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Since the age of fifteen, when he had learned what he was, Julian had pushed every boundary of his body, trying to find the limits that made him human, made him real. He tested what would happen if he denied himself food and water, first for only one day, then two, then three. He gave himself spinal disc herniation when the weights he lifted finally became too heavy, fainted on a track when he’d finally run for too long. He tried raktajino for the first time not on the station, but on Earth, pumping himself full of caffeine to see if he really needed sleep. (He did, but less than he thought. He could function just as well on a few hours as on a supposedly necessary seven.)
It worried his parents, of course. Too many trips to a doctor might have caused someone to become suspicious and look more closely. They told him to stop. The secret needed to be protected.
He hadn’t stopped. He had simply started to learn how to heal himself—and speedily, too.
Sex became a coping mechanism at the Academy, chasing an orgasm that could shut his mind down, turn off the eternally calculating parts of his brain tracking am I doing this right? Is this what someone normal would be like? Something about focusing on someone else’s body helped him forget about his own, at least for a little while. He took alien lovers exclusively, people who wouldn’t know enough to realize if he was something more or less than human.
Taking a Cardassian lover, it turned out, broke Julian into the pieces that made him feel whole. Garak was brutally demanding, expecting exacting literary analysis while buried so deep inside that Julian thought his body would come apart, and it was exactly what Julian wanted, needed, craved.
Maybe it wasn’t healthy, but Julian didn’t care. He reveled in being broken, in the reminder that he could still break, and that to do so was his own choice.
Julian had not yet met a challenge he wouldn’t push his body into, a limit he wouldn’t test.
That was why he had asked. And Garak had agreed.
---
It began in a room that was cold and bright and bare. Julian had expected a space designed for Cardassian comfort, hot and humid and dark. But that didn’t make sense, did it? They wouldn’t want a Cardassian prisoner comfortable, after all.
The only furniture was the chair to which Julian was bound. His ankles were cuffed to the legs, and a length of chain pulled his wrists forward, connected to a ring on the floor. It forced him into a hunched position, preventing him from being able to truly examine his surroundings. The main impression of what he could see was monotonous gray metal off which the light glinted harshly. The ring was the only variation on the smooth surface. He wondered if that made it easier to clean up the blood, if there were no seams or divots for the liquid to collect in. Julian had assumed based on the station, with its ledge on every doorway and inexplicably carpeted Infirmary, that Cardassian architecture always featured textures. This room was proving him wrong.
There was no table and spotlight lamp like in the crime dramas Odo preferred, no convoluted machinery connected to diabolical plots that a Bond villain would use. Only Julian, the chair, the chains, and the interrogator, slowly circling Julian in a measured circuit, as if he had all the time in the world.
“What do you want?” Julian demanded when he couldn’t bear it any longer and the weight of waiting was about to crack him in half.
“That’s not what you’re supposed to say. Mind the script. You’re meant to remind me of your rank and status as a Federation citizen. I’d hate to think you were neglecting your duty as a Starfleet officer.”
It was what Julian was supposed to say, but now that he had been reminded, he didn’t want to. Now if he did, it would be following Cardassian orders.
That was the point, of course. To take away his power, his choice.
“Rank, lieutenant. Federation citizen,” Julian spat, as the interrogator moved behind him.
“Very good,” the voice purred. “I hope you’ll continue to be so obedient, Lieutenant.”
Garak’s low, sultry voice brought back a flood of sense memory that slithered in a slow, delicious shiver down Julian’s spine. It was a voice he associated with gasping and grasping in a twisted tangle of sheets sticky with sweat—not this barren, frigid room.
“What do you want?” Julian repeated hoarsely.
A warm puff of breath in his ear answered. “It’s not what I want, Doctor. It’s what Cardassia wants.”
“What does Cardassia want, then?”
Garak prowled to the front again, where Julian could see him.
“To know why the Federation is sending spies into our midst, and such obvious ones.”
Julian glared back defiantly.
“I’m not a spy.” He hadn’t shared his chosen backstory with Garak, but he had expected that would be the first thing Garak went for, knowing their shared history.
Garak clucked his tongue and shook his head.
“Exactly what a spy would say,” he said, sounding disappointed, as if he had expected better. He leaned down and idly fingered the shackles at Julian’s wrists. “I hope you’re comfortable, Lieutenant. You may be here for quite some time.”
“Have you informed my commanding officer that you’ve kidnapped me?”
“Kidnapped is an ugly word. You’ve been detained for questioning.” Garak’s hand traveled from the chain up Julian’s torso to his face, cupping his chin. “Luckily, I’m the one assigned to interrogate you. Not everyone is as kind as I am.”
“I’m waiting to see the kind part.” Julian ground the words out, forcing himself to ignore the gentle touch below his mouth.
Garak’s thumb pulled at Julian’s lower lip, exposing the row of teeth.
“I haven’t had your molar taken yet,” he pointed out.
Julian parted his lips more, and Garak pushed his thumb inside, tracking the movements of Julian’s mouth with dark, greedy eyes. Julian sucked and watched Garak’s expression, noting the slight intake of breath, a rumble in his throat that might have been the beginnings of a moan.
Then he captured Garak’s thumb between his teeth and bit down as hard as he could.
Garak hissed and yanked his hand back. Julian made a show of ducking his chin to wipe his mouth on the edge of his uniform.
“Cardassia doesn’t get my teeth,” he said.
Garak’s eyes narrowed. This would be the moment, Julian thought. It hadn’t been a real challenge yet, but maybe this was where it would turn, stretching him thin enough to snap, how far can this body go?
Instead, unexpectedly, Garak chuckled.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” he said, voice incongruously pleasant. As he spoke, he wound his way slowly but surely back behind Julian’s chair, where he could not be seen. “Everything in this room belongs to Cardassia.”
---
Garak had always prided himself on knowing the limits of his capability. One couldn’t survive in his line of work unless one did.
Tain had always known Garak’s abilities and limits precisely. How could he not, when he had defined so many of them? At times, Tain knew Garak better than Garak knew himself. Until, quite suddenly, he didn’t.
Never a blunt instrument: not Garak. His talent lay in interrogating with finesse, flaying someone open while leaving their skin intact, wriggling his way into a subject’s heart and mind until there was nothing they could do but to confess. Sometimes he did torture, that was true, but he had always been able to discern when it was useful and necessary, and when it wasn’t.
Tain hadn’t listened to him, when Garak had said that Odo had nothing to share. True, he was fonder of Odo than it was safe for Tain to know. True, he hadn’t wanted to hurt Odo. But more than that, there hadn’t been any point. If Odo had really represented neutralization to a threat to Cardassia, Garak would not have hesitated. But to turn the device on him when he had already shared all he knew was a senseless waste.
No, not a waste. A test. Tain had wanted to test Garak, and in doing so had forgotten where his protege’s true skill lay. It wasn’t easy to accept that Tain could be mistaken, of course. Garak had spent most of his life training himself out of even considering that possibility. But in his final moments the man had known, and Garak had sat in the shuttle afterwards and thought of Caesar, slain for his ambition by men who loved their state, reaching too far until he grasped tragedy.
Now Tain was gone, and Garak still yearned to prove himself, to show that he had not lost his usefulness, his skill, the foundations upon which the lie of Elim Garak was built. Even if a dead man’s ghost couldn’t see, Garak would know.
When the doctor gave him the opportunity, he said yes.
---
There was a muscle memory to it, in the cold, bright, empty room. Do what it takes to get a confession. Everyone has their secrets.
Julian’s source of strength, Garak suspected, was his sense of belonging in a greater whole. Starfleet, the Federation, some abstract sense of moral virtue.
Subvert the link to Starfleet first— ask of Julian whatever Starfleet would to confuse the source of the commands, establish that no one would be coming to rescue him.
Then the ties to the Federation— make it clear that there was no such thing on Cardassia.
Last would be the idea of what constituted the right action— interrogations were easiest when one could convince the subject he wanted to confess.
It helped that Garak knew this particular body all too well, had in fact dedicated himself to its study.
“You’re sweating,” he noted.
“Humans do that.”
“Is it too warm for you?” he asked solicitously. Julian scoffed but didn’t respond.
It had nothing to do with the freezing room, of course, and everything to do with anticipation.
“I wouldn’t want you to be uncomfortable, Lieutenant,” he said amiably. “Perhaps a change of clothes.”
The uniform, after all, represented a connection to that greater whole. And Garak never went anywhere without a way to protect himself. Today it was a knife, easily concealed, but sharp. He never let a blade get dull.
One clean swipe was enough to slice the back of the shirt open, and the fabric was easily pushed forward, bunching around the human’s strained arms. Garak took a moment to blow deliberately on the newly exposed skin, just to watch Julian shudder.
He was getting warm himself from the sight of the bared expanse of Julian’s bronze back.
“What a flimsy uniform,” he remarked, aiming for a detached tone but a little too breathless to make it. To compensate for the weakness, he held the flat of the blade against the skin, admiring the contrast of silver and gold. “And such interesting anatomy beneath it. Tell me, are all humans so unprotected?”
“Are you looking for a lesson in human anatomy? I thought you wanted to know if I’m a spy.”
“No, Lieutenant. I’m already well aware of your crimes.” He slipped the knife away.
“So what do you want, then? A confession?”
Garak raked his nails down the human’s spine, an act he knew had reliable results, and was rewarded with a muffled groan.
“I want to know how this fragile body of yours comes apart.”
He had seen it do so, time and time again, in their quarters, in the back room of his shop, in other holoprograms, listening to the doctor cry out, his head thrown back in ecstasy. This time was different. He knew he could take Julian apart; could he get a confession first?
Julian huffed out a laugh, and Garak stepped back in front of the chair.
“Go ahead and try.”
Sometimes it felt like another body acting, not his own, even though he was the one giving it orders. One hand reached out to caress the human’s face, gentle touch traveling the familiar path up through his soft, un-Cardassian, alien curls. The hand crumpled into a fist, and pulled back, exposing the long column of the throat. Garak leaned forward and closed the space between their mouths, crushing Julian’s in a searing kiss.
They had kissed before, hot and impatient or slow and lazy, but this was desperate and brutal. Garak knew there would be pain—he was forcing Julian’s body in one direction while the chain pulled in another—but pain and pleasure both were interrogator’s tools, and Garak bore down implacably, feeling Julian struggle to catch his breath.
Feeling, too, how Julian leaned into him, trying to chase the sensation, seeking more.
A tell.
Garak withdrew. Julian tried to follow, whining slightly at the loss of contact, but Garak’s firm grip kept his head in place.
“Rank?” he murmured. Julian blinked, disoriented, taking a moment to understand.
“Lieutenant,” he finally croaked.
“Good,” Garak crooned, knowing that Julian was eager for praise, hungry for affection. “Current posting?”
“Chief Medical Officer, Deep Space 9.” Julian’s chest rose and fell in exaggerated motion, heaving.
“Current mission?”
Julian’s head gave an aborted twitch to the side, as if he were trying to shake it. Garak held tight.
“It isn’t spying on you.”
Garak used his free hand to idly trace a pattern along Julian’s exposed collarbones.
“I know. But there is something, isn’t there? Something you want me to know.” The pulse quickened under Garak’s fingertips. “You’ll feel better once you’ve told me. I can tell, Doctor. You want to confess.”
He knew it was true as he said it. There was a secret, hiding in the flash of fear in Julian’s eyes. Something he did and did not want Garak to discover.
“You’ll have to try harder than that,” Julian said, and Garak withdrew his hands. It was time to let Julian’s own nerves do some of the work.
---
A healthy adult human has an average resting heart rate of between 60 and 100 beats per minute. Julian’s was usually lower, a result of the extreme efficiency with which his body ran, although it was a rate not unheard of for extremely active, athletic people, and he made good use of that excuse. Anxiety significantly elevated heart rate, as did vigorous exertion. In a monitored stress test, a healthy human of Julian’s age could go as high as 160 beats per minute, although theoretically his maximum heart rate would be 190.
The numbers ticked away in his head as Garak watched him from a chair placed directly across from Julian. Seconds and heartbeats and temperature fluctuations were calculated and slotted tidily in the forefront of Julian’s mind as his heart rate climbed.
Something had changed, something definitive.
It hadn’t exactly been about sex to start—well, not exclusively about sex—but they had shifted together from something that had initially felt very much like foreplay, to something that didn’t. Or maybe it did for Garak; who knew what he was getting out of this.
It was the blankness of his face that unnerved Julian most. He had never fully appreciated until now just how expressive Garak usually was, projecting his emotions with intention and often a dramatic flair. Now, he was simply opaque and immovable. A stone, smooth and slick as the walls and floor of the room.
Was this the mask, or was this what remained when his masks were peeled away?
This wouldn’t be a physical challenge, as Julian had anticipated. There were no blows, no machines, not even the eroticism that had charged the first line of questioning. Now Garak only sat there, staring.
Julian twisted in his seat, seeking some relief both for his aching shoulders and from the fixed gaze.
“I hate to see you uncomfortable, Doctor,” Garak said, and while his voice was sympathetic, his eyes remained cold.
Julian didn’t believe it for a moment.
“You can remove the restraints whenever you like.”
“The power is in your hands, I’m afraid. You can end this at any time.”
Presumably, Garak meant by confessing, but it was also a timely reminder. They had discussed safewords and hard limits before starting the scene, and Julian could stop it all and walk away. It would be safer to do that than continue into these treacherous waters, well past whatever line they had tentatively drawn and then crossed.
But Julian was not interested in the safer option. He wanted to know the point at which he would break, and now there was an additional incentive—whether it was wise or not, he wanted to know what Garak would do. Before their relationship had changed, Garak had been careful to hide this part of himself from Julian. He danced behind the facade of a simple tailor, the man who had a past of sewing and gardening and nothing more. But Julian knew now that danger lurked beneath the mask, and he was hungry to see it.
“I don’t have anything to confess,” he insisted. Garak smiled indulgently.
“That’s where you’re wrong. Everyone does.”
“Even you?” Julian challenged. Garak’s smile turned sharp.
“Since you’re so eager to talk, Doctor, why don’t we start with something easier?” He shifted his position for the first time since sitting down, leaning slightly forward. Julian felt the weight of his full attention like a pressure on his chest.
“Such as?”
“Your friends, for example,” Garak said, tone deceptively light. “Work. Family.”
“You don’t want to hear me talk about Bajoran immunology.” Outside in the real world, Garak was one of the few people who would listen to Julian ramble about almost anything. But in this room, Julian knew it was not what Garak was really asking for.
“Work is easier, isn’t it? Safer to talk about numbers than about people,” Garak said agreeably.
So that was how this would go. Anything mundane Julian said, twisted into a stab at psychoanalysis, the mirror universe of therapy.
“Do you want me to lecture you about darts?” Only after he said it did Julian remember that his character did not have to like darts or have a Bajoran immunology project. When had this become an interrogation of Julian himself?
“I want to hear whatever you’d like to tell me,” the interrogator said, and Julian didn’t doubt for a moment that it was true. This Garak would peel even the most innocuous statement apart, layer by layer, until only Julian’s vulnerable center remained.
“I don’t want to tell you anything,” he replied, knowing it was a lie. After all, how often had he considered confessing unprompted, or leading Garak to the information with a trail of clues? It would hurt, to be discovered, but the kind of pain that came with disinfecting a wound. It would leave him clean inside.
“I’ll try not to be insulted.”
“Oh, feel free to take it very personally.” He thought about telling every time he got close to someone, but the thought had been particularly persistent with Garak. After all, Garak had no loyalties to the Federation, and he could certainly keep a secret. But Garak would sell him out if Cardassia demanded it. Maybe with regret, if his confessions when the implant had malfunctioned were anything to go by, but he would do it all the same.
“I don’t think it is. You haven’t told anyone this secret, have you?”
Of course not, and it chafed at him constantly. Julian’s behavior with others was not always an act; he liked sharing his work and his stories because he enjoyed sharing as an act of connection. It wasn’t natural for him to keep something locked and obscured deep inside. He yearned for someone to know, to see him fully—
But they weren’t talking about Julian’s real secret, and it wouldn’t do for him to forget that. They were playing a game. Garak didn’t know anything about the augmentations, and that would not change.
“Is this how you interrogate someone? You sit around and make wild guesses, and somehow win a confession?” Julian did his best to convey unimpressed, to take back some control in the situation.
Garak’s face didn’t change.
“I can hurt you, if you prefer,” he offered.
“How generous of you.”
“Is that what you want, Doctor?” With a simple flick, Garak produced the blade that had slit Julian’s uniform, and Julian’s back prickled at the sight. Where had he been hiding that?
When he next spoke, Garak’s voice was lower, dark and intimate.
“I asked you a question,” he reminded Julian. “I’m afraid it needs an answer.”
The knife glinted in his hand, too bright in the harsh light, and Julian’s mouth went suddenly dry.
“No,” Julian said quietly and forced himself to swallow.
“No, what?” Garak prompted.
Julian’s heart hammered in his throat.
“No, I don’t want you to hurt me.” He blinked, and the knife was gone.
“Well done,” Garak congratulated him. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
In that moment, Julian did not doubt that Garak would have hurt him, and could even have enjoyed it.
Would Garak hurt him if he didn’t confess his secret, the real one?
One word would end it. One word, and they could walk back out onto the station.
Julian realized that he had forgotten that the moment the knife had made its appearance.
---
Garak had forgotten how it felt to have power. He hadn’t felt it on the ship with Tain, torn between loyalties he couldn’t articulate. He had never experienced it on the station, constantly at the mercy of hostile peoples.
Now he was being reminded of the high that came with being an interrogator, shaping a miniature world defined by only him. No other part of the job (or his life on Cardassia in general) had ever afforded such a feeling.
It was like the wire.
Just like the wire, it took him out of his own body. He floated slightly above, watching the proceedings. That was not just pleasant, but necessary; he had learned as a novice that being too present in the moment would make it hard to shove the subject from his thoughts later. That was how an interrogator broke, if one could not maintain distance.
It was with distance that he observed the doctor was cracking. Now, it was only a matter of applying pressure until the subject shattered.
“It’s eating you alive inside, isn’t it?” Garak said softly. Where a harsh voice met walls of resistance, a gentle tone could worm inside. “You try so hard to be good, a model Starfleet officer, but there’s something rotten at that core. You want someone to excise it from you.”
The human twitched at the mention of Starfleet, Garak noted.
“Will Starfleet even want you, if the truth comes out?” he continued. “It will come out, you know. Secrets always do.”
Some subjects required silence, like Kelas Parmak had, but Garak knew from experience that this particular subject always responded to his voice. He kept going.
“It must be terribly lonely, being so afraid that someone will see you for what you truly are.”
The doctor had closed his eyes. That wouldn’t do. Garak stood from his chair and took a step closer, watching as his hand reached out to caress the human’s face. The subject whimpered.
“You don’t have to be alone,” Garak murmured. “You can tell me.”
He couldn’t feel the skin under his fingertips, but he knew it must be warm.
---
Julian had almost confessed to Palis.
It went like this: They loved each other, wanted to spend the rest of their lives together, she deserved to know who her husband would be. He entertained the fantasy that she would forgive him for the lie, still hold him close and whisper je t’aime toujour, Julien.
Her father had given him the hiring paperwork for transfer to the hospital. It began with a list of ineligibilities, reasons one could not be hired, including being genetically engineered.
He had never seen a list like that. Even Starfleet Academy framed their language in terms of requirements, rather than disqualifications. But there it was, the stark reminder. This life, chief of surgery with a beautiful ballerina wife, belonged to some other version of himself, to a better man.
He couldn’t marry Palis under false pretenses and force her into helping maintain his lie.
He left Earth, and Palis along with it, and still no one but his parents knew. He strove to ensure they didn’t know much about his friends or his hobbies or his work, but they knew the most dangerous secret he had, because they had given it to him. He had never had the power to choose who knew; it was his parents, and no one else.
He wanted, desperately, to tell.
He thought of Garak back in his second year on the station, I need to know someone forgives me. Had he felt as Julian did now?
He needed someone to know the truth, and choose him anyway.
He opened his eyes, blinking past the sting that had begun to develop behind them.
The human opened his eyes, and suddenly there were dozens of pairs watching Garak at once, not just Julian but Kelas Parmak and Odo and Tain and Mila, Cardassian and Romulan and Tzenkethi eyes.
Go on, they silently urged. Aren’t you going to make him confess?
He was almost there, one more push would do it, and then the subject—then Julian—would break.
That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? To prove you could take him apart?
Being able to do something was different from wanting to, from living with the consequences.
“Garak, I—”
“Red,” Garak interrupted, because his heartbeat was soaring and his breathing was shallow and the room was very, very small. “Red! Computer, end program.”
The bright light and white walls fell away into the dark geometric grid of the holosuite. Only Julian’s chair remained, on a timed delay that they had planned (“so I don’t fall on my ass,” Julian had explained).
“Garak?” Julian repeated.
“Don’t tell me. You don’t have to tell me. It’s yours.”
Julian took a deep breath, although it shuddered on its way in and out. At the edges of his sight, the world had gone blurry, but scrutiny of Garak’s face revealed that his eyes too were not totally dry.
Was that what lay beneath the mask, or was this also some form of pretending? Did it matter? Did Julian really want to know?
“I’m sorry, my dear,” Garak said simply, and Julian wasn’t sure if he was apologizing for stopping, or for letting it get this far.
His eyes and throat burned, and he was sick of this room, even the version that was darker and beginning to warm up. He had gotten what he wanted, in the end. He knew the point at which he broke, and it wasn’t a physical limit, but rather the lip of a well of loneliness. He knew more about Garak, too. Garak could, and would, hurt him. Garak could, and would, choose not to.
“I need something to drink,” Julian said, the only honest thing that felt safe to voice. “And then we’ll talk.”
Every scene required debrief, and that was what this had been, wasn’t it? It was supposed to be just a scene.
They’d drink tea, and discuss, and leave the confessions behind for the moment. It wouldn’t fix anything, wouldn’t make them forget what they’d seen in each other in a cold, bright room. But a better kind of confession came not from fear but from safety, from knowing someone would hold you through whatever you wanted to tell.
They could try to work towards that.