Work Text:
In the aftermath of any war, no matter the species, planet or metaphysical plane, once the shock that the whole thing is over finally sets in, certain ideas always seem to float up to the surface under the auspices of Never Letting This Happen Again. When the dead have been buried and the easier to conceal aftermath of the destruction tidied away, in amongst the busy work of looking for who to blame, on the agenda somewhere near truth and reconciliation and definitely not reparations, just compulsory donations, comes the well-intentioned idea of Cultural Exchange.
Historically for Bajor and Cardassia, this had involved Cardassia throwing its culture on Bajor with all the planning and care of throwing water on a grease fire. It may seem like the obvious idea at the time, but the fire has other ideas.
The elders in Bajoran and Cardassian society may still mistrust each other, but as the youth become a lot more ‘Federation’ in their beliefs in the aftermath of the Dominion war, it was mutually decided that they should maybe get over themselves or run the risk of losing the next generation to those suspicious, happy-go-lucky do-gooders altogether. As a member of the new Cardassian Parliament mentioned to her opposite number from the Bajoran Government, the word ‘Federation’ had stopped being a pejorative in the larger cities of the union (although, she was assured, it still meant a combination of ‘fool’ and ‘shockingly naive’ in the outer provinces of Bajor).
This, Julian mused, bleary-eyed and unprepared, must be why there were thirty-seven fresh faced Cardassian girls loudly bickering in the waiting room at 0845 on a Monday morning.
The 0900-morning meeting bought light to the conundrum. By mutual decree, just over three dozen Cardassian girls were to spend a season on Bajor, exchanging cultures, and the same number of Bajoran teens had already left for Prime the previous day. The Cardassian girls would be staying with Bajoran families, attending Bajoran schools, and doing their best to absorb the culture in a mutually respectful way that didn’t, the Cardassian organiser murmured to Julian later, involve any kind of piercings. Usually, visitors to Bajor would have transited immediate planet side had they come through the station at all, with the immigration filter system only flagging those who needed to be seen in sickbay, but even five years after the war the public health system on Cardassia wasn’t what it should be, and anyway, health screenings had been promised as a perk of the trip.
It is always nice when people decide these things without telling the healthcare staff, Julian thought pointedly as he ate another muffin, and the agenda moved on.
When he returned to sickbay, the girls were still there, mostly well behaved and quiet, letting his staff scan them with tricorders with disinterest.
There was a time when a gaggle of teenage girls on the station would have been a welcome sight. Back in the old days the whole promenade gang would poke their head in, Odo, lurking in the background, always suspicious, Quark drumming up business and testing the chaperones’ boundaries, and the youth of the station would appear from school or necking behind the information booth, hormonal and eager, and it would all be very adorable and entertaining and make the station feel alive in a way Julian didn’t like to dwell on much.
Julian generally finds the chat of the young endlessly engaging, although as he ages away from “cool older brother” to “how do you do, fellow kids” it gets harder to get them to engage back. Still, they are always up for recommending a new holodrama, or a new catalogue of the latest fashions he could torture Garak by flicking through at lunch, feigning interest in the most lurid of designs that caught his eye (which he would then end up ordering because someone thought they were fashionable enough to put in a catalogue, and Julian is self-aware enough to not fall foul of engineers disease and assume he knows everything about everything. Well, less so.)
It's been five years since the war, and things have been stable for so long that the way things are should be the status quo. He should be used to this, to his older bones, his rank, the stability of a normal deep space assignment. He shouldn’t be nostalgic for a war that killed nearly a trillion souls across three quadrants.
These days, lunch was spent alone, with no one to chastise him for hurried eating. Kira moved on last spring, leaving Julian the last of the original crew still in post. It had been thirteen years since he’d graduated and headed out for his big frontier medicine adventure. He felt he had slowed down, his life could run on rails, home to replimat to work to replimat to Quarks to home. Julian can’t remember the last time he bought new clothes, rather than replicating new uniforms and casual wear from the Federation catalogue, their stretchy fabrics not needing the kind of precise tailoring they all got used to back when Garak’s Clothiers graced the promenade. They’d all become a that bit more shabbier since the end of the war.
The girls take a while to process, chatting to each other in rapid-fire Kardasi slang that gave the translator a sensation like a skipping data-disc to anyone listening closely. They were charmingly unused to medical treatment, not listening to Julian as he instructed them to lift their arms, wincing and glaring at him when he took blood, jabbed them with hyposprays, and waved his tricorder in front of their eyes, distracting them from their PADDs. A two-thirds of the cohort are mostly fine, and so he gives them a round of vaccinations, boosters and a vitamin infusion, and sends them to get the lunchtime shuttle to Bajor.
It’s well past the lunch rush by the time he’s done with processing the last third of the girls, who needed cultures and full scans before he could release them, and so he decides to stretch his legs and pick up something from the Replimat while the computer does the hard work, rather than replicating a sandwich from the least biohazard-y medical replicator.
He opts for a double portion of extra-spicy hasparat today, but there’s a moment where he considered the Cardassian option. A whole morning of Cardassians arguing with him, pouting at him, staring at him with sly little smiles – it was enough to make an already lonely man’s memories tip over into dangerously nostalgic.
Hasperat is designed to be a quick meal, and so he doesn’t feel bad for wolfing the whole thing in a few bites, pushing down the nostalgia for a time he could really wallow in it.
It’s always a nice day in space, and Julian is British, even all these years away from home he yearns for the easy excuse of fluctuating weather to excuse his impulses. Maybe the time for excuses was passing. He had a book on his PADD he had been putting off starting for fear he’d never get to finish it, and it really had been a long morning.
“Idanian spice pudding, please” he instructed the replicator, after depositing his used plate in the recycler. As the new tray appeared he smiled to himself, and was startled by a loud, strange, sudden noise. It was a bit like a small animal being stepped on, or some kind of swimming pool pump running in reverse. By the frenzied shh-ing that followed, it was coming from six of the Cardassian girls, half of the girls he had kept behind, sitting at one of the tables in what passed for a corner, their table strewn with the detritus of youth; junk food wrappers, brightly coloured drinks and battered PADDs in among their skinny, scaled elbows.
Pushing down a spike of curiosity to become friends with the nostalgia from earlier, he picked up the tray and headed back to sit down. Someone had taken his previous table, and the nearest empty one took him past the girls. As he passed their table on the way back to his own, the strange noise passed over the group like a wave, followed by much hissed whispers of “No! Shut up!”, “He does! He does!” “Shh! Shh! He’ll hear us!”
“Ladies” Julian sighed, inadvertently echoing every teacher faced with a teenage cadre since the beginning of time. “Can I help you?”
The girls conferred amongst themselves for a wordless, psychic moment and then, after a subsequent short but intense period of hushed bickering when obviously psychic powers failed them (Cardassians being infamously psi-null), one of the girls was shoved out of her chair and put up as their de facto spokeswoman.
“Doctor”, she said, bowing her head slightly, “Do you know if an Ensign Habibi Subatoi works on the station?”
Julian narrowed his eyes at her. “Why?”
The girl held up her hands in a way that was supposed to be disarming but always made Julian itch to check his pockets. “Oh, no reason. No reason at all. Just have a message for him. From someone back home.” She blinked long and slow, innocent as anything, and it gave Julian a pang of homesickness, despite standing in the most worn area of the replimat carpet.
He mentally shook himself. This was ridiculous. “No, there isn’t anyone of that name on the station.” He put all the brusqueness and authority learned in officer training into it.
“Are you sure?” the girl, Jeiyal Entara, if he remembered correctly, wheedled, obviously used to manipulating authority figures. “It’s a big station. I’m sure there’s new people arriving all the time. Maybe you could check the computer?”
“I’m sure” he replied, placing his tray down on their table so he could cross his arms for emphasis. “Subatoi is my middle name, and my mother’s maiden name. It's not exactly common, so if someone with that name was posted here, I would have noticed. He’d probably be my cousin, and I know I don’t have any cousins in Starfleet.”
He wasn’t prepared for what happened next. A few of the girls gasped. One put her hand to her forehead like she was about to faint, and they all pulled back into their huddle, whispering intently. One of them loudly proclaimed “It’s true!!!!!!” with enough force he could count the exclamation marks. The celebration ended with them all holding hands and jumping together in excitement, chairs clattering around them.
“What is this about?” he demanded, so shocked he found himself putting his hand on Jeiyal’s shoulder. “Tell them to stop it!”
Jeiyal, definitely a future member of an Order that didn’t officially exist, reached into her bag and passes him an ancient, battered PADD. It was covered with the residue of childhood, stickers and their ghosts lovingly placed but now faded and peeling, a menagerie of cute puffball animals, each with huge eyes, overdrawn eye ridges and a teardrop jewel between them. Jeiyal’s name was emblazoned in pink glitter puffy paint across the top.
“I’m going to need that back” she said, hastily, her fingers still touching the case in case he confiscated it, “and it would be too complex to explain the whole story to you right now, but you can copy the series onto your own PADD if you like. You should start with ‘The Rose of Terok Nor’.
He should have been a bigger man, realised that no good could come of this, but Julian had never, ever been able to resist temptation, especially not when it took the form of a forbidden book. He tapped his PADD to hers, and the beep showed that the folder ‘ARAMIS x SUBATOI - “ROSE SERIES (INCOMPLETE!!!)” <3<3<3 jhalkjsndad’ had been copied over into the root directory. He quickly flicked it into his ‘Monographs - Unsorted’ folder and set his face into the picture of a responsible adult. It took a few seconds to extract himself, to tell them to pick up after themselves, calm down, and report to sickbay for their results in an hour. They waved as he walked away, giggling among themselves, helping themselves to his abandoned pudding.
When they turned up an hour later, they were well behaved enough that it took half the time to finish their treatment and discharge, and by dinner the girls had been safely delivered to their hosts across Bajor, Julian had done his paperwork, and the familiar, uneventful level quiet returned to the station.
As the beautiful Ensign stomped away, tears of humiliation trickling down his smooth, flat cheeks, Aramis almost broke. Almost held out a hand and said what was in his heart, that men had been felled by less than a single kiss. The Federation were worthy enemies of the mighty Empire, but something told him that this human was different to the others, and that together they could fight them, fight the corruption they spread through the galaxy. Make the galaxy somewhere where they could both be free.
Julian rubbed his eyes, and flicked back to the beginning of the chapter, dumbfounded at what he’d just read. The opening animation auto played and he watched it again, transfixed at the graphics unspooling across the page, silhouettes fading into watercolours, while flowers, Cardassian and Terran, entwined around the familiar docking pylons of DS9. To the background of plinky-plinky instrumental music, the opening narration began anew.
He was a vision. A tall flower, standing up among the alien weeds, a ridgeless beauty, an impossible contradiction. Smooth and soft, so unlike anyone else he’d ever seen before. There were other humans, so similar and dull like pebbles on a beach, but none shone like him.
The opening music kicked in, a syrupy mid-tempo ballad that Julian knew he would have in his head for weeks, as the title unfurled in beautiful Kardasi calligraphy.
The Rose of Terok Nor.
“Roses don’t shine, Garak!” he muttered, before standing up and ordering (another) large drink from the replicator and settling back in to find out what happened next.
It was obvious that Garak was behind it. There were too many accurate details of life on DS9, too much almost-perfect insider knowledge of the events of the last decade that no one else could possibly have written it who didn’t know the truth. The only sticking point to that theory was that...well, he’d have expected Garak to have more of a sense of humour about the whole thing. The Rose of Terok Nor was trash, dreck, unsubtle, bottom-drawer nonsense of the kind they usually agreed didn’t have any redeeming quality. It was the story of Aramis, the loyal son of Cardassia forced to betray his people, watching the events that led to the Dominion war unfurl from the side-lines, powerless to help but so sure he could fix the problem singlehandedly should he be forgiven. It could have been a great story had it not been so incredibly serious, po-faced and melodramatic. It was so overwritten and embellished as to be embarrassing. He couldn’t imagine Garak making it through reading a page of the introductory chapter that described Aramis as the most wronged person in the galaxy, so dark, brooding and selfless that Julian was embarrassed to be even imagining it.
“He’d come to Terok Nor with his name worse than dust, resolute to live with his shame, to take his punishment, to not try and right the injustice. He may not have done what he was accused of, but no one could deny that he deserved to lose everything for the betrayal of his best friend. Cardassia had spoken, and Aramis could do nothing but listen to her, in case it was the last time he heard her voice.”
It was such unmitigated, unparalleled bullshit that if Garak was behind it he had obviously received some kind of extreme head injury or tragic case of radiation induced personality change since the end of the war.
And that wasn’t even mentioning the other bloody main character.
Ensign Habibi Subatoi had yearned his whole life for the stars, to escape from the planet, the Federation, that had never understood him. A failure from a nameless family, the whipping boy of Starfleet Academy, always on the edge of getting kicked out, living under the pressure of the momentous secret he struggled to keep, he had nevertheless made it through the medical programme and received his commission. Now the junior doctor of the most remote station in the Federation, an exile from the future he dreamed of, he was still a lost boy, lost in a faraway land.
Ensign Habibi Subatoi. Junior doctor who it is implied graduated bottom of his class due to his enormous secret and his utter ineptitude at seducing every woman in the quadrant as cover for his enormous gayness. A complete moron who told secrets to the enemy any chance he was given. Who, in the first chapter, was so dense he gave Aramis his command codes, and almost caused the destruction of the station, and only by saving the visiting Federation president from assassination as he is attempting to cruise Aramis, manages to keep his job.
The whole thing was just so personally insulting. Julian would be the first to admit he has grown up a lot in the last thirteen years. He would even go as far as saying he probably had it coming to him, god knows that he looks back on his awful behaviour when he was young, randy and stupid with as much horror as anyone. Ensign though! To not even make him a Lieutenant JG was just petty! Also, Garak had hated Peter Pan, hated the idea of neverland, the idea of eternal youth, had acted disdainful of every piece of Earth literature Julian had introduced him to and how he’s constructing sophisticated referential metaphors? The whole thing was such a slap in the face!
There were 37 chapters in total, according to the index, which he had left running while he got his head together. The first three were greyed out now, The Rose of Terok Nor, The Pull of the Void and A Night To Forget, consumed in one horrified, gluttonous sitting.
In them, Aramis is exiled to Terok Nor and told that if he can destroy the Federation’s influence there, he can come home a hero. If he fails, he would be wiped from history, his name erased from all records, denied his birth right, and, most importantly for Aramis, would never see his beloved home or her dependencies again. His initial attempts at assassination and subterfuge are easily thwarted because he underestimates both the Federation and the Bajorans, and by the end of the first chapter everyone on the station hates him, Bajor is actively trying to evict him, and he’s realised the true extent of the corruption that runs through the sector. After he makes an attempt on the Captain’s life to try and pre-empt his deportation, he’s caught by security and roughed up. Just he’s about to be sent to the Federation prison planet to be tortured and executed without trial, he meets Ensign Subatoi, and manages to save the day (and the Federation president) through cunning use of the Ensign’s ineptitude and own wavering loyalties.
Their attraction is obvious, bristles off the page, but their nascent romance is thwarted when Aramis insults Subatoi right when they are about to kiss and run off together. Subatoi cowardly returns to his post, expecting never to see Aramis again.
Instead, Aramis accepts the station commander’s invitation to stay on the station as reward for his heroism, and the chapter ends with them watching the other from either side of the promenade.
The format wasn’t anything he’d read before. Obviously Garak hadn’t thought the genre representative of the great literature of Cardassia until it became time to put stylus to PADD himself. Each chapter was a kind of hybrid of comic book, art book, TV recap montage and romance novel, set to incidental music that looped while you read it. The scenes with dialogue were drawn in a series of sketchy, fluid panels, showing the characters and their all-important body language, that second tongue so important in conversational Kardasi, conveying nuance in the defeated, submissive slump of Subatoi’s shoulders and the haughty, hurt, misunderstood Aramis’ squared shoulders, as they have misunderstanding after misunderstanding on the journey to love and war.
In amongst these were glorious full colour pages, tableaus that set the scene, but then page upon page of text that detailed their inner monologue, showing how Aramis and Subatoi burned for each other, their love so forbidden they could barely admit it to themselves, and the plot, where the Federation’s regressive, backwards regulations that keep Subatoi and his fellow officers in chains, justifying their behaviour with the Federation ideals of service, sacrifice, compassion and love, while also conspiring, evilly, with the most thinly veiled Gul Dukat expy Julian had ever read, to keep Aramis away from Cardassia, lying and cheating him of his redemption, and keeping Cardassia trapped in a cycle of war.
Julian had snorted when he had read this Dukat’s name. The PADD’s built in annotator had helpfully contributed that ‘Fukas’ was a “common family name from the Southern continent, broadly translating to blacksmith”. Ultimately, Julian needed no other sign or signature to convince him that Garak was the author.
Once he’d got used to the intense syrupy melodrama of the thing, Julian was really enjoying it. His experiences with Cardassian romances were usually of the heavier sort, a thousand years of literary tradition that always ended with good men and fine women from good families giving up their chance at happiness for the good of the state. That this series, with its two flawed characters in service to two flawed states, had managed to be published on Cardassia Prime, was revolutionary.
And, God help him, and despite fearing he’d pulled a muscle cringing so hard, Julian had to know what happened next.
starfleet.medical.ds9@
AUTOMATED MESSAGE FROM STARFLEET MEDICAL
FAO Jaiyal Entara, Gentosha Settlement, Rakantha Province, Bajor (jaiyal.entara@)
Following review of your results, a further course of medication is required. Please make an appointment at Gentosha Medical Center for follow up. Fingerprint verification will be required.
Kind regards,
Dr Julian S. Bashir (Commander), CMO, Deep Space Nine.
PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE.
Message from [email protected]
>So did u like it????????????
>is it real?????
>pls tell me I won’t tell anyone i promise.
>thanks for the medication btw i feel loads better
>your a better doctor than subatoi!!!!!
>ps. im writing this in standard i hope it makes sense
Over the next two weeks, Julian very carefully rationed the chapters of The Rose of Terok Nor to a mere two a day. It would be an exaggeration to say that he was preoccupied with it in the remaining 24 hours of the day, but it would not be a lie. Every chapter had layers, and he dissected them endlessly in his mind looking for notes in them just for him.
Aramis was the protagonist, of course, being a typical Cardassian hero, so in love with the idea of Cardassia he could barely survive the cognitive dissonance of knowing she was corrupt, easily swayed by the charismatic Guls who conspired to sully her further. His inner monologues were endlessly over the top, near sexual, about her endless deserts, her towering spires, her ancient and eternal charms.
As the story developed, the dominion war introduced (again, at least partly caused by Subatoi’s internalised homophobia), Julian began to suspect that the whole thing was much more subversive than he expected. There was no way that Garak would have written something like this that was to be read straight. Aramis was just too much of a perfect Cardassian hero. He brooded, he ignored his own suffering, his sacrifice was never-ending and utterly futile. Despite his angst and anguish, the stars kept on turning, Cardassia rumbled towards war and betrayal. The number of knives thrust into his back, both metaphorically and, in two cases, literally, were twisted any chance they could get, and yet he never lost faith. His passivity was paralleled by Fukas, the leader who was constantly acting like a dutiful son but who didn’t care for anyone or anything, but who despite his moral rectitude made things happen, and who always seemed to win the day.
In parallel, Subatoi was trapped in everything he’d ever wanted. A dream job, a dream posting, but in return his eyes had been opened to the reality of being a military man on a hot border world. He was a beautiful bird in a gilded cage, an alien beauty who tempted Aramis so thoroughly. The art style used individual fonts for all the characters as another nod to their characterisation. Subatoi’s speech was written in two, the first was “his” font, used on his inner monologue pages, but much of his speech was written in the LCARS standard font, for when he was parroting the Federation’s ideals. It was clever, if unsubtle as a brick.
Subatoi’s sickbay was directly opposite Aramis’ shop, and much was made of the wide stretch of the promenade between them. Sometimes whole days would be animated of them watching each other as they worked, with delicate blurs of the Vedeks, Starfleet Officers and Bajorans streaming past, oblivious to the great love story passing in the space between them.
It was really rather beautiful.
Message from [email protected]
>so i looked you up dr bashir
>you’re pretty cool.
>not like subatoi at all.
Each chapter starts with lunch.
The opening tableau was a top down shot of their food and their hands, a hint of second tongue to tease the audience as the chapter’s title unfurls over Aramis’ gesturing and Subatoi’s frantic eating.
It makes the chapters where they eat on their own, or with other people all the more potent.
By the twelfth chapter, Julian understood why the girls had lost it when he had ordered spice pudding. If he had eaten pudding like that he would have been arrested.
The wire incident comes at the end of the first major volume. Aramis is acting cagey, and Subatoi pushes, but instead of it leading to friendly, flirtatious banter, Aramis hits him. Then collapses, then is revealed to be a walking bomb, a trojan horse. The promise he’d been given that he would come back to Cardassia a hero if he succeeded was a lie. Subatoi finds that his blood contains a compound that when combined with air would produce a neurotoxin fatal to humans and Bajorans. Aramis was intended, required to fail, and to fail publicly, to be shot on the promenade, his blood a dirty bomb, purging the station to become "clean" again.
Subatoi saves the day, saves Aramis, but it marks a point of change, when factions develop, relationships deepen, and the subplot kicks into gear.
There are so many differences to how things went. So much was cut to make the story straightforward, so many changes made for so many reasons, and it feels to Julian that he may be the only person who can see how the many threads of fiction combine into a version of the truth.
Aramis is vain and a patriot, but he's not a bastard in either sense of the word. His father is a well-respected military scholar and his mother is a geneticist for a laboratory doing medical research. He went to the right schools, did well, did nothing wrong. Was just, truly, doing what he thought was right.
The more he read, the more he could feel himself falling in love with the man behind the story.
Message from [email protected]
>did u see chapter 38 came out?? I can send it to u if you want.
Message from [email protected]
>Jaiyal, please stop messaging this handle.
<I ened to get hold of dr bashir, can u give me his handle?
<*need
>Unfortunately we cannot give out the private handles of staff.
§You can no longer send messages to this address. Please contact Federation Comnet Helpdesk on comnet.help@ for further information§
In chapter 28, Subatoi's big secret is finally revealed. His parents turn up on the station unannounced, bringing with them a beautiful woman who they declare he is to marry.
She is dark haired, pale with sparkling blue eyes. She’s prone to wearing red, loves Klingon culture and her laughs are written to take up the whole page.
Despite everything, she and Subatoi have sexual tension. They are childhood friends who have easy rapport, and in chapter 27 they solve a mystery in the holodeck together.
Garak didn’t even change her name, although he Romanises it differently to how Jadzia preferred. This Jadzia isn’t Trill, isn’t a friend of the Captain, and there is no Worf. She's unencumbered, an oasis of potentiality, respectability, and she fancies Subatoi like mad. It's everything he ever wanted.
At the end of the chapter, Subatoi goes to his parents and tells them that he is happy with the bride they have bought him, and he would be honoured to make her his wife.
In an excruciatingly tense scene, Subatoi goes to Aramis and asks him to make him suits for his wedding and honeymoon. The following panels, as Aramis takes his measurements carefully and reverently, discusses the marriage tradition of Cardassia, drapes fabrics across Subatoi’s flushed skin, all infused with such aching sexual tension that Julian honest-to-God groans out loud when Subatoi breaks it by asking Aramis to be his best man.
The wedding is held in Quark’s. The bride wears red. The enormous stained glass window frames Subatoi as he stands at the altar and waits for his bride, and right up until the moment they make their vows, Julian is convinced that Subatoi would go through with it.
His bride is introduced in the way all major characters were, with a full-page character profile containing their vital statistics, history, and innermost secrets. She gets scenes of her own, she seems to have secrets and motivations that tie into the plot. This had been a period of high plot tension, and there was no way that Subatoi and Aramis would be allowed to get together, surely.
But then, the Captain asks whether there is any reason this marriage should not go ahead, and Subatoi looks across the promenade to where Aramis is standing in the doorway of his shop, leaning against the frame, his normally perfect posture now crumpled with despair.
And in front of everyone, Subatoi objects to his own wedding and declares his secret, the big secret he’d kept all through the story. The secret that he is homosexual, and that he cannot marry this woman, because he does not love her, and cannot love her, because he loves another.
Julian scoured the translation to make sure he hadn't missed anything. Subatoi’s secret was a big plot point. Characters were always commenting about how different he was, and Subatoi himself felt like his secret could bring everything he’d worked for crashing down around him, but even digging into the source code reveals that it’s the whole of it. Subatoi’s big secret was that he was gay, and that he loved a man, and that was that.
Maybe this was how being augmented should be. As boring and unremarkable as homosexuality and a mutual, ill-advised crush.
There's a reason sexual repression and forbidden love are such timeless tropes - nothing gets the human mind going like anticipation and delayed gratification. Subatoi’s parents and bride leave, and his co-workers act a bit betrayed, but ultimately it improves his standing on the station. He refuses to say who he is in love with, but it wouldn’t matter, as Aramis has disappeared in the aftermath of the wedding.
Aramis reappears with news that the Dominion and Cardassia have made a pact, and that war is brewing. The story forgets about Subatoi’s gayness and goes back to building the tension of the war.
Someone starts leaving chocolates in places for Subatoi to find, and he wonders who his secret admirer is. Eventually, Aramis comes to his quarters, and presents him with the honeymoon suit he had ordered, and tucked in the breast pocket is another packet of Delvanian chocolates, and a note.
Message from [email protected]
>hello???
§THIS MESSAGE CANNOT BE DELIVERED§
Message from [email protected]
>hello???
§THIS MESSAGE CANNOT BE DELIVERED§
Message from [email protected]
>hello???
§THIS MESSAGE CANNOT BE DELIVERED§
Message from [email protected]
>hello???
§THIS MESSAGE CANNOT BE DELIVERED§
Message from [email protected]
>hello???
§THIS MESSAGE CANNOT BE DELIVERED§
Message from [email protected]
>hello???
< Jaiyal? How did you get this handle?
>I have my methods.
Thirty chapters in and Julian had to bite on his hand in sheer frustration as the Dominion pour through the wormhole and take the station, just as Subatoi breaks into Aramis’ quarters and begs him to run away with him. The lovers are due to steal a runabout and flee at the stroke of midnight, but when Aramis, caught up in seeing Fukas standing up in Ops like a destroying angel, turns up a few minutes late, he witnesses Subatoi being arrested for attempting to go AWOL, and the last frame is a sad, broken Subatoi being issued with a pulse rifle and shipping out through the wormhole in a battalion of soldiers, disgraced and doomed to be cannon fodder for the war effort.
The war is pointless and brutal, like all wars. Over the next seven chapters Subatoi survives war, loss, starvation, battlefield surgery and ultimately torture at the hands of Fukas. Aramis, pressed into action as a double agent caught between the Federation he hates and the Dominion’s corruption of his beloved Cardassia, does everything he can to try and save the day. In a triumphant ending, the would-be lovers kill the Founder and Fukas together, and Cardassia is liberated.
The Captain, a blessedly even-handed representation of Sisko, thanks Aramis, and tells him he is free to go home.
It's 0300 when Julian finishes the war arc. Aramis and Subatoi have seen each other across the promenade as Aramis packs up his shop, and their eyes lock, a mirror of the end of the first chapter.
The last frame is close cropped picture of Subatoi's small smile.
The ending theme plays over the credits, and Julian excitedly hits the next chapter button. He has an early shift. He can sleep in the afternoon. This is what Raktajino was invented for.
But nothing happens. He's kicked back to the table of contents.
That's all there is.
Message from [email protected]
Last message: >please dont contact me here, im sorry, it's not appropriate.
> New message: Hi Jaiyel, do you have chapter 38?? Please can you send it to me? Or give me the comnet address? I have to know what happens next!!! Thanks!!!
Message from [email protected]
Accept. Decline.
Open. Save to PADDstore.
>I owe you, Jaiyel. Thanks.
The final chapter is set entirely on the Defiant. A small skirmish injures Subatoi, and Aramis is caught dealing with a spy who tries to murder him for murdering Fukas. The lovers don’t appear in any scenes together until the end.
Julian holds his breath as he savours every scene, every thrill as the lovers come together. As he reaches the end, it feels like maybe it was all going to be for naught, that the classical Cardassian ending would prevail.
But he shouldn’t have been worried.
On the penultimate page, Subatoi is on duty, finally Chief Medical Officer, finally appreciated by his peers. A medal is pinned to his chest, and he has two pips on his collar. He is in the small sickbay, sorting supplies, when Aramis enters. An announcement over the comm says that they will be arriving at Cardassia Prime in five minutes.
They have a conversation, and it’s one that Julian had replayed in his mind for the last five years, that he can remember as if it was yesterday.
"I'm going to miss our lunches together." Aramis says, smile brave and wistful at the same time.
"I'm sure we'll see each other again." Subatoi replies, his smile still so damnedly kind after all these years.
"I'd like to think so... but one can never say. We live in uncertain times."
Julian turns the page and is presented a final tableau spread across the final two pages. The left side had a picture of Aramis and Subatoi entwined in the kiss to end all kisses. Aramis has his claws dug into Subatoi’s uniform like he never wants to let him go. Subatoi has both hands in Aramis’ hair, his eyes scrunched shut, kissing him like he’s heading to the firing squad.
The right page had the following in flowery Kardasi calligraphy.
The war was over. Their debts repaid, their bodies remade. Finally, in the same place, at the same time,
finally, free.
The taste of him was intoxicating, the feel of his body, even as the murmurs of the crew of the ship passing by and commenting filtered through their ears, it was perfect. A perfect moment, untouchable by reality, even though they both knew that it could never work - that their lives were different now. That they could have been something in another time, another place, in a timeless place of no war and no destruction. They both knew that Aramis must return to a Cardassia that needs him, and that Subatoi must grow in himself, let the scars of war heal.
They also knew that there would be a time when the stars would align, and they would know then that it was the right time for them to be together. A sign from beyond, in the casual remark of a stranger, that would allow a thought to grow in a fallow field, and the rose, dormant for so long, would finally bloom.
Until then, there would be this kiss.
The credits roll over a slideshow of the various lunches they had had in the 38 chapters, and finally ending on the kiss again, rose petals falling down the screen.
Slowly, Julian put down the PADD. He walked around his quarters, straightening everything, putting away clothes, turning off lights, until there was nothing out of place but himself. He got into bed, pulled the covers up, and instructed the computer to dim the lights.
It took him a long time to get to sleep.
It felt wrong for the alarm to sound the same, for the quality of light on the station to be so mundane after the emotional turmoil of the day before. He felt like he had been through some momentous event and lost something important, some secret bereavement, but no one seemed to notice. Sickbay was the same as usual, his staff competent and happy to take care of the normal quotidian injuries and illnesses while Julian wastes the day sitting morosely in his office, trawling the comnet and trying to get the hang of Kardasi slang on forums.
He misses lunch and would probably have “worked” straight through to dinner, had Jabara not knocked on his door and told him to get a meal in as an emergency surgical transport was coming up from Bajor with a priority one referral.
By the time he’s crammed a sandwich and slice of poka melon pie into himself, washed down with double strong, double sweet raktajino with speed that would make anyone make a pointed comment, the medical transport had docked, and his patient was being lifted onto the biobed.
Under the harsh lights of sickbay Jeiyal looks small and pale, her hands gripping her PADD in pain as it passes in waves through her body. She vomits, and shakes, and Julian works frantically to stabilise her tiny, frail, still famine-afflicted body. Eventually she stabilises, and as he’s programming the correct dose of anaesthetic to begin surgery she opens her eyes and smiles at him. “Hello Doctor Bashir. Did you enjoy chapter 38?” she whispers, before the hypospray does its job and the anaesthetic takes her under.
A category 4 scan reveals the usual tragedies of radiation damage, lungs tainted with dust and highlights the problem causing all of this to become urgent: a heart defect that opens and closes like a flower with every fourth beat. In isolation, each of these were things he could treat on DS9, possibly all of them if the patient were an otherwise healthy adult, but an ill child requires a specialised paediatric team, special treatment and family nearby. He tucks the PADD back in her sleeping arms and goes to make arrangements. When they ask who will be escorting her, he tells them he’ll go himself. Her chaperones are stuck on Bajor a three-hour flight away, and the sooner she gets to the hospital on Prime the better.
He arranges clearance, plots and logs a flight plan, and arranges cover for his shifts for the next week, and inside an hour, he and Jeiyal are inside the Seine, at Warp 5, heading for the Cardassia City Children’s Hospital.
Two days alone in a runabout with a sedated child is a lot of time to spend on your own, but Julian has enough work he’s neglected for the last two weeks to distract himself from thinking about heading to Cardassia, to where he assumes Garak is either being fed peeled grapes by a parade of nubile, twinky, hangers on, or in prison for outraging public decency. He manages to get through most of the actual unsorted monographs on his PADD by the time he enters the Cardassian system, and then it’s just a case of contacting the hospital, waiting for clearance, and then setting the runabout down in the sprawling capital space port, and preparing for site-to-site medical transport.
Julian hands Jeiyal over to the doctors at the children’s hospital, and then walks, blinking, into the stifling Cardassian night in record time. They made it in time. The head surgeon assured him that they had studied his scans and would get her into surgery as soon as she finished with him.
Outside the hospital Cardassia is warm and dry, good desert weather, and his uniform is far too thick. He should go back up to the runabout, sleep, maybe see some sights in the morning, then head back, but there’s something, some deeply held memory of warm nights like these, the novelty of being too warm. He connects to the comnet, pulls up a map on his PADD, and heads to the nearest guest house.
The local information says that sunset had been barely an hour ago, and despite the inky blackness it was still early evening. He has time, a free evening’s liberty. He ducks into a local convenience store and buys replicator time, so he can quickly order up a summer suit of long shirt, straight legged trousers and a pair of sandals. The suit is tight on his thighs but open on his chest, cut for the Cardassian body, but it is close enough for an evening and far better than wool gabardine. It takes him minutes to change in his hotel room before taking a long look in the mirror, running a hand over his hair, shrugging and heading out into the evening.
Like most desert cities, Cardassia City comes alive at night. The streets throng with people, shopping for pleasure, chatting with friends, eating and drinking at street stalls and little hole-in-the-wall restaurants. The city is brightly lit with signage, light pollution not a concern on a world where the daily weather report includes news of atmospheric debris and radioactivity levels. Every stall and shop is covered in bright signs in multitude of colours, and there’s a warm glow everywhere that says that they are alive, they made it, and they’re here to do business.
He wanders down the main street, his communicator tucked in his pocket for anonymity’s sake, revelling in the sights and sounds and imagining how Aramis felt the day he got back, how he would have felt to be finally warm again. Whether he would ever think of Subatoi again or put it all behind him. Eventually, Julian is distracted from his reverie as the narrow roads open out into the wide avenues flanking Cardassia city’s main square. Just a few years ago it would have had huge screens mounted into the curving, ornate brickwork, where Dukat spun lie after lie to the Cardassian people. The avenues were still lined with the heroic statuary of Guls past, but the gaps now filled with the symbols of the post-war movement. A large statue of Damar stands at the heart of the square, surrounded by abstract symbols of peace, of freedom, of hope.
On one side of the square Julian sees other humanoid faces. It is obviously a nicer part of the city that had been rebuilt early and therefore is likely that the embassies and Starfleet barracks are nearby, and so he turns his face and hurries away, wanting to preserve the anonymity of being a strange alien on an unfamiliar planet.
As he skirts the square though, it feels like he is running out of places to go. He knows from the news that five years on the impact of the bombardment and loss of life was still being keenly felt by the citizens of Cardassia, however much aid and help was being accepted, the priority was healthcare, housing and potable water over rebuilding pleasure palaces and intriguing little restaurants where you could wile away the hours.
He wished that he had been able to visit the old city. Wished that the war had never happened, felt bad for his nostalgia, his stupid, privileged yearning for a personally simpler time when he had a lot of important work to do. He’d never been without emergency rations, never been without a full med kit, hell, he’d never been thirsty for more than a few minutes in his whole bloody life! Who was he to be playing tourist?
As if the gods were listening, there suddenly was a crack of thunder, and a summer storm unloaded much needed rain on to the capital. Julian’s summer suit, chosen for the twin hot-weather virtues of being pale and flimsy, darts under the cover of a semi-bare tree and scans the shops for somewhere to wait it out. He can’t help but smile to himself when he spots that on the corner he had initially surveyed the square from, was a bookstore. There, on a huge screen on the side of it, were Aramis and Subatoi in all their war-torn glory; Subatoi’s scarred face, his sleeves pushed up to the elbow, hair artfully tousled, looking beautiful, fragile and tragic. Aramis standing a step behind him, looking hungry and yearning, his wide shoulders and pronounced ridges tapering down to a small waist exaggerated by his Gul’s armour.
Underneath, the sign read “NEW CHAPTER OUT NOW! READ THE EXCITING CONCLUSION TO THE ROSE OF TEROK NOR! SIGNED EDITIONS AVAILABLE!”
The rain seemed to subside for a moment, and seizing the opportunity, Julian ran like the wind and headed inside.
He didn’t want to appear zealous, so he didn’t rush to the first sales assistant and demand to know where he could find the Rose of Terok Nor section. He forced himself to appear like any other person sheltering from the rain, just another smooth-faced tourist looking at every floor of the enormous shop, picking up a few enigma tales and a special edition of The Never-Ending Sacrifice as souvenirs, really leaning into his adopted role.
Eventually though, he reached the top floor, which could probably be best described as a shrine. The space was large, and every angle from floor to ceiling was dedicated to Garak’s magnum opus. Posters hung from the ceiling, cut outs haunted the ends of every aisle, and in the middle of the floor were a stack of signed editions of the collected full story, signed by the artists, composers, animators, and the mysterious author, “Nom Sudo”.
He carefully slid one of the ornate boxes off the tall stack of them. The complete package, the sticker proclaimed, came complete with specially carved isolinear rods, designed especially to fit into a special edition reader with Terok Nor engraved on the back, a full colour printed paper art book of all the covers and tableau, and a huge, wall sized, picture of the final kiss, for you to hang on your wall and stare dreamily at.
He tucked it under his arm, and after a moment of hesitation, bought one for Jeiyal, too, for deniability.
There were quite a few people milling around, and so it takes a few minutes for him to reach the front of the queue. The sales assistant looks at him for a long moment, and then giggles behind her hand.
“Did anyone ever tell you that you look like Ensign Subatoi?” she said, as he handed over his credit chip.
“You’d be surprised,” he replied with a tight smile. “My…niece is obsessed.”
She handed back his haul inside a commemorative printed bag with Subatoi and Aramis on the front (the cover of chapter 12, Julian knew with resigned fanaticism).
“Are you here long?” the sales assistant replied. “Just, there’s a reading, a meet and greet and signing in an hour with the whole team. Would you like to buy a ticket? It’s almost sold out. Would be a great treat for your niece, to have her copies signed with a personalised message. I’m sure everyone would love to take a picture with you, looking so much like the lovely Subatoi.”
His heart feels like it’s in his throat. Serendipity grips him. He should say no, should end this farce. The sound of the rain has faded, it is probably about time to get some dinner, go back to his hotel, and leave early tomorrow as if none of this happened.
He buys a ticket. The reading is downstairs on the bottom floor, in the café. Outside the rain trickles to a stop, and Julian allows gravity to slowly guide him down to earth.
The signing feels like enemy territory. The room is full and loud, with seemingly everyone clutching some treasured tchotchke that had a pastiche of his and Garak’s face on it. He tries to sit as unobtrusively as possible, hiding himself in the worst seat in the house, half-hidden behind a set of speakers, barely able to see. He watches it fill up from behind his PADD, making sure not to catch the eye of anyone, trying his best to be invisible. He expected it to be mostly teenage girls, but it seems to be a pretty good representation of Cardassian society. He’s not even the only off-worlder, a few embassy staff standing in a cluster on the other side of the room, peering at him curiously.
The crowd were mostly women, but that is how it is now, there were so many men lost in the war, and of course, the topic, but there are men here too, ones who look like they saw battle. Men holding hands, men standing too close, and men looking like they didn’t want to be mistaken for lovers.
He’s lucky, by the time the host steps up to begin his introduction, that the room is packed, and no one is looking at the strange human in the corner.
“Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming to Charisma Bookshop, and to this talk from the production team of The Rose of Terok Nor! We’re so pleased to announce that we have the whole team, including a first public appearance of the author, Mister Nom Sudo himself! Now, I’m not going to keep you waiting, so please put your hands together and welcome them onto the stage!”
The team files in quickly in single file across the rug laid down for the occasion. The composer and her assistant are introduced to much whooping, but it is immediately drowned out by the screams for the line artist, then the conceptual artist, the colourist, their assistants and the art director herself. By the time the main headline artists come out the place is in a frenzy, and finally, the writer is announced, and Julian jumps to his feet to get a better look.
The author was the only man on the team. He came out, black hair slicked back, smiling, bowing, waving back to the screaming crowd. He was fashionably dressed, but in Federation style, and while his hair was sleek and black, it was cut short. He wore eyeglasses and seemed to need them the way he peered at the crowd. He was tall and of medium build, famine thin and unscarred, the look of a man who managed to stay on planet during the war. Of all the Cardassians Julian had met, Sudo Nom looked more like a shorter version of Damar than anyone else.
It wasn’t Garak.
He had to get out.
While everyone was stood up and applauding, he took the opportunity to slink out the back, as if suddenly aware he was in the wrong place. No one noticed or cared. The applause echoed through the building as he scuttled away until it finally calmed down, and the announcement came for everyone to retake their seats.
The main doors of the bookstore were locked, and all the staff were in the crowd, and so it took a few minutes of searching for Julian to find himself an exit. Thankfully, an emergency exit had been propped open slightly with a hard-backed copy of the never-ending sacrifice, and Julian slipped out easily through the gap. He stepped into the sweltering Cardassian night, thinking of nothing but getting back to the runabout and forgetting that any of this had ever happened.
The only thing that hindered him in his flawless escape plan was that he suddenly tripped over Garak, who was crouching by the emergency exit doing a great impression of someone who had been listening at the door.
“Garak! What? How did you know I’d be here?” Julian started, before cutting himself off.
Garak wasn’t paying attention to him, instead brushing off his now dusty jacket with a look that said that the insult to the fabric hurt more than any physical wound. He sighed deeply, and straightened his tunic, before smiling at Julian as if they’d just run into each other on the promenade a decade ago.
Garak looked well. His hair was longer, but well cut in a fashionable style. His skin looked burnished, the subtle gleam that functioned as a Cardassian tan across his face and neck ridges. He looked hale and hearty and well rested.
He also looked guilty as sin.
They stared at each other for a long moment, inadvertently reproducing an exact panel from chapter 23, had anyone been around to notice.
“I beg your pardon, Doctor, I was distracted there. What are you doing on Prime?”
“What am I doing? What are you doing? Why are you listening by the door?”
“Well, it is embarrassing, I had neglected to purchase a ticket, so popular this story is! It completely sold out. What a terrible oversight, it has been advertised everywhere for weeks, but one is so busy these days. It appears that a seat has now become available, so maybe I’ll just let myself inside.”
Julian grabbed his arm, stopping him from moving.
“Leave off it, Garak. There were tickets left when I bought one an hour ago. How did you know I was here?”
“You? Why doctor, I had no idea you were on Prime.”
Julian scoffed. “Of course, you knew I was here, oh I suspect this whole farce was for me, hm? Some kind of trap? Maybe you were supposed to be doing the talk but then saw me and decided to play a trick? Who am I kidding, it’s been five years, you’re probably running the place by now. Never one to be too long in the shadows, hm?”
Garak looks genuinely shocked. “My dear, what an imagination you have. Have you considered writing any of these ideas down as some kind of narrative?”
“Garak!” Julian said, tightening his grip.
“No, my dear, I am telling the truth. Shall I address each of your accusations one by one? First, I’d make a terrible Castellan, Cardassia is a different place now, no need for men like me. No, just a private citizen these days, unconnected to our faithful civil servants, just a mildly successful tailor and occasional author, mere scribbles really, nothing more scandalous. I had no idea you were on planet. You should have sent me a message, rather than trip over me in the street. People will talk should they end up finding two confirmed bachelors in a side-street off Freedom square arguing passionately.”
“You really didn’t know?” It did seem a bit farfetched, the more he thought about it.
“I am as I always was my dear, just plain and simple Garak, at your service.”
“Not so plain now” Julian ripostes, as he goes to touch the sleeve of the jacket, hesitates, and instead deliberately and daringly firmly grips the soft fabric at the shoulder ridge and leaves his hand there. “This is Tholian Silk, if I’m not mistaken.”
Garak’s eyes burn with the blatant come on (taken straight from chapter 2), “Very good, Doctor. You have been paying attention. And you seem to have gained some ability to pick clothes for yourself in my absence. A little revealing, and the fabric is not rain safe, you could do with a tailor to advise you. Those hems! They look like they were replicated by a child. DS9 must be in sartorial chaos without my guidance.”
“You should -” Julian starts, but he stops himself, shaking his head. “No, you shouldn’t come back. It’s selfish for me to even think it. You belong here, you earned it. You did your time, you deserve to be back where you belong.”
“You are kind to say that, my dear.”
“I mean it.” Julian smiled, squeezing his hand slightly, and Garak made a small humming noise in the back of his throat, and then shifted the muscles enough to make Julian let go.
“How long are you here my dear? Have you time for dinner? There is a place nearby that I always dreamed of taking you.”
“I’m due back on DS9 in three days, so I need to leave at the latest…tomorrow morning. If you have the time, maybe you could show me the sights?”
“My dear doctor, it would be my pleasure.” Garak replies, eyes smiling but inscrutable.
Garak links their arms together, and then leads him on a merry, meandering path through the city, before ushering Julian into a small alcove that seemed indistinguishable from any other. Inside are just a couple of tables, and a heavily burnished man with a large scar across his right eye-ridge sitting at the back, playing a card game with his kitchen staff.
There’s something about this place that eats at Julian as he takes his first sip of the bottle of good kanar the chef finds for them. There’s something about the orientation of the table, the shape of the room, the way the chairs feel against his body. It feels like if he closed his eyes, and slipped between the atoms of time, he would be sitting in exactly the right place so that when he’d open his eyes he’d be in the replimat, nearly a decade ago, the Garak in front of him paler, more devious and impossibly, aching, clawingly sad.
And apparently burning with lust for Julian’s flat face, lanky body, and secret, impossible gayness.
Garak orders for them, and all the awkwardness Julian had worried about melts away. The food is good, the company is better, and this time, Garak finishes his meal before him.
The sun is rising when they leave the restaurant, full and satisfied.
As they walk back towards the space port, Julian decides to go for it. All the subtle cues he’d missed over the years, now so carefully explained to him and obvious as the nose on his face. The language of the second tongue was an important subplot that was carefully explained in the story, that most flirting was done through that, while the mouth keeps up appearances. The evening had been like a final exam in the seduction of Garak that Julian thinks he’s done okay on, but he doesn’t want to mistake his ganglions this time round.
“Where are you staying?” Garak asks. Julian watches, but his second tongue, which would be indicating “take me to your bed, it’s been thirteen years, I’m gagging for it, you fragile, beautiful rose” is keeping shtum. He looks relaxed and happy, innocent and blank as a child.
It throws Julian for a moment, before he recovers enough to reply without a pause. “Just nearby actually. I should get my things, if I’m going to go tonight, I mean, this morning.”
“Lead on, doctor.”
The guest house security guard nods at them, and they climb the narrow stairs up away from street level, to where it is still cool and quiet. Garak follows him into his unused room, instead of waiting outside.
Impulsively, Julian changes out of his dusty clothes and back into his uniform without pausing for modesty. Changing in front of Garak is painfully erotic, how Julian gets his trousers done up is a testament to Federation weavers, but Garak still, still, doesn’t make a move. He doesn’t even flick his eyes downward.
Aramis would have looked, Julian thinks as he gathers the last of his things. The room itself seems sad when they move to leave. The bed looks inviting, wide and soft enough to get lost in or to find someone in.
His reflection is scowling when he checks his hair on the way out.
He checks out, pays his bill, and they walk down the street to the star port. It takes just a few minutes for Julian to log his flight plan with the controller, be given a take-off slot and then, it’s just a few steps together to the runabout.
“This is me”, he says, uselessly, as if he wasn’t standing in front of the stencilled “USS SEINE, UNITED FEDERATION OF PLANETS” hull. “Property of Federation Starbase Deep Space Nine” framed his right side.
“I see,” is all Garak says.
The tension between them is thick enough that Julian feels it is unlikely the runabout could even take off for the friction. It is ridiculous. It's glorious. Julian hardly feels like he’s breathing.
“I’ve really enjoyed…thank you. I’ll miss you.” He forces himself to make eye contact, steady and sure even as his voice struggles.
“I’m sure we’ll see each other again” Garak says, wistfully, tauntingly, looking away coyly and something inside Julian just snaps.
“Oh, fuck that” he snarls, and wrenches Garak in for a kiss worthy of a two-page spread, digging his fingernails into the silk hard enough to leave dents in the fabric.
Many, many minutes later, once they had stumbled inside the Runabout and closed the door behind them, his take off slot very much missed, Julian catches his breath and tries to get his bearings.
Which is hard now he is lying in Garak’s arms, which are extremely strong and unwilling to let go.
“How did you know?” he says.
Garak huffs, “My dear, you will have to be more specific. How did I know what?”
“Just, all of it. That I’d respond.”
“Honestly, Julian, you didn’t. You really are remarkably obtuse. You’d write letters every now and then, asking endlessly how I was, fishing for gossip about a planet that has had enough of intrigue, and being polite and genial and so Starfleet I wanted to fly right over there and argue it out of you. So, it was inevitable.”
“Inevitable that you’d write a fictionalised story of our non-existent tragic and epic love?”
“Yes. Did you learn nothing from all the literature I introduced you to? Did you never look up the authors themselves? Did you not know that the romantic epic is the ultimate seduction meta-tale in Cardassian meta-fiction? And to think that despite that, it still took four years to get your attention. The Rose of Terok Nor has been at the top of the bestseller lists for all but a few months, I’m in final negotiations for a holoseries adaptation now the studios are rebuilt, and I’ve finished the story. I was tempted to drag it out a bit longer, but honestly, poor Mister Nom would have been attacked in the street had they not finally got together.”
“Is that the end of the story?” Julian asks. “The true end? They have that one, perfect kiss, and then go their separate ways?” Is that our ending, he doesn’t ask.
He feels Garak’s chuckle as much as hears it. “You tell me, dear Doctor. How does the story end?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they never see each other again. Maybe that kiss was enough. The war changed them, it changed everything. Maybe they meet again in a few years, share a bottle of kanar, a great meal and some spice pudding, talk about all the things that have changed, and then go back to their lives.”
Garak sits up from his half recline so he can better reach out and grope Julian’s face, and not in the sexy way. He shakes his head, “No, no hidden ridges. How macabre, my dear, a positively Cardassian ending. I thought you’d say “Of course Subatoi changes his mind, leaves with Aramis and they live happily ever after in the presidential palace, raising a dozen war orphans”, not crib the ending from “Give My Regards to Your Mother”.
Julian laughs, “I never even read that one.”
They sit, quietly, for a moment before Julian breaks the silence. “Things have changed so much. Five years. I don’t even know what I want anymore.”
“I want…” Garak starts, and then stops and shakes his head. “No, forgive me.”
“Garak, please, what do you want?”
“I want you to stay. I want you to come here and live here. Do what you need to do, work at a hospital, be a Federation liaison, I don’t care. Come and live in my apartment, annoy me, infuriate me, love me, touch me, be mine. For all those long years I yearned for nothing but my home, familiar and warm, that specific quality of light, it was all I ever wanted. And now I am on Cardassia, I should be satisfied. I am a respected member of society again, I am a wealthy man. I could have anything I want, I have everything I want that can be bought, silks and velvets and the like, everything except for you. I cannot buy you, and I did not want to tempt you with intrigue and spy fictions and state secrets, even though I know that secrets are impossibly tempting for you, so I used the other secret, the one that I had held for thirteen years, and now, here you are.”
There really wasn’t anything to do but kiss him, again, and whisper his answer against his mouth.
Longer minutes, maybe even best part of an hour later, and the runabout is strewn with clothing and Julian has some interesting rug burns from the rough, serviceable, evil Federation carpet and a great sense of internal happiness.
“How rich are you?” he asks, staring up at the runabout’s ceiling, curiosity and the silk shirt he is using as a pillow eroding the edges of his socialist utopian upbringing.
“Quite filthily, my darling.” Garak says, above him. He extends a hand down to help him up, and wraps Julian’s spent, exhausted body in a freshly replicated robe. “Wealthy to the point where Quark has been offering his financial services and I worry that I might have to take him up on them. It’s extremely vexing managing such obscene sums myself. Obviously as a good citizen, I invest in public programs, vaccinations, youth programmes, training up the new generation, for example.” He looked at Julian meaningfully, eye ridges raised as if Julian had missed a great big clue.
The bottom dropped out of Julian’s stomach.
“No, you restarted the Order, didn’t you? And... kids, oh god, Jaiyal? Is she with the Order? Did you set this up?”
“My dear, no, calm down, I thought I made clear, any setup was a deep romantic gesture borne out of dangerous levels of romanticism and unrequired love. You really are still so conspiratorial minded. She is my niece. My father’s legitimates did manage to spawn eventually, and so when all my secrets came out after the war, her mother tracked me down. I am no longer last of the line of Tain. She is family. I have a family.” He sounds a bit stunned himself, to be saying it.
Julian’s already wobbly legs properly melted. “Family. Garak that’s wonderful!”
And then realised – “Oh god, I forgot to go by and see how she is. And give her the collection. Can you give it to her? From me?”
“Give it to her yourself. Jaiyal and her mother come for dinner once a week. I’m sure she’ll be thrilled that you’re here.”
Later, as he prepares to return to DS9 very, very behind schedule (as the Captain did not accept “I’m resigning my commission for love, you’ll need a new CMO as I’m basically coming back to pick up my stuff” as a joyous event to give to give him a free runabout), Julian opens up the collection of The Rose of Terok Nor and notices the new inscription on the opening page.
“To Julian Bashir,
So, come with me where dreams are born, and time is never planned. Just think of happy things and your heart will fly on wings forever in never never land.
Yours,
Aramis
And as he powers up the engines, completes his pre-flight checks, he laughs, sets the computer to the first star on the right, and straight on til morning.
Epilogue
“They were right about you” the tall “human” man on the screen spat at the ruggedly handsome Cardassian actor playing Aramis. The makeup they had used to hide the actor’s ridges was good, in that it gave him the weird, alien look that had so endlessly been described in the original story, like someone had carefully and precisely filled in a Cardassian face with light brown putty.
Subatoi turned and cried a single tear that seemed to squirt out thanks to the nature of his makeup, and walks off down the hallway set as the camera lingered on Aramis’ handsome anguish for a full ten, unmoving seconds.
“Can I sue them?” Julian complained, lying in Garak’s arms in front of the holoscreen in Garak’s, their, lavish apartment. He had been sitting at the other end of the couch, but then when he had tried to leave at the first sight of Subatoi’s weird, plasticky face, Garak had resorted to holding him down, which had meant they had missed much of the first act.
“Don’t be ridiculous” Garak replied. “There’s no way that makeup could be considered a reasonable likeness. I should sue them for such an unreasonable level of artistic licence though. I was explicit in the text that Aramis was from the Northern Continent, and that accent is distinctly Southern.”
“They used all your dialogue.”
“Yes, but there is such a thing as soul, my dear. How disappointing. I’m sure it’ll do fabulously.”
The credits roll, and Julian swings his legs over, straddling Garak’s lap. “It wasn’t that bad” he whispers between kisses. “He may be the weirdest looking officer in Starfleet, but Aramis still loves him.”
“Aramis is a fool”.
“So is Subatoi, they’re perfect for each other.”
“My dear, this is getting too, how do you put it, X rated. You know Jeiyal will be calling momentarily to dissect it with you.”
“Think of it as research for the remixes…yes, I know you write them. I think I deserve some of the royalties now it’s not just my face you’re appropriating.”
“What’s mine is yours, my love” Garak demurs, his hands slipping below Julian’s waistband with practiced insouciance. “That’s what those little rings meant, you know. I made sure the judge explained it to you properly.”
“Shut up and kiss me, you Cardassian brute”.
“As you wish, Federation fool.”