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Chapter Text

Prologue: The Night Before

Every Cardassian learns two words for goodbye.

The first is learned early in life, and it is the goodbye he and Elim will say tonight. They’ll have drinks, and Elim will pack, and then, with fingers interlaced, he will lean in and say “thIjek, Kelas” as they press cheeks together gently. It’s the same goodbye they say each morning, hurried, on the way out the door. Or at the end of a comm, through a smile. It’s the goodbye that really says I’ll see you soon.

But each time they go through this ritual—each time Elim leaves for some new round of off-world politicking—the other goodbye lurks, a heavy anchor tied to the bobbing lightness of thIjek. Kelas says it to himself, silent but with feeling. Vridan, Elim.

It’s the goodbye Father whispered when he left for war. It was the only goodbye anyone used for years after the Fire. An Inquirator once told him it had begun as a high-form used for stylized leave-taking in epic, but that, as with most things high and sacred, the Cardassian people had put it to more practical use.

Vridan is the goodbye that really says farewell. It is the goodbye learned through loss.  

And while the constant white noise of loss had quieted in the thirteen years since the Fire, Kelas heard its rattle in these partings. Politics, among its many charmless aspects, was both dangerous and uncertain, especially now, with the Bajoran war crime trials beginning. People stirred up bad feeling on both sides like children poking at a hive of blue-backed stingers. Some condemned the horrors of the past and those who perpetrated them. Others defended the sons and fathers, daughters and mothers who had but followed orders, serving Cardassia as they were taught and told.

And his dear castellan made an ideal target from all sides.

He glanced over at Elim, who was weighing a book in one hand, clearly trying to decide if it was worth its weight in his pack. If he felt any of the same trepidation, it didn’t show.

“Is that the newest Mar? I heard it was rather dull.”

“I heard the same.” Elim sighed and tossed it aside. “And I’m quite certain a summit on the regulation of quadrant mining operations won’t require any additional dullness.”  He held up a hand as if to preempt the objection. “I know, I know....our integration into quadrant policy development is in its infancy, and we must show that we take the role seriously...Timel has given me the speech already.”

“I’m glad. Someone has to remind you that being castellan is about more than looking dapper and giving rousing speeches on the ‘casts.”

A small smile. “If only someone had warned me.”

That small smile still had a way with him. Still wormed its way in and through and touched an affection the years had smoothed but not diminished. “I wasn’t planning on lecturing you, at any rate. I was going to recommend that poet I bought for you last cycle—Prinat Kijal. You’ll enjoy her. It reminds me of Len’s early stuff, but without all those doleful paeans to the state…”

 “I fail to see the value of Len’s work without those paeans.”

“Well, then, let’s broaden your horizons.” He reached over to the side table and shuffled through several volumes until he found it, still pristine, spine uncracked. “It would be good to know it. She’s rather popular with the Fire generation at the moment.”

That got his attention. “Kelas Parmak—are you advising me on matters of my public image now? Should I clear a spot on my staff? Just say the word, my dear.”

He tossed the book across the bed with a huff. “I couldn’t possibly handle you with the patience of those saints. You’d sack me within an octal.”

Their eyes met, and, while Elim smiled, he saw past it to something unsaid. Something Elim was trying to form into the perfect words…

Kelas gave it time and space to form, allowed the other man to pick up the book and set in his case, move across the room for a drink.

Outside, the shrill call-and-response of night-locusts stretched past the open window. For the last few years, the locusts’ song had begun, in tentative strains, to sound again, numbers rebounding from near extinction. Before the Fire, they’d been pests—an interminable night noise the highest ranks in Coranum had paid good money to banish from their trees. As a boy, crushing night-locusts under the heel had been a schoolyard pastime, though not one he’d ever cared for.

Now, no one dared kill a night-locust. Everyone wanted to hear them sing again.

“Kelas, I…have a favor to ask.” The bed rolled slightly as Elim sat, facing away.

He doesn’t want to look at me when he asks. He braced himself. “I’m listening.”

“I’ll be gone for a full octal.”

It was unlike Elim to hesitate. He was more than adept at spinning words around uncomfortable somethings: he was a politician, after all. “Yes, I saw the schedule.”

“It would give me great peace of mind if I knew someone was looking in on…”

The name itself went unspoken, traced by the thin sound of locusts and filled in with night air.

Bashir.

He could feel Elim turn towards him, those eyes searching for his.

His weren’t ready just yet. “Perhaps we could ask Larria to stay a few extra hours. Or someone on your staff…?”

“I don’t need someone to check his blood pressure or wash his blankets, Kelas.”

Of course he knew that. Elim knew he did. “You want me to read to him?”

“Read. Or talk. Or…whatever you feel is best.”

Whatever I feel. What he felt, at least at first, was something utterly unbecoming, and he was glad Elim couldn’t see his face.

Often he and Elim didn’t see one another for nights at a time. They tried for kotra and kanar, but the realities of the castellanship and his own uneven schedule made it difficult.

For the last four cycles, however, Elim had carved one block of time without fail. Every intern on staff knew. Kelas knew. One hour of each evening was absolutely fixed, not to be scheduled over. If the castellan was anywhere in the system, he would spend that hour with the human.

He let the jealousy rise and fall with his breath, watched it burn bright for a moment before fading, as it usually did.

Of course, he had encouraged Elim to do it, and the deeper, steadier part of him knew it was what Elim needed. And likely Bashir, too.

That human is lost in the dark, and I won’t deny him a lantern. Such selfishness was unworthy of him and of Elim and of what they had built. They had long ago learned to love the messy truths of one another, past and all. And that human was a part of Elim, past and present.

So he was a part of them, too.

Reminding himself of this several times, he finally turned to meet the blue eyes that waited, patient, for his.

“Of course I will, Elim.” The look on the other man’s face, soft and grateful, quelled whatever sting remained. “He’ll be well looked after, I promise.”

Palm found palm.

Outside the night-locusts’ song had turned as sweet as a bow across strings. They called to each other, and, joyfully, finally, they were answered.

Chapter Text

Day One: Somret

The suite where Bashir was kept—no, Kelas, he’s not a piece of furniture—where Bashir lived was on the penultimate floor of the residence and had previously been used to house the coteries of visiting dignitaries and the like. As such, it was well-appointed but modest, without the ostentation of the official suites above. The hallway outside boasted little decoration save several paintings depicting various sites from Prime’s former life: the tall brown-fronded trees at Sonaret Springs, the Hebitian ruins at Garnal, the sprawling burial mounds of Suns’sar. There was even a painting of the old Tarlak Grounds, the Way of Heroes in relief against a glowing sun.

It was all gone now. He’d asked Elim why he didn’t commission new works. Works that celebrated their world’s new face and new beauty.

I can think of nothing more appropriate for that space than reminders of all I’ve lost, he’d replied with a rueful smile.

Kelas didn’t look at the paintings as he passed.

It wasn’t dread he felt: dread was too strong a word for the squirming sensation in the back of his mind and the bottom of his stomach. It was more an awareness that the hour had arrived and that he had no idea how it would leave him. How it would feel.

He remembered this sensation: he’d felt it when Bashir had visited Prime in the octals before the incident. Kelas had absented himself from the residence for those few days. Elim hadn’t said anything—certainly hadn’t asked him to leave—but Kelas knew. Elim had anticipated that visit for years, and Kelas wanted to allow him the space to experience it.

This same squirming uncertainty had filled him for those two very long days.

Afterwards, Elim had been different. It was a subtle change, like the slightest drop in pressure after a rain. He and Bashir had finally met on Cardassia, and Bashir had gone. The tension had broken; that chapter closed.

But the next chapter had rather complicated the story’s end. Bashir had returned only a few cycles later—in a hoverchair. Broken.

Pausing at the door, he gave himself a moment and a few deep breaths. Really, there was no need to feel so nervous. It was an hour. Like an hour with a patient. Or a colleague. Or another of Elim’s acquaintances from the times before.

Oh, it’s nothing like that. And pretending it was wouldn’t help.

But, then again, stalling wasn’t helping either.

He’d had a nervous, contemplative disposition all his life. Even as a child, he’d turned scenarios over and over in his mind until he was near paralyzed with fear—a tendency that had annoyed Father to no end. Stop that incessant hmmming and get on with it already. Mother always had a gentler way, though. Each time she’d caught him avoiding some unpleasant task, she would smile and pat his shoulder and whisper: If you want to pass through the desert, lis’sea, you have to step foot in the sand.

Hearing that tender voice now, he reached down to click the mechanism. It was time, he supposed, to dip a toe in the dune.

The door whisked open, and he found himself staring straight into a wide set of green eyes.

“Oh!” the young woman on the other side startled, falling into nervous laughter. Its lightness was so welcome he couldn’t help but smile back. “Oh, do forgive me, s’sava! You startled me.”

S’sava. He would never get used to that. “Larria, dear, I’m no one’s s’sava. Kelas will do fine.”

He knew it was hard for her to think that way, even now. Before the Fire, her family had been service class, and from what he could gather, exceptionally poor. They had lived on state assistance, and he didn’t doubt that the girl had developed a sort of reflexive deference to everyone. It had been necessary in those days.

“Of course. Kelas.” She repeated the name like a child running a sweet through her mouth. “Kelas. I’ll try to remember.”

There was a pause, and they remained face-to-smiling-face in the doorway.

“I, hmm…I’m here to visit Doctor Bashir. Since the castellan—“

“Oh, yes, his staff informed me,” she said brightly, stepping aside to let him enter. “We’ve just finished his evening meal. He was looking a bit parched, so I was going to fetch some water from the replicator across the hall.” She must have seen something cross his face because she set a hand on his shoulder with a reassuring look. “I’ll be right back, I promise.”

She returned quickly, and her energy helped ease him into the staid quiet of the room.

The human was propped in a chair by the window, thin evening light sideways across his lap. The air smelled as the air in such rooms always does—clean and antiseptic and barely breathed. There was a tinge to it, though—an alien musk. He remembered Elim talking about the concentrated mammalian smell of that station: now he understood.

Though the room felt somber and funereal to him, Larria moved through it as easily as if it were her home, taking a moment to dust something from the table before carrying the glass to the window.

When Bashir had first arrived, Elim had asked Kelas for his opinion on arrangements. He’d made medical recommendations, of course, but the human’s problems weren’t, at base, medical. The Federation doctors had done everything that could be done. Medically, Bashir was as sound as he could be. Now what the human needed, Elim agreed, was care. Exceptional care.

And Kelas had thought immediately of Larria.

Larria had grown up with five older brothers and a father partially paralyzed during military service. Her mother died young, and Kelas suspected Larria learned to care for those around her at an early age. They hadn’t talked much about it—the past could be so painful a subject these days—but he knew she had loved her family beyond measure. When she spoke of them, delight spread across her, as sudden and vivid as sunlight and every bit as warming.

Two of her brothers had died in the Dominion War. The rest had been lost in the Fire.

And Larria had shown up at his triage clinic, in shock but desperate to do something. To help. It was all she had left.

He’d found her to be one of the brightest young people he’d ever met. What she lacked in education, she made up for in tenacity, and, even in those dark days, she’d shone with an insistent optimism that was every bit as valuable to patients’ recoveries as fresh water or a course of antibiotics. In the span of a few cycles, she was his most effective nurse and one of the most adored—by colleagues and patients alike.

It wasn’t the medical, though, that Larria loved: she loved the care. The people.

And damned if she didn’t love Bashir.

“I’ve brought water, bhana.”

From his vantage, he couldn’t see more than the slackness of the human’s profile, but he watched as Larria took that cheek tenderly in hand, tipping his head, raising the glass just enough to wet his lips. She smiled down at him, affection shining in her eyes.

Larria made Elim…uncomfortable. He had trusted Kelas’s recommendation, of course, and agreed to bring her in as Bashir’s primary caretaker, but he found her cheer unnerving. Her easy kindness and effusive smiles left him at a loss, and, on several occasions, Kelas had laughed to himself watching Elim bite his tongue through some of Larria’s sunnier observations.

But the first time Elim heard her address Bashir as bhana—in that manner of speech reserved for addressing a beloved elder brother—Elim had understood. He told Kelas about it later that night, speaking in the humblest tones Kelas had ever heard him use.

Elim and Larria both cared for the human—both found something of themselves in him. And through him, they had developed a mutual respect.

Though, Larria confessed, the castellan still made her unspeakably nervous.

He smiled, watching her take the small brown poppet from the window and place it in the human’s lap.

“Well, I’ll leave you two to it.” She turned to address Bashir. “Bhana, Doctor Parmak is here, as I said. Be hospitable and don’t fret too much about the castellan. He’ll be back…what, Velet evening?”

It took Kelas a moment to realize she was speaking to him. “Oh—oh yes. Late Velet, they told me.”

“See, there you go. Just an octal,” she said to Bashir again. His face remained limp and lifeless. “And Doctor Parmak here is excellent company. The time will fly right by us, I know.”

 Looking into those unmoving, glassy eyes, Kelas doubted that very, very much.

“And if you need anything, s’sav—Kelas, just comm me.”

The door hissed closed, and they were alone. The quiet was cut only by the whir of the internal coolers above and the whisper of Bashir’s many monitors.

Well, here he was, standing in the sand…now what?

A chair was positioned beside Bashir’s and, on the table, a book sat, small marker peeking from its pages. Larria had left a glass of kanar as well. Perhaps she usually did that for the castellan.

Or perhaps he looked like he needed it.

There you are, Kelas. Sit in the chair, sip kanar, and read. Simple enough.

But as he sat and truly looked at Julian Bashir for the first time, it didn’t feel simple at all.

The man was handsome, but of course he’d expected nothing less. Elim had never spoken about the man’s appearance except to say that he was young and green as a kerutet sapling when first they met. Still, Kelas knew. Elim had a weakness for beauty in all things.

Of course the human didn’t look so young now, but he’d aged in that way that deepened beauty, like the softness of frescoed walls long admired. Larria kept the hair on his face neatly trimmed: they’d had to ask a few of the lingering human expats about that, and though Larria had despaired after her first attempt with the depilator (Elim had said something about a blind gardener with hedge trimmers), she must have improved because it looked natural now and lent the man’s face a sharp, strong shape.

But this man’s beauty came from his eyes, or rather, it had, Kelas could see. Looking at them now, he understood Elim’s attachment to the paintings in the hallway. Something had been lost there—something to be memorialized…

He blinked, aware he’d been staring. “Forgive me, Doctor Bashir,” he said, sitting up a little straighter. “I’m afraid I’ve neglected the niceties. I’m Kelas Parmak…I don’t know if Elim…” No…that wasn’t the way. “I’m Elim’s partner. He, hmm, he’ll be away for the next octal, and, I’m afraid you’ll have to make do with me instead.” He smiled by reflex: it hung in the air, unreturned.

Of course.

Kelas had seen this situation many times after the Fire. People in shock, locked away within themselves for whole octals or cycles or…well, forever, in some cases. And each time he’d seen a family member or a friend interact with a catatonic loved one for the first time, he’d noticed that surprise. The stuttering unreturned reach. The sudden realization that the person they loved, while sitting there and breathing, was gone, past even their voice to recall.

He’d seen it, but he hadn’t understood.

How awful this must be for Elim. How much he had wanted this man to be here, to sit across and converse and reconnect. Instead Elim sat beside him every night, reminded that such a future was as lost as whatever might once have lit those eyes.

And yet he keeps coming back. Every day that he’s able. Impelled by a sense of duty—of sacrifice, no doubt.

Or perhaps…one never knew with Elim. It might be something richer—something rarer.

Perhaps Elim was holding on to hope.

Hope.

He remembered a time—oh very well—when Elim had been incapable of such. When the man he’d met trusted nothing and no one enough to indulge in the hazards of optimism.

And you almost turned away in fear, then, too.

They’d been thrown together seven days after the Fire. That morning had been all frayed light and dust, and Elim had emerged from it like some specter from a hatchling’s tale. The eyes caught against memory first, of course. Those eyes. He hadn’t seen what passed through them in that shared second of recognition: his own fear and revulsion had overwhelmed him, and he’d looked away.

Self-conscious, he’d straightened the stoop of his back and tucked the gray streak of hair behind an ear. They were the twin legacies of three years hard labor and harder living, and he hadn’t wanted this man to see them—to know the toll that had been exacted.

The specter had spoken first. “Doctor Parmak.”

In that room—before—he’d never heard a voice. The man hadn’t needed a voice. It remained one of Kelas’s greatest shames, how pitifully he’d crumbled.

To his surprise, however, the man’s voice was unaccountably small, and something in it had made him look again.

On second glance, he’d seen no specter. Only deep lines between ridges and hair blotted with sand. The stiffness of an old back forced to sleep on hard ground. Desolation and loss and, yes, the beginnings of gray just at the temples.

There were no more bright lights. No instruments. No threats. There’d been nothing between them or behind them anymore.

Nothing but dust.

This work, he’d reminded himself, wasn’t about him. It wasn’t about this man or their past. It was about the future, and if a man would use his hands to move rubble, it didn’t matter what occupied them before. Hands that had tortured could save a life just as easily.

“Perhaps I should…request reassignment.”

Kelas had shuddered, he knew. Even the intervening years couldn’t sand that edge from that memory. But he had managed, for an unpleasant strain of several seconds, to hold those eyes with his. Not bravery--no. But stubbornness. “That won’t be necessary, Citizen…?”

This time it had been the other man who looked away. “Garak. Elim Garak.”

Kelas had handed him a pack of supplies and moved on without another word.

Neither had known what that one small gesture would begin. Something larger than them both, of course: yet, also, somehow, perfectly fitted for two.

The first step out into the sand.

He looked over at Bashir, whose hazel eyes were fixed on the window, as empty as Elim’s had been. As lost.

Who knew what this small gesture would begin? Who ever knew how a story would progress?

Fortifying himself with a sip of kanar, he took another step out into the desert.

Chapter Text

Day Two: S’saret

Typically, by the sixth cycle of the year, autumn began to play on the air. The temperature dropped a fraction each day. The edges of morning curled with moisture. Clouds thickened, hinting at rain.

This year, however, even into the seventh cycle, the sun seemed stuck in summer’s heat, and today, as it reached midday height, things worsened. For the first time that year, a true dust storm hit—grinding and scratching into everything, driving everyone into shelter until the howling winds had passed.

Replanting projects around the major cities had, as roots gripped and spread, stopped the worst of the storms. There was still dust in the summers, yes, but each year it lessened, and some time every autumn, masks could be put away until the following year. Everyone smiled for a full cycle after that: smiles unhidden, without fear of grit between the teeth.

But today, Kelas had dug the mask out before making his walk to the residence. Even with it, his eyes ached and stung.

The ‘casts insisted the storm was no cause for alarm. Unusual pressure systems brought desert winds from a different direction and with greater force. As he made his way through the streets, however, he saw it in people’s harried, red looks. Fear. Fear that whatever gods had finally shown them mercy were returning for a second round of retribution.

It would be another generation, he imagined, before the people of Cardassia didn’t feel as if they deserved to be punished.

When he finally arrived, blasted and bitten, at Bashir’s suite, the slumped figure by the window gave the unnerving impression of having stopped frozen the prior evening. The whole room had the feel of a specimen, in fact, preserved and floating, and it rubbed against Kelas’s already foul mood, irritating as the sand between neckscales.

“Good evening, Doctor Bashir,” he managed as he set himself down in the chair, dusting the hide of his neck until several offending grains fell free. “Shall we…start where we left off?”

He picked up the novel dutifully and returned to the page where they’d stopped the night before.

But dust tickled his throat, and each word scratched a little more than the one before. Several times, he stopped to relieve it with kanar, but, three or four pages in, his voice was as red and ragged as his eyes.

The choice of literature wasn’t helping either. He’d never cared for enigma tales, and this one was particularly awful, even for Elim.

“Forgive me, Doctor Bashir,” he sighed and closed the book in disgust. An eddy of dust swirled upwards, unusually lively in the stale air. “Elim shouldn’t subject you to this, especially when you’ve no way to defend yourself.” The last sentence he’d read had six clauses, each worse than the last. “Honestly… ‘she gazed at him longingly, as if a single word from those lips might quench a lifetime’s abiding thirst’?” He chuckled, looking over the ridiculous pastoral image on the cover. Costumes. These characters were always be-costumed somehow. “Elim has a weakness for melodrama, as I’m sure you noticed. And flowery prose. Honestly, this thing would be about ten pages if you took out the adjectives.”

He gulped again: it wasn’t wise to drink liquor when thirsty, he knew, but somehow the knowledge wasn’t stopping him. The kanar was too cool and smooth in his throat for moderation.

“You know…Elim told me that the two of you read books together. Were they as horrid as this one?” He smiled. “I’ll bet he talked you into reading all sorts of horrid Cardassian ‘classics.’ Let me see…I’m going to guess Preloc… Crimson Shadow or The Gilded Spear, am I right? Maybe something by Shoggoth, for lighter fare.  And of course—of course—The Never-ending Sacrifice. Elim and that damned book.” He shook his head, turning the kanar glass in his hands. “You should know, Doctor Bashir, that Elim’s view of the Cardassian canon isn’t exactly universal. Plenty of us enjoy less fussy prose and a little humor now and again.  You know, early on in our acquaintance, when Elim had just joined my med unit…”

****************

Sometime in the last octal, the men and women in his med unit had taken to sitting together at the triage tents each night, eating ration bars and discussing things like literature and art and music. Each day, as that hour grew closer, the mood lightened—a subtle change but every bit as palpable as the drop in temperature before a storm. Conversation was a precious reminder of times past and provided far more savor than the nutritionally adequate but otherwise lacking ration bars. And, of course, they were all as starved for a taste of before as for anything else.  

They went about it carefully, though. They discussed literature and art and music but only literature and art and music. Only those things that wouldn’t remind them how many they’d pulled from the rubble—or how many they’d lost in the octals before.

The first night, someone claimed that a salvage unit in the Arts District had discovered a Raskat painting without so much as a scratch, still stretched perfect in its frame. True or not, this led to an argument about the Contextual Modernists, and Prisan, who had studied art at the U of U, proved a fount of information and well-informed opinions. She defended Raskat’s avant garde style against the objections of her elders around the circle. With deference, of course, but also with admirable strength of conviction, Kelas felt.

The next night, Prisan had offered the more pleasing opinion that Ghivak’s Orange Symphonies contained the best azal arrangements since the instrument’s invention. While this pleased her elders, Lagrak, a young man closer to Prisan’s age, scoffed. The two spent a solid hour arguing about the relevance of classical composition and the role of artists in testing established cultural models. He threw Raskat back at her in challenge. After a time, most around the circle merely sat back and enjoyed the show.

Kelas and Malak, the oldest in the unit, had exchanged knowing smiles. “I give it a cycle before they’re in the same tent,” Malak whispered low. Watching the two young people gesticulate at one another, shoulders squared and faces alight, Kelas thought it might be less.

Tonight, with the moons at joined-full and the whole world drenched in white, the conversation moved on to novels. Citizen Garak brought up The Never-ending Sacrifice eagerly.

“Isn’t it magnificent?”

A series of appreciative murmurs percolated around the circle. Malak was particularly effusive, reciting a short passage from the final canto.

My finest jewels, I’ve cast them on the fire

My richest clothes, I’ve torn them thread from thread

For fire warms a soldier’s hands through night

And cloth best serves to decorate the dead.

My eldest child I lost to serve the state

My youngest, too, I sent to war with song

I cast my own poor flesh upon the fire

And pray it keep the Union ever strong.

Everyone knew those words. Everyone learned them.

Kelas’s back ached, and his stomach, too. The ration bar tasted like dust. Everything did.

“I hate that book.”

He’d grumbled it—a barely-there counterpoint to the awed reverence all around. But Garak plucked it up just the same. “What was that, Doctor?”

“I hate that book.” He pinned his eyes to the ground in front of him, to a patch of white sand cast blue beside the light of the generator. “ ‘And for our sacred Union I give all; for from that Union all was given me.’” He recited, anger growling as fiercely as his hunger. “We threw everything onto that fire: jewels, clothes, children, ourselves. We worshiped at the altar of unquestioning loyalty and glorious death and constant sacrifice and… can’t you see?” He gestured out across the emptiness that hemmed them in.  “All of it does have an end…we’ve found it!”

The silence of night was an eerie one now. No night-locusts. No skimmers. No life at all. Just the jagged anger of his voice echoing through so many empty spaces.

In their small circle, the silence tightened. Held breath and averted eyes and nervous shifts. Tension, thick and cloying as the dust, sat on the air.

Those words…no one would have dared to utter them before. Before, most wouldn’t have dared to think them.

And now…?

Guls, it was another hardship. Not just the bodies and the dust and the hunger, but the toppled towers of everything they’d known. The scraped clean halls of state. What could one say? What could one think?

Orders and edicts had fallen as silent as everything else, and the lawlessness left them adrift.

They drifted now, in their circle, and he felt the men and women beside him casting about—searching for an anchor.

No one had said it aloud, but they knew. It had made its way through whispers somehow, what Citizen Garak had been. And so, naturally, they looked to him.

Everyone knew what the man had been.But what is he now?

Kelas forced himself to look, too.

What he expected, he couldn’t have said. Disapproval, perhaps. Coldness of a certainty. At worst, a reminder of a room with a light as bright and rinsing as the moons above.

But he saw none of that. Blue eyes reflected back moonlight and confusion, the other man drifting, too. He asked the same question: could all thoughts be spoken now that no one was left to hear?

It was gone, all of it. They were lost, Citizen Garak just as much. The destruction hadn’t spared even one.

Eventually, Garak sighed, looking out across the bones of the city with a frown. His tone was level, his face impenetrable. “It’s only a book, Doctor. There’s no need for such…dramatics.”

Kelas breathed again. Beside him, he sensed Malak exhale, too. “Yes, forgive me. I can get rather passionate about…literature.”

Their eyes glanced off one another, testing, before Citizen Garak subsided completely, gaze settling back into the desolate distance. “An admirable quality, Doctor.”   

The silence was white, but no longer menacing.

Shaky, one of the younger men cleared his throat. “I…I hated it, too. The ending especially. I really wanted Maran to…live. He had a family. He’d already given so much. It…didn’t seem right.”

Citizen Garak remained silent. Kelas gave the young man an uneasy smile, and everything moved on.

When he laid down that night, back still aching and dust still caked between every scale, Kelas understood with a certainty he hadn’t felt since the world had come crashing down around him.

They would all have to change, interrogators and interrogated alike. It was the only way to make it through this terrible new freedom.

And for once—here in the drowned-white ruins of their city—he began to believe that such change might, in fact, be possible. That their children might not have to be thrown onto that fire again.

The next morning, over another half-ration bar, Citizen Garak asked for his forgiveness.

He, to his own surprise, granted it.

***************

The room had grown warm, though whether from the slide of setting sun or the kanar working its way down his limbs, Kelas couldn’t be sure. It wasn’t until he’d finished the story that he’d even remembered the scratch of the dust.

It had been a long time since he’d let himself think of it, that moment.

He glanced over at Bashir, slumped, unblinking at the red sunset that worked its way across Cardassi’or. He wondered idly if Elim would mind that he’d told Bashir that story. If Bashir had heard it at all.

He wondered if Bashir himself was the reason—part of what had changed Elim in that space between interrogation chamber and med unit. If so, Cardassia owed him mightily.

Kelas certainly did, too.

He tipped the last drops of kanar down his throat, unsure what to do with such a thought. “All that, I suppose, to say that…if you didn’t enjoy The Never-ending Sacrifice, Doctor Bashir…well, you’re not the only one. And that’s okay now.” He looked out the window at a city so different than it had been that night. Not just the cresting red tops of the skyline: the foundations themselves had changed.

“I haven’t had the courage to ask him since, but…I wonder sometimes if Elim feels the same about that book now.” He stood, and, limbs heavy with heat and kanar, set a tentative hand on the back of Bashir’s chair. “Perhaps you can ask him, when you’re able.”

The last bit of sun flushed the distant hills and the brown of Bashir’s eyes alike.

Kelas withdrew his hand, wondering suddenly how he’d let the drink get the better of him. How he’d gone from reading rote enigma tales to discussing the soul of their absent friend.

He swallowed and set the thought aside. Another for the fire.

“Goodnight, Doctor Bashir. I’ll, hmm…I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Silence, as heavy as he remembered, and as lifeless.

Outside the dust had begun to settle, but it stung nevertheless.

Chapter Text

Day Three: Osgalet

Kelas loosened the collar of his shirt, enjoying, for once, the suite’s ever-humming internal coolers. Today, however, even they seemed unable to keep pace with the blinding heat.

Far from abating in the wake of the dust storm, the unseasonable temperature had ratcheted upwards, and, for the first time in years, there was discussion of instituting level five water restrictions. The ‘casts showed endless queues at central replication stations and old women boiling pots of liquid so murky it made him cringe. An uptick in intestinal infections had already begun as well as an influx of the elderly and the young in various stages of dehydration.

As it always did, drought came coupled with anxious murmurs of hunger. It hadn’t hit outside a few small towns to the far north, but the ‘casts had those pictures, too. Families sharing a single ration bar. Fields where crops faded from pale green to yellow to brown. Local officials calling for action from the state, as if, somehow, the castellan and the Assembly were personally withholding the rain.

And the human sat, looking out on it all, like some unseeing god.

Kelas sighed and took his seat.

“I apologize, Doctor Bashir. I’m afraid I haven’t found us anything to read this evening. It’s been a rather hectic day, and on top of it all, Elim has me reviewing requests for medical aid from the local controllers.” He pulled a padd from his case. “I still have quite a few left, so, perhaps you wouldn’t mind working along with me….? A bit of medicine might be a welcome change.”

Elim never worked during this hour, Kelas knew. He’d been quite explicit with Timel: the only messages that were urgent enough to merit interruption were frantic calls from heads of state or any call from Kelas.

Kelas made it a point never to interrupt. Galactic events weren’t always as kind.

He powered on the padd, reassuring himself that if anything, the medical would be of far more benefit to the human than the florid enigma tales Elim had been forcing on him for cycles. Nevertheless, he kept talking, as if somehow talking made it less like work. “I would certainly welcome any medical counsel, Doctor. Elim always said how skilled you—” He stopped, the perspective of verb tense suddenly uncomfortable. He shook his head and moved on. “I read about your work on the Andorian reproductive crisis.  Fascinating stuff. And insightful. We’re…we’re lucky you’ve come to us.”

Something in the smile felt hollow, but he did it just the same.

“Let’s see…” He scrolled to the next item on the padd. “The Controller of Drivet needs more antiviral packs to treat their first few chom’nu cases. We get a few pockets of outbreak every year: nothing to be concerned about. Hmm.” He typed the necessary direction to Elim’s staff in the response form and moved on.

“Ahh, the Controller of Mhet. I don’t suppose you know Mhet…a little town close to Lakarian City.” He still hated to think about Lakarian. The holos haunted him. “I’m sure you remember that name. Still partially radioactive, even all these years on, and no one in their right mind goes near. But a stubborn few have stayed in Mhet, and their Controller is one of the fiercest women I’ve ever known. You should see it, Doctor. She hounds Elim, honestly. I’ve never seen someone get the better of him as regularly as she does. But Mhet…it’s doing alright, all things considered…” He paused a moment to read. “Yes, they need more antirad packs. Everyone who insists on staying there makes steady use of them.”

Several on Elim’s staff argued that relocating the residents of Mhet would be far more efficient than continuing to lay out lek on antirad packs and treatment for radiation burns. But he agreed with Elim on this: Mhet was a symbol. People might joke about the Mheti being stubborn as sandfleas and twice as irritating, but they respected them just the same. Refusing to give up their homes. Refusing to be cowed.

He sent the Mheti their packs and moved on.

The next document was not as easy to read. It took him several passes to assimilate the information. The quiet susurrus of Bashir’s monitors kept time.

This was from Basam, a small city to the south. Rebuilding projects in Basam had been a challenge, but then, Basam had always been a byword for difficulty.  You might as well build a house in Basam had been a common expression of futility even before the Fire, and the bombardment had only destabilized the land further. With the help of the Federation, they had managed to replane surrounding areas and shore up the existing structures, and, in the process, uncovered a sizeable duranium deposit. People had flooded in, looking to join the mining operation. Almost overnight, Basam had become a major hub in the economy of Prime.

He’d seen the report on the ‘casts several days earlier. One of the older buildings had given out. Twenty-seven had been killed in the collapse, and a great deal more injured. They requested a bevy of medical supplies.

There’d been a holo of the collapse that first day. A young girl pulled from the rubble, convulsing, her arm a mess of ligament and absence. It had pressed against memory, and it ached again now.

“Forgive me, Doctor. I…it’s been long enough since the Fire that I can sometimes forget. I can go a full cycle or two without even thinking of it.  But something always brings it back, though. For the best in some ways, but today...” The girl’s face was close, and he set down the padd, knowing it wouldn’t be ignored. Shouldn’t be, maybe.

“There was so much death then, just after the Fire. It was constant as the dust, and you got used to it just the same. But worse than the death, it often seemed, was the living. I would save a life and wonder…will she thank me? Will he live another octal?” He glanced at the human’s slack face as if expecting to see some disgust or disbelief at the sentiment. “Our med unit found a little girl once—"

*********************

They found her under a bulkhead that might have crushed a man twice her size. She wore a red dress with small hounds stitched along the cuffs. Her hair hung loose from a ribbon.

Her legs were crushed, and one of her arms. Beside her, her mother had been dead for days.

The girl herself lay just as still until Citizens Malak and Garak stirred her. A rattle of not-quite-breath escaped, a sudden seizure of pain, and then…nothing.

He set his ear to her chest. There was no denying the beat, unsteady but there. A plaintive murmur, ready to tip into silence. Ready for an end.

The thought passed through him like a chill, cold in hot air.

Best leave it, Kelas.

What was left for her, it asked, atremble: a little girl, maimed, dying, and alone? What was left for any of them? Why save someone from a housefire when the whole world was in flames?

For the smallest split of a second, he hesitated. He watched.

Watched gray eyes go hazy and distant. Watched the first spots of white frost gray lips. Watched the skin between scales contract, the body drawing in for one last gasp.

Death ran cool hands over slight features, claiming its prize.

And, weeping, he gave in. He couldn’t watch. He had to try.

More stimulants, clearing the airways, a transfusion…and again…

He worked, he kept going, kept trying until she woke. Until he’d coaxed that beat back, and her pale eyes met his and saw.

Until they took her away, screaming.

He laid down in her place.

Through the delirium, he felt as if he were dying himself. Or perhaps death had claimed him already and left this in his place. This man who would let a little girl die and call it mercy. This man who would rather bury the dead than save them.

If not for Citizen Garak, he might have stayed in that rubble which, he recalled distantly, had once been a grocer’s. He couldn’t move; couldn’t speak. Oblivion had swallowed him, and it beat like a heart.

Garak carried him to the triage tents and forced half a ration bar and a day’s worth of water into him. But still each breath hurt, and he they would stop. With closed, flooded eyes, he laid down again and pretended they had.

Get up, boy.

He pressed his eyes shut tighter against that remembered voice.

Are you going to lie there weeping like a woman? Or are you going to fight? Ancestors, I swear those doctors were confused when they told me I had a son…

Clouds slithered across the sky, and he wept harder. Tears came without sound or effort, mixing with the dust.

Oh, tsh. Mother always silenced them in those moments. She would lean closer, with a soft hand on his back. With hard certainty in her voice. It’s who you are, lis’sea. A hound may not be a wolf, but he can win races just the same.

There was a soft hand on his elbow now, and, for a moment, the two memories met as if on the silver plain of a touched mirror.

“Doctor…the others are returning. If you…if you’d prefer they didn’t see you…there’s a place…” Garak’s face was impassive.

If I’d prefer they didn’t see me blubbering like a child, eh, Citizen Garak?

He wiped uselessly at his eyes and nodded, following the other man away.

They wandered through the ghosts of streets for a long while, picking a path through what had once been a park, a restaurant, an office building. Through the mangled trellises of the central gardens. The razed flat of Union Way. The cracked glass of Station Rait’za, gold littering the ground in impossible buds. Steps stuttered over and around, as tangled as his thoughts.

When they finally stopped, it was at a high perch. Once, the spot might have provided a splendid view of Tarlak Grounds below. Now, however, it offered only bones, the statues memorializing Cardassia’s finest a scrambled heap of broken faces and legs and dust. At the horizon, the sun highlighted the destruction prettily.

Garak sat at the edge, and, as the silence stretched and the sun fell inch by inch, he picked up bits of rubble and flung them out at the ruined statues below. 

Everything was quiet.

After a time, Kelas sat beside.

Most days he avoided Citizen Garak. He kept someone else along to mark a distance between. They must never sit like this, alone.

But today…today there was something oddly comforting in the sturdy presence of his past. A reminder of his weaknesses. Of his cowardice.

He glanced over expecting the other man’s usual opaque expression. Here in this place, however, it had changed. Here in this place, Citizen Garak seemed…small. Open.

 “Do you...come here often?”

“When I need air. And space,” Garak said at length.

“And target practice, I see.”

He sighed, launching another rock. “They’re easy targets these day.” The rock hit squarely against what had once been the knee of Legate Rait’zel.

“Why here? If it’s open space you need…there’s plenty of that to be found.”

Garak didn’t throw the next one, instead turning it in his hand, examining. “I played here as a boy. My…father was foreman for these grounds.” The words were jagged as the rubble he palmed. “I would look down the Way from here and imagine myself among them. A gul. A hero. A patriot. Later on, on my more grandiose days, I told myself I was one. Serving Cardassia. The Order. Doing my important work.” He took a moment longer to weigh the rock in his hand before he sent it into the darkening sky. It connected somewhere below with a high crack. “ ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ ”

The strange words rang in the open for a moment before he added in a voice bitter as gelat. “Just something I learned from Doctor Bashir.”

Kelas didn’t ask. It didn’t matter. He understood the sentiment only too well.

Instead of a reply, he found a rock of his own. “Are we…hmm…aiming for anyone in particular?”

Garak smiled. “I can’t be certain, but I think that one was Skrain Dukat. I could throw rocks at that face for an eternity.”

It was hard to argue with that. He launched the rock with all the force of the pain and hate he’d found within himself that afternoon. Cycles-worth of loss and fear and hunger in a high, whistling arc.

The blow was glancing but left a satisfying pock in what might once have been a cheek.

Garak tipped his head and gave an exaggerated look of admiration, offering another rock.

“I—I wanted to let her die today.”

The words tumbled out, bare and sudden, and as soon as they had, he wished them back. He has you confessing again, Kelas. How does he do it?

Somewhere just under them, something scurried past, tiny sounds against the setting sun—the first of the night scavengers, no doubt.

What did he hope to accomplish by saying it aloud? What response did he expect? Was he hoping Citizen Garak would mete out some punishment like that inquisitor of old? Was he hoping to be judged and found wanting all over again?

 But the words kept coming, undeterred. “I…almost did. Let her die, I mean.”

Garak frowned. “But you didn’t.”

“I wanted to.”

“But you didn’t, and ‘didn’t’ means a great deal more than most realize, Doctor.” Carefully, with only a moment’s hesitation, Garak took his hand and placed a rock in it gently. “‘Didn’t’ is what separates a man like you from a man like me.”

There were no more words, nothing more offered. Garak turned back to the sunset, disappearing into the quiet as easily as a regnar fading into shadow.

But somehow, something in that thought made Kelas’s next breath come easier, gripping pressure in his chest loosened a bit. It’s who you are, lis’sea.

He would lie down and weep, yes, but, tomorrow, he would wake and do it all again. It was the only type of courage he had. Father might have despised it, but this was him. It was the one thing the Fire hadn’t changed. He wasn’t a soldier: he was a doctor, and, though he might buckle under the crushing weight of death, he remained a servant of life. The cold pragmatism—the calculating of odds and half-mercies—that was for other men. Men like Father. Men like Garak.

“Thank you, Garak,” he whispered, hearing the words bounce off the silent night with the same small force as a launched rock.

It was the first time those blue eyes found him like that. Not as a workmate, not as an uncomfortable reminder of the past—now, suddenly, as a man. Almost like a friend.

“You’re welcome, Doctor. And please, feel free to call me Elim.”

 “Elim.” Two syllables, deceptively soft—so drawn and elegant compared to the ‘Garak’ he’d known. Elim was different, he understood. Elim was the boy who’d stared out at Tarlak and dreamed.

He felt the unlikely tug of a smile.  Strange, this new world. They’d all woken to find themselves in new places, with new people, as jumbled up as the statues below.

He leaned back, looking up at the triple arc of the moons beginning to trace themselves in pearl overhead. “You know, Elim…you don’t have to be that kind of man, either. If ever there was a time to tear down and rebuild …”

He didn’t finish the thought, preferring the echoing ellipsis of another thrown stone.

Neither of them spoke again until well after the sun had set behind Tarlak Grounds.

*************************

Kelas was smiling.  An odd story to smile at…unless you knew the ending.

The heat and the smell of the room drew him back, however, and the smile wavered.

He looked at the man beside. The story doesn’t have an ending yet, though, does it? He was still living it. Still waiting to see how it—how this—would turn out.

“I believe, Doctor Bashir, that was the first time Elim ever mentioned you. Though far from the last, of course. It…it stuck with me, as did those strange words. ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.’ We had plenty of despair, in those days.”

There was no response, no movement save sweat trickling down the human’s face, pooling at the base of his neck and in the bow above dry lips. Too dry. Bashir needed water.

Without much thought, Kelas reached for the glass and took that slack, soft face in his hand. Cradling the down of the human’s skin and staring into dead eyes, however, something stirred. Some afterimage of a gray gaze and a listless beat. Hounds stitched on the cuff of a dress.

Best leave it, Kelas.

He wanted to turn away, but he forced himself to watch. Watch as the truth took shape between them.

What’s left for him here?

Of course Kelas had his own petty fears about what might happen if, suddenly, Bashir reappeared in Elim’s life—or rather reappeared as more than this living ghost. But even beyond that, Kelas knew the pain that waited for the human on this side of the abyss. What it was like to wake to a world utterly changed. To the loss of everything that had been.

Nothing and no one would be the same.

And, to Kelas’s own shame, he realized how very much he had wanted that. To leave the room and never come back and let the man rest in peace—let the story have its end.

But he didn’t.

It was a lesson Elim had taught him, and he’d learned it well.

With a blush of discomfort, he realized that his touch had lingered too long, slicked with a bead of the human’s sweat. He withdrew quickly, reaching for the comm. “Larria, dear, I think Doctor Bashir may need a higher dosage of fluids and, perhaps, some external hydration.”

“Of course, Doctor. I’ll be right there.”

“And if you could, please bring me a datarod with his full file. Federation records and anything we’ve kept since he arrived here as well.”

The least he could do was review it. It was unlikely the Federation doctors had missed anything, but he had some experience with these cases. Perhaps there was something…

Whether it was a mercy or not, he couldn’t say. But he had to try.

He always did.

Chapter Text

Day Four: S’sukvhet

It hadn’t worked.

He hadn’t expected it to—not really. The Federation doctors had tried related medications, so he’d known it was a long shot. Around a five percent probability of success, if everything he’d read was accurate.

That didn’t stop the ache as he looked over the unremarkable vitals pinging across Bashir’s monitors.

Kelas’s brain never had been able to get a proper hold on probability. Oh, he understood the numbers, sure, but feeling them—feeling their weight—was another matter. On the scales of his heart, a five percent chance and a ninety percent chance balanced evenly. No matter the numbers, part of him hoped. He had, Memi always said, a stubborn heart.

So stubborn, in fact, that his eyes went in search of Bashir, still hoping to spy some hint of progress the monitors hadn’t revealed.

Bashir was no longer at the window—a welcome change to the usual frozen tableau of the room. No doubt to spare him the worst of the day’s heat, Larria had drawn the shutters tight and moved Bashir’s hoverchair to a table in the center of the room. On the table, a green vase reflected double in the polished surface beneath, a single meya lily glowing full white in dull light. Bashir’s unblinking eyes gave the impression of staring at it, intent, brightness reflected back as slick and perfect as in the table’s shine.

But there was nothing else there. No recognition. No life.

Swallowing the disappointment, Kelas set his padd on the table and took a seat beside. “Good evening, Doctor Bashir. I hope you’re managing to stay comfortable in this heat.” He allowed himself a sip of kanar and a loosened collar as he thumbed through in search of the article. “I hope you won’t think it presumptuous, Doctor, but I’ve been reviewing your files and doing a bit of reading on trauma-induced catatonia. I’m well aware of the resources and care the Federation devoted to your recovery, but we Cardassians have had some experience with severe trauma responses in the last years…” He turned the padd on the table between them as if Bashir might be able to see. Absurd, perhaps, but it felt right. “This article was published a few years ago by Doctor Kara Tilmak. She’s one of a budding group of, well, psychiatrists on Cardassia. It’s a new field here, psychiatry. Before the Fire, wellness and health of mind were not…priorities. Weren’t even even considered, really. In these last years, though, Doctor Tilmak and her colleagues have made plenty of headway if…if you’ll pardon the pun.”

His huff of laughter sounded lonely between them. Honestly, Kelas. Puns? The admonition came to him, as it had so many times before, in Elim’s voice. He wondered briefly if the human might appreciate that brand of humor more. He could use a little of that around here.

“This article—I’ll read it to you, if you like—is a review of various protocols that have been effective in circumstances like yours. Physical and emotional trauma followed by—” He paused. It seemed gauche to recount the events of Bashir’s injuries, so he moved on. “There are pharmaceuticals involved, of course. NMDA antagonists and anti-convulsives, which I believe the Federation administered and which I had re-administered in a different ratio early this morning. But also—”

He looked up at the human’s face reflecting the brightness of the meya. With its light in his eyes, it was easier to imagine how that face might respond if they were sitting across, having tea and conversation, chatting and reminiscing. I can see how Elim got caught by this one.

He took a measured breath, resisting the urge to reach for the kanar again. He wanted a clearer head. “But also… talking. Talking helps, they say. Not just absent chatter—certainly not those insipid enigma tales. But talking. About the loved. The familiar.”

The last several days, during those rare moments his mind had the opportunity to wander, Kelas found his thoughts returned, reflexive, to this room. To the words that he’d offered up between them. To the stories that, only here, seemed to wriggle to the surface like worms after a heavy rain.

Elim had done it, too, he knew, sat down and written it all out. He’d even sent it to Bashir—a love letter, though of course Elim didn’t think of it that way.

Kelas, however, had never taken the time to relive it. Those first few years with Elim had been so bound up with hunger and death and privation that he couldn’t bring himself to unearth them. He’d left them buried—undisturbed and sacred as a grave—trying to simply enjoy what had grown from those depths.

Why he’d begun excavating them now…he couldn’t guess.

At least he could console himself that it had some possible value—that it was a medical instinct as much as this more personal…impulse.

The radiant white reflected in the human’s eyes was, for a moment, as arresting a sight as Kelas had seen in years. “I think, Doctor Bashir, when it comes to the familiar and the loved, we might find we have quite a bit to talk about.”

He tried not to hear the ceaseless, hopeless pinging of the monitors in response.

“There is another story I…I thought you might like to hear. I don’t imagine it’s one Elim would have told you…he does hate admitting when he’s wrong.” He smiled and let himself imagine the smile was returned. “It, hmm, it was only a few octals after that evening at Tarlak, and I had attended a meeting of the local unit leaders—”

*************************

He’d just finished with the unit leaders’ meeting that evening when Elim slipped from the shadows and fell into step beside him. Elim, he’d learned, faded in and out of sight at will, a skill the man delighted in showing off whenever possible. In fact, Kelas could sense that self-satisfied smirk over his shoulder, though he kept his eyes forward and his pace unchanged.

“There’s no need to skulk, Elim. You could have joined us.”

“Ahh, the new Cardassia,” he mocked, making a grand gesture with his hands. “Everyone is welcome. Everyone gets their say. At least, that’s the direction things seemed to be going in there.”

 “I see you didn’t need to join us: you heard everything anyway.”

“I find the most productive listening is possible when no one knows you are.”

“Ahh, the old Cardassia.” Though it was difficult, Kelas let the words be. Let them leave their mark, as he knew they would.

Over the last few cycles, he’d watched Elim make an uncomfortable peace with the cracked-open freedom all around. Little things eased. He no longer dismissed the sharp disagreement of a former food server or hygiene drone. He at least appeared to entertain criticisms of Prime’s former life—even criticisms of the Order. On one rather memorable occasion, he’d offered up several surprisingly vehement rebukes of Enabran Tain himself.

But for all that, there’d been no missing the cool disapproval when discussion turned toward democratic reform. He might be willing to talk of change in a general sense, but Elim balked at the idea that Cardassia could adopt anything resembling a Federation model.

Kelas had been glad to see that didn’t stop the others from voicing their opinion just the same. “The sectors are all trying to decide who should manage dealings with other worlds. The Federation has aide proposals, but…”

“But we have no one to sit at that big, shiny table looking properly penitent and needy.”

The shattered remnants of a viewing screen lay sprinkled across their path—a curious relic now. Already, it was growing harder to remember things as they’d been. How the faces of Vorta and legates had been as ubiquitous as clouds or street lanterns. How the droning of speeches had played natural as birdsong behind the passage of everyday life. The silence was so deep that it seemed bottomless—as if it had simply always been.

As they passed by, Elim pushed the dirt-caked glass with a sandaled foot. “Mondrig is trying to get himself a seat at that table, I heard.”

“Yes. He has some support, too.”

Elim scoffed. “There’s no accounting for taste.”

And wasn’t that as dry as the dunes. “Do you disapprove because of his views or his humble background?”

“I disapprove because he has the vision of a regnar and the intellect of its sunning rock.”

Kelas couldn’t help but laugh. Say what you would: Garak did know how to turn a phrase.

Since their conversation at Tarlak, Kelas had considered the problem presented by Elim Garak on more than one occasion. Despite Elim’s past, most members of their work group had come to respect him. At first it had been fear, but Elim had a way—a charisma Kelas couldn’t deny—that softened the keen edge of distrust. That drew the listener in and in until they forgot.

Beyond that, there were whispers.  He didn’t know if Elim had heard them or if he’d started them or if they were even true. Most seemed to think so.

Citizen Garak was part of the resistance. Citizen Garak was at Damar’s side when he died. Citizen Garak helped end the war.

Elim Garak was a bit of a figure, it seemed. If they could convince Elim, he’d said to Ghemor, it might go some way to convincing others. What was more, the man was bright and hard-working and could no doubt be put to better use than moving rubble when the time came.

If, of course, he could be trusted. If he could be…better.

The man was a worrying collection of ifs.

“Mondrig won’t be the only one on the ballot,” Kelas tried.

“There will be a vote, then?”

Hmm. A tone less contemptuous than he might have expected just a few octals before. “It’s been planned, yes. Two cycles from now.”

A cloud passed across the sun, and wind gusted through the narrow alleyway, whirling dust at them sharp as a whip. They would need to get inside soon.

“Populism on Cardassia,” Elim sighed. “My father would be glad he didn’t live to see it.”

“And what about you?”

The pause had the length and width of consideration. “I…think it’s folly. But then, I’m one voice, easily drowned out. Isn’t that the new Cardassia?”

“I hope so.”

Those blue eyes turned towards him in clear appraisal. Kelas had begun to feel less pinned down by their intensity—had learned to see more there, at times. Wit and humor and, occasionally, a firmness that had the same pleasing quality as a settling touch.

But in that moment, Kelas felt the need to take a step away.

A fact that didn’t escape Elim. He turned his gaze to the path in front of them, keeping his tone light. “You’re an intelligent man, Doctor. Perhaps you can explain how we might expect thousands of differing voices raised at once to result in anything but cacophony.” The words were in the declarative, but he heard the question beneath. “It all sounds rather…inefficient.”

The wind whipped past again, harder this time. Kelas brushed sand from his eyes absently. “We spoke with one voice before, and it brought us, quite efficiently, to this. If you ask me, Cardassia might benefit from a little inefficiency.” He still felt a shock of fear saying such things, like a child cursing and expecting a smack. But slowly, he knew, it would get easier. It had to. “And differing voices sound harmoniously all the time, Elim. It is called music, and, as I understand, producing it requires only practice and determination.”

To his surprise, the other man had no immediate retort.

“Besides, it would be hard to do worse, don’t you think?”

That, at least, earned him a smile. Elim’s smile was quite stunning when genuine.

The crash came suddenly, knives of dust and debris following hard upon. Everything that had lain inert and innocent at their feet moments before now whirled at them in a frenzy. Elim barely dodged a large hunk of viewscreen that had set itself on a collision course with his head.

Duststorms were commonplace, but a telltale buildup beforehand usually allowed for the sounding of an alarm. The seeking of shelter. This one had descended on them with all the focused destruction of boot on beetle.

They stumbled through walls of dust for several minutes before he found it: a small alcove created between a fallen roof and the side of a building. Taking Elim’s arm, he pulled them both inside and propped a half-sheet of corrugated metal over the exposed end like a makeshift door. The howling winds fell to a dull whistle. Outside, rubble knocked rubble, cracking like thunder.

It was a relief, but a small one. Cramped and dim, only a few darts of light squeezed through cracks in the plasticrete. The smell was heady. Rotting. There had been a body here.

Elim covered nose and mouth as he crunched into the space across from Parmak. Their legs pushed together from necessity—there was no other way. “Wonderful.”

“I’m sorry. It seemed the best solution.”

“No, no. We…we couldn’t have stayed out there much longer.” The words tilted, an unfamiliar note in Elim’s voice.

“These storms usually don’t last longer than twenty minutes or so. We’ve seen worse.”

“Yes. Yes.” The vagueness of the response made him wonder if Elim had even heard what he’d said.

“Do you…do you need me to move further back or…?”

“No. Fine.”

What was this? “Are…are you alright?”

“Yes. Yes.” He repeated, as if stuck inside the words.

Then Kelas noticed. Quickened breath. Eyes pressed shut. Elim’s hand, white-knuckled against his leg, nails digging into palms...

Stuck inside.

“Are you…”

“Yes. Yes.”

 It was claustrophobia.

In the light that eked through the door, he could barely see it. Elim trembled.

Kelas felt the terrible cresting wave of the familiar. Rapid huffs. Shaking voice. Eyeridges drawn close in fear.

The next thought was an uncomfortable one.

Was this what I looked like to him?

For a moment, it was hard to find his own breath. The memory opened up, rotating and allowing him to a view from the other side.

Elim had sat and watched. It had been dark, with a single punch of light. Time had ticked, and Kelas had feared. The room had been small, like this.

No—no it hadn’t. It had felt small. The claustrophobic press had been in his mind.

He swallowed, feeling, for the hot tick of a moment, a shameful thrill at the other man’s fear. It was disturbingly easy, actually. To stare in silence as an unfelt torment took its toll. To say no words, to hone in on details. Far easier than he wanted to know.

The strangled noise of Elim gulping air, however, righted things. Suddenly it was difficult. It was real.  

You must do better, Kelas. You must be better. You’re not a man like him, remember?

Not knowing what else to do, he did what he came naturally in such situations. He thought of his mother. Of the days that had found him curled in a corner, anxious and alone.

And he did as she had. He set a gentling hand on the man’s arm.

Elim jumped.

“I’m sorry. I was just—”

“No, no. Please, Doctor. I…I’ll be fine.” The touch seemed to have steadied him a bit, and he opened his eyes now. “I’ve been in worse, as you said.” A bitter laugh. “I managed a holding cell for six cycles: I can do this.”

An ominous thing to say through laughter. “Holding cell?”

“On the…space station.”

Elim hadn’t spoken much about his time in that place, and Kelas hadn’t asked. He had his own years of exile which didn’t do to dwell upon. He understood.

But now, he could see, was a time for talking, and Elim had chosen the topic. “You were in a holding cell there? Whatever for?”

“Oh…a misunderstanding over… tactics. After the destruction of the Order, I tried to…to handle the situation. With the Founders. Starfleet…didn’t approve. Although…” A half-chuckle. “Although in retrospect, I think everyone might agree it was a far more efficient solution.”

He wasn’t precisely sure what that meant, but he had a sense that six cycles hadn’t been long enough. “There you go with your efficiency again.”

Breath caught in the other man’s throat. The beginning of hyperventilation. “Tell me more about that station, Elim. Concentrate. Deep breaths.”

“It—it was terrible. Cold. And. Smelled like. Voles. They all…” He could see the other man’s pulse at his throat, shivering wildly. “They—” 

“Deep breaths, Elim.” No, the station was too unpleasant a topic. He grasped about for something. Anything. “The—the other day at Tarlak you mentioned someone. Doctor…?”

The name came in exhale. “Bash…ir.”

“Yes. Doctor Bashir. Who was she?”

“He. He was…a friend.”

Male doctors. He forgot, sometimes, that, outside Cardassia, that wasn’t considered odd at all. “Tell me about him.”

There was something unsettled in Elim’s eyes.

Ahh. That sort of friend. “A Bajoran? He must have been unusual to be friendly with a Cardassian.”

“Human. Starfleet. And he…he was young. Too young to know better.” A loud pause and a deliberate breath. “But also bright. And curious.”

“A dangerous combination,” he tried to joke.

Elim gave a strained smile that said for whom? “He liked to read. We ate lunch and discussed novels. Poetry. Sometimes…politics.”

Elim had closed his eyes again, concentrating on the words. They’d taken on an air of monologue—almost, Kelas hesitated to think, of confession. In exile, they said, I strayed. Kelas wondered vaguely if the human had shared these feelings. If the human had even known how to recognize the courting behavior.

If the human had any idea who and what Elim had been.

Now wasn’t the time for those questions, though. “Was his taste in literature as appalling as yours?”

That got a laugh. “Worse, if you can believe it. But he was…passionate. And good.” Eyes cracked slightly, a gauging line of blue. “You…you remind me of him more than a little.”

The words sat, thick as the smell on the air.

They fell back on the sound of the world battering at the door and the ragged sounds of breath. Too long a pause, he knew. It let more than light creep in.

He could think of no response, so he changed the subject.

“At Tarlak…you said something he…taught you.”

“From a human poem,” he said breathily.

“Do you remember it?”

He opened his eyes fully now, confused. “The poem?”

“Yes. I love poetry. And I’ve never read any human poems.”

This was true. He did love poetry. Before the Fire, one of his favorite ways to pass an evening was with a glass of civit and a volume of Kavit or Iloja or another of the Serialists. He even enjoyed a few of the Bajoran poets he’d managed to read once Bajor had become a Dominion world, and everyone had pretended to enjoy an open and equal relationship.

But really what he wanted at the moment was something to keep Elim occupied. Something to fill what was becoming an uncomfortable space, even for him.

He released Elim’s arm and sat back to listen.

“Um…yes. It was short, let me see.

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Elim had recited haltingly, stumbling with the translation and twice retracing a phrase or two to get it right. But, even imperfect, it fit perfectly into place somehow--into a hollow grief Kelas hadn’t fully known the shape of until those words had sounded inside it.

Through the low light between, they took a rare moment to look at one another fully, without either’s eyes skittering away. Everything about Elim was still taut, but he smiled nevertheless. In the darkness, those blue eyes were almost…

 “Lovely. And stark. Your translation?”

“Best I—I can manage. Given the circumstances.” He forced out another deep breath, looking up as if hoping to find an escape. “The funny thing is…I argued with him about it. He said it was the fate of all conquerors, all those who clung to and worshipped conquest and power and glory. But no, I said. That was the human obsession with the individual again. In the Union, I insisted, the only true glory is that of Cardassia. An individual is only celebrated as they have strengthened the whole. So the glory survives because the Union survives, long past the rule or contributions of one king of kings. The glory of Cardassia endures.” He ran a shaking hand over his hair. “I suppose I’ll have to concede that point now.”

“The Union still endures, as far as I can see. The glory didn’t come from the statues or the art or the buildings—it came from us, Elim. And we’re still here. We endured…some of us, at least.”

“Too few. And not…not always the best.”

Her face flit through memory, though he tried to evade it. Brown eyes, white hair, hard-set lips that somehow always said what he needed to hear. She had deserved more. So many had. “Yes, the best of us have gone. But also, perhaps, the worst. So those of us who are left must do better. Be better. Build statues and memorials and glory that will mean something.”

The space around them had quieted, but neither moved. Somehow he knew Garak was doing the same thing as he. Naming the dead. Remembering.

“Your hopefulness is…admirable, Doctor.”

“You say ‘admirable,’ but you mean ‘foolish’.” The tone was undeniable.

 Elim shrugged. “I respect it, but I see little enough reason for it now.”

Kelas understood that. It was the same question he returned to each morning as he woke again to dust and silence and the reek of death, like some damned repetitive epic always circling back to pain.

And each morning, he gave himself the same answer.

“It seems to me it’s every Cardassian’s duty to hope now. It’s the risk and the pain we must endure if our world is to survive.” He let himself touch that pain—the pain of hoping it wouldn’t all crumble to dust in their hands. “Hope is our never-ending sacrifice, now, I think.”

The look on Elim’s face was strangely tender, almost childlike.  “‘For Cardassia’, then” he said at length through a wan smile.

A trick of the light, perhaps, but in those eyes, Kelas thought he saw it spark. Something new.

“It sounds as if the storm may have—“

But Elim was already halfway out the door, taking a deep breath and then, inevitably, hacking a cough full of dust. He stretched, features awash with relief.

Kelas yearned to do the same but was forced to pause, crumpled, at the exit.

Since his time on Avenall, his back and joints had never quite been the same. As he tried to unfold, a creak mid-spine made itself known, a fire that locked him, head to hip. He gave a hiss.

“Doctor?”

“I…I just need a moment. My back is…a bit stiff.”

Elim offered an arm. “Would you…allow me?”

Eager to be up from the dust and the stench, he nodded and reached for the offered arm without much thought.

Something inside clutched. The arm that lifted him, the arm that steadied him at the waist. The blue eyes that drew closer. It was easy and meaningless.

And then it wasn’t. It was close and warm. It was firm. Something stirred.

He let go as if burned. “I—should be getting back to triage. I…I trust we’ll see you for recovery rounds tomorrow?”

If Elim had noticed his reaction, he was kind enough to give no indication. “Yes, Doctor.”

It was an illusion, that feeling. It must be. The product of a few minutes trapped knee-to-knee, filled with Elim’s fear. Vulnerability. Poetry. You’ve always gone stupid as a koia bird when it comes to poetry. It would fade, the strange clutch, in the light and open air.

It had to.

“And, Doctor, I feel I should…” Elim’s pause was tense. “I should thank you. That was more kindness than I could ever deserve from you.”

“Only children believe that we get what we deserve.” He could feel the confusion of his own smile. He wanted to step closer and to run away all at once. “As I said, we have to be better. I include myself in that.”

He’d made it only a few paces before Elim called back.

“Doctor? Who will you be supporting in this upcoming vote?”

He thought of mentioning that such a question was both tactless, and, considering the source, a bit terrifying. But, remembering the consideration in Elim’s voice during their earlier discussion, he let it go. “Alon Ghemor. The Reunion Project, they’re calling it, but he’s the head.”

Elim nodded thoughtfully and walked away.

***********************

“I don’t mind telling you, Doctor, that Elim and I avoided one another for awhile after that. I wasn’t sure what had happened, but I knew it was something. Something that would take time to understand.”

He reached out to adjust the lily in the vase, watching its reflection sway in the human’s eyes. “I…I’ve always wondered what he was like with you. Elim. I wondered if you… visited him in that holding cell?”

Silence.  It hurt more than usual today.

“Elim never talks about his time on that station…nothing true, anyway. He does like to embellish, I’m sure you know.”

The sound of his own chuckle hit him, sudden and hard, like a punch of light in the tight interrogation chamber of his own mind.

Why are you doing this, Kelas?

Telling the man stories in some vague attempt to draw him out was one thing. But telling him stories of how he and Elim grew close? How they eventually…well, he hadn’t gone that far, but this story—in his mind he knew this was where it had begun. The first time he had felt something more.

Was this some perverse form of jealousy, then? Or possessiveness?

He examined the feeling more deeply, trying to part its layers as gently as the petals of the lily.

Perhaps some possessiveness. But also... the desire to connect. The desire to bring this man—this man who had meant so much to the one he loved—to bring him into their now. To bring him into the present with them.

He shook his head.

Where do you think he is? He’s here in the present. Just like you. And this…this wasn’t going to help. It was going to sharpen the eventual feelings of loss. His pain at Elim’s loss if Bashir never recovered.

The pain of his own if Bashir did.

“Hope is terrible, isn’t it, Doctor Bashir?” He ran the smooth white petals of the lily through his fingers, watching them thin slightly at his touch. “My memi…my mother, that is…she was a wise woman. She had all these little sayings, and I…I still hear them sometimes. She always used to say that hope is a seed. You can plant it, and it might grow and you might eat. But just as often, nothing comes of it and you go hungry. We need the seed though—to keep us watering the soil. To keep us looking for new growth. For something to bloom.”

The never-ending sacrifice after all.

He let the meya lily slide through his fingers and back into the vase, searching for its light in Bashir’s eyes once more.

But…something had changed. The reflection wasn’t there. The eyes…

Somehow the angle was wrong. Had he moved the flower too far? Or…or had Bashir moved?

He watched intently for several minutes as if expecting to catch the human in the act. Fear and hope warred, hot, in his chest. “Doctor Bashir?”

Silence.  

His heart hammered absurdly.

“Julian?”

Five percent, Kelas. Stop looking for something to bloom.

But he kept watching those eyes, unable to give up. Unable to believe that the ground would remain...

Those words found their shape in him again. Boundless and bare.

He stood and crossed to study the monitors. They would give him some clue. There was something to it, he knew.

Keep watering the soil, lis’sea. Even if, in this heat, it seems nothing could possibly grow.

Across the table, the human’s gaze stretched far away.

But outside, just at the horizon, it had begun to rain.

Chapter Text

Day Five: Daret

He set the padd down alongside his copy of the Courier, taking a moment to ring the water from his sleeve. He apologized silently to Larria for the droplets that settled in a puddle on the floor.

Bashir looked well tonight, color in his cheeks and on his lips. Reviewing the monitor history, he wondered if Larria had made any changes to the human’s regimen or if it was merely that the fever of the world outside had broken. Bashir’s heartrate was elevated slightly, his brainwaves more varied. It was…promising.

Yes, that was the word he would allow himself. Promising.

Shortly before Bashir’s arrival on Cardassia, Starfleet had asked an expert from Betazed to assess the doctor’s cognitive state. Even the advanced technology of Starfleet Medical reached its limits when it came to the conscious and unconscious mind. The machines might say that the brain lived but knew nothing of the man. Of Julian Bashir himself.

It’s like looking into a deep well, the telepath had recorded in Bashir's file. One senses there must be a bottom and that, at that limit, something lives. But, when examined more closely, there is only the quiet dark of the water, and, after a time, it fills the mind. It is endless and nothing stirs.

That’s when Starfleet had given up.

The readings from the last twenty-one hours, however, were something new. Ripples on the water. Movement beneath the surface.

Kelas made a note on Bashir’s chart. A slight adjustment to the medications again. The human was metabolizing them more quickly than he’d imagined possible. They could be safely increased, bit by bit, even at this ratio.

It might all be a coincidence—wind stirring the water.

It might be something…promising.

All the more reason to keep talking, Kelas. All the more reason to sit down and hope.

“Good evening, Doctor.”

Bashir was at the window again, face streaked with the shadows of raindrops on the pane.

“I’m glad to see you looking well. It’s the only good thing I’ve seen all day.”

He glanced down at the Courier, folded over, picture on its cover still partially visible. Another day, joyful stories of rain and lower temperatures might have been blazoned across the page. But today, another story had taken hold. The ‘casts had no time for anything else.

On Bajor, the first Cardassian had been declared guilty of war crimes.

Kelas tucked the Courier completely out of view. He didn’t want to see Bel’rek’s face anymore.

Even the most fanatical Cardassians admitted Bel’rek’s guilt. Darhe’el’s Dog, the Courier called him, recounting the testimony of Bajoran after Bajoran who had watched as Bel’rek and Darhe’el committed some of the most vile acts Kelas ever heard described. Cardassi’or had cringed to hear it but had watched each day as the ‘casts brought it into their homes and restaurants and places of work. They hadn’t turned away.

We didn’t know, Larria had said to him, after that first day of testimony. So many said the same. They’d known about the Occupation, but they’d had no idea what fanatics like Bel’rek were doing in the name of the state.

I knew, he’d thought, trying not to cry. I knew.

And now, Bel’rek was guilty. The first and certainly not the last.

What that guilt would mean was up to a tribunal equal parts Bajoran and Cardassian. The Bajorans and their Prophets, the ‘casts informed, did not approve of executions. Cardassians hardly knew anything else. It would be another tense negotiation.

“Justice is a simple concept, and yet, so difficult in practice, don’t you think, Doctor? Can we call it justice when Bel’rek is guilty but Darhe’el was laid to rest a hero?” He looked up to see only the side of the human’s face. No, this wasn’t right. They weren’t conversing. It should be more…real. They should be sitting across. Like colleagues or friends. Looking at each other.

Gently, he turned Bashir’s hoverchair so they faced one another. So he could call down into the well.

“Gul Darhe’el had a tomb at Tarlak, did you know? On the Way of Heroes. Oh, it’s dust now. I think there’s a park where it used to be. But it’s…it’s hard to square. It’s hard to understand how one man can be executed and another lauded…”

A polite chime from the comm interrupted the thought.

Kelas reached across to the console on the table. Incoming from off-world…huh. He’d assumed it was Larria, but this would have to be…

Reflexively, he pushed his braid behind his ear before calling for the viewscreen. It flickered to life across the room.

Odd, how those eyes found him across a room just the same. But today—these many years on—they caused nothing but contentment.

“Kelas,” Elim said simply, placing a palm to the viewscreen.

He held his up as if returning the gesture.

“And Julian, of course.” A nod and eyes flitting immediately away. Immediately back to Kelas. No doubt to gauge my response.

“It’s…it’s good to see you, Elim.” He was glad to hear none of the discomfort he felt. “How’s the conference?”

“Oh, quite diverting. Klingons and Vulcans trying to negotiate is an underappreciated form of farce.”

Elim smiled, but Kelas saw past it. He would never understand how that smile worked its magic so easily on others: to him it was transparent as Tebalian glass. “What’s wrong?”

Usually Kelas’s refusal to entertain pretense amused Elim, but tonight the smile merely fell away without comment. “I…wanted to tell you before it hit the ‘casts. I’ve…received a summons to testify. At one of the extradition hearings. A former…colleague.”

He went cold.

They’d known this was likely. Known that once wounds were reopened, everyone would remember that their leader had once held the knife. It was a moment Elim had dreaded since the people of Cardassia elected him castellan, choosing, tacitly, to forget.

And forget they had. But forgiven, well…that might be a different matter.

“How…how bad is it?”

“I’m certain that whatever the man is accused of, he’s guilty.” Clean, simple, and impassive. “I’m certain I’m guilty of no less.”

“It’s not your trial, Elim.” Not yet. The addendum was a presence: it didn’t need to be spoken. “How are you…doing?”

This smile was softer—it was real. “Better, seeing the two of you across from one another. Kelas…I… Thank you. I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve it, but—”

“Only children believe we get what we deserve, remember?”

Elim’s laugh told him he did remember. He watched the memory play across those blue eyes as they met his.  “For my sake, let’s hope that’s true.” He placed his palm to the viewscreen again with a sigh.

Kelas knew that sigh. Time’s up.

“And now I must attend a dinner at the Klingon consulate. I do hope they’ll be serving something that doesn’t wriggle on the way down.”

Castellan Garak was back, and, while the castellan was a charming persona, Kelas missed Elim. His Elim. The Elim who would eye his outfit scathingly but then somehow combine colors and patterns that burned the retinas. The Elim who would snark at him about the cloying sentiment of Iljoa over kanar, and then recite said sentimental poetry as they lay against one another, spine to belly.

They’d had precious little of that in the last few years. It was, of course, for Cardassia. As were they. But quietly, deep down, Kelas looked forward to a day when it could be for them.

“Stick to grikt and bloodwine, and don’t make that face,” he scolded genially at the pinched distaste of Elim’s reaction. “The Chancellor was more than generous trying taspar eggs and zabo meat when he was here. This is diplomacy, Elim. It’s what you signed up for.”

“Indeed. Perhaps being deposed will have its advantages.”

That’s the way. Don’t let it get to you. Kelas raised his palm again. “ThIjek, Elim. I’ll see you in a few days.”

“Velet can’t come soon enough, my dear.” Blue eyes drifted to the human, and something stuttered behind that mask. “And good evening, Julian. I will see you then as well.” 

Elim allowed only a few seconds of terrible silence before cutting the comm.

Kelas let it stretch longer.

Sometimes he forgot. It was easy to forget when you sat next to someone in bed or played kotra or listened to the same story about an annoying colleague for the twentieth time. He forgot the Inquisitor. What he had been. What so many had been before.

Forgetting, his mother had always said, was a dangerous trick. Worth it, though, if you could get it right.

He knew Elim was guilty. Everyone knew, Elim most of all.

Did everything since balance the scales? Was it possible to balance scales when it came to lives?

As someone who had sat across from him in that room, Kelas really wasn’t sure.

And he knew how that stung Elim. How much he wanted to balance those scales. How much he wanted Kelas to tell him that he had. But, while Kelas had long ago given up trying to make his heart and his conscience agree in this matter, he couldn’t. He just didn’t know.

Justice was indeed a simple concept: living it, however, got quite messy.

“He regrets it, Doctor Bashir. I don’t know if you ever saw that…or if it wasn’t until later that regret took a shape he recognized. But he has tried, I know. He is always trying. More than some…more than many I’ve met since the Fire.”

His mind had already moved forward, and he paused, glancing at the human as if looking for permission.

The well was dark, but he spoke down into its depths anyway. Bashir was there. He would hear.

 “I…I saw that change in Elim the cycle before our first election on Prime. I went to Paldar, looking for him—”

********************

Elim had never said precisely where he lived, but it hadn’t taken much to puzzle it out. Part of him had guessed the moment he’d heard Upper Paldar.

It wasn’t Kelas’s first visit, of course. He’d made housecalls in that time before. Before the bright room and Elim and the stoop in his back. Once it had been the grandest house in the sector—a great gray sentinel, looked on with whispered awe and looking back with cool suspicion.

As he stared now at the rubble where that house had stood, a sharp, white thrill ran chufa to toe-claws.

The carved weight of a gable was all that remained, peeking up from debris all around, and the turned-over corpse of a pralnat tree lay across the drive. The last time he’d been here, its white branches had housed a full nest of blackwings, he recalled. They’d screeched as the men dragged him away.

He spat on it.

On the tree. On the memory. On all of it.

I’m alive, and you’re gone. Every part of you is dust.

He spat on the dust, too, for good measure.

“Doctor Parmak?”

Elim had appeared, soundless as always, from behind the rubble. His hair was disheveled, dirt smeared across one cheek and caked thick at the nails. The loose smock he wore was partially unfastened, flapped open to reveal a length of collarbone and the upper curve of chula.

“Elim.” He tried to tamp down the anger that had flared within. “Forgive me for…showing up unannounced.”

“Of course, Doctor. You’re always welcome.”

“And…also for…” He indicated the spot on the tree in front of him, abashed.

To his relief, Elim smiled. “You’re hardly the first.” Something in the heavy corners of that smile made Kelas wonder if Elim had been one of them himself. Things really have changed.

He tucked his braid behind his ear and realized, a bit too late, that his eyes were trained on the bare skin at Elim’s throat.

“Ahh, pardon my state. I was working in the back, and it’s gotten rather warm.”  Fingers closed fasteners without a hint of embarrassment. “Is there something I can do for you?”

“I needed to…ask you about something. There’s a hunk of metal just up that way that looks like it might have been a bench. I thought we could—“

“Doctor, if you wouldn’t find it overfamiliar or too great a strain on propriety, I would suggest we have a seat inside. Sitting in the streets at this time of evening can invite unpleasantness.”

He balled and unballed his fists, feeling the torn skin there. “Yes…I noticed. I’m afraid I was…relieved of my water rations on the way here, in fact.”

The civility in Elim’s features sharpened. “What? You were mugged?” Blue eyes came alive, sweeping around them with the practiced look of a man who knew how to pinpoint danger.

“To be fair, I didn’t put up much of a fight.” There had been three of them. The oldest couldn’t have been more than fifteen—a girl. Her face summoned memories of small stitched hounds and yellow ribbon: Kelas hadn’t lifted a hand to stop her. He’d tried to speak to her, but they’d run. “They were practically children. No doubt they needed it.”

Elim made a disgusted noise. “Ration stations are open to everyone. Children or no, they’ve no right to resort to theft.”

The clinic had taken in a boy that morning, twelve years old. He’d been found living in a half-collapsed tenement, bathing and drinking from a rancid puddle that had gathered in the corner of the building. In his delusion, the boy had thought Kelas his father. He kept asking when memi would have dinner ready: he was hungry.  

“Not everyone is in their right minds these days, Elim. Not everyone is thinking clearly. Scared, lonely children most especially.”

“Not everyone is in their right minds, that’s true.” His arch tone made the sentiment clear. “Are you…you’re not injured?”

“Not at all.” Truthfully, his back did ache where he’d hit the ground, and his palms burned in tatters where they’d braced against rocks on the way down, but he wasn’t looking for pity. Pain of this sort hardly registered anymore. “However, if you agree that it wouldn’t strain propriety too much, I…wouldn’t mind sitting on something more comfortable than a twisted pile of metal, either.”

Elim gave him the tilted smile that always made Kelas feel both amused and wary. “Oh, propriety is at its most flexible these days, don’t you find?”

Elim’s home turned out to be a small shed that sat, unassuming and miraculously whole, in the shadow of Tain’s house. The single room might have felt cramped had it held more than a photolantern and a flat pallet. Beside the pallet, a shoulder bag spilled its contents on the floor: several padds and a number of books, most with titles in scripts he couldn’t read. In the far corner, a collection of dented pots, mismatched flatware, and a burner formed a motley sort of kitchenette, though the shelf beside, he noted, was glaringly empty.

Across everything, dust shaded the room in bland tan. Grit hung in the air.

Elim kept the door open, unable, Kelas realized, to close it. Unable to sever the connection and be trapped in the small space alone.

An itch tickled at his mind…a question insisting.

If you’re going to bet on the runt hound, his mother had always said, best bet it all.

 “Why Tain’s house, Elim?”

So it was possible for those eyes to register surprise…

 “Just seeing how flexible propriety really is these days,” he added jokingly.

 Elim had a marvelous way of taking every challenge in stride. Of turning it on its head. “If you wanted to test propriety, Doctor, I can think of more enjoyable ways.” Those eyes danced, letting the implication hang on the air, thick as the grit.

Kelas did not have the same poise, and a gray blush burned its way up his neckridges.

“Joking, Doctor. Only joking,” Elim chuckled, giving him a serves you right expression before picking up the shoulder bag from the floor. “My mother was Tain’s housekeeper. I grew up here.” With an air of finality, he moved to the other side of the shed, clicking on the kitchenette’s burner and turning his back. The fullness of the stop was clear enough.

In the last cycles, Kelas had been sketching a portrait of Elim, each conversation, each observation, each argument adding a new stroke, a new shade. And he found, to his surprise, that he rather liked the man who was emerging. There were shadows and unfilled corners, to be sure, but overall, he looked at the portrait and understood it. The man he had sketched was a friend.

This new fact threw the picture into further perspective. Father was a foreman, mother Tain’s housekeeper—Elim had been solidly service class. Less affluent by far than Kelas’s family. Tain must have noticed the boy. The spymaster had plucked the boy from service, and, Elim, in gratitude, threw himself into a different sort of service altogether. One that paid better but which made you pay in turn.

Kelas squinted out the door at the ghost of that house, still looming even in collapse. What must it have been like to call that a home? To live in the long shadow of that man and his legacy?

The scent pulled him from the reverie. Biting but sweet, it slammed against memory, and he parted his lips to pull it in fully. Ziyet mornings after breakfast was cleared away, Memi would sit at the long table and read the biology journals aloud while he listened. In her hand, always a cup, steaming. And that scent.

“Tarkalean tea?” he asked as Elim turned away from the burner and proffered just such a cup now, ceramic with a faded spiral pattern and a crack that leaked. “It’s my favorite.”

A soft smile. “I brought a bit back from Deep Space Nine. I…developed a fondness for it there.”

“But…the water. Surely you’ll need the rations for—”

“I’ve been conserving, and...” He sipped and offered the next observation dryly. “I’d hate for you to go thirsty.”

Kelas chuckled tasting the sharp scent on the back of his tongue as he did. It had been so long since he’d smelled anything like proper food or drink. “Thank you. And yes—I admit, I was thirsty.”

“You should have fought back, Doctor. Those children will continue taking advantage of the unsuspecting unless someone teaches them the consequences,” Elim chided.

“Perhaps you’re right. But they were so young. Desperate. I couldn’t help but wonder—I’ve wondered it often since the Fire: what force determines that some should drink and escape and live while others suffer, go mad, or die?” It was a heavy thought, and he tried not to feel its weight too often. “I couldn’t bring myself to stop them. I don’t want to be that force, I suppose.”

Elim watched him, thoughtful through rising steam, before he sighed. “Well, next time instead of waxing philosophic, you should at least consider some means of resistance. Nothing protects those who don’t protect themselves.”

This touch against memory was less pleasant. “My father used to say that.” Less pleasant, yes, and he couldn’t recall having ever spoken about it before. He wondered for a paranoid blink if there might be something in the tea...

Then again, the man across never seemed to need anything special to loosen his tongue. “I…I was never a fighter, I’m afraid. Terrible shame for the son of a distinguished gul, but I’ve always had more interest in the sciences than the arts of war. Whenever I’d come home with a black eye or a bruise from some schoolyard bully, he’d say the same thing: the beaten deserve what they can’t defend against.” The tea was lovely and warm and almost kept the words at bay. “The motto of many fathers in our youth, no doubt.”

 Elim’s brow was drawn slightly, and, for the first time, Kelas thought he might have seen the outline of regret there. “Well, nothing causes views like that to evolve more than the decimation of one’s homeworld…” His gaze drifted, travelling the same path Kelas’s had earlier. Finding the bones of the past just outside the open door.

For a few minutes they sat in silence, the sound of teacups muffled against the shed’s solid walls. It was heavy, that quiet. Full of memory. Perhaps it’s the tea. In his experience, tea always walked arm and arm with contemplation.

 “You said you wished to discuss something, Doctor?” The words had a feigned note of lightness, but Kelas picked it up like a welcome tune.

“Yes…Alon came to see to me this morning. He was elated. It seems the Reunion Project received a sizable donation from an unnamed source.” He watched Elim carefully. “In Federation credits and gold-pressed latinum.”

They stared at one another for a moment before Elim finally conceded a nod. “I liquidated my shop, and the commanding officer on the station was kind enough to transfer the assets on my behalf.”

This had not been part of the sketch. “Elim…it was quite a lot.”

The other man shrugged over his tea.

This can do good, Kelas, Alon had said in that energized way of his, running over the figures. We can do so much with it. Alon had assumed they had a concerned Federation patron.

Kelas had known. He hadn’t said anything, but he’d known. “Well…I’m glad to see you supporting the cause, I suppose. I got the impression you thought our reforms rather misguided.”

The clink of Elim’s cup on its cracked saucer was small but hard—a ceramic pause.

Their eyes met.

“It’s not the cause I believe in, Doctor. It’s you.” The words, for all their kindness, were uttered as matter-of-factly as if they’d been discussing a hound race.

His grip on the hot handle of the cup tightened. “I—I don’t understand.”

“I’m going to tell you something, Doctor Parmak. Something I’ve told only one other person in my life.” He continued sipping his tea, and so Kelas did, too, glad for some mundane guide through the moment. “I have a…condition I’m hoping you can help me with.”

“A…a condition?” Well, that was a relief. It wasn’t the direction he’d anticipated, though it was certainly a logical one. He was a doctor after all. “A chronic condition?”

His expression strained. “I’m not sure, actually. It hasn’t troubled me until… recently. Until I stared at the emptiness where Lakarian City used to be.” He swallowed, allowing himself a sip of tea. “I hope it won’t prove a chronic condition, but it is most certainly an inherited one. You … weren’t the only one with a difficult father.” He nodded vaguely in the direction of the demolished house.

Oh.

It took everything Kelas had not to drop his teacup then and there. Oh.

It made a sudden and horrific kind of sense. The question was answered fully—the portrait darkened and sharpened all at once, contrasts revealing dizzying new depths.

“I’m afraid I’m afflicted as my father was with the capacity—no, more than the capacity—the drive to do harm. My constant instinct is to bend those around me to my will. To manipulate, to arrange, to do what it takes to bring reality to heel. And…there are many men like me, Doctor. Our world bred them like prize hounds, I’m afraid.”

Kelas thought of his own father. Of how often, as a boy, he’d wished to be like that himself.

Of how often Father had wished that, too.  

“Men like that won’t wait for change to have its day. They’ll cut change out at the heart. And they’ll want my help, Doctor. I was once an expert at cutting out hearts, was I not?”

Kelas found himself straightening the stoop again and then cursing himself for it. Here they were, sitting across. Tea burned in his gut. Why am I here, Inquisitor?

“I’m not sure if I believe in your cause, Doctor Parmak, but I believe that men like you must be given a chance. I want to help you see this through, you and Ghemor. I want to do better, as you said. I want Cardassia to do better. I will do what work is required: I’m a man of many skills. But… this condition. It must be monitored. It must not be allowed to turn… malignant. Not in the pursuit, even, of your cause.” Those eyes were on his, as intense as they had been. As they had been but also utterly changed.  “I can think of no one I would trust to judge my fitness more than you, Doctor. You are…a rare man.”

Kelas had no response, and Elim didn’t press. They merely sat and sipped tea, while Kelas tried, in overly controlled spans of breath, to catalogue the duststorm of thoughts that whipped through his mind.

There was how dare he presume and this is precisely what you were aiming for. There was he must be mad along with a healthy dose of it’s a ploy, isn’t it?

And underneath it all, a tension that had nothing in common with the tight fear of penitent and confessor. A tension that was entirely about two men staring directly at one another and seeing, bare and real.

It wasn’t a ploy. It was a plea…or as close as he could imagine Elim Garak ever got to such.

And he had nothing to say to it—at least no single thing. The storm of thoughts refused to coalesce into one.

And Elim knew it. “Doctor…perhaps…would you allow me to show you one thing more?”

Kelas had caught a glimpse of the piles in the yard when he’d arrived, partially obscured and seemingly unremarkable. But, as they rounded the corner and viewed them fully in the twilight, they had taken on a sinuous quality, orange sun twisting through and around them like the smolder of fire. Though Elim remained on their edges, Kelas felt drawn forward, pulled into their roiling shape. The tallest opened a yawning mouth toward the sky: the smaller spiraled around it as if in celebration. Between, the smallest piles looked on, somber witnesses.

It reminded him of holos of Suns’sar, the old Hebitian burial grounds once reserved for the revered. He could imagine the same death chants humming through this space in a mix of rapture and sorrow, of violence and poetry. The spilling of blood and the names of the lost. In a moment of impulse, he did just that, allowing his hand to slide across a jagged edge and spill a rivulet of red down its length.

Memi. Haral. S’soran. Mheran. Tekeny.

Elim’s voice sounded far away. “I don’t know what they are, but I’ve been…consumed with them. Since I moved the first together, I spend every free moment, constructing, removing, reinventing. To some end I can’t understand. But I feel it. With urgency, in fact.”

Watching his blood slide into the dust, spiraling in homage to the shapes around, Kelas knew with ferocious certainty. He understood.

Hand shaking, he reached out and touched the tallest of them with reverence. Its radiant heat was a balm. “It’s your Tarlak, Elim. You’re taking the rubble—all that has past and gone—and shaping it into something new. Something worthy. Something with a nature of its own.” The truth came breathless but fierce, with the contours of a prayer. “You’re rebuilding yourself, Elim. As are we all.”

When their eyes met again, there was contemplation. Recognition. And something…something Kelas wouldn’t name but that he recognized reflected in himself.

He couldn’t deny it. He wanted to help this man. He wanted to embrace him. He wanted to make him see this beauty through his eyes.

Instead, in the end, he distilled it all into a smile. It felt full. “Elim, I think there may be hope for you yet.”

Elim’s laughter echoed, loud and bright, through the broken remnants of what had once been the grandest house in the sector.

*************************

The memory came with an ache, a longing he could barely contain. The moment Elim had shown him those piles—Guls, piles was too profane a word—Kelas had felt a connection he couldn’t explain. To their new Cardassia, to all those he had lost, and…to Elim. If one could paint a soul on any canvas, Elim had done just that.

“It was beautiful, Doctor. I…I don’t think I can describe what it meant, but I think a doctor would understand best. That moment of standing at the crux of life and death, creation and destruction, seeing the beauty of both…Elim showed me that. He made it visible to all of us—let us stand at a crossroads and see what had been and what could be meeting. I think…I think he was the only one who didn’t see it then. He was too close: it was his soul, after all. People never do see their own noses, my mother used to say. And I’m not sure Elim has ever truly been able to see the beauty of what he’s built. Any of it.”

He sighed and let his eyes drift over to Bashir. The crux of life and death. “I wish you could see those monuments, Doctor. I think…I think you would see. What we have made. What Elim has made. What you made possible…”

And it hit him with all the strength and certainty he’d felt standing there, among those shapes.  He knew precisely what he needed to do.

He was going to take Bashir to that place. He was going to put that hoverchair there, in the center of everything that Elim had made, and together, they would share it. Share the experience of that crossroads.

And perhaps—if that vague force of the universe could be convinced—it would speak to Bashir in a voice he could hear. It would draw him to the surface.

Without a second thought, Kelas turned to the comm.

Chapter Text

Day Six: Merutet

He read over the contents of the message again, as if, on second reading, the words might arrange themselves into a more pleasing answer.

Dearest Kelas,

As so often happens, I find I must apologize.

It occurs to me that I shouldn’t be surprised by the way you’ve taken the care of Doctor Bashir to your heart. You have always put what is good and right above what is comfortable—a tendency, I might add, that has worked out to my enormous benefit.

After so many years, we neither of us have many surprises for one another. Which is why I’m sure it will not surprise you that I’ve denied your request to take Doctor Bashir to Paldar.

In fact, I know it will not surprise you. I know because you were clearly trying to avoid this reaction by arranging the excursion behind my back. Unfortunately, young Dhessek decided the security detail needed my approval: otherwise you might never have been caught, my dear.

With a little refinement, we may make an operative of you yet.

I hope you will not blame Dhessek—or me. The timing simply isn’t right. Coverage of the Bajoran trials seems to have become inordinately focused on me—I trust you’ve seen the now ubiquitous cartoon published in the Courier today—and I don’t wish to draw that attention to Bashir.  Reprisals are to be expected given the extent of taint he uncovered in those gleaming Federation halls, and if something were to happen to one or both of you, I fear for whatever party was responsible.

Mostly, I fear for myself.

For now I must insist that Doctor Bashir remain in the residence where he is safest. If I thought there was any point, I’d ask you to remain there as well.

As always, please forgive me. I know you will tire of it eventually—I hope today is not that day.

Yours,

Elim Garak

In the distance, thunder growled. It felt like a rebuke.

He hadn’t honestly expected to keep Elim in the dark. He hadn’t been trying to hide anything…well, not exactly. He knew Elim worried for Bashir’s safety. He also knew—though Elim wouldn’t say it explicitly—that parading the castellan’s human around Cardassi’or would look bad on the ‘casts. Elim didn’t need help looking bad on the ‘casts these days.

But the castellan’s image wasn’t on his mind at the moment. He was concerned for Bashir and for Elim and for what he felt was right. The security arrangements he’d outlined were as tight and thorough as any when he and Elim travelled. Tighter maybe. That’s what tipped them off, of course…

He glanced up at the raindrops tracing down the pane. The weather might not cooperate for such an outing anyway, he supposed.

“Good news from the castellan?”

Larria had handed him the secured padd and discreetly withdrawn to check Bashir’s monitors and update his charts.

Kelas’s face must have said enough. “Was it about the Courier?”

He’d spent the better part of the day making security arrangements and sifting through medical journals attempting to ascertain what, if anything, might be of further benefit to Bashir during their time at the monuments. Clearly, with eyes elsewhere, he’d missed something of note. “I’m afraid I haven’t seen the Courier yet. Is it that bad?”

Never one to speak a gloomy thought, Larria merely activated the viewscreen.

It wasn’t more than a minute before the cartoon flashed across the ‘cast.

It was a beautiful sketch, really, gray-shaded, with a realism that made it seem closer to proper portrait than political cartoon. In it, Elim Garak sat, smiling that wide, insinuating smile the entire Union knew well, though here its usual coyness had an edge of menace. He was seated on a Bajoran court bench, and in their traditional posture of giving witness, his hand was placed sideways above his heart. Behind the splay of his fingers, however, an image was just visible, as if the castellan obscured it purposely.

The image was obscured but rendered with painful clarity nonetheless—the insignia of the Obsidian Order.

In the caption, the second line of the Bajoran Oath of Justice took on new meaning: “On the name of my father, I swear I speak the truth.”

 Kelas hissed in a mix of anger and pain. Larria clicked it away.

He suddenly regretted adding more worries to Elim’s day. That had to hurt. It hurt him. And by the tight look on Larria’s face, she felt it, too.

“It isn’t very kind, is it?” Her voice was small, clearly unsure she should speak on the topic.

No, kind it was not. But fair. It was absolutely fair. He leaned back and rubbed at his eyes as if scrubbing the image from them. “Kindness has little to do with politics, I’m afraid.”

Any other day, Kelas might have reflected on this as a certain sign of progress. In those times before, such a cartoon would have meant death—and not just the single death of the artist. The death of any who reproduced it, who owned it, who dared to comment on it. This was the price of freedom, as he reminded Elim regularly.

Today the price seemed a bit higher than he’d been ready to pay.

“At least the rains seem here to stay,” Larria said at length, setting a glass of kanar in front of him.

“You’d think the ‘casts might spare a few seconds to talk about that.” The kanar was sweet. And welcome.

Larria made one last adjustment to Bashir’s monitoring array before she turned to offer him a warm smile. “Comm the castellan, s’sava. Let him know you’re thinking of him. That you’re here with bhana. That will brighten his day more than any forecast.”

Not for the first time, he said a silent prayer of thanks to whatever gods remained to Cardassia and had brought Larria into their lives. “You’re probably right. But please do remember to call me Kelas, hmm?”

 She laughed and, for the split of a second…

He looked more closely at Bashir. He thought he’d seen it, from the corner of his eye. Movement, change. He thought perhaps—

You’re reaching, Kelas. Seeing miracles in shifting shadows.

It would be a good day for a miracle.

Larria picked up the padd and handed it to him as if to emphasize her former point. “Comm the castellan.” She turned to Bashir. “Tell him, bhana. You can convince him if I can’t.”

She gave the human a little wink before she walked out the door. Her brightness lingered long after she had gone.

“She’s something, isn’t she, Doctor?” he sighed, taking another sip of kanar. It was a breet tonight, and a good one. “She’s taken you for family, and, I’m sure you know, family isn’t something we treat lightly here.”

He wasn’t exactly sure what had happened. Maybe it was the message from Elim. Maybe it was the afterimage of that cartoon still burned, inverted, in his mind’s eye. Maybe it was Larria’s gentle push. But a feeling within him had shaken loose, and he probed it, careful. Self-aware.

We’ve taken him for family, too. More than.

“I…don’t know what to make of it, Doctor Bashir, though that’s nothing new. I don’t know where all this has come from—why I sit here and tell you these things. I don’t even know precisely what I’m feeling.” He scanned the human’s smooth face, searching for something. Anything. “I know Elim… loves you. And I love him. I don’t know where that will leave us if—“ He stopped—forced himself to revise. “When you come back to us. But…I find that…I do want you to come back, Doctor Bashir. I do.”

There was no movement, no visible change, but across the room, one of Bashir’s monitors gave a lively sort of beep. A tempo change. Larria said it had been doing that today, on and off. An increase in heartrate, usually. Or cerebral function.

Keep pressing, Kelas. He’s there.

And for whatever it meant, he was more than family. It was all bound up in love, tenuous between them all, like the gossamer tangle of a longleg’s nest.

He watched the rain fall outside. Watched the world soak it in, the staccato hopefulness of the machines marking time.

“There is…one more story I think you need to hear, Doctor Bashir. I don’t know if it—I don’t know if you wonder, as I did then, how I could ever forgive him. How it could ever be…love.”

This time the thunder was gentle, like a sigh.

 “It was the night before our first election. There’d been tension for octals and, that night, almost violence—“

*****************

Neither of them said a word. They simply sat, tired and lost in the quiet, watching Alon fade into the distance like a ghost. Above, the night sky was every bit as solemn, though, at the horizon, darkness had grown spare and violet. It would be dawn soon.

Kelas returned to the same thought every so often. When it ached, he put it away again.

That was almost civil war.

Cardassians were no strangers to war: in recent years, it had become as much a part of them as scales or ridges. But civil war—Cardassian facing Cardassian across the field—that was terrifyingly new. Civil war had long been a term for others. For those soft, querulous aliens who couldn’t maintain order. Who couldn’t control themselves. It had been unthinkable here.

But tonight, they’d stood across—they and Mondrig’s supporters—and everyone had known what was at stake. Two visions, one Cardassia.

Elim caught the worst of it. Mondrig’s men started by toppling several monuments, and Elim stepped between. A Restorationist struck him across the face and sent Elim toppling just the same. White had flashed against moonlight, and Kelas was sure the other man was dead, so swiftly and surely had Elim produced the blade.

But Alon called to hold, and, to Kelas’s surprise, Elim did. His body had shaken with it, blade throwing off sparks of starlight, but he’d held. He’d held, and they’d all held, and eventually…Elim lowered the knife. They’d watched the men push the remaining monuments to the ground as if trapped behind glass.

In the end, the price came in too high. Enough, eyes had said to one another. Enough, footsteps whispered as they left. We’ve had enough war.

After everyone had gone, they hadn’t said anything, he and Alon and Elim. They’d simply put their shoulders to it. Rebuilt it all, remaking both monuments and their own shaken resolve. A little destruction wouldn’t stand between Cardassia and tomorrow.

At some unmarked point in the night, Kelas had lost his balance under an unwieldy piece of metal scrap. He’d found himself wrapped suddenly in a clutch of sturdy limbs, and, with a questioning look, Elim helped pat the dust from his clothes. They’d taken hold of that beam together, then, setting it within the twisted stretch of the central monument. It found its place there, perfectly. Naturally. As if it was meant to be.

And Elim had smiled up at it, face a study in admiration. It wasn’t as it had been before, but it fit.

Something had broken in Kelas then, he knew—or perhaps it had been breaking for cycles and only now collapsed completely, like those half-ruined buildings around the city just now giving way to time. Gravity.

He’d resisted it. He’d analyzed it. But there, then…he’d felt it. Watching Elim smile, eyes turned to the top of that tower in honest joy… Kelas had broken. He still refused to shape a word around it, but he recognized it well enough.

The ecstatic slide of sun across the soul, the poet Kavit had called it.

Kelas let himself look at Elim now that they were alone. He sat with his back against one of the monuments, knees drawn close, expression thoughtful. The black ring around his eye gleaming silver. 

Yes, the turn in his chest whispered. Yes, you idiot. That’s the slide of sun, alright. The slide of sun in the dead of night.

A jolt of surprise as those eyes turned to his. Was it his imagination or did they seem to know that he’d been watching? How he’d been watching?

 “I have something for you, Doctor.”

Any words might have felt jarring in that silence, but these particularly so. “What?”

“I have something for you,” Elim repeated, shifting slightly to produce the item from his pocket. It was wrapped in a scrap of grimy cloth, corners tied prettily to give the illusion of a bow. “It was meant for after the vote tomorrow—a Union Day gift of sorts. But I’m afraid I fell on it this evening and there was an…undeniable crunch. It should still be more than serviceable, but…”

Kelas held it in his palm, staring, wondering what on Prime had led them to this moment.  “Quite a lot of surprises from that pocket tonight. Knives and now…gifts?”

“Never in the same pocket, Doctor,” he joked, wagging a finger.

“I see. Is that the sort of thing they taught you and Alon at that intelligence school?” The unknown fabric parted easily, but he didn’t need to see what was inside. He’d scented it the moment the tie loosened. Butter and spice and a hint of sweetness—an undeniable combination. “Ghevet?”

“As I said—for Union Day.”

Staring down at it, Kelas realized, absurdly, that he might cry. The horrors of the everyday had long since lost the ability to draw tears, but here he was, watching cracked squares of candy tilt and swim through them.

When he said nothing, Elim continued. “Some nights when I can’t sleep I do a bit of scrounging through what’s left of the houses in Coranum. It’s bizarre what’s survived. Teapots. Mirrors. A whole set of hideous silver curtains. The ghevet was in a cupboard box under what I imagine was a kitchen wall.  I don’t know how it will have held up. Might be rotten for all I know.”

Turning one of those squares over with the tip of his finger, ginger, Kelas couldn’t help but smile. Something survives. Something always survives. Even, sometimes, the most delicate things.

“I was afraid waiting a whole day after breaking might risk whatever flavor’s left.” He sighed. “Besides, it’s been a tense evening. I thought you could use it.”

Mother had always let him break the ghevet on Union Day morning. For the cake, yes, but she’d let him sneak a few squares for himself, too. He would trace down the stamped symbol of the Union first, feel that glossy shape against his finger. He did the same now, though the shape was splintered. Fitting. “You’ll share it with me, I hope?”

They sat and ate, sharing the sweetness. It wasn’t rotten at all: in fact, it seemed that whatever life the ghevet had lived in that improvised coffin had somehow concentrated the spice of it, making it keener, sweeter, greater. It melted on the tongue just as it should, and Kelas allowed himself to exist in it. The taste touched a hundred memories, yes, but it made a new one, too. It knitted this moment to those in a way he couldn’t have imagined until then.

“Thank you, Elim. That was… most kind.”

“Elama vo’it, Doctor Parmak.”

Those Union Day words meant something new now. Somehow, like the ghevet, their essence felt more concentrated, denser on the tongue. “Elama vo’it. May the Union grow ever stronger.” He licked his lips and was rewarded with one last whisper of ghevet. “Let’s go inside. I’ll have a look at that eye.”

They left the door open, as Elim liked it, and moonlight trailed in with them like dirt caught on their shoes.

Kelas pulled a rag from beside the pallet and gestured for Elim to sit as he wet the cloth with the last of his water ration. “I don’t have a regenerator, but I can at least wash it out.”

“You needn’t bother. It will mend, and frankly, I ought to have been faster. Ten years ago, he would have been the one with the black eye. Or worse.”

 “Really, Elim? Are we back to this? ‘The beaten deserve what they can’t defend against’…?” He was more than aware that his tone had turned from gently chiding to what might have skirted the bounds of flirtation. “I thought you were moving past these ridiculous notions.”  Best bet it all.

A thin smile. “Merely a habit of thought, Doctor. It will…take time. The bruise will be a…helpful reminder.”

Kelas worked thoroughly, concentrated on dabbing dust from tender blue flesh as gently as he could. Every once and awhile, across the backs of his teeth, he tasted it again. The sweetness.

Elim’s eyes followed him, close. He tried not to think on it.

“Habits of thoughts aside, you were right. You did the right thing,” he said as he worked.

“If Alon hadn’t called a stop, I would have stabbed him.”

“But you didn’t.” A flick of his eyes towards blue and a smile. “And, as a somewhat wise man once told me, ‘didn’t’ counts for more than most people think.”

“Somewhat wise?”

“He has his moments.”

“Does he?” Elim sat back slightly, tilting his head in amusement.

“Oh yes. He’s a veritable fount of half-baked ideas about the Serialists. He can quote a staggering array of insipid propaganda, particularly in couplet form. He won’t hesitate to share his opinion on any subject, no matter how ill-informed.”

A laugh.

“And occasionally…very occasionally…he doesn’t stab people.”

At their most playful, those blue eyes were almost tactile. “Luckily for you this is one of those occasions,” he said, smile a challenge.

“Some might say that, given our history, that’s in rather poor taste, Elim.” He grabbed aural ridges firmly and pulled the other man back into place. “Now hold still.”

“Whatever you say, Doctor. As always.”

Their eyes met, direct, and did not withdraw. It was almost too much, but he stayed there. Blue and bright and unusually heated.

Sunlight slid.

As often happens in such moments, Kelas felt his body move without the clearance of his mind. The hand that had been gripping aural ridge slipped down until fingertips rested on the large keeled scales where neck met jaw. Slow—so slow—he ran them from scale to scale, savoring the swell at his touch, all too aware that his breath had caught. He was caught along with it, fingers turning in to trace the hard contour of Elim’s collarbone, the soft curve of chula. A shiver, as he reached forward, searching for the other man’s hand…

“Doctor?”

Somehow the word brought him, stuttering, back to himself, thoughts and breath unstuck. He made the mistake of looking up again and found those eyes.

His eyes.

He sat back on his heels slowly.

What in the white hells are you thinking?

Elim tried to lean forward, but Kelas shifted back, uncertain. “I—I.” Words found no connections, and he closed his eyes.

Elim hesitated. “I didn’t intend to startle you. Or imply in any way that your touch was unwelcome, if that’s—”

“No,” he breathed. Guls, he’s trying to comfort you. It’s not the same.

But the words wouldn’t convince his heart.

“I’ll get us some tea,” Elim mumbled eventually.

Kelas had never quite understood why silence pulls at the reins of time, but, there, in the quiet of that shed, everything moved slow, like tilted-light through water. Steam rose lazily from the stove, kettle wheezing in halftime. Light made little progress across the floor. Outside, even dawn paused, sluggish.

And his heart answered, slowing. In pieces, his mind came back until he was staring at his own hands, traitorous, in his lap.

What had he been thinking? Whatever this was with Elim, it couldn’t be that. It couldn’t.

Elim held out the cup of tea. As he took it, he didn’t miss the light trace of a finger against his.

“Elim, forgive me. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“In my experience, these things don’t often involve an abundance of thought. It’s one of their better aspects.”

They let the tea fill several minutes.

“Doctor, I—I have—”

“An uncharacteristic loss for words. I’ll try to take that as a compliment.” The joke was a lifeless one, but he refused to give in to the heavy feeling trying to drag itself over him.

A weighed-down smile. “Sentiment doesn’t come…easily to me.”

Perhaps it comes a bit too easily to me, he thought ruefully, overly aware of Elim sliding down from the pallet to sit directly in front of him. Their knees touched.

“I…keep a tidy garden, Doctor. Cut back. Ordered. No unintended growth, no wild flourishing. It’s kept things simple over the years. Easy to manage.”

Kelas glanced through the window at the neat rows Elim had made just outside. In the furrows, tiny sprouts had begun, against the odds, to peak up heads. Tidy. Ordered.

He knew, of course, that wasn’t what Elim meant at all.

“But I can’t deny that, since that moment…at Tarlak, I’ve...put away my shears. Let what may grow, grow. A private garden, I told myself. No harm to anyone. A small, green indulgence in desolate times.”

Just above those ordered rows, the first bit of light licked up against the stars.

“I was wrong, Doctor. It isn’t a small indulgence. The garden has overgrown the beds, roots burrowed too deep, I fear, to pull easily. There are blooms here I’ve never seen before. Rare. Beautiful.” Fingers found his, and, leaden but tender, palms pressed into one another. “And perhaps…I might hope the garden is not as private as I thought, either.”

All Kelas could manage at the moment was a nod. Everything hinged on the spot where Elim’s hand met his.

“In fact, I will strain propriety once again by admitting that I…have thought about pressing against those long-fingered hands rather regularly since the first time you sat here.” Surely, in a way that brought a low clench, one of Elim’s fingers slotted down between his and then retreated again. Light. Gentle. “Regularly and with…desire.”

Tentative, making his breaths as even as he could, Kelas answered, twining their fingers fully, gripping hands in yut’mer. The flicker of eyelid this drew from Elim lit a fire—hot as sunlight. And not in my soul…

But his heart rebelled again. The same creeping unease. The same uncertainty.

As if sensing it, Elim withdrew his hand and waited.

They returned to the tea and the silence.

He wanted Elim. He did, and whether it was right or rational, he couldn’t deny that it had overtaken his garden just the same. Part of him wanted to wrap their hands and take Elim on that lumpy pallet with the smell of tea and the cast of moonlight all around. Without thoughts, without words, just bodies.

But…there was some shard still inside. The word was a new one in Kardasi, though the reality of the thing had long been known. Min’zala—the shadow left on the mind even after danger’s past. Plenty were haunted by the things they’d seen, the things that had been done—both by them and to them. And some part of Kelas, though he looked at Elim now and felt no fear, part of him was still caught in that shadow.

“It will always be between us, Doctor.” Elim knew. Of course he knew. His expression was stoic, but even the dimness couldn’t cover over the regret that lurked somewhere deep.

“I don’t know how to explain. What I want is—”

Elim shook his head. “You don’t have to explain. We can forget it happened.”

Kelas considered that, traced that path forward. Friendship. Warmth. But never closeness. Never anything that would bring them back to joined hands. Never touch.

That future felt as brittle as the strip of moonlight that filtered through the door.

“My mother used to say that always is a very long time. Longer than anyone can know.” He reached out and pressed palms again lightly. “She was a wise woman.”

The other man’s face didn’t change in any way he could pinpoint, but it had changed, showing a reluctant hope Kelas knew, at any other time, Elim would have kept hidden. He was letting Kelas see it. A little peak into a private garden.

“I don’t want to forget, Elim. I…don’t think it will be always.”

The possibility sat between them. Given time, shadows could shift, could fade. Fallen monuments could be rebuilt.

Sometimes even the most delicate things could survive.

“It’s you who’ve taught me to hope, Doctor. I will put your lessons to good use.” The words touched him as gently as any caress. As gently as the fingers that found the spaces between his. “Against all my training and beliefs and against everything I have ever known, Doctor, I trust you. I trust you, and however you want to see this garden grow, I will tend to it.”

Kelas let that linger a moment—gave Elim’s fingers a squeeze, reveled in the catch of breath. Inside, a mix of lust and sunlight and absolute confusion. Outside, his eyes drifted up Elim’s neckridges, dark and swollen, a sight to behold.

He should leave. He knew he should. It was the proper thing.

It wasn’t a night for proper things.

“Elim?”

“Yes?” The tiniest note of lightness in that voice gave him the strength to continue.

“If it wouldn’t be too tactless—or too much of an—”

“Of course. I was hoping you might stay.”

Without another word, the two of them lay beside each other on the pallet, Elim wrapping close to Kelas tentatively. A question.

He answered, drawing the other man in.

They fit together easily, bodies arced back to belly, Elim’s lips settled against the back of his neck. “Rest well, Doctor.”

The voice plucked the string of his spine, hot and near, straight to his center. The ecstatic slide of sunlight.

“Elim?”

“Mmmm?” The reply came muffled in his hair.

“I…I think it’s time you started calling me ‘Kelas’.”

The laugh tickled. The arm around him pulled tighter. “Rest well, Kelas.”

He fell asleep slowly, basking in the moonlight and the sunlight all at once.

**************************

For a few painful seconds, Kelas felt the absence, keen and cutting. I wish he was here. Elim would be hurting. He knew because he was hurting, too. He could sense the precipice—it was far out still, but they were running towards it. Change was coming, and it was coming quickly.

Velet was too far away.

 “I never forgot what happened, of course, but…it wasn’t ‘always’.” His voice was barely more than a sigh as he worked up enough strength to look to Bashir once more.  “Nothing ever is, is it?”

The thought felt oppressive until the sight of Bashir turned it, suddenly, aright.

Even this…even this that had happened to the human. It would end, too.

Kelas watched Bashir a moment longer, trying to let that thought fill the absence.

He needed to take this man to Paldar. He needed to let him see.

Certainly—with a resolution he hadn’t felt until he remembered Elim’s hand against his—he picked up the padd and typed out a reply.

Dearest Elim,

Of course I will forgive you. I only hope you extend me the same courtesy.

Paldar is what Bashir needs. You once said that you trust me: I intend to see if you really mean it.

Let the garden grow, Elim.

And don’t dwell too much on the Courier: let’s make it to Velet first.

Yours with love,

Kelas

As soon as he’d pressed send, an alarm pinged from the corner—the scheduled time for hydration. Larria entered again, scurrying from the monitors to the replicator and back to Bashir, gently moistening lips before turning to eyes.

“Thank you, dear. I hope you’ll be able to join us at Paldar tomorrow evening? I’ll be taking Doctor Bashir to the castellan’s personal residence. An outing. Your help and your company would be most welcome.”

“Me? At…the castellan’s private residence?” The tightness of anxiety. “I—I mean I would be honored, but—“

“Don’t worry, dear. It would just be you, Doctor Bashir, me, and…the security detail.” He watched her closely.

She stilled. “Who from the security detail?” There was a smile in her voice.

“Oh, several. Including S’suron Dhessek,” he teased.

She threw a glare over her shoulder. “Las’sant,” she hissed, chufa blushing blue in a most endearing way. “You shouldn’t…I wasn’t…”  But she didn’t seem able to complete the thought believably.

He couldn’t help but smile. Larria’s interest in the security officer had been clear from the first time they’d met, and Elim said she still blushed every time Dhessek accompanied him to visit Bashir. Thus far, however, neither had worked up the courage to do much about it. Kelas would ask the young man to be their escort within house. It would allow the two young people time to talk, to be alone together. It might have scandalized his mother, but that was the way of things these days. And if anyone deserved to be happy and loved, it was Larria.

“Thank you for inviting me, s’sava. Of course, I’ll come along. It will be a fun, won’t it? An outing?” She never turned her attention from Bashir, administering his eyedrops and then smoothing the hair from his forehead lovingly. “You’ll like it, bhana. I’ve heard that the castellan has the most beautiful gardens. That will be nice, won’t it? Fresh air? The smell of kis’sa and meya?”

Kelas felt his smile deepen—felt it deep down. Yes. Everyone needed a garden.

Larria gave a start. “S’sava, I think—he blinked!”

Kelas was on his feet in a second, crossing to the spot where Larria stood beside the hoverchair, hands trembling.

Bashir looked utterly the same.

“Perhaps it was a reflex because of the drops—“

“No! I saw it. He was there for a moment, s’sava. I saw him looking back.” Her voice shook, as did tears in her eyes. “If I could have just—I thought he might speak!”

The hope was beginning to feel frantic and dangerous, careening in the too-small space of his chest. He forced himself to walk, measured, to the monitors and review the last several minutes as clearly as he could.

The readouts agreed. For a moment—not quite five seconds—Julian Bashir had surfaced.  He had been, for all intents and purposes, himself.

“Five seconds? That’s all?”

Five seconds.

It wasn’t much. But somehow it was enough.

“Five seconds can be the difference between life and death, my dear. Tomorrow, we’ll hope for six.”

Larria flung her arms around him, bursting into tears that confused joy and disappointment and many hundreds of hours of hope all at once. Over it, he barely heard the familiar chirrup of the comm, instead catching the flash of light as the padd glowed to life on the table.

Dearest Kelas,

I’ve learned my lessons well. Everything’s arranged.

I trust you, as I always have, in everything: it is the world I trust not at all.

Do be careful, my dear, and I will see you both on Velet.

With humbled heart,

Elim

Chapter Text

Day Seven: Ziyet

Kelas couldn’t help but look up. It was a night made for looking up.

The setting sun had dragged rain clouds behind it, baring the night sky until only bone-white moons remained, stars stippled between. As Kelas drifted over them, each shape connected, asterisms catalogued neatly in Mother’s voice. The Koirala, crown of the moons. Four bright points that formed the tail of T’sorast, the Night Serpent. An inverse-U textbooks called The Heart of the Union but everyone else simply called the Chufa. And Es’skia—the dirt-red bullet that was both prime star of the Bajoran system and the top-most point of the Manse. It had always been his favorite. As a boy, he’d lain out and imagined Es’skia as a little red bird perched atop a great palace, chirping his sad song down on the inhabitants below.

And, of course, the Taluvian, beating in a language that explained the mysteries of existence—or so the Hebitians had claimed. Kelas always searched for it, hoping this time it would hold some answer he might understand.

It didn’t.

Then again, whatever answers it held hadn’t done the Hebitians much good anyway.

Usually, on nights like these, Elim would ask him to point out the various arrangements. Is that T’sorast? he might ask—it never was. Elim was the sort to keep his eye on the room and not the stars. Where Kelas saw pictures and stories and poetry, Elim saw a star chart. Names, travel routes, systems. Sometimes, the odd bit of verse learned during schooling.

But he didn’t feel them as Kelas did.

He glanced over at Bashir in the hoverchair beside him. Dim eyes sparkled with points of light.

“You’re a stargazer, though, aren’t you, Doctor?” He slid from Bashir’s face back to Es’skia. “We’ve got a new set of stars to learn if you like. A new sky.”

He’d done his best to treat the evening like any other at their Paldar home. Once each cycle or two, he and Elim managed a visit, and they followed roughly this same routine.  

They began with dinner. Elim pulled up a few odds and ends from the garden, and together they made a fresh salad or a well-spiced s’sast. Tonight, however, Kelas relied on the replicator. Elim had always been the more enthusiastic cook, and while Kelas did prefer a home-made meal, he found that, without Elim, the kitchen felt far too empty.

Larria and Dhessek joined he and Bashir at the dining table. When Kelas didn’t set a plate down for Bashir, Larria had gone back to the replicator herself, returning with a cup of tea, a fragrant punatur salad, and a matter-of-fact expression.

Kelas had smiled, but he’d felt only fear. The girl hoped so easily and so freely. He didn’t want to see her hurt.

Nor himself.

He’d distracted himself from such thoughts by watching the two young people dart looks at one another across the table, each scouting when they thought themselves unobserved.

On a usual night, security would have waited in the foyer. Tonight, however, Kelas invited Dhessek to the table. He could hear Elim’s voice in the back of his mind mocking his lack of subtlety, but Kelas knew it was for the best. Some needed a firmer push in the right direction and, this way, even if he was disappointed and Bashir remained unreachable, some good might come from the occasion.

And the two young people had made a bit of progress already. Dhessek set off a rather promising disagreement about the proper seasoning for a s’sast which led into a full-on argument about the merits of southern versus northern cuisine. It had begun to fizzle, however, when Larria paused to change the hydration pack on Bashir’s mobile unit.

So Kelas had excused himself and Bashir to the garden patio, as he and Elim often did. Let those two be alone. Hopefully they would keep arguing, lean closer. Feel sharpness turn hot and then soften in the middle in that way that nothing else ever could.

Young love. It was truly one of the marvels of life, wasn’t it?

Out in the distant dark, night-locusts answered.

Kelas kept with the routine, doing as he and Elim did: decanted a bottle of kanar, flipped on whatever music Elim had last been enjoying, and took a reverent seat beneath the heavens.

Some nights, the two of them brought books and read in silence. Some nights, they set a kotra board between.

Some nights, they left no space between at all.

A deep breath and a sip of kanar tempered the flood of remembered touch. “Hmm, perhaps slightly older love isn’t so bad either,” Kelas mumbled with a chuckle into his glass.

And he sat remembering for a time, letting the music and the moonlight fill the quiet. The air was clear and warm, the smell of the city just there, a hint mixed with rain-drenched soil and blooms in the last rapturous throes of life. The scent of a garden in autumn, lush before the chill. It brought him back, again, to thoughts of older love.

Eventually, he let his eyes turn down again, returning to the world. From this vantage they could see the monuments, draped in the gauze of silver from above, deceptively delicate in low light. Kelas could appreciate the spectral beauty even from a distance, but it was a pale thing to moving in their midst. Feeling them surround. Even now, though they’d been smoothed and worn by time, that space between still had a way with him. Still gripped him in a spiritual place that, at his age, fewer and fewer things could reach.

The music strained sweetly, swelling at the thought.

It would be the same for Bashir. He would feel it.

“We have a word in Kardasi, Doctor. Uttam. I’m told young people say it about food and clothing and all sorts of mundane things these days, but, when I was young, it was reserved for…something a bit more transcendent. For a piece of music or an arrangement of lines or a sight or sound that hits in just the right way. Your human Ozymandias was uttam for me, once. And this…this place. It has been uttam for me, too. From the first time I saw these monuments, to the moment when I sat here, in this place, and…”

He stopped. The memory hurt, even now, though it was as smoothed and worn by time as the monuments. He hadn’t looked directly at it, but he knew some part of him had been worrying over it since they’d stepped through the front door. Some part of him saw it framed now, again, in this moment, the past circling back to the present like one of Elim’s damned repetitive epics.

He gave a bitter laugh as he realized he’d even switched on that same opera, one of the arias from The Farewell of Oralius and Niza. The tragedy of Oralius and his sun-goddess had been wildly popular a few years after the Fire, when all things Hebitian were being rebirthed, everyone anxious to exhume what they’d buried unthinking. Elim had listened to it over and over through the years, never quite able to convince him that it was good. But they’d listened to it first that night, on a newly requisitioned mobile player, They’d sat beside one another, under these same stars. Stars that had held no answers then, either.

He opened his mouth to begin the story but closed it again. Tonight, the memory was for him.

He smiled, and it played again, silent, in time to the music and the pulsing of the stars.

***********************

“Uttam? Really?”

Elim opened his eyes only after the last note had faded fully.  “You…don’t like it.”

Kelas shrugged, stretching against the crick in his back. He was happy to eat in the garden, especially now that it was living up to that name. Seeing kis’sa point red tips toward the sky and sarnak vines stretch across their beds was certainly gratifying—almost enough to make him forget that, a few years before, it had all been bent beams and crumbled stone and dust.

Gratifying, yes, but he was long past the age where sitting on the ground came easily. They were going to need to find some chairs.

The next song picked up, and he wondered how many more he would have to sit through. “I’m not enjoying it as much as you, apparently.”

Elim’s face lit with the prospect of disagreement. “I must say, I’m surprised. When I read that this was the first arts proposal to be produced, I thought surely it was made for you.”

“I do love the story of Oralius and Niza, and it’s well-composed, I’ll give it that. But this libretto is…maudlin, to be honest.” He made a dramatic gesture, inflating his voice. “‘I shall live in your light, but never in your arms…’”

Elim grimaced at the off-key rendition. “Too sentimental for Doctor Kelas Parmak? Who would have thought it possible?”

Smiles sharpened against one another and fingers laced.

 “And who would have thought the redoubtable Elim Garak could be softened by a few flowery declarations and overworked metaphors?” Kelas teased his thumb along Elim’s, letting scale tug lightly at scale with admiring slowness. “I knew you had a romantic streak in you.”

At the space where palms touched, Elim’s pulse quickened. “Do guard that secret well, if you please.”

On a normal evening, they might have fallen into touching and closeness and that odd human custom of tasting lips Elim had taught him (and which he’d discovered he rather enjoyed). They often found such things an easy interlude to conversation.

But tonight, Elim hesitated. Hesitated and yet clearly yearned, too—a happy song in a minor key.

“Is…something wrong?”

For what felt too long a time, Elim said nothing. Blue eyes cast far out into the waning light before dragging back, empty, to the present.  

They never quite made it back to Kelas. “Alon has asked me to leave.”

A second before those words, Kelas’s heart had raced, eager and hungry.

A second after, his chest was a hollow. “Leave?”

 “He’s asked me to be the Cardassian ambassador to the Federation. I’d…be living there. On Earth.”

Hands fell apart, and, as his mind scrabbled to catch up, the moment splintered into impressions. The lack of air in his lungs. The tin of music from the mobile player. The patch of rusty sun painted across one knee.

Earth? What was he saying?

“You…you just returned from the Federation. You’re needed here.” The words came out fragile, fear obvious. “You can’t accept.”

He knew the look Elim gave him: this wasn’t a point for debate. It had been decided. “I understand why Alon wants it.”

“Well I drekking well don’t! And I’ll tell Alon myself—“

“Kelas, please. I know you understand, my dear. You do.”

It hurt. It hurt, that understanding. He wished he could cut it out.

“All of this—everything you and Alon have worked for—is…uncertain. Vulnerable. To govern this world the way Alon wants—the way we want—will require perfect strength of character and absolute transparency.” Elim caught his eyes. “Not my strong suits.”

“Elim, you—“

“I’m a liability, Kelas. My past is…uncomfortable. I can’t be seen to have a hand in any of it.”

“But that isn’t fair! That’s not the Cardassia I want, either! You aren’t—“

“It’s not just that. Here, I’m a liability, but elsewhere I can be useful. I have contacts in the Federation. Experience handling them. On Earth, I can serve.”

“You can be useful here! Even if you’re not involved with the Reunion, there are other ways to serve.”

“Doing what? Weeding the garden? Reading your reports for spelling errors?” The joke in his voice was sharp, not at all intended to amuse. No, he intended to press the point home, keen as a blade. “Perhaps opening a tailor’s shop…?”

And Kelas felt it, that point—felt it sink deep. Elim had spent years wanting nothing more than to be back in service to Cardassia. He wouldn’t refuse it now, no matter what shape it took. Even if it meant a second exile.

Even if it meant goodbye.

The smooth sound of azal that had pleased him just a moment before turned suddenly tuneless. He clicked it off.

As a youth, when Kelas had read a tragic love story like that of Oralius and Niza, he always found himself hoping absurdly that, this time, the ending would change. That this time it would be different. Fate would soften, and the lovers would not be parted.

He went through the same absurd motions now, though he’d long since traced the conversation to its end.

“I could come with you.”

Elim’s hand found his. Solid. Contrite. “No, you can’t, which you well know. You truly are needed here. I won’t take you away. And I don’t think for even a  second that you would really let me.”

The truth of that settled over them. It was cold.

He couldn’t leave. He’d never been so needed as in the cycles since Alon’s election to castellan. Around them, slowly emerging through that haze of dust and death, change was taking a more and more solid form. In the last few cycles, he’d begun to believe—many had begun to believe—that Cardassia could be remade. Emptiness was giving way to kis’sa and sarnak and something entirely, wonderfully new.

Elim was right. That was everything.

Though right at this moment, through the press of the other man’s hand, that duty felt utterly empty.

“When…when would you go?”

The tension of Elim’s silence answered.

“Tomorrow, then.”

 “I have a long-haul shuttle flight to Alpha Centauri early tomorrow, yes. I’ll spend a few days there at some benighted conference or other, and then on to Earth. Alon says they have an apartment fitted out. Someplace warm, I hope.”

Kelas tried to imagine tomorrow. Tried to imagine the sun setting, rising. Setting, rising. Imagined waking in their bed alone and drinking morning tea in a garden slack from inattention. Moving through a day knowing that, when he came home, Elim would still be gone.

At the edge of the patio, the sunlight was fading. He felt as if he were fading with it.

 “I…I can’t believe you’re telling me now! A little opera and yut’mer and then you’re gone like some rajnit spirit from Mherin’s tales…?”

“Forgive me, Kelas. I’ve never understood the point of…long goodbyes.”

Vridan, he’d said. Vridan. Two syllables like kindling.

“Forgive you. Forgive you. That’s the way of things, isn’t it?”

Emotion rarely made its way to Elim’s face, but it was there now. The sink of pain at the corner of lips. The dullness of sharp eyes. “I’m afraid it is. I’m not sure why you bother. With forgiveness or friendship or—” He stopped, unwilling to say it, but it sat there, frail.

The word they hadn’t said.

“Love,” Kelas finished without feeling. The word’s liquid edges cut where, any other day, they might have caressed.

Elim nodded. He took Kelas’s other hand, lacing it as well.

They rarely found themselves at a loss for words. They moved from politics to supply management to the best way to slice masok with hardly a thought. They could go on about books or philosophy or fond memories for hours at a time with never a stutter, never a too-long stretch of silence. But this—the topic between them now—had never been easy. Had never distilled itself readily into words.

So he borrowed some. “‘I’ll live in your light, but never your arms’.” His voice was bitter. He couldn’t bring himself to look at anything in particular. “I think I’m suddenly far less fond of that story.”

Something struggled in Elim’s expression, and there was a tick of hesitation before he gave Kelas’s hands an uncertain squeeze. “Kelas, I…I need you to know—”

“Is it going to be declarations now? Because I really don’t think—”

“I almost said no, Kelas.” The small trip of confession. “I almost...”

Words unspooled into breath, but he heard them nevertheless.

I almost chose you over Cardassia.

Every bit of anger evaporated, lost in a lightning strike that could only be love.

He could imagine no greater declaration from Elim Garak.  

It made no sense, really. None of it. That he and Elim should be sitting together. That they would have such feelings. That he should only now understand the fullness of them as they said goodbye.

They were going to have to say goodbye. He didn’t want it to be like this.

At the horizon, the sun was gone.

“Somewhere in the Gamma Quadrant, Enabran Tain is rolling in his grave to hear such a thing.”

Elim laughed. It was manic, its release uneven, and it struck odd against the quiet of the night. “Let the bastard roll,” he whispered, leaning in and kissing Kelas deeply. Hungrily. The kiss tasted of tea and masok and change, and Kelas needed more.

His hand found Elim’s hair, tight, and for the first time, he felt not the cool urge to slow but the unstoppable momentum of lust, driving him forward to meet the other man with equal hunger. His touch slid down and kept sliding. Down the ridges that corseted Elim’s waist, down their arc around his hips. He gripped roughly, possessively. He didn’t intend to let go.

In general, Kelas was a gentle soul—something he’d long since accepted. Soft as the dunes, his father had lamented under his breath: moving this way and that with every little wind. But here, in the down quiet of goodbye, he was the wind, and it was Elim who parted, moaning and opening himself to Kelas’s insistent touch, pressing into each stroke and bite as if in request. As Kelas’s teeth found the sensitive scales at the base of neckridge, a hiss of pure need thundered between. New. Desperate.

A tumble of touch and lips found him draped over the larger man’s body, thighs between thighs, pressing Elim fully into the dirt with thin hips. Elim’s ridges had darkened as much as the sky, maddeningly beautiful, and Kelas dipped back in for another kiss. Demanded.

“Kelasss.”

Whispered against his lips, the name glanced against red lust. It felt cooler than it should, and though the swollen heat between them spoke of want, those blue eyes…

 “I—Kelas. Guls I want you. But…”

Things went still. Only breeze stirred, violent against hot scales.

Beneath him, Elim shifted with a sweet jolt. The other man was eager, he felt, part-everted already and clearly having some difficulty forcing himself back into words. “White hells, Kelas, you …” He paused to take a breath. “You’re a vision. One I’m going to think about on many cold Earth nights, I can promise.”

Kelas pulled back. “But…?”

Elim pressed a hand, steadying, to the ground below. “There’s…there’s pain. In your eyes.”

Kelas looked down at him, limned in what little light remained. Yes, there was pain. Beneath the want, pain lurked, inescapable. What did he expect?

“I don’t want to see that pain in your eyes.” He pulled Kelas down with him, chufa to chufa. “There’s been too much fear and pain and regret between us. I don’t want it to be part of this.” A gentle kiss. “I want you to lay me down—“ Another kiss. “And touch me.” Another. “And take nothing but pleasure from me.” A longer kiss, tongue run along lips. “Until I’m so full of you that you forget what pain is.”

The tears were there, had been there, just beneath.

“I…I don’t think we can have it without the pain tonight,” Elim said simply, holding him close.

He was right. Kelas hated him for it, but he was right. It wasn’t a thing to be done to cover over pain. It wasn’t what either of them wanted. Or needed.

That wouldn’t be the ending of the story, no matter how many times he read it.

Though they eventually surfaced again, breaking heads back above the muffled ocean of desire, neither moved from that place in the grass. Kelas wasn’t entirely sure he’d be able to move. Unyielding surfaces took their toll, and his spine was already punishing such impulsiveness.

More than that, he feared to move. If he moved, it would be over. Elim would move, too, and there would be nothing left but change. Embraces and bland gratitude and pressing palms in vridan. And then pain, rushing fully into the place now occupied by the man beside him.

So he stayed, lying on an aching back, staring up at the clear night sky. At the margins of vision, the tallest monuments loomed.

When Elim finally spoke, his voice was re-tightened, giving no hint of what had passed. “Is that T’sorast?”

“Madrin. Those three are her braid, see?” His arm felt heavy as he traced the stars in question.  “T’sorast doesn’t rise until much later this time of year.”

Dirt crunched as Elim turned his head, eyes sliding from the stars to Kelas.

Kelas couldn’t do the same. Not yet.

“I’ll have to learn the stars on Earth. I’ll teach them to you, when you visit,” Elim said.

It was a question, though it didn’t rise. It didn’t hope.

“You’d better learn them quickly, then. I expect I’ll be visiting soon enough.” Of course he expected nothing of the sort. Off-world travel was highly restricted, and, even if he could get dispensation, he knew the next few years would afford little time for holidays. He was for and of Cardassia for the foreseeable future. They both knew it.

But it was a pleasant lie, and he’d always felt it best to let Elim have his little lies now and again. To clear the way for the bigger truths.

“And you’ll…keep up the garden while I’m away? I’ve seen you garden, of course, so I’m not expecting much, but…perhaps a bed or two? To keep things…green?” Elim’s tone told him this wasn’t about the kis’sa.

 “I suspect you’ve planted the seeds so well something of them will remain for some time to come.”

Eyes found each other now, and fingers. They lingered, like a kiss.

 “Yes, well. Don’t overwater the sarnak. You’d drown a fish, I swear.”

The laugh bubbled up, warm in that emptiness. Love. Yes, it was that. “I was speaking metaphorically, Elim.” He used his best chiding voice—the one Elim enjoyed.

 “I thought you found that sort of thing maudlin.” That pursed smile hurt and healed at the same time.

“But you don’t.” A pause, and he raised their hands to his lips. “I live in your light, but never in your arms…” This time it was tender. An offering.

I will give you all the flowery declarations I have, Elim Garak. Just come back to me.

When Elim spoke again, his voice was steady but, at the edges, Kelas sensed the roughness of sorrow. “Describe the sky to me, p’rimit. I want to be able to see this night when I close my eyes.”

And Kelas did.

Above them, Taluvia blinked on, impassive.

***********************

Stars joined the two moments, and Kelas felt the hinge.

Fear held him here, he knew, just as it had then. Fear that the moment he stood and wheeled Bashir into that place, it would be another end.

Happy. Sad. Who could say?

And so you sit, mapping the sky. Stalling again.

If you want to cross the desert, lis’sea…

 He smiled and forced himself to stand.

Bashir’s heart rate was elevated, brain activity increased only slightly since they’d left the official residence. Kelas had adjusted the medication again, and it looked as if, finally, he’d managed to catch up with the human’s metabolism.

Still, there wasn’t much in those readings. They didn’t say much more than they had a few days before.

This isn’t medical, Kelas. This wasn’t like putting him in a scanning modeler or irradiating him or performing surgery. This was spiritual treatment. This was calling down into the water, to the man he now felt sure was there. Felt sure must be listening.

It wouldn’t do, then, to be clinical.

He took one more cleansing glimpse of stars before he forced himself away from the monitors and towards the man. As he’d seen Larria do the previous evening, he leaned down to push hair back from Bashir’s face, giving him a full, unobstructed view of the night. Against fingertips, the human’s skin was soft in a way it hadn’t been a few days before, and there was something…more. Something you couldn’t see on a monitor or a chart. A focus far behind the eyes. 

He sincerely hoped the other man would find something worth seeing.

“Well, Doctor, I…think it’s time to take a stroll. If you would care to join me…?”

There was no response, but he allowed a few seconds before taking his place behind the chair nevertheless.

They circled the monuments for a time, scouting a proper point of entry. As they walked, Kelas named off the plants absently, just as he had the stars. The kis’sa that had been first, still growing tall. Sarnak lounging free beside more restrained sprays of night-blooming pelat. The arching white of the ithian tree they’d planted several years before. “I told Elim it was pretentious and tired, but he has dreams of Coranum mansions…”

Sunken from the earlier storm, the tree’s branches drooped, tickling the top of the nearest monument. Pale leaves blended with steel and stone, garden giving way to the un-green space in patchwork increments. Kelas touched the surface of the nearest monument, still damp from the rains. Its strength was a relief. An invitation.

So they slid between. Into.

The tallest monument drew him, as it always did. The smaller ones had currents of their own, to be sure, but the tallest was the tempest’s center, and while he let the others pull them, balletic, through eddies and swells, he knew where it would end.  He knew their destination.

 “I’ve been thinking about your Ozymandias, Doctor Bashir. I do, sometimes, in this place that was ‘lone and level.’”

Shadows shifted and slid across them as they walked, soft as the brushing of wings.

“It’s the fate of everything, isn’t it? Monuments, empires, love… The sands take it all, eventually. And they’ve taken plenty from you, Doctor. Your body, almost your life. An empire half-sunk at least, even if it still stands. And…” With less thought than he might normally have given it, he set a hand on the Bashir’s back. Gentle. With the same reverence as the monument. “And love, too. Elim said you—lost someone. Someone beloved.”

Kelas didn’t know the specifics of the woman Bashir had lost, only that, when Elim had spoken of her, there’d been a chill to his voice Kelas read well enough.

“It’s an empty feeling, staring out across those sands. I know it. Still feel it sometimes, when I remember. And it’s easy—so easy—to sink into the sand alongside. Become another ruin, living but lifeless.”

They’d reached the center now. The tallest monument bent light inward, drawing the eye like a bright window in a darkened room. Even the air was different here, thin against the scales and clean. He’d read once about the underground sanctuaries of the Hebitians, cool and dark, and he imagined, just like this. A feeling of enclosure. Of embrace.

He turned Bashir toward it, wondering what, if anything, the human could see—could sense—of that embrace.

“This place, though…here I can truly feel it, that lesson Cardassia has learned so well. What is broken stays broken, Doctor Bashir, but we…we can mend.” He could see Elim in his mind’s eye again, setting that beam into its place, finding that shape.  “Sands don’t stay boundless and bare. Destruction may be a constant, but growth is, too, and it only takes a seed. One seed. A fortuitous rain now and again, and, if you’re lucky, someone to tend to it.” He breathed deep. The air was redolent of life, and he touched the monument, just as he had that first time. It hummed with starlight.

“I don’t blame you for sinking into those sands. I might have, too, if things had gone differently. But we’re here for you, Doctor Bashir. We can’t rebuild the statues or save what the sands have claimed. But if you can find it in yourself, Doctor, even for a moment, to plant that seed—well, Cardassia knows how to scratch life from the dust. We’ll help it grow. And Elim is…an excellent gardener.”

As he said it, the words that just a few days ago might have hurt somehow felt right—heavy but clean and true as the air here at the center of this place.

That was the thing about gardens. You could water them and tend them and set things in neat rows, but you could never quite control how they grew. Weeds crept in, droughts withered, occasionally, roots tangled, spreading in unintended directions.

He’d known for some time now that change was coming. Deep down he’d kept a space reserved for the loss. As much as he dreamt of easy nights under the stars, he’d known things couldn’t stay the same. There’d been too many disruptions. Complications.

The trials for one: what consequences might come from all Elim had been and done…well, those seeds had been planted long ago.

Bashir was another. If Kelas was honest with himself, the human had felt like nothing so much as an unwelcome complication since the moment Elim set aside a space in their home. He understood, of course—he always did. But it was another change. Slowly, the sands crept forward, claimed another little piece.

And that was the fear—the space he’d held onto deep down. The thing that had kept him from moving. You’ll lose him, Kelas. And this time, he won’t come back.

Of course, that might not be so. The trials might prove nothing more than a temporary discomfort. Bashir might remain lost. Or, if Bashir woke, it was possible he would leave. Or that he’d never loved Elim after all.

But that wasn’t how the garden was growing. Kelas could sense it, just under the cover of soil.

“I will live in your light, but never in your arms,” he sighed, and here, in this space, it felt like absolution. If that was the way of things, he supposed, he’d been through worse. If all he could have was light, then, well, light did help things grow.

He pressed his palm harder against the edge of the monument and let several drops of blood feed black steel and grass. He didn’t have a name to chant this time…only a goodbye. An acceptance of whatever would come, even if it was vridan.

When he finally turned back to Bashir, he found the other man just as he’d left him.

He cradled his hand, more than a little disappointed, and equally embarrassed at the drama of the gesture. “It’s an old custom—the o’dal. The offering of living blood and the whispered names of the dead and gone. There must have been a reason for it once, but it’s little more than ritual now. A way to let the pain of the heart find an escape, I think.” He looked down at his gray palm, freckled with blood. “Like a prayer.”

Something shifted. It was as if he could hear it, the parting of the dimness. The rustle of moonlight.

Bashir’s hand. Almost imperceptibly, it stretched forward, long fingers straight.

He was reaching for the monument.

From somewhere behind the hammering pulse in his ears, Kelas was aware of the monitors frenetic alerts. He switched them off, never taking his gaze from that outstretched hand. It wasn’t clinical—not this moment.

“Doctor Bashir?”

No words, but fingers twitched, as if in answer.

Trembling, he inched the hoverchair closer until Bashir’s hand found its mark, smooth skin to smooth stone.

The blood ran readily alongside his own, twin streams of red and black.

Bashir gave a rasp that might have been a name, sibilant at the start. And a second, certainly a name. Though it was barely audible, Kelas heard it as clearly as if the human had shouted it to the sky.

 Julian.   Counting himself among the dead and gone.

Those eyes found him with difficulty, glazed in tears. They were alive.

Years of ingrained medical training brought him to the human’s pulse, despite the buzz in his mind that clogged most rational thought. His other hand went, just as automatically—and from some entirely different instinct—to Bashir’s shoulder, firm and settling, though he wasn’t sure he ought to be trying to settle anyone. “Doctor Bashir, are you—can you hear me?”

The tears in Bashir’s eyes blinked away, neat tracks down cheeks that had, a moment ago, been so dry and dull. He nodded and moved his lips soundlessly.

“I’m sorry. I can’t—"

To Kelas’s surprise, he felt the warmth of the human’s hand settle over his. A slight tremor, and a struggle, but the touch was sure. “Julian.”

Something in the soft press of eyes told him: it wasn’t the o’dal this time. It was a request. An introduction.

“Of course. Julian.” He started to continue, to introduce himself properly, telling Bashir who he was and where they were and how he’d come to be there, but that look quieted him. They didn’t speak of it: no words passed. And yet, Kelas understood.

Some part of it—of everything that had past these last days—was there. It had gotten through.

The introductions had already been made.

Carefully, helping Bashir to turn his hand, Kelas pressed their palms. “Welcome back, Julian. We’ve been… expecting you.”

At that, Bashir lost his composure and wept, cleansing and terrible and necessary.

Kelas embraced him, and the two of them sat in that place for a long while, watering hope with tears.

**************************

The rain came on gradually, clouds sliding in like a curtain closing. Kelas tried to speed the two of them out of that place, apologizing, but Julian raised a hand in silent signal. When Kelas looked close, he could see it in the human’s face. The absolute focus on sensation—on breeze combing through hair. On raindrops tapping against skin. It was a warm rain, and mild, and Kelas could only imagine how pleasant so much feeling must be after all those cycles wrapped in numb nothing.

So he forced himself to slow, strolling through the downpour and trying to ignore the clammy cling of his tunic all around.

Larria was not pleased with this decision.

Of course she’d lavished her affections on Bashir first. The moment she’d seen them roll onto the patio, she’d flung her arms around the human and pressed their palms and cheeks together, as if Bashir truly were a brother. A second later she seemed to realize her error, and she’d stuttered back a bit, muttering an “Oh, forgive me, bhana, I didn’t—”

But Bashir had reached up and held her close. Kelas couldn’t hear what he whispered to her, but he could heard one word well enough: ana—little sister.

And with that Larria had flown into a frenzy of efficiency, checking pupillary function, blood oxygenation, and any number of vitals Kelas himself probably ought to have been checking, truth be told. Instead, however, he sat back and watched and marveled at how far the young woman had come and how very fiercely she loved.

“So he’s…he’s recovered then?” Dhessek had followed Larria out onto the patio and was now watching her with much the same look as Kelas.

“It seems he’s on his way. After so many cycles, he’s having some difficulty moving and speaking, but nothing a few octals of assisted movement augmentation won’t help. He does say he still can’t feel his legs, but we’ll see if that comes. All in all, things are looking infinitely better than they were this morning.”

Dhessek nodded, clearly thoughtful. “And… will he stay…with the castellan?” The stilted tone made it clear he was trying to ask something sideways and failing miserably. “I mean—if he’s recovering will he…stay here…or go back to the Federation?”

Kelas grinned. It was good to see their time in house had not been misspent. “If you’re asking whether Larria will remain living in the castellan’s residence for much longer, I don’t know. But if I were you, Dhessek, I wouldn’t wait to find out.”

The young man stood stiffly, not making eye contact.

Some truly do need a bit more of a push… “She likes sculpture. Take her to the sculpture garden at Darvat.”

“I—I was merely curious about the human.” The young man was far too stolid and prideful to let his embarrassment show, offering only a curt nod. “But that’s…good advice.”

“S’suron!”

The boy looked like he’d been struck by lightning at the sound of his name. Struck by lightning and he loves it.

“ ‘S’suron’?” Kelas teased in a whisper. If the time inside had put them on a first name basis already, perhaps everything would have happy ending tonight after all.

The young man didn’t have to give Kelas a glare for him to feel it. “Yes, Mhir?”

“Bring Bashir S’sava a glass of water, please. Not too cold.” She didn’t look up as she said it. “And I need the secondary medkit we brought. It’s still at the dining table, I think.”

The boy moved with an efficiency to rival hers. Yes, it would be a good match.

“And you.”

Now he was being struck by that lightning, and not nearly so lovingly.

“What in Mherin’s jevonite palaces were you thinking letting him get soaked like this?”

“Larria, dear—”

“Humans are fragile! Getting wet like this lowers their body temperature, you know that!”

He opened his mouth to point out there was hardly any danger in such warm weather but decided it best not to argue.

Clearly this was the right decision as the anger burned itself out almost immediately, satisfied with his contrite expression. “Forgive me, s’sava, I—I just can’t believe he’s….” She seemed as amazed as he’d been. “What did it, do you think?”

Kelas really didn’t know what might have brought the man back from the brink. The scientist in him might have looked to the adjustments to the medication protocols and the man’s unusual, more-than-human physiology. But some other part of him—the stargazing part—wanted to believe it was more. That it was his words or the stories or this place—that something in all of it had been uttam. Something had found the man beneath, as healing as any medication Kelas could have administered.

Of course, in the end, it was probably both. Both and then that unknown force that gave and took without method or reason.

“I don’t know,” he answered at last, holding up his palm to the young woman tenderly. “I don’t know.”

They pressed palms, and Kelas felt the tears threatening again. He took a lesson from Doctor Bashir and tried to revel in the feeling of them against his skin.

“Oh! And the castellan!” Larria exclaimed suddenly at the thought, eyes as wide as the moons above. She turned to Bashir, almost trembling with excitement. “Oh, just imagine how happy he’s going to be!”

He couldn’t begin to imagine what Elim would say or do when they told him. “We can comm him as soon as we get home, if you’re up to it, Julian. It would be cruel to make him wait, even a day, I think.”

Kelas didn’t miss the shaky smile that pressed into Bashir’s lips.

Dhessek returned with the requested items. Kelas didn’t miss the surreptitious touch of hands as he gave Larria the medkit. “I, um, I took the liberty of comming CCH and asking them to send Bashir’s primary physicians to the castellan’s residence.”

Kelas gave a nod. It was a good thought.

“I also asked them to bring the skimmer around to the side gate so we can keep Bashir S’sava out of the rain as much as possible.” A darted glance at Larria.

She smiled and so did Dhessek.

Yes, they would be good for one another.

“But we really should go. We’re almost an hour over the security schedule, and I don’t think I have to tell you the castellan was very…clear…about how closely we should stick to the prescribed timetable.”

Kelas chuckled and clapped the young man on the back. He had no doubt how emphatic Elim had been about the security arrangements. “Of course, Dhessek. Luckily for you and I, the castellan will be too happy to scold us overmuch.”

Yes, he will be happy. And, though it ached still as he thought it, a glance at Bashir trying, with some success, to get the glass of water to his mouth, gave him a greater joy.

He sent Larria in to get a few rainshades from the cupboard before he leaned down to smile at Bashir. “Julian, how are you feeling?”

The other man’s voice was fuller now, though the hand holding the glass seemed to strain. “Wet.”

Dhessek laughed too.

“Yes, well, that can be tended to, I think. Any dizziness? Blurry vision? Anything out of the ordinary at all?”

The man shook his head. “I…I still can’t move my legs. But…for now…no. Thank you, Kelas.”

The syllables stretched longer than natural, clearly still said with some difficulty, but it was already a great improvement. What was more, the sound of his name in that voice was…oddly pleasing. “Of course, Julian.”

They shared a look—one that connected as Kelas had imagined and wished for the last several days. It was a look between two men who had shared something. Who shared many things between them.

He turned to replace several items in the medkit, unwilling to let himself be overwhelmed by emotion yet again. There would be time for that. Seven days ago he’d imagined this octal would be the beginning and the end of his time with Julian Bashir. Just an hour ago, he’d feared this evening brought an end.

But, he knew now. This was a beginning.

Out the corner of his eye, he saw Dhessek lean down. “I don’t know that this belt will be necessary anymore, will it?”

As much as he understood the urge to free the man completely, they’d need the restraint for travel. He reached out a hand. “Actually, Dhessek, he still isn’t—”

He got no further. A sting—an awful pinprick followed hard upon by the sensation of fire up his arm.

His mind hardly had the time to work, giving up only a heap of broken images. A hypo in Dhessek’s palm. Bashir’s cracked cry of alarm. A line of black that traced so fast, up up up from hand to elbow and disappeared beneath his sleeve.

There was a scuffle, some violent press nearby. Dhessek was beyond, and he couldn’t tell. Was it Larria? Was Larria here?

Where was he?

Is that T’sorast?

Through the growing haze, only three things more:

The unmistakable shimmer of a transporter.

A voice, struggling as it called for a medkit.

The dirt-red bullet of Es’skia singing her sad, small song.

The stars went dark.

Chapter Text

Day Twelve: S’sukvhet (again)

The sarnak were dying.

He crouched to examine the patient, running a finger along the darkening blade of a leaf. Its waxy shine had dulled, vine grown limp. Scattered about the bed, segments had fallen away, shriveled from orange to black in accusation. He gave it a few pours from the spout, though he wasn’t sure why. It didn’t take a doctor’s instinct to know: this was a terminal case.

Sarnak are little better than weeds, Elim had insisted. The challenge was to keep them from overtaking everything else. They’ll choke the pelat, if you’re not careful. They had to be trimmed back. Controlled.

Well, they certainly wouldn’t to be overtaking anything anytime soon, least of all the pelat, which he’d lost to laceflies last cycle. How was he to know laceflies laid their eggs in pelat? Elim hadn’t mentioned it. Had he thought it too obvious?

With a sigh, he let the vine slump back into its bed. At this rate, within the cycle, it might all be gone.

All but the kis’sa. Against the odds, the kis’sa held on, and he gave them what he hoped wasn’t too generous a drink, as if imploring. Under the weight of water and sun, the blooms nodded.

Once, just once, it would have been nice to send Elim good news. To begin a comm with something other than that same sad sentiment reframed: I’m sorry to tell you. I hate to say. I wish I had better tidings.

But the last few cycles had been all dead pelat and unrest and—

He paused. Though he didn’t look up, he felt it behind—the red veil of mourning across the door. Through a cake of dust, it was the same listless orange as the sarnak.   

Alon.

Three octals had passed since the assassination, and the name was a fresh wound—difficult to staunch if he worried at it. He dug fingers back into the dirt, trying not to remember.

At least they’d managed an octal without riots. Councilors Mhesk and Garan’s plea for calm seemed to have stopped the bleeding for the moment, at least in Cardassi’or. But as he’d passed the sector’s Federation Aid Center on his walk home the night before, he’d found gates heavily bolted, floodlights stark. A sign in matter-of-fact Kardasi merely proclaimed it “closed until further notice.”

And it was difficult to forget the octals of rioting and protests they’d endured. The acrid stink of violence still hung on the air. Alongside the dust, it had spread into every corner of the morning, refusing to settle.

 Everything was going to seed. Fading at the edges.

“Kelas Parmak, I am never letting you touch my garden again.”

Though Kelas might have been loath to admit it, he’d heard that voice almost every day for the last year. It offered opinions as he examined his outfit in the mirror. It scoffed at the imbecilic statements of fellow council members. It lamented the short-sightedness of policies limiting educational resources. It quipped.

It wasn’t real, of course. It was the seed Kelas kept inside. The two of them couldn’t justify the resource allocation for vid-comms, but that didn’t mean Kelas hadn’t heard that voice each time he’d read a letter. He knew the tune even if the instrument was far away.

But this…this was really Elim.

Of course it was, slipping in stage left, unannounced and unheard. Why would he expect otherwise?

It was Elim and yet…

He wore a traditional mijast, though the material was something unfamiliar, dark blue and vaguely luminous. His hair had gone greyer at the temples, and his waist filled in, no doubt from the steady availability of replicated food. More than anything else, however, Kelas noticed his bearing: an expression softer and more measured, shoulders held not with tilt and insinuation but in the gentle square of exchange.  Oh, the usual coyness remained, playing behind the eyes, but it was framed by a man now versed in diplomacy. In compromise and humility.

Elim had changed.

It suited him.

Elim opened his mouth to speak—some explanation about why he’d come or how he’d gotten there—but Kelas heard none of it, swallowing the words up in a kiss. Hands found hands, and then bodies, lost. As Kelas pressed him against the outside of the house, Elim hissed his name, coarse and hot as the sweltering morning air.

Kelas hissed back. “Elim Garak, if you leave me again, you’ll have more than your garden to worry about.”

Somehow they made it into the house. Somehow they made it to the bed. Beyond a few panted words of encouragement, neither said anything more until they’d found their pleasure.

Good news. Finally good news.

Even after, words kept a respectful distance, and they drifted, the squeeze of thighs speaking enough. A hot breeze bellowed through the open window, spraying dust to already sticky scales. The air smelled of bodies and dawn. Eventually indistinct sounds intruded. The voice of neighbors. The buzz of skimmers.  Elim made as if to rise and close them out, but Kelas stopped him, locking arms. They weren’t leaving the bed yet. Even the idea of leaving had no place.

So Elim subsided, settling back into the embrace. “You’ve hung curtains.”

Kelas made a noncommittal noise. He’d managed to get his hands on the fabric two cycles ago. It helped with sun in the afternoons.

“I don’t think I like them.”

They fluttered as if in protest.

“I knew you wouldn’t.”

He could hear Elim’s smile as a hand played at his hair, gentle. “I was worried, p’rimit. The news service on Earth was reporting unrest, but I couldn’t get much more than glossy half-truths from those vornek left in Central Council…”

Kelas didn’t want to discuss it. They’d cordoned-off a patch of happiness here in this bed. Too much reality would breach it. “I have trouble imagining a situation in which you can’t lay hands on any information you like through some means or other.”

“You know I don’t do that sort of thing anymore,” Elim said virtuously. “At least…not much.”

“Never managed to figure out those Federation security protocols, hmmm?”

Elim’s finger had been tracing a circle on his upper thigh. At this, it gave a little pinch. “Security was much tighter on Earth than Terok Nor. Especially in my office suite, if you can imagine.” A faux-wounded tone.

Kelas forced his eyes open. The light stung.

Elim really did look different. He was still circling the scales on Kelas’s leg teasingly, but his eyes betrayed something more. There was genuine worry there, and, to his own surprise, Kelas suddenly wasn’t sure Elim was lying. Perhaps he truly hadn’t known. Perhaps he hadn’t used whatever means necessary to find out.

Perhaps time on Earth had changed more than his figure.

“Yes, things have been unpleasant since…” Kelas tried but failed. The name stuck.

Elim hadn’t said much about it yet. Elim wasn’t the type to not say much.

So he left it, settling closer still. There would be time to mourn Alon. Time to discuss, to remember. But not now. “I was worried about you, too, mata. With all this anti-Federation sentiment…”

Elim frowned. “It’s one of the most absurd twists of fate that I should become emblematic of the Federation.”

An absurd twist of fate—it wasn’t the only one, certainly. Lying in bed beside one another had to rank as well.

“Are you going back?”

The softness of Elim’s reply told Kelas he hadn’t hidden the fear well. “There’s no government to represent at the moment, and I got a distinctly Don’t come back until your house is in order reaction from the Federation Council.”

Kelas knew he shouldn’t feel joy at this. Cardassia’s relationship with the Federation was tenuous at best, and just an octal before, a Starfleet warehouse in Munda’ar had been bombed. No one had been killed, but it was only a matter of time. If the Federation pulled aid entirely… “But once there’s an interim…”

Elim’s hand was at his jaw, following the line of aural ridge. Kelas stopped himself.

He wanted to ask. He wanted to know. Would Elim return once an interim government gained traction? Would the Federation need him on Earth to negotiate? Would he be asked leave again?

But he knew the answer.

Focus on the kis’sa, Kelas.

“You met Ekar Mhesk, didn’t you? In State Authority?”

Elim hummed an assent into his hair.

“He’s taken on a sort of interim role, along with Councilor Garan. So far, he’s sent the—”

Elim’s lips were on his again, and the thought evaporated, so much steam between the hot press of bodies. “I’m not interested in Ekar Mhesk at the moment, my dear.” Elim’s hand traveled down, taking hold of his waist.

As they rolled close once more, Kelas found blue eyes fully. His eyes.

In them, he saw nothing more than the slide of the morning sun.

Fate did enjoy its little twists.

“Are you saying, Ambassador Garak, that there’s something more important than the political state of the Union?”

Elim smirked, hand sliding lower.

Kelas gasped.

“Perhaps, just this once, Cardassia can wait.”

************************

There was no one in bed beside him when he woke. Though sun painted the window’s glass in full white, raindrops murmured against the pane.

For a sickening moment, he feared it had been a dream. Elim hadn’t returned, and he was alone, waking to a red veil and riots in Torr and—

“Doctor Parmak?”

The voice was far from familiar, yet he knew it with certainty. He blinked. “Doctor Bashir.”

The human smiled broadly, and Kelas almost laughed. It was the first time he’d seen Bashir truly smile, and it lit the room every bit as much as the seeping sunlight. Beautiful. Terribly beautiful.

Bashir took a seat beside him on the bed and set long fingers to his temple. The touch was exceptionally warm, and Kelas fought the urge to both pull away from and lean into such concentrated heat. He hoped his pulse hadn’t sped too obviously.

“Your heartrate is good. How are you feeling?”

Still trying to focus, Kelas took stock. He was in bedclothes, and, so far, at least, he felt fine. Thirsty, maybe, and heavy-limbed. His joints ached slightly, but not more than usual after a long sleep. He was having a bit of trouble concentrating, and there were pins and needles at his fingertips. But mostly, at the moment, confusion was his greatest affliction. “I—I’m fine, but what am I doing in our b—mine and Elim’s bed?”

Bashir was gracious enough to ignore the amended phrasing. “You’ve been in a coma for five days.”

“A coma? How…?”

 “What…do you remember?”

Bashir’s tone was careful, and he turned inward with some trepidation, sifting through dream images and memories in an attempt to patch together something of the real. “We were on the patio. It was raining, and Larria had gone to get a rainshade… Dhessek?”

“S’sava!” Larria was on him in an instant, embrace so fierce that joints creaked and her weight near smothered. “Thank the State and the sky! After the third day, they were afraid…”

He did his best to accept the whirlwind of affection, patting the young woman on the back and whispering reassurances. Her face was rigid with a sorrow he didn’t understand and hadn’t seen there since the Fire.

“S’sava, I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I shouldn’t have left. I should have—”

“Larria,” Bashir interrupted, guiding her aside with a deft hand. “Could you go and see that Garak knows Doctor Parmak has regained consciousness?”

Larria looked back at Kelas doubtfully.

“The castellan will want to know, ana. And I’ll be the only one with him, I promise.” The look Bashir gave her radiated kindness. “Please.”

Kelas knew that some part of Bashir must have felt them, those friendly words and hopeful musings and cycles of care Larria had given him. There was such tenderness in the human’s expression that, for a moment, Kelas forgot where and why they were here and felt only keen gratitude that they had arrived.

As soon as she’d left, Bashir retook his seat with a sigh. “It’s good to see her smile. She’s been quiet the last few days. Feels responsible, I think, for that security officer. For leaving us with him. For not realizing. I try to remind her she’s the one who kept him off me in the end, but...”

As the memory filled in bit by jagged bit, Kelas knew Dhessek must be gone. Must be gone and, what was more, must never have been who he seemed. If anyone should feel guilty, it’s me. For pushing them together. For putting her and Bashir in the same danger.

“I wanted to cheer her up—she did so much for me. But I think seeing you awake was the only thing for it.”

Kelas had sat across from Bashir for a full octal and wondered, in the back of his mind, what this moment would be. How it might feel to sit side by side and talk. How the human’s voice might sound. What sort of man he would be. Would they find that, apart from medicine and Elim, they had little between?

Kindess finds kindness as the river meets the sea, his mother had always said, and as he listened to Bashir fret over Larria, he felt that very estuary. It was a familiarity of soul, and he knew there would be more than enough. They shared more. “She likes to play khel.”

“Pardon?”

“Larria. She likes to play khel. She brought the chits to your room several times. Would play both hands. Do you… remember?”

He strained, lines in his brow. “The pieces were…round. Silver?”

Interesting. He truly had taken in more than Kelas might have thought possible. Perhaps it was something about the augmented mind. An interesting point of discussion for another day, perhaps. “Yes. You should ask her to play a game. I can’t think of anything that would please her more.”

They traded smiles, warm but stretched over whatever unpleasant truth must be yet to come.

Trying to prepare himself, Kelas pushed up to sitting, back objecting only briefly. The room had the stuffy air of housing too many for too concentrated a time, round table at the center a mess of padds and cups and a mostly-empty bottle of kanar. Beside the window, a tussled cot lay bleached in the sun, and, on the opposite side of the room, a neatly-made pallet on the floor. He knew instantly that one was Bashir’s and one Elim’s.

Five days. He couldn’t help but imagine what Bashir and Elim had found to discuss for the five days he’d lain insensate between.

He distracted himself from such useless thoughts by cataloguing the equipment nearby. Many were the same monitors that had sat by Bashir’s side so recently. On an end table, a number of empty hypo inserts made a hollow line. He leaned forward to read the labels.

“They used a barbiturate of some type,” Bashir said, guessing his aim. “Well, a mix of a barbiturate and a paralytic. I’ve sent some of the blood cultures with your hematologists to see if they can fully identify it, but I suspect it will be something they’ve never seen. Thirty-One had quite the stable of chemists.”

He’d known that’s what he’d hear, but he hadn’t been ready just the same.

“Luckily I guessed the right protocol for whatever mix they selected. That and they planned on dosing me: Cardassians must be made of tougher stuff.” Bashir sighed and, lurchingly, slid across to a chair beside the bed.

Only now did Kelas notice the motor relay devices at the human’s knees and hips. He’d been so caught up in his own recovery, he’d forgotten Bashir’s entirely. “You…haven’t regained control of your legs?”

Bashir looked down at his knees ruefully, making a few jerky movements. The devices whirred. “Not yet. The neurologist said the MRDs might help, but I’m going to get some sent from friends in the Federation. The doctors from CCH did a lovely job retrofitting the Cardassian ones, but…” He shrugged.

“We’ll contact Doctor Kharn at Culat Central. She’s a genius when it comes to paralysis and motor retraining. I saw her work miracles after the Fire.”

There was a silent space that felt, for the first time, awkward.

“That is…assuming you’ll be staying with us for awhile.” Oh, even worse. “On Cardassia, I mean.”

 Bashir hadn’t decided: the struggle was written in every line of his face.

Well, it had probably been too much to hope things would resolve themselves while he was blissfully unaware.

“I don’t know if you’ll want me to stick around,” Bashir said, shaking his head. “I don’t doubt 31 will try again., I’m a bit of a liability at the moment.”

 “Ahh, we specialize in those here.”

This earned him a smile, and white hells, it was a lovely thing. Kelas smoothed at the bedsheets as if trying to smooth away the unease. “Do you, hmm, think I might have a cup of tea as well?”

“Oh, oh of course! Where are my manners?” Bashir, seeming grateful for the task, poured a steaming cup from the pot nearby. The smell was immediate and familiar and hit memory like an arrow to a target.

That tiny tin of tea Elim had kept just after the Fire. I brought a bit back from Deep Space Nine. I…developed a fondness for it there.

“Tarkalean tea?”

Bashir looked up from the cup. “Yes. It’s…my favorite. But if you prefer something else—”

 “No, no. It’s my favorite as well.” The cup was almost as warm as Bashir’s touch. “Thank you. Truly. For everything.”

“I don’t know if you should be thanking me. If anyone’s responsible for what happened to you, it’s me. I’m the one 31 was after: you just got in the way.”

“I don’t claim to know the details, but it was my understanding that Section 31 had been exposed...?”

For the first time, Bashir’s expression turned ugly. Kelas wished for the smile back. “Apparently the Federation wasn’t quite thorough enough. No doubt some few survived and are rather nervous with the idea of me still knocking about. I know plenty: some things, I’m guessing, that haven’t come to light yet. As long as I was catatonic, it made sense not to draw attention by killing me, but…”

“But I ruined that.” Kelas sighed. Elim had been right. Guls and gettle, he would never hear the end of it.

“Ruined in the best possible way,” Bashir stressed with his eyes. “Dhessek must have been placed to ensure that, if I did recover, I could be removed immediately. And, as Garak was keen to remind me, good spies never let something as insignificant as the dismantling of their organization change the plan.”

Kelas tensed. It was a grim thought—not only the prospect of Section 31 still clinging to life, but the thought of Elim getting drawn into that fray. With Kelas lying near death, what might Elim have planned? What subtle wheels had he turned, what old tricks had he conjured to find some hint of Dhessek? To exact revenge? This—these spy games—were dangerous, and he feared, suddenly, that they might cost them dear. “Where is Elim?”

“He’s going to be cross with me,” Bashir lamented, leaning back with a fondness Kelas couldn’t miss. “He hasn’t left the room until this morning, when I finally convinced him to go to whatever briefing it was they’d been shouting about for the last five mornings.” Fondness warmed. “But you should know he hasn’t left. From the moment he made it here, he hasn’t left your side. It’s…it’s odd for me to see him so…devoted. Odd but…touching.”

Kelas was surprised to find it still there, beneath the weight of the five days. A stir of nerves. A question that was working its way toward an answer. “Not so odd. He spent quite a lot of time at your side as well.”

Bashir hid his obvious discomfort in a sip of tea. “I remember some of it. Kukulaka. And…and I think there was a book. With a meadow or…or maybe a forest on the cover.”

“Oh you could stand to forget that.”

That smile again. One wondered how it all fit on his face. “So his taste in literature hasn’t improved I take it?”

Kelas scoffed. “I’m no miracle worker.”

“I disagree.” Bashir’s eyes struck deep and held tight.

Raindrops dot-dot-dotted, loud but gentle. A flare of sun, as a cloud gave way.

They tipped smiles into teacups and let the quiet stretch as easily as they could.

It was good to see Bashir like this. Bright and alive and smiling that incandescent smile. No matter what it meant, no matter how the story might unfold, this was the ending they’d needed, this quiet peace over tea. This was as it should be.

“Kelas, I…I hope you don’t mind if I speak frankly.”

He couldn’t deny the sharp prick of fear that traveled, as insidious as some wicked barbiturate, down his spine. Perhaps I shouldn’t decide we’ve reached the ending just yet…

“I know you and Garak are…involved. Have been for some time.”

He barely managed the nod.

“And I know you…at least I think I can assume Garak has told you that he…”

“That he what, Doctor?”

Bashir looked as if he might jump out of his skin, eyes suddenly as wide as the saucer beneath his cup.

Truth be told, Kelas hadn’t heard Elim enter either, but he’d learned long ago not to startle. It only encouraged him. “Elim Garak, must you always make an entrance?”

“What good are all those years of intelligence training if one doesn’t make use of them?” A smug smile. “And is that any way to greet me after having the audacity to almost get yourself killed?”

Kelas studied that face. It was a lovely face, his favorite, and, after so many years, he often found its best parts by reflex. The upturned ridge at the chin. The playful set of lips. The sharp point of blue. This time, however, he searched for something else—something uglier and older. Something of before. He prayed not to find it, and yet, there was heaviness behind those eyes and those light words.

“Elim?”

That was the comfort of the years between them. Elim knew the question, though it hadn’t been asked.

What have you done?

Elim sat, pressing their palms and working his way to Kelas’s eyes with a gaze steady though pained. “I’ve done nothing, Kelas. I wanted to. Guls know I wanted to.” A stroke along the side of his thumb. “But I didn’t.”

Relief and love mixed, rapturous, in his chest. ‘Didn’t’—especially for Elim—truly did count for more than most realized.

He wrapped their hands fully, knowing it didn’t need to be said.

“Larria sent some lunch, if you’ll have it. Taspar broth, easy on the stomach.” He could see the same relief reflected in Elim’s face, though his tone stayed even.

“That would be wonderful.”

“And that would that be safe for him…?” Elim asked Bashir, glancing away for only a second.

“He should take it slowly, but I think he’ll be fine.”

Elim’s smile was the opposite of Bashir’s: cool and wide and subtle. And every bit as beautiful. “I’m glad to hear it,” he said as he leaned forward and pressed their chufas together. And then their lips. “Kelas, p’rimit…thank you. Thank you.” He kissed him again.

Kelas wasn’t precisely sure what Elim was thanking him for. If it was for Bashir’s recovery. Or his own. Or any of the hundred other little things that had passed between them in the last thirteen years. It didn’t matter. He merely kissed back, accepting.

Somewhere in the background, there was a mechanical whir. The pad of feet. Breaking the kiss, he glanced over Elim’s shoulder.

Carefully and as quietly as he could, Bashir was making his way out of the room. He had turned a rather charming shade of red.

“Julian?”

Hazel eyes turned back.

Kelas felt something bloom in that moment, as both Bashir and Elim watched him in open question. It was a new peace. A new certainty.

He gave Elim’s hand a squeeze. “Perhaps you might…join us for lunch?”

With a smile that barely surfaced, Elim squeezed back. He understood. “If, that is, Doctor, you can stomach a little debate with your broth. I have a few choice words for Kelas about his suggested reading material for my recent trip.”

Kelas perked up. Well that was a surprise. “You finally read the Kijal?”

“I did, and I half-suspected this coma of yours was some ploy to avoid having to defend such ridiculous drivel.”

“Ahh, I see. If there aren’t convoluted sentence structures or plodding political ideologies then it’s ‘ridiculous drivel.’”

Bashir beamed, turning back toward the table. “You know, he said the same thing about Dickenson--a human poet. One of my favorites.”

“I’m not surprised. Elim has terrible taste in poetry.”

Elim’s expression grew wary. “I’m beginning to fear this may not be a fair fight.”

“Since when have you been bothered about the fairness of a fight, Garak?” Bashir said through a laugh.

“I think you’ll find quite a lot has changed, Doctor. I am a man of fairness and virtue now.”

It was Kelas’s turn to laugh. “Let’s not get carried away in hyperbole, Elim, dear.”

Elim shrugged, but his eyes shone with a happiness Kelas hadn’t seen there in years, every hint of that heaviness gone. “A debate for another day, perhaps.”

As Elim helped him to the round table where Julian set out the broth and tea, Kelas knew this wasn’t vridan, not yet. Not a farewell, but a hello, and while Kardasi had two goodbyes, there was no word for this. For a hello that began not a few minutes or hours or days but something longer. And deeper. And more precious.

Lacking a word, Kelas merely leaned back and sipped his tea.

“So, who is this Kijal?” Bashir asked innocently, taking a slurp of broth.

Elim grinned.

Outside, through sunlight, rain fell, and the garden grew.