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At some point after the Promenade had gone the wrong kind of quiet, the rest of Deep Space Nine caught up with it--the food, from Quark’s replicated fare to the gagh, tasted off, the usual hymns from Bajoran services held a different melody, and Bashir stared at the ceiling of his quarters well into the early hours of the night with an odd pit digging into his stomach. He was in his bunk alone, because at some other point, he and Ezri stopped coming back to the same bed after their stints in the holosuite.
Only his noticing the shifts was abrupt. Logically, he knew they couldn’t have happened overnight--they’d piled up, one after the other, just as his shore leave hours had during the war with the Dominion and afterward, and only one of those was useful.
So he packed a bag. Said some see you in a bits to Ezri and Kira and Quark and Kasidy, and Jake standing at his old childhood spot where the view of the wormhole traffic was best. Tried to ignore the weight of the other farewells a part of him still expected to give: to Captain Sisko and Odo, however they learned to exist; to the O’Briens, whose correspondence had grown so irregular that Bashir could stick his whole head through the gaps; to Worf and Jadzia, because he still thought of them as a pair, even now, even when he saw Worf on the news and he caught a familiar glint in Ezri’s smirk over dinner.
To Garak. But he didn’t let himself linger.
He didn’t linger on Garak, but he did at the bar on Risa his first night away from the station, because where else would Julian Bashir end up on shore leave? It had to be expected by then--he could imagine it so clearly, stepping off the shuttle at the end of his sabbatical, Kira asking if Risa had gotten sick of him after all that time. He ignored that his mental image of her had shorter hair than she’d had in years, that the thought of more than a day on Risa added another thick layer onto the pit poisoning his gut.
Four electric-blue cocktails into the night, a Tarkalean woman struck up a conversation that wove from the perfect weather to an invitation back to her room faster than Bashir could track. Someone spooling out charming sentences at warp factor, that was new, or maybe it felt new because it had been so long--but he didn’t have time to toss the idea from palm to palm. The enormous room was already plastered with bodies at various stages of undress, and Bashir wasn’t so drunk that he couldn’t reasonably deny himself this.
So he stayed, wrapped himself around the Tarkalean woman and a handful of others he scarcely paid attention to as their limbs pushed and pulled, and at some point he found himself under a beautiful human man with jet black skin and a grin so disarming Bashir was sure it could have ended the war on its own. And he wasn’t drunk, he sensed the four cocktails had flushed out of his system when he slipped out for a glass of water, so there was nothing to point to but himself when he pulled their mouths together, carefully relishing the slow pull of the man’s tongue against his own, the sharpness of his stubble. Other hands and fingers tugged for his attention, vainly. He whined into the man’s ear, and he held him through it.
The next morning, ignoring the four different dark spots on his neck and the vague headache behind his eyes, Bashir sent out comms to the last known number Garak had given him.
“My dear doctor!” The voice on the other line sparkled in a way Bashir could almost see, but could definitely feel in the bruises the man had left on his hips the night before. “It’s been so long since we’ve had a real conversation. I was beginning to worry you had forgotten how. What--”
“Where are you?” Bashir said. He was sure to get an earful about interrupting later, but he would manage. “And if I were to show up, that wouldn’t be a…”
“If you were going to say ‘an inconvenience,’ please spare yourself. It’s nothing of the sort. The last few years have--if you’ll spare me a moment of true honesty--quite bleak, and I can think of no better remedy than your presence.”
The location he sent to his PADD’s inbox was nowhere on Cardassia or any planets of the surrounding system, some system far off in a corner of Federation space in the Beta quadrant Bashir didn’t recognize. But Risa had a shuttle service to a station offering flights there, so it was far from impossible, like so many theoretical day trips could be.
He slept the entire trip, scenes of separate dreams crossing and weaving over each other. Ezri and Miles flanked him in the spy holosuite program, and the man from before was kissing his neck, undoing the crisp bowtie, except when he looked back he saw a Trill--Jadzia’s smirk and Ezri’s hold of the shoulders along the same man’s face, the characteristic spots still light tan trailing down to his collarbone. Miles standing beside him all the while, watching, inscrutable. The spy drama shifted someplace warmer, humid, dimly lit. A baseball laid at his feet, factory-new, and when he knelt to pick it up, that pit in his stomach glowed hot. A physical ailment he’d missed, brushed off.
And then the shuttle was landing.
The landing pad was the only one of its kind attached to the small settlement, where both the attempt at a port and the walls to the town had started to endure the wear of the native flora. The materials were recognized as state-of-the-art at some point in Bashir’s lifetime, but the vines along the ground were thick, studded with curved thorns primed to claw their way in and stay there.
Garak, as Bashir had assumed, lived elsewhere. While the rest of the passengers filed out into the town’s main thoroughfare, he followed his scanner’s directions toward a thin trailhead in the surrounding forest, diverting sharply into the thicket after twenty minutes. Another five minutes, and ne nearly walked straight into the house’s front door.
Instead, he walked straight into Garak, who must have heard him coming.
“Dense underbrush is a perfect alarm system,” he said. He made no move to put an extra few inches of distance between them, seemingly content to have this close-up view of Bashir’s first hint of a wrinkle, their noses nearly pressed together. “It’s wonderful to see you.”
And Garak didn’t hug, he wasn’t a man for hugs--a carefully placed hand somewhere between the shoulder and elbow, maybe along the base of the neck if the replimat had served up something that could pass for organic. Today, though, now he hugged, arms squeezing around Bashir’s thin frame in a way that only felt familiar.
He sank into it, latched his hands onto the back of Garak’s bony shoulders.
“Before you ask, no, I’m not coming back to Deep Space Nine,” he said. “I don’t care how many Starfleet officers need their pants hemmed.”
“That’s not it--”
“Let me have a joke once in a while, doctor. Now, come inside before the polyspiders get in.”
*
The house was spliced between an almost Earth-like sense of rustic historicity and eclectic modern pieces from across the galaxy--the dining room table looked hand-crafted, a replicator sitting on the counter just behind it, while a near greenhouse’s worth of plants dotted windowsills and hung from the ceiling over furniture in a den that was influenced by what could only be Cardassia’s version of cubism.
Garak immediately guided Bashir to a seat at the table, one just as handmade and creaking under the slightest shift of his body. He watched him flit around the kitchen, searching through cabinets and drawers for first a set of glasses, then a flash of Saurian brandy, and then for who knew what.
At last, his eyes fell upon a beige lump on the far counter, closest to the door. “You caught me in the middle of kneading,” he said. He held the knob of dough in one hand for Bashir to see, and the little bit of sense he’d teased out of the entire situation fell to pieces. “It tastes so much better than replicated bread, trust me. I just need to get this set aside properly and… there.”
“You… bake?” Even Captain Sisko, without question the best chef that had ever stepped foot on the station, had never ventured with flour anywhere further than the roux for his jambalaya.
“What else was I supposed to do here? Wait for you at the window?”
Bashir only just began to formulate a response when he was presented with a heaving glass of brandy.
Garak lowered himself into the chair beside him, dusting the remaining flour on his hand onto his pants knee. His glass of brandy was an entire finger fuller than Bashir’s.
“You were… waiting for me?” Bashir finally managed.
“A figure of speech, doctor, that’s all,” he said, taking a long sip. “Now tell me: how is the station? What brings you here, and so suddenly? You said you came from Risa?”
The rise of his eyebrows--or what acted as such for Cardassians--rose suggestively, and Bashir saw the grinning face of his mystery man behind his eyes again, fought him away before there was evidence of it on his face.
“I’m sure I’m plenty interesting,” Bashir said, “but you… whatever happened to Cardassia? You’re light years away from Union borders, and after they welcomed you back--”
“Sometimes fantasies are better off unfulfilled.” He held his glass of brandy as if waiting for a toast, pointedly staring at Bashir even as he felt his brow knotting.
“Right.” Their glasses clinked, liquor burned the backs of their throats, and the afternoon trekked onward.
The local sun inched further toward the horizon, the brandy drained from their glasses, and they each told the most innocuous tales from the last couple years to keep the conversation flowing on in a steady stream.
Garak had a garden around the back of his home until a herd of local porcine fauna trampled and devoured it whole that first spring.
Some dimensional anomaly passed through Deep Space Nine and rendered all phaser and photon weapons useless, choosing to possess Quark in a desperate bid for the Federation to recognize their people.
A species of giant flowering plant gained electromagnetic powers during solar eclipses, an event that happened only every few centuries, and Garak was the only person on-planet who could reverse the effects in the port settlement.
Solok returned to the station hoping for a baseball rematch and was forced to stay longer than he intended when the holosuites malfunctioned in such a way that grounded all the ships.
“Vic Fontaine was able to roam the Promenade,” Bashir said, “so at least it wasn’t boring.”
“You know, I don’t think I ever made my way to his little supper club.”
“Really?”
“Didn’t see the appeal.”
“I think you would’ve had a good time.”
Garak knocked back another finger of brandy, keeping an eye on his own hand as he brought the glass back down to the table, a nail dragging against its edge.
The conversation quickly turned to the latest Earth novel Garak had read, which Bashir had some passing familiarity with, so they managed to fall into something comfortable. The space was warm, and Bashir would have been content to stay there for days, even with Garak arguing him into a corner. The back-and-forth continued as Garak stood to return to his bread, knocking the air out of what had apparently been the first rise, shaping into something precise before leaving it alone again, refilling both their glasses again, redirecting them to the oddly-shaped couch on the opposite side of the house.
“But tell me about you,” Garak said. “You’ve told me about Dax and Kira and what’s left of the Siskos. What are you doing with yourself?”
“Being a doctor. That’s it, really.” It slipped off his tongue before he had a chance to think about it.
When he allowed himself that chance, all he could think about was this: the hollow left by the absence of Ezri on the other side of the bed, the different sort of chasm that formed when he finally accepted that Miles wasn’t just down the hall, the loneliness he’d come to accept as his due even before the edges grew sharper under a different, post-war Deep Space Nine. He’d welcomed the loneliness before Ezri, before Miles had accepted the position on Earth, before he’d thought to dream of a life standing beside his genetically-enhanced peers.
When he thought of loneliness, of fighting off that chilling tinge, Bashir thought of the man on Risa. He thought of Garak.
“Are you sure about that?” Garak said, quiet.
Bashir sighed. “Tell me about this bread you’re making.”
It was a whole wheat bread, and he twisted in some of the locally-made soft cheese before the second rise and putting it in the oven, but the dilemmas over moisture and how it affected bake time could only take so long to explain.
Garak didn’t sigh, though he looked like he wanted to. He transferred the worked dough into the makeshift oven and turned back to Bashir, still seated at the table. “Tell me about this latest trip to Risa.”
“I don’t know,” Bashir said carefully. “It just seemed like the right first stop when you hadn’t taken shore leave in as long as I have.”
Leaning against the counter, careful not to bump against the settings on his oven, Garak studied him like--Bashir couldn’t pinpoint exactly what. There was too much affection in his gaze for it to be some leftover of his time in the Obsidian Order, but the steely sheen was impossible to ignore. He was searching for something specific, behind the fronts Bashir offered up.
“What that tells me is you didn’t plan,” Garak said finally. “You were acting on impulse. And your impulse brought you here.” He gestured to the kitchen, arms extended wide from his body, but he might as well have been point back to himself.
“As did yours, at some point.” At that, Garak’s grin wilted. It wasn’t that Bashir wanted to lob the questioning back on him so immediately, but he’d realized the excuse he’d queued up was far from the truth. It was closer to come here than to go all the way to Earth to see Miles and my parents. No, the trip to Earth from Risa took a third of the time and used a nicer fleet of shuttles.
“Well…even if you do make plans, sometimes they change themselves.”
“Not without help, I imagine?”
“Not from me.” Garak turned, switching on the oven light to squint at the bread through the door window.
“Very mysterious.”
“You’re one to talk, doctor.”
Garak returned to his seat, having deftly positioned himself to be a few inches closer, pouring them both more brandy as their knees pressed together. This many glasses deep, neither of them had run dry, but he wasn’t going to risk it.
One aspect of their many lunches together at the replimat that Bashir had always returned to was how the chatter never stopped--someone was always going on about something, even if one of them had a cheek full of salad or sandwich--so the pauses, the lulls here on this new planet in this new house that he could hardly recognize as Garak’s, they were a weight. They pressed the pit in his stomach like a hot brand.
They both stared at each other over the lips of their glasses, slowly letting the synthehol pour into them one spine knot at a time. Half of Bashir’s glass was gone by the time he set it back on the table, and more of Garak’s sloshed over the edge as he tugged it from his grasp, barely letting it land upright on the floor before he took Garak’s face in both hands and kissed him.
Garak whined into his mouth, wound his hands into Bashir’s hair, taking hold at the nape of his neck like he was fighting the pull of an airlock, or some terrible astral anomaly, or simply the way the galaxy flung everything apart as the eons spun on. His skin was rough under his lips but welcome; Garak pressed his tongue forward and Bashir welcomed that too, leaned into it, ran a hand down Garak’s chest until it caught at his hip and he felt him pull back.
Garak’s breath, a shallow panting, left the small space between them humid and charged. “I--my dear doc… my dear,” he said, each syllable handled as delicately as glass. “Don’t make me burn my bread.”
“I’ll rebake it myself,” Bashir said, ducking his head to tuck his tongue under the angular ridge of Garak’s shoulder.
“You--ah… you’re good at many things, dear, b-but…”
Bashir’s universal translator struggled to interpret the string of Cardăsda that followed, a garbled mess of tones cracking like a pubescent human.
“But what?”
Garak splayed a hand on Bashir’s chest, pushed him back from his neck and then further, further, down until he was laid back against the sofa cushions where he could straddle him properly, knees pressed into his ribs. “Julian…”
His name fell from Garak’s mouth softly, affectionate notes curled around every vowel, every stretch of skin where Bashir felt the chilled line of his thumbnail trace his cheekbone. “...I think I became too lost in thought,” he sighed, leaning down to kiss the corner of Bashir’s mouth. “Just know I am going to ravish you.”
His skin burned as Garak began to methodically pull him apart, and there was that odd familiarity again, as if something about this was long overdue. The vague ache in his muscles abated, the pit in his stomach shrinking the longer Garak laved attention onto his bare skin. He missed this, somehow, what he’d never had, an absent and necessary piece in the warmth that permeated the station amid a terrible war--some deeper thrum of the galaxy offering an apology, one he would gladly take.