It's not his impending death that bothers him. No, it's the indignity of it all. Two years' worth of matches and two years' worth of victories and now Martok, son of Urthog, is to be brought down by something as pathetic as an infected wound?
Qu'vatlh.
He swipes the rag over it again, for all the good it'll do.
"You should quit poking at it," says Tain, from his bunk. "It's not going to help."
Martok snarls at him, the rag clenched tightly in his fist. He does stop poking at it, though. He's not stupid.
Footsteps echo from outside the barracks door, and Martok stands to attention. Another fight, so soon? No matter. He will emerge victorious, even if he only has one eye.
The doors open and instead of the First, it's the Fifth and Sixth, a man wearing a blue Starfleet uniform suspended by his arms between them. They toss him roughly into the barracks, and he stumbles. Human, Martok sees. Soft.
"Don't worry about your eye, Klingon," says the Fifth. "We brought you a doctor!" The guards roar with laughter as the human gets to his feet.
A doctor, eh?
They toss a battered case to the human, who catches it one-handed.
"The Klingon here had a little run in with the First. Maybe you can fix him up."
The human looks at him, warily at first, and then with a spark of sudden recognition. "Martok?!"
What? "Do I know you?"
The human's eyes widen and he's about to say something more when one of the guards shoves him forward, roughly. "Get on with it."
"No, I—I suppose you don't," the human says, softly, as he pops the case open and begins to rummage through it. "Bashir. Julian Bashir. Chief Medical Officer on Deep Space Nine."
Martok grunts. The name means nothing to him. Nor the posting.
He's sorting the through the equipment and although his hands move with a speed that Martok recognizes as nerves, his fingers are steady when he puts them up to Martok's face, probing at the wound.
"The eye's gone. I can't regrow one here—"
Martok growls, annoyed. "I know that. Clean it out."
The human sighs, sharply, and it looks like he's about to say something else, but Martok fixes him with a glare—no mean feat, for a one-eyed man, but a good commander works with what he has—and it quells whatever protest the human had in mind.
"Okay," he says. "This is going to hurt."
"Do not give me your human platitudes, Doctor!"
The human gets to work with whatever it is he's holding and he might as well be stabbing a painstik into the hollow socket for how it feels. Martok growls, once, and forces himself to stay still. He will not show weakness now.
He recites his most recent crew manifest in his head to keep his attention off the agony ricocheting through his skull and he's halfway through the Engineering section when it finally stops. There's a throbbing ache left behind, but he can already tell that it's better than it was before.
"You have my thanks," he says, and the human says something he doesn't catch. Something else soft, no doubt. He has no need of it.
No sooner has the human put his equipment away than the Fifth steps forward and snatches the case from his hands. The human straightens up and squares his shoulders at him, incensed. "Hey! That's my medkit!"
"Not anymore," says the Fifth. "Security risk."
"Oh, come on! What, you think I'm going to disinfect my way out of here?" The Sixth belts him across the face without hesitation, the sound of the impact reverberating through the bunkroom. The human only stares him down, unflinching.
Martok grunts, again. Maybe not so soft, after all.
The doctor and Tain are acquainted with each other, apparently. Martok wonders at first if this is part of the escape plan, but the doctor's shock—and thinly-veiled disdain—make it clear that it's not.
Tain finds something about the situation deeply amusing, his mouth curling into that sardonic smile even as his breath catches and sputters in his chest. The episodes come more frequently, now, and whenever he ventures into the crawlspace Martok finds himself holding his own breath in kind, hoping that he'll make it back out, or at least finish his work first.
"Is there nothing you can do for him?" he asks the doctor as they keep watch by the crawlspace after another such episode. "The transmitter is our only chance."
"Congestive heart failure. He needs a hospital. If I had equipment, then maybe—" He draws in a breath, abruptly, shakes his head. "There's nothing I can do here."
Martok would say something about defeatism, but he's nothing if not pragmatic. "How long?"
"Impossible to say." The doctor scrubs his hands across his face and rises to his feet, stiffly. "Excuse me."
He heads out of the bunkroom and doesn't return. They put him in solitary, Varak says over dinner. Fighting with the guards.
Tain chuckles as he unwraps a ration bar. The chuckle turns into a wheeze, then a cough, and his face is a truly terrifying shade of purple by the end of it. "He doesn't know when to quit," says Tain.
No, Martok thinks, he doesn't.
Julian had always thought that the point of an interrogation was to find things out. The Jem'Hadar apparently don't share that definition. One day, a few weeks after his unceremonious arrival on this godforsaken asteroid, a few days after his second stint in solitary, they drag him out of the common area without so much as a by-your-leave and don't even start in on the questioning until they've already roughed him up.
For half a terrifying moment he wonders if they've found out about the transmitter, about Tain's plans, but if they have they don't let on, and he has no intention of telling them. The questions they ask are incomprehensible, intelligence he'd have no way of knowing, and Julian quickly gets bored of giving them name, rank, and serial number, so he gets incomprehensible right back, reciting Ch'Lor's Fundamentals of Andorian Hematology word-for-word until they've had enough and turn to beating him to shut him up.
When that's done two of them take him by the arms and haul him back to the bunkroom. Martok and Varak rush the door as soon as it opens, and the guards shove him at them, none-too-gently. Julian stumbles, hard, and hits the floor before anyone has a chance catch him. He lays there, panting. There's no chance of him getting up.
Something else clatters to the floor, next to his head, and the guards laugh, mockingly. "Here's that medkit you've been begging for, Doctor!"
Another laugh and the doors hiss shut, leaving him to his fate.
Varak crouches next to him, her fingers searching for a pulse. Wrong spot, he wants to tell her, wrong species. His mouth won't move. "Is he-?"
Not dead yet, he wants to say, but he forces his mouth open and only groans come out.
Martok seizes him by the shoulders, yanks him up and drags him until he's sitting propped against the wall. "Doctor! Your patient has a head wound! What do you do?"
What does he do? He tries to pull himself together and make everything make sense again, but the room spins and his head throbs and his stomach churns and everything turns to gibberish. His thoughts swim in circles and all he remembers is Dax saying something, once, about how Klingons don't make good doctors.
"He's losing consciousness, Doctor! Are you a spineless petaQ who would let him die?"
"N-no."
Martok slaps his shoulder, hard, and the world jolts and tumbles as Julian tries his very best not to be sick all over himself. "Good! Then what will you do?"
His vision's blurry, doubling, and his arm doesn't want to listen to his brain, but he reaches out, toward the medkit - at least, he thinks he does. He hopes he does. "The - the hypo. The blue vial."
It's a tiny thing in Martok's hands, and Klingon fingers were never nimble, but Martok slots the vial into place and hands the whole thing to Julian, who just manages to inject it into his own neck before he drops it, breathing fast and shallow.
The fog starts to lift.
Right. Okay.
He sees Martok looking at him now, searchingly, eye narrowed. He sits up a little straighter. The side of his face is warm. Blood. Probably a lot of it. Probably why Martok's looking at him like that.
"Don't suppose there's - a tissue regenerator in there."
Martok grunts, and holds the kit out for his inspection. It's a hodgepodge of different tech, cobbled together from whatever ships the Dominion have impounded here. No regenerator, of course. Some bandages. A few medications. Disinfectant. A handful of suture packets, like something out of the dark ages. He hopes they won't need those.
"Bandages. Got to apply pressure." He reaches for them, but to his surprise Martok takes them instead, holds them to his scalp. He presses hard enough that it's difficult for Julian to keep himself upright, but he can't complain.
In the end it does need suturing, and Martok gives it the old Qo'noS try but Varak ends up having to take over. When it's finished, the general looks at him, appraisingly. "You humans are stronger than you look."
If only you knew, thinks Julian.
"Perhaps the heart of a warrior beats within your chest, after all."
Do not give me your—
"—Klingon platitudes," Julian whispers, and the general gives him a wolfish grin.
"There's hope for you yet, Doctor. Po'tajg!" he says. "Well done."