In Times of War

by thebluemeany

Something happened during The War. Something, twenty years later, the Federation will go to any lengths to keep quiet. Sisko is gone. But the Cardassian tailor is still alive. As is the young doctor who followed an order. Living in Lakat and trying to forget the past, Julian Bashir is about to find out just what he and his hero did In The Pale Moonlight...

4. The Constant Gardener

Three years earlier.

Elim Garak stands by a hospital bedside. He's long beyond hope.

Laid out in front of him is what's left of Julian Bashir; catatonic and hollow. The human's mouth is clamped open; thick tubes run down his throat. All around the medical machines drone; they work constantly, pushing air in and out of his lungs.

Five years after Section 31 left him for dead on Memory Alpha, Bashir can no longer breathe by himself.

Garak looks at the blank, white-washed walls. Visiting the patient is a grim ritual; what he does every Friday. His thoughts wander as they always do, back to the same old puzzle. Back to the same questions he's turned over again and again, never quite able to answer.

Why did you back off? Pull away? Why could you go so far but then no further? Why did we stop meeting for lunch?

Talk to me. Tell me something. Anything.

Say anything.

Please.

Bashir dribbles down his chin and onto his shirt. Garak dabs the saliva up. How I've grown to hate Fridays…

A worn through teddy bear sits on the bedside table. With care, the Cardassian picks the strange, fragile creature up. Repeatedly patched, stitched and re-stuffed, very little of the original Kukalaka now remains.

He places him into his owner's arms.

"I have a present for you." Reaching into his tailoring bag, Garak takes out a small pot of white English Roses shipped (with no small difficulty) from Earth. "Ta-da!"

He waits.

Nothing. No reaction. No change.

There never is. Bashir is as unresponsive as the day he took him into his care. He lies there placidly; drooling, with dull unblinking eyes.

Is any part of the Doctor still in there?

Garak doesn't know.

What he does know however, is how to make a choice.

And that sometimes, you have to change to survive. Under no illusions the human will ever forgive him; Garak chooses to save whatever is left of Julian Bashir.

"There's a new treatment." He retrieves the consultant's report from his bag. "Reaccelerated neural pathway formation. That is, I believe, the medical term."

He doesn't see the patient's fingers twitch and cling ever tighter to Kukalaka.

"It's a form of genetic engin-." He stops and searches for a phrase he can live with. "It's a form of re-coding."