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It had started when he came back to a Cardassia in ruins. Everything torn down and nothing left, there was nothing to do but rebuild something new.
No, he had already been far, far gone by then.
It had started when Garak sat in a holding cell for six months, unexpectedly alive and with no distractions from his own mind. Except for the doctor’s regular visits, there was nothing to do but quietly disintegrate. To buckle beneath the weight of all the horrible masks he wore, masks that were all there really was to his person. This husk called Elim Garak- even his last name a sort of lie. He should be dead, he had counted on being dead. And yet he wasn’t. Alive, then, the dissonance harboured in his mind between all that he knew to be true and all that he had held to be true, could no longer be quietly ignored…
No, that wasn’t it.
It had started when he was back in the interrogation chamber, for the first time since his exile. When he was welcomed back into the fold by Tain. All he had wanted for so long at his fingertips, there to grab hold of, and all he had to do … was torture a friend. Not even a friend. An acquaintance, really. It should have been nothing, interrogating Odo. Should have been easy. But it was revolting. It was … wrong. He still did it, of course he did. He did it, plagued by all the insidious ideas that had wormed themselves into his heart and mind over the years cut off from Cardassia, free from the all-consuming influence of the Order, of Tain…
That wasn’t the beginning either.
It had started when he lay on his deathbed, in the deafening quiet of the missing buzz of the Wire in his brain. Dr Bashir was at his side taking his Shri’tal, such as it were. Not that the alien understood it. Not that Garak would ever explain. Only, it wasn’t his deathbed. He was saved. The Human had granted him forgiveness. Because Garak had… had asked for forgiveness. Had begged for absolution.
If the guilt was there already, it must have started earlier.
When did the process begin? He had thought himself a finished man – when had that lie begun to unravel?
Perhaps…
Perhaps it started over lunch. Perhaps it started in pleasant conversation. As a harmless distraction in the biting, cold solitude…
Yes. Of course:
It had started as a game. That was how it had started
-
It was powerfully erotic, arguing with Dr Bashir. The human threw himself into the verbal dance with a passion, visibly becoming flustered. Flashing those expressive eyes in frustration at the slightest provocation… Perhaps not the slightest, but Garak did so love to provoke the young, delectable Human whenever he had the chance. It was stimulating. Diverting. Secretly arousing, and all the more arousing for the secrecy.
It was a game, of course. Garak knew very well that impassioned arguing was not how Humans flirted. No, spirited debating was perfectly innocent behaviour in the eyes of the occupying force in control of the station. It was not as though it actually meant anything, this verbal sparring with the young man. If the Cardassian got a kick out of the erotically charged exchanges, if he committed the expressive mammalian’s face to eidetic memory whilst in the throes of argument in order to recall its features later in his quarters with his fingers up himself and the Wire tripped…well, that was neither here nor there.
It was inconsequential that Bashir’s neck made Garak quietly reconsider his stance on alien bedwarmers. Not proper moral behaviour perhaps, imagining oneself split open on the appendage of an enemy military officer. Juvenile, everting in his pants in his workroom to the fantasy of a pretty young alien kneeling in the changing room for Garak. Expressive eyes looking up, head chock full of depraved Federation propaganda. Bashir burning with the same passion he so unguardedly displayed in argument over the table at the Replimat, as he was shut up by better occupying his soft, hot mouth... It was filthy, the ways all stimulating notions were, of course. But it was not something to dwell on. Nothing that would lead Garak down the path of corruption.
So what, if the taboo of openly discussing state dogma - as if opposing arguments where not utterly blasphemous - did something to Garak. It was all a game. He was playing a game with himself, provoking Bashir to argue for the incorrect stances. The beautiful human doctor wasn’t even aware enough of the stakes to be considered an opponent. It was harmless, fun, exciting. Garak knew the way the world worked, of course. He was a man in his middle years, having spent most of his life as a Night Person in service of the proper ideals and for the functioning of the state. The way society worked just... was, and self-evidently so. It might not always be pleasant, but it was inevitable.
Garak might have his weaknesses, might have secretly wished in the past for the universe to be a softer, kinder place, but that was not how things worked. He knew the arguments that explained the truths governing society, of course he did. Garak hadn’t had to actually formulate them quite like this before, in open conversation with an uninhibited and verbose interlocutor taking the counter position without reservations. Not that it would have ever mattered to Garak’s world view if he had, naturally. Any counter arguments regarding State truths would be childish. Of course. Hearing them out loud and engaging with them changed nothing. Being challenged on fundamental axioms in ways Garak never before had did not feel like standing at a precipice and swaying on the edge in the wind. He could stop whenever he wanted.
It was just a game of sexual perversion, nothing more. Garak was high on the Wire, and reckless, and he brought the Human ever more literature to read and misunderstand. He wasn’t seriously considering any of the points Bashir was making, that would go against everything Garak was. So of course, he didn’t spend sleepless nights turning over particularly infuriating concepts like “bodily autonomy” or “right to privacy” or “the inherent value of life” in his mind in order to find the perfect string of word that would make the doctor see just exactly how he was wrong about it. The Federaji propaganda could sound so alluring when it wasn’t outright nonsensical, but it was all just lies and obfuscation. Knives behind smiles. Soft skin and blunt teeth and highfaluting principles hiding a military might to best even Cardassia in battle.
Garak could rest assured that the unsettled stirrings in the depths of his being, the depths he never ever sounded, were just the simple sexual thrill of breaking taboo. He would masturbate furiously, monologuing at an imagined Bashir, meticulously dismantling the strapping young officer’s every inane point. Of course, the doctor would stubbornly refuse to bow to age, wisdom, and obvious intellectual superiority. Bashir’s eyes would flash with animated conviction, and he would claim something infuriating about 'the objective reality of truth' or some such, and Garak – at the cusp of his rains – could not at that moment find the words that would refute him. It was disgusting.
It was intoxicating.
It was the beginning.
-
“What are you doing up? Come back to bed love.”
“In a minute.”
He doesn’t deserve this. Oh, how he doesn’t deserve this. The warm Human in his bed, the love and kindness and care. Elim is getting old, his joints aching in the evenings no matter wat the dear doctor does to sooth them. Elim enjoys the soothing immensely, but secretly he also enjoys the pain. He does deserve the pain but not the soothing, after all. Elim looks over at the golden-brown body partially obscured by a sheet in the warm Cardassian night. Julian Bashir had his own journey to go on before he found himself landing in Elim’s arms. It never ceases to baffle the old Cardassian that the doctor did.
Garak didn’t spend the latter half of his life in constant public service in order to shape a world Julian could call his home. He did it for Cardassia. But as he reconstructed both himself and his beliefs, as well as poured all his being into reconstructing his home… the endless talks with Julian during their years at the Station were there. Elim wanted Cardassia to be the best she could be… and such a place turned out to be one that a Dr Julian Subatoi Bashir could proudly call home. The warmth in Elim’s’ chest blooms as he traces the shape of the impossible sight before him in his bed with his gaze.
“Seriously, Elim.” Said impossibility groaned irritably “Stop creepily staring at me in the dark and come Back. To. Bed. Silly old lizard.” So fond, even in annoyance.
No, Elim doesn’t deserve this. But the fact is that he’s got it, and he will not squander this gift by rejecting it and decrying his unworthiness. He will keep striving to deserve this second chance at life, with Julian, in the New Cardassia.
“Do I have to come and scoop you up?”
Elim chuckles.
“No, my love. I can make it back to you under my own power, thank you very much.”
Reconstruction is still ongoing, but now, decades later, something new has taken form. Not perfect, far from perfect. But better.
Something much better.