"Is that how you think a man will kiss you?" his tutor asked, and Elim put his fingers up to his lips, feeling where they were tingling and plump with blood in a way they never had been before. He felt slightly dazed and overwhelmed, blood rushing up and darkening the ridges of his neck, perhaps even those around his neck. "Is that how you think a man will expect you to kiss him back? Is that what you think a woman will want from you, Elim?"

"I need to…" said Elim stuntedly, nervous and nauseous in a way he'd never felt before – he always struggled with certain lessons, with the weight of his tutor's attentions on him, agonisingly aware of everything he must be doing wrong, of all the things he'd be told he was doing wrong.

It hurt terribly, on the days he was a disappointing student, and was sent silently home in disgrace. It hurt to feel the weight of his tutor's staggering disappointment, to know he had not measured up to expectations, to know that he had failed, and worse than that, he had displeased, shown himself unworthy of the tutelage, the attention, being offered, that he was so lucky to be given in the first place.

He didn't want today to be a day like that.

"Need to what, Elim?" was the cool demand.

"Some men will want to kiss a man like that," said Elim. His throat felt thick with shards and spines, as though he'd swallowed poison. "Some men will want to kiss a man who doesn't respond, to… to put their tongue between his lips, and…" This was wrong. It was gauche, indecent, to speak so frankly with his tutor, with anyone, not to obfuscate his words or his phrasing, but he was being looked at with expectantly raised eye ridges and a focused stare, and he wanted to be sick, which was a very bad idea.

Being sick at this juncture, he imagined, was a guaranteed way to get himself sent home.

"But most men will want a, a response."

"A response." The repetition was supremely acerbic in its tone, and Garak felt like it had cut under his scales, it stung so much.

"Again," said Elim, although he didn't want to, and when his tutor's mouth met his this time, he kissed even more fiercely than before. As he was the first time, Elim felt overwhelmed and his jaw went slack, his mouth open, but he steeled himself after a few seconds of this, forced himself to shift forward on his knees and meet his tutor's mouth. He didn't try to control the kiss – he mirrored everything his tutor did, the movements of his tongue, his head, his lips, the rhythm with which they broke apart, and his tutor's chuckle was dry and warm, and Elim's sheath was wet, his cock threatening to evert, and he felt so embarrassed and disgusted with himself he could cry.

This was meant to be a lesson, after all. It wasn't meant to be a satisfaction of his— his baser urges, a show that he couldn't even control the responses of his body, and even if it was—

Tain's hand slid between his legs, cupping him through his trousers, and Elim let out a sharp, brittle whine of noise like a wounded lemur. Immediately, Tain drew back from him, his eyes dark with cold focus and expectation and anger, and Elim almost apologised but he swallowed the words on his lips.

"Some men would want that," he managed to say, as if he'd done it on purpose, let out that pathetic noise, that cry, that show of utter terror at the touch of his patron, for whom he was supposed to be grateful. "A noise… like that. Wouldn't they, Enabran?"

"Again," said Tain, and this time when he kissed Elim he did it very hard, and he didn't pull his hand away from Elim's crotch. Elim didn't make a noise when he matched his patron's mouth movement for movement, but there were tears on his cheeks that Tain either pretended not to notice, or had wanted from him all along.

He stumbled when he woke from the dream, all that painful memory, and after he'd finished vomiting, he heard Bashir step out from the bed, appearing sleepily in the doorway. They were in Bashir's quarters, and silhouetted as he was with the light of the doorway, flowers and leafy vines falling about the frame of the door, he looked like a glyph in a Hebitian etching.

Tolan Garak would have liked Julian Bashir very much, Garak thought. And Tain—

Garak's stomach gave an awful lurch, threatening to invert and force its way up his throat again to empty out its contents, but he managed to withstand the urge, his eyes closed, his elbow resting on the edge of the waste unit.

"You didn't drink that much," Bashir mumbled sleepily, rubbing quite endearingly at his eye with the heel of one hand. "I didn't know ithkara disagreed with you, Elim."

"It must have, my dear," Garak said, feeling his stomach slowly return itself to its proper shape and slide down the lower part of his windpipe, dropping back into its proper place.

"I can get you a hypo—"

"Please, no," said Garak, putting his hand on Bashir's waist when he stepped closer, squeezing him through his pyjamas. "Go back to bed, dearest creature. A walk will do me the world of good."

"It wasn't the ithkara, was it?"

"My dear—"

"Bad dreams?" asked Bashir. "Or—Mmm, Cardassians don't dream, do they? They just… remember." It was Garak's own fault for encouraging him to read Cardassian literature – he knew too much.

Garak pressed a kiss to the top of Bashir's knee, his hand loosely curled around the back of his calf, looking up at him.

"A grown man doesn't kneel at another's feet, Elim," said Bashir playfully. That he said it in Kardasi only made it worse.

This next round of vomiting was even more vicious and fierce than the first, and when it finally stopped, Garak's throat and belly ached, his head dizzy and dazed, his mouth feeling raw. A glass of water rested on the floor beside him, and Bashir was kneeling behind him on the floor, his body pressed up against Garak's back, his arms around his waist, his cheek resting on a space between Garak's ridges. Garak waited for his stomach to resettle itself before he sipped from his glass of water, still feeling the ghost of it in the back of his throat, like he'd swallowed a balloon.

"Are you awake?" he asked, and Bashir mumbled his reply, muffled against Garak's scales, "Mostly. Sorry."

"Why are you sorry?"

"For not knowing," sighed Bashir.

"What are you supposed to know, my dear, if I never tell you?"

"That's the point, isn't it? I'm meant to know anyway. To figure it out."

No nausea rolled through him this time, although he braced himself for the wave, thinking of himself and Tain, thinking of himself and Bashir, and he went to hold Bashir's hands under his own, feeling the evenness of his breathing and the steady beat of his heart, the warmth of his body that radiated against Garak's own.

"Prang?" asked Bashir.

"No," said Garak. "Tell me something."

"What?"

"It doesn't matter."

"You want it to be true?"

"Nothing's true, my dear," Garak reminded him, and Bashir's laugh was quiet and sweet.

"Mmm, what haven't I told you?" asked Bashir. "Any subjects I should avoid?"

"When did you first have sex?"

Bashir laughed, nosing against the back of one of the protective ridges that cupped the blades of his shoulders, breathing on the flesh there. "How blunt," he said. "How unbecoming of a Cardassian man of class."

"I'm the son of a groundskeeper, Julian," said Elim bluntly. "I'm not a man of the aristocracy or even the middle classes – I'm service class, lower service class. Made for tending the rot of dead things, and the simple plants that sprout from them."

Bashir was silent for a moment, sliding his hands over Garak's upper arms, and he said softly, "You don't hold yourself like a man of the service class, in the past or present."

"And how would you know?" asked Garak, aware that his voice was cold and clipped and cool. "Haven't your glorious exiles abandoned class hierarchy, so unfit as it is for their Vulcan paradise?"

Bashir's voice is mildly catty, but with too much desperately hidden concern under the disapproval for Garak to be fooled into thinking he truly doesn't care. "Not in the mood for your usual interrogative method, I see."

"Perhaps I'm not."

"Bluntness is befitting the service classes, I suppose, if we listen to our lady Cardassia."

It's pathetic, but his voice is pleading when he starts, "Julian—"

"I was sixteen," said Bashir, sliding his hands under Garak's arms and pressing gently up beneath his elbows, and as patronising and irritating as it was, Garak made no movement to resist as Bashir pushed him to his feet and began to guide him back toward the bed. "I was at school on Proxima for the summer, before we were due to go back to Earth again. My mother was home a lot, so I wasn't – I'd spend the time I wasn't in school in a local library, or… I spent a few evenings a week volunteering at a wildlife reserve, cleaning out tanks and enclosures, spending time with the more animals that could be handled. I was already trained in first aid by then, and I'd taken a few courses in animal handling and first aid as well. Even when I wasn't scheduled to volunteer, I'd go to the reserve and settle in the staff and volunteer lounge, or in one of the ticketed areas within the zoo. My mother wouldn't come for me there, you see."

"Where was your father?"

"Oh, spreading bollocks somewhere or other, I suppose," Bashir muttered as he slid into bed and laid on his back, letting Garak lie on top of him, his nose pressing against Bashir's neck, tasting him, scenting him. Like this, he could not only feel the distant electric pulse of Bashir's skin, the space he occupied, but also, the beat of his heart, the breath of his lungs, the rhythm of his body. "He's not a very popular man, my father. He loses jobs as easily as he loses friends."

"You said he was a polyglot."

"He is," said Bashir. "He speaks more languages than you could believe, and speaks them all like a native – he has a natural ear, picks up people's accents, is very keen and aware of slang, and not the way that you or I do it, consciously, on purpose. He almost wouldn't know precisely how smart he was, were it not that he's so arrogant. But you can speak all the languages you want and still be disorganised, workshy, rude, entitled—"

"This is a treatise you've prepared," murmured Garak, feeling a treatise of his own like a lump on his tongue, one about the importance of respecting one's father, one's patriarch, but it wasn't the night for that. If he started it, he was liable to vomit again midway through.

Bashir laughed powerlessly.

"One I've rehearsed enough," he muttered. "But suffice it to say, my father was off-world, and it wasn't both of them I had to juggle. Spending all those hours in the zoo, I was noticed by the employees, the veterinarians, other volunteers… They found me irritating at times, but mostly they were pleased by how earnest I was, how much I wanted to learn. Rigellians take education very seriously, and it's a privilege and a duty – they don't see learning the hard stuff as a chore the way a lot of Federation Humans do. They're like Cardassians in that way."

"All the staff were Rigellian?"

"Maybe two thirds," said Bashir. "I ended up having a tumble in a field of adras grass with one of the veterinarian's daughters – her name was L'or."

Garak, so close to Bashir's throat, heard not only the guttural stop in the midst of the word in Bashir's mouth, the shift of his tongue, but also the clench and shift of muscles in his throat.

He had lied, when he had first told Garak what languages he spoke, or lied by omission. Of course, he spoke Urdu and English and the Federaji Standard – and he spoke not only the dialect of Urdu heavily influenced by Rigel's guttural tongues, but he also spoke several dialects of Rigellian Standard, and more than that, he understood Klingonese, as many Vulcan languages as Garak did, some Tellarite, Kelpian, and Trill tongues…

Bashir, like a Cardassian, had an eidetic memory and a keen ear for language and its study; Bashir, like an educated Cardassian, could learn to understand a language quite easily given enough exposure, even if he couldn't easily speak it or construct his own sentences.

Bashir, like a Cardassian, lied as easily as he breathed, and overcome with affection so powerful it rose to the service through the fog of maudlin self-pity, Garak pressed lips to the underside of his jaw.

"Are Rigellians very like Cardassians?"

"Physically? No, not really," said Bashir. "They're actually cold-blooded, for a start, and they have much smaller, thinner scales… They have genital sheaths, the men, and a hemipenis, but the sheath is part of the cloaca, not separate to the anal canal."

"This is that infamous human dirty talk you warned me about," said Garak, and Bashir chuckled.

"She was funny," he said. "Witty, a burgeoning playwright, although I don't know if she ever got anywhere with that. She'd never been with a Human before, and had only been with Rigellian boys. Rigellian tongues are even longer than Cardassian ones, and she wanted to taste everything – I thought she'd kill me."

"How many boys had she been with before you?" asked Garak quietly.

"Oh, two or three," said Bashir, yawning. "Rigellians are expected to explore a lot sexually, in their late teens and twenties. When you come from a species without pregnancy, let alone accidental pregnancy, it tends to liberate things, or so I'm told."

"Is sixteen late?"

"Oh, no, Garak, I was sixteen. She was twenty-one, I think."

"Ah," said Garak. Five years apart – and at sixteen, Bashir knew that he was genetically engineered, but he was still, by Human customs, very much a boy – by Cardassian standards, he would still have been considered a child. Even by Cardassian standards, the girl would be considered a woman in her own right, albeit a young one. "I'm the culmination of a pattern for you, am I?"

"You bear more similarity to a twenty-one-year-old girl than you know."

Garak pinched Bashir's waist, making him laugh.

"Yes, Garak, I've slept with people who are older than me. I've slept with tutors and my teachers, too, with my superiors – once, my direct commanding officer."

"Sisko?"

"In your dreams."

"My fantasies, maybe, if not yours, my dear."

"I've slept with inferiors too," Bashir went on. "Strangers. Casual acquaintances, coworkers. People that found me very impressive and admirable, people I found impressive and admirable."

"How many?"

"How many people have I slept with?"

"Yes."

"Fifty-two."

"Hm." He wasn't surprised by it, not really – if anything, it was almost a smaller number than he had expected, and yet it was obscenely high from a Cardassian perspective, almost unthinkable. Even the Cardassians on one planet or another that took "comfort" from the aliens tended to pick a handful or one or two, and keep to the same ones for a period of time.

"You?"

Garak had had sex with twelve people, altogether. Most of them had been exercises in interspecies study, or part of one mission or other. People who hadn't mattered – some of them who'd been dead before the week had finished out. It was only four of them that mattered, four of them that had left an impact:

Tain. Lok. Palandine. Bashir.

So he gave the answer that was truthful, even though it was not the truth. He couldn't help but wonder if Bashir would one day be on Cardassia, and truly understand the distinction. "Four."

Bashir laughed. Garak didn't immediately say anything, and Bashir laughed again, but then suddenly stopped, and sat up on his elbows, realising that Garak wasn't joking. "Four?" he repeated.

"Mm," said Garak softly. "By Cardassian standards, it's quite the high number."

"Four," repeated Bashir, in a whisper this time. "But that's… Four?"

"A thirteenth of your… What was that charming aphorism Lieutenant Dax introduced me to? Body count?"

"When did you first have sex?" demanded Bashir.

"Oh, I started far later than you, of course," lied Garak softly. "Sex isn't for the young, my dear."

"Wasted on them, is it?"

"Sex can be an injurious act, as well you know," murmured Garak. "There are some scars better left to adults than children."

"Oh," said Bashir quietly, falling back on the bed. "You're thinking of Lora."

Garak thought of young Adorak Lora, looking at him with cool suspicion as she had when they had first met, and the longer they spent together, the more they talked, the more she watched him with Rugal, the further she relaxed in her place.

She had remarked some days into their acquaintance, with the confidence of youth, "You, Garak, are like me."

"My experiences have preceded yours, whichever of them you mean," Garak had replied. "To be quite accurate, my dear, you are like me, although I shouldn't recommend shouting it from the rooftops if you want to work up any popularity on this station."

He knew which she meant. Judging by the look on her face, she knew he knew.

"Yes, my dear," said Garak. "Of course I think of her."

"You're going to take her as your apprentice?"

"If she wants me to."

"I'll teach her too, from my trade as much as yours," said Bashir sleepily, and this time it wasn't nausea that swelled in him, but wondrous warmth and relief and familial affection. "We share those duties, don't we? Your child is my child, your apprentice is my apprentice." Garak never knew Kardasi could sound so drowsy and so somnolent, quoting aphorisms – from a book Bashir hated, no less – and more than quoting the words, but embracing their meaning, and the values they dictated. He imagined Bashir in his bed in Cardassia City – he imagined Bashir in his bed in the basement apartment beneath Tain's home in the Paldar Sector, imagined Tain appearing silently in the doorway as he had sometimes before, his hungry gaze taking in Bashir's naked body as Garak's did.

"Yes, my dear," whispered Garak, dropping his face to the crook of the doctor's neck, feeling the doctor slowly drift to sleep beneath him. "You're quite right."


"Is there a reason you're calling?" demanded Julian, and he watched the body language of his parents on the holovid even as he fastened the magnetic clips on his jacket.

"Jules, is it a crime to want to speak with our only son?" asked his father, tone declaratory and almost performative, and Julian rolled his eyes, because it didn't take much mental effort to guess why.

"We miss you, Jules," his mother said more softly. "We were hoping you might visit Earth soon—"

"No."

His hair still needed combing, and in the bathroom, he heard Garak curse as he caught the shedding stone on the same bit of his shoulder. Once more clumsy drag like that, and he was liable to draw blood. "I'll get it!" he called over his shoulder.

"My dear doctor," was the muffled retort, "I am a man of some years, and I am quite capable of—"

"Of rotating your arm a hundred and eighty degrees in the socket, and bending your elbow back to touch between your shoulder blades? Oh, Elim, what wonders I have to look forward to in my old age!"

He caught the lotion bottle out of the air before it could hit him, and launched it right back, making contact with the curve vulnerable flesh under the protective ridges over Garak's hips, and Garak hissed in pain before he started to laugh.

"I'm busy," he growled, looking back to the screen. "I have an appointment in less than twenty minutes, and I don't have time for this right now."

His parents had bristled a moment ago, his father with his shoulders back and square, his mother folded in on herself, but now they were both sitting forward, craning their necks as though they'd be able to see around their son and to the stranger in the bathroom.

"Liba said you sent word to Proxima," said his mother, smiling in a way that made his skin crawl, because she did mean well, and her meaning well had never gone well for him. "That you asked if they could fill a book order for you, and send them one bound in paper. She said it was for your…"

"Boyfriend?" supplied Julian when she trailed off, and his mother offered him a fragile smile.

"Nearly a year, she said," his father said. "Why didn't you tell us?"

"I suppose I rightly thought it was none of your business," said Julian. "You won't like him, anyway. What do you want?"

"Well," said his father.

"Just to talk, Jules," said his mother.

"My dear—"

"Coming, Elim," said Julian, and he hung up the holovideo with no goodbye and no more ceremony, ignoring it when it began to ring again behind him. "Computer, refuse call."

"You really hate them so?" asked Garak as Julian briskly took the shedding stone from his hand, gently pushing Garak to lean forward and pressing up along his spine, between the meeting of his shoulder ridges as they sloped down, and Garak groaned with relief as a sheet of shed skin came away like paper. Julian carefully rolled it up, ensuring it came away from the V the ridges made on each side, and he took the brush when Garak handed it to him, scrubbing oil over the fresh new scales the skin had revealed.

"It's not that I hate them," said Julian. "But they only call when they want something from me, and if they ever wanted anything important, perhaps I'd let it go. But it's never that – it's that my father wants to brag about whatever job he's going to lose in another two months, or when my mother wants to assure herself she did the right thing, that she meant the best for me. They couldn't care less about me or my relationship with you – they just want to be told they're good." Garak was sighing, relaxed, as Julian kept buffing along the lines of his ridges, making the new scale shine. Julian was in a poor mood, stressed and tired, and he couldn't well cope with his parents on top of everything else today. "You'd normally lecture me about the importance of respect for one's parents."

"Seeing as my lectures fall on deaf ears, my dear, perhaps I see fit to lecture you in another subject."

"What subject is that?"

"Lower? Mmm," rumbled Garak, and Julian chuckled as he spent a little extra time on the sensitive spot before passing back the buff before picking up a comb to run through his hair. "Do they know that I know?"

"It might be what they're worried about, why they want to talk," said Julian. "I've never told anybody before. They wanted me to tell Palis, but that was just to make sure I married her, I think. Can't run off and leave such a good prospect behind if she knows your secret."

"They want grandchildren?" asked Garak, with a slight hitch in his voice that Julian winced at, but pretended not to hear.

"They wanted an extension of their legacy, something else to brag about. Palis is an award-winning dancer – they wanted to prove that their genius son is a genius everywhere, that he's not defective socially, that he could please a wife just as much of a genius as he was. Liba doesn't know anything about you except that you're a man and that I thought you might appreciate some poetry from the colony – my parents will be disappointed with you, you can have no doubts about that. If they'd caught a glimpse of you my mother would already be rehearsing gentle-toned ways to point out that you're old and fat and Cardassian as if I hadn't noticed, perhaps even comment on how ugly our children would be, although she wouldn't say it so outright. She'd talk about incompatibility and conflicting aesthetics or something.

"And my father would no doubt be grilling you about your prospects for expansion as a tailor, because it's just pathetic that you'd own one shop. It's already bad enough that you're an exile and like as not reviled on Cardassia as much as anywhere else in the quadrant – from a political perspective, marrying you would be like marrying myself to a dead end. If you were a Human, the benefit of your age would be that I'd likely be widowed soon enough, but you're Cardassian, so—"

He finished combing his hair, and listened to the resounding silence, and realised that he'd said all of that out loud.

Turning to Garak, who'd gone very quiet, he watched as Garak pulled his tunic on over his undershirt, his facial expression calculatedly blank. Julian swallowed. He'd spoken clumsily with Garak before, of course, said something without thinking and offended him, but it was normally a mock offence, or something that Garak would turn into a flirtatious argument. When Garak went quiet, it was a sign that whatever Julian said had cut, and after last night, he felt wrenched to pieces at the knowledge that he'd made it worse.

He'd looked awful last night, on his knees with his head tilted toward the waste unit, his head in his hands, the uncomfortably metallic smell of Cardassian bile on the air, and Julian had said the wrong thing then, too, had tried to be Cardassian when Garak had wanted him to be Human – and here he was, being far too Human when Cardassian would probably suit him better.

It had made Garak feel better, he thought, when Julian had pressed himself against his back last night, but it wasn't a good idea to try that now. In the other room, the console started to ring again, and Julian was so exhausted he could cry.

"I'm," said Julian, "I'm so… I'm so sorry, Elim, I don't— I don't think any of that. That's just what they… You know that, don't you? You know I don't think any of those things about you?"

Garak's nostrils flared as he inhaled, his lips pressed loosely together, and Julian wanted to smack himself. Last night, Garak had been vomiting out his insides because of some horrible memory, probably about sex or his childhood or his time as a spy or something, and now here Julian was, listing off everything that made him undesirable.

Garak's voice was quiet and pointedly cool when he asked, "You don't think I'm fat, old, and Cardassian?"

"You are fat, old, and Cardassian," said Julian. "Three of your most attractive qualities."

Garak, doing up the last of his tunic fastenings, gave him a sidelong look.

"I'd marry you tomorrow if you wanted me to," said Julian, the words tumbling out of him just like the others had, but these were even more dangerous. So much for being Cardassian – best to go all in with Humanity. "I love you so much I might just embrace exile for you – so much, in fact, that I finished The Never-Ending Sacrifice for you, and however many other painfully dull repetitive epics you've inflicted on me. You're in my bathroom surrounded by Cardassian plants, with Cardassian regnars sleeping in the next room, and a man who's learning Kardasi for you even though he can't pronounce the zh's sound."

"Zh's," Garak corrected him breathlessly, looking at him with a pained awe.

"Elim," said Julian, "you're not a political dead end. My father is an arse. My mother isn't much better. I love you."

"My dear, this really isn't the time," whispered Garak. "We've only five minutes before we have to go."

"I don't expect you to say anything ba—"

Garak's hands were entwined with his, the comb dropped aside, and Garak's mouth was warm and wonderful and his tongue slid with ease against Julian's own, and Julian sighed into his mouth. Garak was cupping his cheeks when he pulled away, and murmured, "You're a sentimental idiot, my dear, proposing marriage, especially to distract from something else idiotic you've said."

"I'm not proposing, I'm just saying I'd marry you right now, if you wanted," said Julian, "and I'm not saying it because I'm an idiot, I'm saying it because it's true."

"And are you an idiot?"

"I'm in your arms, aren't I?"

Garak pinched his arse, and Julian laughed breathlessly, dazed and wanting, and imagined living in a house with Garak, just the two of them, old and grey, and he ached. He imagined the two of them in suits, the two of them sharing quarters, imagined their names together, really together, with an automatic & between them – Bashir & Garak. Elim & Julian.

He liked Garak's name. Doctor Julian Bashir-Garak was right, being alphabetical, but Julian Garak-Bashir, he liked that. He wanted it.

They were the sort of thoughts that crept into the cracks of his everyday musings, not the sort he normally let himself have all at once, let alone blurt out to Garak, who looked almost as ready to cry as Julian did, although it was never easy to tell with him.

"If we got married, I suppose it might be complicated," Julian admitted, his head spinning distantly with the idea of having a marriage ceremony on the station – a Cardassian one? Here? A proper enjoinment? "People would wonder why you didn't take Federation citizenship, and if my secret does come out, I—"

"Hush, you fool," whispered Garak. "It's really quite a simple stupidity, more to do with me than what I represent as a Cardassian."

"Why, because I don't know a thing about you?"

"Among other reasons."

"I'll buy you a ring, if you want," said Julian softly. "A big, audacious one. With a diamond."

"A diamond?"

"It's a crystalline form of pure carbon," said Julian.

"How… gaudy," said Garak, seeming as confused as he was mildly disgusted. "Why would you buy me a diamond?"

"They used to be considered quite valuable back on Earth," said Julian, "but their value was broadly manufactured, in large part to maintain white supremacy, British Imperialism, and the oppression of… Well. Most of the world. Quite fitting for a Cardassian, actually – doesn't it show the proper respect for your culture? I'm very respectful."

Garak's eyes were sparkling with humour, and when he laughed, Julian felt perhaps he'd made it right again. "Very," murmured Garak, voice rumbling with delight, and he kissed Julian again.

"I'm sorry," Julian whispered again. "I can't… I can't make last night better, and I can't make today easier, but I can tell you that I love you."

"You just did," Garak murmured. "You want me to say it back, do you?"

"No, not if you're not rea—"

"Of course I love you," Garak interrupted him, cupping the back of his head in strong, gentle hands. "What insult for your intelligence haven't I used yet this morning?"

"Dunce?"

"Dunce, dunce is good," repeated Garak, Kardasi accent making the c buzz in his throat. Dunzzse. Garak's mouth brushed his. "I love you, my dear. You match the half of my heart I have left."

The first time Julian had seen that motif in Cardassian art, seen it in the etchings that went with a romance novel they'd read together, he'd thought it akin to Human friendship bracelets – admittedly, the etchings were far more anatomically accurate than the cartoon heart, but the idea had seemed the same, two halves of a heart that matched together.

It was more complex than that, of course – in the first instance, the anatomical details meant that two matched halves became one, intractable from one another, and thus enjoined. Veins met veins, arteries joined arteries, and two hearts quite literally beat as one – Cardassians looked very poorly on remarriage and on infidelity, and when one heart was cleaved away, the half left was often depicted as cracked or calcified, or somehow on its way to death.

In the second instance, Cardassian hearts weren't made in halves. When they were on their own, they were scarred or bloody on one side anyway – Cardassian hearts came in halves because they'd already given half up to Mother Cardassia.

Two hearts enjoined served the state as they ought: in union.

It was part of the reason interspecies unions weren't easily romanticised – he had seen Kardasi art of Cardassian-Klingon unions, or Cardassian-Vulcan ones, where the Kardasi heart was a parasite on the other, or where one heart or both bled for their union.

In a favourite of his, a Vulcan heart gently enfolded the Cardassian's as though holding it in aortic arms, and no blood dripped from either. The green and brown of the heart-flesh looked like moss on tree bark – when he'd said as much, Garak had laughed, and murmured his agreement.

"My heart is healing, with yours to match its wounds," whispered Julian, quoting a line from Kardasi poetry – albeit of the exile to Vulcan, Iloja of Prim, so that Garak at once slid his thigh between Julian's and groaned in mingled frustration and want.

The alarm telling them it was time to go chimed.

"Fuck," said Julian against Garak's mouth.

"We haven't the time, my dear," said Garak, and swept past him.