Disclaimer: I do not own Star Trek, nor any of the characters, materials, ideas, of concepts therein.
These are the places that recall the gods, and by them the stars that let us remember.
This is a line of poetry. Garak is not sure where it is from or who wrote it. He has devoured books over the years, because the line knowledge is power is famous in one derivative or another throughout the galaxy. And he has searched for this line, has hunted for it, and he has failed.
(He tells himself it is only a matter of time; Elim Garak is never a failure for long, even when he is a tailor.)
He remembers hearing the line, vaguely, at the knee of his housemaid. (It is safer to call me your maid, dear, even in private.) And he remembers that she had pointed up at the stars, and said, "Maybe you'll live in the stars someday, Elim."
"I wouldn't leave Cardassia," he had responded, with painful sincerity. He loved Cardassia. He still loves Cardassia, and perhaps he even loves it more now, because there is a human aphorism that absence makes the heart grow fonder and what is exile if not absence, stretching into both the present and the future?
(And, oh, he remembers this too: the maid had laughed at him, and hurt his feelings, and when this showed on his foolish, naive face she sighed and stooped down to kiss his head. And she said, "Sometimes we need to leave behind the things we love, Elim, and sometimes it's better that we do." She looked sad, though, so he wasn't sure if he should believe her.)
(Garak was a stupid, stupid child.)
"You absolutely must read this book, Doctor. It is just your style."
"A mystery?"
"Somewhat. It is a stupidly sentimental novel, about an innocent man pursued unjustly by the law, who through great trials and courage manages to prove his innocence against all odds.
"Doesn't sound like something you'd like."
"It's dreadful," Garak replies promptly. "Precisely why you will adore it. You clearly lack a proper appreciation of literature."
"Oh, just because I don't like your Cardassian 'classics' - "
"Don't even get started on The Never-Ending Sacrifice," Garak warns.
"I still can't believe you like that!"
"Of course not." Under his breath: "I've met your parents now, after all."
"And just what's that supposed to mean?"
"Hm? You must be hearing things, Doctor."
The Never-Ending Sacrifice is not a classic.
It is well-known, so the casual off-worlder can become confused. But really it has something more of a cult-following.
"All the characters live lives of selfless duty to the state, get old, and die. And then the next generation comes along and does it all over again."
The book has a cult-following for precisely one reason: because at a state dinner, on national broadcast, Enabran Tain mentioned having read it with unspecified 'family' to impart ideals of the Cardassian Nation. Every minor sycophant promptly began trotting around the book, and some even fooled themselves into thinking they liked it. But most people have read it once, and romanticize the book after their initial boredom has passed. Elim Garak is one of few who genuinely love it.
"And as he died," Elim recited, "he looked into the eyes of his son and heir and knew peace, secure in the knowledge that his line would serve the state and his people proudly long after he was gone."
"An important lesson," Tain said, ruffling his son's hair in a rare moment of fondness. Elim indulged briefly, letting himself enjoy this moment of rare paternal closeness, but there was a thought niggling at him.
"I can't serve the state in your name," Elim said quietly. "And I can't bring the name Tain any respect."
"No. You can't. But you can do great things in your own right, Elim. And you can do one thing for me, one very important thing."
Elim had looked up, eager, and still so, so young.
"What's that?"
"You can kill my enemies for me," Tain said.
Once Bashir asks, "Was Enabran Tain a good father?"
"Oh, he locked me in closets. Raised me among dead corpses. The usual things evil spies do, I suppose."
"Ah, yes," Bashir sighs, resigned to not getting a real answer. "I would expect nothing less."
"You idiot! Do you see what you've made me do?"
Elim sobbed, turning his face into the darkness of the couch, legs curled uselessly under his shaking body. Between his rattling breaths he clutched uselessly at the unimpressed leather, inhaling the powerful scent of cleaner and dust to try to rid himself of the wet iron smell blooming throughout the room. It was a useless endeavor.
"Don't hide!" Enabran Tain barked. "Look at what you've done!"
He was pulled away from the couch, shrieking, and pressed face-first into the pool of blood still widening across the room's expensive wooden floor. He kicked his feet, writhing, as the dead eyes of a nameless Obsidian Order operative stared at him disdainfully.
(Some people associate the Obsidian Order with dark things in the shadows, with disappearing family, or even with order and justice and security. Elim Garak will always associate the Order with dead eyes and drying blood, but he joins it, and what does that say about him anyway?)
"This is because you had to call me 'father'," Tain snapped. "I am not your father. You are a bastard and a servant, you understand?"
"Yesyesyespleasefatherplease - " he gasped, squirming away desperately.
The mistake was realized too late.
Four days later he was taken out of the closet, half-dead with thirst, wild with hallucinations of things that moved and spoke and lusted in the dark. But it was his own fault, for calling Tain 'father', for making Tain kill in his name, so he didn't protest.
(Then, or the next time.)
"To the USS Gallant!" O'Brien laughs, appearing by Garak and Bashir's table without prelude. He raises a bottle of ale.
"And to what are we toasting?" Bashir asks, dutifully raising his glass of water. Garak picks up his own, feeling indulgent.
"They blasted down three Cardie ships and a Dominion fighter all on their lonesome! No casualties!" Grinning wildly at this spectacular luck, the engineer tips back his ale for a long drink. Bashir follows suit.
No casualties except, of course, for the hundreds - perhaps thousands - of Cardassian men and women aboard the enemy ships. Garak hesitates, warring with grief and anger at these stupid, stupid humans, who forget that soldiers follow orders, that not every Cardassian wants to live and fight under Dominion rule. Who forget that their enemies are real, not simulations and wargames, and they have families back home, too. It is a lesson Garak, in all his years as an inquisitor and torturer, has never let himself forget.
But he is on a Federation starbase, giving out Cardassian secrets to humans and their human interests. So he raises his glass and drinks, long and uncomfortably deep, with resignation. He can hardly become more of a traitor, after all.
A red sun, over a heat-baked world. A young Cardassian standing alone, gazing at the clouds. He flexed his muscles, let himself trace a burnt scar along his arm. He considered fleeing. He considered crying. He considered dying.
He considered, and he considered, and he considered. And then he turned and walked back inside his house, still considering.
The sun waited. It had time to wait. The child, after all, would be back tomorrow.
"When did you join the Order?" Bashir prompts sometime after O'Brien has left.
"That's a sudden question, Doctor," Garak replies. "And probably something you would be obligated to report to Starfleet."
"Only if I begin to suspect you're telling me the truth," Bashir points out.
"Which is unlikely," Garak concedes. "But actually I suppose there is no harm in the truth. I was, you see, selected for the Order at a very young age." He leans forward. Bashir, despite himself, copies the movement. "They had a mission only fit for a child," he whispers. "Infiltration into a secret society - the sort of highly-guarded place where everything is suspicious, where everyone watches for traitors. After a mere month of training I was sent in, only twelve years old - " Bashir sucks in his breath. "To uncover the secret... of their lace-smuggling ring."
Bashir gapes at him. Then, huffing with amusement, he leans back in his chair. "An assignment given, no doubt, due to your life-long ambition to become a tailor," he mocks.
"It was my specialty," Garak says.
"This is going to be my specialty," Elim said, "and I suppose I get to practice on you."
"It was just lace! Fabric!" The woman cried. "I've told you everything, everything - "
"Of course you haven't," Elim chided. "There's always something more, even if you don't think so; you just need to be motivated enough to remember it."
He carved stripes of flesh from the woman's skin until her shrieks rang in his ears. His stomach twisted and cramped and spun. He told himself that this was a pathetic non-person, a non-Cardassian. A traitor in her heart. She was an enemy of the state, and she deserved this.
When he had to throw up, he vomited on her chest and kept carving.
He learned. A twist just so made her screams extra piercing. A tickle here made her gasp out random names, trying to give him something, anything to end the pain. It was only after he began scraping out her sex that she shrieked out anything new; as a reward he waited five whole minutes before continuing. Motivation, Tain had told him, was key.
She died within the hour.
When he finished Garak left the interrogation room. Tain was waiting, watching the security film of Elim's practice session inscrutably.
"I found a new name," Elim said.
"You did," Tain replied. He handed a padd to Elim. "Read it."
Elim read. The padd held information on one Kieyta Xorn. A simple tailor, with no prior crimes. She was married to an architect and had two daughters, aged four and three. The file was detailed. Her favorite food was pukya crepes, and she enjoyed painting in her spare time. Nature scenes, mostly.
Elim was confused. "I don't understand."
"That woman you just tortured was a mother," Tain told him. "She had daughters. One is sick, do you see that? And the family wasn't making enough to get that little girl any medicine. You killed a mother over a damn lace trafficking ring. A simple tailor."
There was a pause.
"I want you to think about that," Tain said. "And then you can start on the others."
Humans, Bashir has explained, mostly don't have religion anymore. This seems bizarre to Garak, because he knows even Vulcans have some religion they never discuss, but apparently humanity has a bad history with the whole thing. Whereas most planets have one or two large religions, like the Bajorans, humanity had dozens, even hundreds at one point, and dozens of factions within 'single' religions. And many people were driven to violence through their beliefs. This doesn't fully surprise Garak, because humans are certainly convoluted and contradicting enough, and variant enough, to refuse to agree even with each other. But the thought always makes him inexplicably sad. Because Garak is too cynical to really Believe anything, himself, but sometimes when it's dark and he's stuck in a small space with only his memories he likes to chant quiet prayers under his breath.
It's not Faith, not really, but the cadence makes him feel better. Stronger. At peace. He figures that's worth something, anyway.
Long ago, Garak had this exchange with Bashir:
"What I want to know is, out of all the stories you told me which ones were true and which ones weren't?"
"My dear doctor...they're all true."
"Even the lies?"
"Especially the lies," Garak told him. This, ironically, was not a lie.
At the end of the Bajoran Occupation Garak was in a place of privilege on Deep Space Nine. He was able to mock and belittle Dukat as he willed, being the untouchable protege of Enabran Tain himself. And he enjoyed the way the Bajorans watched him - like a herd of deer watching the predator in their midst, the unpredictable one. Because Elim Garak was not like other Cardassians. He was talkative, but he was also private, and he was cunning. He was perfectly polite to Bajorans in public, but everyone knew he got the best results from interrogations, and everyone could hear the screams ringing out from behind his office doors every now and again. Elim had deliberately neglected to sound-proof his interrogation rooms from the outside; why waste such a perfect opportunity to unnerve people?
But Elim, as Tain taught him, never forgot that the people he interrogated had lives of their own; he typically just didn't care. But even Elim Garak, scion of the head of the Obsidian Order, found it hard to torture children.
A girl, fourteen. She did not look at Elim, murmuring fervent, tearful prayers under her breath. Two boys, twins, both twelve. One had a purple birthmark on his cheek, arching out in a distinctive starburst pattern.
(That mark still haunts his dreams, but always covered in blood. In his fantasies Garak finds it hard to tell if he fears the what-if, if he is worried about how close he came to murdering a child, or if he just regrets not going through with it after all.)
In any case, reality cannot be changed. The children left, and they were resistance members. Elim let them escape, for a moment's weakness and mercy, and they bombed a Cardassian shuttle.
Cardassians were dead because of him. And because Elim loved Cardassia and believed in her people, and because he deserved whatever happened to him for his betrayal, he turned himself in.
He was lucky to only be exiled. And he told himself that, year after year, as his drug-induced euphoria waned and he began to be revolted by himself. Lucky. Lucky. So, so lucky.
He was alive, after all.
Most people would call that luck.
"For such a cynical person," Bashir says, "I always find it odd how much you appreciate knowledge."
"My dear, naive doctor. My cynicism is precisely why, for my own safety, I need to know everything."
"Education is power," Elim said dutifully. "Joy is vulnerability."
"And you were joyful," Tain said. "You've never been joyful and you've always been safe, and now you're giving that up."
"I was very careful."
"I'm sure you were. It was still stupid."
Elim's face didn't waver. "Perhaps. But killing her still strikes me as a tad excessive."
Tain kicked the body on the ground. "Bury her in the back. No markings."
Elim bit back a remark, and waited until Tain left. Then, because he was not, in fact, a fool, he went and re-opened the door to check that Tain was truly gone. He closed the door.
Only then did he let his knees buckle, fall to the ground, and start to grieve.
"I never know when you're being sincere, Garak."
"On the contrary, I think you know me better than anyone alive."
"If that's so, it's hardly comforting. I barely know a thing about you."
Garak smiles. "And the fact that you think so is very reassuring." He takes a sip of his drink, and tracks the swirling liquid a moment. When he looks up Bashir is watching him. "But, truly," he adds recklessly, "You know more about me than you yourself are aware. And that, I think, will have to be enough."
"Enough for what?"
"Protect yourself, Elim. No one else will do it for you."
"You'll protect me."
"No," Tain said. "I won't."
"Enough for what?" Bashir asks.
Garak looks back down at his drink.
"To be a vulnerability," he says, very softly. And smiles.
"Education is power, joy is vulnerability" is a line by Gul Dukat in The Maquis, Part 1.