Chapter Text
After their lunch is over and Julian is well out of earshot, Garak goes to Quark and says, “I would like to purchase one hour of holosuite time.”
Quark leers at him. “I have many programs that I can recommend—”
“No. I’ll browse the catalog myself.” Garak certainly isn’t going to articulate the type of program that he wants aloud to Quark.
“Holosuite three,” Quark tells him. “I’ll set the computer to display our—full selection.”
Garak pays him and goes to holosuite three. The computer catalog begins with the adventure section, which he skips past, and then the extensive listing of pornographic programs organized by the species of the participants. At the very end of the human collection, he finds what he’s looking for—one of the very first old-fashioned programs that isn’t interactive but simply allows the viewer to select participants from among a list. Garak has never seen a human coupling before. He chooses a slim dark man who looks something like the doctor and a taller, broad-shouldered man who is not his own height and looks nothing like anyone on the station. Then he begins the program.
They start by kissing and Garak brushes his fingers across his own lips, remembers the softness of Julian’s. There’s a great deal of touching, almost grappling, and then the taller man drops to his knees—ah. Human sex between males is not unlike Cardassian sex. After the man who is certainly not Julian has come, the taller man pushes him onto his hands and knees on the bed and begins to finger him open, prompting enthusiastic noises.
That, of all times, is when Garak hears someone enter the holosuite and Julian says “Oh! I apologize—Garak?”
“Computer, freeze program.” Garak turns very slowly to face Julian. “What are you doing here, Doctor?” His mind is working rapidly to come up with a believable explanation for the fact that he is sitting here watching a man who looks—he can admit it—very much like Julian, preparing for intercourse—
“I need to practice a medical procedure. Quark unlocked this holosuite for me.”
“Quark should already know all of the ways that I can kill him,” Garak says. He doesn’t want to think about what Julian can see right now. “Verbally, of course.”
Julian coughs. “Of course.” He sounds strangely calm compared to what Garak would extrapolate from his previous behavior. “I can find another holosuite and leave you to your program. Of course.”
Garak allows himself only a brief second to contemplate it. He wants to watch the rest of it—wants to see the look on the not-Julian man’s face as the other man pushes inside, wants to discover—all of it. Wants to see Julian like th— “No, my dear doctor, the holosuite is entirely yours. Computer, end program.”
As he starts to walk out of the holosuite, Julian says, “Garak—what were you doing?” His voice is very soft.
“I couldn’t possibly begin to explain it to you.” It’s the absolute truth.
* * * * *
There are some days when the thought that this is all his life will ever be again—days in the tailor shop, nights to himself or lurking just to keep in the habit of it—nearly overwhelms him. When he thinks to himself that Tain knew what he was doing when he exiled Garak because it is the keenest form of torture—to take a man like him, who has spent his life in the pursuit of something more, and chain him to this station with no hope of anything ever beyond this tailor shop. He is a very good tailor, but it occupies only a fraction of his mind, of his capabilities. This place can be a prison worse than any labor camp or cell sometimes.
It is on those days that he becomes almost desperate for the doctor’s company—even Odo’s company—anyone who will challenge him. Two women browse his shop and he spends the hours on the most meaningless pleasantries he can imagine. He tells himself it is all an exercise, all practice, to spin out lies with his voice and his body that disarm them. See the Cardassian who will sell you pretty things, the toothless viper, turned into a station pet. He has transformed himself so entirely that he wonders if some of the Bajorans that he has interrogated would even recognize him.
“You look tired,” one of the women tells the other. “Not sleeping enough?”
“Not even for good reasons,” the other sighs, and her friend laughs. “Just lousy dreams.”
“Like what?”
The dreamer is examining a silk shirt with a very light touch. It’s the wrong shade for her hair, which Garak will tell her and offer a different color if she comes to purchase it. “You know, that one where all my teeth are falling out.”
What a dreadful kind of dream. Cardassians don’t dream much, as a rule, or at least Garak doesn't. But Garak’s impression has always been that human dreams are meant to be pleasant.
“You know what that means,” the other woman says, and then recites the meaning too quietly for Garak to hear. When they come to purchase the shirt, Garak locks down the impulse to ask what it means and instead persuades the dreamer to purchase two silk shirts in different colors. What a meaningless success, to perform well as a shopkeeper. Quark appears to derive some pleasure from this kind of thing, from selling a customer more than they originally wanted. Perhaps it’s only a Ferengi trait.
The lack of purpose in his days translates into poor sleep at night. He blames the women in his shop for the dream that he has tonight: he is on Cardassia Prime and, after his first molar is pulled for identification, the dentist continues. The pain of each pulled tooth is an annoyance, but a distant one. When Garak looks closely at the dentist, he sees Julian.
Garak wakes abruptly from the dream and decides that perhaps he’s slept enough for the night. He goes to the replimat, which is nearly deserted, and sits drinking tarkalean tea until the morning rush begins. He doesn’t even really like tarkalean tea.
“Garak? Are you—all right”
An inexcusable lapse in focus, to have failed to notice the doctor approaching. He smiles his best plain-simple-Garak smile. “Of course I am.” Julian, it appears, does not plan to mention the holosuite—incident. Strange, when it should give him such power over Garak, that he does not take the opportunity at least to remind Garak that he knows.
“It’s 0500,” Julian says. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you awake this early.” He sets his tray down and sits opposite Garak. He has a cup of raktajino—perhaps that would have been a more appropriate beverage choice.
What an image Garak has cultivated here, to make Julian of all people think that he is the sort of man who would never be awake at this hour. Garak can remember days spent without sleep in the old days, when 0500 and 1700 might as well have been the same time, when he trained himself to need only a few hours of sleep every few days because that was all that was available to him. The 26-hour Bajoran day is hardly a challenge. “Do you have many dreams, doctor?”
Julian looks startled and coughs a little into his cup. Perhaps this is too personal a question? “Well, I suppose eventually I’d like to cure certain genetic diseases—”
“Ah. No.” This tea lacks the stimulant properties that Garak would like to have right now. He eyes Julian’s cup. “I heard—you humans are always talking about how you dreamed that you were flying or all your teeth were falling out or any one of a number of banal dreams, that you then persist in interpreting based on your psychology. The unfortunate dreams that I have heard Mr. O’Brien describe—”
“I see.” Julian sets down his cup. Garak’s fingers itch to take it. “Did you have a dream last night?”
“It was the oddest thing,” Garak says. “I can’t remember the last time I dreamed. But there I was having my first molar pulled, as we do when young—but I was an adult, and the doctor continued to remove my teeth.” Julian grimaces and runs his tongue over his own teeth, but doesn’t comment. “And then I saw the face of the man removing my teeth.” He wonders abruptly if he’s erring in admitting this.
“Who was it?”
Why has he set up this situation? There was no need to mention the dream in the first place, and certainly no need to tell Julian any details. “It was you, my dear doctor.” He sees the full-body flinch as Julian hears the words. There was a time that every word he said had an intention behind it, a goal. Now, he fears, he’s telling Julian for no reason beyond the fact that it was a strange experience and Julian was part of it.
“Well, in that case, I apologize for my part in it.” Julian’s voice is light, belied by the shape of his body. “I imagine it was quite painful.”
“More puzzling than painful, I would say.” Garak wants to touch the place where his first molar used to be, but he doesn’t. “I understand that humans have methods of interpreting such dreams.”
“I wouldn’t think of trying to apply the extremely fuzzy practice of human dream to interpretation to the dreams of a Cardassian,” Julian says. “Maybe it symbolized your willingness to sacrifice everything for Cardassia, or maybe it symbolized your gradual disconnection from Cardassia—I would hate to guess.” Garak would hate to guess too, but he would like Julian to try.
That’s when the dreaded words come over the comm: ”Medical emergency. Dr. Bashir to sickbay. Medical emergency.”
Julian leaps up, preternaturally graceful. “I’m so sorry, Garak, I have to go.” He doesn’t wait for acknowledgement before he slips away into the crowd.
Garak sighs and reaches for the doctor’s abandoned cup of raktajino. It’s too sweet, but he drinks the rest of it anyway.