally offended by the sight of Quark in his current state. 

Gorch and Leck flanking him show off all their pointy teeth in identical menacing grins. They're all fully clothed -- no intentions to bathe then.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m showering; ever heard of it? Or maybe that swamp eel stench of yours is permanent...”

The insult is a distraction that allows Quark some sleight of hand. He slips the tools behind his back in his fist, various metal tips pointed out.

“Gorch saw you,” Brunt says. Gorch gives a cheery wave. Leck rolls his eyes. “With that thing . It held you close to it, intimately. You pressed yourselves face-to-face. If you can call that ball of mud a face. Disgusting.”

Quark sucks in a breath, stomach dropping. If Gorch could see him and Odo interacting, he could hear what they said -- Ferengi hearing developed specifically to pick out sounds through the constant rain on their planet after all.

“Could cut the tension with a knife, he said,” Leck says. He flicks his tongue out across his teeth.

“Only listened to a bit of what you’s said,” Gorch says. “But you de-fi-nit-ely talked ‘bout escaping with him. Uhh, with ‘it.’ And leaving us behind! Not very team-oriented of you. I thought we were becoming friends! So I ran fast as I could to tell Mr. Brunt here, figured he’d know what to do.”

Quark wills his shoulders to relax. He props one hand on his hip, a performance of nonchalance. Like it’s no big deal when several violent thugs confront him naked in the shower about plotting against them, and they’ll certainly be reasonable about it once he explains.

“Oh that. You think I enjoy his company?” Quark affects a loud laugh. It echoes off shower walls in a disconcerting way. “It was all an act! To convince him to help us escape. Us, all of us. You misheard that part. I wasn’t very coherent, I admit -- a little drunk, you see.”

“I don’t know…” Gorch shifts his weight. “Can’t imagine wanting to kiss another man, let alone a weird one like that.” He screws up his face in thought. “Was it squishy?”

“Ye-yeah. Squishy, that’s it.” Quark swallows the lump in his throat. “I’ll uh never forget it that’s for sure. Though I wish I could of course! Heh.”

Odo’s mouth was smooth and cool against his. Firm, safe, true . He smelled like rain and sounded like the swell of melody at the beginning of a song. What would he sound like at crescendo, their harmonies intertwined in polyphonic bliss? 

Quark will never know. He does wish he could forget. 

“You liked it, you freak-loving pervert!” Brunt shoves Quark backwards.

The force of it knocks the breath out of Quark. Mud from Brunt's jumpsuit smears across his newly cleaned skin as he invades his space. “And you are all too eager to push me around. What, do you get off on it or something?”

With a snarl, Brunt grabs Quark’s lobe and yanks his head closer. Quark yelps; his lobes are sensitive from his earlier activities. 

Brunt’s breath is hot and rank against Quark’s ear as he spits into it, “You’ve always been a traitor to Ferengi-kind, but this is beyond the pale . You may have Gaila fooled, but I know what kind of man you are.”

Brunt grips the lobe tighter, then slides his thumb across the helices. Quark flinches with the flash of sensation it causes. There’s a perverse, fascinated look on Brunt’s face. He scrapes his nails into the flesh, drinking in Quark's reaction. Quark whimpers.

“Says ah! aaaah! the man oww giving me aaahhh oomox. How did you know I like it oooooooh rough?” Quark manages to say through the shooting sparks of what is, in this context, pain. 

Though the truth is if he didn’t hate Brunt so much, and if it were very different circumstances, Quark might even be enjoying it. 

(What kind of delightful shapes could Odo’s hands make on his lobes --?)

“Why -- you disgusting --- ugh!” 

Brunt jerks his hand away like the ear burned him. He glances back to check the reactions of his smirking minions, though they seem more impatient to get in on the torment themselves than anything else. Quark laughs, hiccoughing in the middle of it as a delirious sense of mania overtakes him. He shouldn’t provoke him further, but as the realization slides into place he can’t help himself. 

“You’re the same as you were on the freighter. Obsessed with me and desperate for your own crew’s approval.”

Brunt says, “You were the cook! The lowest ranked member of the crew!”

“But I hate you as much as they did --”

“And now you’re nothing at all, still just a dupe that Gaila’s using to get ahead. Why would I care one slip about --”

“Can’t help but press your body against mine, can you Brunt?” Quark’s laughing is unhinged now, even to his own ears. 

“You -- you with that creature, might as well suck face with a slug! -- naked and submissive -- YOU are the deviant!” Despite this, Brunt presses himself closer to Quark. His body is now flush against Quark’s in an unbroken line from knee to pelvis to shoulder. “You were always the one telling your stupid flirty jokes, and everyone laughing despite how poor you were. Parading around in your cheap little suits like you were worth something, though you made a tenth of the profit shares I did. Softening up tube grubs for the crew like a female --”

“Insults are nice, boss, but we want in on the fun too. Love to give my baby a taste of flesh,” Leck says. He runs his tongue along his knife’s edge. Gorch grunts his assent -- so much for team loyalty.

Quark shivers.

“Wait your turn!” Brunt yells over his shoulder.

The sharpness of his voice stings Quark’s ears, but he hardly cares anymore. If Quark knows anything, it’s how to leverage someone else’s vulnerabilities against them. It’s how he always used to beat Brunt at tongo, something else he suspects Brunt has never forgiven him for. 

Brunt presses harder into Quark. The grating of the shower wall digs into the back of Quark’s head. “ You -- with that thing acting like now you’re its female --”

“You know Brunt, I don’t think you even want to hurt me, deep down,” Quark says. His eyes bore into Brunt’s, and he thinks he sees a flicker of something there. “You don’t want that at all. That’s the real tragedy for you. You’re mad at me for selling you out still, though it really doesn’t matter now does it? We’re almost out of here, thanks to my help! But that’s not the whole story.” 

“Quark! I’m warning you…”

“You can’t act on what you actually want, never could, because then you’d really lose the respect of your crew. Because it would make you the real deviant, between us. And here I am, naked and aroused, but it’s not for you, it’ll never be for you, and you can’t resist --”

Brunt recoils from Quark, but only as far as he needs to slap Quark across the face. He puts muscle in it, hard enough that Quark’s head whips to the side. 

Quark’s cheekbone stings -- it’ll leave a bruise -- but still only a slap. 

“I’ve had greeworm bites worse than that!” Quark cackles for a moment, then abruptly cuts himself off. He settles a glare on Brunt. Brunt takes an unconscious step back from the force of it. “Also. That ‘thing’ has a name. And Odo is twice the man you’ll ever be.” 

Which is why Odo will never talk to Quark again, but Brunt doesn’t need to know that.

Brunt’s face puckers like a sphincter. His eyes scrunch into tiny beads, a little moisture pooling at their corners. He spits at Quark. It lands with a splat on his cheek, then slides off. 

“Do whatever you want to him. I don’t care,” Brunt says, then leaves.

They all watch him exit, then Leck and Gorch turn back to Quark. Smiles lurch across their faces, spreading slow and dangerous as an infection. Quark scrambles along the wall. His only thought is to put distance between them.

“Nah-now fellas! You don’t have any issue with me. We’re all on the same team here! Right Gorch?” Quark cringes and holds one wrist out bent in supplication. 

Gorch stomps on his foot. Quark doubles over, howling with the pain. Gorch knees him in the stomach, which sends Quark sprawling onto the floor. 

The tools clatter everywhere.

“This will be fun,” Leck says. 

“I could use some fun.” Gorch cracks the knuckles on his fists. “Not much fun around here.”

“I want to take it slow. Savor every moment. What do you think?” Leck’s knife whistles as he whips it through the air. 

“‘Pick on someone your own size,’ they said. But everyone here’s so big. Nasty. Finally got my chance.” 

The thwack of flesh meeting flesh reverberates through the small space. Then -- the twang of something stretching past its limits. The crunch of bone. 

Quark screams for the catharsis of it. Not that it lessens the pain. Not that it drowns out the terrible sounds of his body breaking. Not that it matters… because even if anyone could hear him over the buzz of the showers, who would come to his rescue?

Eventually, blood pools in front of where his cheek lies pressed against the floor.

His last thought is what kind of scars this will leave, if he survives. He’s not sure he can pull off the rugged, tough guy look. Maybe there’s a concealer that would help, for the right price?

Maybe it’s better if he never finds out.

A gushing sound, the blood maybe.

Then all goes quiet.

---

Fuzziness. Everything muzzy and thick, like a bolt of Rigelian cotton.

Quark fights his way through it, but he’s swimming through mud. Keeps sucking him back down into its deep, dark soft depths.

He tries to take stock of the situation, but his thoughts aren’t connecting quite right. Slow slow. Focus on one thing at a time…

The drip drip drip of the caves. The smell of wet rock. Soft padding below him. Some shuffling sounds from nearby. 

And other heartbeats.

Quark shifts, but a phaser-bolt of pain shoots through his arm. A high-pitched whining --  exactly like his brother used to make, but why is Rom here? And why does his throat feel like sandpaper --

Oh, it’s from his own mouth.

“Ahh ahhh, no need to deafen the rest of us! And after the scare you caused!” a voice says, not one Quark recognizes.

Quark restricts himself to a soft whimper at the back of his throat. Panic rises in his chest. Who is that? Where is he? What’s going on? His nostrils flare and collapse as he sucks in shallow breaths.

“Shh shhhh there there little prey. Deep breaths.”

“Try not to move, Quark,” says a second voice, in a whisper. “And back off, my dear Garak, he’s disoriented. Give him space.”

Quark hesitantly pries open his eyelids. Everything is grey and blurry and muted. Thank profits for dim Cardassian lighting. He blinks a couple more times, before the world fades into view.

Hovering over him is a round smiling face. Ridges line the forehead and ring around the eyes. Grey skin with pinkish accents.

Out of a black hole, into a supernova.

“Ah!” the face says with affected relief. “Not in the Vault of Destitution after all then, are you? Though perhaps it may as well be… Alas…”

Quark screams, then passes out again.

Chapter Text

Quark’s head swims and reels, like a shuttle tossed about by electrodynamic turbulence. Thoughts flare and dissipate in his mind like the rays of a solar storm. He can’t connect two and two, can’t make his way to four. Anxieties, real or imagined, boil away within him. 

Nearby are strange voices -- frantic yelling and tense whispers.

Something’s wrong but he doesn’t know what. Something bad happened. 

“GET OUT.”

“Let me see him! I’m his cousin."

“Odo, let him pass. Quark is in danger of hemorrhagic shock, so --”

“So treat him! You’re the doctor! If it's incentive you need – latinum? contraband?”

“What I need is your assistance. This will be a long shot…”

Quark feels grey. How can a person feel grey? He’s like a padd with a drained power source and all the little numbers slowly fading away to a blank screen. 

He wants everyone to shut up, to just be quiet. Let him rest, let him wash away into the grey...

“This is YOUR fault! You and your vicious cronies. Don’t act like you care now.”

“Believe me, this wasn’t part of our plan, Odo. But was it yours? If it was up to you, he’d stay there forever in your cell, never make a strip of profit again –-"

“Gentleman, we’re wasting time. Gaila, can you help or not?!”

“Family must mean something to you beyond just another person to exploit.”

“Yeah – I – I’ll make it happen.”

Sshhhhh…

—

Holding onto lucidity is water in the hand. He grasps it while he can:

“Is this -- Divine Treasury?” Quark gasps. It can’t be the Celestial Auction; that isn’t supposed to hurt. No, no… this must be what it’s like to be condemned to eternal separation from latinum. “Or the -- Vault? Desti-dest-”

There’s something he needs to do he’s forgetting about, or something he already did that he shouldn’t have. 

Wherever this is, whatever’s happening, he can’t stay here.

Unless this is it.

“Quark, you’re -- awake! You’re safe. Shh, shh, don’t try to talk…”

All his life he tried so hard, and this is where it’s gotten him.

He’s going to negotiate his way out of this if it kills him; what else can he do?

But first, sleep…

---

Electricity rips through his arm with jagged edges. Like skewers spiked through him, jabbing over and over. 

Firm hands hold him in place. He writhes against their restraint and regrets it.

“I’ll tell you anything, stop stop stop.” Quark’s voice is thin and weak, like a vole at the end of the Klingons‘ entertainment.

“It’s for your own good,” says a gruff voice. It sounds familiar, but he’s too disoriented to place it. “Julian said you need -- hold still .”

The taste of copper bites his mouth. “We can talk about this. Don't do this…” 

“I am trying to help you. I need you to stop fighting me --”

The hands wrap something around his chest, constricting it tighter.

“Stop please please please stop please…”

---

His mouth is parched as Vulcan. His tongue is desert dry and shriveled. 

“Need, need… water…”

“Open.” A hand on the back of his head tilts it forward. “A little to start with…”

Then he’s drowning. Water clogs the back of his throat. It stings as it shoots through his nose. He’s coughing it up from his lungs. The muscle contraction tears at his ribs, which sets off more whining and thus more coughing.

“Quark! What’s wrong?! What did I do?” The gruff voice again, and complicated feelings about that swirl in Quark’s gut, though he can’t place why or what.

One hand lifts his head higher so Quark can expel the liquid he breathed in, and a second supports his back.

“No, no like this,” a different voice says. “Just wring out the cloth, a few drops at a time until he can handle more. There, there… good.”

---

Fire sears through Quark’s frontal lobes. Each of the anterior bulbs pulsate with heat. His head feels twice as large as it should, heavy and swollen as it throbs.

Faces blur and swim in front of him like the shimmer of a heat wave.

“It wasn’t me! I didn’t do it! You’ve got the wrong guy!” A hoarse moan comes out of his mouth, almost unrecognizable to his own ears. There’s a sense of deja vu -- this isn’t the first time he’s made this plea during his torment.

“After all that bragging about how guilty you were? Hmph.” 

“I had to, I didn’t -- I had to.” He’s saying whatever he thinks someone might want to hear, whatever might convince them to stop the pain.

“Shhh, shhh. That’s enough. Rest.”

A cold cloth drapes across his forehead and the sweetness of it carries him to the depths of cool darkness.

---

The water is salty and a bit thicker next time, fed to him by spoon. His stomach doesn’t know what to do with it though and clenches. His body heaves, and pain shoots through him. Why is this happening to him? Why is this still happening?

“Please, let me go,” Quark moans. “Don’t -- the cook! I’m, I’m not --”

“You have a fever. No one’s cooking you, we’ve been over this. Eat.”

“No no no. I was the cook! Didn’t know,” Quark pleads with a whimper. 

“When were you a cook? Shhh, never mind.”

“Told you, I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything. Let me go.” He thrashes against the arms supporting him, but he’s weak, so weak.

“You’re not going anywhere. Shh shh, try another bite, you need to --”

A spoon presses at his lips, but the smell turns his stomach. He turns his head. “We had a deal, please I’m innocent. Let me go, let me go…”

Acid upheaves from an empty gut, and he almost chokes on it. 

“Alright, Quark. If you say so. I believe you, shh.” The familiar gruff voice again -- he would only say that if he meant it, Quark thinks, but disorientation swarms and doesn’t reveal anything more.

He can trust the voice though. He has to.

A broad, firm hand rubs his back. Comforting murmurations soothe at his ear.

---

A bitter taste on his tongue as a thick liquid slides down, though the fingers that press open his mouth taste of salt.

Several labored breaths later a heavy wool smothers his mind, and he succumbs to its softness. Relief at last. Sinking, sinking…

--- 

Drip drip drip of water and whoosh of doors. 

Open, close, open, close.

---

“You haven't made him better! He sleeps all the time, and when he’s awake he doesn’t recognize me, doesn’t remember --”

“Good signs! With the four enlarged lobes that Ferengi have, it’s perfectly natural to redirect massive amounts of energy and resources away from the brain to more urgent matters while healing. Especially with the hydropolycordoline additive. These are normal side effects.”

“Rrrrrrgh! He’s paranoid, disoriented, upset any time he’s awake --”

“I think we all would be, in his shoes.”

---

When he wakes up, it’s to discover he’s being held captive by that Cardassian prisoner.

But there were other voices…

---

When consciousness lifts him up again, after passing out from fright, Quark is hesitant to open his eyes. 

But whatever the mysterious, possibly dangerous Cardassian wants, Quark won’t convince him of anything by pretending to be asleep. He also has a vague sense that there was someone else accompanying him in the throes of his suffering, and curiosity flickers.

Haggle, negotiate, plead, that’s all you can do . Tired though, so tired…

A millimeter at a time he raises his lids.

Rocky walls encase him, and he’s almost disappointed to realize the pattern of the protrusions is the same as his own cell. Same captors as ever then, for better or worse, so why-- 

With a couple soft grunts, Quark props himself up on his elbows so he can take a better look around. His body is oddly numb, and it’s difficult to make it respond to his requests.

A slorping noise, and then: “Quark! Lie back down.” 

That gruff voice -- it was Odo. 

Odo had been with Quark -- giving him water, responding to his delirious rants, wrapping bandages -- the entire time.

Taking care of him, despite what Quark said when last they talked, despite what Quark told him he did to be locked away, despite what Odo thinks of him.

A warmth permeates Quark, through the numbness.

Odo hurries to kneel beside him, that preternaturally smooth face now lined with worry. He holds one hand under Quark’s raised shoulders to help support him.

Quark’s heartbeat slows to normal, as does his breath. No matter who else is around, if Odo is here, then Quark is safe. For all the issues Odo has with him, Quark knows in his bones that he wouldn’t hurt him. 

Not that Quark can feel his bones right now.

“Odo -- there was --” But Quark’s voice is hoarse, and it’s difficult to talk. Odo is ready with a cup of water. Quark sips at it gratefully. “That Cardassian was here. And -- someone else.”

“Yes Quark. You -- you’re going to be okay.” Odo doesn’t sound like he believes it at first. His eyes do a rapid scan over Quark. Then something in his form, the illusion of tensed muscles, gives the impression of relaxing all at once. “You’re going to be okay.” 

“The Cardassian, he’s --”

“Garak was here yes, now he’s not. Do you understand what happened?”

“Wait, I was --” Quark’s mind is made of mush, and once a different train of thought takes hold, he loses the previous one. With a jolt, he fumbles a hand down his torso -- there's a fresh jumpsuit on top of layers of tight bandages. “I was in the shower!”

“Yes, good,” Odo says, in a soothing tone, like Quark is a lobeling he’s teaching not to stick latinum in his ears. “That’s where I found you.”

“I -- you --” Quark’s face floods with heat. Odo with his talents could be anywhere, at any time. “You were watching me?!”

“You’re hurt, so I've been watching over you --” 

“No, in the shower.” Quark scowls. “Well I hope you like what you saw.” 

“Glad to know your priorities are in order. Hmph.” Odo’s small note of amusement is music to Quark’s ears. “No… That night… You were supposed to come back to the cell. The buzzer was going to sound soon --”

“Blah blah the rules. So what.” 

Exhaustion hits him in a wave, and Quark delicately lays himself back down. There’s padding beneath him, he realizes. A jumpsuit filled with scrap cloth to create a makeshift bed. A blanket pools at his feet, and Odo gently lifts it back over him. Softness unspools in Quark’s chest.

Odo’s goo takes on a downward note -- like sadness, though Quark can’t trust he’s reading him right. Not anymore. 

“With how we… left things… that night, I didn’t know if you would come back… or get in… worse trouble...” Odo's words come out in a slow aching creak similar to when he first arrived; it throws into relief just how much Odo has changed in the short time Quark has known him. “You mentioned a shower… I waited outside for a while. Your -- crewmates left… covered in blood...” Now the goo rushes, that falling note intensified. “It didn't take a detective.”

“Oh.” There’s a large lump in Quark’s throat. He swallows, but it doesn’t help. “I told you to leave me alone.”

Odo nods, but doesn’t say more.

“I suppose I didn’t leave you alone either, when you asked,” Quark says. 

“Here,” Odo says softly. He holds a small vial to Quark’s mouth. “This has been helping you. Took a while to procure, but it has the effect the doctor said it would.”

Quark jerks his head away, eyeing it skeptically. “What’s in that? Who said? There’s no doctor here…” His train of thought from earlier bursts back into him like torpedo fire. The muzzy effect of his sleep has faded away, and in its wake, a new sharpness. “The Cardassian prisoner was here. You can’t trust him --”

“He -- they’re helping me take care of you,” Odo soothes.

Quark tries to sit back up, but Odo gently presses him back down. “Odo, he’s dangerous . Rumor has it he’s Obsidian Order. They’re -- worst of the worst --”

“‘The ever-vigilant eyes and ears of the Cardassian Empire.’ I’m aware.”

“People like him don’t help for nothing -- If he is helping -- Some of them are deadly assassins!”

“ Drink ,” Odo says, so sharply that Quark parts his lips without thinking. The medicine slips down his throat, bitter and chemical like battery fluid, before he can pull away. 

“What if it’s -- poison?!” Quark’s heart pounds like a trapped vole. Should he regurgitate it? What if it’s too late? But his body has started to throb over the course of this conversation, the numbness dissipating as sensations sharpen, and puking sounds like it would hurt.

“If anyone wanted to assassinate you, they could have finished the job in the shower,” Odo says darkly. “It’s fine, Quark.”

All at once the pain vanishes. A thick fog descends on Quark’s mind once more, plush and soft enough to lose himself in.

“Rest,” Odo says.

Quark can’t help but comply.

---

Beeeep beep beep 

The clamor jerks Quark out of unconsciousness. A scruffy human waves an obnoxious device in his face. 

“Who are you? What the frinx do you think you’re --”

The beeping shifts to a loud buzzing, and Quark hisses at the sound. The human whacks the device on its side a few times until it quiets, before cursing under his breath. “Ah, supposed to be a medical scanner, to aid in tracking your recovery. Still tinkering with a few bugs though.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

The human looks up from his device and grins, a bit too overeager with it to be threatening. Quark is reminded of a mudpuppy Rom had once as a kid. Waste of money, not that anyone listened to him. “Decided I’m not a Celestial Auctioneer then? The gig is up!”

“Of course not. You’re not even Ferengi.”

“You kept shouting about it the first time I was here. Traumatic situation all around.” The human pokes two fingers at Quark’s throat. Quark flinches. “Relax, I'm taking your pulse. Doctor Julian Bashir, at your service.”

“Yeah right. And I’m Grand Nagus Gint.” Warily, Quark allows him to count his heartbeats for a few moments. Julian must approve of what he finds, because he goes back to fiddling with a few wires on the device.

Quark takes a moment to assess him. So-called Dr. Julian Bashir is dressed in a jumpsuit, skinny with a haggard look. A fellow prisoner then… And undeniably human, not a ridge or stray spot to mark him otherwise.  

He certainly seems too goofy and good-natured to be dangerous, but, as a human, this Julian fellow is a very long way from home. And his people are unlikely to abandon him here in this prison without an extreme reason. 

It’s a good thing Julian isn’t taking Quark's pulse anymore, because it accelerates.

Quark can’t keep the fear out of his voice, as he says, “What kind of doctor gets sent to prison? A Federation doctor, in a Cardassian prison…  I’ve heard about -- you’re going to harvest my organs aren’t you! I’m using those!”

“What?!” Julian jerks his attention away from the device, alarmed at this outburst. “Of course not. My, but you jump to the most absurd conclusions sometimes.” He considers with a boyish tilt of his head. “Although as I recall, Ferengi have three kidneys, so I expect you could spare at least one --”

“Very funny.” Quark clutches the blanket tighter around him. “But the Federation takes care of their own. They prize doctors. You wouldn’t be here unless --”

“Unless I was some bloodthirsty criminal they’re happy to let be Cardassia’s problem? No no… Nothing I did anyway. The Federation discovered my secret, so I went on the run, got caught treating resistance fighters on a border moon... But it was my parents who had me genetically enhanced as a kid. ‘Accelerated critical neural pathway formation’ -- so you see,” Julian says with a wry twist of his mouth, “you are indeed in very good hands. My very existence may be dangerous according to the Federation, and technically I never received my medical license, but… you have nothing to worry about. I am an excellent doctor. And not a bad mechanic, in a pinch… There!”

Julian reconnects a couple wires, and the device gives off cheery beeps once again. He beams with pride. “Reverse engineered it by reconfiguring a dermal regenerator I built from scrap -- after sealing you up first of course,” he says and waves it over Quark once more.

“Where’s Odo?” It comes out in a small whine, and Quark is embarrassed how pathetic he sounds. Genetic freak or not, he’d feel a lot better about whatever the human means to do to him if Odo were here.

His tone catches Julian’s full attention again, away from whatever personal information the device is stealing from Quark. “He’ll be back soon. I promise. He’s barely left your side. Beside himself with worry this entire time.”

“He did? He was?” Quark feels like a lobeling, completely dependent for profit on his caretakers and helpless otherwise. Julian’s soft words bloom within him, but alongside them disbelief flickers:

Why? 

Why would Odo care so much? Saving Quark is one thing, as repayment for Odo’s own near death experience, but continual worry ? Over someone who, once he heals, will go right back to the profitable activities that Odo despises him for?

Although Quark isn’t so sure what he’ll do, anymore. 

“You should have seen what he was like when he thought you were -- well,” Julian says. He readjusts some settings then goes back to waving the device over Quark. “As established, you won’t be going to the Vault of Eternal Destitution after all. You’re lucky he was able to find me in time -- or rather Garak, who knows of my talents.”

The Cardassian’s name, that's what Odo said. There’s a pressure in Quark’s throat that seems to climb up his face and into his sinuses. To his horror, he’s about to cry in front of this stranger. He’s scared, disoriented, and so very tired. As relieved as he is for a moment of consciousness to assess the situation, the uncertainty of everything wears him out. He clenches his face and blinks his eyes, until the overwhelm ebbs.

“Quark… I swore on the Starfleet Physician’s Oath to do no harm,” Julian says gently as one would to a nervous customer. “I promise on that Oath once more: I only wish to help you.”

“Starfleet,” Quark scoffs. “And where did that get you?” 

But he lets Julian continue his scanning; what else can he do? 

Only hope that Odo will return soon.

---

“You said he lost that blood forever, we couldn’t put it back in him…” Odo says.

“Not the same blood, no,” Julian says, with the patient voice of someone who has explained this before. “Which is why we had to do what we did.”

“And now he needs more??”

“No, the septochloramine compound accelerated his body’s natural healing process into overdrive, exactly as intended. Which is why the extra food is very important.”

“Because…”

“Because bodies convert food into blood and tissue and energy for repair.  Well, most bodies. Present company excepted. Say if I had access to a lab, I’d love to study your physiology some day --”

“And his internal structures that collapsed…”

“Bones.”

“He’s still broken , Julian.”

“Yes he has fractured ribs, as well as severe contusions, damaged muscles -- all of this takes time to heal. Medications aren’t instant. If I had access to Federation technology… But he will heal.”

Julian and Odo speak in hushed tones outside the cell, but like many aliens, they misgauge the capability of Ferengi hearing. Quark isn’t about to correct them, though; they’ve been reluctant to reveal just how severe his injuries are to him, as if Quark himself weren’t living with the consequences every day. These secret conferences of theirs confirm that recovery is progressing… or at least that Julian tells Odo the same comforting lies as himself.

More concerning are the peculiar questions that Odo always has for the young doctor. Basic things like not understanding that when a fluid or body part becomes separated, it’s often not feasible to rejoin it with the whole. Or Odo’s consistent near panic that two weeks after the attack, Quark hasn’t magically healed back to full health. It's not like they have access to a bioregenerative chamber. 

With the science experiments he was part of, is Odo really that far removed from basic humanoid biology? Maybe he’s one of those savants who overspecialized in one area at the expense of pre-apprentice level knowledge? 

Quark’s not sure what to make of it, other than that it’s worrisome that his primary caretaker seems so ill-equipped to do so. Luckily, though Odo hovers over Quark almost constantly, leaving only to retrieve supplies if he can help it, Julian also visits often. Quark has difficulty with even basic movement, let alone all the wounds to dress, medication to administer, and symptoms to assess, so Odo would need the assistance even if he had a clue what was going on. 

Julian, for his part, betrays no hint that he has any motive in this affair other than aiding in Quark’s medical care. Humans are a strange breed, and though Quark's never had a reason to trust them, he has no other choice at the moment… 

(Garak, to Quark’s great relief, has not been left alone with him… although Quark’s not sure if this has to do with a sensible distrust on Odo’s part, or Garak’s apparent boredom with the whole matter. His entire interest in visiting seems to be to share company with Julian, though Quark suspects this may be an act to cover for his real intentions.)

Quark performs some loud yawning noises; he had been pretending to sleep to better eavesdrop. “Is that dinner I smell? Terrible customer service. Stop dawdling, chop chop!”

Julian’s laugh echoes from the corridor. “Prince Quark demands service! Yes your majesty, may you bestow generous mercy upon your humble servants.”

They stroll into the cell. Odo holds two steaming bowls of stew. Quark’s stomach growls as ferociously as a targ.

“Whatever,” Quark groans. “I’m hungry , and you’re over there chit-chatting about who knows what while I’m eating myself alive! It’s rude!”

“You are not. Did I ever tell you about the time I extracted a four foot long tapeworm from a rail-thin Bajoran xenobiologist? A pet that had gone missing while on the run from Cardassian troops! Now that was a man eating himself alive, and it took my expert surgical skills to avoid perforating his bowel --”

“Excuse you! Didn’t your Moogie ever teach you manners? Or don’t hoo-mans -- ow!” He doesn’t register Julian injecting him with his nightly dose of whatever concoction until it’s done. (Hyposprays are too difficult to sterilize and refill here, and not all the medications Julian insists upon can be taken orally)

As often happens between them, Quark is so caught up with the ridiculous things Julian says that he’s distracted from the indignity of the doctor poking and prodding him. Which might be intentional on Julian’s part, come to think of it… 

“There go you! Enjoy the banquet, your majesty.” Julian winks, and Quark scoffs in his general direction as he leaves.

Odo sets the bowls down beside Quark and dips a spoon in one to feed him. 

Quark huffs. “Hold on, I’m not a complete invalid --”

“Of course you are!”

With altogether too much grunting, Quark attempts to sit up, propping himself up first on his less-stabbed side, and then carefully pushing up with his hands to avoid straining his torn intercostal muscles. 

But like every other time he tries, he fails.

“ Ow! It’s like Leck’s knife is jabbing me all over again,” Quark whines.

“You idiot, you don’t have to do that. I can use the spoon --” Odo tries to help him lie back down but Quark swats his hands away with a hiss.

“I WANT to feed myself. At the very least. I'm not some lobeling on his first set of ears, Moogie chewing every tube grub to mush and spitting it down his throat --” With another yelp, Quark attempts a different angle: “OW, yeesh not like that either…”

“No, you are injured, and you shouldn’t strain yourself.” Odo sighs. He loops an arm around Quark’s shoulders and helps him sit up anyway.

“I’ve been -- resting -- all day -- and I’m BORED. No thanks -- to you…” Quark is winded from this small amount of effort, so he takes a moment to catch his breath, a death grip on Odo for support.

“Hmph!”

It’s a familiar pattern between them by now: Quark whines about every little ache and inconvenience, then Odo shoots back just as irritably, even while waiting on him hand and foot.

“I still don’t understand how you talked Bertho into giving you two servings. I’ve been wearing her down for years, and she's never given in!”

“I simply reminded her of subsection four dash seven eight. One portion per prisoner, even for immobile inmates, so unless she wanted to deliver it herself --”

Quark attempts to bring the spoon of soup to his mouth and feed himself, an otherwise unremarkable task that has since become as elusive for Quark to achieve as a full consortium in tongo. 

“Yeah, yeah, so you've told me -- arrrrrrrgh!” Quark lets out a growl and throws the spoon across the room in his frustration. It hurts to bend forward and reach the bowl. It hurts to hold himself upright. It especially hurt to throw the spoon. Everything hurts, but the alternative is to be drugged all the time, and he’s so tired of it. 

Odo sighs and rolls his eyes. “Now what did that accomplish, hmm?”

Odo retrieves the spoon and rinses it in the running cave water, walking over to do so even though he could easily lengthen his arm to accomplish the same task. Come to think of it, Quark hasn’t noticed him shapeshift at all in quite a while, other than his nightly puddle in the dark.

“You’ve more than paid your debt to me!” Quark whines with rising tone and volume. “You don’t have to treat me like a helpless pauper! Your charity is as insulting as it is unnecessary.”

“Yes, because you’re so self-sufficient without me. Here…” 

“Wha-what are you doing?”

Odo sits behind Quark with legs outstretched on either side of his. He scoots his torso flush against Quark’s back. “Lean back.”

Fortunately, from this angle, Odo can’t see the way Quark’s face flushes. Quark slowly relaxes, not quite trusting this until it's clear he’s able to fully prop himself against him. Odo’s body lets him sit at an incline without using any core muscles. With the makeshift bedding underneath, it’s almost comfortable.

Quark releases a breath he didn’t know he was holding. He greedily slurps down a proffered bowl, hardly chewing in his haste. 

“Thish ish dishgushting ,” Quark says working his teeth through a tough chunk. “Next time bring me something good. Like tube grubs.”

Odo scoffs. “If you keep complaining, next time you can go hungry. See if you like that better.”

They go through this every time, but despite his threats Odo always brings him more. Quark’s appetite rages more than before -- ‘part of the healing process!’ Julian pipes cheerfully in his mind -- and he’s grateful that Odo supplies him with a second portion every meal. It’s the longest Quark has gone without a skipped meal at the prison.

Not that he can tell Odo that. They bitch and complain at each other in a familiar repartee, while steering clear of any of the more personal conflicts between them.

It doesn't matter how many bowls of soup you bring me, Quark had yelled at Odo, yet here they are. Quark's afraid it does matter, after all, because it's hard to deny he's falling harder than before.

He knows it can’t last between them, but in the meantime he may as well enjoy the benefits.

“Why not be a couch? If you can be a terrifying tentacle monster, surely you could be a couch right?” Quark says between bites of the second bowl. “With a luxurious fabric even. Lurian velour? Something cozy instead of that hard masculine --” He titters hastily. “-- uh muscular frame of yours. But you don’t even have muscles right? So why --”

“Eat,” Odo says.

He's stern in his instruction, but within him his liquid is a peaceful river, careening lazily along in its contentment. Quark has to agree with the goo’s sentiments. It’s oddly nice, to be here with Odo like this, despite the circumstances.  A certain level of physical intimacy has become necessary between them, albeit of a medical and often humiliating nature on Quark's part, but right now at this moment it feels a lot more like something normal. Domestic, even. Like cuddling, Quark's horrified to admit, and even more horrifying, he doesn't want it to end.

But the weight of everything Odo has done for him so far, without Quark even needing to beg for it (not that he could while passed out from trauma), plus the heaviness of all the unresolved baggage between them bears down on Quark.

(Would Odo do this for anyone? What's the limit of these acts of care? How unpleasant would Quark have to be until he gives up? How long can they ignore what will happen after Quark heals?)

“I meant it. What I -- what I did, in the rain,” Quark blurts out before he can think better of it. “You didn't think I meant it, but I did.”

Odo deserves to know, he thinks. But he's also testing the boundaries of their detente. As nice as this moment is, he can't trust it if Odo will bail on him the next time their arguments cut deeper than whether Odo can turn into a couch.

Quark's heart thumps so hard in his chest that he wonders if it reverberates through Odo too.

Odo is very still behind him. He stays silent, so Quark keeps talking:

“This is where you say ‘you're a highly erotic kisser Quark, but I’m such an uptight stick in the mud I still hated it’ or maybe ‘I wish I never shapeshifted a mouth at all, save those luscious latinum lips for a nice fe-male.’”

An indecipherable grunt from Odo is all Quark gets in response.

“Don't worry!” Quark says, hysteria rising with his voice. “I won't make the same mistake twice. So if you want a piece of this, you’ll have to kiss me yourself next time.”

A long silence, big surprise, while Quark tries not to hyperventilate. Finally, Odo mutters something indistinct like, “Is that so…”

“And what I said that night, I meant that too. Well, some of it. Not the part where I hate you. I think --” Quark swallows. Must be the meds making him sappy. Or it could be that it's easier when they’re not face-to-face. “Maybe you’re the only person in here that I don’t hate.”

Odo makes a sound like he's clearing his throat. 

Awkward tension stretches the moment. 

Finally Odo says, with an odd warble in his voice, “What about Julian?”

“Him.” Quark rolls eyes, not that Odo can see this, but the derision must come through in his voice, because Odo lets out a little hmmph . “Annoying is what he is. Genetically enhanced case of motormouth.”

Odo's goo dances and lilts in its music. “As if either of us knows or cares what an Earth prince is, bah!”

“Did you hear him? A tapeworm and bowels! His idea of dinner talk!” Quark clucks his tongue a few times to emphasize his point. He hazards a glance back in time to see the corner of Odo's mouth tug upwards. 

That's all it takes for them both to bust out into laughter. 

Unfortunately the carefree moment is ruined by the Klingon pain sticks stabbing through Quark’s chest. His laughter quickly morphs to pained yelping.

“Ah - ah ahhh owowow -- Odo! This ow is your aahh ah fault!” Quark clutches his side and pants shallow breaths as he tries not to cry through the sharp pain. Further convulsions will only exacerbate the issue. “Look what you did.”

“Ssshh, shhh, Quark, okay, no more laughing.” Odo gently rubs Quark’s shoulders to soothe him. 

Odo gets him the pain medicine (though they’ve been weaning him off the high doses). Once Quark is calm, Odo spoon feeds him the remaining soup, and by the end weariness descends. Nestled against Odo, with the satisfaction of a full belly and the wool of the medication draped over him, he’s impossibly cozy.

“Tell me a story…” Quark says through his haze. He closes his eyes and wills Odo to stay here, just like this.

“Hmmm.. The Nausicaans caused all manner of unnecessary problems for everyone else in the dinner line today,” Odo grumbles. He loops his arms around Quark, enveloping him, and Quark snuggles deeper. “Unruly. Hmph!”

“You're telling me! When aren't they?” Quark mumbles. 

“The guards have been more negligent than usual, so I had to break up three different fights before anyone could get dinner…”

Odo launches into his daily complaints about the futility of enforcing order in this place, and other such drama from outside the cell. The longer they spend time together, the easier it is to provoke Odo into a tedious diatribe about something or other, streams of words gushing forth as if they had been dammed up for a long time without an outlet. It’s a far cry from the strange creature who would only say “no” and roar, when they first met.

The drone of it washes over Quark in a comforting buzz.

Maybe it's the floaty effects of the meds, or maybe it's wishful thinking, but just before sleep carries him away, Quark swears the smooth surface of Odo's strange lipless mouth brushes against the side of his head.

It’s nice, this moment with Odo, it’s so very nice. 

All the more so because he knows it can’t last.

---

As the healing progresses and Quark becomes more mobile, it’s pathetic how much it feels like a victory just to stand up and walk around. 

But he never ventures farther than the junction at the end of the hall. 

Once the tunnel risks potential through-traffic from other prisoners, his heart races and a cold sweat breaks out and he can’t take a full breath.

(What if he runs into Leck and Gurch? Or Brunt? Does Gaila know what happened? Does he care? Does Bilga still need him to get past the security system? What if Gaila expects him to uphold his “contract”? What if Quark doesn’t? What if Quark gets all the way to the Yard and none of the Ferengi are there? What if they left without him? What if --)

The prison traps him, his injuries trap him, but more than that his own mind sabotages what little freedom is available to him. As soon as he grapples his way back to the safety of the cell, he’s fine… Until the walls start closing in, until he’s sick of seeing only the same several people, until Odo leaves for the Yard after a spat, and Quark’s alone with only his own thoughts and regrets and worries.

But for all Quark’s progress and complaints, Odo never asks when Quark will stop hiding in the cell, never pressures him to get his own food now that he could, never mentions any of the Ferengi, never discusses anyone’s hypothetical plans to escape or not. 

Quark doesn’t bring it up either.

They don’t talk about their past disagreements. They don’t talk about what the future holds. 

They stay in the immediate present of mutual irritation, the lifeline of each other's company, and avoidance.

---

Another topic that Odo doesn’t talk about, despite Quark’s nagging inquiries, are Garak’s intentions, shutting down any further discussion. 

Julian only laughs at Quark’s insistence that his beloved friend is a spy or an assassin -- “Yes I suspect so! Fascinating man, isn’t he?” -- and promises if he discovers anything that affects Quark he’ll let him know. His judgement, however, is questionable at best. Whenever Garak accompanies Julian to his doctorly duties, they spend the whole time bickering about books, politics, anything and everything. Obnoxious. All the “my dears” between them would sound sarcastic, except that Quark is well-versed in Cardassian cultural practices, and suspects the arguing might be an indication of courtship… 

(On the other hand, Quark knows better than to ask questions he doesn’t want answers to. He tries hard not to see too many parallels between the duo and his own interactions with Odo.)

Then one day a threeway brawl between the Klingons, Nausicaans, and several Gorn calls both Odo and Julian to rush to the Yard, abandoning Quark mid-care. “Let them kill each other! Why bother,” Quark had said, but the two insisted on mediating the violence (Odo) and tending to the wounded (Julian).

This leaves Quark alone with Garak for the first time.

“Don’t leave yet, I have questions for you,” Quark says, sounding bolder than he feels, once Garak finishes rewrapping Quark’s bandages -- work left undone by the hasty departure. “I know why Odo helped me. I saved his life once.”

Garak’s eyeridges rise with mild curiosity. “He’s not invulnerable then? Interesting…”

Quark hisses, but Garak waves him off -- a joke, sure, very funny. “And the so-called doctor… Always strange those types, no accounting for backwards hoo-man values.”

“Such sentimentality is a dangerous vice, I agree.”

“He doesn’t want payment, fine, no skin off my back!” Quark throws up his hands, ridding himself of any debts there. “But you…”

Garak blinks innocently, that insidious smile plastered on his face. “Me? Oh I’m a humble tailor, paying my debts to the state. I was accused of simple tax fraud, nothing mysterious about that.”

“Uh-huh…I’m aware you’re the one who obtained everything. All that medicine can’t have been easy to procure, for example. Would take a skilled negotiator, cashing in precious leverage he could have used for himself…” Quark narrows his eyes at him. He doesn’t believe Garak’s act for a second. “What do you want from me?” 

“I’m simply supporting the roseate whims of my young doctor friend of course. A pretty face beguiles one’s better senses. I’m sure you can understand that.” Blink, blink. Smile.

Quark sighs. “I’d rather not have a debt hanging over my head for you to collect on later.” 

“A favor for the Constable then, no concern of yours…”

Quark waves his hands in a circle. “Even worse! If it's a favor for Odo, then it still falls back on me. What kind of trouble did you con that rube into?” 

“Simple friendship!”

“I’d prefer to cut out the middle man, keep it simple.”

“Fine… if it would put your mind at ease, I suppose…Hmm…” Garak pauses. He taps one finger on his temple like this wasn’t all part of his plan. “Ah, I know! You have access to the main office sometimes, don’t you?”

“The guards have been hounding me to organize the prison’s finances… I’ve kept up the woozy, medically unstable act any time when they come around, but that won’t work forever.”

“In that case…” Garak takes out an isolinear rod from his pocket. 

Quark squints at it. “Well?! You’re gonna have to explain.”

Garak’s smile creeps wider across his face.

---

“It’s been weeks ! I have to see him.” The way Gaila insists makes it sound like an old argument.

“He’s still healing. I won’t have you distressing him,” Odo says in a hushed voice, just barely audible from down the hall, near the turn to the next corridor. 

Gaila matches Odo’s volume, but he must know it’s loud enough that Quark can hear from the cell, even if Odo doesn’t. “How do I know you actually want him to get better? How do I know you’re helping him heal? For all I know you’re holding him captive in your cell. None of us have seen or heard from him this entire time. One word, that’s all I ask.”

“It’s our cell, and I’m not letting you pass. Leave .”

“I understand that extenuating circumstances have tarnished any possible trust between us. I regret that. But I’ve done what you asked,” Gaila talks faster as he goes, determined to say his piece. “We went along with that hoo-man’s crazy plan to save him. I’ve been patient. My crew is anxious!”

“ Your crew . Hmmph,” Odo says, deadly cold in a way that has Quark shivering. 

“We extended our timeline, at great personal cost I might add. They keep asking when we can proceed; as DaiMon, they look to me for answers, and I don’t have anything to tell them.”

“They’re the reason he’s in this situation. So forgive me. If I’m not. Sympathetic . To your. Concerns.” 

Each phrase is rougher and deeper than the last, punctuated with a growl, and each sound reverberates from a slightly different direction down the hall. Quark has been at the other end of Odo’s intimidation himself, so he can imagine the way Odo looms at Gaila.

“Uh-understood.” A rare moment of timidity from Gaila. There’s a long silence. “Promise me one thing. That if he asks, you’ll let him talk to me.”

“LEAVE,” Odo growls. The word reverberates through the cave hall loud enough that even a half-deaf Klingon blasting a full operatic cycle could hear. 

Fire rages within Quark, propelling him to his feet, as quick as he can… which is not very quick at all. But at least he can do that much without straining anything. He shuffles his way towards the hall, though he hasn’t entirely decided whether he means to confront Odo or Gaila. 

He just knows he’s furious.

One step into the hall and Odo is there steering him back inside the cell, with one hand on Quark’s elbow and the other arm around his back. 

“You’ve done your physical therapy for the day, now rest --” Odo soothes, as if he ignores it, Quark will play along.

“No! What was that --?”

“Nothing,” Odo says. For such a laconic man, he’s a terrible liar.

“Gaila! In the hall! You’re keeping me here like some sort of -- of -- like a pet slug in a terrarium. I need to talk to him! Let me go .” Quark shoves at Odo. The motion sends a cascade of pain through his upper body, and Quark grits his teeth against it. Though the attempt is weak, Odo releases Quark immediately.

Odo steps back from Quark, still talking in that soothing, patronizing tone. “No, of course not.  Gaila may be your cousin, but you can’t tell me you want anything to do with him, after --”

“He -- he didn’t attack me. It was the others. Gaila -- he’s family!”

“You forget you told me about rule number six: ‘never allow family to stand in the way of opportunity.’”

“But I heard him! He waited for me! And if he’s still planning to escape --”

“You can’t be serious. He’s still fraternizing with the same crew! With your would-be murderers!”

“I’m the one who was attacked, and now I’m the one who’s about to be left behind because of your scruples, so don't patronize to me like I don't know what I'm dealing with here--”

“So you’ll escape with them, and -- they’ll kill you next time!” Odo's voice breaks with anguish. His goo within him snaps with a twang, discordant. “I almost lost you, Quark. I can't lose you.”

Any doubts Quark had about Odo's sincerity or if he’s reading him correctly vanish.

It doesn’t matter what Quark did before he got here, or what he does after. Odo already thinks he’s the heartless, cutthroat criminal he wishes he could be, but it doesn’t matter. Whether Quark kills people (indirectly!) or betrays them, Odo will care about him regardless. 

Everything Odo has done since he found him in the shower has been out of a deep regard for Quark’s life, no matter what else he thinks about him.

Quark swoons towards Odo, but catches himself.

He wants to stroke the strange, smooth cheek of this strange, dear man. He wants to kiss away the sadness in his eyes, to hold his hand, to tease him when he gets worked up about injustices, to spend all their days together complaining and laughing and arguing and loving…

But he can't do that here.

“There's a lesser known Rule of Acquisition,” Quark says softly. “Two hundred forty-one. People can’t be owned, only rented.’ You have to let me go.”

Odo's goo churns within him. He stares at Quark for a long moment, then looks away. “After everything you can’t tell me you’re going to put your trust in them.”

“Of course I don’t trust them, but if they’re --  I can’t stay here forever.”

“They don't care about you.” Not like I do, goes unsaid. 

“I don't need them to!”

“They aren’t your crew! They’ve never been your crew!” Odo shouts, as if greater volume is more convincing.

“I know that!” Quark screams right back. The stone echoes. He’s breathing as heavily as if he tried running back to Ferenginar. He fumbles at the wall for support and props himself against it. Quieter, he says, “I know.”

Odo looms over him. “You lied to me. You said --”

“I was the cook. On the freighter, before all this. Not the captain, not anyone of any importance. I didn’t even know --” Quark cuts himself off. “It was a different crew, other than Gaila and Brunt. But not that different.”

Odo backs off, confused where Quark's going with this, but willing to hear him out.

“I always thought -- a deviousness to do what it takes to get ahead, a ruthless thirst for the Great River of Opportunity, ambition for more latinum than the Sacred Marketplace… that’s what it means to be Ferengi.” Quark clenches his fist in front of him as if snatching the profit for himself out of thin air. But his starry-eyed excitement fades. His hand droops back down to his side as his passion turns bitter. “Those guys? They’re no better than Klingons and without the so-called honor to justify it. They want blood, for no reason other than to watch it fall. Nothing but violent savages.”

“It’s justifiable in the name of profit. According to your rules.”

“No… No that's not --” Quark sighs. He tries to readjust the bandages wound tight around his torso, constricting him, trapping him, but gives up. He shrugs. “Did you know there aren’t any prisons on Ferenginar? No need. We’re not a violent people. Or I thought we weren’t… Sure, you try to cheat on a contract or you start a union, and the Ferengi Commerce Authority will seize your assets, ban you from business with other Ferengi, maybe sentence you to indentured servitude to pay off your debts…” Once Quark thought this was the worst possible fate; he knows better now. “But locking someone up and throwing away the key? Or killing off future potential customers? That’s for barbaric races; we’re better than that. We’re businessmen.”

“Perpetuating a war, selling the tools for other people to blow up millions -- that isn’t barbarism? That isn't violence?”

“Yes!” Quark screeches, the word slipping out before he can stop it. He covers his mouth. Odo is taken aback at that, but Quark can’t pretend any more. The truth bursts out of him like bloodspray from a wound. “I can’t do it okay! I never could!”

“Can’t do… what… exactly?” Odo says slowly.

Here’s where Quark can deny it, where he can harden his heart and be the Ferengi he should be, the one he wishes he could be.

”I didn’t know they were selling weapons, not for the first six months I worked on the ship. When I discovered it I -- I turned them in.” 

“You --”

“I was the snitch, and it backfired. Are you happy? Now you know the truth. Are you satisfied? Piles of latinum within my grasp, enough profit to buy the Divine Treasury, and I couldn’t do it. Where’s the ruthlessness, the deviousness? Where was my ambition? I always had this conviction that I’ve got what it takes, if only the opportunity presented itself. But I don't. Even now, I keep trying to fool myself, but I know I could never go through with it. So you see I’m not a Ferengi either. I’m nothing.”

Odo’s eyes are wide and soft. His hand twitches like he wants to reach for Quark, but doesn’t. Quark might fall apart if he did. “They arrested you. You followed the law -- but they convicted you!”

A bitter laugh escapes Quark before he can tamp it down. He massages his ribs at the strain. “Yes, because the Cardassian legal system is well-known for being fair and even-handed. The last champion of truth in the galaxy.”

“You’re… innocent.”

“Uh-huh, my greatest shame.” Quark can’t take the intensity burning on Odo’s face.

This time Odo does reach out. He squeezes Quark's shoulder and caresses the side of his neck with his thumb. Quark’s eyes flutter as he melts into it. “Quark you shouldn’t be here.”

“That’s what I've been telling you!” Quark catches a sob in his throat.

“We have to get you out of here,” Odo says. He looks to the door, as if contemplating a march to the surface without further delay. 

“And how do you propose we do that, hmm? Do you have a ship? Are you willing to do your part finally? Would you impersonate, I don’t know a guard, and steal a shuttle with me? You won’t even tell me why you were arrested.”

“No… I can't…” Odo withdraws his hand, and Quark lets him. “I’m guilty, I deserve to be here.”

“Yeah. That’s what I thought you’d say.” Quark squints against the hopelessness pricking at his eyes. “So unless you have a better idea, Gaila’s investor is my only ticket out. It’s either work with them, or stay here and test which is more inflexible: your stubbornness or this rocky grave.”

“You just said you couldn’t sell weapons. If you’re part of Gaila’s crew --”

“I know, I know. I don’t know what else I can do.” Quark buries his face in his hands. He tries to press the water gathering back into his eyes. Despair rips through him, and then --  a light flickers in the dark. A small seed of an idea snowballs, as the pieces slide into place. 

Quark drops his hands from his face, straightens up.

He pulls Garak’s isolinear rod out of his pocket and turns it over in his palm. 

“What’s that?” Odo looks at it, then back at Quark. “Where did you get that?”

Quark blinks a few times, thinking it through. It's a long shot, it probably won't work, and it doesn't solve all their problems, but... maybe… “What do you say we enact some justice of our own?”

Chapter Text

All the evidence was laid out in front of Quark in no uncertain terms, and it couldn’t be unseen. He couldn’t undraw conclusions, couldn’t pretend not to understand what it revealed to him, and what was most damning, most frustrating, was that he couldn’t sit by and do nothing about it.

Neat graphs showing upward trends. Lists of key contacts and drop off sites. Catalogues of products.

While the rest of the freighter crew disembarked on Bajor’s moon Derna for a delivery, Quark had been left alone on the ship. He kept himself productive and busy, at first. He purged the waste extractor tank, fed the vat of tube grubs, changed the water in the tank of mudbugs, and got ahead on prepwork for the next several meals. But the crew still hadn’t returned. They were taking an oddly long time for a simple sale of food products, and Quark was suspicious. It wasn’t the first time that actions of the crew didn’t quite add up with what he was told. 

So he had spent the extra hours hacking into confidential files on the main computer. The decryption codes were ones he had been working on for a while, with no luck... until the dark secrets of the ship’s true business plan were laid bare to convince even the most naive loyalist.

Projected casualties. Subspace codes for terrorists and guls alike. Coordinates for future battle sites. Disruptors, explosives, missiles.

All the crates of beets that made suspicious rattling sounds, the oddly heavy boxes of Bajoran cotton, the late night rendezvous in isolated regions -- incongruences that Quark had noticed from the beginning now all added up.

It was the tiny columns of numbers that did him in. Neat little stacks of them -- per location, per date, per regiment or cell -- accounting for those lost on each side according to products this freighter was selling, and the rate of return on investment. Each impersonal integer represented real people’s lives, all dead because of the men that Quark served beetle aspics and snail juice each day.

Quark didn’t know any of the people they helped kill. Hadn’t been to Bajor or Cardassia, didn’t have a stake in the conflict either way.

But spreadsheets and numbers -- those he understood.

Quark was an expert at talking himself (and others) into believing whatever he needed the truth to be at the moment. 

But evidence like this was unequivocal. Evidence like this couldn’t be ignored.

---

“I understand during your analysis of the data involved that you may come to the conclusion that we have conflicting interests. However, you would do well to know that I can be quite generous in rewarding loyalty.” Dukat spreads his hands wide on the viewscreen, that smarmy grin oozing whatever his version of sincerity is.

As long as that reward doesn’t involve kanar , Quark wisely does not say. He nods along, projecting cheerful acquiescence with ease. “I don’t doubt it!”

“We could have a very fruitful partnership, if you are smart enough to cooperate. And if you decide you aren’t…” Dukat infuses each word with insinuation, as if speaking in a code.  Which might mean there’s delicate information of some kind within the prison finances that Quark is meant to organize. Something Dukat can’t say outright, either over their communication channels, or in front of the guard flanking Quark.

“I think you know by now exactly how smart I can be,” Quark says with a wink. “We understand each other perfectly.”

“Good. Any failure of comprehension will be to your deepest regret.” Dukat smiles one last oily smile and then the viewscreen is blank. 

Derak shoves at Quark. It sends shock waves of pain down Quark’s body, but he’s able to ride it out without more consequence than prolonged whimpering. “You heard the man, get to it. And do it smart!”

“Something I expect you’re incapable of…” Quark mutters under his breath, in between pained moaning.

“What was that?” Derak growls.

“Nothing! Ready to get started.” 

The former prison warden was some bureaucrat that as far as Quark could figure never set foot at the prison moon and performed whatever minimal management was required from afar. He apparently retired sometime around Quark’s attack, passing the wardenship to Dukat. 

Who is, in turn, all too eager to delegate duties involving the prison budget to Quark.

Quark inserts the data rods that Dukat sent: spreadsheets, receipts, expenses indexed by vendor and category. Quark goes about matching them to the monthly budget. 

It doesn’t take long to see what the issue is. The actual receipts from the prison total barely half of the amount budgeted by the Cardassian Carceral Council in any given month. Even less recently -- ah, half the guards had been fired, with the ones who are left working longer hours for less pay. 

Quark sneaks a glance over to Derak. The guard has dark circles under his eyes and black grime under his fingernails. Quark wonders if he's had to take a night shift in the mines on an adjacent moon to support his family. 

This explains a lot…The way the guards have recently been more short-tempered in their interactions with prisoners, when they weren’t strangely absent.  The way they haven’t put up any fuss over Odo acting as prisonwide mediator. 

Quark flips further back in the financial history. Until Dukat took over, the prison used exactly the approved budget amounts. He digs deeper into the line item expenses -- no wait, these receipts are doubles… as are these… And that expense doesn’t match a saved receipt… And there’s absolutely no way they’re spending that much on food each month!

Dukat’s insinuated warning makes a lot more sense now.

Derak’s eyes have glazed over from where he’s supposed to be supervising Quark to make sure he doesn’t sabotage their computer systems, or piss off Dukat, or whatever else he expects to accomplish by being here. In any case, he’s certainly not interpreting the information on screen that Quark is. 

Quark cracks his knuckles and rolls out his shoulders. Though his previous position was as a cook, this is the first chance he’s gotten to perform the time-honored tradition of cooking the books. Water down that budget category with inflated numbers. Add a dash of fake expenses charged, season them with forged receipts, stir up the real with the fake until they all dissolve together into one savory budget stew. 

Smells like legitimacy, tastes like profit. 

The extra funds Quark reroutes through fake vendors with fake accounts and several complicated layers of corporate structures, until they reach their final resting place in Dukat’s private account at the Central Bank of Lissepia. Quark’s garrulous former cellmate, Morn, had expounded at length about its sophisticated security measures and protection from foreign influences (like the Cardassian government). He had apparently been part of a failed heist there once, to Quark’s future benefit.

The size of the account has grown significantly since Quark last checked it.

This is the same account that Quark set up for Dukat to absorb extra income from Terok Nor: payments from private merchants to “rent” Bajoran labor crews, docking fees from Orions to store smuggled goods on station, various bribes, and any funds that Central Command didn’t need to know about. 

Cardassians may be meticulous about compiling and organizing their files, but byzantine levels of bureaucracy also mean they’re often too overburdened to review anything in detail. Nothing like the Ferengi Commerce Authority, where liquidators have personal incentive to uncover cheats. Despite the fun of the challenge, Quark’s own personal incentive with his role in this otherwise exciting embezzlement is conflicted, just as Dukat predicted. 

There is one short term benefit he can probably slip by Dukat, regardless of any promises for “rewards.” With one eye on Derak, who has now slumped against the wall softly snoring, Quark opens the cafeteria replicator program and increases portion sizes. It will wear out the replicators faster, and require more input matter, but at least that’s not an expense that will reflect back on Quark in the near future. 

He doesn’t mess with the shoestring maintenance, guards, or security -- more comfortable living conditions would be nice, but any lapses in security are in his best interest as well.

All in a day’s work…

Quark fingers Garak’s isolinear rod in his pocket. 

Access to the main computer is Quark’s real personal incentive in this, although the risk factor is considerable.

But Quark doesn’t know when he’ll next get this chance.

Derak snuffles a few times, sound asleep.

Rule 62: The riskier the road, the greater the profit… 

Quark leans in closer to the screen in an attempt to obscure it from Derak, should he wake up. He inserts the rod. 

The screen goes blank. 

A moment of panic. Did he break it? Was all his fretting and scheming for nothing? The other Ferengi will kill him for it, Garak will kill him for it, he’ll never be trusted in the office again, he’ll get banned from future computer work… 

Then the Cardassian emblem brightens the screen, its pink and green curves a reassurance that maybe Garak’s rod wasn’t a virus. 

Quark holds his breath. 

Bits of the emblem fade away. The color drains to black. A partial silhouette flashes then disappears.

Data menus spiral out from the center, a whirlpool of colors and light like a wormhole opening to otherwise inaccessible space sectors across the galaxy. 

Quark, cyber explorer, dauntless or just plain foolhardy, flies through.

He’s in.

---

“This is it, cousin, we’re finally doing it,” Gaila said with a grin. He hesitated before clapping a hand on Quark’s shoulder. It’s the first time they’ve seen each other since the attack, about a week ago before Quark was recruited back to the office. 

“I can almost taste the latinum!” Quark said, but had trouble infusing as much enthusiasm into his lies as normal. “I’ve got to say, I’m a little surprised you all didn’t leave while I was -- that you’re still here…”

Gaila’s hand was featherlight where it rested, like he was afraid to apply a normal amount of pressure on Quark. Gaila hadn’t questioned Quark’s request to meet in the privacy of his cell, or his insistence on keeping the other Ferengi away from him, he had simply shown up at Odo’s begrudging word. The touch seemed to reassure Gaila, as a confirmation of Quark’s ongoing existence, though for Quark it was heavy with expectations of fraternity. 

“I’d be lying if I said it didn’t cross my mind.” Gaila shrugged. “Lucky for you a couple of Hagath’s other crews didn’t work out, so he needs us again. But do you realize what a month of lost profits in our business is worth? More than a ten point drop in Slug-o-Cola stocks, I’ll tell you that.”

“I have some idea.” Quark did a couple quick calculations. He’d seen the profit margins in the past, and a month’s worth was not an inconsiderable sum. This is apparently what his life is worth to Gaila. He’s not sure if he should feel flattered or offended. Though he supposed most Ferengi wouldn’t value him at more than a handful of slips at the moment; he had the scars to prove it. “Blame your crew for the delay, not me.”

“About that…” Gaila’s grin wavered as he scanned over Quark. Quark knew despite his ongoing recovery, he was still too thin and brittle-looking, and all his movements telegraphed the pain he aimed to avoid. 

Gaila drew in a sharp breath, his eyes pinched with something like concern, and for one strange moment Quark thought he was going to apologize. 

Quark frowned. “Uh-huh. If you’re going to tell me we’re all one big happy crew in this together you can shove that out your ear.”

“No I -- I have a confession,” Gaila said in a low voice. 

“Don’t tell me your ship’s not coming!”

“The rest of the so-called ‘crew’ isn’t coming. Gorch, Leck, Bilga… They never were.”

Gaila didn’t mention Brunt and neither did Quark.

“What? You mean --”

“Not that they’ve figured that out of course. Which is the problem. Oh they’re useful allies in our present predicament, but not exactly a suitable talent set for our line of work.”

“They’re not?”

“We need a crew that’s ruthless, sure, but also perceptive. Shrewd. Let’s face it, those guys wouldn’t be in here if they had a few more lobes between them. Not like you and me. This is a high risk, high reward business, and I for one don’t aim to get caught ever again.”

“Yeah… Me neither.” Maybe that was an apology, or the closest Quark could expect, from Gaila. “Anyway, I  asked you to come here because I know how we're going to make a quiet escape. Memorize these numbers…”

---

A map of the prison’s functional underbelly glows in front of Quark. 

Symbols color-coded by utility intersect and overlap throughout the labyrinthe tunnels. He finds the docking bay and sets a wipe to the geo-tracking, bioidentification, and locking systems of any shuttles currently docked -- first task done. 

Then he filters out everything but the security systems of the prison itself. He adds a code to the access panel settings. One eight digit sequence that he can punch into any door panel is now all that lies between Quark and open space.

He sits back as the reality of what he just did sinks in.

He didn’t expect it to be this easy. 

Quark was sure that the rod would turn out to be a hoax, meant either to entrap or trick him, but curiosity and desperation (and no less than seven veiled threats from Garak) led him to try it anyway. Instead, layered within Garak’s roundabout explanation of what he needed from Quark, the rod is exactly what he implied it would be -- a skeleton key to Cardassian cybersystems. 

Now for the trickier part. 

Quark scrolls through the coding configurations of the security system, getting a sense of how it fits together. Hacking software isn’t too different from lockpicking hardware, and both are core skills for any self-respecting, well-educated Ferengi. Or at least It’s always easier to break something than fix it… Ah there, that should do it -- he crosses the digital wires of two strands of computer code that are absolutely not meant to tie together and then locks them through a different eight digit sequence.

It’s this second sequence that he told Gaila would be their ticket out.

A trap, though one he’s now second guessing. 

The second sequence when punched into the doors should overload the system. Components should explode or at least malfunction, buzzers should sound, and the culprit will be either reassigned to a separate prison or secured in solitary or worse. Then, Quark will use the first code to sneak out by himself. He’ll slip away alone on a shuttle in the middle of the night, and from there, the Great Material Continuum will provide. 

His attackers will be punished, Quark will be free to make his fortune, and none of them will sell weapons ever again.

A gnawing sensation in the pit of Quark’s stomach grows, however.

Gaila risked a lot in order to wait for Quark. He’d also been quick to reassure Quark that he wouldn’t have to speak or see the other Ferengi ever again, that it’d be just him and Quark, hiring a new crew together. Full partners in their future endeavors. 

It doesn’t seem right to punish him now.

Unless Gaila was lying to him.

Was it Gaila’s choice to wait, or was there an issue with Hagath anyway? Surely there are easier ways to find new employees than a prison break... Combined with the fact that Hagath “lost” several crews so recently (Quark didn’t even realize he had others in his employ) it all adds up to be rather worrisome -- like they’re interchangeable and thus disposable. Maybe Gaila was stuck here regardless of Quark’s condition.

There’s also the fact that Gaila could be telling Quark whatever he knew he wanted to hear. If Gaila so easily uses and discards the other Ferengi as needed, what’s stopping him from doing the same to Quark? He manipulated him into the job to begin with, he’s manipulated Quark all their lives, so how is he manipulating him this time?

On the other hand, the relief in Gaila’s eyes at seeing Quark in the flesh, battered and bruised but undeniably alive, was genuine. Quark’s sure of it. Gaila plays his tongo cards close to his chest, but he usually hides emotion rather than fake it.

Quark is lost in his thoughts when --

KA-BOOM

Quark doesn’t hear the sudden noise so much as feel it thud through his chest. Derak wakes with a start. He jumps to his feet, whipping a disruptor around.

“Whoa, whoa!” Quark turns around. He blocks the screen with his body, and with one hand attempts to click back to the accounting program blindly. “Put that thing down.”

A crashing sound from far away reverberates through the stone. Sound doesn’t carry well through the tunnels and usually insulates the activities of what’s happening elsewhere -- to Quark’s eternal consternation, as eavesdropping is impossible anywhere but the Yard or immediately down the hall from a conversation. So for them to hear this means it’s a major issue.

Alarms sound, rather belatedly considering the severity of the noise.

“Out of the office,” Derak barks, still waving the disruptor at Quark. “Gotta lock up and deal with whatever the hell you people did this time.”

“Wasn’t me, I’ve been here the whole time!” Quark says, still moving the cursor towards where it needs to go. Though Derak’s plenty distracted. “Slaving away for your boss . How about -- Gul Dukat might not take so kindly to delays. This could reflect poorly on your judgement. What if you leave me here to finish up? The computer locks me out of anything interesting, you made sure of that when we started..”

And… there . Quark swallows and steps aside. To his relief, spreadsheets fill the screen.

Derak glances at it, but more crashing pulls his attention. With a growl and a rough grip on Quark’s shoulder, he manhandles him back into his seat. Quark whines at the shockwaves of pain that radiate through him. His patheticness, fortunately, has the benefit of satisfying Derak’s current appetite for cruelty.

“Remember I’m the one that has to deal with you every day. Keep to scurrying around in your number maze like a good little vole, or I’ll make you regret it.”

“Heard -- loud -- and clear! S-sir,” Quark gasps through the stabbing in his shoulder.

One last slap to the upside of Quark’s head for good measure, then Derak is off to go deal with whatever the hell that is.

---

An unexpected boon for Quark, despite the very real whimpers still escaping from his mouth. He grits his teeth, lets the pain dull for a moment, and then gets back to it.

Next order of business is Garak’s main task. He impressed upon Quark that he couldn’t leave without certain vital intel, and the guards, despite being giant blockheads, had just enough paranoia not to let Garak anywhere near a computer… Although really Garak was cunning enough that shouldn’t have stopped him, in Quark’s opinion; more likely Garak needed someone else to take the risk. Somehow it’s always Quark that gets stuck with the shit work.

Quark recites the list of names Garak told him under his breath and flips through the prisoner directory.

Lief Garon … Nausicaan arrested for the murder of a Cardassian council member. Lorn … Lurian arrested for murdering a ranking member of a Cardassian political party. Greska … Klingon who apparently murdered, yup, a Cardassian bureaucrat of some regard… It goes on in the same vein.

Quark downloads the requested inmate files onto the isolinear rod, though he notes a very distinct pattern. None of the accused assassins have any motivation, according to their files, for killing their particular Cardassian targets, nor any previous association with each other. They’re also exceptionally stupid, getting caught with the knife or bottle of poison or bomb remote in hand, leaving no question to their guilt. There’s a common thread to the targets, however. They’re all associated with a particular strain of Cardassian politics…

Quark shakes his head as if the motion will physically dislodge any of the information from sticking. He doesn’t need the Obsidian Order after him to tie up loose ends.

---

Some yelling down the hall, but no further explosions.

Garak’s task complete, Quark goes back to the financial data. He copies the latest expense reports over to a folder in the computer database and encrypts it with a couple of his own special codes. He takes a few budgets from past months, highlights the obvious cheats, and also moves those to the folder. After a pause for consideration, Quark saves several of Dukat’s tax returns with corresponding documentation from his previous visit in the folder as well. 

A bit of Quark’s own essential intel.

---

When he’s done, Derak still isn’t back, and the Gaila issue nags at him.

Quark pulls up his own prisoner file. 

He does a double take at his intake photo: the man staring back at him has a bit of a smirk on his mouth, healthy unmarked skin, and even the remnants of some eyeshadow. It’s the picture of a man who’s cocky enough to think that he’ll find a way to wriggle out of this situation unscathed. It unsettles him -- this person that he used to be, that he no longer recognizes.

The charges, however, are no surprise:

Colluding against the Cardassian Union. Aiding and abetting terrorism. Providing material support for enemies of the empire. Selling of weapons of mass destruction. Etc, etc.

This is followed by detailed lists of specific terrorist attacks, dates, locations, and casualties, with information on the weapons used connecting them back to the Ferengi freighter. It’s all the evidence that he gave the Cardassians on Gaila and the rest of them, except attached to his name instead. He scans the information with little interest; also unsurprising is that there’s no reference in the file to the contract he signed giving him both immunity and reward money for his testimony.

Then his eye catches on a detail:

Captain and sole proprietor of Frek’s Freighting Company. Coerced and manipulated Ferengi crew into [cross-reference link] listed criminal charges.

The cave walls close in on him, reducing his entire world to the black-and-white of the words flashing betrayal into his increasingly distraught brain. 

He dives deeper into the evidence. There are documents listing Quark as captain, non-disclosure agreements preventing the crew from revealing the weapons mission to anyone without his permission, computer files on weapons bearing Quark’s electronic signature… All easy to fake, and even on short notice it wouldn’t take that long, Quark figures, but then there are the crew testimonies: 

“We could have made plenty of profit off of food distribution, like our original manifesto,” Brunt says to the camera, “but no, Quark wanted more.”

“I provided the start-up capital, yes that’s true,” says Hagath, “but the business plan was under Quark’s discretion. All I knew is he paid good dividends; he never told me how.”

“I didn’t want to sell the Bajorans cases of ten-fourteen CRM blasters at the Jeraddo rendezvous,” Krog says. “But Quark threatened that it was a violation of my contract to disagree with him. I had no choice.”

A rushing in Quark’s ears almost drowns out the lies every crew member tells against him. His fault… blackmailed me… I didn’t know… his orders… Quark’s fault… his decision…

He only plays ten seconds or so of each testimony, clicking on in a daze without reading the video titles.

Gaila’s face pops up, rounder and healthier than it is now. The scar across his nose is fresh. 

“Yeah uh… he’s family…” Gaila nods at something someone’s saying off-screen. He’s looking everywhere but the camera and keeps rubbing at his nose. “Uh-huh. Right, my name is on a lot of official documents as DaiMon, but he was the one uh… That’s right, he was running the show… He wanted me to take the hit if we got uh, if we were caught, but uh... Yeah he double-crossed all of us.”

The rushing turns to a pounding in Quark’s ears. Gaila doesn’t deliver his confession with quite the same conviction as the others, but it hardly matters. The result is the same.

“I can’t believe it! I betrayed you first!” Quark shrieks at the screen, as if the video clips will respond to him. “Or I thought I did! This is some underhanded revenge alright! Or was this your plan all along? Was I HIRED as the fall guy? ‘A family favor,’ I should have known!”

In a fit of pique, he deletes his entire file, all the evidence and all the betrayal zapped from the database.

“If I had kept my big mouth shut…” But that was never an option, not for Quark. “I always admired your deviousness but -- see if I ever deal with you again. You’ve made a fool of little cousin Quarkie for the last time!”

Quark slams a fist on the desk. 

A loud boom rattles through the stone. 

He does a double take at his own hand, before realizing it came from a different part of the prison, like the others.

Maybe it was all Hagath’s idea. Maybe they planned this only after he betrayed them. Maybe Gaila had, at first, been trying to insulate him from the risk, before it all went wrong.

Maybe it's Quark's own fault for not being as cunning as he thought he was. He had told Gaila that he discovered their secret weapons business. He went to him directly, perhaps hadn't hid his concerns about it as well as he thought, and this had given Gaila all the time needed to put measures in place for Quark to fall on his own bat'leth, so to speak.

But it doesn’t matter. Quark can never work with him again. Not that he ever trusted Gaila, he taught him better than that, but for some stupid, short-sighted reason Quark still thought there were some lines you didn’t cross. 

These recursive layers of betrayal -- ironically, it’s all rather Cardassian.

Most of the time, Quark lives for the game -- the risk and thrill of it, the schemes and dreams, the challenge -- but not like this. Not the constant vigilance even among people supposed to be on his team. Quark doesn’t care what the Rules say or what kind of Ferengi he “should” be. Not if it means putting up with stuff like this… What he wants is to get to know regular customers. To build profitable relationships, establish trade routes, make mutually beneficial deals. 

Not question every person that gets close to him to the point where he doesn’t have a single person he can count on not to betray him at first opportunity. 

Well, not every person.

Maybe there is one person he can count on.

---

More yelling and crashing sounds from elsewhere in the prison. It seems closer than it did before, but whatever. As long as the guards are busy, it’s not his problem.

A brief moment of hesitation, as Quark hovers over a particular inmate’s file. 

If this inmate wanted Quark to know about his past, he would have told him one of the hundreds of times Quark has asked… On the other hand, some confirmation that his own character judgment isn’t completely defective would be nice. 

Quark’s curiosity burns within him like solar plasma, and he has a rare opportunity right in front of him…

He’s never been great at impulse control.

Odo’ital, originally labeled “unknown sample” (Bajoran). 

Labeled, not named. Hmm.

Highly dangerous and volatile. Strategic potential. Do not underestimate. To be held at Raskor Detention Center until appropriate precautions can be developed for future research.

Quark does a brief scan of the rest, but there are no charges listed anywhere. No crimes tallied for even the thinnest justification for incarceration. In fact, it's like it's not discussing an inmate at all.

Unknown origins. Found in the Denorios belt, Bajoran System, in 2337 and shelved at the Bajoran Institute of Science. When the sample showed signs of life some years later (selected lab reports available), it was assigned to Bajoran scientist Doctor Mora Pol for seven years. Recent setbacks have made this untenable.

Quark blinks a couple times. Rereads the section. Found, shelved, assigned… The verbs don’t make sense to him. Sample, subject, it: neither do the nouns.

There’s a photo of a beige-filled beaker labelled Odo’ital in Cardassian, shortly after “discovery”.

Quark flips through a few reports from this Dr. Mora fellow, hoping to learn more about Odo’s history, something that would make any of this make sense with the man he knows. The language is dry and scientific, often beyond his comprehension, but a few selections jump out:

Sample refuses to shift any shape more complex than the beaker, though I know it is capable of more. Sample understands speech, but refuses adequate verbal response.

(Odo when they first met, saying only “no” and forming only the most basic impression of a humanoid…)

Cardassian directives (see lab report 146.89.41) rerouted Institute resources for several weeks, and Sample was more difficult to work with than usual upon return. Recommendation for shorter lapses between experiments. 

(Odo’s tendril reaching for Quark not to leave him, and Odo’s goo singing whenever Quark talked to him… Odo standing in the Yard, nodding stiffly at passersby…)

Electrical stimulation provided the motivation expected. Original humanoid shape remains elusive, although mimicry is exceptional with (reluctant) practice.

(“Faces are hard.” The guards zapping Odo with their electric disruptor-thingies and Odo’s fear as it lit into him...) 

Subject, sample, discovery, it, experiment…

(“You asked who I am. I don’t know.”)

A dark ugly weight in the pit of Quark’s stomach grows heavier and uglier with everything he reads. If this account is accurate, Odo has gone from the void of space to laboratory control to prison. He didn’t perform the experiments, but was instead the unwilling subject. The experiments didn’t cause his powers, they were because of them. Coercion and subjugation, beakers and cells, locked doors and restricted agency... What does that do to a person? 

No wonder Odo doesn’t long for freedom like Quark does; he’s never known it.

No wonder Odo is so mistrustful, so withdrawn, so misanthropic; he’s never had anyone in his corner before. If the file is correct, he doesn’t even have a family. There may not even be anyone else like him in the galaxy.

What “crime” could Odo possibly have committed that he’d feel such guilt over, in these extreme conditions? 

Quark skims through more lab reports, but he’s not sure how much more he can stomach. They’re more suited to especially interesting fungal growths or warp core innovations, than a stubborn grump of a man (with, admittedly, a few special abilities). Occasionally a bit of emotion or attachment does slip through in the reports (pride in Odo's accomplishments, worry about his assimilation, frustration often), but it's also clear there's no consultation with Odo regarding course of study. There’s definitely no consent for the electric “motivation” that the scientists insist necessary. 

Everything seems to hinge on this Mora guy. For years he's the main liaison to the Cardassians regarding the research, then suddenly he's out of the picture due to “recent setbacks.” 

Quark finds a link he skipped over near the beginning of the file.

A video. 

It's a party on Bajor, judging by the architecture. To the immediate right of the camera are a group of mixed gender Bajorans in plain tunics, taking notes on padds. Scientists. The rest of the crowd in the room is comprised of male Cardassians in military uniforms, with arms slung around scantily dressed Bajoran females. There's a buffet of food at the back, and bubbly drinks in every hand. Quark squints at the buffet, wondering how best to cater an event like this  -- a fusion of Cardassian and Bajoran foods, or some of each served separately? -- then someone steps into a clearing at the center of the crowd that catches his full attention.

Gul Dukat.

Behind him, in the crowd, is another Gul Dukat.

Two Gul Dukats.

The one in the middle stands there with his arms crossed and an uncharacteristic frown on his face. The second Dukat is laughing with a Bajoran woman cuddled up on him and pointing to the first Dukat.

Laughing Dukat says something to Grumpy Dukat and gestures to his neck ridges -- the audio is a bit garbled. (An investment in Ferengi microphone technology would not go amiss!) The crowd laughs along, but Grumpy Dukat grows even grumpier.

The ugly pit in Quark’s stomach expands to a black hole. He doesn’t have a good feeling about this. He doesn’t have a good feeling at all.

Laughing Dukat insists. There’s lots of gesticulation and that slimy grin Quark knows too well by now. Grumpy Dukat shakes his head, looking around at everyone watching him expectantly. His closed off body language is all too familiar to Quark. He’s distressed and trying not to show it.

The smile slips from the real Dukat’s face. He gestures to a couple of Cardassian soldiers who pull their disruptors out. Dr Mora darts out from the cluster of scientists. He spreads his hands wide and seems to be talking fast, an attempt to placate either the Cardassians or the fake Dukat or both.

Fake Dukat’s face hardens a second. A resignation dulls his eyes, or so Quark imagines. Then his neck stretches impossibly long, like a Larvian anaconda. The neck ridges flare and undulate alongside.

The crowd erupts. They point and clap and yell, jeering at Fake Dukat. Real Dukat laughs uproariously. He shouts something in approval. Whatever he says catches on, and soon the whole crowd is chanting at Fake Dukat in the middle. Fake Dukat swivels his wobbly head from high up on his ridiculous neck around the room. The absurdity of the sight has everyone laughing again, but Quark notices the panic in his eyes and the jerkiness of his movement.

The Bajoran female hanging on Real Dukat walks over to the fake one. She reaches out towards the undulating neck ridges with a look of fascination.

Fake Dukat doesn’t notice her. Not at first. 

As soon as she touches him, his head whips toward her, knocking her back into Real Dukat’s arms. There’s yelling from the crowd, everyone on their feet. Several of the Cardassian soldiers attempt to subdue Fake Dukat. 

Huge tentacles erupt from Fake Dukat, and now there’s no question who this is. 

The Bajoran women scramble out of the way, or try to. A couple of them catch crossfire from soldiers shooting wildly at Odo. Their bodies thud to the ground. Odo’s tentacles slap the disruptors away. He uses enough force that it also sends the soldiers themselves flying. 

Quark lost Dr Mora in the commotion, but now he appears near Odo with blood streaming from his nose. 

Dr Mora shoots a current of electricity into him. All of Odo’s angry flailing pauses as he lights up golden from within. When he fades dull again, one of the tentacles, in a very deliberate motion, sweeps through the crowd, until it reaches Dr Mora.

The microphone has no trouble picking up the loud crack of Dr Mora’s neck as it snaps.

Another loud crack and a stalactite crashes into the computer monitor.

Quark yelps. He rubbernecks around, surprised to find himself in the dingy prison office, alone. His heart pounds in his head. He feels dizzy. He grabs Garak’s isolinear rod out of the computer and shoves it in his pocket.

More dust falls from the ceiling and a crack rips up the side of the room.

Quark scurries down the hall as fast as he can (it’s more of a shuffle really), grabbing the wall as he goes for support. 

All he can think, as scrambles through the tunnels and his world crumbles around him, is Odo, Odo, Odo.

I have to find Odo.

Chapter Text

Quark’s heartbeat pounds in his head, as heavy crashes and bangs resound through the caves. He’s not sure what’s happening within him and what’s around him. His hands tremble as he grappels his way through the tunnels -- or is it the walls that are shaking?

He has to find Odo. 

He doesn't know where he’s going. He turns and twists and turns through passages. It’s been weeks since he ventured far from the cell, and even if he were thinking clearly, even if he knew where to go, he’s not sure if he’d know the way in these conditions.

A pack of Pakleds thunder past Quark. Yelling from everywhere. A stampede of Klingons head in the opposite direction. 

He has to find Odo. He doesn’t know where he would be. He doesn’t know where he is. 

He has to find him.

Several cracks snake the ceilings as he shuffles through. Dust shakes loose, coating him in its powder. A rock the size of a Rigelian mollusk bounces off his head, but fortunately it’s the only one he encounters.

The words from the lab reports race through Quark’s head. The  way those scientists talked about Odo, the way they treated him -- like just another curiosity to study. Quark's never really trusted scientists. Interest in inquiry purely for the sake of it is unnatural and only for those who lack all lobes for latinum. This only proves it. A businessman at least has a healthy respect for the potential agency of the people around him, whether he's exploiting them, competing with them, or wheedling money from them. There's no locking someone in a room and never taking into account how they might react to such treatment, how they might act against you if they get the chance.

Although… the testimonies from his former crewmates certainly didn't feel like respect. He threatened their business, he misplayed his hand, and they retaliated, sure. All’s fair in the strive for profit. Plus he's not so naive to think they were ever friends, not Gaila, not the ones he played tongo with or served centipede puddings or who sometimes charmed by his customer service patter. But it still cuts him deep, as much as Leck's knife did, or so it feels right now.

Everything Quark thought he knew seems in flux, so the walls might as well cave in at this point. 

It doesn’t change anything, what he’s learned. It doesn’t change anything at all, and also it changes everything.

A familiar voice calls his name. At first Quark thinks it’s one of the video clips still pulsating through his mind.

“Quark! Quark!” 

“Wha--” Icy fear stabs down Quark’s spine like an Andorian icicle. The sight of him knocks his breath out of his lungs for a moment. He gasps a bit through the constriction in his throat, before sputtering out, “You. ” 

“Quark you have to help me!” Brunt’s odious face is tear-streaked and greyish with rock dust. 

Quark scrambles backward, adrenaline putting distance between him and Brunt faster than his healing body normally could. Conscious thought trickles in enough to comprehend what he’s seeing and stop.

One of the walls has caved in, with the rockslide trapping Brunt’s right leg beneath it. He tugs at it, but he can’t get it loose. A few more rocks fall from the ceiling; staying put is a liability.

“You -- if you help, I’ll tell you -- we can all get out of here! Right now! Please - Quark - please, we need each other --”

The ice in Quark's spine melts, as rage boils over.

“I ought to smash -- you -- with this -- rock!” 

Quark heaves at a large chunk of wall nearby, with the intent to lob it at Brunt’s head, but it barely moves a centimeter for his effort. He digs into the rubble instead and lets his fury loose. Brunt screeches with satisfying agony, as if it actually were boulders being hurled at him instead of handfuls of gravel and dust.

“Please! Be reasonable! Ack -- pftooah -”

“No shut up! I hate you! You ruined my life! You almost got me killed!” 

(Several Orions pause to assess what in the green hell is happening in this hall, then decide it's none of their business and hurry on.)

Brunt tries to shield his ears from the onslaught, but this allows the tiny rocks to pelt his face instead. Dust coats his open mouth, and he sputters and spits through it. “Quark, let me blech talk -- stop BLECH doing ack that --!”

“You don't -- get to ask -- for -- favors… Whew.” 

Eventually the satisfaction of Brunt's blubbering doesn't seem worth the effort anymore. Quark slumps to the ground against the opposite wall, panting with exertion. 

Brunt wipes at his face and shakes pebbles out of his ear ridges. He spends far too long spitting gobs of saliva off to the side. It lands in thick gooey splats.  “Pftooo, blech, gach… Are you bleh done now?”

Quark is too busy gasping through pain to do more than wave a vague hand at Brunt. As the adrenaline fades, there’s stabbing through his torso and burning floods his muscles. It’s truly deplorable how often the consequences outweigh the results of his actions these days. Brunt can’t hurt him while trapped, and Quark apparently doesn’t have the strength to retaliate. Might as well hear out whatever pathetic drivel Brunt comes up with to justify himself, or at least until he regains the energy to move.

“Gaila is headed up to the surface. The explosions cut off some of the security --”

“What -- explosions?” Quark interrupts between labored breaths.

“Oh, Bilga’s sneaky little innovation, the impatient rat. Gaila’s been stringing the rest of them along for weeks because of you --” Fortunately, a withering glare is easy for Quark to accomplish, even in his compromised state. Brunt cringes. “So… th-they had the bright idea to detonate the transtatic whats-its and subwhatever conduits Bilga’s always blathering about… but the last one backfired, and Bilga… well… No more detonations from him.” 

That explains the kabooms, and the red alert for guards. “But -- Gaila?”

“When Gaila discovered what they were up to -- hard to keep explosions secret! -- he was ranting about a code, so Gorch punches the numbers he tells him into the next set of doors…”

The trap. Quark swallows. What timing. “And?”

“The whole thing also explodes. Sparks everywhere, fried components. An electric current shoots through Gorch, killing him… Next thing we know there’s tremors through the rock. The caves are falling apart, I’m trapped, Leck is who knows where, and Gaila of course has seized this rare opportunity to save his own neck.”

“Frinxing hell…” Quark’s sabotage to the security code wasn’t meant to kill anyone, but he can’t say he’s sorry about those two in particular. The real trouble is that it may have messed with some of the forcefield nets through the stone. The same faulty shielding that sometimes fails to keep the rain out may be what’s keeping this place structurally sound, and now it’s been compromised, because of him.

“But… even if the security system is down, there’s bound to be another hardlock before Gaila can get out. And I have what he needs…” Brunt with a devious grin, pulls out Quark’s set of lockpicking tools from his pocket. “Which means you do too, if you help me out.”

The tools last seen scattered on the shower floor, splattered with blood.

Quark shoves his sweaty palms under his armpits. He hardens his voice to keep it from shaking, though he doesn't quite succeed. “Any ship we’re on together, I’m tossing you out of the airlock first chance I get. I would rather us both die here than help you survive . ”

“Why -- you --!” Brunt’s face turns an odd purplish-orange as he fumes. “That’s a lie.”

Quark scowls. “I crossed you, you double-crossed me -- I know about that, by the way, the framejob. Both of us are punished for it, then you almost get me killed… now it’s my turn for payback. But here you are asking for charity, tsk tsk. The nerve!” Though Quark’s caught his breath, the pain is too bad to get up and leave just yet. 

“Not -- charity -- errrrgh! You pathetic ingrate! Do you really hate me that much? Woe-is-me, poor Quark, of course you ignore everything I did for you!”

“How hard did those rocks hit you?” Quark says in disbelief. Maybe if he braces on the wall, he can pull himself up and get out of here… slowly… “All you’ve ever done is make my life hell --”

“The -- blood!” Brunt blurts out. Quark flinches, but his subsequent bewilderment must show through, because Brunt shoves down his jumpsuit sleeve. “Look -- there! That hoo-mon’s junk heap of a dermal regenerator… And of course your pet monster didn’t tell you, of course not --”

“Don't talk about him like that.” Quark winces as he stands. He shuffles closer to Brunt, wary of a trick. There’s the ghost of a puncture wound in Brunt’s inner elbow.

“Look on your own arm. Do it!”

At Brunt’s strange urgency, Quark complies. He has an identical mark, though his is deeper. Of all the other sealed wounds with varying levels of scarring, this one never stood out before. “What -- what is it? What do you mean blood?”

“You lost too much blood. Gaila comes up to me blubbering about it in the middle of the night. ‘Oohh boohoo what am I going to tell my moogie? She’ll tell Quark’s moogie, and then I’ll never hear the end of it waaahhh he wasn't supposed to die!’ To think I used to admire him. He's really fallen far, hasn’t he?”

“I don’t understand.” No one ever dies from blood loss; it’s too easy to synthesize. Well, in any normal situation…

“Blood transfusion, that hoo-man’s idea, and your bodyguard let him.” Brunt looks as sickened at this as Quark feels, which is little relief. “A ‘hail mary’ the hoo-man said, whatever that means. Gaila gave first, but you were too greedy. Needed to suck us both dry.”

“You -- what?” Quark keeps looking between the little circle scars on their arms. “You -- I have your blood inside me?!”

“Disgusting isn’t it?” Brunt smirks. 

“Vile. ” Quark gapes at Brunt with fresh horror.

“Positively primitive, I told them.” 

“ Barbaric!” Quark agrees.

The revelation sinks in for a moment. 

“Of course, I should have guessed your freak boyfriend --” Brunt spits out the word like poison, while Quark's heart skips a beat. “-- wouldn't tell you. Had to make himself out to be your sole savior.”

He didn't want to lose me.  

And now because of Odo's care (and Julian, and Gaila, and Brunt unfortunately), Quark has the chance to leave him forever.

With a great heaving sigh, Quark digs through the rubble on top of Brunt. He clears away the smaller bits until he can see what the problem is.

“Wh-what are you doing?” Brunt says.

“What does it look like? I swear you’ve got grubs for lobes…” A boulder traps Brunt’s leg against the remaining bit of wall. Quark crawls to the other side of it and peeks through the gap he cleared. He looks Brunt in the eye. “Two things I want from you.”

Brunt’s head bobs up and down in a frantic nod, like one of those cheap toys at overpriced gift shops (the best kind).

Quark yanks Brunt’s leg forward and back. It barely budges. “One: you and Gaila get out of here and never sell weapons again. You get into, I don’t know, conning people into buying runabouts with faulty warp cores, or real estate on tribble-infested meteors in deep space, or uhhh stembolts. I don’t care.”

Brunt squints, but nods. Quark doesn’t trust that this agreement will hold any weight, but he has to try.

“Two… I never. See. Your ugly faces. Again.” Quark jerks Brunt’s leg around against the rock with each word, not being gentle.

Let them turn all that betrayal and backstabbing on each other in a drama worthy of a Cardassian repetitive epic; Quark wants no part of it.

“OW! Okay, okay! Fine! Yeouch. You drive a hard bargain --”

“I mean it. I walk into a bar, you get up and leave before your Samarian sunset changes colors. You hear a rumor I’m within five light years of you, and you warp to the next star system. Or you’ll have to deal with Odo, and you don’t want that.” One way or another, Quark can’t leave him behind, not now. “Got it?”

Brunt cries out at the rock biting deeper into his leg, but he nods. “Yes! Yes okay! I swear on my vault at the Ferengi Central Reserve -- I swear on every piece of latinum I’ll ever make -- I swear on my moogie, on Gaila’s moogie, on --”

“Leave mine out of it, you’ve done enough.” Quark rotates Brunt’s leg to the side, and it slides out from under the boulder. “Oh, and remember these numbers, should work.”

Quark tells a very disbelieving Brunt the real escape code he programmed.

Brunt limps down the hall a ways, before calling after him, “Goodbye Quark.”

“Also I don't want to hear your grating voice again either!” Quark shouts over his shoulder, not even turning around. 

More rubble and cracks line the tunnels since the start of their little conversation, and he’s got better things to do.

---

Several laborious twists and turns through the caves later, Quark is no closer to where he’s going.

He should have asked Brunt if he knew where Odo was. Of course then he'd have to wonder if Brunt was deliberately misleading him and if he should go the opposite way. Unless it was a double bluff… No, that wouldn't have helped at all.

“Odo! Oooodo!” Quark calls as he walks. It echoes off the walls. But Odo doesn’t have a Ferengi’s hearing, the caves don’t carry sound well, and the cracking and shouting elsewhere likely drowns him out.

It’s all feeling hopeless when he hears, “Quark! Over here!”

Julian lights up when he sees him. He’s holding hands with a harried-looking Garak. They’re both breathing a bit fast, like they’ve been searching the tunnels as well.

“Do you have the data?” Garak’s ice blue eyes penetrate with startling intensity. “Did you get it?”

“Yes, yeah I got the files. All right here.” Quark holds up the rod. “The door code is active now too. Very useful this rod of yours…”

Garak snatches it in one motion, and his whole body sighs with relief at the possession. 

“You’re welcome,” Quark says grumpily.

His hand is still outstretched; now that he knows what the rod can truly do, he’s reluctant to see it go. He should have driven a harder bargain, Obsidian operative or not.

“Thank you.” Garak inclines his head. “Now, we all must be off!”

“Wait!” Quark says. “We can't go yet!”

“This situation is the perfect cover, and there's no telling if we'll have a better opportunity to slip away unnoticed,” Julian says.

“But... Have you seen Odo?” Quark says.

“Back at the Yard, where everyone else is headed,” Julian says. Quark swivels his head around, but he's still disoriented. Julian points down the hall. “Two lefts, then a right that way.”

“As the dear doctor said, we must leave now . There’s no time for lengthy goodbyes!” Garak warns.

Quark nods. “Fine, but first I have to talk to him. His prisoner file -- I learned -- I can’t leave without him.”

“We can’t hang around at the shuttle dock, Quark,” Julian says.

“I’ll be right behind you! We’ll be right behind you,” Quark pleads.

Julian puffs out a breath, softening. “We’ll wait as long as we can, but…”

“Doctor, really, I will not jeopardize our freedom for two irritating nitwits, who reject basic self-preservation --”

Garak’s cut off by rocks crumbling from the ceiling, causing them all to jump back. With one last lingering look from Julian, the two of them head out.

“Doctor!” Quark calls after them. Julian never did charge him for his services. After everything Quark went through, he feels like he should at least say something. It all feels so maudlin though. Or maybe he should ask about the blood, but what does it matter anyway; he’s made his choice. “Good luck out there.”

“See you very soon, Quark,” Julian says firmly.

And then they’re gone.

---

By the time Quark gets to the Yard, everything hurts, and his heart races. Not that he was ever in peak physical condition, but since the attack even a stroll down his own corridor counts as exerting himself. However long he’s spent wandering the tunnels is entirely too much for his present levels of endurance.

The Yard is a dizzying cacophony of shouting inmates, yelling guards, and echoes of thudding rocks. Everyone seems to have had the same idea to gather in the widest open space, rather than get trapped or worse in any of the narrower tunnels. People bustle past in swarms, various individuals all looking for their groups, calling for accountability and taking stock of who may be in trouble. The guards are trying to keep the masses from breaking out into a riot, although since their techniques mostly involve threats and occasional stun blasts, hysteria continues to rise. Quark can hear it in the decibel levels.

Quark pauses to adjust to the commotion and get a sense of things. How can he shout over this when he can’t even catch his breath? How is he going to find Odo, when he’s a head below most everyone in height? How can he elbow past everyone while exhausted and aching? What he wouldn’t give to be immersed in the happy hullabaloo of a busy bar instead. 

Focus Quark, focus…

With a finger along the rim of his lobe, he attunes to the sound around him. He zones in on individual noises… 

There, that way to Odo’s gravelly voice, closer, closer to his goo noises...

“Quark --!” Odo shouts. 

Ten Nausicaans, five Klingons, and a whole mess of Orions separate them.

“Hey! Hey over here!”

Thankfully, Odo seems motivated to fight his way past the crowds himself, so Quark slumps against a nearby boulder while he waits. 

Once Odo makes his way near, he gives Quark a onceover in relief. He folds his arms across his chest so tightly his hands make deep indentations in the crooks of his elbows, past what would be normal for a solid person. He’s left more distance between them than seems necessary, over a meter. 

It’s as if it’s taking everything within him not to squeeze Quark close and never let him go -- or maybe Quark’s projecting.

Odo says urgently, “Garak was searching for you --”

“Yep, gave him what he needed, the rod worked like a charm. We’re all good.” Quark takes in Odo’s odd face for a moment, contorted as it is with relief and confusion. He knows him better now in some ways, where he came from and how his past may have shaped him, but what Quark knows now doesn’t actually change all that much about his perception of him. Odo’s still the same stubborn man that Quark knew before. “They're headed to the shuttles to make a break for it, and -- so should we.”

“Then go.” 

“Thought you could send me away, and I’d just leave without you? Well you can't get rid of me that easily!” Quark says, revving up to his best put-upon bluster. 

Odo blinks in surprise. “You have to go now. We don’t know how long the code will hold up. If Garak and Julian are leaving --”

“Forget the plan! Listen to me, listen -- I know about everything -- Odo, I know about… Dr Mora.”

Odo flinches at the scientist's name, then stills. He’s waiting for the next blow.

In a low, even voice, like Odo were a vole cornered after one of the Klingons’ tournaments, Quark says, “You don't belong in prison. They tortured you -- the scientists, the Cardassians… You didn't deserve any of that. You’re a person, and I think you’d agree, with those frustrating ethics of yours, that no person deserves to put up with that kind of treatment.” 

Odo’s goo crashes within him like a rockslide, as he withdraws into himself. Quark holds his palms open in a display of non-threat. He takes a couple slow steps closer to Odo. 

Quark continues: “What else could you do?  You weren't even charged with a crime -- I read your file. The lab reports, the party, everything.”

A stalactite several meters away drops, and the crash of it makes everyone around them flinch. Orions scatter, pushing past them. Quark and Odo don’t break eye contact during the interruption.

Finally Odo looks away. “So you know what I am.”

“No!” Quark bursts out with a confused laugh. “Do you?”

Odo harrumphs in dark amusement. The tension in his folded arms ebbs slightly. “No, I suppose not. But you know what I'm capable of.”

“I know you're capable of incredible stubbornness! Titanium level inflexibility! I know you're way too uptight to enjoy yourself at anything, let alone violence. I know you're the most irritating and clueless person I have ever met. So if you’re an irredeemable murderer, then I'm the Kai of Bajor.” Quark proclaims this in a fit of grandeur. He has no idea if he’s getting through to Odo, who at least now looks more confused than distressed. “And okay, you feel guilty… He raised you, right? He was your introduction to the world, Dr Mora. So he was like a father --”

Odo’s expression shuts closed like a door. “No. Nothing like that.”

Shit. Quark gestures wildly, as if he can wipe the word away. “A bad father! The worst! I'm on your side here! I'm saying it’s okay to feel conflicted about what happened. He failed you, and you -- maybe you feel like you failed him, so --”

“He didn’t deserve to die,” Odo says with finality. An Odo-decreed fact of reality.

“You don't deserve to keep punishing yourself for how you dealt with an impossible situation. Like you’re some uniquely bad person. Newsflash -- everyone sucks, and that doesn’t keep the rest of us from carrying on. If you stay here, you’re treating yourself no better than Dr. Mora did.”

Something cracks in Odo's expression, letting light into a dark cave. But then it cracks further, and the tumult of it becomes a cave-in. A rushing sounds in his goo.

“And go where , Quark?” Odo’s voice strains with his inner torment. “I don't have a home. I don’t have a family or even a planet. I don’t have anything to go back to, so what does it even matter --” 

The decibel levels skyrocket with yelling all around them, guards and inmates alike in surging clamor. Odo cuts off, looking around for clues on the change in situation. Something’s happening, though whether it’s a precursor to a riot because of inmate conflict or whether it’s solely distress over the geological situation is hard to tell.

Quark barely notices. A problem for other people and another time.  It’s all background noise to the estranged, forlorn man in front of him.

Quark leans in. He has to make him listen. Odo can’t go on thinking those things and feeling that way. It’s just not right. He places a hand on each cheek of Odo’s smooth face and pulls him in close, centimeters away.  Odo’s eyes are wide and wary as they focus back on Quark. 

Even at this intimate proximity, the rising din threatens to drown Quark out.

His voice breaks as he shouts, “You have me! You’ll always have me!”

A flash across Odo’s face, unreadable. Someone knocks into Odo, pushing the two of them unsteady for a moment. People swarm past like a river around an island.

Then Odo’s face presses against his. 

Quark stays stock still at first. Maybe Odo was knocked into him? He doesn’t breathe, doesn’t think, doesn’t hope.

But Odo doesn’t pull away.

In fact, he places both hands on Quark’s upper back and holds him in place 

His face is uncanny in texture -- a smooth and pliable uniformity with no alternating firmness from bone or muscle underneath. 

No heartbeat or pumping blood belies his reaction within. But -- there…

Quark swears he hears it, despite the noise. Odo’s subtle singing goo. And as what’s happening settles in to Quark’s reality, everything sings within Quark as well. 

Odo keeps the same gentle, even pressure and stays almost immobile, as if he’s not sure what else this activity entails. Perhaps a little encouragement won’t scare him off. Triumph rises within Quark as Odo copies the way Quark moves his mouth against his in the kiss. 

Finally, finally. 

Quark slips his tongue in -- tasting, yearning, eager to explore. The inside of Odo’s mouth undulates around him with unmistakable fluidity. Quark deepens the kiss. Odo’s liquid surges into Quark’s mouth in response. It’s unlike any kiss Quark has ever had (and he’s had a few), but unmistakably Odo. Odo’s hands liquify on Quark’s back as well, flowing up his neck and around his shoulders, until Quark is surrounded by his swirling mass.

Quark feels the vibrations rather than hears it, through the all-consuming reverie of their shared moment. A crashing thuds from somewhere outside them. 

Unimportant. Doesn’t concern him. 

Nothing matters but the two of them, together, at last --

Reluctantly, Quark attempts to extricate himself from the goo. It’s no easy task. Parts of Odo’s face have lost their structure and flowed over Quark’s hands on his cheeks, so in addition to the liquid hands, he’s engulfed him completely. 

Finally, Odo figures out what Quark’s trying to do. Though his face retracts to its usual shape, it doesn’t maintain its usual outward simulacrum of solidity. The liquid of it flows over his surface.

“What the hell was that,” Quark croaks through his daze. Because someone has to talk first, and that person is usually him. Though he has no idea what Odo can hear over the crashing behind them. “Leave it to you to find the weirdest way to do a normal thing.”

Odo jerks away. The rest of his goo, still encircling Quark in a river of Odo, snaps back into his body with a startling momentum. Quark reels from the sudden loss.

“I didn't mean to -- I shouldn’t have lost my form --” Odo takes a step back, his face struck with shame.

“Hey, hey get a grip.” Quark grabs Odo’s hands, solid and regular-shaped again, before he can retreat any further. His thumbs rub soothingly across Odo’s shifted attempt at knuckles. “It’s okay. It’s good. I’ll never be able to imagine you’re anyone else in the act, that’s for sure. Which is just what I --” Quark swallows. His heart spasms. Great, more medical issues, and the doctor's out. “-- what I want. You.”

Odo searches him for a moment, then nods, though he still seems unsure. 

Quark will just have to keep convincing him that he means it.

But it’s perhaps not the time. It’s noticeably quieter now, which is maybe more alarming than the crashing. Quark and Odo both come to their senses and assess the situation. The crack across the top of the atrium is wider -- more like an open-mouthed grin than a toothy sneer. Rocks pile into the center and crowds hug the edges of the Yard in huddled masses. Even the guards seem subdued by the power the caves have shown over their control.

Even worse, the wall closest to Quark and Odo, only ten meters away, has slid down into another giant pile. Ignoring that is not something Quark would have believed possible. But it was quite the earth-shattering kiss… Pebbles and dust cascade down the wall, threatening further avalanche.

“We have to hurry,” Quark says, squeezing Odo’s hands. “Julian said they’d wait, but who knows how long the tunnels will remain passable, if they still are, even for you --”

A resounding crack, then a bang. A boulder bigger than a Klingon thuds from a hundred meters up down to the existing pile. Quark yelps and tugs at Odo.

But Odo is intractable. When Quark looks back to see why he isn’t moving, he's shaking his head.

“Odo, please,” Quark cries. “Odo --”

“You said you know everything, so you know what Odo meant. Nothing,” Odo says, oddly calm amidst the surrounding panic. “It was never supposed to be a name, but what else did I have? An all too appropriate description of me, I thought. But now, acting as Constable, whenever one of the Klingons or Orions or Lissepians, whoever, calls me Odo, I no longer think of myself as nothing. I’m Odo. You were the first to help me see that. You saw me from the start.”

“I don’t -- what are you talking about? Odo, I don’t understand. You can be whoever you want, out there and away from this place. Let’s go!” Quark pulls at Odo’s hand again, but it does nothing.

“Who I am is a protector of order! I’ve been keeping these people safe from themselves as best I can. Now that prison itself is disintegrating, I can’t abandon them here to die!”

Hundreds of people cower below imminent danger with nowhere to go, with more caught in the tunnels…

And it’s all Quark’s fault. A trap set for a revenge that felt all-consuming at the time, but now seems hardly worth it.

Every one of them will die, if the walls keep tumbling down like they have.

But not if Constable Odo, Protector of the Yard, has something to say about it… It occurs to Quark that this is the first time Odo has asserted any kind of identity out loud, maybe ever. That this is him declaring what he wants for himself (beyond being left alone) for the first time. Though it is, of course, the most inconvenient timing and in service of the worst type of people. 

“Them?!” Quark says in naked disbelief. “Murderers and bullies and the dregs of the galaxy --”

‘Hey, watch it!” A Lissepian nearby grumbles. But the crumbling wall diverts his attention, and Quark and Odo hardly notice the interjection.

“You were innocent,” Odo points out. “Julian was only helping people. You keep insisting I don’t belong here. And if you require further evidence that death by cave isn’t justice, I have strong suspicions Urol was imprisoned for an inopportune romantic entanglement… The smuggling only began after --”

“Fine, fine I get your point!” Quark remembers Lief Garon, Lorn, Greska, and the rest of the perhaps wrongly accused inmates in Garak’s collection of files. He grumbles in frustration, “Next you’ll tell me Klagore is only here on public indecency.”

Odo scoffs. “No, he’s a contract killer, high body count.” 

They share a brief amusement that quickly fades.

“So what are you going to do?” Quark throws up his hands. This whole situation is ridiculous. They don’t have time for this. “The cave itself is falling apart. You can’t just yell at the rock until it behaves. Or whatever you do as Constable to make people listen to you. So what good can you --” A spark in the shadow ignites into dazzling sunlight. “Hold on -- what if you become the rock?! You could be a structure to keep everyone safe --”

A deep furrow appears in Odo’s forehead. “I can’t do that.”

“Of course you can,” Quark says. “Wait, can’t or won’t? I thought -- why not? Would it hurt?”

“No... I look like this now.” Except accidentally when kissing. “I'm a person, like anybody else. You taught me that.”

“What! Me--?” Quark wants to pull his ears off in frustration. He half yells, “Part of being a person is not being like anyone else! You're a person who can shapeshift!!! I'm not going to stick earplugs in my ears so that my hearing is the same as a Bolian! Klingons or Nausicaans don't hold back in a fight with weaker species! Part of being a person is using what you've got!”

The rocks tumbling down have grown from pebbles to the size of Lurian melons. People scatter further back, but a couple of the Klingons get trapped in the cascade. Their comrades dig them out while dodging further onslaught. Not an honorable way to die. The decibels increase again as the stunned fear gives way to terror.

“This is how people know me! This is the person they respect, the one that keeps order. There's no respect or order for a shapeshifting monster!” Odo pleads, but he’s not looking at Quark. His eyes flick from victim to victim and at the chaos surrounding them. He’s not arguing with Quark anymore, he’s arguing with himself.

“I don’t think anyone will mind while you’re saving their lives.”

A sense of resolution ripples over Odo. He releases his arms from where they folded over his chest again. His posture straightens, no longer cowering into himself. Then his arms elongate impossibly long. More limbs sprout out from his torso, snaking along the walls to hold the rock in place or curving over people as shelter. 

Odo's head remains in place, for now, so Quark tiptoes up to meet it. His core muscles stab at the motion, but he ignores it. He nuzzles Odo’s nose with his own in the traditional Ferengi gesture of affection. 

I see you, Odo.

Though latinum is pressed in solid gold for convenience, it retains its liquid essence... And the value doesn’t change. 

Odo’s a giant version of the tentacle beast Quark has witnessed several times before. But it’s different this time. Each movement is purposeful and calm, with protection of others in mind rather than himself. The goo within him is a powerful river, flowing with intention.

Emotion wells up inside Quark so that he bursts with it, too big to contain.

The crowds in the Yard grow truly quiet, in a way that Quark’s never heard before. Everyone stares in awe at the sight of Odo overhead.

Several guards rush towards Odo with tasers in shaking hands. “Hey, what -- what do you think you’re -- But that collar was working great before!”

Quark surprises himself by jumping in front of Odo, as if his comparatively tiny body could do anything to shield him. Self-sacrifice, ugh – as always a soft heart means stupid lobes. 

“He’s the only thing between you and certain death, so I wouldn’t do that.”

“Quark you can still go,” Odo calls down from his heights. “I’ll be okay; I’ve found my place.”

“Go where? What’s he talking about?” The guards yell amongst themselves. They’re still waving the tasers around, but more out of confusion on what to do than any intention to use them on Odo.

Quark's at a junction in the caves. 

One tunnel rises up to the surface -- to the stars and wealth and freedom. The other heads down down down to this tomb where Odo has chosen to cage himself, despite Quark’s best efforts. 

Quark has been here before, in several defining moments of his life. Choosing affection over his profession. Choosing lives over latinum.

Like each time before, the correct choice is obvious. Everything he's yearned for. 

It’s only a climb and a few codes away to what he's dreamed of every day for the past two odd years.

But once he leaves, he'll never come back. And without him, Odo may stay here forever. All that potential, all that righteousness, all that stubbornness will stay locked away where it can never expand and grow.

Quark will never meet anyone like him again. An entirely unique commodity in so many ways --  for example, the soft, imploring way that Odo beams down at him, and how it makes Quark's stomach swoop and heart flutter -- which has to be worth something more than the golden vault out there waiting for Quark. 

Quark sighs, exasperated at himself even as his mind’s made up.

“Your place isn’t holding up the wall! It’s as Odo,” Quark shouts up at him. “You can’t do this forever, not by yourself!” 

Odo cocks his head in confusion. 

Quark sighs again. He turns to Grendor nearby. “I can fix the software code for the structural shielding. Do you have an extra monitor? The one in the office got smashed. You ought to invest in more durable hardware, place like this.”

---

The guards may be too stupid to realize that the system failure was the result of sabotage beyond Bilga’s explosions, but after Quark untangles his handiwork, they do know enough to reset the security code entirely.

Across the prison, walls are smashed in and various tunnels are either impassable or merged together. The atrium gapes open to the heavens above, but the shielding holds steady. For now. Some of the cells are unusable, but enough people died or escaped that it almost evens out. It wasn’t all because of him, Quark reasons to himself. This place was crumbling already, due to years of deferred maintenance and embezzled resources. One prisoner shouldn’t be able to wreck the whole place with two strands of code. And honestly who builds a prison in an unstable cave system when buildings have been a perfectly acceptable alternative for centuries?

Two of the prison shuttles are gone. Quark hears nothing else about what happened with Garak and Bashir, or Gaila and Brunt. He assumes no news is good news.

Requisitions are submitted to the Cardassian Council for replacements, whenever the bureaucracy gets around to its review. Dukat’s not going to be happy about what this does to the budget. The cafeteria replicators, thankfully, spit out bigger portions for Bertho to serve just as Quark programmed. The only part of the plan that worked, or at least the only part that benefits him. 

After the destruction and near death, the Yard is more subdued, as inmates cluster between meals among the evidence of their trauma. There’s only one Ferengi, but he has an ally. Each day he hangs out around the common areas, and no one bullies him. Each night he returns to the cell at night and sleeps soundly, curled up underneath a blanket of goo.

Prison days blur one by one in unending continuity.

Chapter Text

“Last week, Klem’pin agreed to a half pound of vole jerky in exchange for my share of the bloodwine --” Gref the Klingon bellows.

Klem’pin, a Lissepian, rolls his eyes at this. “The first shipment was intercepted before our contact could smuggle it in!”

“Now he’s demanding a whole pound!” 

“Prices have gone up. It happens.”

“That’s an entire vole!”

“That’s the rules of supply and demand!”

They both pause in their yelling to look expectantly at Odo for his verdict.

Odo clears his throat. “You should honor the terms of your original agreement.”

“Now hold on!” Quark says. “As a Ferengi I have special insight into market fluctuations. For a price. Some of that jerky maybe?”

“Quark…” Odo warns. “Not everyone appreciates the Ferengi worldview, we’ve been over this.”

“Most people don’t have the lobes, it’s true. But from what I’m understanding this was more of a ‘dibs’ situation than establishing a firm price.”

“Is that accurate?” Odo affixes a hard stare at each of them in turn. Klem’in agrees readily. Gref growls, but is cowed by the potential repercussions of lying to Odo, and reluctantly nods as well. 

“And I’m sure any of the other Klingons would be glad to pay, if Gref would rather be sober than give up one dried out vole,” Quark says.

“Fine. Pay, or pass then,” Odo says.

Klem’pin bows his thanks and hands Quark a strip of jerky. Gref grumbles while stalking off.

Quark eagerly rips off a piece with his teeth --  what it lacks in flavor it makes up for by not being prison stew -- before calling to the crowds. “Next! Anyone with decent food to offer gets first priority. Perhaps a good, crunchy beetle --”

“Quarrrrk! ” Odo groans. “First come first serve, as always. Payment not accepted.”

“But tips appreciated! To incentivize fair decisions!” Quark says cheerfully. They go through this every time.

A Pakled with a black eye oozing pus is being held back from throwing himself (again, presumably) at a smug-looking Nausicaan. “Cheat! No one beats Eygor at dom jot!”

Odo sighs. “We’ve been through this. You should stop playing if you can’t handle losing.”

“You can’t just tell a man to stop gambling!” Quark gasps. “It’s uncivilized.”

“Eygor plays good! Eygor shoots, and ugly Klingon blocks it from goal!”

“And… that isn’t a permitted play in your game?” Odo says.

“Yes!”

“No!”

“They’re playing with rocks in the western alcove. Not exactly regulation,” Quark chimes in. Not that Odo knows anything about dom jot, regulation or not. “Common prison rules allow certain blocks to account for the variation in terrain. More importantly… Eygor, you got any more of that Aldebaran whiskey I saw you with earlier?”

Odo rolls his eyes. “Ignore him. Are there any bystanders who can corroborate what rules you agreed on?”

So it goes. Unless more urgent matters interrupt, Odo and Quark hold court in the Yard every day, solving disputes that prisoners bring them. Or more accurately, people appeal to Odo for mediation, while Quark butts in at any opportunity.

Today, there’s an eventual lull in petitioners, though the lull doesn’t extend to Quark and Odo’s back-and-forth.

“The increased meal rations should be more than adequate for your nutritional needs. Stop hounding people for food while I’m working!”

“Pfff, prison chow, hardly counts. And that’s not the point. We’re here every day for hours listening to scumbags complain about who stole whose contraband, who threatened to kill who in their sleep if they didn’t share the Romulan ale, blah blah. You should be asking for compensation!” Quark says. 

“They come to me for help, you don’t have to be here. And I don’t need anything,” Odo grumbles in that harsh gravelly voice of his. 

“Then who would provide the amusing commentary? Bunch of angry yahoos, someone’s got to entertain. Besides, I'm very useful to you.” 

“Pah! Not the words I’d use. Obnoxious and distracting, more like.”

To anyone else, he might sound irritated, but Quark can hear the dancing amusement in his goo. Arguments like this are as good of a way to pass the time as any.

Quark grins. “I know my worth and all I ask is a pittance in return. I provide valuable insights on gambling, basic economic theory, gang history --”

Odo groans. “Fine! But respect for my impartiality is all that’s keeping any sense of order around here, and I can’t have your whining interfere.”

“Oh it’s more than respect for you, it’s reverence. Awe and fear. After the cave-ins, those thugs realized that at any point you alone have the power to decide if they live or die, and I’m the only one who realizes what’s holding you back is the fact that, at heart, you’re a deeply boring man.” Quark bumps Odo’s shoulder playfully. 

“Hmph!” Odo scoffs, though his shoulder stays pressed up companionably against Quark’s as they sit side-by-side on a boulder. Quark suspects that the bickering and teasing between them is a welcome contrast for Odo to the veneration others accord him.

“With social capital like that, you could declare yourself Grand Nagus of the Yard and demand piles of tribute, and everyone would trip over themselves to comply. But you refuse. As your cellmate and partner --” (The literal definition of this in Ferengi is business associate, but he’s not the first to apply it to more subversive, intimate affiliations, there being no suitable term otherwise.) “-- I deserve at least the occasional bottle of ale.”

In truth, Quark has benefited from Odo’s status in many significant ways. No one dares push him around anymore, no taunts or stolen food or bruising, even if no one’s particularly friendly to him otherwise. He’s not fool enough to think his own merits have anything to do with this. 

(There are also rampant rumors -- which Quark stokes -- that Odo killed all the other Ferengi for daring to hurt Quark. No one is willing to test the truth of this, despite Odo's fervent denial.)

“And another thing,” Quark blows right past Odo’s protestations, “if we had escaped like I begged you, I could be buying anything I wanted right now. With latinum, instead of haphazard prison barter. Good honest exchange --”

“Hah, honest! As if anywhere in the universe is safe from your sad attempts at manipulating and exploiting anyone with the misfortune of meeting you.”

“So really this is your own fault. I did the noble, honorable thing, and stayed with you, when I could be on a culinary tour around the galaxy, eating myself into a stupor! You’re the one holding me back, so you owe me.” 

Though Quark declares this as lightly and cheerfully as he always does, Odo is overly harsh as he bites out, “You should have left when you had the chance! I told you to LEAVE.”

But Quark knows this anger just hides his insecurity. “Not gonna happen, not without you. I told you, you’re stuck with me whether you want it or not.” 

“If you’re having regrets --”

“Never. I’m just making sure you know that any complaints you have about me are your problem, not mine. You'd be lost without me.” Quark leers with his most disarming, ingratiating grin. 

It does the trick to cut the tension, because Odo rolls his eyes with great derision. “Without the constant pestering? I’d be far less irritated for one.”

“You’d be bored, we both know it.” 

They also have this argument at least once a day. 

Uncomfortable topics are like Tarvian swamp boils: ignore them despite how bulbous and grotesque they grow, until one day pungent oozing pus will inevitably explode everywhere and infect everyone in the vicinity. But lance them a little at a time, here and there, and the pressure never builds up before your body can fight the infection. Quark’s always been a big fan of complaining, and he gets the sense that Odo appreciates not having to bottle everything up like he tends to otherwise.

Besides, if Quark’s throwing his life away for Odo’s sake, he’s never going to let him forget it.

“Anyway, like I was saying,” Quark says, “you have no idea the grand array of commodities out there! Food, drink, art, clothing, baubles and bits, a whole wealth of possessions ripe for pleasure that you so cruelly deny yourself!”

“I don’t eat, I don’t drink, I don’t need ‘baubles’ whatever those are, in fact I don’t require any of the material luxuries you’re so obsessed with, so if this is your best attempt at persuasion --”

“Okay, okay fine --” Quark slides into salesman mode easy as sliding into the silky mudbaths of Ferenginar’s Western province. “But consider: there are hundreds of gambling games out there. Ones with actual pieces -- wheels and lights and shiny bits that spin, not just the grubby handfuls of dice or beat up cards that the Orions smuggle in. Millions of dedicated players, whole civilizations dedicated to vice --”

“The wonder, the glory,” Odo deadpans. “This is meant to entice me how?”

“You know how people get so worked up in here about one measly bottle of ale they bet while throwing some rocks into a hole? Then consider how much more passionate they’d be about a game that’s actually fun to play, betting actual latinum! Picture the whole bar cheering them on… They're feeling on top of the world, a jackpot with their name on it… So they put down their life savings, only to have it all come crashing down when cruel fortune forsakes them! Think of how that person might react.”

“And?” 

“And you could be the one stopping them from doing something they’d regret!”

“Hmph. I don’t want the crimes I solve to be more exciting, I want there to stop being crime. At all. I want people to be safe.”

“Sure, but in the meantime can’t you at least admit you find it a little bit fun?”

“That would require me to admit I’m capable of fun,” Odo says smugly, and they both bust out laughing at that.

In another life, maybe they both overcome their origins and find the success they long for. Maybe Quark earns enough latinum to question the tenth rule (“greed is eternal”), while Odo is a dictator somewhere, or a judge, or, most likely, law enforcement.

Maybe they even cross paths.

But without the particular circumstances that brought them together in this wretched place, are they even friends, let alone “partners”? A greedy hustler and an ascetic authoritarian, on the same side... It seems improbable.

If Quark had experienced anything other than shattering failure in his past, if any of his ventures thus far had been even semi-successful, if he were still out there chasing latinum, he can’t imagine he’d keep a lover happy. The race for profits would always come first, leaving potential paramours dissatisfied.

If Odo had the iron control he longs for, if he were imbued with the authority to enforce the law, he’d devote his entire identity to that, leaving nothing left over for a personal life. He’d never find himself in a situation where he could be vulnerable enough to open up to someone else, let alone allow himself to fall in love.

In this other life, are they happy? 

Quark can’t imagine so. 

It makes him a bad Ferengi, he’s well-aware, but here at rock-bottom, having let go of each and every one of those chances for success, maybe for good, he’s found an odd sense of peace. He’s already given up any chance of bidding his way into the Divine Treasury, so now he may as well enjoy what he gave it up for.

In another life, can his latinum buy his joy as Odo laughs at something outrageous he’s said? Can it buy the warmth when Odo kisses the side of his head thinking he’s asleep? Can it buy the swoop in his belly when their eyes meet across the Yard, Odo seeking him out specifically?

This is what carries him through the remaining discomforts of prison life, and oddly, it feels like freedom.

Or so he tells himself.

---

It’s during one of these carefree afternoons spent chewing the fat when an offer arrives that changes everything. 

First, a guard approaches them in the Yard: “You’re wanted in the office.”

Quark and Odo glance at each other. Quark asks, “Can I ask what this is about?”

“No,” Grendor says by habit, then sighs. Ever since the rockslides, the guards have acted strangely around Quark and Odo. Cruelty isn’t a habit that dies easily, and they’re reluctant to shift perception of the duo as anything more worthwhile than cave dirt. But the fact remains that Quark and Odo saved them all from certain death and that buys at least a couple slips worth of respect. “Gul Dukat. That thing -- arrhm , your cellmate should come too.” 

With a jerk of his head to indicate they should follow (a big step up from the way he’d drag Quark around, before), he strides off. Now Quark is even more confused. They walk after him.

“Tax season’s long gone, I’ve already done this month’s budget, and all the requisitions for repair funds were submitted, or so I thought…” Quark muses. “And none of that has anything to do with Odo…”

“Hmph,” sums up Odo’s thoughts on the matter.

“If you wait five minutes you can ask the Gul himself,” Grendor grumbles, meaning he doesn’t know anything either.

At the office Dukat lounges behind the main desk.

“Quark! My favorite accountant! The Reskar is a joy to fly; I might visit my wife more often, just for the excuse.” Dukat says, referring to a zippy personal ship he recently purchased. They discussed the financial logistics last time they met. “Then again, the Bajorans would miss me too much.”

“Glad to hear it. To what do we owe the pleasure of your company, sir?” Quark says carefully. He sits down in a seat across from him, when Dukat indicates to do so. Odo remains standing by his side like a sentry. “It’s not like you to grace these walls with your presence.”

“Ready to get down to business, are we?” Dukat holds his hand out. “You are dismissed, Gil Gradar (or was it Gred?), run along now. Yes you! Go babysit the other inmates, or whatever it is I’m overpaying you for.”

Grendor’s face twitches, but he nods and leaves reluctantly. No doubt he’s as curious about this whole affair as Quark is. Or at least he’s jealous of whatever swill Dukat is sure to ply Quark with this time.

“Now then.” Dukat sighs. “Cardassian Command in their infinite wisdom has decided your list of requisitions for prison repairs is excessive, given the preventative measures they’ve been paying for over the years. They’ve required me to inspect the damage myself, in person, before they’ll shell out any more. Skinflints, no appreciation for all I do for Cardassia, the pressure I’m under already...”

“I assure you I was as conservative as I could manage with the estimates, sir, only the bare minimum --” Quark hastily preempts the blame that's sure to come.

Dukat waves him off. “But that's my burden to bear. Here.”

He holds out a padd. Quark blinks a couple times before taking it. 

“I don’t understand. You need me to review a contract? I’m an accountant by trade, not a lawyer…” He flips through it briefly in confusion. “But… oh a business contract. Then I know enough to manage, I used to have aspirations of my own, of course.”

Dukat’s snake grin doesn’t betray anything. 

Quark reads more closely. “Hmm… this is for a… bar. On Terok Nor? ‘Must supply all equipment and stock, though lending options are available. Stock must include kanar’ -- at the station manager’s discretion, naturally… Also, dabo, good healthy fun for Cardassian officers to blow off steam, good plan sir… I see, the bar owner would lease the space, hmm reasonable rent, though if I were him I’d have to run the margins first. Owner retains all rights to the business brand name and all shares of profit, that’s very good… Lots of solid legal rights laid out in this document -- Oh! Ooohhhh…”

Quark gapes at the signatories. The contract is between the leasor-slash-station manager and the leasee-slash-business owner, which are listed as, respectively, Dukat and… Quark.

“In exchange for all your assistance and especially your discretion, I promised you a reward. I make good on my promises,” Dukat says smugly.

“This is for real? You want me?”

“In a position like mine, it’s essential to surround oneself with proven loyalty. So hard to find good help these days…” 

“A bar,” Quark says in wonder. “On a space station…”

“It would improve crew loyalty, boost morale, provide a refuge from Bajoran drudges… The workers are so depressing, it wears on me after a while,” Dukat says, but Quark’s barely listening. 

“A bar, of my own…” Quark can’t stop staring at the padd. His hands shake with how tight he’s gripping it, as if any ease in pressure would cause it to disappear.

Him, a business owner, with all the respect and potential that entails…

While under Dukat’s surveillance, Quark would have to take out a loan to fully outfit the joint. Also, though Quark prefers space-living to planetside, a deep space location in a conflicted region like Terok Nor has restricted market appeal, which isn’t ideal... On the other hand, the existing customer base is stable, and soldiers will have expendable income with the inclination to spend it. Cardassians do love their kanar and aren’t ones to shy away from games of chance. Quark can work with that. He’s also aware who else traffics the station, as evidenced by their bribes to Dukat -- Orion smugglers, Lisspeian merchants -- which spells additional opportunity for anyone with shrewd enough lobes.

As the one in charge, there’ll be no one to exploit Quark’s labor or hide key business operations from him. He wonders if he could hire an entirely Ferengi staff; they’re the only ones who understand proper labor practices. And dabo girls, he’lll have to hire dabo girls, certainly. He’s already looking forward to the interviews!

It may take a few years to break even, but there’s profit to be had here. A life to build on.

Quark, a manager and calling all the shots himself…

“It shouldn’t be any issue to pardon you for service to Cardassia, so long as you agree to these conditions,” Dukat is still talking.

Of course, Quark will need to keep Dukat’s good favor and acquiesce to his every whim. Though Quark will be his own boss on paper, the customer is always right, and Dukat will be the top customer. It’ll be like feasting on razor-toothed greeworms -- succulent and nourishing, but with the constant risk they'll bite back. But Quark’s confident he can handle Dukat; he has so far, after all, and only benefited from it, relatively speaking. 

The tricky thing will be convincing Odo this is the best move --

Odo.

Quark whips his head around. Odo is a statue beside him, immobile in the same position as when Quark sat down. His expression is completely blank and has likely remained so as he’s watched him swoon over the contract. Throughout Quark’s conversation with Dukat, Odo hasn’t said a word, hasn’t made a sound, and likely hasn’t so much as twitched. 

Still as a slug in the muck, with the swampbat circling for prey overhead.

Dukat with the unnaturally long neck, whipping his head around the laughing crowd, distress in his eyes…

Quark swallows. “Gul Dukat, sir, you also -- uh, the guard mentioned Odo needed to be here for this…? To meet you? I believe -- we make quite the team, Odo and me, so he would be quite the asset to the bar, if you would be so gracious to allow --”

Dukat grins. “Subsection fourteen, I believe. It’s all laid out in the contract. Cardassia is eager to make use of him as well.”

Quark spares a nervous glance to the side. Odo maintains his stoicness. Quark flips through to subsection fourteen, careful to tilt it so Odo won’t see.

The research subject known as Odo’ital (“subject”) will accompany the proprietor to his bar. Proprietor bears full responsibility for the subject’s ongoing compliance and for the safety of bystanders while the subject remains on the station. Any property damage will be added to lease payments (see section 3.03 for repercussions in the case of nonpayment). Damage to persons of any kind due to the subject’s actions will result in criminal charges for the proprietor. 

“You have proved yourself capable of taming the beast. Experiments with that collar have proven insufficient for control, but inexplicably, he listens to you, if one trusts the account of the guards,” Dukat continues. “I’m willing to take the chance. For Cardassia.”

The Cardassian Science Ministry and the Bajoran Institute of Science (under Cardassia’s purview) will have full rights to resume study of the subject. Subject may also be called upon for uses as deemed suitable by the station manager. If the subject causes any issue, including but not limited to disobedience, bodily harm, or intimidation, station manager has full discretion to secure the subject at a detention facility (Reskar or other as suitable). 

What would Dukat want to use Odo for? Ore processing… or entertainment? Quark doesn’t want to ask.

Quark flips the padd over in his hands, thinking. Odo’s eyes burn on him from the side, but Quark avoids looking over. 

His own business, profit, freedom, and a chance to prove himself… What’s more, it’s a legitimate enterprise, and his products won’t be tied to any suffering worse than a hangover. In fact, he’d be making people happy and helping them relax. A net good for the galaxy and his pocketbooks. Odo couldn’t disapprove of that. Win-win in every respect… except…

“I’ll be occupied the rest of the day, cataloguing damage in these gloomy tunnels,  but I expect your answer by the time I'm finished,” Dukat says. “I understand Ferengi regard negotiation as a traditional part of the contract process, but you’re intelligent enough to comprehend your limited leverage in this situation.”

Quark blows out a long breath. He pushes the padd across the desk. Another dream dashed, but it gets easier every time. “It’s been a great honor to serve you, Gul, sir. This is a very generous offering, and while I appreciate the opportunity you’ve presented to me, I’m afraid I’ll have to pass --”

“What about your moon?” Odo croaks.

Both Quark and Dukat double take at the interruption. 

“What moon?” Dukat says with genuine curiosity.

His moon. When was the last time Quark even thought about that, let alone discussed it aloud? As much as the dream of it kept him going over the years, it was only ever a delusion. Quark kid himself for a long time, but he knows better about what to expect from life, these days.

“Nothing, I don’t know about any moon,” Quark says to Dukat, although he’s locked in an intense staring contest with Odo. 

“The bar could be a… stepping stone. For what you want. When we met, it was the first thing you told me about yourself --” Odo’s eyes bore into him like a spectral scan, decoding his innermost intentions.

“Things change! Life here isn't so bad anymore, right? And I’m not sure if this bar is really such a good fit for us --” Quark says between his teeth, hoping Odo catches his drift.

“Sign it.” Odo’s voice is a deep, commanding rumble that pierces through Quark’s lobes. Quark shivers.

“Well, that settles the matter!” Dukat claps his hands together. “Your friend here knows a good deal when he sees it. I assure you this will be to all our benefit!”

“Odo, I’m the one with the lobes for business, and I wouldn’t be so hasty --”

“You said you thought it was a good deal, for the bar owner --”

“But not for you!”

“Sign it, please.” Odo’s tone eyes flick over Quark, searching his face but for what Quark’s not sure. “I want you to sign it.”

Dukat, on the other hand, seems to be finding this whole exchange amusing, like he’s letting it play out purely to see what happens. 

Trust me, Odo implores Quark with his expression.

And Quark does.

Quark holds his breath as he executes the document with a few Ferengi symbols right under the Cardassian characters that denote Dukat’s signature.

Odo addresses Dukat, “Quark will hold on to this for his records.” As if Quark has a whole filing cabinet back in their cell.

“Certainly. I’ll have a guard retrieve you both when I’m ready.”

---

The man wearing Dukat’s face scowls as he walks up the tunnels alongside Quark. He’s stiff and awkward in his stride.

“How about you let me in on your half-baked plans next time, before dragging me into them!” Quark says, with a whack to his companion’s shoulder. ”You’re not a schemer. You’re not meant to scheme. I am!”

The man is an exact replica of Dukat from the chufa to the long neck to the military uniform, with overall uncanny attention to detail. “I thought you’d be too disconcerted by my appearance. I didn’t want to waste time arguing about it.”

“Oh pfff, because you’re him? Hardly. You can never hide that you’re Odo , not to me, though maybe sometimes I wish you could.”

Odo stops in his tracks. He looks himself up and down, pulling on the fake fabric of the uniform sleeves to even them out. “I’ve been assured I succeed at this form in particular. Due to all the forced practice… Dukat himself approved.”

“Yeah sure, you look like him. To anyone else.” Quark taps his lobes. “But you don’t sound like him.”

“I mimic the tones of his voice perfectly!” Odo’s goo sounds swirl in him with mild panic. There’s of course no signature breathing, no heartbeat rhythms, no specific pattern of organs whooshing, like Quark would identify in anyone else. To a Ferengi, the soundscape of a person is much more distinct a characteristic than their appearance. Any misgivings Odo has about Quark being freaked out by this form are entirely misplaced.

“Ehh,” Quark says. “Lots of undertones and subtle qualities you’re missing. But it’s probably fine! For other people! Though there’s also the issue of your body language…” 

“Body language?” Odo cocks Dukat’s head in such a distinctly Odo-like gesture that Quark almost laughs out loud.

“Very important.” Quark pries Odo’s arms apart from where he’s folded them across his chest. “Dukat has an ease about him. Top viper in the pit, thinks he’s hot stuff. You gotta loosen up.”

“I didn’t know you paid so much attention to him,” Odo grunts, but he swings his arms by his sides a bit to test out Quark’s suggestion. 

“Not that loose! You also -- need -- to remember -- bones!” This time Quark can’t help but laugh. 

“I’m not entering a contest, just trying to escape!” Odo half-yells. “I swore I’d never shift into him again, no matter what, and if you’re just going to criticize --”

Right, the trauma…

“Hey, no it’s good, it’ll work,” Quark says softly. It has to, or they’re done for. He places a hand on Odo’s chest to calm him. He’s tiptoeing up to kiss Odo’s cheek when --

“Oy you, is there a problem over there?” Gil Derak gallops into their end of the passage, but skids to a halt when he sees who’s here. “Sir!”

They jump apart. Odo, with a quick look to Quark, carefully nods to the guard. He limits his words and movement so as not to reveal himself. “Gil Derak. No trouble. As you were.”

Derak does a double take, and Quark winces. Dukat rarely remembers the prison guards’ names; he views them as incompetent and largely interchangeable.

“Gul Dukat, sir…” Derak says slowly. “What are you doing here? Last I heard you went with Grendor deep into the eastside halls. Said it was going to take you hours.”

“I don’t have to justify myself to you.” The derisiveness is very Odo-like, but Quark supposes it doesn’t play too different from Dukat’s own sense of superiority.

“Of course sir…” Derak bows a little in deference. He looks between them, narrowing his eyes at Quark. “But if -- you don’t mind me asking, sir, what… are you doing here with him ?”

“Whatever I like!” Odo draws himself up to Dukat’s full height to look down his nose at him.

Quark rushes in between them, waving his padd around.

Odo snatches it from him on cue. “Taking him with me, to Terok Nor. He's under contract, and none of your concern.”

Derak glance at it, noting Dukat’s validated signature next to Quark’s. “Hmm.”

“Now escort us to my ship,” Odo demands.

Derak squints at him. He knows something is off about this Dukat, but can’t place what. “As you command, sir…”

They walk through the tunnel together. As Derak punches security codes into the various doors along the way, Quark realizes they’re going to run into trouble down the line. Odo squeezed into the locking systems to open them before Derak arrived, but he won't be able to continue that now.

“The -- ah -- esteemed Gul was complaining to me earlier,” Quark chatters as they approach the docking platform, “that your security system is acting up. Not the same since the incident. That’s why he’s here! To get you upgrades! So he has another request for you, please sir --” 

“Do you?” Derak looks to Odo, who nods readily, relieved to let Quark do the talking.

“Um… I suspect your computer troubles might have extended to the Gul’s ship, while it’s docked here. So… we’ll need you… to… unlock it… for him?” Quark ekes out each apologetic word, cringing deeper as Derak grows more and more suspicious at this request. Quark holds his wrists together in front of his ingratiating smile in supplication.

“Sir, why are you letting this little vole speak for you? What’s going on?” Derak drifts a hand towards his disruptor. “If you would allow me, I will need to… discuss security protocol with Grendor first. So we can confirm your tunnel inspections went… well. I uuuhh wouldn’t want you to have wasted your time here. Sir.”

Derak is a terrible liar, but the threat of discovery is real.

“Oh! He didn’t tell you yet did he!” Quark chuckles and whacks the side of his head, like he feels dumb for not mentioning it earlier. Odo and Derak gape at him. “The bonus! Dukat, uh sir, you forgot to tell him about his bonus. To reward his devotion and hard work.”

“Right…Yes,” Odo says slowly.

“Bonus?” Derak perks up, all suspicion dropped. People are the same everywhere. “We're talking money?”

Quark lets out a long breath and relaxes. “How does ten thousand extra leks to your name sound? That can buy all the regova eggs your kids can eat, I bet. Why wait until payday, we’ll transfer it over right now!”

---

“Tube grubs!” Quark shouts jubilantly at the replicator. 

“Recipe not found.”

“Bah, no accounting for taste. Beetle aspic? Slug steak with millipede sauce? Hmm… gagh?”

“Recipes not found.”

“Anything but subpar Cardassian food, I’ve had enough of that for a long long time.” Quark considers the soiree catering, and Dukat’s obsession with Bajoran females. “I could make do with some hasperat?”

Happily, the replicator spits out a pile of thin flatbread wrapped around layers of red and green. Quark takes a moment to enjoy the spicy scent as it fills the air before chowing down.

“Not bad, not half bad,” Quark says around a mouthful of half-chewed food. “But first stop we pick up a barrel of live grubs. Hmm an hour or so from here there used to be this little market outpost…”

“An hour?! Quark we can’t stop! We need to put as much distance between us and the prison, before they realize what happened!” Odo hunches over the ship controls, tension evident in every line of his body. Every little noise or beep catches his attention, on high alert for any incoming ships or hails. 

Quark marvels yet again how a liquid can manage to be so stiff… And then realizes -- oh, right. This is the first time Odo has poured himself out from the walls surrounding him all his life, from the safe confinements that others have limited him to, and this is the first time he’s faced with the open sandbox of a disordered universe and all the potential failure that making one’s own choices entails. 

A liquid decanted from a container will flow and spread until it becomes formless… 

Nothing can bind Odo unless he lets it -- not a physical form or any laws of physics that Quark’s aware of, nothing but Odo’s own intransigence, and though once Odo may have felt he needed those boundaries to thrive, he’s now figuring out who he is without them. Every aspect of this situation is new to him, and it will take some time until he’s comfortable with independence.

The immediate practicalities, at least, Quark can reassure him about.

“Oh, I --” Quark has another large bite of wrap in his mouth, so he swallows in a thick gulp. “I didn’t tell you, did I?”

Odo focus slides to Quark. “Tell me… what, exactly?”

Quark holds up a finger and gets some springwine from the replicator first to wash things down. Snail juice, they'll also have to pick up some of that too. “First important thing to know: this ship is secured solely through Dukat’s offshore bank account. Which means he doesn’t technically own the ship -- his account does. I convinced him it was a better tax shelter that way.”

“I don’t see how that--”

“Second, Dukat’s account is one set up by yours truly through the Central Bank of Lissepia. What he doesn’t know is that it’s only a custodial account. Like you’d set up for a child learning about profit. The fiduciary of it is me. He doesn’t control the account; I do.” 

Odo gapes at him. Maybe he doesn’t get the implications of basic banking logistics; Dukat certainly didn’t bother to comprehend.

Quark grins. “Rule eight, ‘always read the fine print.’ More accurately Dukat used to be the beneficiary. I kicked him off the account while I was transferring leks to Derak.”

“You -- what -- you have control over Gul Dukat’s money… I thought the ‘bonus’ was a trick! You actually did give Derak ten thousand --?”

“Unfortunate, but necessary. And a small drop in the bucket compared to the size of the account, which is all ours to invest and spend as we like!” 

“We’re in bigger trouble than I thought. You stole his ship, you stole his fortune, you --” Odo’s goo churns in a maelstrom of rising panic; Quark’s attempt at reassurance has backfired. Only thing to do is keep talking…

“If anything it’s reparations for wrongful imprisonment and unpaid labor. He owes us. It wasn’t even his money to begin with! Would you rather Cardassia spend it on phaser cannons and warships? You’re all for justice and obeying the law and all that, right? So this is exactly what you -- oh, third… that reminds me…” Quark chews through another bite of hasperat while he types in a few messages through the ship’s subspace communication system. 

Odo returns to gaping at him. In horror or in awe, Quark’s not sure.

“There. A few messages to clerks in the Cardassian government. Not sure which is the appropriate contact, but it should get flagged pretty quickly for higher ups. I’ve been saving evidence of Dukat’s tax fraud, prison funds embezzlement, unreported station income… All there in a secret file of mine in the prison computer system. Any minute now he’s going to have much bigger problems than tracking us down.” Quark finishes off the hasparat with relish, licking his fingers. “Hold on I was thinking of the wrong market earlier… but there’s a moon next sector over that should have tube grubs, we’ll stop there.”

“But someone will track us down! You’re a convicted criminal!” Odo looms over where Quark sits as he harangues him. Quark shrinks down in the pilot’s chair. “This isn’t a vacation; we can’t just loiter around rest stops whenever we feel like.”

“Um. Fourth… I deleted my inmate file, uh, right before the cave-ins. When I was resetting security codes? And you were never charged. I’m sure we can petition some government nearby to shelter us. For a bribe, if they don’t hold to your noble ideals of justice.” He glances over to the star map. “Hmm… Trill isn’t too far, that should do.”

“You… you’ve been planning this the whole time.” Odo steps away from Quark, seemingly in a state of shock and disbelief at this. The turbulence in his goo goes unnervingly still. 

Quark, who had been puffing himself up with an ebullient smugness over the course of this conversation, deflates. “I’m always scheming. I told you, I’m a schemer. Until now they've all crashed and burned, so really I didn’t expect anything to come of it, but we’re doing it Odo, we’re actually gonna pull it off… It’s going to be okay.” 

Odo is scrutinizing him now, an odd look on his face. 

Quark softens. “I can’t help a certain amount of optimism, it’s in my nature as an opportunistic Ferengi, but I never expected you to want to leave. At least not so soon. I would have stayed forever if you needed to.”

Odo nods without doubt. The single furrow in his brow smooths over again. A softness overtakes him as he gazes down at Quark. It’s doing funny things to Quark’s heart.

“What… um. What finally changed your mind?” Quark says, and it comes out in a rasp.

Odo cups Quark’s cheek with his hand, and Quark’s eyes flutter shut. He’s met with a kiss, lingering in its tenderness.

When Quark opens his eyes again, Odo says, quietly, “I realized how… small you had become.”

Whatever Quark expected him to say, it wasn’t that. “I’ll have you know I’m perfectly average for a Ferengi. Besides, it’s only lobe size that has any relevance --”

Odo chuckles softly. “No, in here. And here.” He moves his hand to Quark’s chest, and the other on the top of his head. Quark’s heart thumps against his touch. “You were constraining yourself to fit in someone else's beaker, never letting your dreams outgrow its limited capacity.”

There was that photo in Odo’s file, of the beige beaker on the lab’s shelf. How long did he sit there, filed away as unknown space goo, before anyone realized that he was sentient? “Oh.”

“And I realized… I had been doing the same thing to myself. Letting others make me small. I couldn't bear to be the one doing that to you. You were meant to be selfish and conniving and melodramatic, with grandiose schemes bigger than you’re able to pull off --” 

“Glad to know your faith in me. And what, you were meant to be the one keeping me in check?”

Odo gives an affectionate shake of his head. “You wanted a moon, once. So let’s get you a moon.”

“Wha…” Slack-jawed and struck dumb, Quark wonders if this is what his brother Rom feels like all the time. He's not sure he wants to know the answer, but he has to ask, “What about – what do you want?”

Odo smiles at him for a long moment, saying nothing, until Quark thinks he’ll avoid the question again, like he did that very first time, when they first met. If Odo doesn’t know what he wants, if at some point he learns their goals out here aren’t compatible, then who’s to say he’ll bother sticking with Quark through whatever obstacles they inevitably face? As Odo alluded, Quark gets in over his head all too easily.

Finally, Odo says, "You’re my moon.”

“I -- uh -- okay.” More Rom-worthy insight. Odo’s soft gaze seems to burn him, so, cheeks flushed with heat, Quark looks out to the rush of stars flooding the viewscreen. “You’re making me sound like my brother. My brother is an idiot.”

He's Odo’s moon. Because Quark almost threw away everything to revolve around Odo like some sort of lesser space rock? Or because Quark’s love and well-being makes Odo happy, helps him overcome his fear of independence in the same way Quark’s moon kept him going through those dark years alone in the prison?

Odo decided to venture out into the uncertainty of freedom, despite his fears, despite his doubts, because of Quark .

“First, tube grubs,” Odo relents, already moving on this photon bomb of a revelation. “Then what? If you think we’re safe from repercussions, we could visit your family first. Ferenginar?”

Quark shakes his head. 

No, Quark’s not ready to face them yet. Although come to think of it, he should at least wire Moogie some money, and assess what kind of horrendous debt they’re almost certainly drowning in without him around. 

There’s much that Quark wants to do -- test out that mattress in the cabin (first for sleeping, then for other purposes), buy makeup and skincare products, buy clothes and jewelry, hunt for real estate, price out startup costs, maybe pay for a real doctor to assess his remaining aches, invest some of his new fortune before he spends it all, research stories of other goo people out there, endlessly plan for profit -- but for now, all they need is to enjoy this moment, together.

Odo stands beside Quark, so that they both face the streams of blinking pinpricks that rush past them in warp. The symphony of space travel, all the hums and beeps and buzzes (not a single drip or cave echo!), are a comfort to Quark’s ears. The velvety blackness of space unfolds around them, expanding into a whole universe of open possibilities. Quark’s heart expands with it, so big in his chest he feels it might burst. It’s happening, it’s really happening. At some point, Quark stopped expecting it ever would. The joy travels up to create a lump in his throat. 

Odo rests a hand on his shoulder. Quark places his own on top of it. “Rule seventy-five. My favorite rule. Home is where the heart is… but the stars are made of latinum.”

Chapter Text

“Holosuite six and seven are down for maintenance again.” Grop, Quark’s timorous young assistant, reads off from a notation padd. “The last engineer quit when he couldn’t figure out your brother’s handiwork…”

“Prioritize getting those back online, asap! We’ve got an Andorian reunion arriving tomorrow. With those complicated family structures, they’re gonna need all the distraction we can offer,” Quark says. He snaps his fingers at several waiters chit-chatting on the job. They scurry off without another word.

“Then we’ve got the Bajorans and Cardassians checking in for the Peaceful Palms wing of the beach resort --”

“We what?! Who let that happen? Convince one party to rebook, and any discount you have to offer comes out of your paycheck --”

“No, no!” Grop waves his hands about excitedly. “Same party -- two of them are getting married!”

“A Bajoran, married to a Cardassian? Huh.” The Occupation has been over for years (not long after Dukat’s arrest and subsequent execution in fact, though the funds Odo insisted on funnelling to the Bajoran Resistance didn’t hurt), but tensions remained high for long after. Quark’s not used to the new friendship between their worlds. “If you’re certain… make sure Odo knows so he can keep an extra eye on that.”

“Speaking of Odo, about that trade deal with the Lissepians…”

“Shhhh!” Quark hushes him. His eyes dart around, looking for any unexpected objects around. He licks a stray glass, to no effect. “We’ll discuss later. I don’t have the proper import permit for those Denvian crystals, and Odo can sniff out subterfuge. About the only thing he can smell.”

“Fine! Sorry!” Grop squeaks. “Ummm… Kaga at the Klingon restaurant has a few new menu items he’s trying out, if you want me to arrange a tasting?”

“Finally. Some good news,” Quark says, rubbing his hands together in anticipation. A few waiters carry trays of canapes past, and Quark grabs a few. “Grek, Brolta -- come back here! Too salty, take those back to the kitchen.”

“Yes, sir…” They rush off to comply.

“Oh, that reminds me. Grop -- see if you can get a hold of Garak through one of his last encrypted channels. I’m ready for a new suit.” Quark runs his hands down the brocaded Tholian silk number he’s wearing, interlaid with gold thread and no less than ten bars worth of precious gems. The jacket's middle section strains at its crystal clasps.

Quality control at the ten different restaurants ranks as only fourth favorite on the list of Quark’s many duties as founder, proprietor, and operator of Quark’s Resort Moon, but only because he enjoys so much of his daily grind. He’s as round as his moon, these days, with the wealthy gut he always longed for, and all the happier for it. The excuse for new clothes as his measurements change is always a joy. Garak turns out to be a very good tailor, though Quark is the only customer he deigns design for, other than himself and Dr. Bashir. He’s hard to get a hold of though, with whatever clandestine undertakings he and his husband are up to these days.

“Garak is visiting me next week,” Odo calls from across the room. “You can ask him then.”

Quark yelps. “Odo! Uhh nice to see you! How much did you hear?”

Odo undulates up to Quark and Grop in a liquid ribbon bouncing in arcs off the ground, before he resolidifies.

“Oh that’s new!” Grop claps his hands with delight.

“I’m taking a break from bird forms. Those Klowahkans were a menace.” Odo often experiments with new shapes these days, though he only communicates while in his same old humanoid form. He squints at Quark suspiciously. “Why? Were you discussing the Lissepian trade vessel that hailed you earlier?”

“Oh them! A new shipment of dabo chips, nothing interesting --”

“Mm-hmm. I’ll be inspecting the cargo hold. Thoroughly.”

“As expected! Oh, don’t forget -- we’re meeting my family for dinner at the Swampgrounds Cafe tonight.” Quark makes a face. “Moogie will be wearing clothes , Rom won’t have the money to pay, working for hoo-mons like he does, hmph! And Nog…” Quark sighs, placing a forlorn hand over his heart, like he’s mourning his nephew’s imminent demise.

“This dinner is supposed to be a celebration. Big promotion for the first Ferengi in Starfleet! The rest of your family is very proud,” Odo chides. 

“Proof that good judgement isn’t genetic. I should have kept him here, instead of letting him run off to that Federation starbase with Rom,” Quark says darkly. “Grop, any chance you can manufacture some credible reason for me to skip tonight? You mentioned Kaga’s tasting menu?”

“Uuuhh…” Grop stutters, knowing from experience it’s best not to get in the middle of one of the couple’s many spats.

“I promised your mother you’d be on your best behavior tonight. Don’t make me go back on my word,” Odo says. 

“But the boy deserves to be reminded of what kind of trouble he’s getting into!” The Federation’s investigation into the Gamma Quadrant, with information on the mysterious Dominion revealed only in whispers, worries Quark.

“Play nice, and I’ll make it up to you…” Odo says, in that low, gravelly tone of his that he knows hits Quark in the lobes just so .

A thrill that runs through Quark. “Oooh!”

“Uhhhhh sir?” Grop is reading something on his padd.

“Can’t you see we’re in the middle of something?” Quark snaps.

“Not you, him.” Grop squints at the padd. “Someone wants to meet with, uhh, Odo.”

“With the ‘spectacular shapeshifting sensation,’ you mean,” Odo scoffs. 

A journalist visited the resort and wrote an article about Odo some years back, bringing unwanted attention to the “one-of-a-kind!” security manager on the moon. The article attracted considerable latinum in new business, even considering how many visiting rubberneckers Odo hasn’t hesitated to kick out for gawking at him. Quark never protests these lost customers (okay, only a little). What matters is that Odo isn’t self-conscious about shape-shifting anymore; he even seems to enjoy it, as long as witnesses treat him with respect.

“No… Well, he does only refer to you by your um abilities, but… This Laas person claims to be a fellow uhh ‘metamorph’?”

“He what?” Odo snatches the padd from him, reading it for himself. “Metamorph… Hmm. I suppose that could describe what I am. Likely some sort of angle on his part, to capitalize on my shifting.”

“Odo, you have to meet up! What if he is just like you? Maybe he knows where you came from! Your people!” Quark exclaims. They never did solve the mystery of Odo’s origins. Excitement quickly curdles into anxiety. “But you -- you have to promise not to run off with him! Why -- I bet he doesn’t have a single business to his name, let alone an entire moon .” 

“Yes,” Odo says dryly, “that’s the only reason I fell in love with you -- your moon.”

“You tell him I don’t share. In fact, I’m very possessive --”

“Who, you? Not greedy at all…” Odo chuckles. He kisses the top of Quark’s head. “You’re getting ahead of yourself. Even if he does turn out to be one of my people… I already have a family.”

“You do? And you’re happy with him?”

“And I’m happy,” Odo says firmly. “I’m not alone anymore. You never let me have a moment’s peace.”

“And this is where you belong? Quark’s Resort Moon, premier vacation destination for all the fun your latinum can buy -–”

“Nothing could tear me away. You know how stubborn I can be.”

Quark and Odo lean their foreheads against each other, eyes closed in shared bliss (while Grop awkwardly distracts himself with his padd in the corner). 

Quark sighs with happiness. “I suppose that’s alright then.”

“Good. Oh, I’m cancelling your Parrises squares tournament next month. I have observed serious safety concerns --” 

Bustling with the non-stop industry of running an entertainment conglomerate, at the center of a web of social connections, in a home they built together, and flush with the abundance of good fortune -- life for Quark and Odo these days is nothing like their time in prison… Except that they will never leave each other alone, not for anything.

All is well.