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The first dream came two night after Miles dragged him from the flickering, fading dregs of Sloan’s dying mind.
Julian woke gasping, lungs burning. This in itself was concerning: his body almost never protested like this. The dream—the memory—was trying to fade at the edges, but there was still Bolian brandy on his tongue despite having only touched synthale for weeks.
A Klingon station. The weight of prosthetics. The weight of a phaser against his hip, a Balduk woman’s eyes shift from skepticism to realization to nothing as the poison took hold.
Julian hadn’t been to that station, certainly never handled poisons.
Sloan had.
He knew it before his mind even started thinking through half-lives of residual neural pathway symmetry; the dream-memory came from eyes that were too short, a body with weight settled more solidly around his core with hands that were too pale and had unfamiliar calluses.
God, looking through Sloan's eyes. Feeling his body move. Feeling his mental narration whisper at the edge of awareness.
Julian sat up, pressed his palms to his eyes. He'd thought the aftereffects would be manageable: some disorientation, maybe a few stray, intrusive thoughts. The mind was resilient; he knew that better than most.
Not this.
Not dreams where he was someone else: a man he feared hated. Certainly not living memories as though they were his own.
The worst part wasn't the killing.
The worst part was the satisfaction.
He checked the chronometer. 0146. Stars hung in their multitudes outside his viewport.
Sleep came eventually, restless and unwelcome, no better than nothing.
The recycled air of the court couldn’t eliminate the smell of sweat, which Julian had always found oddly comforting.
"Ready?" Miles asked, bouncing the ball twice. That was his confident move. He thought he had a shot today.
"Always." Julian got into position.
The problem—and there was a problem, he knew, as much as he didn’t want to acknowledge it—was that he kept losing two or three seconds at a time. Not regularly, and certainly not blacking out. Just… slipping, coming back to himself with the vague sense of missing a beat, like reading and suddenly realizing he’d turned the page without taking in a word.
Miles served. Julian returned. A volley of six, and then he lost the thread.
He retrieved the ball.
"Serve."
He got the next one. Lost the one after because he went after it presuming a shorter height, a different build, different hands—
"Point," Miles said. He retrieved the ball, then peered over at Julian. "You alright?"
"Fine. Giving you a head start." He bounced the ball. "Your serve."
Miles served. Julian returned it cleanly. Eleven strokes, a decent rally, and then he put it in the net because for three second he was not Julian.
"Julian."
"I know." He picked up the ball. He could feel Miles watching him. "Long shifts. I'll sleep tonight. Your serve."
Julian lost by six points. He couldn't ever remember losing by more than two.
They walked back to the habitat ring without discussing Julian’s distraction, because Julian wasn’t going to give Miles the opening, and Miles wasn’t going to talk emotions without an opening being forced down his throat. It was a successful endeavor on each their parts. He made a joke about Miles cheating and walked back to his quarters with his racquet over his shoulder.
He did not think about whose hands held the grip.
The Yridian's blood was lukewarm.
He was washing his—Sloan's—hands in a sonic scrubber, watching the blood break apart and vanish. The mission had gone well: the Yridian had been selling intelligence to the Tal'Shiar, and now wouldn't be selling anything to anyone.
Julian-as-Sloan looked at his hands in the blue-white light and felt proud. Efficient. Clean. The target never saw it coming.
But underneath the pride something preened that made Julian's hindbrain twitch in rejection: a darker current, almost sensual in its intensity. The Yridian had struggled at the end, tried to thrash when realization of the final curtain sank in. The windpipe collapsed under his thumbs, light faded from those bulbous eyes, and he felt—
Powerful.
Julian woke gasping, scrambling away from his pillow like it might contaminate him. He knew that he'd never killed anyone with his bare hands. His hands were for healing and saving lives.
But the memory—tjat rush of power and control and finality—was in his neural pathways now, firing and entrenching the patterns that weren't his own.
He couldn't go back to sleep. He lay on the bed with the lights at thirty percent and watched the stars and told himself that borrowed clothing—not matter how well it fit—still had textures for other skin.
The satisfaction still felt like his.
Jadzia’s gift for finding gossip must have come from Dax. Deny it all she liked, there was no way her bloodhound-like ability to sniff it out came from a single lifetime.
"—and apparently Ensign Tunis has been leaving love poetry at Lieutenant Vilix'pran’s station," she gushed, eyes bright. "They think he’s beautiful when he’s budding—quadruplets, this time—and his wife is not happy—"
Julian snorted. "How do you even know that?"
"I know everything." She reached across and stole a dumpling from his plate. He hadn't touched them. "You're not eating."
"I ate in the infirmary."
"Ration bars don’t count.” She ate the roll without guilt. "Julian."
"I'm fine."
"Mm." She refilled his glass without asking. "Tell me more about fine. Let’s see if it matches my definition."
He let her pour. "The war’s… long," he offered, which wasn’t the issue at hand, but did have the virtue of being true. "I suspect we're all running on less than we should be."
Jadzia looked at him with three hundred years, and let it go. She navigated back into Tunis’s poetry instead, which Julian appreciated.
He was doing all right.
He scaffolded a theory. After all, there was a problem and the only thing he could do was name it.
His mind was not a typical mind.
He knew this, of course, in the most obvious way. But even among those with enhanced neural pathways, using a multitronic engrammatic interpreter usually only resulted in disorientation and emotional residue, perhaps a week of strange dreams before the neural pathways settled back into the patterns of a single person. Not weeks of coherent, narrative, sensory memories that came fully formed and faded slowly and grew increasingly specific.
He suspected it went back to Vantika.
The criminal jockeyed his pathways like a joyrider, using him, looking out through his eyes and playing dice with his body while he slept.
It was years ago, and he'd been cleared: a full neurological workup revealed no residual foreign engrams. But damage didn't always show on scans.
His working theory—and it was only a theory—was that having a foreign consciousness occupy his neural pathways had changed something in its underlying architecture; made him more permeable, perhaps. Other people got impressions. He got memories. Other people dreamed faintly for a week and then stopped.
He couldn't stop.
It was a reasonable hypothesis. It did nothing, but he clung to it.
Julian—he—a was treating a Bajoran with plasma burns.
While he—Sloan—observed it all.
Julian-as-Sloan looked through the infirmary windows. The promenade lighting was at night cycle, and his position offered a clear view while keeping him concealed.
Waiting was natural. He-as-him spent years perfecting waiting—in blind alleys, hotel rooms, always watching, always gathering.
The door hissed open.
Julian—real Julian, other Julian, crossed over to a repli-stand, tripping on the way.
Yes—the trip solidified the date for him. Twenty-six hours on duty—Julian remembered that night.
Target.
Real-Julian ordered Raktajino. His shoulders were tight with exhaustion, and he rolled them unconsciously while waiting for the replicator to materialize his order.
And Julian-as-Sloan watched with an intensity that gnawed and snapped like hunger.
Brilliant, his—Sloan's— thoughts wove around him. Wasted on idealistic principles and outdated morality, but brilliant.
Affection and contempt emulsified together, a sickening mixture that turned his stomach. Sloan looked at him like a promising student—a disappointing one who kept failing to live up to their potential.
Real-Julian took his tea and returned to the infirmary, oblivious.
He stood in the shadows, lingering. Planning.
He could be extraordinary, with the guidance. The right motivation. He just needs to understand his precious principles won't survive contact with reality. I could show him. Mold him. He'd resist at first, of course—that's part of his charm—but eventually...
The thought trailed off into confident patience.
Eventually, he'd understand. They all do, in the end.
Julian jerked awake, heart hammering. He remembered treating that engineer and feeling vaguely uneasy as he finished his triple-shift. He'd dismissed it as the general stress that came with war.
Apparently he should have leaned into the paranoia.
"You look terrible," Miles said, setting his tray down across from Julian.
"Didn't sleep well." Julian's tea sat untouched in front of him. He couldn't stomach it.
"Mm. You keep saying that." Miles leaned forward, lowering his voice. "Is this about the Sloan thing?"
Julian's fist tightened. "Why do you think that?"
"Because you've been off ever since." Miles shrugged, watched a cluster of Klingons walk by. "Have you… damn, have you talked to anyone?"
Things must look worse than he thought if Miles was recommending talking.
"I'm fine."
"Alright. But if you’re not..."
Julian nodded, knowing he wouldn't. How could he explain that he was experiencing another man's memories without calling into question his capabilities? The last thing the station needed was the removal of their best doctor—who was he to say his sense of self was worth more than the lives he saved daily?
Nobody, really. So he wouldn’t.
The interrogation room was colder, standing on this side of the table. The pit in his stomach grew with every terrible moment of the inquisition playing out again. The table, the chair, the harsh light was constructed to create maximum disorientation, sow uncertainty and anxiety. Each pause had been a hand around his throat, choking him.
This time, he looked at the construction and saw craftsmanship. He watched himself squirm as he laid the loyalty trap, delighted as fear and confusion played across his own face.
Such a brilliant mind, wasted.
Julian-as-Sloan leaned forward, into his own personal space, watching stress etch into each line.
Beautiful when he's frightened.
Julian woke choking on bile.
Garak appeared at the infirmary at 1130 bearing a uniform Julian had dropped off and a mildly affronted false frown.
"Twice I've repaired this," he said, by way of greeting. "Yet you continue to rip the shoulder at the same point."
The uniform looked fine from that distance. But they hadn't had lunch in three weeks, and Garak had made the effort to come, so Julian came around the biobed.
"Let me see."
Running his fingers along the reinforced seam gave him something to look at that wasn't Garak's face, and something to touch that wasn’t Garak’s hand—which was useful because could Garak read him: it was the most disconcerting skill in a man who had many.
"You haven't been sleeping," Garak said pleasantly.
"I've been sleeping."
"You haven't been sleeping well." A pause. "Is there anything… particular keeping you awake?"
"The war," Julian said, by default. "I imagine everyone's having difficulty sleeping."
"Mm." Garak had a mm that filed observations away, like Miles, though his arrived in a completely different plcae. "I expect you're right."
Julian kept his eyes on the seam. "Thank you, Garak. I think it’ll hold, now. Did you use a double—"
"Doctor."
His soft voice. Garak rarely used it: twice in four years, perhaps three times, if Julian counted that one time in the afterglow that Garak never brought up again, always in the dark and always when Julian was probably meant to be asleep—
But Garak using it now, in the middle of the infirmary, with patients on the other side of the room—
"How are you?" Too careful, more than a question
Beautiful when he's frightened.
"I'm fine," he said, and the false smile was easy; it started coming automatically some time ago. "Truly. It's just been a long few months."
Garak considered him, the subtext. Damn trained spy, taking in the latency. Then—
"Of course." He straightened his cuffs, nodded. "I won't keep you."
He was three steps from the door, and Julian thought to perhaps call out, but then Nurse Jabara was walking up with some supplemental titrated carbonoflouride vials, and got back to work.
Julian studied his quarters, and briefly wondered when he had gotten up—had he started sleepwalking?—when he looked down from the doorway and saw himself, asleep.
Security override successful.
One of Julian’s arms was thrown over his head, the other rested on his chest. His sheet had slipped down to his waist.
He stood in the doorway for a long time, watching rise and fall of Julian's chest. Ah, the vulnerability of sleep. How easy it would be to simply reach out and—
Not yet, the him schooled by decades of training and discipline whispered. He's not ready yet. Patience.
Julian-as-Sloan took a step closer. In the bed, Julian’s eyelids fluttered.
Julian—he—should be waking up. His body knew the difference between routine sounds and those of an interloper. And yet the him-before-him slept. His skin—his metaphorical skin, not the skin he wore standing there—crawled.
Of course he’d wake up, in normal circumstances. Must adjust for that.
He stood beside the bed for—how long? He was satisfaction-drunk, and it make time stretch and compress, blur with he singular focus he placed on that prone body before him.
So vulnerable. It’d be so easy. A pillow over the face, a break to the neck. Paralytics. Poisons. Should he not be… convincible.
Julian woke, stumbled to the bathroom, and vomited.
The stimulants helped him avoid sleep.
He'd always run long shifts, always found reasons to stay in the infirmary past the point of usefulness, and the stimulants were a logical extension of that.
He would have told a patient it was a poor long-term strategy without a moment's hesitation, but he was not his own patient, and he steadfastly avoided Dr. Giriani. Shifts started to run together, but he was excellent at maintaining the surface of functionality. It was remarkable, really, how long he could keep running on mechanical routine alone, long after he-as-the-conductor abandoned the train to its careening route down the tracks.
But eventually, inevitably, exhaustion claimed him.
And with it, more dreams.
Sitting in Quark's, in a back booth with a clear view of the bar. Real-Julian was there, having a drink with Miles, laughing, completely comfortably unaware he was being watched.
Regular social patterns. Three nights a week at Quark's: usually with Chief O'Brien, occasionally with others, increasingly seldom with Garak, never alone. Most enhanced individuals display some degree of social distance, yet he appears to crave connection. A weakness, or strength?
A different dream, different night. Real-Julian walking through a corridor, PADD in hand, Julian-as-Sloan following at a distance, never close enough to be noticed but never losing sight.
Predictable route from infirmary to quarters. Varies timing but not path. Tactically unsound. I’d need to break those patterns, train him properly—
A pause
Soon. All good things.
The medication was routine: tri-ox compound, Junior Grade Yrenees, standard acclimatization for Mitzukians posted to stations with grade-C Federation atmospheric compounds. 25 ccs.
Julian prepared the hypo, lined it up, paused. There—the flicker of a not-quite mistake not yet made—and he checked the hypspray settings.
250 ccs.
He stared at the hypo. Dialed down the settings, administered the dosage. Yrenees thanked him and left.
Julian set the hypo on the tray.
Julian was afraid to sleep now, which meant being afraid of the inevitable; exhaustion was not something even he could outrun indefinitely, even with his physiology, biology was patient. It would collect what it was owed.
He slept eventually, because it was not a decision.
His quarters, and the flat, nausea of a recurring nightmare. But this time he didn't stay in the doorway.
His weight settled into mattress. Deeper than he was used to; he was carrying more weight closer to the ground, after all.
Remarkable specimen.
His hand reached out, touched Julian-nonotJulian-can’tacceptit’shim’s hair. From the outside it could have been tenderness. From the inside there was no such sentimentality about the gesture of ownership.
Illegal enhancement, yet somehow utterly dedicated to the same Federation that would have prosecuted him, persecuted him. Should have found him before—could have been extraordinary with proper guidance. Still could be.
Julian-in-the-dream stirred, groaned, a small thing. Julian-as-Sloan froze, hand in his hair.
After a moment, he settled. He withdrew his hand slowly, no hurry.
Not yet. The asset must be cultivated carefully. Rushing would compromise the investment, and this truly is an investment. A brilliant, beautiful investment.
An investment that could be all mine.
Julian broke through the dream-roof, clawing himself to consciousness. His scalp tingled.
He sat on the edge of the bed with the heels of his hands pressed against his eyes until he saw stars. Had it happened? Surely he’d have awoken, like he had the times Sloan snuck into his quarters to enlist his work. Besides, time slid and slipped with that sense of unreality that marked holosuites.
Then again, Section 31 had access to chemicals and compounds he could only think of with disgust.
He made his way to the refresher, and Julian stared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror and saw himself through Sloan's eyes. Beautiful, brilliant.
Could be all mine.
He shattered the mirror with his fist, which didn’t sting enough to teach him anything about consequences.
He went to Garak two days later, which was not so much a decision so much as the last resort after all his decisions collapsed one by one. He talked himself into it. He talked himself out of it.
And then he was at the door to Garak’s shop, then in it.
The lights were low. Garak was at the workbench with a bolt of rust orange, and he looked entirely unsurprised, despite the polite, theatrical façade of astonishment.
"My dear Doctor." Garak set down his cutter. "You look dreadful."
He'd had a speech. Several, in fact. But they all dissolved and dissipated in the face of what was most true.
"I need to talk to you."
"So I see." Garak inclined toward the small setup of chairs and table. "Well. Let us sit."
They did, and Julian waited until Garak had poured out redleaf tea for them both before getting to the meat of the matter.
"I need to tell you something," he said. "And I need you to let me get through all of it."
"I shall endeavor to restrain myself," Garak said pleasantly, and folded his hands on the workbench, and waited.
So Julian told him.
Garak listened with his chin slightly raised in polite attention that Julian had learned long ago was the his face when he was paying complete attention and preferred the listener not know it.
He shared athe mission memories: The Balduk woman, the sonic shower. The interrogation room and watching his own reactions from the other side of the table.
He hesitated, then told him the words that started the slope into terror. Beautiful when he's frightened.
He glanced up, unsure what Garak might say, and then Garak said, lightly, "Well. We can no longer deny the execrable taste he had.” It was, all things considered, a rather helpful thing to say, in its lightness.
Then the heart of the matter.
"The problem’s that I don't know whether it's real."
"Mm," Garak said, thoughts not yet ready for sharing.
"I've experienced Sloan's training memories. Holosuite simulations, to prepare for missions. I couldn’t even tell they were holosuites until he ended them."
"Of course he did.”
"So when I’m him in my quarters, standing over my bed, over me, I can’t tell if he was actually in my quarters, watching me. He knows my space, could create a holoprogram—" He stopped, breathed. "I almost don't care what the reality is. It’s just… the not knowing.”
He stopped, wondered if Garak knew what he wasn’t saying—Garak had never, in Julian’s experience, missed anything about him—except for the one obvious exception, and even there, Julian remained unsure if Garak truly never knew, or if he maintained the polite fiction for that reason that neither of them ever said, only hinted at in not-meant-to-be-heard softness.
If it was simple hatred or simple lust, it wouldn’t have kept him up all those night. But it wasn't simple. It was layered and intelligent and patient, and now he knew what it was to want himself with Sloan’s poisoned want, and couldn’t look at himself with tasting that contamination—
Yet Garak did not talk, leaving Julian to make the ask. He’d hoped to avoid the ask. "You've worked in circumstances where false memories or holosuites were a… professional concern, I'd imagine." He met Garak's eyes directly because by this point, he was too tired for their games. "Is there a way?"
Garak handled his mug, considered Julian’s not-ask.
"The Order," he said, "took the greatest pride in its methods. Even the most junior Probes were taught that a fabricated environment, no matter how intelligently and to fidelity it’s designed, is assembled." He inclined his chin. "And no builder is omniscient."
"How do you know where to press?"
"Ah." Garak smiled. "That’s the thing. You don't press; you skirt around the corners, where the builder wouldn’t think to look. A simulation is built from records, from the observations your Mr. Sloan would have garnered in his… previous visits. He would have been thorough, I have no doubt. And yet." He paused delicately. "However thorough the operative, they can only capture the room as it was. It cannot account for changes." He learned toward Julian. " A simulation has only a past. A real room has a present.”
Julian nodded. "I need to look for discrepancies.”
"Ah, for it to be so easy! This is a master operative you’re speaking of, my dear Doctor. Doubtless any holoprogram he created was the product of deep investigation and, quite frankly, from what you’ve shared, personal investment. He would seek to make any simulation as indistinguishable from your quarters as possible.”
Julian’s heart began to sink.
And then Garak stood.
"There is really," he said, "only one way to investigate, in light of such a man."
"You want to go to my quarters.”
"I think that would be most useful, yes. Unless you have a more pressing engagement?"
He did not, but Julian's hands tightened on the arms of the chair nonetheless. The lights in his quarters had been on for five days running, the couch his place of sleep on the rare night that he succumbed to it.
Garak, walking through it. Pressing—no, skirting— the details, leading Julian in determining if the man he saw through not-his-eyes was himself or a compelling holocreation—
"No," he said. "None at all."
His quarters were exactly as he'd left them, lights on, mirror broken, couch rumpled.
He stood in the entryway for a moment before stepping aside to let Garak in; some part of him wanted to keep the struggle isolated, and if he let Garak in, that’d be letting him in, and they hadn’t let each other in for months now—
Garak walked around him. Julian supposed he’d been in a great many rooms where his welcome was uncertain. He looked around once, then clasped his hands behind his back and turned to Julian in inquiry.
"Well," he said. "Shall we begin?"
Julian had thought he was ready for this. It was only standing there that he wondered if he had miscalculated.
"Conjure the memory in the highest detail you can," Garak instructed. "For you, I presume this will be high, indeed. I will ask you questions of what you see, based on your living space."
Julian took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and summoned the memory.
Shorter. Sturdier. Sterner. Colder. Standing in the doorway, he fought the sweep his eyes wanted to make and instead surveyed the room.
His desk, shelves along the far wall, the low table by the window with…
“The chess set,” Garak observed.
"It was there in the memory." Julian's voice was steady. There for months.
Garak made a small sound of acknowledgment and drifted toward the shelving unit. "The medical texts on the second shelf. Would you have changed the order?"
“No.” In his mind, Julian-trying-to-be-Sloan walked to the bookshelf, surveyed the texts. "The Vulcan anatomy compendium was furthest left. And there should be a gap where I lent the Starfleet surgical manual to Girani. She still hasn’t returned it. Then The Himalayan Manual, Andorian Anatomical Digressions, Access, Informatics, and Trans-Quadrant Records.
No response. The texts aligned.
"The viewport," Garak said. "Is there anything on the ledge?"
In his mind, Julian crossed over. The simple origami fish Molly made him. A fragment of K’taran jade Jadzia gave him, ‘to brighten his week’.
He said as much. Garak hmn-ed in agreement. Both items present and accounted for.
"I notice you keep the lights—ah,” Garak mused, “somewhat brighter than station standard."
"Recent habit."
"Of course." A soft rustle signaled Garak’s continuing survey of the room. "The blanket on the bed, Tellarian wool? Not standard issue."
Julian's fingers flexed. "My mother sent it. It’s there."
Sloan even thought it looked nice. He ran his fingers across it, once.
Garak said nothing and migrated to the shelving unit, where Julian kept things that didn’t warrant display: a stack of unread journals, a carved wooden box that Worf had, inexplicitly, given him, the rethkava set Jadzia gave him and he never played because he was terrible at it and didn’t want to keep losing to Jadzia in the pursuit of getting better, and—to his embarrassment—balled-up fabric scraps that Garak had given him months prior, that he kept meaning to feel-test and get back to him on what would be a better lining for his scrubs, which felt awful without some inner lining blocking them—
He detailed each item in turn, sans commentary. This time, there was a pause.
"You know," Garak mused, "you really won't improve if you never play. I suppose you’ll want the piece back at some point. I confess, I've been in no particular hurry to return it."
Julian opened his eyes. "I'm sorry?"
"The third rethkava minor. I realized some time ago that it was almost certainly not you who gave it to me. Though I admit the changeling handed it over surprisingly quickly after I raised the aesthetic merits at the time." A small, airy pause. "It's been sitting on my end table. I've grown rather fond of it—it’s such remarkable stonework, after all—but it is yours, so…"
Julian blinked.
The changeling. Of course, that Founder who spent months occupying his life, when no one had—
He didn't let himself finish that thought. He particularly didn't let himself finish the natural, consequential thought that, about what else the changeling might have done in his quarters, what else it might have given Garak, that Garak didn’t even—
He aborted that line with great prejudice. It wasn’t productive, wasn’t the point, and furthermore, Garak would never in a thousand years answer the question directly regardless.
He instead crossed over to Garak and looked at the rethkava set.
Seven pieces.
He stepped back into the memory: his quarters, the shelves. This shelf, the corner, the rethkava set tucked in the back where Julian had put it after one too many losses—
Eight pieces. The whole set.
But Garak had had one piece for—how long? Before the changeling was discovered. Months and months, sitting on Garak's end table.
The whole set in the memory.
Seven pieces in his room.
It was a holoprogram. The memory was of a simulation—a very good one, thorough,—but a simulation nonetheless. Sloan saw the rethkava set but didn’t consider that it wouldn’t be whole. He hadn’t stood over Julian while Julian didn’t wake for reasons he couldn’t bring himself to name.
He'd never trailed his hand through Julian’s hair.
Julian sat with that, and breathed.
Slowly, he realized he was exhausted.
He looked over to Garak, who was standing a few feet away with his hands still clasped behind his back.
"He wasn't here," Julian said.
"I’m glad to hear it," Garak said.
Then, because he was very tired and very relieved, Julian stepped forward and rest his forehead on Garak's shoulder.
Garak went rigid under him; staying put, but not relaxing either. He was sturdy, reliable. He smelled like his scale oil and still did not move.
"Thank you," Julian said, into his shoulder.
Garak said nothing for a moment. Then, quietly, “Of course, my dear Doctor."
Julian lifted his head and looked at him—properly, with fresh releif—and kissed him.
Not much: it was brief, soft, an landed at the corner of his mouth, too grateful to be anything of passion. It had been months since they'd broached anything close to this, not for offense or lack of want, but because they were just so damned tired all the time, and there was always something more to do, more lives to mourn—
—that was, to say, Garak's sharp intake of breath was small and audible and not at all unexpected.
Julian pulled back.
Garak was very, very still—stiller than when Julian first leaned upon him. His eyes were wide, then quickly returned, with clear intentionality, to fond composure.
"Sleep," he instructed. "I do believe you deserve a respite."
He guided Julian to the bed, where Julian collapsed without even a front of resistance.
"The piece, of course, is yours whenever you want it." He showed himself to the door. Julian’s eyelids fluttered. "Good night, Julian."
"Good night.”
The door closed.
Julian lay in the quiet—his quiet, his room, his doorway with nobody in it—and looked at the rethkava set.
He instructed the computer to turn the lights off, pulled the blanket up, and slept.
Garak's quarters were comfortably warm.
He’d debated returning to his shop, but the day had taken a turn, and besides, there were no commissions demanding his attention, which was fortunate considering that turn.
He hung his jacket. He did not think about Julian’s forehead on his shoulder, his weight in his arms, his lips on his own.
He thought about Julian’s relief, and the release when he let go of his load. That was worth thinking about.
He went to the table by his couch, reached into his pocket, and withdrew the third rethkava minor. He turned it once, then set it down.
Julian would sleep tonight. That was the start, the end, and the validation of it all. He would sleep without the question pressing down on him, and in the morning he would be slightly less hollowed out, and eventually—gradually—he would be better.
That was the point.
Garak left the piece there, went to bed, and did not think of it further.