Chapter Text
In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored...
- East Coker, T.S Eliot
It was not an easy thing, coercing the brutalised and razed earth to come back to life. An endless balancing act - how much water could he spare, how much time? - and still, the garden had bloomed, in time.
Two years after the Fire, Garak has managed to cobble together a semblance of a life from the ruins of the past. He has a place to live (though the walls are too thin for both the hot days and cold nights of Prime), neighbours (though friends, he supposes, would be too strong a word to use) and work. Good work, real work - advising the storm-battered ship that is the new democratic leadership of Cardassia, steering it carefully towards some pretense at a future.
The house looks a lot like a Federaji crate, which Garak hates. He’s extended the steps outside the front door, built a little porch from reclaimed wood and placed a single chair on top of it. There is no table, but an upturned box gets the job done whenever he can’t bear to stay inside the cramped little space anymore.
And there is a garden.
Keiko had sent him bags of seeds, back in the early days. It was illegal, of course, exporting foreign flora to distant sections of the quadrant without the proper clearance, but who was going to spend the time snooping around Garak’s little plot of land, searching for contraband herbs? They all had better things to do. There had been seeds for different root vegetables, mostly. Hearty and filling, enough to scrounge up a few stews and soups from. Thyme and rosemary, for flavour. And, at the bottom of the pile, a bag with a picture of yellow flowers on it.
He had spread the seeds reverently, religiously, on top of the earth he had sifted and sifted, picking out each piece of glass and stone and concrete with his bare hands. Four little pallets of soil, their frames carefully surrounded with piled rocks he had picked up on his long walks around the neighbourhood (if that’s what it could be called), trellises constructed out of bent and rusted metal wire that he dug out of a rubble heap.
Tonight, the thyme is almost blooming - he will have to trim it, soon enough.
There is a rattle behind him as his next door neighbour, Sayet, pushes her door open. Her tiny, hunched frame is barely visible in the glow from the string lights they’ve looped from the electrical poles, but still he can see the judgement in her eyes clear as day.
“Well, you look terrible,” she says, and Garak almost laughs. They all look terrible. All of Cardassia looks terrible.
“Long day at the office,” he says, and she tuts, ambling over towards him on unsteady legs. He feels himself tense up, ready to lunge forward if she should stumble, but she doesn’t. To have survived this place for so long, he supposes, you have to be made of hardy stuff.
“Don’t overwork yourself, young man,” she admonishes, waving a bundle of khess in her left hand.
He’s halfway through his protest that he’s not young, hasn’t been young for a long time, when she reaches him at the end of the little garden.
“All of you look young to me,” she says, running her fingers along the rows of herbs, picking a leaf to rub between her wrinkled fingers. “These are coming in nicely.”
“Yes. As long as there’s no frost I think they’ll manage.”
“Hasn’t been frost in these parts of Prime for five hundred years,” she mutters, dropping the leaf. “But who’s to say what’ll happen, what with what’s going on down by Lakarian. Tell me, boy, how are those friends of yours in the Assembly holding up? What are they saying about the blackouts?”
Friends… He doesn’t quite know how to tell her that besides her and his… coworkers, he supposes, the people he talks to the most are a Federaji botanist and a Bajoran ex-terrorist. He’s not sure what her reaction to that would be - telling him that he should broaden his horizons, probably.
“We’re hoping to cut them down to only four hours per afternoon,” he informs her. “In a couple of weeks, if all goes to plan.” He smiles, then, meeting her eyes. “This is strictly confidential, of course.”
She snorts. “Don’t take me for a fool, child. I won’t tell a soul. Except maybe Kavis, at our next kotra game.”
If Kavis finds out, so will the rest of the neighbourhood. Garak doesn’t mind. It’s good publicity, isn’t it? Ghemor won’t be too upset with him.
Sayet wanders closer, inspecting his attempts at domesticity. There is no fence between their gardens, but there’s still an invisible line running between his space and hers. She grows vegetables, mostly, and tea.
Garak had made Sayet’s trellises too, one late night when he had given up on the idea of pretending to sleep. In the morning, she had come out on the steps with a steaming cup of something sweet, watched him place them carefully into the earth, nodded, and said nothing. In the afternoon, there had been a loaf of freshly baked bread hanging from a bag on his door.
Apparently done with her observation, Sayet turns back to Garak.
“Take these,” Sayet says, pressing the bundle of khess into his hands. They smell earthy, and familiar, and green.
“I couldn’t possibly,” Garak tells her, but Sayet is not to be deterred. She reminds him vividly, painfully, of Mila. That unstoppable force of will - there was nothing he could ever say or do to change her mind when it was made up. Sayet is the same. If she has decided that the khess are his, they are.
“You look terrible,” she tells him again, nodding towards the vegetables in his hand. Sayet pats his arm, roughly, and ambles back inside.
In his letter back to Keiko, between his profuse thanks, Garak had asked about the yellow flowers. Were they medicinal? Edible? No, she had told him. But every place needs something useless and beautiful to look at. It makes everything seem lighter, don’t you think?
-
He returns from the Assembly building, such as it is, long after sunset. The days are hot and sweltering, the air shaking and distorting the rocks and rubble below - the nights are freezing cold. Garak keeps a jacket in his bag for this reason, something to keep the chills from his bones on the long walk home in the dark.
Fog has rolled in from the sea, cloaking the streets that are once more becoming familiar to him in a soft blur. Lamps shine through the haze from above, but just barely.
The seasons have been acting strangely since the Fire. He’s no scientist, but Garak stays, by necessity, well-informed. The words nuclear winter have been floated, and dismissed. But there’s a disturbance in the south, where Lakarian City had once stood. Not unexpected - wiping out a city of two million people in one fell swoop is bound to have lasting effects. Firestorms, then its ashes spread into the atmosphere. Then, almost another billion dead.
The number is so large, so incomprehensible, that Garak’s mind keeps rejecting it outright. He can understand one person dead - is intimately familiar with it, in fact. Five, ten, a hundred. Somewhere after that, it all turns into abstraction.
When he mentioned this to Kira during one of their regular calls (and just when had they become regular, exactly?), she had been generous enough not to say: so now you finally get it? She had already known that he did.
Garak turns onto his street, which of yet has no name. He can only just make out the rows of identical houses, their facades grey and unassuming, even more so in the fog. A blur of plants like spectres in the dark, electrical cords like a torn-up spiderweb.
There is a ghost outside his door, curled up and almost invisible in the dim lamplight.
A ghost with a slender frame and dark hair, longer and more unruly than he remembers it. A ghost wrapped up in an oversized cream coloured sweater, the cuffs fraying and threadbare. A ghost, shivering in the cold.
“Hello,” says Julian Bashir, and Garak, for perhaps the first time in his life, is speechless.
-
It’s not as if they haven’t stayed in touch.
Over time, yes, their communication had grown scarce. They were both so busy. Julian, working on the cure to the Jem’Hadar’s addiction to the White, and then distributing it in the Gamma quadrant. Garak, desperately trying to hold together this ruined world with his bare hands. Not sleeping enough, not eating enough, not even having the energy to read, or speak.
Eventually, their messages to each other were nothing more than platitudes. How are you, oh, just fine thank you, work is keeping me busy, please give my regards to so and so… And if Garak, ancestors forbid, were to be honest with himself, it had stung. He had measured carefully the amount of words and jokes and jibes Julian put into his letters, matched them exactly. Never overstepping, never offering anything more than was offered to him in return. It was a safety measure, a moat between himself and everything he didn’t want to, couldn’t, express.
Still, despite all of his calculations, it had stung.
Three months and five days since their last communication. Another empty shell of a letter that Garak had typed up one late evening, and then nothing. He had supposed, at the time, that it was the end. It wasn’t as if they had been particularly close, those final years.
And yet, there is a ghost on his doorstep, with a battered duffel bag at his side.
Julian looks as if he hasn’t slept in weeks. There are dark circles underneath his eyes, purplish like bruises, dark stubble on his cheeks. His complexion has a grey tint to it that Garak hasn’t seen before. His cheeks look sunken beneath the stubble.
Garak is an old hand at tampering down instinctive physical reactions, if not always very successful at the endeavor. He slows his breathing, makes sure his heart is pumping at the normal rate, that his voice won’t shake when he speaks. Standard procedure.
“Terrible sweater,” Garak says, “but a good choice for an evening on Prime. Temperature-wise, that is.”
“Sorry to disappoint you once again with my choice of clothes,” Julian mumbles, unfolding himself slowly from his position on the porch.
“Some things never change. A cup of tea, perhaps, doctor? I’m afraid there’s not a lot of coffee to go around in these parts.”
“Please,” says Julian, and drags himself up to his feet. Slowly, as if he had been transported into Sayet’s body, not the young and genetically perfected one he actually inhabits. He looks unsteady, as if he could fall over at the slightest breeze.
This is a man that is unwell, he can surmise that much, and a man that has come here for - what? Help? Garak has an outstanding debt when it comes to life-saving measures, and no currency in which to repay it.
There is so little he remembers from that time with the wire.
The start of the ordeal is completely, unrelentingly clear. Cardassian memory is, after all, overly detailed and brutally unforgiving. There was the tremor that had begun in his right hand, the way he had stabbed a needle deep into his thumb on accident, drawing blood. That had never happened before. The way the tremor had, over the course of a week, evolved into a shaking in both hands that he couldn’t control. There was the nausea. The splitting headache that had made him want to claw at his eyes, if only for a moment’s release. The way that drinking himself into a stupor had worked for a while, and then stopped working.
And then -
Julian’s hand in his. Drifting in and out of consciousness, but Julian there, always there. Sleeping, reading, just sitting by his bedside. It must have been days.
Julian’s fingers in his hair, combing through the strands, feeling for the scar left from the insertion of the implant.
And when it was all over, Julian forcing steaming cups of broth into his hands, making sure he dutifully downed all of his pills.
It wasn’t the first time that Julian had patched him up, and it wouldn’t be the last. He’d had his clavicle, skin and nose broken on separate occasions. He’d had his teeth knocked loose in their sockets by Sisko, his ribs broken by Kingons not once but twice. Each time, he had sauntered into the infirmary with a crooked smile and a flippant remark, and Julian had put him back together.
Roles reversed, Garak finds that he doesn’t know what to do.
What are you doing here?
That would be the expected thing to say, Garak supposes, but he takes a certain amount of pride in habitually sidestepping the expected and choosing another path entirely.
“Tell me about the station,” Garak says, maneuvering Julian into the armchair he keeps by the kitchenette. “How is everyone?”
“Quark is fine. Morn is fine. Kira is fine. Well, you know that. She says you speak quite frequently.”
“A few weeks hiding in a basement together does much to strengthen the bonds between former adversaries,” Garak tells him, lightly, filling the kettle with the last of the day’s water.
“I’m sure,” Julian says, sinking deeper into the armchair. He is fiddling with the cuff of his sweater, tugging at a strand of yarn that is already unraveling.
“And your research?”
This had seemed like a safe option, a sure way to get Julian to talk and keep talking. Instead, the doctor freezes in place, his hands stilling to an unnatural degree. Garak lets the silence linger, pours the tea into his nicest cups, the ones with the least amount of chips in the china.
“I’m on leave. Well, I was put on leave,” Julian says, dragging a hand through his overgrown hair. He laughs, almost to himself, staring down at the crate Garak uses as a kitchen table. “Failed an evaluation.”
“You failed -” Garak starts, cuts himself off. The old adage about the preganglionic fiber comes to mind. He wants to ask, very much, what type of evaluation this was. Patience, he tells himself. They all speak, eventually. “Did you do it on purpose?”
Julian gives him a look, then, that he can’t quite decipher. “What do you think?”
“I think that you’re tired, doctor, and that you’ve travelled a long way.”
Something seems to occur to the doctor, then, his eyes suddenly lighting up.
“I’m not imposing, am I? God, I should have asked… Garak, I’m sorry.”
“Whatever for? I told you, didn’t I, just after the war’s end? You’re welcome here.”
“Thanks,” Julian breathes, relaxing back into his seat. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” Garak says, standing to pick up their empty cups, “Perhaps you won’t find my planet to your liking.”
When he’s washed the cups thoroughly and left them to dry on the stand by the little sink, he turns, and finds Julian asleep in his chair, slumped to one side. He’ll have a crick in his neck in the morning, probably, but he can’t bear to wake him up. Instead, Garak retreats to his cot in the far corner of the room, and tries to think of nothing, and fails.
-
When Garak wakes from his final, fitful bout of sleep, Julian is gone.
For a moment, he almost believes that it was all a trick of the mind, a dream. But there is Julian’s sweater abandoned in a pile on the armchair, tangible proof that his appearance had not been some kind of hallucination brought on by lack of sleep.
Garak folds the sweater carefully as he waits for his water ration to boil, puts it neatly back in its place. The duffel bag, he notices, is missing.
He steps outside just as the sun is dragging itself above the horizon. No sign of the doctor in the garden either, but Sayet is sitting on her rickety chair outside her house, a cup of tea between her hands.
“Good morning,” he tells her on his way out, as usual, and she nods in return. He considers, for a moment, asking if she’s seen a young and beautiful Federaji doctor somewhere in the vicinity, but decides against it.
Instead, he slings his bag over his shoulder and begins the long walk down to the offices. He has an investigation to start.