Garak slowed himself down just for a couple of instants at the sight of the doctor that was already waiting for him at the table in the replimat. Smiling, he thought that he appreciates these moments especially high. It pleases one to sense that someone considers your company worth waiting. Julian was so ingenuous in it that he reminded him more of a bird that doesn't see a predator that already approached stealthily than of someone who's waiting for a friend to meet.
"Good afternoon, doctor," Garak ran his palm over Julian's shoulders in a gentle touch, making him shiver.
"I haven't heard you approaching again, Garak," he smiled for an answer. "So, what are you willing to talk about today?"
Today they were discussing the poetry of Iloja of Prim. Julian found it too mannered and unduly emphasized. Serialist poets of the time of the First Republic tried to berhyme the way of thinking contemporary with them, but the doctor couldn't get rid of the sensation that all the emotionality, all the passion, put in the lines he read, were artificial, served but not expressed, persuaded but not revealed.
Just like Garak.
Garak seemed to choose the pieces that could let them get into a fight on purpose, so he could display his unquestionable intellectual supremacy to the doctor time and again — at least, Julian saw their debates this way. He argued with the cardassian, defending his position, but in the end, was it really that important to Julian himself to vanquish in their endless fight by all means? Garak looked so alone on the station, left by the Cardassian Union, why not to give in to him, not to let him feel a bit better because of his superiority consciousness? Disregarding what opinion Julian held himself on this matter.
Garak's observant eyes seemed to follow the thread of thoughts of his partner in conversation, perceiving slightest changes in facial expression, pose, manner of holding a fork or a mug.
"Perhaps, the case is, doctor, that you see what you are expecting to see. You are talking about mannerism, artificiality, insincerity, but aren't these the traits of the Federation?"
Julian choked with his tea.
"Wait... what?!"
Garak half-closed his eyes. Julian's face definitely revealed carefully pent-up rage that he had a chance to see in the doctor's features on so rare occasions.
"Does the Federation sincerely want to help Bajor? Isn't the case that the Federation wants Bajor to join it? Isn't it that the station resides near the wormhole and has its strategic value? While Bajor was at war with Cardassia and pleaded for help, did the Federation help it? Or did it hide beneath the Prime Directive when it suited its intentions and then find a loophole in it when its priorities shifted a bit to the side? To my thinking, it is mannered enough and fairly artful," Garak sneered unabashedly.
The whole time he was talking, the doctor could nothing but to open and close his mouth. Resenting, overfilled with indignation, he was so perfect that Garak was about to believe, to let himself sink into illusion that everything that was going to be said afterwards shall be said because Julian is aware of the essence and the basis of the cardassian flirting as well as himself.
"Garak!"
"I'm all ears," the cardassian took a sip of the rokassa juice.
"You never tire to astonish me with your capability to wrench any fact, to sophisticate any thought, to turn the concepts upside down — and all of it just to... to..."
"To?" Garak tilted his head slightly to the side, feeling the blood beginning to run a bit faster, warming his cold limbs.
"To demonstrate your hypothetic intellectual supremacy!" Julian spat out finally into his face, flushed, breathing heavily because of anger, reluctant to cease, that meddled so inaptly in a consistent line of his thinking.
"Hypothetic indeed?" Garak's smile intertwined condescension with a shade of tenderness.
"I may charge you with exactly the same," Julian went on coolly, trying diligently to compose his features. "You see only what you are expecting to see. If it's a common practice on Cardassia to say one thing, while implying another, and to do yet something else, it doesn't mean that all the forces in the quadrant follow the same pattern of interplay."
"And yet you just called the Federation a force yourself, doctor," he took another sip. "Doesn't that mean that its presence on this station is precisely the same question of the balance of power?"
Julian knuckled one hand and made a sound, similar to a growl.
"Garak, how can it be that we were talking about poetry and you led our conversation elsewhere?"
"Was it me who did it, good doctor?" Garak raised his eyeridges a bit questioningly. "It was you who charged serialist poets with insincerity because in your judgement their poetry has more of politics than of sentiment," the last word melted on his tongue.
Most important was to calculate carefully, how and what with he could hit Julian hard enough for him to be no longer able to follow his smug federal tolerance position and to step into a fight more fierce than he usually let himself to be drawn in. Garak didn't want to scare the doctor away, but these rare moments, when he managed to make him flare up, raise his voice on himself, say something sharp, were magnificent. For a couple of instants he could imagine that the doctor knew the rules of the game, that it was not an illusion, shaped by him for himself, that Julian wasn't that hopelessly naive as it truly was.
A deep inhale, a deep exhale. The doctor tries to compose his features again. Garak drinks the rokassa juice to not let himself believe too much in his own deception and at the same time to soften even remotely the glare of the unescapable onrush of heavy emotions because it still is a deception.
"Perhaps, I should read this poem over again," Julian says with an obvious effort and tries to smile.
"Perhaps, we should find a subject of discussion more pleasant to you," Garak suggests softly, returning a smile that looks sincere. His mug is empty.
At ten meters from them lieutenant Dax and major Kira are passing by, sent by commander Sisko to deal with another debatable question between Bajor and the Federation. Jadzia shoots a watchful look to their side.
"In point of fact, I rather feel sorry for Garak," she says in a low voice for only Nerys to hear her.
Nerys smiles wryly and they keep on going their way.
"I would never have thought I would say that, Dax..." she jerks up one eyebrow like if being bemused by herself and casts a musing glance on her friend, "but me either."
