Chapter Text
He rattled the pills in their vial.
Five left.
That would normally be two days. Three, if he stretched it.
It could also be five days without sleep.
It could perhaps even be ten days, although they would be ten very long days indeed. Quite frankly, if he was at the point that he was considering ten days, perhaps he should accept reality: this was it.
He’d been trying to reach his supplier for a month, a month now, and at first he’d been unconcerned when his emails received no response. This wouldn’t be the first time that there had been a delay in the supply. Elim Garak was a resourceful man and had always set aside enough to keep him going.
After a week of unanswered emails, he’d started to get slightly concerned. He’d tried the backup address; the email had bounced. He’d tried the address he wasn’t supposed to have; there’d been no answer at all, not even the standard “away on vacation, expect my reply in a few days,” just nothing. Public search engines had, of course, come up dry, but so had some databases that were much less visible to the public eye, and even a few discreet inquiries on various unadvertised message boards had yielded no fruit.
After two weeks, he’d accepted that there would be no reply to his request, and had started looking into alternative sources. Surely, in this day and age, a man with a need could find a way to fill that need without causing too much of a fuss…
But no pharmacy here had known what he’d needed. His politely anonymous phone calls had been met with equally polite confused responses. And he’d not wanted to get into the gory details of exactly what he was looking for, and certainly not why he needed it.
No online pharmacy seemed to stock it – at least, not one he’d trust to sell him anything that he was to then ingest.
And this was all rather beside the point, because obtaining a legitimate prescription would be… difficult.
That left illegitimate avenues, and the idea of trying to hunt such things down in an unfamiliar city, where he had no contacts, where no one was his friend and anyone might be his enemy… that didn’t appeal.
He’d even considered Quark, who often boasted that he could get anything for anyone, whose business operations clearly tapdanced back and forth over the line of legality, but that would be so obvious. The idea was moot, anyway: Quark wasn’t someone he could trust to keep his mouth shut, and Garak was sadly not in a position to make him do so.
So here he was, four weeks in, and down to five tablets, and this was how it was going to be. He’d known it was coming.
A smart man would stop taking them now, and would ready himself for the oncoming storm.
A frightened man would hide them away, immediately, so that he could rely on having them when he really needed them.
A practical man wouldn’t overanalyze the situation, and would simply accept that his life was about to go to hell.
Garak placed the vial back into its spot behind the sewing machine feet and slid the little drawer shut.