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Once upon a time, Julian Bashir had been exhilarated by the prospect of working on a space station. Real, unadulterated frontier medicine! Working at the cutting edge of xenoanatomy! The chance to conduct surgeries no human had ever attempted before!
In time, of course, he had come to understand that there was so much more to Deep Space Nine than that. And he had found the true challenge of medicine on the edge of known space, with systems and tools inherited from a non-Federation Empire:
Paperwork.
Julian rubbed his eyes, trying to make sense of what he was seeing on the screen. Or rather, what he wasn’t seeing.
“Doctor Girani, did you file the personnel medical check-ups like I asked last week?”
The Bajoran surgeon walked over to his console to look over his shoulder. “I did. Why?”
“Because they aren’t here.”
Girani frowned. “They better be, because I put them in.”
“In Standard, Bajoran or Cardassian alphabetical order?”
That earned him an unimpressed look. “Standard. Obviously.”
“Obviously.” He tapped something into the keyboard. “And they are obviously missing. Either the system has misfiled them, or it has…” He sighed. Getting those records in order had taken days, and if all that work had been for nothing…
His comm badge chimed, and Julian half-expected to hear Miles’s voice, with some apology about how he had been working on something entirely unrelated and somehow, it had caused the system to eat the medical records. Again.
Instead, he was greeted by a rather unexpected voice.
“Garak to Bashir.”
Julian tapped the comm. “Bashir here. I was about to comm you actually, I’ll likely be off shift late, we have run into-”
“Doctor.”
There was a strange tone to Garak’s voice. Strangled, almost breathless. It made the hairs on Julian’s neck stand on end.
“Garak, what’s wrong? Do you need help?”
The response was a gasp.
“My quarters… please…”
By the time the comm cut out, Julian had already grabbed a med kit, told Girani she was in charge of finding the missing paperwork, and was on his way towards the turbolift.
Comming Garak again brought no response. By the time he stumbled out of the turbolift, Julian had run through all possible reasons for the call, based on the sound of Garak’s voice, the way his breath was coming short. A further issue with the wire was of course the most likely (76.27%), followed by an attempt on his life by the Obsidian Order (8.73%), infectious disease (6.84%) and then other conditions (6.27%). That was, of course, if there were no congenital defects he did not know about, which would alter the calculations and-
He reached the door to Garak’s quarters before he could recalculate with those options, and rang the chime.
There was no response.
“Garak? Are you in there?”
Nothing. Julian took a breath. The words were strikingly familiar. “Computer, open the door to chamber nine-oh-one, Habitat Level H-three. Emergency Medical Override Bashir One Alpha.”
He was through the doors before they had quite opened.
The quarters seemed empty. “Garak?” Julian looked around, ensuring he had not missed Garak’s body collapsed somewhere. He had not. Which left the bedroom, and the adjoining refresher. The doors were closed, and his brain picked up its abandoned calculations again as he crossed the room and then the world exploded into fire and pain.
***
All in all, it had been a successful day. Garak had finished two commissions, started work on a few stock items, and made a couple of sales. He was looking forward to a quiet evening, musing about his plans as he walked towards his quarters. Perhaps he would comm the doctor when he finally finished his shift. He had some thoughts he wanted to share about their current reading material, and-
The force of the explosion threw him backwards. Garak slammed into the wall, breath driven from his lungs for a second. Smoke billowed into the corridor through the torn remains of the doors to one of the living quarters, and Garak knew, even before he had stumbled to his feet, before he had shielded his face with his arm and begun staggering forward.
The acrid smoke was burning in his throat.
Was this an assassination attempt? If so, a clumsy one. If it had been the Order, he would be dead. Which left the military, given outright assassination was not the council’s style. But why would either of them move now? He was missing information, vital information. The computer in his quarters would be gone, but the one in his workshop would do. But first, damage control, before security descended on this space, trampling and destroying evidence or uncovering things he would rather leave hidden.
It was the stench that hit him then. It had been there, all along, below the noxious odours of his charred possessions, like a horrible undertone. Yet when he reached the ruined doors to his burning quarters, he knew what it was before he saw it.
Blood.
Warm, rich, human blood.
Part of the back wall had been blown away, leaving a gaping hole now sealed with the emergency force field. What remained of it was painted red, great arcing splashes that reached the blackened ceiling.
Someone had been in his quarters when the explosion occurred.
No.
The body lay behind the sofa, which in turn had been sucked towards the hole in the wall in the half second of decompression before the force field kicked in. The uniform was charred, ripped, with blackened, blistering skin showing beneath. Garak stumbled towards it, fell to his knees. Took in the ruins of the hands, the beautiful, delicate hands. That one of his legs was… missing. Carefully, endlessly carefully, he lifted the arm that was still covering the face. It was the only part that had remained unharmed, save for some darkening of the skin around the nose and mouth.
There was no movement. No soft rush of air.
Garak pressed his comm with a shaking hand.
“Garak to ops.” His voice was choked, and it wasn’t from the smoke.
Lieutenant Dax sounded surprised at his call. “Mr Garak, how can we help?”
“Emergency medical transport. Lock on to my location. Two to-” He coughed, gasped. “To transport. Please.”
His hands were cramped into the remains of Julian’s uniform as the ruin of his quarters dissolved around him.
When the world swam back into focus, the infirmary was already abuzz with activity. Before Garak could orient himself, he was pushed back, gently but firmly, by one of the human nurses. He did not know her name. He did not care.
“The doctor…” Trying to speak sparked another coughing fit.
“We are doing what we can.” The nurse’s voice sounded strained as she scanned him with a tricorder with one hand, and pressed a translucent mask on his face with the other. “Here, this will help you breathe…”
The pressure closed around his mouth and his nose and the room was too small, too loud, too bright, he needed to– he ripped off the mask, ignoring the nurse’s frown.
“No.” And, when she looked like she was going to push it straight back onto him, “please.”
The nurse hesitated a moment, but then nodded. “Okay. I am going to give you a hypo then, you are suffering from mild smoke inhalation. We are going to keep an eye on you…”
Garak was barely listening to her. Barely registered the cold sting of the hypo against his neck. His eyes, his entire being, was fixed on the body on the biobed.
All remaining nurses, and Doctor Girani, were flocked around Julian. Garak could not follow most of what they were saying, the medical jargon was a language he had never been able to learn. But he understood the list of injuries, horrific and unending, that they were cataloguing, one after the other.
Burns, covering most of Julian’s body.
Trauma to his head.
His chest caved in from the force of the shock wave, with several broken ribs and what Doctor Girani called a “floating sternum”.
A fractured spine. A fractured pelvis.
His hands, mutilated, long fingers bent and broken and flayed.
His left leg missing, torn off mid-thigh.
And he still wasn’t breathing.
They were doing something, something to do with dermal regenerators to reduce swelling of his airways and tubes and micro-forcefield and Garak could not see his face, his view blocked by the people frantically working to keep Julian alive.
Was he still alive?
He wasn’t breathing. He heard the whirring of what he knew to be a cardio-stimulator. Saw what he could make out of Julian’s body jerk on the table. It looked wrong, the half thigh, ending in ragged flesh, and no one seemed to be doing anything about it other than a quick run with a regenerator to stop the bleeding.
The nurse in front of him said something and Garak flinched violently as he felt her hand on his shoulder.
“I need you to sit down in the waiting area. You shouldn’t be in here.”
He shook his head. He couldn’t move. Couldn’t look away. If he looked away, they might stop, they might give up, they might accept that Julian was gone…
Julian could not be gone.
Clearly, the nurse who had been trying to dislodge him had lost her patience, because the next person to appear next to Garak’s elbow was Odo.
“Garak.” The changeling’s voice was steady. “You need to give them space to work.”
“I will not leave him.”
If the statement, or indeed the depth of feeling it was said with, surprised Odo, he did not let it show. His and Julian’s relationship, born from fierce debates over lunch, had been an open secret for a while. It was hard to really keep any secrets on a space station, but Garak had been content to have it believed by most that the two of them were simply seeking entertainment and distraction with each other. He had even told himself for a while that that was all there truly was to it. It had been easier than admitting, even in the privacy of his own mind, that once again, his sentimentality had gotten the better of him. He had fallen head over heels in love with Julian Bashir.
Julian Bashir, who had been in his chambers when someone set off a detonation.
Julian Bashir, who lay on a surgical biobed, with his colleagues frantically working on him, and was still barely responding to their efforts.
He could not leave him. If he left, Julian could slip away, and Garak could not imagine life without him.
“You have two options. You can walk through the doors on your own, or I will have us both transported out of the infirmary. The nurses have promised me they will keep the doors translucent. You will still be able to see him.”
“Odo.”
“Garak. Spare us both the indignity, yes?”
“But if he-”
The nurse, still hovering beside Odo, took pity on him, and Garak could not even resent her for it. “If the worst happens, I will let you in. I promise.”
Hours passed. Odo left, understandable given he had a serious breach of station security to investigate. Perhaps even a murder. His team had finished their comb through the wreckage of Garak’s quarters. “I will have to question you,” he said by way of goodbye and sounded apologetic. Garak barely heard him.
As their shifts ended, a steady stream of Julian’s friends and colleagues began appearing by his side, eyeing him with looks ranging from sympathy (Lieutenant Dax) over neutral politeness (Commander Sisko) and suspicion (Major Kira) to downright hostility (Chief O’Brien). None of them tried to talk to him. Garak did not want them to.
His eyes, his entire being remained focused on whatever glimpse he could catch of Julian’s body, limp and grey and broken. Every breath he took was a prayer, sent into an unfeeling universe.
Stay with me. Stay with me. Stay with me.
***
When Doctor Girani finally stepped through the doors, she looked exhausted.
“How-”
“Mister Garak.” For a Bajoran nearly a head shorter than he was, she was remarkably unimpressed by the way he all but blocked her way, by his stare. “He is alive. You are going to step back, and you are going to let me get some water, and then I am going to explain.” She ducked past Garak without acknowledging him any further, nodded at Lieutenant Dax, sitting in the waiting area, who had just come in during her break to check on Julian’s progress. He should have been angry. He should have grabbed her, shaking the information from her.
He couldn’t.
The nurses were finishing up their work, and for the first time in hours, Garak could see Julian. His hands and the stump of his leg were wrapped in white bandages. There was a mask on his face, and a neural monitoring device on his forehead. His skin was ashen. Lifeless.
“Right.”
Girani had returned, and her firm voice pulled him out from between the closing walls. Dax joined them, hands clasped behind her back. Garak could feel the tension radiating off of her.
“As I said, he’s alive.” She pinched her nose-ridges to banish the minute quiver from her voice. Garak doubted anyone without interrogation training would have even noticed it. “We have managed to stabilise him, though the damage to his lungs is too great for him to breathe independently for the moment.”
Garak wanted to be sick. Girani ignored him, looking at the Lieutenant. “The facilities on the station are insufficient to provide anything more to him.” A momentary pause. “So is the personnel.” Her eyes slipped back towards the door, towards the still figure on the table. They all knew what she meant. The only doctor able to even attempt to deal with these kinds of injuries was Julian Bashir himself.
Dax nodded. “We have already sent out a message to Bajor and any nearby ships who might have a trauma surgeon on board.”
“Thank you. For the time being, we are preparing to put him into stasis. It is his best chance.”
Another nod. “I will speak to the Commander.”
She left, and Garak stood, staring at the body on the bed, bereft like not even exile had left him.
***
The infirmary was quiet during the station’s night hours. Sitting by the stasis bed, Garak could hear the muffled sound of the dabo tables at Quark’s—did that wretched establishment ever close?—but other than that, there was silence. He suspected the nurse who had first tried to examine him behind the fact that no one had tried to dislodge him from his vigil as the shifts changed. If he was sitting beside the stasis bed in the intensive care part of the infirmary, he could be monitored for any ill effects of the smoke inhalation. If he thought about it, he could tell his throat was still a little raw from it, but the slight discomfort faded into the background as soon as Garak stopped paying attention to it. Perhaps, there would be questions in the morning, about why the only Cardassian on the station insisted on staying next to the CMO’s sickbed. Perhaps Odo would return and ask pointed questions about who would plant a bomb in the quarters of said only Cardassian, a plain and simple tailor. Or why said CMO had responded to a distress call no one had yet confessed to placing.
And then, Garak would have to decide which lie to tell, for the truth was that it was all his fault.
He had worked it out by the third hour of sitting, watching Julian’s lifeless body, suspended in the space between two breaths, between two heartbeats. There was no reassuring rise and fall of his chest. No warmth to his hand—in fact, Garak could not touch him at all, through the stasis field. Could only watch, and fear to close his eyes for even a moment.
Perhaps Julian was already gone. Perhaps they had simply not noticed yet.
It was then, when the terror of spending the rest of his days on this hell of a station began to claw at his chest that everything fell into place. He had been wondering who would have the skills, and the technology, to circumvent his personal safety, as well as that of DS9. And who could achieve all that, and would then detonate the explosive early, and leave him alive, not even injured. It had made no sense. Until Garak realised that he had not been the target at all. He had overheard talk of a medical emergency that had sent Julian from the infirmary. A simple, yet effective ploy, to draw him out. To put him right where he needed to be when the opening door—with the medical override, to ensure the right target was in situ—triggered the explosion.
It had been Julian all along. And that, in turn, revealed the reason in all its horror.
They had not been discreet, exactly. Their lunches in the Replimat and the spirited discussions that accompanied them were public knowledge. Garak was relatively certain that Quark had been running a betting pool on when a relationship would spring from these encounters, and he was equally sure Lieutenant Dax had made a tidy sum when someone had seen Julian emerge from his quarters early one morning, and the news had spread through the station like a forest fire. There had been little reason to keep things hidden, after that. Not that they had been vulgar about it, Garak was still a private man. And yet. It should not have come as a surprise that the information had reached the wrong ears.
Tain had always hated his sentimentality. Had hated anything that brought him comfort.
Tain had tried to take Julian away from him and Garak had never hated him more.
***
“Neither the Central Hospital in Ashalla nor any of the ships in range are equipped to handle a case like this.”
Garak dimly noticed the quiet conversation happening on the other side of the room, but he barely followed it. Shameful, for an operative, but he could not bring his mind to focus on anything but Julian beside him.
How many days had it been? He could not tell.
“Earth is our best option,” Commander Sisko continued. “I have contacted Starfleet HQ. A runabout will be ready in the morning.”
Earth. Julian’s homeworld, though he had never spoken much of his time there, outside of Starfleet Academy. The centre of the Federation. As unreachable as his beloved Cardassia itself, for a stateless exile.
A Cardassia that had tried to take Julian from him. Garak was not so naive that he did not know his return home was bound to Tain’s favour. Yet he would defy Tain over and over if only it meant Julian would stay by his side…
The conversation had moved on. Commander Sisko, Lieutenant Dax, Major Kira, talking in hushed tones about Julian’s future. His survival. They would take him away, to save his life. Garak was not sure he would be able to make himself let go.
“The papers are ready, I only need his biometrics.” He did not know how much time had passed. It was quiet again in the infirmary. How long until they would pry Julian away from him? It took him a moment to realise someone was talking to him.
“Major, my apologies. It seems I was quite distracted.” His voice sounded hollow to his own ears. He could not muster a smile. What had she asked of him?
Kira waved some sort of device at him. Garak thought he should have cared, but he could not bring himself to tear his gaze from Julian. So still. So lifeless.
The major left him alone and Garak settled back into his vigil. Station dawn was close. Soon, Julian would be taken away.
***
It was Nurse Jabara who stepped up to the bed a few hours later. Garak idly wondered whether it was because she was on duty, or because she, how had Julian put it? Because she had ‘drawn the short straw’.
“The runabout is ready. I need to disable the stasis field for transport.”
They would transport him directly into the runabout, of course. Who would be the pilot? Garak wanted to ask, but, unusually for him, the words would not form. Instead, another question spilled out.
“May I…?” Without the stasis field, he would be able to touch Julian. Only for a moment. Before he was transported away.
Jabara smiled and Garak tried not to see the pity in it. “Of course.” She was opposite from him, perhaps deliberately leaving him space. Perhaps the controls of the biobed necessitated it. Whatever the truth was, and perhaps it was both, she gave him a little nod, right before the blue hue that had been surrounding Julian’s body disappeared.
Garak wanted to take Julian’s hand, but of course it was bandaged, and most of his body was covered in burns. But there was a little stretch of skin, halfway up his forearm, that seemed intact, and he slipped his hand around it. Julian’s skin was cold. Perhaps, this was their goodbye. “Safe travels, my dear…” He started when the room dissolved around him.
“What-” How had he been so distracted to not notice a transporter lock? Why was he being transported in the first place? His hand was still locked around Julian’s arm, and only when Jabara reminded him she needed to reactivate the stasis field did he let go. A kindness, perhaps, to let him spend these last few moments-
“Replicator’s over there,” Chief O’Brien’s voice cut through the haze. “We couldn’t exactly pack you a bag, what with your quarters…” Garak blinked in surprise, cursing himself while trying to get his bearings.
“My dear Chief, whatever are you talking about?”
“Clothing, toiletries, whatever you need for the trip.”
Garak was feeling increasingly stupid. Not a feeling he liked at all. “I did not expect myself to be travelling.”
“Well, you are.” O’Brien had sat at the console and was beginning to manoeuvre the runabout away from the station. His observation was correct, regardless of his plans, Garak was now, undeniably, travelling. “We figured Julian would like you to be with him, not that I get it. So Kira did… something, anyway. You’re coming, because I’m about to take this thing to warp.”
Garak returned his gaze to Julian’s still form and could not find it in himself to object.
The silence during the journey from DS9 to Earth could have almost been called companionable, had it not been so tense. With the runabout comfortably in warp, there was little for the Chief to attend to, and often Garak found him sitting opposite, eyes fixed on Julian’s body. There was little for them to speak about. They would never like each other, Garak was certain of that. But the Chief was one of Julian’s closest friends, and clearly O’Brien had volunteered to see his friend safely to Starfleet Medical HQ. They had nothing to say to each other, but they both deeply cared for Julian. So they sat, and kept vigil over their still cargo, willing past the hours and lightyears.
***
In some odd way, Garak had not wanted the journey to end. Time was suspended in the runabout. Had been in the infirmary. He did not know how long it had been since the explosion. He felt in stasis as much as Julian’s lifeless body was. Yet once they reached Earth, he knew things would change. There would be no more stasis field. And they might find that Julian, suspended, unbreathing, unliving, had slipped away without any of them noticing. Perhaps, all they were carrying was a corpse.
Garak pressed his fingers against the stasis field until they grew numb.
***
His fingers had grown numb. Garak frowned and sat back on his heels, shaking feeling back into his hands. Bajoran summer mint was tasty, beneficial to the health of most humanoids, and thriving once the ban had been lifted after the end of the occupation. It was also, annoyingly, mildly toxic to Cardassians, but delicate enough that transplanting it with gloves on would only mean losing half the seedlings.
“How many more?” He turned at Julian’s voice and smiled up at him. Julian was walking with a cane, having left the hoverchair behind a week or so ago. The biosynthetic limb required an extended period of integration, but he was making great progress with it.
“Three in this batch and I think I will take a break before the second. I would not want to damage the seedlings with clumsy fingers.”
Garak got to his feet and Julian caught his hands with his free one, ignoring the fact that they were covered in dirt. Warmth helped against the effect of the mint.
“And you?”
“I have finished for the day.”
The Home for Heroes of the Bajoran Resistance lay a few hours outside Asharra, in the verdant hills of central Bajor. Somewhere between a hospital and a temple, it provided care and a safe place to those who had been injured during the occupation. It also had an excellent program for biosynthetic limb integration, and the staff and leadership, somehow, had had no issues taking on a Cardassian as an interim gardener. Garak suspected Major Kira had had a hand in this. Just as she had had more than one hand in the fact that he had been offered asylum and emergency citizenship by the Bajoran government, to enable him to travel with Julian. His provisional passport had been the reason for the scans she had taken in the infirmary “A thank you for what you did on Cardassia, with Entek,” was all the reason she had given.
And so, after Earth, after endless surgeries and endless hours, days of waiting, with Julian weak and half-broken but alive, they had come to Bajor. Had found their refuge here, between others who had fought too long and seen too much. Julian, of course, had not been content to be merely a patient, and so outside his own therapy, he had begun assisting with some cases, with training and research. It was just fortunate that the facility had a lovely, if much neglected garden.
The warmth of Julian’s hands had brought the feeling back into Garak’s fingertips, and he slipped out of the grasp. “Three more. They cannot stay in the small pots much longer.”
Julian smiled, slowly lowering himself down on a nearby bench, and Garak could feel the warmth of his smile as he could feel the warmth of the setting Bajoran sun.