Work Text:
The Deserts of the Heart
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
—WH Auden, In Memory of WB Yeats
Bajor, 2393
For years this had been a wasteland, abandoned and untouched. Thirty years ago a division from the Fourth Order arrived and, across the course of one day, systematically demolished the houses here. Pulled people out of their beds, thrown them onto the street without a chance to pack anything, left them to stand and watch as their homes were turned to rubble. There’d been resistance activity in the area, they’d said. Perhaps there even had been. It was a story you could hear just about anywhere on Bajor, and the pain was not diminished for its familiarity.
Some distance away, the Cardassian working in the garden pulled himself up from his knees, and stretched, raising his face briefly to the weak white sun. When he saw Kira sitting on the bench, he lifted his palm in greeting. He came towards her, walking down the path that led past the lilacs. He moved more slowly than in the past.
There was a garden here now. Flowers and vegetables and young trees settling in nicely. Four days out of every six, the Cardassian was here, digging, weeding, tending. Doing whatever it was that people did to make things grow out of the ground. Kira only had a hazy idea of what that involved. The man who would have taught her lost his garden before she was born, and there wasn’t much of that kind of thing going on in Singha. You kicked a ball around in the dirt, when there was a ball to kick around, and then you ran away to learn how to kill Cardassians.
Garak sat down beside her on the bench. He had a flask of raktajino with him and two metal cups, like field kit. He opened the flask and poured the liquid into the cups. He always had a flask of raktajino with him when she came. She knew he didn’t particularly like raktajino, but that he knew that she did.
“It looks beautiful today,” she said, “in the sunshine.”
“Well, I think so,” he said, and sighed.
She’d asked him once, sitting beside him on this bench, who had taught him to garden. Sometimes, these days, he answered questions like that, if you caught him at the right moment.
“When I was a boy,” he told her, “someone cared enough to teach me.”
“What about the sewing?”
“That,” he said, “was tradecraft.”
Tradecraft. What had she learned, as a kid? Not to garden, that was for sure. Not to sew, or cook, or clean, or take care of anything much. She’d kicked a ball around when there was one. She’d kept her distance from the guards. And then she’d run away. She’d learned how to move quickly and quietly. She’d learned how to use and maintain a weapon. She’d learned how to live on nothing. She’d tried, once, to work in clay; she still shuddered when she thought about the results.
“It’s no small feat,” he’d said, watching her face, “to rebuild a world from nothing.”
Signing off permission for this garden had been one of the more contentious decisions she’d made in office. Some of her colleagues, she knew, wanted to lock this man up and throw away the key. When they’d started digging here, people said that nobody would work alongside a Cardassian gardener, that nobody would want anything that had been grown here. They’d also said, once upon a time, that nobody would buy from a Cardassian tailor. Kira had never used the shop, but she’d eaten food made from vegetables from this garden many times.
He sat looking round. The raktajino cooled in his hand. He was going home at the end of next week. “Oh, Nerys,” he said, “I hope it survives.”
“It will,” she promised, and drank from her cup.
The kids from the nearby houses had turned up first, curious about what was going on here, and young enough not to run for their lives at the sight of a Cardassian face. Their parents had come and dragged them off back home. Still, though, kids. As far as Kira could tell, you couldn’t stop them doing anything they really set their minds to. They went where they wanted, did what they wanted. A barrier had been set up between the garden and the houses, but it hadn’t lasted long; the kids played a game where they were resistance fighters storming a garrison and kicked the thing down. There’d been a few lacklustre attempts to rebuild, but none of them lasted. After that, a couple of the adults turned up – to keep an eye out, they said. At some point, the people who lived in the houses started work on the piece of land nearest to them. Cleared the rubble, smoothed the ground. The kids kicked a ball around there – when they weren’t in the garden. Next they built a playground for them. Swings and stuff. A paddling pool. The small ones loved that; on a hot day, jets of water shot up and they would scream and laugh. But it still didn’t pull the older ones away from the garden. Bit by bit, step by step, the two territories inched closer to each other and now you could see, more or less, where one day they might merge.
There was a little girl in the pool today, splashing around with her daddy. The two of them, out here together enjoying the sunshine. Kira leaned forwards to study them, to see what it was they did together.
“It’s strange where life takes you,” said the man sitting beside her.
“Yeah?”
“It turns out that whatever it was you missed, it’s never too late.”
She wasn’t sure that was true. She’d read everything in this man’s file. She knew that, one time, he had pulled off the impossible to get to his father before he died. She often wished that she could say the same.
In the pool, the man and the child were splashing up a storm. He bent down to pick her up, and then he swung her round and round, and she laughed and laughed, and the sunlight sparkled off the water drops. Kira’s eyes began to prickle.
“You know,” she told him, “I never learned to play…”
14th March 2026