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Shortly after the diverting situation with Tahna Los, Garak realised he had made a mistake.
The young svelte doctor could've walked out of any below-counter publication catering to Cardassian men of a certain taste. He was, in fact, the very epitome of the type.
Garak was not unaffected. He had thought he was making a calculated decision, but perhaps he was just drawn in by those wide eyes and that long, slender neck.
Yet was he to play the role of the elder statesman, retired politician, or war-weary Gul in this fantasy? Tailors were very much of a type with doctors in the genre, and spies did not feature at all. Not even peddlers of obscene material dared to raise the spectre of the Order in their printed pages.
It would be best, really, to keep his distance. A polite customer service smile if he entered the shop. A brief nod if their eyes met on the Promenade. Nothing more. Nothing…intimate.
Which was a fine plan right up until the point he noticed the stuck shed.
It was not an uncommon problem for Cardassians, of course. However, the usual methods were thwarted by the tedious Federation obsession with safety regulations. Water flow to personal quarters had a maximum temperature, and any steam accumulation was swiftly dealt with by the environmental controls. He couldn’t afford to use his replicator credits on hot water, even if the ageing machine could provide him with enough to fill a bathtub. Scale oil, of course, was no longer regularly imported, and Garak had no desire to become indebted to Quark, especially over such an intimate issue.
The stuck shed would ease off his claws in time. And if it did not, he could probably afford to lose a toe or two before the loss severely affected his balance. He would adapt. He always did.
He did not require assistance. He certainly did not need a doctor.
From the few times he had been under the surgeon’s knife, he knew what to expect. The brutal lowering of the temperature to render the subject motionless but still aware, still in agony. At the mercy of the surgeon, who could do whatever he wished with him.
An entirely different subgenre of fiction, a dark sort of thrill. The kind of fantasy that a younger Garak enjoyed before he learned more of pain and cruelty. The older man knew that to place himself within another’s power was tantamount to death.
Then he woke in the middle of the night, desperately longing for a hot basking rock and unable to feel the lower half of his left leg. He had severely miscalculated and left himself with no options.
Submission was preferable to death. He could endure the pain and humiliation of it all if it meant that he lived, if there were still some small hope of returning to Cardassia, to serve once more.
He couldn’t stand up, but he refused to crawl to the Infirmary, prostrating himself before the Bajorans and Terrans who worked there, the object of their pity and disgust.
“Garak to Bashir,” he said aloud, waiting for the computer to acknowledge and connect.
“Bashir here. Garak, what’s wrong?”
Bashir was far too astute, or perhaps he knew that no one called him at 03:49 without something being amiss.
“I believe I need…a house call,” Garak said, as lightly as he could manage.
“I’ll be right there. Bashir out.”
His voice was professional, taut with concern; nothing like the naive young thing in the Replimat, in his changing room. This was Doctor Bashir, the man in his element.
Garak felt that sense of dread return. Miscalculation after miscalculation. How Tain would laugh over his corpse.
The door chimed, but Garak couldn’t quite remember what he was meant to do about that. However, the door opened anyway, and Bashir came charging in, calling for him from the living room until he found his way to Garak’s bedroom.
“Garak?”
He already had his tricorder out, scanning over Garak’s body without touching him. He hissed through his teeth. “Garak, you have an advanced infection in your left foot - what happened?”
“It’s only a scratch, Doctor,” Garak said, an artless lie, entirely without merit.
“Bashir to Ops - Medical Emergency. Two to beam to the Infirmary. Energise.”
Garak felt a roll of nausea as the transporter deposited him on a biobed, with only his sleeping clothes to cover him.
Which was when he realised Bashir was wearing pyjamas and a worried frown.
This was not how the fantasy was meant to go. This wasn’t the opening of the horror story. This was…different, strange. Another miscalculation?
“Nurse, I need to prepare the operating table.”
Ah, this was more in keeping with the genre. But it was difficult to view Bashir as a tormenter when he was wearing green plaid pyjamas, even while he wielded a stitch cutter to split Garak’s trouser leg to the hip, revealing the extent of the infection.
“Why didn’t you come to me sooner?” Bashir demanded, but it was clearly a rhetorical question. “This will need surgical debridement to avoid an amputation - what were you thinking?”
It was difficult to recall now, with Bashir in a passion, earnestly castigating him while he lay entirely at his mercy. It seemed an odd sort of foreplay, but then Garak’s experience was perhaps more limited than he liked to imagine.
Bashir took his lack of response as a sign of shock - which was perhaps not very far from the truth - and started barking more orders at the nurse, resulting in administration of a hypospray and fitting an IV port in quick succession.
Garak was losing control. He was losing his connection to his world, and soon the cold would come for him. He wasn’t strong enough, he couldn’t–
“Please…Doctor, please,” he begged, reaching out to grasp Bashir’s arm. “Not the pTha wep’kir. Anything but that.”
“The ‘cold box’? Garak, you’re not making any sense. Just rest, please - I won’t let anything happen to you.”
“He’s talking about freezesthesia,” the nurse said, grimly. “Cardassian military surgeons just chill their patients when they operate. They feel everything through it. The only time I felt sorry for a Cardassian.”
There it was - the pity and disgust. The inevitable price of weakness.
Bashir, however, appeared to be furious.
“What kind of doctor would do that?” he said, with charming Federation naivete.
“A Cardassian one,” the nurse said, blandly.
And he wasn’t wrong. Presumably civilian doctors had a little more care for their patients, but never any doctor Garak had met.
Bashir returned his attention to Garak. “Do you want to be asleep for this? I can use a local block or a delta wave inducer - your choice.”
Choice - another quaint Federation notion, but Garak would capitalise on any advantage. “Awake.”
He would know exactly what Bashir was planning to do to him. He might not be able to escape or resist in his current condition, while under restraint, but he would know and he would revenge himself. He would–
“I don’t want to risk further transportation at this point,” Bashir told the nurse. “Let’s prep here with sterile fields.”
Garak wasn’t stripped bare, merely covered in drapes, before Bashir placed two warmth fingers to his inner thigh. He tensed involuntarily, a flinch - this was it, the first cut. The first liberty the doctor would take.
He was dressed in a surgical gown and mask now, the perfect picture from a holonovel, the torturer and seducer.
“I’m going to block the nerve now, Garak.”
A hypospray replaced Bashir’s fingers, and then his entire leg went numb - as if it had fallen off his body. He narrowly avoided looking down to check it was still attached.
“There - you shouldn’t feel anything for the rest of the surgery. Let me know if it’s uncomfortable.”
Then Bashir moved out of his line of sight, quietly giving instructions to the nurse, and checking over his tools.
Garak found he could still move his hands, could speak if he wanted. The IV fluids and medication were restoring some of his higher faculties, and he realised by degrees that he was not in danger.
It had all been a fantasy. Every last scrap of it. The delirious ramblings of a former agent who couldn’t separate his work from his longings.
“All done,” Bashir said, moving back up to his head. He looked tired but satisfied. “There should be no permanent damage, though I think these scales might grow back in an unusual pattern. Would you like to return to your quarters to rest? I can monitor you from here.”
Suddenly, Garak didn’t want to be alone. He wanted to be near Bashir, to puzzle out how wrong he’d been, to recover under the eye of the man who’d saved his life - and demanded nothing in return.
“I will be quite all right, Doctor,” he said. “Those monitoring devices give me such a headache.”
Bashir pursed his lips. He was still wearing his pyjamas, Garak realised, beneath the surgical gown. The image cemented him firmly in reality, because no erotic writer would imagine something so blandly absurd.
“Then I will have to settle you in your quarters myself,” he said, and Garak tried not to smile at how well that had worked.
Bashir peeled off the gown and said half a dozen things to the nurse, just as Garak’s leg started to come back under his control. The pain flared briefly, before the little device inside his head washed it away in a wave of pleasure.
“Bashir to Ops - Medical Transport. Two to beam to Habitat Ring H3 Chamber 901. Energise.”
Garak should probably be more alarmed that the transporter operator could pinpoint the location of his bed well enough to transport him into it, but he was too fatigued to consider the implications. Also, he did not wish to be transported onto the floor for the sake of obfuscation.
Bashir immediately set about arranging the bed to his satisfaction, including propping up Garak’s bandaged leg on a spare pillow. He then fetched a glass of water and a hypospray from the replicator, but set the medication on the bedside table instead of administering it.
“For the pain,” he offered. “It might also have a sedative effect, but there isn’t much data on Cardassians.”
“I will pass for now, Doctor. There is very little pain.”
In fact, Garak felt positively giddy with endorphins, which meant that there should be quite a lot of pain. But Bashir certainly didn’t need to know that.
“I will give you some privacy then,” Bashir said, with a tired smile. “I will just be outside the room, if you need me.”
Garak suddenly felt immensely selfish, keeping the doctor from his bed without even the pleasure of his company to ease his conscience. But he could not very well invite him into his own bed without the risk that his sentimental fantasy drift towards reality.
“Thank you, Doctor,” he said, and allowed Bashir to leave him.
Were these the inevitable consequences of being the last Cardassian on Terok Nor? The fantasies of a has-been, the artificial euphoria caused by a relic of his former profession, the constant upending of all he knew and believed about the world? The abject loneliness?
Perhaps there might be something more. Perhaps Doctor Julian Bashir could be more than a naive plaything or an erotic trope. Perhaps he could be…company.
Or perhaps Garak should sleep, because his imagination was quite clearly running wild.
He’d consider it in the morning. Over breakfast with Doctor Bashir, just this once. It wouldn’t do to make a habit of debating over their food, after all.
Someone might receive the wrong impression. (Garak feared it would be him.)