Note: Don't try this at home. And credit where credit is due, I borrowed the phrase "exhausted beyond comprehension" from the stage directions in the script for "Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges" (DS9, Episode 7.16). Some of Ronald D. Moore's best writing is never heard on-screen.
Part II, Act V: An Obvious Truth
In the end, it was not broken ribs or a blow to the head that felled General Martok in the ring. By the beginning of his third match, Fourth Tiratak'Nar had regained consciousness and his feet, but the twice-victorious Klingon was tiring rapidly. The hulking Jem'Hadar he had been set to fight this time got a grip on Martok's outstretched forearm and threw him savagely to the floor. Julian's mind had a brief moment to observe the various forces in play and extrapolate the physics of the motion, and he saw the inevitable result before it happened, but the sickening pop still caught him off-guard. He cringed in sympathetic shock as the Klingon warrior let out a bellow of savage outrage.
He was flat on his back, clutching his left wrist and rocking on his shoulder blades as he tried to push himself up with his feet. It was a disconnected, chaotic series of movements, and despite Martok's valiant struggle to rise, Julian was reminded of a turtle upturned on its shell. He drove that image from his mind and hastened lopsidedly to the edge of the ring. It took an act of maddening willpower not to go right to Martok's side, but the Vorta's threat was fresh in his mind. He waited until the First declared victory for the preening Jem'Hadar who had felled an exhausted man, and then hitched himself over the lip of the arena.
Martok was still writhing, his teeth bared in pain and frustration. As Julian bowed inelegantly over him, getting as low as he could before the pain in his knee started impinging on his ability to focus and then bending the rest of the way from the waist, the warrior snarled and tried to roll onto his side. The motion jarred his injured arm and he hissed through clenched teeth, but it was clear that he had no intention of crying out again.
"Try to hold still," Julian instructed, firmly but quietly. He wasn't anxious to broadcast his patient's condition to the lingering Jem'Hadar, but that wasn't the only reason to lower his voice. He wanted the Klingon to be forced to listen if he wanted to hear the words: to compel him to focus on something other than his agony — or his defeat. "You've dislocated your elbow. Don't pull on your wrist."
Martok let out a hot hiss of breath, his head whipping away from Julian and then back again. His eye, burning with animal anguish, fixed on the doctor's face.
"How can you know that? You haven't even touched me!" Martok challenged.
How, indeed. The defect wasn't visible under the heavy sleeve of the Klingon battle uniform, and doctors weren't supposed to be able to diagnose injuries on the strength of Newtonian physics alone. Julian could explain the principles of differential diagnosis and the most probably pattern of injury from any given trauma, or how the fact that he'd heard a pop rather than a crack meant the arm wasn't broken, but what good would that do?
"Never mind that," he said, taking a steady grip on Martok's left bracer. He had to bend further forward to do it, and his temple began to thunder ominously. The Klingon's fist abandoned his hold on that wrist, and closed on Julian's arm instead, threatening to fling him off. "Trust me."
As soon as the words left his lips, he heard how absurd they sounded. The man who had vowed to avenge betrayal of the Detapa Council extraction upon the whole of the Federation, instructed to trust a Starfleet doctor while he rocked in pain. But Martok's hold on his arm loosened, and he was able to ease the Klingon's wrist up towards his breastbone. This widened the gap in the dislocated joint, so that bone no longer ground excruciatingly on bone. Julian flattened his palm over Martok's hand, pressing it in place as visible relief rippled across the warrior's face.
"Hold it there instead," Julian said. "We need to get you back to the barracks so I can pop the elbow back into place."
It wasn't just a matter of doing this out of sight of the Jem'Hadar. If Julian was going to reduce the deformity on his own, without the capable assistance of Nurse Jabara or one of the other members of the highly-trained staff he relied upon on Deep Space Nine, he needed a table. He looked frantically back over his shoulder, hoping that Major Kalenna was still standing in the shadow of the pylon.
She wasn't: she was already climbing into the ring.
"We need to get him up. Help me," Julian said.
Martok shifted as if to push himself up onto his good elbow. Julian stayed his hand before it could shift. "Support your arm," he admonished firmly. "We'll help you sit up."
It wasn't easy. Martok was a large man, and though the dispiriting prison fare had left him lean and sinewy, his body was still heavy with densely-packed muscle. Kalenna was small, Julian couldn't anchor himself for proper leverage, and several of the Jem'Hadar were still watching. But with a concerted effort and some painful exertions on all their parts, Martok was sitting up, bowed forward over his lap and still clutching his injured arm as his physician had instructed. From there, he was able to do most of the work of clambering to his feet, though he uttered a few very choice oaths as he rose.
Kalenna guided the fallen warrior back to Barracks 6, and Julian thought it was a mark of how much pain the General was in that he let her do it. Limping behind, trying to stay simultaneously out of the way of the Major and in control of his patient, Julian slid past the unlikely pair — Klingon and Romulan, fleet commander and spy — at the barracks door. He hurriedly swept the blanket and bottles from the first of the benches.
"How bad is it this time?" a conversational voice asked, curious but ultimately indifferent to the answer. Julian glanced at Enabran Tain, who had disappeared during the breakup of the mealtime assembly and was (apparently) back again for no discernible reason.
"It is nothing," growled Martok.
"It's not nothing," Julian corrected irascibly. His head was throbbing and his knee pulsed hotly, but there was no time to waste worrying about his own discomforts now. The longer he waited to reduce the dislocation, the more inflammation and muscle spasm he would have to cope with. He had no anesthetics or antispasmotics or anxiolytics or even analgesics: nothing to make this process easier for either patient or doctor. All he had on his side was proximity to the time of injury, and that was slipping away by the second.
"I'm going to need you lying face down on the bench," he instructed. "And I'll need access to the elbow. Is there any way to get you out of that tunic without removing the chainmail?"
Martok growled, rolling his good shoulder to shake off Kalenna's guarding hand. He stalked away from her, prowling to the back of the barracks. "I do not need to lie down. It is nothing. Put it back into place, and be done!"
Julian restrained an exasperated roll of the eyes. He was cross and sore and exhausted, but he didn't intend to let any of that overcome his professionalism. He had treated Commander Worf often enough to know that Klingons made challenging patients. Pride was part of it. So was stubbornness. But frankly, he thought the truth was that they simply were not comfortable with doctors.
Having an audience didn't help. Julian looked around at the others. Two Romulans, one of whom was gawking noticeably. The General had let Major Kalenna support him on the painful walk back to the barracks, but that didn't mean he wanted her to witness the setting of his arm. The Breen's blank-visored stare was unnerving at the best of times. And there was Tain, who seemed to be taking in the whole spectacle as if he were in a corner box at the theatre.
"Everyone out!" Julian decided briskly. "Go and take a walk. Do a sweep of the perimeter. Just leave the room."
Parvok didn't need to be told twice. He was out the door almost before Julian finished speaking. Kalenna looked less certain. "If you need assistance…" she began.
"I won't need assistance if the General cooperates," said Julian resolutely. He glared at Tain. "You need to go as well."
The Cardassian looked affronted. "I don't let anyone tell me when to go or when to stay in my own home, Doctor," he said, blustering with false injury.
Julian cast a wide, sarcastic look around the room. "This is home?" he challenged. "How the mighty have fallen, Tain."
"How indeed, Doctor. How indeed," Tain lamented, nodding sombrely. But his eyes glittered gleefully at the riposte, and he meandered for the door at last. As it slammed closed behind him, Julian turned his attention back on Martok.
"It's just you and I, General," he said. Belatedly he added, glancing at the middle cot on the righthand wall; "And the Breen."
"The Breen," muttered Martok. "I do not trust a people who fear to show their faces."
"I can't ask them to leave: I'm not even sure they can understand what we're saying," said Julian. "As far as I know, Starfleet translators aren't able to parse the Breen language."
Martok made a grumbling sound, but he returned to the bench. He was moving more stiffly now, shuffling instead of striding. The pain was telling in his movements, and upon his face. "Is this really necessary, Doctor?" he groused.
"I'm afraid so," Julian said with an exaggerated sigh. Klingons tended to respond well to dramatics, in his opinion. "But the longer we wait, the more unpleasant it's going to be for both of us."
Martok sat down on the edge of the bench, pushing up with the toe of his boot until he was positioned to lie back. Julian wasn't quite sure how to break the news that he needed to be in a prone position, but before they got to that, he had to deal with the sleeve.
"I'm going to unbuckle your bracer," he said, taking an awkward shuffle-step around the corner of the table. He planted his left foot firmly and tucked the right up behind, so that the weight of his calf could traction his knee a little. The pulsing misery in the joint let up slightly but measurably, freeing more of his mind to focus on his patient.
Martok bared his teeth in anticipation of the pain as Julian brushed away his good hand and took control of the injured limb. Klingons apparently favoured simplicity over inscrutability when it came to the design of their garment fastenings: he released five small hooks, and was able to slide the truncated cone off of the forearm. He opened the cuff of Martok's sleeve and slid his hand inside, but there was not enough room to manoeuvre.
At home, in his well-appointed infirmary, Julian would have simply cut the sleeve off in order to access the injury. Here, not only was he without a laser or even a pair of scissors ("Low-tech, but effective, Mister Bashir!", as his Heritage Techniques in Manual Surgery professor had loved to say.), but he had no means of repairing — much less replacing — the garment when he was done. If there was any way to spare Martok's tunic, Julian had to try.
He returned control of the arm to his patient, and reached to unfasten Martok's belt. If he could ease off the heavily padded vest that supported the winged shoulder plates and the interlocking spine ornamentation, maybe he'd be able to see a solution. The Klingon, however, shifted his hip and pulled back from Julian's hands.
"I just want—" Julian began apologetically. He always tried to make a point of explaining himself to patients before he touched them in unanticipated ways, but he'd forgotten. It made him feel guilty and less-than-competent — not a good frame of mind going into any procedure.
"It unlaces at the shoulder," Martok muttered tightly. "I am hardly the first warrior since the days of Kahless to need an arm set while in armour."
"Oh!" Julian didn't have the time or the energy for chagrin. He reached up into the shadow of the left shoulder-plate and felt around. Sure enough, the top of the sleeve was laced to the edge of the armhole with a single flat cord, wrapped in a tight spiral through a series of eyes. He found the knot near the back, and his fingers worked nimbly to separate the two pieces.
Easing the sleeve down over the elbow was delicate work, and twice Martok growled ominously against the urge to cry out in pain. But soon the voluminous black tube was lying on the floor, and Martok's arm was encased only in the snugly-fitted sheath of his undershirt. It looked like it had once been off-white, but it was stained with blood and grime. It felt oily to the touch, and gave off a pungent stink of dead skin and Klingon body odour. But it clung tightly to the arm, and Julian was able to appreciate the dislocation visually at last.
It was a nasty one, the joint fully separated. The humerus seemed to be coming out of the forearm much further down than usual, with the crest of the ulna sticking out like a nob behind. Deciding to leave well enough alone and to work around the remaining sleeve, Julian fixed his resolve and flexed his fingers.
"I need to examine your hand," he said before reaching to take it. He had to ease the forearm down a little out of the guarded pose in which Martok had been holding it. The Klingon's mouth tightened, but he made no sound. Swiftly, Julian checked the resistance in the fingers, and pinched the tips to watch the capillary refill. The palm felt unremarkably warm to the touch, but something about that niggled on the back of his mind.
"Could you touch my wrist with your other hand, please?" he asked. It felt good to hear his capable, professional voice again, and he kept his eyes on what he was doing as he palpated the carpals and felt for any unusual give or resistance.
"Your wrist?" Martok huffed. He was very deliberately looking away, as if the ceiling might fall if he did not glare at it with sufficient ferocity.
"Just touch it, just for a moment," said Julian, still focused.
The Klingon eyed him quizzically, but obeyed. He landed on the border of Julian's cuff, but even through the sleeve of his uniform, the doctor could feel the radiating heat from his patient's fingers. His lips twitched in a tiny moment of academic satisfaction. He'd suspected as much: what would be considered a normally warm hand for a human was a cold hand for a Klingon.
"All right," he said calmly. "We need to fix this right now. You're not getting proper blood flow to your hand. Turn over and lie down on your stomach. I've got your arm."
Rolling over and easing himself down was an ordeal for Martok, but he did so without complaint — almost without a sound, except for the ragged hitches of breath deep in his rumbling throat. It might have been easier on him if they'd been able to do this over the back of a chair, but if any such furniture existed in this prison at all, Julian hadn't seen it. He drove back the list of everything it would have been nice to have, and forced himself to accept the task at hand. When the time came for him to lift the arm away from Martok's chest, guiding the humerus with one hand and supporting the forearm with the other, the Klingon stiffened against the pain, but he did not cry out.
"Good," Julian soothed, kneading Martok's shoulder in a gesture intended to comfort under the guise of coaxing the muscles to relax as much as they were able. "Can you get a little more to your right, so that your shoulder's off the edge of the table on that side? I need more support over here."
Martok obeyed. Though broader than a bench, the table was narrow by biobed standards. A third of the Klingon's chest hung out over open air on the right by the time Julian had enough of the humerus anchored on the left. The General was rigid with the effort of keeping his balance.
"Put your arm underneath, around the corner," said Julian. "If you hold onto the edge, it'll help you anchor yourself."
Martok obeyed, hugging the tabletop tightly to himself. He planted his left cheek on the unyielding surface, turned resolutely away from the disjointed limb.
Finally, Julian was able to consider his own position in relation to his patient. He shuffled up a little, considered, and then took ahold of his trouser leg and hauled his right calf up onto the table. His knee protested fiercely, but he shifted his weight so that he was bracing his shin against the lip of the bench, instead of kneeling directly on the knee. As stable as he was going to get, he leaned forward over Martok and closed his right hand around the Klingon's bicep.
Julian eased more of his weight onto his arm, slowly increasing the pressure on Martok's humerus beneath. He reached down with his left hand, getting a good grip on the Klingon's forearm. He rotated it gently, rocking the joint and correcting the lateral drift of the ulna. He didn't watch his hands, staring vacantly at the door instead and letting a visualization of the anatomy involved float dreamily in his mind's eye. Overthinking a reduction was a sure way to make it as clunky (and therefore as painful) as possible.
"I've been meaning to ask someone, and I think you're the right person," he said conversationally. He could feel now that none of the bones were fractured, which confirmed what he had heard when the injury occurred. "How many Jem'Hadar are stationed here?"
"Thirty," huffed Martok. "Including the First. And there is the Vorta, of course."
"Really?" asked Julian. He could feel the coronoid process grinding against the base of the humerus. It appeared to be a little more distal in Klingons than in humans: interesting. "I counted twenty-six."
"There are thirty," Martok said resolutely. Julian recognized that tone of voice: it was the same one that Commander Worf used when delivering a tactical briefing. The General was warming into his lecture, and he had forgotten all about his arm. Perfect. "Among the Jem'Hadar, unit strengths are typically in factors of ten. This is because—"
Briskly, fluidly, and with an economy of motion that had made him the star of his orthopedics practicum, Julian unlocked the coronid process with a thrust of his right arm as he dug his left thumb against the posterior aspect of the olecranon. There was an appreciable clunk, a perfect bookend to the maddening pop he had heard in the ring, and Julian's lips parted in a sudden grin as he let out a triumphant puff of air.
Martok roared, caught mid-sentence by the unexpected sensation, and he bucked instinctively against the table. But he settled almost immediately, moving his left arm gingerly up the edge of the table. Julian patted him on the shoulder-blade in companionable congratulation, remembering a little too late that a Klingon might not take kindly to such a gesture.
"Finished," he pronounced. "You can sit up now."
Martok shifted awkwardly, hampered by his unwieldy garments and the need to lift himself one-handed. Julian supported the freshly-set arm as the Klingon rocked up onto one hip and got his booted feet over the side of the table. He guided the wrist inward, satisfied by the smooth rotation of the elbow as he did so. Martok did not cup the arm with his other as most patients would have done. He seemed satisfied to rest it against his chest as he braced himself on his thigh.
Julian bent forward, reflexively rubbing his knee. He was aching to sit down, but he wanted to finish his post-procedural exam first.
Martok was watching him, taken aback. As Julian shifted awkwardly, meaning to apologize for his momentary distraction, the Klingon chuckled.
"Look at us: what a pair!" he rumbled ruefully. "Only five good limbs between the two of us. Fear not, Doctor! What we lack in stoutness of body, we make up in spirit!"
He reached out with his uninjured hand to clap the human on the shoulder. Reflexively, Julian shied away. His professional competence was fading with the afterglow of his success, and the anxious part of his mind was once again aware of just who was sitting before him.
General Martok leaned in and frowned up at him with one piercing eye, puzzled.
"Why do you fear me, Doctor?" he asked, his hoarse voice low and wondering. "You do not fear the Jem'Hadar, and yet you flinch from me."
"I don't fear you," Julian argued. The lie felt sour on his lips. "I don't know if I need to fear you," he amended. "Back home, we'd be enemies. Here…" He looked around the barren barracks, stripped of all but the starkest necessities. "If we don't do what we can for each other, we won't survive."
Martok shook his head slowly from side to side. "Enemies?" he echoed. "For eighty years, the Khitomer Accords have ensured peace between our two peoples. I do not count you an enemy, Doctor. Not for staying the hands of the Jem'Hadar, nor for your… interference this afternoon." He grinned briefly down at his hand as he waggled freshly functional fingers. "Quite the opposite."
"Seventy-eight years," Julian muttered sickly, missing the compliment entirely. His mind's eye was eclipsed by the memory of Jadzia, pacing from one end of her quarters to the other, gesticulating wildly as she soliloquized, her hurt and anger detonated by what he'd thought a harmless question. She had taken the collapse of the treaties as a personal affront, and rightly so. Her former self, Curzon Dax, had brokered the negotiations on the Federation's behalf in a tremendous diplomatic effort and, as it had turned out in the end, at a great personal cost.
Martok glowered at him, and slowly it dawned on Julian that the expression on the warrior's face was one of incomprehension.
"What do you mean?" Martok demanded. "It is eighty years. Eighty of your Federation years this spring. Time passes slowly in this place, but not as slowly as that."
Even Julian's good knee felt rubbery. He took a hopping backward step away from Martok and eased himself down onto the nearest cot. Comprehension was dawning, and with it the knowledge that he had been an arrogant fool to have made the assumption he'd made.
"Eighty years of the Khitomer Accords," he said cautiously, knowing despite his consternation that he could not project his own hypothesis onto his subject. "Eighty years of… peace between the Federation and the Klingon Empire."
"Yes!" Martok said emphatically. "I expect our respective diplomats will be ordering some sort of celebration. Humans make much of significant anniversaries, do you not?"
He should have seen it. It made perfect sense. How many times since last night had Julian struggled to reconcile this grim but honourable and even gruffly considerate man with the wild-eyed warmonger who had led a fleet against a civilian government and laid violent siege to Deep Space Nine? He had even snapped at Deyos this morning, saying that hostilities would have ended between the Klingons and the Federation months ago, if not for the agitation of the Changeling spy who had replaced General Martok.
But it had never occurred to him that, if not for the infiltrator, the war might never have started at all.
"How long have you been here?" Julian asked hoarsely.
Martok grimaced. "Two accursed years," he spat. "At least, that is my guess. Time moves strangely here. Keeping count of the days… is not helpful."
Julian did not give that remark much thought. "You were here before Tain?" he asked, his mind whirring over the chronology of the last twenty-four months. "Before the survivors of the Romulan-Cardassian fleet were brought to the camp?"
"Indeed." The word was dark and heavy, laden with the burden of his long captivity. Martok shook his head bleakly, resentment burning in the eye that stared down at the taloned toe of his boot. "Two years, that I might have spent aboard my new command, strengthening the fleet, preparing the Empire for war against the Dominion. Two years, in which I might have brought honour to my family and my people, wasted here!"
He spat the last word, wafting a broad gesture of hate and disgust at their surroundings. He must have jarred his tender elbow as his other arm swung, because he stiffened abruptly, arrested the motion, and gripped the side of the table instead, shifting his hips uncomfortably. He fixed his penetrating stare on Julian.
"Do you know anything of the news from Q'onos?" he asked. What he surely meant as an officer's businesslike request for intelligence from the field had the unmistakable undertone of a desperate plea. "Can you tell me anything of what the imposter did in my place, before the Order of the Bat'leth brought an end to its worthless life?"
Julian nodded, a tight, quaking motion that sent a fresh ripple of pain through his skull. Everything he had believed about the political situation in the Alpha Quadrant since the collapse of the treaty was crumbling. He had assumed — everyone on Deep Space Nine had assumed — that the war had been the inevitable result of factional politics, Klingon infighting, and the constant stressors of sharing a very crowded corner of the Galaxy. That, and the fanatical jingoism of one General Martok. Now it turned out it had been engineered by the Founders from the very beginning.
Divide, and conquer. The fall of Tain's joint fleet had crippled the Obsidian Order and the Tal Shiar, essentially eliminating the threat to the Dominion posed by Cardassia and Romulus. And so they had sent a Changeling to turn the only two remaining great powers against each other, in the hope that the Empire and the Federation would simply finish each other off.
"It started a war," Julian said at last, knowing that he owed Martok the truth. He would want the truth, in the General's place. Six months from now, a year from now… he might be sitting right here, questioning a newcomer himself, trying to gauge how much chaos and bloodshed had been brought upon Starfleet by the actions and machinations of one Doctor Julian Bashir of Deep Space Nine.
It took all of his courage to drive back that terror and find his voice again. "The Changeling that replaced you, it led an invasion of Cardassia," he murmured. He had brought news of the death of loved ones with less strain on his soul. But as devastating as such losses were, this was somehow worse. For a patriot, a loyalist who loved his homeworld and his people as deeply as Martok obviously did, was there any more terrible tidings?
"When my Captain — when my colleagues —" Julian closed his eyes and swallowed hard. There was no point in mincing words. "When my friends and I took steps to protect the Cardassian lawmakers from illegal capture, your replacement called for revenge. He lead an assault on Deep Space Nine, where I'm stationed. Gowron abandoned the Khitomer Accords on the Changeling's advice. The Federation and the Klingon Empire have been at war ever since."
The silence was interminable. He could hear Martok's laboured breathing, but Julian could not bear to look at the General. He kept his eyes closed, curled forward over his lap with his elbows propping him against his thighs, and he hung his head, and he waited.
"How many have died?" asked Martok.
"Hundreds of thousands," Julian whispered. His lips scarcely moved. "There have been battles on almost all of the border worlds, firefights between the fleets, raids deep in Federation space. For a few months, it seemed as if the Klingons were so hungry for bloodshed that they would roll out across the Quadrant, whatever the cost."
"And since the shapeshifter was discovered?" Martok pressed. "Since I am believed to be dead?"
"Gowron hasn't been calling out for blood as loudly as before," Julian admitted. "But other factions on the High Council…"
"Other factions are hungry for glory, and they do not care how they have been manipulated," Martok agreed dourly. "It is our way."
"They don't know that the war was started by the Dominion," Julian tried to explain. "No one knows. They assumed you were replaced only a few months before the infiltrator was discovered. Everyone thinks…"
"Everyone thinks it was I who started the war." Martok made a noise of disgust, a tectonic rumbling deep within his chest. Then he grunted in comprehension. "And that is why you fear me. Because you saw in me your enemy, the man who had attacked your space station. The man you and your friends defied by rescuing the Cardassians."
Julian tried to nod, but couldn't. His head felt as dense as a black hole, dangling between his shoulders. He was ashamed of his assumptions, of his fear, of failing to give the benefit of the doubt to a man who was in the identical, untenable position he was now in himself.
"Yes," he breathed, exhausted beyond comprehension.
There was a sound of shifting limbs and the clank of chainmail. Julian stiffened, expecting some kind of reprisal. If he got lucky, Martok would simply storm from the room, disgusted by his presence. If not…
A hand closed on his shoulder, gripping tightly but not painfully. It was firm and steady, grounding him. Julian raised his head at last, looking up at the Klingon's grim countenance. Solemnity was writ across his features, but there was something softer in his lonely eye. Compassion? Empathy.
They looked at each other for a long, silent interval. When at last Martok spoke, his voice was not gentle, but it was grave and very low.
"What is your name, Doctor?" he asked. "When you did not give it before, I thought it an oversight. Now I think you were afraid I would recognize it, if I was the one who led the assault on your posting."
"Bashir," Julian said. He flicked his tongue over his lower lip, trying to wet it. "Doctor Julian Bashir."
Martok nodded, exhaling thoughtfully. "It is a warrior's name," he pronounced solemnly.
There was no higher praise in the Klingon lexicon.
(fade to black)