Work Text:
The scrawls first appear when he’s a grown adult, and come to believe that he’ll never have a soul-mate. He calls them scrawls, well, because he can’t think of a better description. First there is just a blob of waxy feeling red, quickly followed by a large thick back and forth line, like a child scribbling-out. When that fades it’s followed by two awkward, wobbly, smiley faces. Then one with only a downturned mouth.
Garak picks up the nearest pen and, on the inside of the other arm he draws a smiling face to match the pair. It disappears into his skin as if it had never been there, and he makes a mental note never to put trivial things there.
The scrawls appear regularly for a year, a year and a half. Most times they don’t look much like anything, a collection of odd circles and blobs. But there is such care in their gradual formation on his arm that he can’t be critical. His soulmate is obviously a youngling, perhaps not even understanding why any drawings on that peice of skin disappear as if they had never been there. So he looks at each one and sends back the same simple, positive response of a smile. Then, after a sudden flurry of drawings, which he thinks are meant to be different aliens, something coloured like an Andorian had appeared near his elbow, his soulmate goes very quiet. Six months with no little tickles on his skin, no strange art. Despite himself, despite all his training, there is a worry there. Is the person sick? Dead? Tain gets cross with him after two assignments are nearly fluffed, he applies himself to his work. And consciously forgets about his forearm.
An unbearable itch. And when he looks, there is something there. Federation standard, written in beautifully artistic, slightly cursive handwriting
Hello
Hello He writes back. His own handwriting looks stiff and boxy for the brief seconds it remains there on his arm.
IT WORKS HURRAH!!! The words nearly end up overwriting each other as they appear, his soulmate is writing so fast. The next words creep onto every extremity of the patch as whoever it is tries to fit them all in. I thought I remembered this happening, but everything is so odd from before I thought I had imagined it. A brief pause then: I’m glad. It’s nice to not be alone.
Garak stares at the stream of words, so different from the frankly terrible drawings which had been his last communication with his soulmate and that oblique reference to before implied something had happened to change this person, who he had to remember, he didn’t even know.
Yes it is isn’t it is what he finally writes back.
They scribble back and forth for years, sometimes great long stories from his soulmate, whining generally about all sorts of things. Garak gets good at ignoring things he’s pretty sure his soulmate didn’t mean to write, venting in the way he vaguely remembers from being around that age when the world seemed unfair and scary. Sometimes he’ll be the one writing far too much, when his soulmate begs to be kept company or distracted from whatever it is. He’ll tell great long tales that are 99% fantasy and lie, wandering off wherever he can think of. You are a cynical thing is the favourite thing which appears in response.
The Bajorans, children, just starved desperate children, are staring at him in terror, all trying to hide behind each other as he stares them down. In a shallow part of his heart he knows that they don’t know anything. But he has to interrogate them, Tain has told him to, and if he doesn’t then he is a traitor to Tain and Cardassia. But his mind is sluggish, it is cold. The children are shivering like leaves on trees in a high wind. But he’s been taught better than this. His arm itches, and even as he tries to dismiss it as a manifestation of the cold he’s looking down at that patch of skin.
I will abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm.
He knows he should dismiss it, it’s nothing but one of the many notations that have accidentally found their way across the skins over the last few years as his soulmate makes reassuring notes. But it strikes a chord. He finds himself standing, digging in his pockets for those last chips of latinum, sending them flying across the room, frightening the children further back into their corner.
Crossing the room, wrenching open the door out onto the street, snarling at them in his best gutter Bajoran “Get out of here, get far away”
They flee, snatching the chips from the floor, never taking their eyes from him even as they run. And he drops back into his chair and stares at that beautiful cursive and wonders whether being a traitor to Cardassia is quite as bad as being a traitor to the other half of one’s very soul.
Shallow honey face, big brown eyes like a chama doe. Innocent, naive, so hopeful. He crosses the promenade to the replimat, watching the young man drink his tea. He startles him, actually enjoying the way poor Bashir clings to his composure against all his front and tries desperately to be polite and amiable even when Garak knows he’s deliberately knocking his feet from under him time and time again. He eases off, then breaks all the rules and deliberately lets his hands rest on Bashir’s shoulders, squeezing ever so slightly. The poor boy is so startled he almost feels sorry for the game.
His arm itches. The writing is shaky, as though whoever it was has just had a shock and can’t quite hold a pen steady. Quite different from that oh so elegant cursive he’s used to. A Very Strange Cardassian just introduced himself to me.
He stops, looking down at his arm. He pulls out a pen and writes.
Indeed I did.
Then he turns around in time to see Bashir standing in front of the turbolift and staring down at his arm. In time to see those wonderfully innocent childish eyes lift and scan across the crowd until they rest on him. Bashir walks across the flow of people like one asleep until they are standing face to face.
Then the doctor takes out his pen and writes something on his inner forearm
Garak’s skin itches Garak?
Now, inexplicably, it’s his hand which is shaking as he writes Hello and then, before it disappears, for old times sake, he draws a smile next to it.
And when Bashir turns his ‘appearing’ arm towards him, it’s that one word and a smile which fill his vision.