AN: This is meant to be situated right after the happenings of Tacking into the Wind, and some time before The Dogs of War. Garak, Kira, Odo and Damar have just finished retrieving the Dominion ship with its Breen energy dampening weapon and brought it back to DS9. References to 'Return to Grace.'

The door comm beeped. Damar looked at it briefly, and hesitated, his brow set in its now habitual frown, before he said, with some reluctance, 'Come in.'

The door opened to reveal Garak, whom Damar had not been expecting. And yet his appearance did not come as a surprise. Damar jumped to his feet, and looked Garak in the eye, half defensively, to mask the shame and surprise he felt. Garak inclined his head slightly in return, his clear blue eyes gleaming in that unsettling way that, in Damar's experience over the past several weeks, always predicated mischief of some sort.

'Can I offer you something to drink?' he asked, remembering his manners and crossing the room.

'Some red leaf tea would be nice,' Garak said. 'Extra hot, if you don't mind.'

Damar replicated two cups of the stuff, although he himself had never been a great fan of it. He brought it over to the table where Garak was sitting. The latter nodded his thanks, and both sat there, not speaking. Damar's frown deepened as he sipped at the tea, which was far too hot for him to gulp down, as had been his wont with other beverages. Such as kanar.

He had no idea what Garak wanted to see him about. They had not spoken since the altercation in the Breen-Jem'Hadar ship, which had culminated in his killing of Rusot. In fact, they had not really spoken very much, even before that. Their conversations had mainly been about the resistance, tactical analyses, and then that one time in the runabout, when Garak had walked in on him right after he received the news about his family's slaughter. There was too much between them – Ziyal, Dukat. He didn't know where to start, and was not sure he had the strength to hear what Garak had to say about all this unfinished business, either. He felt that he'd had enough truth and revelations in the past 24 hours to last him quite a while. He briefly wondered if Garak was going to attempt to assassinate him, but decided that Garak had had plenty of opportunities to do so already, so he was probably safe, for the time being.

'I must say,' Garak said, breaking the silence, 'red leaf tea tasted much better in Cardassia Prime, brewed fresh from the pot. Replicator rations are a poor facsimile of the real thing.'

'Unfortunately replicated tea is the best I can offer,' Damar said, a bit more roughly than he intended to. 'If you want some properly brewed red leaf tea you can always go to that Ferengi's bar on the Promenade.'

'Oh, I am well aware of that,' Garak answered, with another of those enigmatic smiles. Damar grunted, and took another sip.

'I must say,' Garak said, 'there were times when I .. doubted whether you had it in you.'

Damar stiffened. 'I don't know what you're talking about.'

'Oh, but of course you do,' Garak answered. 'That whole business on the Breen ship. It was touch and go there for a moment – I really did not know whether you were going to kill me or not.'

'I did what had to be done.'

'Precisely,' Garak said, his eyes gleaming. 'Who would have thought – Legate Damar, formerly so opposed to the Bajorans and all they stood for – would kill one of his own fellow Cardassians, to save the life of a former Bajoran terrorist.'

Damar did not know what to say in reply to this, so he held his silence. What did Garak know of the burning shame that he had carried for the last two years, of how much blood was already on his hands, and how much more blood was going to be shed in his name? But then he remembered what he knew of Garak and his own past as an Obsidian Order operative. He wondered how much blood Garak himself had on his conscience, and if Garak ever thought about the men and women who had died by his hand, or for his cause.

'You know,' Garak said, watching him, 'she was in love with you, before she ever met me.'

Damar's melancholy mood was temporarily forgotten for a moment as he started in genuine surprise, bewilderment flooding his features. 'Who was?'

'Ziyal,' Garak said, with another of his smiles, still watching him closely. Damar's features were unsure, his eyes flickering wildly with emotion. Guilt, shock, sadness, and even something akin to happiness, if Garak didn't know any better.

'Nonsense,' Damar managed gruffly.

'I can assure you, she most certainly was,' Garak said. 'She told me all about your time together on the Groumall. She said that you were one of the few Cardassians she'd met who could see beyond the ridges on her nose, and that the time she spent with you and her father on that decrepit freighter was probably amongst the happiest she'd ever been in her entire life.'

'She was my commanding officer's daughter,' Damar said. He did not want to think about that, the young girl whom he had been instinctively drawn to, whom he had once watched over and protected, who had been a friend of his during simpler times. The girl who had gradually metamorphosed into someone whom he disliked on principle. And finally, the woman whom he had killed. 'It was my duty to see to it that her wishes were attended to.'

'She cared about you very much,' Garak said. 'She thought that you made her a better person, and that maybe she made you a better person, too. She could never understand why that all changed, when you first returned from your guerrilla war against the Klingons.'

Damar said nothing, his face as if it had been carved from stone, his jaw set and stern. The cup of the red leaf tea lay abandoned. Garak took another sip from his own cup.

'You have no idea,' Garak continued, his eyes shining with a keen light, 'how devastated she was that day when you told her that you were married with children. She never really forgot the pain of that day and that moment..'

'Is there some point to all of this?' Damar asked roughly. He did not want to hear any more, nor did he want to be reminded of all that he had lost. Not now, not when he had managed to shut himself back into oblivion to concentrate on the task at hand.

'In a manner of speaking, yes,' Garak said. 'We may not get a chance to speak so candidly about this again. After all, we leave for Cardassia Prime in 5 hours, on a mission in which none of us may survive.'

'Maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing,' Damar said quietly, picking up his cup of tea again and wishing, for a moment, that it was kanar instead.

'You may be wondering,' Garak said, 'why I am telling you all this. After all, I cared for her deeply as well. The truth is, Damar, I thought that you had a right to know.'

'Know what?' Damar asked, rising from his seat and turning away from Garak to hide the anguish he was feeling. 'That the woman whom I killed in cold blood – who died hating me – once loved me?' He began to laugh mirthlessly, and he crossed to the replicator and ordered a kanar. Garak watched him, his eyes glinting. Damar raised the glass of kanar and was about to drink it, then he paused, his shoulders slumped, and he threw the glass and its contents into the waste reclamator. He spun around on his heel and returned to the table, and poured himself another cup of red leaf tea. He needed some time alone to himself, to process this. There was one last question that he needed to know the answer to, though..

'Does Commander Kira know?' Damar asked, his voice subdued now.

'Oh, the Commander is more than aware of Ziyal's feelings for you,' Garak said. 'In fact, she was the one who found this amongst Ziyal's possessions.' He drew from his tunic a sheathed knife in leather, and Damar's hand went instinctively to the phaser at his waist, but Garak said nothing, only put the knife upon the table and laid bare the blade. Damar recognised it immediately. It was the d'k tahg that he'd taken from one of the Klingon soldiers on the Bird of Prey, shortly before the Groumall's destruction. With a pang, he remembered how Ziyal had approached him in the mess hall, asking him to teach her some combat moves. He'd improvised with the d'k tahg, reckoning that a Klingon weapon would be good practice for her, as this certainly would not be the last Klingon foe she would encounter. They'd spent the better half of that afternoon wrestling and rolling around the Klingon engineering room, giggling. A rather compromising position for a married glinn in his late twenties and the teenage daughter of the erstwhile chief military advisor, for sure. An involuntary smile lit up his face at the memory of that day. They'd gone back to the mess hall to have dinner together afterwards, and laughed about how glad they were that no one else had walked in on them. 'I don't know what my father would have said about me rolling around Engineering with his first officer,' Ziyal had said, looking flushed and happy. She had tried to give the d'k tahg back to him, but he'd refused, telling her to keep it as a souvenir of the very first Klingon ship she'd captured. He felt a horribly hollow sense of emptiness as he thought about how she had kept it with her, all this time, all throughout the years of hurt. And I called her a traitor.. He thought of how she had never thrown away the knife, even when Dukat had brought him and his newly minted hatred for all Bajorans back to DS9, a scorn that he had not been shy about sharing with Ziyal, who had recoiled from this vicious, thuggish version of him. A version she had been unable to reconcile with the warm, kind young officer who had taught her self defence and freighter operations, who had thrown himself in front of her and fought a gang of bloodthirsty Klingons hand to hand, and shouted at her to stay behind him so that he could protect her. All this time.. With another dull sensation of loss, Damar remembered how infectious her joy had been, and how much she had always looked forward to the training sessions he would give her on self defence and basic engineering during his time off. How much he had looked forward to spending time with her, too, and the pleasure he derived from seeing her smile and hearing her laugh. The smile faded from his lips, and his face grew stony again, masking the deep, terrible sense of grief and loss that he would never see her smile again, or hear her melodious laugh, and for a moment he felt as if that black, overwhelming fog of misery would consume him there and then.

'Is there anything else I can help you with, Garak?' he said coldly, draining his cup of red leaf tea and rising from the table.

'Not at all,' Garak said, rising with him and bestowing another of those horrifying smiles upon him. 'I have everything I need.'

'Then I will see you at airlock 5,' Damar said.

Garak bowed his head, and exited the door. Damar looked back to the d'k tahg that he had left on the table. Those had been simpler days, he thought, bitterly.

He wondered how much more the commander knew. How much Dukat knew of all this. Had his commanding officer ever known that his daughter had once harboured an unrequited love for him? He reached out and took the d'k tahg, and closed his eyes as he wrapped his fingers around the blade, and thought of all the people that had died. His wife and son. The massacre of Septimus III. The men who had given their lives at Rondac III. Rusot. All the people that had died during the Bajoran Occupation. Especially the Bajorans.

Ziyal.

Unbidden, the memory of the last time they'd eaten together on the Groumall sprang to the forefront of his memory. His fingers tightened around the blade and it bit into his fingers. Damar did not care. Anything was better than the pain of Ziyal, of their shared memories together, and the fact that she was now gone and would not be coming back, and that it was he who had killed her.

It was Ziyal's last night on the Bird of Prey. Damar was rather sorry that she was leaving, not that he'd ever admit it, but he had gotten used to her bright, cheery presence on the ship, and seeing her after work. She'd asked him to coach her on everything she would need to become an asset to her father and to aid Cardassia in its cause. He'd been happy – more than happy – to oblige her. He was a long way from home and it had been months since he'd seen a friendly face, and Ziyal had the unique ability to brighten every room she was in. He liked having her around – he felt that he was a better person for being in her presence, and everything seemed a bit better when she was there.

He ordered some hasperat from the replicator, which he'd specially programmed into the computer as he knew how much Ziyal liked the strongly flavoured Bajoran dish. He had recalibrated the replicators on the Groumall too on her first week aboard, after she'd let slip about not having had any since her mother passed away. There was still a lot of fine-tuning to be done – he needed to eliminate the remaining 50 courses of gagh to free up the replicator memory storage, for one thing – but at least they'd be eating food that wasn't raw and wiggling around, for a start.

Ziyal came into the mess hall, wreathed in smiles. Damar immediately straightened up when he saw her, and hurried over with the hasperat and yamok sauce.

'I didn't realise that you'd already reprogrammed the replicators to produce hasperat,' she said in delight. 'This is so thoughtful of you, Damar!'

'If you weren't leaving so soon I could further programme it to produce soufflé,' he said. 'As it is, we're operating under a rather tight schedule here.'

'I know,' Ziyal said, and she placed her hand upon his, her eyes sparkling. 'I'm really going to miss you, Damar. I don't even know how to thank you for everything you've done for me. That first night when I'd just arrived, and you came to help me recalibrate the temperature settings, and then helping me fix the phase compensator, and all those lessons on engineering and navigation. Not to mention self defence and hand to hand combat.'

'I was just doing my job,' Damar said awkwardly. He'd always found it difficult to accept compliments, not that he came much in the way of them.

'I really appreciate it, and so does my father,' Ziyal said. 'He says that you're the best first officer he's ever had.'

He smiled a bit, and dug into his hasperat. It wasn't a dish he'd ever actually tried back on Cardassia Prime, but he had been surprised to find that he rather liked it – again, all down to Ziyal and her unexpected but welcome presence. He was halfway through his meal when he realised that Ziyal wasn't digging in with as much relish as she should be, and that she had a sad, pensive look in her eyes, most uncharacteristic for her.

'Ziyal?' he said. 'Is there anything wrong? Does the hasperat taste bad? Or is there something wrong with the yamok sauce?'

Ziyal laughed a little at that, and Damar felt himself relaxing slightly as the familiar light of happiness returned to her eyes, if not in full. 'No, no. The hasperat is fine, at least the half that isn't gagh..' She laughed in merriment as Damar's eyes widened with horror, then when he realised she was joking, he sat back and laughed with her.

'It's just that,' she began, after their laughter had faded, and then the look of sadness returned, and she allowed her sentence to trail off.

'Tell me,' Damar said.

'Have you ever secretly been in love with someone, but just can't tell them about it?' she said, letting it all out in a rush of words.

Damar frowned. 'No. Not really, I've never had that experience before.'

Ziyal looked very disappointed and bit her lip, and poked at her hasperat.

'Why don't you tell me what's on your mind,' Damar offered, feeling very much out of his depth nevertheless. Advising his Gul's daughter on affairs of the heart certainly wasn't in his job description and he had never been one for moping over love. He'd married his wife, a girl he'd grown up with, when he was more or less Ziyal's age. There hadn't been much dawdling over it. Their families were friends and they'd found each other reasonably attractive, although they never really had much to say to one another. A lot of the relationship was purely physical, but he certainly wasn't going to share that particular detail with his commanding officer's daughter.

'Well , hypothetically speaking of course, suppose that you met someone, and then you decide that you really like them, and might even want to marry them one day,' Ziyal said. 'What would you do?'

'Tell them how I feel,' Damar said simply, in his characteristically blunt manner.

'It's not that easy,' Ziyal protested. 'What if you're close friends with them and that ruins the friendship?'

'Then don't tell them,' Damar said, unhelpfully. 'Find someone else to marry.'

'But what if that person is special.'

'There are eight billion Cardassians in the sector,' Damar said with a chuckle. 'It's no stretch of the imagination to say that you could find someone else you like.'

'Damar, it's not funny,' Ziyal said with a frown. 'I'm trying to ask you a very serious question here.'

'I know you are,' Damar said, soberly. 'It's just – I don't really know how to help.' He paused, as it dawned on him. 'There's someone you like?'

'Yes,' Ziyal said, her ridges flushing dark.

'Is he Cardassian?' Damar asked, his interest piqued. Ziyal nodded, and Damar felt a odd sense of gratification at that.

'Then I see no problem,' he said briskly. 'You are beautiful, Ziyal. Any Cardassian man would be lucky to have you as his wife.'

'You think I'm beautiful?' Ziyal asked.

'Well – yes, you are, but don't tell your father I said that,' stammered Damar, his entire military career immediately flashing before his eyes.

Ziyal dropped her gaze to her hasperat and yamok sauce, then looked back up at Damar. 'You know,' she said quietly, 'you're the first Cardassian man who's told me that I'm beautiful.'

'Maybe the other Cardassian men haven't been looking properly,' Damar said.

'Maybe they only see my nose ridges,' Ziyal said.

Damar looked up at her, uncertainty in his eyes. He had gotten so used to her that he'd almost forgotten that she was half Bajoran. Of course. That was, after all, the entire reason why Gul Dukat and Ziyal were now on this clunky old cargo ship. He began to apologise awkwardly, but Ziyal shook her head and smiled. She did not seem to be offended – on the contrary, she put her hand upon his again and squeezed it gratefully.

'I wish you were coming with me,' she said. 'Where will I find someone else like you?'

'I hear there's a Cardassian aboard Deep Space 9,' Damar said.

'He'll never be anything like you,' Ziyal said immediately.

'I should hope not,' he said, 'there's only one Damar.'

Ziyal laughed at that. She did not withdraw her hand, and sighed.

'I wish I could let him know how I feel, but I'm terrified that it'll ruin things between us,' she said. 'Also – I might not see him again for quite some time. It's complicated.'

Damar frowned in thought. 'He's not on this ship right now, is he?'

Ziyal nodded, her ridges darkening again.

Damar grinned. For some reason he found this situation absurdly funny, more so than he probably should. 'Let me take a guess. Glinn Kovar. I noticed him helping you recalibrate those inertial dampers the other day.'

'Kovar has always been nice to me,' Ziyal conceded.

'And he's only a year or two older than you, I believe,' Damar said, slathering the rest of his hasperat with yamok sauce. 'The two of you would make a good match. I don't believe he's married yet.'

'But he would still be off fighting with my father, and I wouldn't be able to see him for a long time,' Ziyal said.

'That's what happens when you fall in love with a soldier,' Damar said. Ziyal did not reply, and he reached forward and clasped her hand. 'Ziyal. If you like I can speak to Kovar for you. I know him fairly well and he's a good man.'

'No, don't!' Ziyal said hastily. 'It's not Kovar I like.'

'Well then, who is it?' Damar asked. 'Maybe I can help.'

'I can't tell you who it is,' Ziyal said, her ridges very dark now.

'Then I will ask no further,' Damar said, releasing her hand and returning to his hasperat.

They finished the rest of their meal slowly, talking amicably about some of the other glinns on the ship. It wasn't till an hour later when Damar noted with alarm that he needed to return to duty, and he hurriedly took his tray and threw it in the dispenser.

'I'll come and see you off tomorrow, of course,' he said.

'Please do,' Ziyal said, and then, much to Damar's surprise, she hugged him.

'I might not get a chance to do this again,' she said softly, when she finally let go of a rather astounded Damar.

'I'll see you tomorrow, then,' he managed, before hurrying off to the bridge.

Damar let go of the d'k tahg, which was now drenched in blood. How cruelly ironic that a captured Klingon blade, of all things, was all that he had left of her, all that he had left to remember her by. He hollowly remembered the blood that had oozed out of Tora Ziyal's body as she lay there dying in the arms of Dukat. He remembered all the harsh words he had said to her, how he had sneered at her during his time on DS9, and his heart contracted painfully as he wished dearly that he could somehow turn back time and change all that he had done. He would give his life for her a thousand times if only it meant that she could come back. How much he had hurt her, and how she had kept the d'k tahg, hoping against hope, and he had killed her. He hated himself and what he had done, and the fact that he could not change anything. He wondered what Ziyal would make of him now. Him and the resistance front. He thought that he had managed to put all that behind him, forcibly suppress all memories of her and what he'd done, and for a time there, he had succeeded, but those memories would always be there, close to the surface. Would she have approved of him and his cause, and what he was doing now? Somehow, he knew that she would. He had to win this for her, he had to succeed, and re-forge the new Cardassia that others like her would be able to live in, freely and from care.

The comm link rang. 'Garak to Damar,' the erstwhile spy's voice said. 'Please report to airlock 5.'

He had not realised that it was time already. 'Acknowledged,' he responded dully, and rose.

Damar was surprised to find Commander Kira also waiting for them in the runabout. The memory of Ziyal and his meeting with Garak was still raw, but his voice was steady, as he addressed the commander. 'I thought you were going to stay on the station with Odo until he gets better.'

Kira shook her head. 'I think the liberation front has a greater chance of succeeding if I come along, and Captain Sisko shares my sentiments.'

Damar inclined his head in thanks, and his eyes met hers. She met and held his gaze, and something passed between them. Her gaze dropped to his bandaged hand, and then to the d'k tahg which hung at his hip, then she looked back at him, and gave a small nod, and turned away.

AN: I always imagined the events of Tacking into the Wind to take place several months before Dogs of War. It was heavily implied that there was a sizeable window of time between the rebel trio's initial journey to Cardassia Prime, and the final uprising. I also felt that they didn't go straight away to Cardassia right after their return from the Breen mission, and that the ill-fated rendezvous with Gul Revok happened a month or two after they had left the station. They are trying to run a rebellion, after all, and those don't happen overnight. I hope you all enjoyed this fanfic, and I'm working on a sequel which will explore the dynamics between Kira, Garak and Damar during their journey to Mila's house and the time they spent in the cellar. I still maintain that the DS9 production team should never have cut out that drunk scene in the cellar where the three of them get hammered.