14.

"She's dying, you know."

Garak drew his breath in sharply and threw the needle on the worktable. He'd been sitting there for three hours now, ever since he left sickbay, working on some ceremonial robes for a group of Klingon merchants. It was the easiest possible kind of work, requiring only a minimal level of attention, and he'd managed to prick his finger at least a dozen times. It was unacceptable, but there it was. He sighed and composed his face. Smile, Garak. Smile. It will soon be over. It always is.

"Aren't you being a tad melodramatic, doctor?"

"Look at me, Garak. Do I look as if I'm even slightly in the mood for your shit? This is not one of our little lunch talks. We're talking about a person's life here, ok?"

Needles, Garak thought. I need another type of needles for this kind of work. Thicker needles. These are too thin, they bend too easily. I need the ones that arrived in the shipment the other day. The ones in the back room.

"How very dramatic. Very well then, since we are being so refreshingly frank, let me tell you that I am not in the mood for any *shit* either, doctor, if you will allow me to use your colourful expression. So I would suggest that you just go ahead and tell me what it is that you want so we can both go about our day with as little *shit* as possible. Would that be at all acceptable?"

Bashir leaned towards him. Do not shrink away, Elim Garak. Do not dare shrink away. Garak's right hand closed around the needle he had left on the worktable and slowly, lovingly, his thumb drove it into his index finger.

"You can help her. You can help me help her."

For a moment, it looked as if Bashir was going to put his hand on Garak's shoulders, but Garak looked at it, and the doctor backed away.

"Quite aside from the obvious question of how I would do that, my dear doctor, there is the even more interesting question of why. You *were* present when Ziyal and I last spoke, were you not? In this very room, only yesterday? In fact, not even twenty-four hours have passed since she was standing precisely were you are standing right now, telling me that, after some consideration, she had decided she was not going to kill me."

You know me. You know who my father is.

Garak paused. The doctor continued to look at him with that concentrated, good-person, Starfleet intensity. Breathe, Garak. Breathe. And don't forget to smile.

"'You don't bother me, I don't bother you.' That is what she said, remember? It seemed like a reasonable arrangement then, and it still does now."

"Didn't you hear what I said? She is going to die."

"We all must die, doctor."

"But not like this. No one deserves to die like this."

You shouldn't even be alive, Elim. You're a mistake. A mistake is eating my food, a mistake is sitting on my chair, a mistake is taking up my space. Mistakes are ugly things, Elim. No one wants to see them, they should't exist. Go away now. Go somewhere where I can't see you.

Yes, father.

And don't call me father.

"You, doctor, may very well be qualified to decide who deserves to die and in what manner. I, for my part, am just a humble tailor. I prefer not to get involved."

"Damn it, Garak!" Bashir slapped Garak's worktable in frustration and started to pace. As the doctor moved away from him, Garak started to feel his breath come more naturally again. Carefully, he pulled the needle out of his finger and looked at the tiny hole it had left in his skin - it was almost invisible if you didn't know what you were looking for. As he had expected, there was no blood. He knew all the places and all the ways to achieve just the right amount of pain with minimum amount of trace.

The doctor turned to face him again. Garak remembered how Ziyal had stopped in front of that very dress, how he had watched the muscles in her back working.

"I do remember your conversation. I do. I remember how you looked at her. And you know what else I remember? I remember how you talked to her, just now, just a couple of hours ago, in sickbay. You knew exactly what to say to her, and how to say it, and it worked. If you hadn't been there, she could have killed me without a second thought."

He remembered her eyes. Every time he had seen her, her eyes were saying "kill me" so plainly that she might as well have been screaming it in his ears. Until he couldn't take it anymore, he just had to make it go away. That look.

"She wouldn't have killed you, doctor. She just wanted you out of the way. You were easy. But-"

"But she might have hurt others."

"Or herself."

"Or herself. And you didn't want that to happen. You stopped her. Because you knew exactly what she was thinking, what she was feeling. Because you've been where she's been. And because you care."

Garak felt a surge of anger. Damn him, damn the girl, damn this godforsaken station. How did this - person, this so-called doctor, dare to presume on where he had been, what he knew? Who he cared about. And how had he, Elim Garak, whose name had been whispered in terror throughout sectors, ended up in a position where he had no choice but to listen to his drivel?

"You've known me for long enough to know that the only thing I care about is myself, and Cardassia. Not necessarily in that order. I acted instinctively, as anyone else would have. Nothing more."

"I don't believe you, and I don't believe you believe yourself. I was there, Garak."

"You were crawling on the floor wheezing and trying not to vomit. Not exactly the best position to make detached and professionally accurate observations."

"Garak-"

"Leave, doctor."

"But…"

"It would be wise for you to leave. Now."

Bashir, that fool, was not afraid. How, it what world, in what *Universe* was it possible that someone like Bashir wasn't afraid of someone like Garak anymore?

I'll tell you why, Elim. Because you are nothing. You never were anything else. You, people like you. You don't matter.

"Fine. Fine, I'll leave. I'll leave, and you stay here, in your cosy little shop, with your needles and your scissors, and your - attitude. I thought there was something to you, Garak, you know? Something behind all that, something worthwhile. A real person. A hurt person, maybe. A wise person even, someone I could learn from. But hey, I can make mistakes too. I thought I couldn't, not really, but I've been learning all about that, lately. So maybe everyone else was right about you, and I'll just have to accept that. That fascinating guy I was having lunch with all this time, he was just a product of my imagination, and all that you really are is a cruel, petty man who is bitter because he once had some power and now he's lost it. And you know what? I don't find that interesting at all. I'd rather have lunch with Morn. Now *he's* interesting."

After Bashir left, Garak looked at the unfinished work on the table for a long time. People came and went in front of his shop, the station now buzzing with life. Some of them spoke to him, and he answered, customers came in, Odo stopped by to ask him about the Klingon merchants, but Garak's mind never left his worktable. There was something, something that was missing, something he needed…

Needles. He needed to get some needles. The good ones.

The back room was little more than a closet, really, containing a small table covered with samples, an even smaller stool, and otherwise stacked so full of boxes and crates that there was scarcely room for one small person. Garak went in and said "lights", but they didn't go on, as usual. It was a design flaw, one of many this station was riddled with. It didn't matter, the light that came in from the shop was enough to read by, and Garak started to scan the top boxes for the one containing the needles he wanted. He didn't particularly like the back room, but he'd been in it many times without any problems - until today. Today, it suddenly seemed to him as if the boxes were about to fall on him and bury him. He could have sworn they were moving.

His hands started to sweat, and breathing seemed like a delicious fantasy. He turned to leave and found he could not move, it was impossible to move a single muscle, including his lungs or his heart. Everything stopped. I am going to die here, he thought. After everything, after all these years, this damn closet is finally going to kill me. The closet has finally won. As I knew it would.

I'm going to kill you, Elim Garak. I swear I will.

Too late, sweet girl. Too late. He wins. He always wins…

And then, as he remembered her voice, as he saw her face again, he took one breath, and then another, and then he was walking out of the back room, which was full of boxes that were not going to move because he had stacked them very carefully. He was not going to die today. And neither, he decided, was Ziyal. Not today, and not tomorrow. He asked the computer about the location of Tora Ziyal, and when the computer informed him that she was in her quarters, he smiled to himself. She wanted to be found. There was still time.

Afterwards, Garak resumed his work on the Klingon robes, and finished them in half an hour without pricking his finger once.