Chapter Text
“There’s a third one,” Julius says, or tries to say. Garak looks at him—surprised?—and then says something that Julius can’t hear. When Julius shakes his head, Garak frowns and crouches to dig through Ryan’s pocket. He retrieves the handcuff keys and releases Julius, then helps him stand. “There’s a third one,” Julius repeats, and this time he can hear himself a little bit.
“He’s gone,” Garak says into his ear. “Are you all right?”
Julius’s brain is aware that there are parts of his body—a lot of parts—that hurt. He can’t breathe through his nose and one of his eyes is swelling shut. His wrists are bruised and scraped raw where the handcuffs were. There’s a sharp pain in his side where Ryan kicked him, and he thinks his rib might be broken. His ears are pounding. “Fine,” he says. “I’m fine.” In this strange distant part of his brain, it feels true.
“You wouldn’t know it to look at you,” Garak says. The ringing in Julius’s ears is starting to subside. Garak looks down at Ryan’s body. “Pity, I rather liked him.” At what must be a truly horrified expression on Julius’s face, he hastens to add, “As an asset. Not as a person.”
“Not a very good asset either, if he decided to betray you to the Russians by kidnapping me.”
Garak frowns a little as he looks at Julius’s wrists. “He was always swayed a little too easily, but he was useful. You should get home, you’re only going to feel worse over the next few hours.”
“Yes,” Julius agrees. “But I want you to take me home and I want you to explain to me exactly why it is that I was kidnapped off the street and interrogated about where you keep your ledgers.” When he sees Garak hesitate, he adds, “Unless you’re planning to kill me yourself, now that I know there’s some value to anything in the flat.”
For the briefest second—so brief that he may have imagined it—Garak looks horrified. Then he says, rather dryly, “No, I think you’re rather more useful than Ryan.” He touches his fingers very lightly to Julius’s chin and then, even more lightly, ghosts his fingertips along the line of Julius’s nose. “It’s broken,” he says. “Do you want me to fix it?”
“What, re-shape it?” Julius brushes Garak’s hand away and feels the line of his nose himself. The pain is still distant, separate in his brain, and he touches it less gingerly than Garak did. “It’s still the same shape. Just—swollen.” Every part of his face feels swollen, in fact.
“Whatever you want,” Garak says. He’s moved his hands to Julius’s shoulders, running along the length of each arm, then down along Julius’s ribs on either side. When he touches the place where Ryan kicked Julius, it takes Julius a minute to process that it hurts.
“Ouch,” he says belatedly. The dried blood on his face is starting to itch.
Garak lightens his touch, but he runs his hands carefully over the rest of Julius’s torso, his abdomen, his hipbones. “Does anything feel out of place?”
My head, Julius wants to say, but he doesn’t. “What about the—bodies? Are you just going to leave them there?”
“What, a police officer and a Russian spy? I doubt anyone will have much trouble coming up with an explanation for that.” Garak takes his chin more firmly and peers closely into his eyes. “Any dizziness? Blurry vision?”
“I can see every one of your eyelashes,” Julius says. “Clearly.” The room around them smells murky, like wet concrete and iron, but Garak’s hand is full of the sharp scent of gunshot residue. The forefinger touching Julius’s chin is the trigger finger that saved him—and put him in danger in the first place, Julius reminds himself. “I suppose you have a way to get back without everyone seeing me in this state?”
“Of course.” Garak releases his chin. “Follow me.”
They’re two flights of stairs down in an industrial basement, Julius discovers, and the broken rib is seeming more and more likely as he climbs the stairs. The light outside is fully afternoon, and there’s a truck waiting in the parking lot, a truck that looks suspiciously familiar. “Mr. Reed and Mr. Tucker took a day off from moving furniture to pick us up?” Garak doesn’t bother to answer.
Even as he asks it, Reed climbs out of the driver’s seat and hurries to support Julius. "All right there, sir?” Reed guides Julius around to the back of the truck, where Tucker is waiting. They’re both in very anonymous navy-blue uniforms and the inside of the truck is set up like a troop carrier, with a bench along either side. Tucker helps him up into the truck and onto one of the benches. Garak follows and nods at Tucker, who closes the doors behind them.
The truck rumbles to life, jostling Julius on the bench. “Hold still,” Garak tells him. He crouches in front of Julius with a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a cloth.
“I hope they’re better assets than Ryan was.” Julius allows Garak to clean the blood off his face and dab the skin with rubbing alcohol. “Are they the ones who did that dreadful job sewing up your wound from—what was it?”
“The dueling brides,” Garak says, and his voice sounds warm in the dim light of the truck. “Yes, I’m afraid Mr. Tucker isn’t quite as good at repairing the human machine as he is the more traditional kind.” His touch is very gentle. “Let me clean your wrists.”
“They’re mostly just bruised.” Julius offers the wrist that took the brunt of the force when Yevgeny punched him. “Maybe sprained.” The alcohol stings.
“Can you put this on?” Garak reaches under the bench and then holds up another of the navy uniform jumpsuits.
Julius considers. “I might need a little help.” The clothes he’s still wearing are wretchedly filthy and ice-cold by now. “I’m afraid I lost your scarf.”
“Yevgeny took it,” Garak says. He begins to unbutton Julius’s shirt.
That distant part of his brain, the one holding all the pain at bay, keeps him from startling at Garak’s use of Yegeny’s name. It shouldn’t be a surprise that Garak knows him. “You’ll have to get me another one,” he says. “In another color, so that you won’t mistake me for him.”
Garak’s hand stills for a moment, and Julius remembers only a few days ago, when he was doing this for Garak. “Don’t go out alone next time.”
“Are you going to tell me this is my fault, Garak? Twelve years in this city and I’ve never so much as been mugged, and now I go for an early walk and get kidnapped by Russians?” Julius yanks off the shirt and drags off his trousers without assistance, and he might have hoped that the first time Garak undressed him would be very different. He steps unsteadily into the uniform and zips it closed. He sits down hard as the truck jolts, and only then does he shiver with cold. Silently, Garak passes him a pair of socks and black boots. “You have all these in my size, do you?”
“The truck has quite a few sizes,” Garak says. “Including yours.”
Quite a few. Specifically set aside by the bench on which Julius was meant to sit, when Garak rescued him. Of course. He’s warmer now, and the pieces of his brain are beginning to return to their proper shape, the pain growing more insistent. “I don’t suppose the truck also has some paracetamol—some Tylenol?”
Garak offers him two pills. They ride the rest of the way back to the flat in silence, until Garak sends Julius—with Tucker as a guard—up the elevator. Reed and Garak meet them at the door; only after Tucker and Reed have cleared the flat does Garak allow Julius to enter behind him. “Thank you,” Julius tells them, because Garak doesn’t seem like he’s going to.
“Of course, sir.” Both men look to Garak, who nods shortly. After they leave, Garak bolts the door.
“Now,” he begins. “Where is your suitcase?”
“My suitcase?” Julius has just allowed himself to take a few steps toward the kitchen, where he’s confident that there must be something edible in the refrigerator. “Why would I—”
Garak marches into Julius’s room and digs into his closet until he emerges with luggage. “It’s time to go,” he says.
Julius follows him. “You’re not making sense.”
“I have another—trip planned. A long one. It’s clear that you won’t be safe here while I’m gone, so you’ll have to come with me.” There’s a strange kind of emotion in Garak’s eyes.
“A work trip, or a trip to visit a sick relative?”
“Really, Julius. You know the answer to that.”
“But who do you work for? What are you running around the world trying to do, that you come back looking like this sometimes?” Julius gestures to himself. “Who wanted me?”
“My dear man—”
“FBI? CIA? MI-5? MI-6? KGB? Stasi?” Julius is running out of intelligence agencies. “The United States military?”
The humor has been growing in Garak’s clear blue eyes. “Have you run out of guesses?”
“NACA?” Garak’s lip twitches. Julius knows him well enough to know that he would never give himself away unintentionally. “Garak, you know my most dangerous secret. Isn’t it only fair to tell me yours?”
“That’s hardly how it works,” Garak says. “But I do feel some obligation to ensure you don’t think I work for—government.” He holds out the suitcase, and Julius refuses to take it.
“What, you’re a freelance spy?”
Garak looks heavenward with annoyance. “That is a tediously dramatic way to describe it. There are—men and women around the world who believe that the Cold War should not be fought across the poor nations across the world, with world powers pulling the strings. Men and women in many governments who would prefer to see the war limited to a war of—ingenuity.”
“The Cold War is certainly prompting a lot of innovation.”
Garak opens one of Julius’s dresser drawers and inspects its contents. “Not that kind of innovation. The kind of ingenuity that you write about.”
“You’re a spy—on behalf of the space program? Every space program?” It sounds absurd even as Julius says it. “Come on, Garak. I’ve put up with most of your lies. I pretend to believe that some member of your extended family falls ill every few weeks. I ignore that you have some kind of hold over every person in this city. But I asked for the truth for once—not your version of the truth, but a version of truth that I can understand. You don’t have to insult me.”
“Julius.” Garak turns away from the dresser, takes Julius’s better hand, and squeezes it almost uncertainly. “Look at me.”
Julius lets himself. Garak’s blue eyes are darker than usual, pigment blooming in his irises. “I swear to you on whatever you think that I believe in that I am telling you truth that is true.”
“What a strange way to say that you’re telling the truth,” Julius murmurs. He can’t look away. “How does control over the police have anything to do with the space program?”
“Every person and every organization has a—leverage point. One has only to find it to be able to exploit it. A person’s future usefulness isn’t always immediately obvious.” He looks a little impatient. “Come now, don’t be naïve. Politicians advance from city council member to senators. Police become private security officers who are employed by wealthy companies. Infrastructure can always be improved or damaged or altered as necessary.” Garak frowns at him. “You can see it. You’re brilliant. You just don’t want to believe it.”
“But you have…principles? Things you wouldn’t do on behalf of your employers?” Julius has known there was something strange about him since the day that Garak surprised him at the club. He’s known that the passports, the gun, the ledger, weren’t the kind of thing that an ordinary man would have, and hasn’t wanted to accept it.
Garak glances away. “I have—beliefs, if you want to call those principles. I don’t have—moral limitations. Certainly none that I’ve encountered,” and that’s terrifying. Julius believes it entirely.
“I suppose my leverage point is my—augmentations.” The words are as bitter as fernet in his mouth.
“Julius,” Garak says softly, and he doesn’t want to hear it, but for once Garak is merciless in telling the truth. “You have many leverage points.”
Of course he does. How stupid of him, to have told Garak anything. To have told him about the experiments, the war itself, the dreams. And how incautious he’s been around Garak, to have showed his interest so obviously. “It would be very silly for me to—have an emotional reaction to your revelation, wouldn’t it,” Julius says. “As though I didn’t know what’s under your mattress. As though I had every truly believed a word that you said about your time in the war and your sick relatives and—and your other travels.” Or the way that Garak seemed to look at him sometimes when he thought Julius wasn’t looking—no, the way that Garak seemed to look at him when he knew Julius was looking and wanted Julius to see that look. God. “And I suppose you don’t have a single leverage point, do you.”
Garak’s gaze fixes on Julius. “No. I don’t.”
He says it very firmly.
“I believe that too,” Julius says. He feels weary and hurt all over. Garak hasn’t apologized, he notices.