The Cardassian sector in Revaht was nothing like he ever would have imagined of Cardassians on any world, knowing what he already did of them.
Although the buildings had the dark colouring and strong, fierce angles he associated with Cardassian architecture and design, each of them designed to leave a heavy impression and cast an equally heavy shadow, by no means did the sector have the austerity or the cold sobriety he had come to expect.
Amidst the square buildings and their angular arrays, tall trees with broad, flat branches and thick layers of wide leaves sprouted up, creating natural parasols that spread lighter, less oppressive shadows in the gaps between buildings, setting off the effect of the sun without fully blocking it out; there were further gaps made up of complicated latticework, and these lattices were strung all over with vine fruits and flowers that Julian recognised at a glance as rokassa.
It didn't stop there. Everywhere he looked, there were more plants – plants in pots, plants grown along fences, plants growing from window boxes or up lattices beside doors and windows, over walls, in plots that bordered the edges of paths or broke up their center.
Everywhere he looked, he saw leaves or flowers or budding fruit: he could smell feyta and gelat beans, saw troughs growing with red leaves and oceanleaves and a handful of other Cardassian tea leaves. He didn't recognise the flowers or the leaves of any of the rows of vegetables in the ground, but he knew from Cardassian stews that there were all kinds of tubers and roots native to Cardassia.
The light that reflected between the buildings landed most heavily where the plants were growing, and yet the soil where he saw it was just as dry or thickly textured as he expected of Vulcan.
What surprised him the most wasn't all the plants, though or the fruit, or the flowers, or the leaves. What surprised him wasn't the overwhelming verdancy or the bright and varied colours and scents, so unlike the unfeeling grey of typical Cardassian fare, and not even the many Cardassians that moved back and forth in clothes he'd never seen Cardassians wear before, with different styles of hair, or the smiles and cheer on their faces.
It made sense that Cardassians here would have a different style of dress. For one, he saw no one in armour, and the clothes he did see were lighter, with thinner fabrics that lacked so much weight – he didn't need to be a genius to know that the heavy weave of the fabrics Garak wore were protective and served to insulate him from the cold on the station, and the Cardassians here had no need for it, any more than the Vulcans here had need for thermal vests or underclothes as some of them wore on their off-planet postings.
The Cardassians here favoured much more flowing, open clothes: although he saw structured tunics that emphasised the shoulders, the hips, the elbows and the knees – in short, the sharpest angles of the Cardassian body – he also saw more skirts and loose fabrics in looser jackets or open cuffs. The fabric was still squarely or angularly tailored – the fashions were no doubt influenced by Vulcan robe designs, albeit lacking the veils and stiff collars that Vulcans seemed to like – but it flowed. It draped. It moved when they walked – children tugged on their parents jacket or skirt hems, or were wrapped in swathes of fabric, or wore cape-like cowls and hoods to shield them from the sun.
Some of them showed their chests or their arms, but there was still a certain careful modesty: open collars revealed the chest spoon on some Cardassians, but didn't dip so low as to be below the line of the sternum, and when the arm was showed it was only the forearm, and typically only its inside, in open darts at the mid-forearm or the elbow that let the shirt cuff fall open.
Some of them had their hair cut short or neat in Vulcan styles, and others wore their hair longer than he'd seen before. When the hair was worn long, it wasn't exclusively under their buns or tied at the nape of their neck: some of the Cardassians wore their hair up, with side braids or curls of hair, or wore the complicated, neatly sectioned braids that Vulcans sometimes favoured.
Some of the Cardassians had skin that was greener than it was grey, or had noticeably pointed ears, lighter ridges, thicker, less shiny hair. He didn't just see Vulcan hybrids, though, he was interested to see – he saw one Cardassian with a red-brown tint to his flesh, and his ridges were a combination of Klingon and Cardassian physicality; he saw a few with Bajoran nose-ridges, even.
He saw Cardassians that smiled and gesticulated with their hands, as Garak did; he saw Cardassians that walked proudly and spoke deliberately, as Dukat did; he saw Cardassians that nudged one another and wrestled and laughed with one another; he saw Cardassians that walked straight-backed with Vulcan neutrality in their features; he saw Cardassian children, laughing and running together in the streets.
No.
No, none of that surprised him.
He saw two Cardassian children run up to a window box, and pluck some yellow berries from the fruit hanging down, before a man came out of the house and handed them some of the berries too high for them to reach; he saw an old woman touch a passing man on the hip and point, and he reached for her up into the lattice, pulling down the rokassa fruits that she chose; he saw people come into the squares he and Dinar were walking through with baskets under their arms, picking out fruits or vegetables or leaves or beans as they might pick them from market stalls.
"Community gardening," he said softly.
"It is the Path," said Dinar. "As we are connected to our fellows with the natural tendrils of love, so are we connected to our gardens, to the spread of their roots or outreach of their branches, and them to us. We tend our gardens as a collective, and we harvest from them, each according to our needs. The foodstuffs grown within the borders of this sector feed us – they are not to be bought or sold, and only the surplus is to be traded for food or drink or small items for the community – fireworks or children's toys, rolls of fabric, pots and spades, art for our schools or community buildings."
"What do the Vulcans think?" asked Julian.
"They think it is logical," said Dinar. "Which it is. Limited, yes, to a local community, but nonetheless effective – and Vulcans have an appreciation, as Cardassians do, for the work of the collective in creating value for the community."
"As opposed to the work of individuals in creating value for individuals," said Julian.
"Quite," said Dinar, her lips smiling. "Here: this is Oralius."
Julian was spellbound at the huge mural which covered one great wall of what looked to be some sort of church or place of worship, topped with a roof garden that hosted pots of plants and bushes, and more than that, hives of whatever the equivalent of bees were – to Vulcans or Cardassians, he had no idea.
Oralius had an almost Cardassian face, but it was also draconic: Julian could see the bright blue of the teardrop on his face and the colour of his skin, the ridges of his nose which became more like a snout; the ridges that would have been on his shoulders instead spanned all about his face, created a flare of spines and thickly scaled flesh.
This spread of frills faded at the edges of the mural, becoming stars and swirls of energy, fading again into nothingness.
It was late in the afternoon, and the red skies over Vulcan were turning to a darker gold that would soon darken still to bronze, and then to black.
"Come, Doctor," said Madrel, patting his back with a hard thump – if a Klingon had done it, on DS9, he might have pretended to be winded, but no one knew him here, and he was surrounded by Cardassians. As it stood, he appreciated the hard and sudden pressure. "Meet my children."
"What will your husband think of you bringing a handsome young Starfleet doctor home with you?" he asked, and she laughed.
"He will think I've brought home another child," she said. "As this is what I have done."
"I wish the universe would spare me Cardassians and their fixation on their superior age."
"Live a few decades longer, my dear, and you can wield your age as we do."
"I could never," said Julian good-naturedly. "I'll be a child all my life, I promise."
"With that smooth face, you'll look like one, I'm sure," said Madrel.
Her home had a garden with a fence around it, to his surprise, and for a moment he didn't understand why, until he saw the careful labelling on the plants and bushes that grew in rows in the yard, along the trellis on the wall, from the window baskets that hung from the cover of the veranda.
Plants for medical use – to be taken and used in moderation, and set aside from the rest, no doubt so they weren't mistaken for food by accident.
A cat-sized creature jumped up at him as they came through the gate, and Julian caught it in his arms, laughing in surprise. It had tremendously large, protuberant eyes, long, flopping ears and a prehensile tail that ended in a set of three claw-like fingers; with its six legs it gripped at Julian's uniform, and Julian breathlessly laughed at the sensation of its fur under his fingers, softer than he'd ever felt before.
"My daughter's lemur," said Madrel. "Her name is Leli."
"Hello, Leli," said Julian, stroking the animal's soft, thick fur, marvelling at the texture of it, tremendously dense and downy. "She's beautiful."
"She's a pest," said Madrel, and Julian made a low, disapproving sound as he bent his head, letting the lemur climb up onto his shoulder – she curled her tail around her neck to keep her balance, and with three of her little hands, she kept bushing and tugging at the sides of Julian's neck and shoulders, as though searching for where he was hiding his ridges.
"You're not a pest, are you, darling?" he asked in a cooing voice.
"You'll see," said Madrel in foreboding tones, and clapped as they entered the house. "My children!" she called, in a loud parody of maternal woe, almost wailing. "Where, oh, where, are my children!?"
Laughter sounded from up the stairs, and Julian hid his smile in Leli's thick-ruffed chest.
It wasn't like the paperwork Bashir had shown him he'd signed himself.
Bashir's paperwork had been neat, orderly, but had been ordered with the requisite simplicity of any other Starfleet or Federation paperwork. It had asked for far more details than was necessary, but many of those details had been optional – the forms had been flexible, fit to serve all manner of species, crew levels.
This paperwork lacked that… friendliness.
The first form was bluntly hostile: in the first instance, it printed Garak's name, Bashir's name, the date of birth Garak had previously provided the Federation, a description, not trusting him to input such crucial information himself; in the second instance, none of the questions were optional. None of them were flexible.
They asked stark questions that required one to check yes or no, or to provide a one-word answer.
To what non-Federation state were you born a citizen? The answer had been filled in for him: CARDASSIA.
Are you still a citizen of the above state? YES or NO.
Have you applied for or been granted citizenship of any other non-Federation state(s)? YES or NO.
Have you applied for, or are you currently in the process of application for, Federation citizenship? YES or NO.
Are you currently in need of Federation asylum? YES or NO.
These were the introductory questions. These were the pleasant ones – a little cool by Federation standards, yes, but not unbearably unfriendly. As the form went on, they became more so.
If you are still in possession of citizenship of a non-Federation state, is it at risk of being stripped from you in response to your intimate relationship with a Starfleet officer? YES or NO.
In the event of discovery of your intimate relationship with a Starfleet officer, would your state call for arrest, execution, torture, and/or any other retaliatory action that would result in your death or your immediate harm? YES or NO.
In the event of discovery of your intimate relationship with a Starfleet officer, would your state call for arrest, execution, torture, and/or any other retaliatory action that would result in the death or immediate harm to the Starfleet officer with which you are involved? YES or NO.
Do you and the Starfleet officer with which you are involved currently have offspring together? YES or NO.
Are you and/or the Starfleet officer with which you are involved currently pregnant, laying, budding, and/or otherwise imminently to produce shared offspring? YES or NO.
In the event of discovery of your intimate relationship with a Starfleet officer, would your state call for arrest, execution, torture, and/or any other retaliatory action that would result in the death or immediate harm to the aforementioned offspring? YES or NO.
The questions on the form did not get kinder or friendlier, although they did become more foreboding.
The ones on the Bajoran forms were even colder in their tone.
"Not being a citizen of a Federation state," said Garak softly, "I suppose I might argue that I am under no obligation to fill out these foolish little parodies of true bureaucracy."
"No," agreed Sisko. "You are, however, a resident on this station, under Federation allowance."
"And you would evict me," asked Garak with wide and innocent eyes, "just for refusing to tick some boxes on a little form?"
"Ordinarily, no," said Sisko. "But you're the only Cardassian left on this station, Garak, here in Bajoran space. I'm sure it doesn't surprise you that Starfleet wishes to be stringent in this matter."
Garak knew that Sisko could be capable of real and pleasant conversation – such a shame they had to communicate to one another in such blunt and obvious ways.
"Paperwork is the least you'll have to deal with if you hurt him," said Kira. "If you leverage him to hurt anybody else. You understand that, don't you? You understand that the Bajoran courts would show you no mercy?"
"Of course I appreciate your concern, Major, but the Cardassian definition of mercilessness rather leaves the Bajoran one in the dust, so to speak."
"I wouldn't show you mercy either, Garak," whispered Kira, hatred flaring in her eyes, and Garak didn't glance to Sisko – if he hadn't wanted her to threaten him, he wouldn't have allowed her into the room.
"My dear Major," said Garak. "By no means would I expect you to."
He filled out the forms. He lied on them, for the most part – in the event he said, for example, that he was likely to need asylum, he had no doubt it would be assured that he did. He couldn't help but wonder if Tain still personally monitored his communications and his dispatches, or now, the Federation paperwork he appeared in – did Pythas Lok? Did Limor Prang? What old friends of his still monitored him, examined him, dissected his life?
Which of them would lead the interrogation, were he ever to return home?
"I'm sorry," said Sisko when the forms were finished, after Kira had left.
"Why?" asked Garak simply.
"It's no fun to do the paperwork for love and romance," said Sisko casually. "Even less when it's sex."
"I thought for your people, Commander, the three were one and the same?"
"Doctor Bashir is Human too, you know."
He said it just as Garak was leaving, and Garak turned to look over his shoulder at him, gave a pleasant surprise. "Funny," said Garak pleasantly. "You're quite right, of course – but I've always thought of the doctor as better than that."
He waited for long enough to ensure that he saw Sisko's face in the reflection on one of the doors – Cardassians liked polished surfaces for more reasons than one. Sisko's frown was one of confusion, intrigue.
It was not the expression Garak had wanted from him, was unfortunately keener than he might have given him credit for – he still had much to learn about Deep Space Nine's new commander.
Dinar Madrel had three children – two daughters and a son. They were perhaps the most intelligent, precocious children he had ever met: they asked very keen questions, and sitting around the dinner table, passing plates between Dinar Madrel, her husband, Corel Madrel, and the three of them, it was very easy to get the impression one was being cross-examined.
It was incredible, the tight weave they could form together, and yet it was not one Julian resented in the least.
"You're from Earth, but you fare well with the heat," remarked Corain, the son – he was the youngest, a boy of eight or nine, and he had a birthmark that spread out from the spoon on his forehead, making so that there was a little burst of dark blue between his brows, making the teardrop formation seem like the centre of a smile.
"His skin is golden-toned and has more melanin than the paler humans," said the oldest of the girls, T'Vana a green-eyed, slim thing with very carefully braided hair. She was tall for her age, which he would guess to be thirteen or so. "He's better suited to sun than others, and like as not to heat just the same."
"Bashir," said the middle child, Suna. She looked the least like her mother of the three – Corain and T'Vana had their mother's stout, rounded features, but she looked more like her father, angular and quietly graceful in the way so many Cardassians were. Her voice was soft and sibilant. "What is the origin of this surname, upon Earth?"
"It's an Arabic name," said Julian. "It means herald or harbinger – a bringer of good news. Arabic is typically spoken across West Asia and much of Africa – my mother's origins are Pakistani, and my father's Egyptian."
"Arabic is a beautiful language," said Suna. "More like Cardassian than your English. A shame Federaji could not follow suit."
"Suna," said her father: he had a stern, quiet demeanour, and when they met eyes over the dinner table, they almost seemed like doubles of one another. "You mustn't be so truthful to our Human friend. Veracity disagrees with them."
Julian laughed, couldn't help it. "You've been studying Arabic scholars, I suppose?"
Suna inclined her head. "I have been examining the writings of Al-Farabi alongside those of Surak."
"How do you think they compare?"
"They don't," said Suna simply, and Julian laughed again. "Do you consider yourself a logician, Doctor Bashir?"
"I'm afraid not," said Julian. "I apply logic only as far as it helps my work as a physician – everywhere else, I'm disgustingly emotional."
"That's logical," Corain decided.
"How can it be logical to cast aside logic?" asked T'Vana dryly.
"I don't bring my spade with me to the well," said Corain. "There's no sense digging in water."
"The well wouldn't be there had no one brought a spade to begin with."
"My argument is that you should bring only the tools with you to suit your situation," said the boy. He had a Vulcan child's cold simplicity, but his smile was smugly Cardassian, a mirror of the one on his own mother's face, and the effect was to make him seem simultaneously older than most Human children, and tremendously small and sweet. "If you know a well to be there, but you carry a spade instead of a bucket, I cannot help you."
"Point Corain," said Suna when T'Vana stared at him.
It was a nice dinner – they were nice children.
"Would you prefer to work, or to play?" asked Dinar that evening. The two of them were sitting outside: the night was setting in, but the night was still very warm, and they both settled in it. Julian almost felt as if he were basking in the heat, and he had no doubt that Dinar was doing just that.
They were drinking small goblets of a mead-like drink. Julian didn't hate kanar's taste, which was typically strongly fruity with heavy notes of acid sweetness, but he disliked its texture, which as far as he'd sampled so far, was often syrupy. Even the good stuff – or, as Garak had darkly corrected when he'd made Julian try it, the moderately consumable stuff – had a thickness that rested in his mouth and wanted to cling to his gums and his palate. This drink, made with ithik berries and Cardassian honey, was thick but incredibly slick, so that it almost slid down the throat without you trying to swallow.
He'd taken too big of a mouthful at once, and Dinar had smacked him upside the head and chided him for not savouring it. "You tell me you're not a child," she'd said sharply, "and yet you swallow all in front of you as though you've no patience at all!"
He liked it. He was going to bring a bottle home, he thought.
"In general?" asked Julian.
"Tomorrow," said Dinar. "I can give you access to our files, if you like – or I can teach you. Treat patients alongside me."
"That's the best way to learn," said Julian.
"Yes," she agreed.
"I'd like to work, if it's no imposition," said Julian, and Dinar hummed contentedly, leaning back in her seat.
"Good," she said approvingly.
She was a harsh teacher – in the days that followed, she hit him thirty-two times more upside the head. It was a light, sharp smack, not enough to really harm him or sting for more than a moment or two, although she hit him harder when he tried to dodge, and that made him laugh.
Common Cardassian skin ailments included dust rashes, impacted shed, and broken claws, especially on the feet. The ridges themselves, when damaged, did not often tend to topical infections, but the shadows beneath the ridges and edges where the flesh was thinner than the keratinised raised parts, were. Many Cardassians developed small infections under the ear and eye ridges, under the ridges that met at the base of the back and under the armpits, at the hips, and around the Cardassian genital sheath, or around the flared burst of the Cardassian mons pubis.
Some Cardassians – a minority of between one and five percent – possessed vestigial ridges, either a flat nub that was the ghost of what was once the Cardassian tail, or a protuberance not dissimilar to a dew claw on the back of the heel, and these ridges were particularly prone to damage or infection. When they treated these patients for infections or small injuries, Madrel typically advised that they adjust their tailoring to accommodate it better, so that it didn't happen again.
Cardassian's didn't sneeze, and they didn't ordinarily produce mucus from their nose and mouth; when they vomited, their stomachs partially inverted, and mild hernia or prolapse was a not uncommon after effect of flu-like illnesses. Cardassians were not prone to dehydration, as they could eat and drink small amounts and then go many days without further nourishment, or even without sleep, but dry air in combination with reduced water intake worsened not only skin conditions and the shed of one's scales, but could also cause damage inside the genital sheath or the mouth, where the skin was thin, membranous, and ideally heavily lubricated.
Cardassians had a gestation period of ten months, and due to the configuration of the Cardassian vaginal canal, it was near impossible for Cardassians to bear interspecies children, although the reverse was rarely the case.
Madrel showed him some diagrams of Cardassian sexual organs, and he'd forgotten himself, had stared with his jaw agape, looking between the vaginal canal, the Cardassian ovaries and womb, before pulling the screen closer to better examine the Cardassian penis, which was… Ridged, yes, and spined, and flared, and… Prehensile.
"Ah," had remarked Madrel. "Your personal friend is a male, I take it."
He'd taught her a Federaji curse word she'd not heard before, and it had made her laugh her barking laugh.
"It won't be a problem for you," she'd advised him, "but Cardassian men are very fertile. These latex prophylactics, they are not effective in the face of their prodigious output. If you allow him to penetrate you, you must lubricate your inner passage accordingly, and lacking a womb, he will no doubt flood your intestines." She had laughed again, and said, "You might know what it is like, young man, to be pregnant, after a fashion – you'll look it, at least."
Madrel was very… frank, for a Cardassian.
He'd thought it was part of her being Hebitian, but she scandalised a lot of other Cardassians too. Lewdness amused her, she told him – and as much as it scandalised people, it meant they spoke to her very freely of sexual and reproductive concerns, because they felt her beneath them, and knew she could and would offer no judgement.
"That's very manipulative of you," said Julian.
"Maybe so," she said. "Don't you use those innocent eyes in the same way, and feign a naivety more than you have?"
Like a Cardassian, he'd spread his hands, one foot behind the other, and bent his knees in something almost like a bow – a Cardassian expression of mea culpa, and she'd laughed again.
He liked her laugh.
He liked the way all the Cardassians laughed, in Revaht. Funny, that he'd wanted time off, and instead come to work – and how grateful he was for it. How much it made him… relax.
The contemplation gardens, outside of the holosuites, were the only significant green space upon DS9. When the place had been Terok Nor, the room with its glass ceiling and mirrored pieces, ushering what light could be drawn in from Bajor's sun, had served as a sunning room for visiting high-ranking officers or, far more often, the wives of the officers aboard. It had been the hottest place on the station, kept humid by allowing water run-off from the ore processing centre through without allowing it to be wasted.
They had moved the mirrors. It was painfully bright inside during the days, now, but it was the dead of DS9's night, angled away from Bajor's sun, and the only light came from the cool, subtle lighting around the edges of the octagonal room's ceiling, underneath the outer framing of the glass.
They had to keep the lights cool at night – the gardens were carefully cultivated by the Bajoran priests upon the station, and also some of the most devout worshipers – but even were it not for the painful brightness of the sunshine during the days, Garak would never go in at such times.
There were always people then – Bajorans.
Serving as a greenhouse, although it was not as hot and humid as once it had been, it was comfortable to stand within, and Garak allowed himself the indulgence of a soft sigh as he stepped inside, and walked amidst the sprouting bushes, the red leaves of the Bajoran ranka saplings, and went to sit on a stone bench that had been left behind when the Cardassians withdrew.
It was still warm with the sun's light, and Garak closed his eyes, imagining he was fading into it, sinking into it to become part of the stone, as a regnar sank into sand or disappeared, its scales shifting their colour to accommodate its camouflage. How many times in his youth, at the Bamarren Institute, had he faded into walls and surfaces, made himself apart of them, copying the regnar who had taught him?
If he thought about him, he could still imagine the gentle weight of Mila, the regnar he had gently taken from the sands of the Mekhar desert, in his palms, feel the way he flattened himself against Garak's hands, craved Garak's warmth.
He had thought he kept the regnar secret, hidden as he'd been in a cache within his personal locker at the Institute, and yet Tain had known about him – more than known about him, he'd known his name, knew what Garak had learned from him. Had Tain ever held the animal in his hands, or in his lap, as Garak had so many times? Had Tain touched him?
Had Mila even known the difference, blind as the creature was?
Had Tain considered crushing him in his hands, and killing him?
Garak had only been only a boy when he'd had a pet lemur, a wild thing he'd tamed from about Tain's home. She would lurk in streets and alleyways, preying upon rodents and small creatures: Tolan had declared it a pest, and when Garak had, wide-eyed, asked if that meant they must kill it, Tolan had given him an uncharacteristic chuckle, and told him no.
Cardassian lemurs were tremendously soft things – bathing as they did in dust, their downy fur was best kept dry, and they got most of their hydration by eating other creatures, or suckling what moisture they could from leaves and berries, being omnivores. So many times, he'd fed her from his hand, and Vlatvlat had purred herself to sleep on Garak's shoulder or his knee, or been his steadfast companion as he'd played amongst the graves and monuments his father tended.
Tain had ordered him to kill the animal, when he'd gotten too attached – he had disobeyed, of course, and set her free on a nearby reserve instead.
He'd been punished for that. He well remembered the dark enclosure of the closet he'd been locked in, how he felt he would never breathe again, trapped as he was in it, desperate to scream, to shout, to sob, even to kill his Uncle Enabran, who had put him there.
Tain had never told him to kill Mila, some years later, when the time had come to set aside his regnar, as he had set aside his lemur.
He had been almost grateful at the time – and how strange was that, to be grateful to a man for denying himself his cruelty? Tain could be so cruel. Tain was cruel even now, Garak knew, although he was so far away, and how Garak yearned for that cruelty, and the love and affection with which it was entwined.
Paternal love, perhaps – or perhaps a patron's affection.
Something worse, something better, than both. Sometimes Garak felt sick just thinking about it, and other times his ridges prickled with flowing blood and his skin was electrified with remembered pain and remembered touch and the memory, too, of—
Not now, though.
Now, Garak was of the stone beneath him, because someone else was entering the Bajoran contemplation gardens, their footsteps quiet on the greenhouse floors, and Garak, unwilling to be accused of treachery or sabotage by whatever Bajoran was passing through, made himself invisible, occupied a space that was not there.
It was not a Bajoran.
It was Keiko O'Brien.
He did not know why he suddenly came to occupy the space that was, instead of the space that wasn't, chose to go as still as any living thing, instead of something that wasn't, why he chose to sit there in the dim light and let her see him, instead of walking past as she would have if he'd let her.
She gasped, and she shifted the bundle in her arms – Molly O'Brien, who, according to chatter Garak had heard about the station, had been a little unwell. It was no more than a small cold, nothing the doctors could inoculate against, but nothing they should want to: it would strengthen her immune system, to throw it off now, for all she had a few days to suffer with it. He could hear the girl's breathing, interspersed with the quiet coughs and hoarse grunts of her blocked nose and throat.
Mucus – why ever did Humans produce so much of it?
"Sorry," she whispered. "Am I disturbing you, Mr Garak?"
"How could you disturb me, my dear?" he replied in gentle tones – not a whisper, but his voice pitched low, that he not disturb the sleeping young girl. "Do you imagine perhaps that I am praying, and offering my service to the Prophets?"
His tone was very sarcastic, and it had its desired effect. Her face crumpled in a way that Garak was intimately familiar with – he saw the same expression on Bashir's face rather often, the expression of a Human who wanted to laugh, but felt the object of their humour was not an appropriate one.
"She couldn't sleep," said Keiko, offering the information although Garak had not asked for it. Her husband had no care for Cardassians, and that was right and true, but Keiko did not share his prejudices: Garak had tailored garments for Keiko and Molly alike, and he had already set aside designs for the girl's next birthday, that she might choose from them as her gift. "Back on the Enterprise, I used to walk her around the botany labs, but here on the station…"
"Yes," said Garak softly. "I imagine she isn't the only one to miss those gardens, hm? You are a schoolteacher now, Mrs O'Brien, but I know as well as anyone else upon this station that you are truly a botanist. The bonsai plants you care for hardly amount to the work you once completed as a matter of course."
He and Keiko O'Brien were birds of a feather in that way: him once one of the Sons of Tain, one of the most dangerous operatives in the Obsidian Order, and now condemned to a life of hemming trousers and repairing shirt cuffs; her once a phenomenal botanist, a leader in her field – oh, yes, he had read much of her research, and found her to have a keen and focused mind, understanding plants in the holistic, compassionate way Tolan Garak once had – and now, like Garak, trapped on this vestige of a failed occupation, teaching children to read and think.
And with what ingratitude they treated her, how they complained of the homework or the study, because neither they nor their parents were made to understand the value of the gift she was choosing to offer them.
Educators were treated with reverence on Cardassia, and education itself revered as a privilege – funny that the Federation, for all its play at desiring new knowledge, treated it as though its very abundance was a chore.
Keiko had narrowed her eyes at him, her lips doing an amusing twist that he understood to mean he was about to be teased. "Mr Garak," she said suspiciously, a smile showing through, "what do you know about bonsai?"
"I know very few Humans would have the patience and discipline required to cultivate them," he said, and she laughed softly.
The way the laugh lingered on her face, slowly drifting into a ghost, reminded him of a woman he'd once loved. Keiko O'Brien was like Palandine in many ways, of course – intelligent, driven, loving, good-humoured, disciplined, but there was the crucial difference. Apart from the fact that Garak held no attraction to her – Keiko was very lovely, he was sure, but the time in his life when he might have allowed himself to want for a woman like her was long behind him, barring one – the difference was that Keiko loved her husband.
It was why she had let loose of her work, and allowed herself to come to this station: unlike Garak, she had entered her exile voluntarily, and unlike Palandine, she had abandoned her work, her passion, her great drive, not out of duty to the state, but to her husband and their marriage together.
One could say that duty to one was duty to the other, but Garak was not so naïve as to believe that was so – particularly not to Federaji.
"Will you hold her?" she asked. "I want to prune back that sivat bush. You know the priests let it get out of hand."
"I find it best to let the Bajorans learn from their own weaknesses," said Garak, but his casual cruelty didn't deter her – she ignored it as deftly as Bashir did, although she rolled her eyes at his attempt to scandalise. "Mrs O'Brien, do I resemble a traditional nursemaid on your planet?"
"You're a regular teddy bear," she said dryly, offering Molly out. The girl was relaxed in her sleep, her thumb in her mouth, although her nose was wet with what he knew to be called snot, no matter that Keiko had only just wiped it.
"Mrs O'Brien—"
"Garak," said Keiko, somewhere between plaintive and chiding, a magical tone that mothers seemed to perfect as soon as they conceived. His own mother had been expert in it. "She's cold."
He rolled his eyes now, but he took Molly from her, and the child stirred, coughing into her fisted hand before shifting in his lap. Bundled as she was in a blanket, a little too large to be comfortably carried about the station, he adjusted her on his knee and let her rest in the crook of his arm, her cheek against his cheek.
"'Lo, G'rak," she mumbled in a high voice made nigh-incomprehensible on the border between mucus and sleep. "Your shir's rough." This latter was said with some scorn, and he delicately bounced her knee, rocking her in her place.
"I am sorry, child," said Garak, rubbing her back with his thumb through the blanket wrapped around her. "For your benefit, in future, I shall dress myself in furs like a Klingon on his wedding day. Will that please you?"
Molly's laugh became a cough, and he took from amidst the bundle she was wrapped in a revoltingly damp handkerchief – although it seemed to smell more of the child's sweat than her nasal excreta, he was glad to find – and helped her wipe her nose.
She slept again in no short order, and he felt her weight in his lap, still sliding his thumb over the vulnerable line of her back, feeling the tiny blades of her shoulders – so vulnerable, so delicate, compared to a Cardassian child.
Would he have had children, had he stayed in the Obsidian Order? By now, would he have them – really have them, not have sired a bastard, as Tain had? He wasn't certain, but he liked to think so.
Tain would have selected an appropriate wife for him, he had no doubt, not trusting the selection Garak would have made for himself – would he have been a good father?
If he were anything like Tolan, perhaps.
If he were anything like Tain—
The nausea suffused his body as the heat in the room had, and suddenly it seemed criminal that Keiko O'Brien should entrust her child, beautiful gift that she was, to Garak's care, that she should abandon Molly to a man liable to bring her to destruction – how could Keiko be so thoughtless, so irresponsible, so uncaring? To abandon her career, and now her own daughter?
It was ridiculous thinking – apart from being very Cardassian, and very uncomplicatedly Cardassian, as a surface reading of a morality tale, he knew that his thinking was flawed from lack of sleep and nostalgia, and distant, aching pain that even the wire could not flood out of him entirely.
He stood with Keiko as she made to leave, and carried Molly for her – in the dim light of the contemplation gardens, his vision was exceptionally keen, and he could see the bags showing underneath the pigment she wore on her face, see the dryness of her eyes, and more than that he could see how she kept rolling her shoulders slightly, trying to work out their ache.
Mothers would carry their children until their death, if needed, but when they were very nearly four years old, the duty became somewhat more unwieldy than it had when they were infants.
"Thank you," she said as they walked out onto the Promenade. They walked in silence through the quiet, darkened halls, until they came to the domestic corridor that led to the right turbo lift, and he bent to give Molly back. She was entirely asleep now, lolling as sweetly as a doll. "Do you miss him? Julian?"
"Good night, Mrs O'Brien," said Garak. "I wish your daughter a good recovery, that it might steel her for future ills."
She blinked at him at that – the translator made the statement seem a little overly formal, but that was nothing compared to how she might have looked at him if he'd added the traditional ending, For Cardassia.
"Good night, Mr Garak," said Keiko, and turned away from him.
He did miss Bashir, he realised.
He missed lots of things – he missed Cardassia, and the Bamarren Institute, and Tolan Garak, and Mila, and Enabran Tain, he missed the basement apartment he'd grown up in, he missed Vlatvlat the lemur and Mila the regnar, and he missed Pythas Lok and Limor Prang and the easy rhythm of the Obsidian Order, and he missed Palandine. He missed interrogating, sometimes – he missed feeling useful, feeling valuable.
Sometimes, when he was outside of his shop, he even missed tailoring – and now he missed Bashir.
The Cardassian memory was trained from a natural inclination to its firm eidetic tendency, but even before that training and that inclination, they experienced time in a way that many others didn't. Simultaneously, time was regimented and obvious to them, a constant ticking clock, and yet nothing of the past faded, no connections drifted apart from one another, as he had heard others describe.
Everything in Garak's life might as well have happened yesterday, and he missed everything he no longer had with the urgency of decades. He was so maudlin of late.
When Bashir returned home, he had every intention of fucking him until he bulged with the strain, and making it worth the paperwork he'd lied on.
"Loitering, Garak?" asked Odo form the second level of the Promenade, and Garak looked up to him.
"Do you ever remember, Odo, what this place was like when it was Terok Nor?"
"It was terrible," said Odo. "But predictable."
"Yes," agreed Garak placidly, beginning his way home. "Yes, that's just what I was thinking."
Julian travelled by train back to the conference centre, where he would be catching a shuttle to board a ship home. His bag was all but stuffed with souvenirs – a bottle of the ithkara, the mead-like drink; a bundle of books of Cardassian poetry and literature and recipes and medical texts; a shirt he planned to wear when next he saw Garak, with the Vulcan and Cardassian blend of designs…
And on the table in front of him, resting inside their tank, a pair of regnars.
They were a lizard native to Cardassia, propelling themselves on two front legs that were wide and many-jointed, and also with their tails. They could burrow under sand and earth, liked to hide themselves in cracks and under rocks, but they could change the pigmentation and shift the angle of their scales to blend into almost any background. The two regnars had eyes, flattened to their flat heads, but they did not see much, only the difference between light and dark and perhaps vague shapes and shadows – and in their glass tank, they moved and burrowed amongst the root system of the flowers in the tank.
He'd get them something bigger, once he had them home. He had space enough for a nice, big tank, and he could sit in his quarters and watch them, feel how calm they made him as they slowly moved about, or try to find them when they were hidden, just as he could now.
He'd fallen in love with them as soon as he'd seen them – Madrel had taken him to the pet shop to introduce him to a Cardassian riding hound, which had snuffled in his face and then licked him from elbow to shoulder, but he'd seen more lemurs, of course, and he'd seen sehlat pups, but the regnars…
He'd liked to look after lizards best, volunteering in animal shelters as he once had in San Francisco. He liked the way snakes moved, and he liked bearded dragons very dearly – he liked frogs and axolotls and other amphibians too, of course, but they were nothing compared to reptiles and the way they'd crave the warmth of your hand, the way they'd look at you with that sort of utter intelligence and utter stupidity they had at once, so simple and yet so cunning.
He'd kept his affection for them almost entirely secret on DS9. Even before Garak had made his approach, it hadn't seemed worth the teasing, and now…
"May I?" asked a quiet voice, and Julian glanced up. The man was a Cardassian, but not one of the Hebitians or the other Vulcan-Cardassians – he was dressed in a military uniform.
"If you like," said Julian, and the other man sank across from him, but made no conversation, just set his bag aside and the PADD he'd been carrying on his knee. As Julian had been doing, he leaned back in his seat, and he watched the regnars in the tank. "Do you miss them? When you're away from Cardassia?"
"No," said the Cardassian.
"Of course," said Julian. "Cardassians don't waste time on sentiment, do they?"
The Cardassian's smile was small and thin, but it seemed genuine. He was an extraordinarily still, quiet man, older – Julian would guess he was twenty or thirty years older than Garak, well into his middle age.
"What's your name?" asked Julian mildly.
"Prang," said the Cardassian. He didn't say anything else – no title, no friendly words. Laconic, then. He'd never met a laconic Cardassian before, and the novelty delighted him, for some reason. He was in a good mood – he was excited to get home.
"Bashir," he replied.
The Cardassian's lips twitched again.
They rode the rest of the way in silence together. When they got off the trade, Prang gave Julian a neat bow of acknowledgement and goodbye that Julian returned, and they parted ways.
