Fic I’ll never write where Cardassians have a specific scale on their neck that gets bitten open in the enjoinment ceremony. This is part of why showing neck ridges is considered tantalizing and why Cardassian clothing often goes out of its way to accentuate ridges–to display whether the mating scale has been bitten. Biting it open releases bonding hormones that tie two Cardassians together, and the scar that’s left behind is their version of a wedding ring.
When Julian shot Garak in the holosuite, he shot him in this scale, and that’s why Garak acts like that and switches gears so quickly. He was high off feel-good lovey-dovey bonding hormones directed at his husband, and what an amazing husband he’s found!! So strong, so capable. The perfect secret agent Garak would happily follow off of a cliff. Not things he was feeling before he was shot. Garak doesn’t begin to understand what’s happened until later, and why he felt so stricken when Julian offered to heal the wound with a dermal regenerator. Why now alone in his quarters he’s feeling bereft. In a normal enjoinment, this would be when he was having sex, but of course, that’s not happening.
At first, he thinks this is just another case of Julian Bashir blue balls, a chronic condition he’s intimately familiar with. But this feels extreme. He can feel tears trying to gather in his eyes. A niggling thought comes, a terrible suspicion.
With calm, measured steps, he walks to a mirror and inspects his neck. Blood has caked around the scales and formed a kind of chrysalis, so he takes a handkerchief from the inner coat of his jacket and wipes it away to reveal… yes. Yes. That would be the correct scale, ripped clean open. It’ll scar beautifully, a clear signal of his husband’s enthusiasm in choosing him.
If his husband had been aware that’s what he’d been doing.
Garak stares at it. It stares back.
His legs have weakened, and before long, he finds himself grappling behind himself in a stagger. He hits a chair and settles there inelegantly, jittery, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters right then. The handkerchief is still in his hand, so he folds it. Folds it again. And again. And again.
He can’t sleep, so he goes to his shop. It’s not too late yet, he can get some work done.
By morning, he’s gotten no work done, but he has exhausted his delavian chocolate stash, three glasses of kanar, and a bottle of excellent spring wine. He’d been saving the wine for a special occasion. Now, it sits stale on his tongue like a joke. It’s an hour past when his shop would be open, but it’s irrelevant. A Bajoran comes banging for her appointment. They were meant to discuss the details of her wedding dress. She leaves after ten minutes, distraught.
Not long after, banging comes again, this time more insistent. “Garak!” a voice demands. Major Kira. Annoying, but irrelevant.
She tries asking the computer to locate him. Of course, it doesn’t tell her he’s inside, or anywhere, but she forces her way into the space he pays rent on and comes surging through like a sandstorm anyway. Incredibly rude, but irrelevant. She’ll leave soon.
She doesn’t. She scans the space for heat signatures and finds his weak emittance slumped behind the counter. “Garak,” she huffs. Evidently the Bajoran woman from before is a friend of hers and she’s come to investigate on her behalf. When she sees the state he’s in, she stops, though, and opens her mouth to ask what’s happened, and stops again. She’s noticed the blood on his neck.
The poor woman has shocked herself into silence now, but she’s come all this way to harass answers out of him, so he gives them to her in as pleasant a voice as he can muster. Of course, it’s a simple story, so being cordial is no trouble. He fell on his scissors. Very unfortunate, but naturally, as an “agent of the Obsidian Order”, he speaks the allegation with all due severity, his bonding scale had to be made inert, so no harm done.
He doesn’t tell her Tain administered the serum himself, nor any of the implications of his having administered a fake. How dangerous it was for a field agent, how easy it made exploitation. How neatly he could have been killed in an altercation, when a moment of hesitation - a second of hormone-induced compliance - would have made all the difference. All more irrelevant little details.
She tells him she knows he’s lying. A ridiculous statement. Of course he’s lying, but the truth is none of her business. She expresses as much then, surprising him. “I won’t ask what happened,” she says gently, just as he notices the empty bottle of spring wine is still next to him, the vintage label visible. Ah. “I just want to ask… are you okay?”
That would be the question, wouldn’t it? Is he okay? Is it okay that he is - in every way culturally significant - bound to Doctor Bashir? Through biology, no less? How fitting! Bashir would have a field day with his neurochemistry right now. It’s been hours and still his thoughts keep circling back to where his husband is. He’s not his husband, but he is, even though he’s not, and he’s always wanted him but this is a new kind of hell. Where is he? What is he doing? Why isn’t he here? Didn’t he choose him, and so decisively, with such remarkable precision?
He didn’t, but it’s irrelevant.
“I have lunch plans,” he says. He doesn’t know why. He didn’t mean to, but it’s out of his mouth now.
“Okay,” the Major says. “Do you need a way out of them?”
Does he?
He sits with it for a minute, and she waits patiently. Finally, he looks at her with resolve. “No.”
He gives Kira his sketches for her friend to look over and promises to set up another appointment soon before he leaves for his quarters. He naps off the hangover, eats, showers. The last hours tick by in peaceful sewing until it’s time for him to don that unfortunate outfit again and go to lunch.
Julian’s eyes settle on the bandage on his neck shortly after his arrival, but he doesn’t ask. Garak takes note of that. It is interesting how the man has been distancing himself, losing himself in an imagined world of mystery and mystique without a single friendly soul as witness. Of course, Garak had no intention of allowing him to do so and every intention of bridging the gap between them with rose petals and duranium, but they have skipped several steps now, haven’t they? More even than Garak expected.
Another scantily clad young lady with an impressive resume serves them their meals and they eat, drink, and chat. It’s wonderful. He has missed this so. Julian’s pretty voice fills his ear with Earth history and the novels of one Ian Fleming and Garak is more than happy to sit back and listen well past the lunch hour, the terror and tension of the past night falling to the side, just out of sight.
It ought to be enough that he has been permitted. Fantasies are a common defense against the cruel realities of life–a coping strategy Garak has seen many a colleague fall into, himself included. His extensive library is not one Garak has amassed by any accident, but by necessity. He understands. Whatever stressors Julian has found himself requiring an escape from, it should be enough that Garak is no longer one of those things.
And yet, his neck is throbbing, and it is not out of tune with his heart. Whether by good fortune or not, the facts remain.
Julian has been spending every moment away from his work playing this little game, but luckily, Garak knows how to play games, too, and while Julian is across the room draping his jacket and bow tie over a couch, Garak lets a drop of his blood fall from a small container into his drink.
Julian throws it back without a thought, and Garak smiles blandly. A clinical bastardization of an otherwise beautiful ritual dating back thousands of years, but beggars and choosers.
“Doctor,” Garak begins, and Julian draws a deep breath and meets his eyes. Garak’s mouth hangs open. “I…” No. “Forgive me, but I have to wonder again. Why… this particular program? What is it about it that captivates you so?”
The eye contact breaks. “Does it matter?”
“Well, it is only that-”
“Garak, why are you interrogating me?”
Garak’s mouth snaps shut.
Julian stares at him, and looks away. “Oh, Garak. I apologize. It’s only that…” he takes an agitated sip of his coffee, “you do love to needle me. No one else quite presses my buttons the way you do, do you know that?”
Oh. Oh. Garak beams. “Why, thank you, Doctor. I find you uniquely capable of vexing me as well.”
Julian rolls his eyes to himself. “I’m sure you do.” Before Garak can dissect that particular statement to ribbons, the man interrupts him with a sigh. The mood shifts suddenly to something morose. “Garak, you said yourself that I just wanted to play the hero. Kiss the girl. It’s very simple. Can we not just… leave it there?”
If only. “Do you know what I think?”
“I wouldn’t hazard a guess.”
“This is more than a mere fantasy for you, Doctor. In fact, I believe there are secrets - breadcrumbs, as you say, to your inner world sprinkled between the text - hidden within the very code of these holoprojections. If only someone would care to look hard enough. If only someone would see… Oh,” he says, as Julian glares at him, “but you didn’t want anyone to see, did you?”
“As a matter of fact, Elim,” Julian says with padded steel, “no.”
Garak sits back in his chair.
Julian is out of his seat and across the room the next moment. “I do have my shift in another hour, so I should be leaving soon, but there is one last thing I thought you might get a kick out of. If you’ll join me by the windows here, Mr. Garak?” Garak does so wearily, and Julian gives a strange command to the computer. It’s as Garak is fiddling with his bandage that the first plume of color lights up the night sky, and Garak startles into stone, watching with equal parts concern and awe.
Julian sounds pleased. “Fireworks. Controlled explosions colored with different minerals. An old Earth custom.”
“How wondrously strange,” Garak breathes.
“I thought you might think so.”
The doctor’s shoulder bumps his and Garak can’t help it, won’t even blame himself. He falls into it. Leaned against the human, shoulder to unlovable shoulder, they watch these fire-works, and it is almost like what Garak had hoped for when he’d first started entertaining the notion of barging his way into Julian’s daydreams. What was the first time? A year ago? More than? An enigma tale, an exercise program. Oh, to accompany beautiful Julian into the holosuites, so frequently ravaged with unchaste revelry, and have things change. His own juvenile fantasy made flesh amidst the figments.
But of course, he never was invited, this is the most they’ve ever touched, and things are never going to change. Even after everything has. Whatever secrets Julian’s crude romanticization of his old profession hold, they are not his to understand. The man continues to hide, and while the luxury of hide-and-seek is no longer Garak’s to enjoy, he will not force his dearest companion into the light when his own eyes are still burning from the exposure.
“Doctor…” Garak tries one last time, hopeless.
“Shhh,” is the response.
In the end, Julian doesn’t shove him off, though. Not even after the fireworks have ended.
Stuff and Things
Posting art and whatever else I want since 2014!
She/Her or They/Them
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I'm also on AO3 and Deviantart.
She/Her or They/Them
Feel free to send me asks.
I'm also on AO3 and Deviantart.
