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Garak picked through the detritus that remained of his shop, and considered his options.
It wasn't going to be easy. Of course it wasn't. The Federation had every reason to be exceptionally careful with the artifact the Bajorans had so courteously lent them—and every reason not to let a Cardassian in the same room with it. And that was hardly likely to change, given that Garak had no leverage whatsoever to bring to bear on the station's brand-new administration; in point of fact, he would be forced to consider himself almost inconceivably lucky if Starfleet chose to allow him to remain where he was, and to keep running his shop, at least once it and the rest of the Promenade had been cleared of debris.
The odds were difficult to calculate. Sisko had so far seemed inclined to allow any civilian with a presence already established on Terok Nor to remain. But perhaps that would change once it was brought to his attention that one of those civilian presences was Cardassian. Garak simply didn't know enough about the man to guess, and that fact, too, pressed upon his mind. It wasn't a position he found comfortable in the least, to be so ill-informed about a person so crucial to deciding his fate. He should have been grateful Dukat was gone, and yet at a bare minimum he had known Dukat, had understood him—could hold his ground against him, insofar as there was any ground that belonged to Garak to be held, these days.
But Sisko? Garak had no sense for Sisko, for what he liked or disliked, which sorts of appeals were likely to sway him and which were not; and information had so far been damnably thin on the ground. There was certainly some potential to be seen in the way he'd handled matters with Quark: bluntly done, to be sure, but Sisko could hardly be blamed for having little patience for Quark, and there had been something charmingly Cardassian in the spirit of the maneuver that Garak couldn't help but enjoy.
Perhaps he had nothing to worry about. Perhaps Sisko would even be pleased that another shopkeeper had chosen to remain—had thrown his lot in with the Federation, and without even needing to be strong-armed into it. He'd also likely be suspicious of Garak, of course; he'd be a fool not to be, and nothing Garak had heard about Sisko so far today made him inclined to consider the man a fool. But perhaps Garak's position on Terok Nor would prove at least as secure as it had ever been.
And oh, he'd have to break that habit, and fast. Using the station's Cardassian name would only cause problems, would only make it look as though he were trying to emphasize its origins—wildly undiplomatic under the circumstances—or as though he still considered Cardassia the station's true master.
But never mind. There would be time for that later. The point was: he had every reason to tread carefully, and to very deliberately avoid obvious mistakes. And there could be no mistake more obvious, more egregious, than to get himself caught in a restricted area trying to do anything whatsoever with a Bajoran Orb.
He heaved a piece of scorched wall paneling out of his way, and eyed the awful mark it had left on the carpeting beneath it.
It was just that the prospect was so tempting.
He could even come a quarter of the way toward rationalizing it. Halfway, if he felt like being generous with himself. He had believed as much as anyone that the Cardassians had all of the existing artifacts in their possession—if the Obsidian Order had known otherwise, after all, something would have been done about it years ago. He couldn't say what sort of advantage might be gained from being the first, and potentially the only, Cardassian to get a look at this one in particular; but that didn't mean there wasn't one, and given the situation, Garak would be pleased to think he had any advantage to hand at all, even if it were nebulous and ill-defined.
And—oh, it was petty, but all the more satisfying for it—Dukat would never come as close to this Orb as Garak already had, just by being on the station with it. He wanted to, Garak didn't doubt it. He wanted to, felt entitled to, and yet Sisko had already refused him, and there was nothing Dukat could possibly do about it.
That was a truth very much worth savoring.
It could also be admitted, Garak thought, piling up a half-dozen scraps of twisted black metal as neatly as he could, that he was curious. Another habit he might be better off breaking; it was useful, yes, to feel driven to pry where you weren't wanted. But only deliberately—only when there was something meaningful to be gained by it. Not because you simply couldn't help yourself. Not because you wanted to.
But the fact of the matter was that he'd never seen a Bajoran Orb with his own eyes, and certainly not at close range. He'd heard a great deal about them, and by all accounts they were unusual and fascinating objects, unpredictable. Intriguing.
Of course, this one was almost certainly shut away safely in one of the station's science labs. And probably under active monitoring, at that. How would he get to it? What explanation could he possibly offer, if he were discovered there? Whatever the odds were that Sisko might in fact permit him to remain here, there was still no arguing with the fact that they'd diminish sharply if he were found somewhere he had less than no authorization to be—
Half the lights in the shop were broken, but the other half were still working. Garak froze when they flared briefly brighter. Not that it was a surprise that power flow to the Promenade should have been adversely affected by all the damage, of course. But if the remaining fixtures were about to explode, he'd rather not be too close to any of them.
He looked up cautiously at the closest, and then twisted to glance at the rest.
And that was when the gleaming, faceted, impossibly brilliant hourglass shape of an Orb of the Prophets came out of the wall.
Garak blinked. "Goodness," he said, at a carefully conversational volume. "How remarkable."
No reactions, no inquiries, nor even any footsteps from the shop's exterior. If there was anyone close enough to hear the words, they weren't giving themselves away. So he was probably reasonably safe from accidental interference by a stranger; and there was no countering more deliberate surveillance, at this point.
He looked at the Orb, and took a cautious half-step sideways.
No apparent reaction. The Orb simply hung there, glowing, gently coruscating.
Would it cause any less trouble than breaking into a science lab would have, if he were to show up in the station's command center with the Orb in hand, only wishing to return it? Somehow, he thought distantly, he doubted it.
He assessed its shape, its size, its approximate dimensions; a tailor's habits, of course. And yet he couldn't help but observe that it was—beautiful. Glorious, scintillating. Little wonder the Bajorans believed these artifacts had been crafted for them by the gods. It seemed as reasonable an explanation as any.
And more reasonable than any excuse Garak would be able to give station security, such as it was at the moment, if the absence of the Orb were noticed and it were traced here—
The Orb drifted closer to him. He held up his hands, unthinking, as if there were anyone here who needed to be convinced he'd had no intention of touching it, and lifted a foot to back away.
He didn't get to set it down. The Orb's brilliance doubled, tripled; it flashed, abrupt and blinding, filling his vision with light, and then he was somewhere else.
He blinked. He breathed. Lifted a hand, reflexive, to shield his face from the sunlight—and in the same instant, doing so, realized that there was sunlight, and that there shouldn't have been. He looked out at the view in front of him, and didn't see it. And then he did, and his breath caught sharply in his throat; he was powerless to prevent it.
He was on Cardassia.
He was standing in the sunlight, on Cardassia, a step away from the shade of a fine pavilion, set within the open courtyard of an unfamiliar house.
Except he couldn't be. He knew he couldn't be. There must be some explanation for it: dream, hallucination, thrust upon him by the Orb. Or perhaps the thing that had come through the wall hadn't been the Orb at all, but some sort of unfamiliar trap; and he'd been captured by it. Perhaps this was an illusory construction, designed to please him and occupy his mind, while even now his body lay upon a metal table deep within some Obsidian Order facility or other.
He needed to figure out which it was, and he needed to do it quickly.
But he stood, and looked out, and felt the warmth of the sun against his scales, the sweet hot breeze, and his eyes stung.
He made himself inhale. He blinked a few more times—and then frowned.
Something was different.
Garak had a general idea where he was. It would have been more difficult not to recognize the skyline of Cardassia City, from a vantage point that he estimated dimly must be somewhere within North Torr. And yet—it didn't look quite the way it should. The first flood of embarrassingly uncontrolled reaction having begun to subside, he found himself capable once again of meaningful analysis. There, there were the spires of Tarlak: some of them. But there were buildings missing, and others had changed somehow. He couldn't find the familiar soaring shape of the Tower of Lagarek, nor the solid sturdy outline of the Hall of Unfaltering Patriotism. The monument of Turat was still there, but it looked damaged—he couldn't understand it.
He wouldn't have been capable of being surprised by it, in a dream. And it could not be drawn from his memory. Illusion; except what would be the purpose of an illusion so blatantly and obviously flawed? This view of Cardassia was not one that currently existed, nor had it at any point during Garak's lifetime. Surely anyone who hoped to deceive Garak into believing himself to have returned there would have bothered to be accurate. What could possibly be the point of—
"There you are! Lunch?"
A voice. Pleasant in timbre, warm in tone. Within the bounds of this peculiar scenario, evidently intended to belong to someone who knew Garak well; someone who was expected, welcome, and wasn't meant to have any reason to fear approaching Garak from behind without warning.
Best not to shatter the illusion, not until he better understood its purpose. So when Garak turned to greet whoever it was, he made sure he was already smiling.
"I'd like nothing better," he said, with equal warmth. It was the right time of day for a meal, judging by the angle of the light, and—
And in fact, he discovered distantly, he did indeed feel hungry.
But he could spare no attention for the tray of food before him, not when there was so much that was surprising about the man who carried it.
Human. That alone was baffling in the extreme, Garak thought. Human, and utterly unfamiliar in every respect. Lovely, but atypically so—not the blandly exceptional beauty one might expect to see in a holosimulation. Likely Terran in origin, and yet the cut, the style, and even the material of the clothing he wore were all unmistakably Cardassian. Dark hair, dark eyes, a narrow studious face and sensitive mouth.
But he certainly was attractive, and that wide-cut collar, those half-exposed shoulders, forced Garak to settle the odds that this was some kind of deliberate construction back up where they had been before.
It would have been subtler to decrease the man's appeal a little. And yet most likely the point of this was to compel, to distract; and who wished to be compelled or distracted by the promise of a companion of only average allure? Garak could appreciate the debate whoever had designed this scenario must have waged—and could spare a moment to be gratified by the clear evidence as to which side of the line they'd come down on in the end.
And of course he'd better appear compelled and distracted, hadn't he? Whatever this was, if it was deliberate—if he was being monitored—then he wanted to know why, and the best way to find out would be to play along: to see where the conversation went, what this man would ask him or press him to discuss, without seeming suspicious. And if this was all in his head, well. It wouldn't do any harm to have taken the precaution; and it certainly wasn't going to be a hardship.
He assessed his options. He didn't know the man's name. The scenario evidently wasn't designed to accommodate that. Perhaps he wasn't intended to have noticed—perhaps something had gone wrong, some block of code meant to hand him the answer or dull him into easy acceptance misdirected or nonfunctional.
"Thank you very much, my dear," he said aloud.
Half a gamble, if a good one.
And it paid off within a moment: the man looked up from the tray, settled now neatly upon the low table within the pavilion, and smiled, and the smile was as lovely as the rest of him.
Garak smiled back, the slant of his mouth briefly wryer than he'd intended before he could correct for it. He felt caught in the grip of oddly mixed emotion: it was unpleasant, a slow cold itch beneath his scales, to think he was so painfully transparent to the creator of this illusion that they would both forge this creature for him and place the man so readily within his grasp. Surely it would have been more appropriately Cardassian of Garak to prefer to be denied—to relish the long slow task of making this man want him.
But transparency it was. For even as he rued the fact of it, it remained stubbornly true that he also felt a helpless warmth, cutting through him with a sweetly sharp and undeniably possessive edge. To be permitted such an endearment, permitted and even rewarded for it; to be welcome.
He loved it. Sickening, excruciating, to think someone knew that he did, knew and had used it against him like this—but he did.
"My pleasure, I'm sure," the man was saying, settling himself on one side of the table with an absent, comfortable little sigh. And then he looked at Garak again, and the smile was lingering still, his mouth curving softly. "But then it always is, eating lunch with you."
"Likewise," Garak let himself say gently, easing himself down opposite, and—testing the capacities and parameters of the scenario; that was all—touched the back of the man's hand with his fingertips, rested them there for a moment, before drawing away again.
High quality, he decided. Excellent, in fact. Sometimes weaker systems or simulations struggled, when the demands of touch and sensation were added to sight, sound, smell. There would be flickers in the distance. Or problems with textures, the tingling buzz of hard light breaking through the intended sensory experience.
But the man's hand felt like skin. Human skin, of course: warm, smooth, unridged. Oddly soft, distinctly unarmored. Garak felt an unaccountable spasm of something that was almost concern, dismay and protectiveness blended. What couldn't he do to this man? This man, so singularly undefended, constructed to like and trust him—to be pleased, when called "my dear" by Elim Garak. He'd be so remarkably easy to break that it almost didn't bear thinking about.
Though of course, given the circumstances, breaking was hardly the word. How could it be?
He wasn't real, after all.
"Busy morning?" Garak said, mild and conversational. Another gamble, but less of one. There you are—the man had been looking for him, for at least a little while. Therefore, they had been apart for at least some of the day.
And, sure enough, this one too paid off. The man looked up with a grin, and began to speak with great energy and enthusiasm about some sort of work he had been engaged in. At a refugee center of some sort, if Garak followed the available hints correctly.
Garak gave every appearance of listening intently, even as he glanced down to assess the contents of the tray between them. He picked up a piece of food he didn't recognize. An interesting tactic, not to provide only familiar and well-loved items. Surely no one could have worked up a profile on him that was sufficiently detailed as to allow extrapolation about his likely opinion of food he'd never tasted? And yet he put it in his mouth, and bit down, and taste and texture both pleased him. Unnerving. A fruit, he thought distantly. Almost certainly a fruit.
"—and she's promised to come back tomorrow and let me take another look at it," the man continued, "to evaluate. I told her to keep her weight off it as much as possible, but I'm not sure she will. You Cardassians are all so damned stubborn."
Nothing sharp or irritated in the voice. Warmth, still. And yet Garak looked up and met the man's eyes, and was struck for an instant by the expression in them: soft, knowing, bittersweet.
Whoever had coded this, Garak thought, had been a genius.
"Which I'm sure doesn't meet your standards as a segue," the man added, "but here we are. You've been resting, I hope?"
Interesting.
"I feel fine," Garak said, both because it was true and because it was clearly expected of him. Though of course all he'd done here was stand staring out at the city like a fool, and then turn around and sit down. He wasn't actively in pain at the moment, but he knew perfectly well how little that might mean, depending on the injury or illness he was intended to have sustained.
An explanation for pain that his real body, lying elsewhere, might be in shortly? But why? What would be the point of torturing someone when you'd taken such care to lead them to believe they weren't experiencing it?
"Mm," the man agreed, in a way that made it sound like it wasn't agreement at all. "At least you respect my observational skills enough to have brought some books down here with you as cover. I appreciate it." He tilted his head, and Garak followed his gaze away from the table, past Garak, toward the traditional long couch that stood in the pavilion—right below the large central section of roofing that was constructed to retract, leaving only a tinted force-shield, and allow a lucky Cardassian with nothing better to do to lie stretched out in the heat of full sun, midmorning to midafternoon.
There were indeed books piled neatly at one edge of the couch. Physical books, in excellent condition; Garak recognized over half of the titles, but not all of them.
"The Light Falling Like Water," the man read off one spine thoughtfully. "Well. Perhaps you really were reading after all."
"Hm?" Garak said, reaching for another piece of the unknown fruit. "Oh, I've read that one before. Interesting enough, I suppose, if that's the sort of thing you like."
The man looked at him, and frowned a little. And then he said, "But whatever do you mean? Garak—that's your favorite book."
Garak was moving before the man had even finished speaking, filled with the clear cold awareness that he needed every single advantage he could get, and that speed, surprise, was one of the most fundamental. He rounded the table with a single long stride, struck the man in the chest with one hand and then closed it, fisted it tightly, in the fabric of that gorgeously draping Cardassian shirt; and with the other hand he reached unerringly for the yarak upon the table, and caught it up, and twisted it around.
Within a breath, he'd jerked the man up, carried them both another stride—the man's back struck one of the pavilion's stone columns, his breath catching in his throat audibly at the impact, and Garak held him there and pushed the long curving blade of the yarak beneath his chin.
Human skin: unarmored. It would take even less pressure than usual to cut his throat.
And if he moved, Garak would do it.
But he didn't move. He stood there, pinned, hands half-raised and palm-out, and held very still; swallowed, once and then again, against the length of the yarak, but his eyes were dark and steady on Garak's face.
"Elim," he said quietly.
"Who are you?" Garak gritted out.
It was the most he could bear to say. All of this was irrational, pointless—surely, no matter which of Garak's hypotheses would prove correct, this man could tell him nothing. Dream, hallucination; a construct of the Orb, or of the Obsidian Order, both or neither. It didn't matter.
But beneath sense, beyond purpose, Garak also retained some semblance of self-preservation. And this man had struck so abruptly, so terrifyingly deeply, that Garak couldn't help but reflexively respond in kind.
Because no one knew the thing this man had just said. No one. No one, except Garak. He had claimed a dozen different novels, a hundred, as his favorites over the years—not least because it was an excellent way to trace the flow of superficial information, observing which titles were mentioned to him in turn by those to whom he'd never named them himself. He'd extolled the virtues of The Never-Ending Sacrifice, of course: the finest Cardassian novel ever written. The number of people who were willing to assume that that statement meant he considered it his personal favorite was a perennial surprise to him.
He spoke, too, of The Light Falling Like Water. He enjoyed reading, he was voracious; and it was well-known, had made a bit of a splash, experimental as it was. Experimental, a bit unpredictable. Peculiar. Even a little subversive, depending on how you chose to interpret the final paragraph, though of course there was nothing in particular for the official censors to point to. It would have been almost as conspicuous to avoid it, to fail to purchase it, as to carry on about it endlessly. But whenever the topic arose, well, it had been a little confusing, invariably. A bit dull. Self-important. There were a few books like that—he had a list of several, always to hand, and treated The Light Falling Like Water the same as any of the others, so it could not be found exceptional even in his vague disinterest in it.
Had it—had it been pried from his mind? Had they already sunk their claws in so deeply? Had they somehow managed to force Garak himself to provide the details that enriched this place, that made it feel so real? But The Light Falling Like Water was neither at the top of the stack of books, nor at the bottom; it hadn't been left open, there was no marker. Even if his own brain had been responsible for filling in the titles—what was the cue? How had the man known to identify that one—
"Elim," the man said again, very gently.
Garak became aware of his own breathing: too fast, too harsh.
"Garak," the man amended after a moment.
He looked uncertain, startled. Concerned.
But he didn't look afraid. Garak had him pinned with a blade at his throat, and he didn't look afraid; and that was perhaps the most terrifying thing of all.
"Garak, my name is Julian Bashir," he said. "I'm a doctor. Is any of that information familiar to you?"
"Don't you have more pressing concerns, my dear?" Garak murmured.
Julian regarded him evenly. "If you wanted me dead," he said, clipped, a little strident, "I would be already, and I'm well aware of it. Therefore, you must still be in the process of deciding whether to kill me or not. I have absolutely no idea whether you recognize me at all, and that affects my odds of being able to sway that decision profoundly. So, in point of fact, ascertaining the current state of your memory is the most pressing it could possibly be." He stopped; his jaw tightened. "And it would be even if I weren't also deeply concerned that you may somehow have managed to sustain life-altering brain damage without my noticing it."
Garak blinked.
"So, if you don't mind," Julian said, more quietly, "my name is Julian Bashir, I'm a doctor, and I'd appreciate it very much if you'd tell me the year. Federation calendar, please."
Garak considered it. The year—except he knew Cardassia didn't look like this, not in 2369. It didn't look like this, and he wasn't on it. Considering the unfamiliar food, some books he recognized but a few that he didn't, the fact that he'd never been in this pavilion with this man in his life ... surely the future was a likelier setting than the past.
"2377," he offered, after a moment.
Julian's face gave nothing away. "I see," he said. "And will you let me check you for head injuries, or will lifting my hands result in that yarak being positioned in increasingly uncomfortable places?"
"Please, give me some credit, my dear doctor," Garak murmured. "You seem lovely; I'd make it quick."
And, remarkably, Julian laughed.
Just a little, the barest huff of breath through his nose. He shook his head, and then allowed it to drop back the slightest degree, so as to let it come to rest against the column behind him. And then he did lift his hands, and slid them into Garak's hair.
His fingers were very like the rest of him. Narrow, strong. Gentle. Almost absurdly warm.
He was looking away, for a moment—following his own motion, and then gazing into the middle distance, focusing on what his hands were telling him. And then he met Garak's eyes again.
He hadn't tried to move otherwise. He was still pinned at the chest, Garak's flattened palm and weight holding him there, the knuckles of Garak's other hand pressed into the underside of his chin.
It was the closest Garak had been to anyone in quite some time.
Julian cleared his throat. "I don't suppose you're aware of anything that might be affecting your brain function," he said, mild.
An intriguing angle of approach. Was someone looking for information regarding the brain implant? Not the Obsidian Order, then. Unless, of course, this was a test—to see how quickly he'd give up their secrets, if pressed. And in a situation in which the implant could neither help nor hinder him, in which he couldn't have activated it even if he'd wanted to—
And then all his mind went still, as Julian added with absent ease, "Perhaps we missed something, removing that implant of yours. I can't say I'd be surprised, if some sort of secondary function had been built in. Maybe it was supposed to kick in years ago. Wipe your memory as soon as the damn thing came out, so you'd have no secrets to give up even if it were gone. That would be awfully Cardassian, wouldn't it?"
Garak stared at him.
Julian looked back, and something soft and a little sad swept across his face. "Ah," he said. "I should have realized. If you don't recognize me—as far as you're concerned, that hasn't happened yet."
"No," Garak heard himself say. "It hasn't."
"You don't think this is real, do you?" Julian said.
He still hadn't looked away. Garak wished he would look away.
"It can't be," Garak said.
He'd hardly thought about it. The assumption had been too fundamental to require it. The task before him had been to decide which kind of unreal this was, not whether it was unreal at all.
Because of course it wasn't real.
It couldn't be.
He'd been in his shop. The Orb had come through the wall, and flashed. Cardassia didn't look like this: it hadn't transported him there. Dream, hallucination; trap, illusion. There weren't any other options.
The future was a likelier setting than the past. A likelier setting, that was all. This wasn't—this couldn't possibly be—
It wasn't plausible. It wasn't plausible, in so many different respects that Garak hardly knew where to begin. That he should ever find himself able to return to Cardassia at all, let alone that he should do it and somehow end up living there, with—with this man, who wore Cardassian clothes and knew the titles of Cardassian novels, who brought Garak lunch; who seemed to understand that Garak was the sort of person who might hold a blade to the throat of a man who'd brought him lunch; who knew about the implant. Who knew.
Except perhaps that very implausibility was the best argument yet that this might be real after all.
Garak knew the art of lying—had been taught it since he was a child, by example; had studied it with painstaking care, as he grew older. And one of the first fundamental principles he'd identified was this: people lied much, much more carefully than they told the truth, because lies had to make sense.
He'd never have imagined something like this, such unfettered and obscenely gratuitous excess. It was possible to pretend that perhaps, if he only took sufficient care in his presentation, if he only tucked all the worst things away where they couldn't be seen, he could win himself some flavor of happy ending; but there was no fantasy he'd ever had, even at his most pathetic, where he'd indulged himself in the thought of being known, known for precisely who he was, and finding himself welcomed regardless. He'd never been foolish enough to try to tell himself that particular variety of lie.
And anyone with the resources to tell a lie of their own to him this way—within this ludicrously detailed an environment, this ridiculously well-engineered a simulation—would surely also have taken care, at a bare minimum, to make it believable.
"It can't be," he said again.
No sane person who knew what Elim Garak was capable of would stand there with a yarak to the throat and look at him like that.
"Garak," Julian said, very soft, and then stopped, and pressed his mouth into a line. "I wish I knew what to say to you. I wish I knew how to convince you."
"Don't you?" Garak said.
"Dear god, no," Julian said, and laughed a little, in a way that didn't seem terribly amused. "I'm sure you'll be pleased to hear that as yet a great deal of you remains a mystery to me, despite my best efforts."
And despite all that Garak had been braced for, he didn't sound frustrated by it. He didn't sound as though he resented it.
He sounded—fond. Fond, wry. He sounded as though he liked it.
"Your best efforts," Garak repeated.
On one level, it was difficult to imagine what sort of effort Dr. Julian Bashir, Julian Bashir and his wide dark eyes, his narrow face, his gentle steady hands, could possibly bring to bear on such matters.
And yet Garak looked into those eyes, that face, with those hands still absently half-cradling his head, and was abruptly aware that on another level entirely, it didn't matter in the least. Here was a master interrogator, the best Garak had ever seen. What need for torture, deprivation, psychological pressure, or any number of other equally blunt and clumsy instruments, for a man like this? He could make Garak want desperately to tell him anything, by the most elegant and devastating means of all: Garak's own desire to find himself understood by him.
"Oh, you've told me some of it," Julian was murmuring, watching Garak with a look that was both sweet and sad at once. "You've told me quite a lot of it, really. Certain things," he added, mouth slanting, "you've let me find out, so you could see what I'd say to you afterward. And some of it I've dug up on my own, though you're probably already well aware that I have, and just waiting to see what comes of it."
Garak drew a slow breath, and wet his lips, and didn't look away.
And something in Julian's face changed. His eyes softened, his gaze heavy on Garak's face—moving over it, back and forth, as though despite all the time he'd purportedly known Garak, somehow he still hadn't looked his fill.
"It's been a long time since you've looked at me like that," he said, very low.
Garak arched a brow ridge. "And how am I looking at you, my dear?" he murmured, as evenly as he could.
"Like you have no idea what to do with me," Julian said, and smiled just a little. "Usually, these days," he added blandly, "you have at least one course of action firmly in mind."
"Do I," Garak heard himself say.
Impossible. It was impossible; it had to be. This was not his future.
But in that case, he thought distantly, he had better seize the opportunity before him—all the more so, given that he'd already acknowledged his own certainty that it wouldn't, couldn't, come again.
Except Julian did know him well, it seemed, and was already half a step ahead of him. Pushing forward, beneath his hands, and Garak twisted his wrist immediately, unthinking, so it was the flat of the yarak and not the edge that Julian pressed his throat heedlessly against.
And then Julian kissed him.
It was disorienting, thoroughly and wonderfully. Garak hadn't been kissed by anyone in quite some time, and had never been kissed by this man before; and yet Julian did it as though he'd done it a hundred times, a thousand. As though it were known, as though it were easy. As though he loved to do it. His mouth was soft against Garak's, his teeth sharp when he dug them readily into Garak's lip, the contradictory sensations as marvelous as the simple indefinable feeling of welcome: that this was allowed, given freely. That there was no purpose behind it, no motive, except how badly Julian had wanted to do it—
Light, somewhere beyond Garak's closed eyelids. Garak squeezed his eyes shut tighter. No, wait, he wanted to say, but he'd have had to stop kissing Julian to do it.
And there was no point. The light grew bright, in the space of an instant. Brilliant, blinding, until there was nothing else; and then it was gone, and Garak knew even before he opened his eyes where he would be.
He stood in his shop, and he looked at the Orb.
It hung there, silent, shining. And then, as quickly and quietly as it had come, it went: passed without any apparent difficulty through the wall, and was gone, and left him there alone.
He looked at the place where it had vanished, and breathed, and waited for his heart to stop pounding.
It took a long time.
And then he cleared his throat, and absently smoothed down his shirt, and bent to reach for another piece of debris.
It hadn't been real. It couldn't have been.
It made no sense, and had meant nothing, and the wisest course of action was clearly to leave the matter behind. Keep the memory close, perhaps; he knew himself too well to imagine he was capable of making himself forget it entirely. A bewildering, intriguing, and comforting fantasy, but no more than that. Perhaps, now and then, when things became difficult for him, he could amuse himself with the thought of it. But that would be all.
It was the reasonable response.
It was the reasonable response, right up until the moment he stepped into the replimat and saw the man.
Human. Dark hair, dark eyes. A narrow, studious face, attentive, intelligent; narrow hands, long steady fingers.
Federation uniform, this time. A scientist's colors, if Garak remembered right—but then that was what their doctors wore, too, wasn't it? Young, of course. Younger than he had been.
And yet, unmistakably, it was Julian Bashir.
It might be, Garak told himself. There was no reason to start making wild unsupported leaps, or taking pointless and plainly ridiculous chances. He was Elim Garak; he was smarter than that, he knew better. If anything, this was evidence that the Orb might well have drawn upon his subconscious—perhaps he'd caught a glimpse of this man in passing days ago, and had taken no note of it at the time because there had been nothing to take note of, until the Orb had chosen to lend that face significance.
Best to act deliberately. When there was something to be gained by it.
Not because you simply couldn't help yourself. Not because you were, foolishly and recklessly, curious. Not because you wanted to: wanted to make a wild leap, just to see what might happen next; just to see whether there was a chance, and never mind that it was a chance you already knew better than to hope for.
Garak stood there and acknowledged the truth of all those things.
And then he crossed the replimat with even, steady strides, and eased his way along the wall—almost as though he meant to simply pass behind Julian's chair and keep walking. Which was precisely what he should have done, and he knew it.
But instead he slowed, and glanced down, and spoke:
"It's Doctor Bashir, isn't it? Of course it is. May I introduce myself?"