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A lot of the memories he has from before he was six are mercifully indistinct. Not this one.
He’s running down a sunlit path, thinking very carefully about where to put his feet. Mum is at the bench at the end of the path. She asks him questions and he tries to answer but he’s very excited; it’s a brilliant park with red fish and ponds and his sneakers aren’t waterproof like the man in the store said, that man was definitely incorrect, because his toes are still wet and squishing and all the words are so eager to get out.
Mum strokes his head and her other hand drifts down to rest warm and large over the back of his left shoulder. That’s where the birthmark is. You can see it in the bathroom mirror. Mum is always happy when she sees it. She smiles and says it’s special and once she laughed when he took his shirt off to show one of her friends instead of getting upset.
He knows it’s letters, he just has a harder time reading than other kids. Next year he’ll find out what it says. Mum says next year next year he’ll be able to do lots of things.
---
Jules had a Mark. Someone would have loved Jules.
One week, at the Academy, Julian tries a sure-fire Vulcan lucid dreaming technique designed for memory access. In hindsight it’s pure masochism. What was he going to do? Find that person and explain the whole thing? Write them very passionate letters from prison?
Either way it doesn’t work. Yes the memory was clearer than it’s ever been; he could count the spots on the ornamental koi. But he couldn’t read the street signs. Turning his head until his neck hurt, clawing at the back of his shirt he could only see the very edge of it - the end of a sweet curl that could have been an ‘s’ or an ‘a’ or an ‘i’ or actually any other letter.
- - -
Julian doesn’t try anything like that again. In the dorm mirror his back remains perfect and bare. He retaliates by wearing long-sleeved shirts, elegant close-cut jackets that seem a set of pips away from an officer’s uniform, full-body exercise outfits, even in summertime. It doesn’t really do anything, only helps him find short-term volunteers to help him take his clothes off. And that’s fine, for now. He’s young, for now. Most people at the Academy aren’t worried about their Marks unless they’ve met them. Viva la vida. What happens - happens, right?
Still, he keeps a strip of medical-blue kinesio tape wound around his ankle (A Mark-spot for a respectable 18.592% of the population) as a polite fiction and does not take it off under any circumstance. When he wakes up in their double bed to find Palis’ manicured nails toying with it, fake-casually peeling back the start of the strip he makes a joke and she laughs and they go out to brunch but he knows it’s over then. He’s wasted enough of her time.
On the day he finds out he’s being sent to Deep Space Nine, as requested, he slowly unwinds and dematerializes the tape before he can lose his nerve. It’s a whole new start, a new life. He can never be completely honest with his new colleagues, but he can take this one medium-sized step towards the truth.
It’s heroic isn’t it, to fight your fate? After all, lots of Unmarked people end up in deep space. For some reason they seem to congregate in the more dangerous assignments.
Maybe he’ll meet someone.
- - -
There comes a point with Garak’s condition where he’s just grasping at whatever he can think of. In class he’d cringed whenever the ‘Your Mark is Somewhere Waiting For You’ appeal was brought up but training takes over and before he knows it he’s saying the same nonsense, the same earnest carefully-couched speech that isn’t applicable (is frankly insulting) to at least 10% of the population.
Curled up on the bio-bed the Cardassian does manage to feebly lift his head and give him a look of incredulous disdain. Paradoxically it only makes him want to help the man more. It’s important to have friends who can sense when you’re being insincere, who won’t let you lie to yourself.
Four hours later Garak has a dizzying drop in vitals and asks for his forgiveness. Julian holds his hand until he falls asleep and then goes to splash cold water on his face in the bathroom. He has to look professional if he’s going to go wake the Commander up in the middle of the night to request a runabout.
What he realizes, as he’s walking through the softly lit corridors, is that he’d already decided something even before the moment he had taken the other man’s hand. Exile, murder, addiction... he could certainly observe their effects on one person. He could be present for his suffering and fight the patient himself to ease it, but this whole time he had been firmly on the shore of sympathy rather than empathy, unable to cross over.
It had been that look Garak gave him when Julian had mentioned Marks. For the first time he had looked at his most alien friend and seen a kind of pain that he could understand.
- - -
“Was Elim… was he Garak’s Intended?”
Julian asks the hateful old man because it seems like the right question and he’s felt so behind at every turn of their conversation that he can’t help but try to slip something in. To try and win, just a little. Fighting Tain seems to mean fighting ‘for’ Garak in some way and if he’s made up his mind to be the spy’s naive inadequate champion he may as well go for broke.
The spymaster laughs. He laughs so hard he has to put an arm against the wall to brace himself as the laughter fades into dry, unpleasant chuckles and then into just a wobble of his vast chin.
“Oh is that what he said? How inventive! I haven’t even heard that version. Doctor, Elim is Garak’s first name. He doesn’t have an Intended. He’s never had an Intended. The Will of Cardassia clearly understood something you have yet to grasp - he is a person who should have never been born.”
“Now do show yourself out. You’re lucky it’s deeply amusing to me to see you prolong his lonely existence.”
Getting the leukocytes still feels like winning. Concentrate on that, he tells himself. That and getting the hell out of Cardassian space. But fields of stars passing across the shuttle’s dash, something that was once damn wondrous and is now nearly as exciting as good wallpaper, can’t distract him for long. His thoughts keep drifting sideways.
So it’s stigmatized everywhere, isn’t it? Cardassia does, come to think of it, seem like a terrible candidate for his ongoing project of finding a culture where the Unmarked aren’t framed as some kind of dismissible evolutionary error; either supportive working drones or shallow sexual distractions. Apparently even the mighty State couldn’t conjure up the appropriate propaganda to explain why certain individuals were redacted from the Universe’s official mating project.
He finds himself leaning into the pilot console, as if it could somehow make the little craft go faster. Only three more hours; he can’t wait to get back to the lab. Half of the sequencing is done in his head already and it will need to be finished and checked and double-checked but he can feel it; it’s going to work. He’s going to save Garak.
Which will leave them where, exactly? With a grin he dismisses the thought as irrelevant. As long as Garak lives the probability space for their future interactions will continue to expand. He’s optimistic. A better question is how will he keep from blurting out ‘Oh by the way I know your name!’ in their next conversation. How is he going to keep that off his face?
Elim. ‘Elim’ He sounds it out with his lips and still feels like he’s overstepped somehow. Fine, he won’t say it aloud until Garak gives him permission to use it. It’s a deceptively simple name.
Perfect, in a way.
Reluctantly he sets the auto-pilot and staggers to a bunk to rest his eyes. He needs to be fresh for the surgery. Just as he lets his mind unfocus it drifts back to the last thing Tain had said; Garak does not have an Intended. Garak has no Mark. In a very fundamental way, he and the resident tailor and self-confessed torturer are the same.
It’s impossible to stay away from him after that.
- - -
Garak, for his part, acts charming and agreeable after his recovery. As if he’d never hissed and raged and easily upended a 200lb duranium table in his presence. Julian suspects he’s enjoying maintaining that bit of cognitive dissonance, which makes him boil over with frustration to the point where he’s tempted to practice some radical furniture rearranging of his own. Until he realizes there’s no reason he can’t play along. True, he had found himself smiling helplessly at “especially the lies” (the nerve of that man!) over lunch yesterday but now it’s time to make a few of his own moves in the game.
The next day when he beams and says “Good afternoon, Garak!” there seems to be no change in the other man’s posture, no obvious slip of his friendly expression but he’s clearly on his guard. Julian beams a little brighter as he prescribes light exercise and early bedtimes ‘for that little trouble you had’ and Garak, good strategist that he is, is prepared to make a few comparatively worthless concessions, and, for once, does as he’s told.
Julian even gets him into the Infirmary for a vitals check on the treadmill, though any attempts at getting him into patient scrubs while conscious are firmly rejected.
Their lunches resume, as if that noble institution of Tarkalean Tea and Larish Pie was invulnerable to trivialities like dark histories, table-flinging, or the odd near-death experience.
At some point it seems to percolate through Garak’s labyrinthine brain that Julian isn’t going to stop seeking him out, whatever he’s learned. There is one last hiccup, though.
A day where everything runs late and he steps in just as Garak is closing up the shop.
The doors are shut, the storefront turned off, it’s just the two of them with an audience of looming mannequins. Julian sees him standing a certain way, with the safety lighting gliding along his profile, and the air seems to go out of the room as Garak says, very mildly.
“I do wonder, if there is a point where stubbornness outlasts its merit.”
And Julian’s hand curls into a perfect boxer’s fist.
“No. You know I see what you’re doing there. Very dramatic, well done. And you’re standing there so the light’s in my eyes - not enough to hurt, but just enough to leave me unbalanced. Thank you for that, really Garak. But it’s not working.“
“You’re going to need about four more stone and atrocious taste in cardigans to terrify me right now. At least until a couple months go by and I’ll forget how that horrible old bastard had looked at me.”
Now is the perfect time for some sweeping arm gestures of his own but as he lifts his hands Julian sees they are trembling. That can’t be right, not his his perfect surgeon's hands. No, no, it’s his whole body that’s shaking. God, he’d almost died. He’d almost been hauled away, locked up, and probably tortured to death.
Instead of ringing and calm his voice sounds high with anger, almost hysterical.
“Enabran Tain was it? Former colleague of yours? Now I know you have some strong feelings, some rather choice things to say about your new career but, really. My completely unsolicited medical opinion is you’re well washed of that one. He only gave me the leukocytes because he thought it would prolong your exile, ‘your lonely suffering’ he called it. Well did you know that aside from tennis my hobby is thwarting people?”
Whatever reaction Garak had been expecting, it clearly wasn’t this.
“Beg pardon, but did you just say that you are using me to spite the former head of the Obsidian Order?”
“Just like you’re using me for... amusement? Fledgeling conversation about books that everyone else here is too biased to read? A chance to practice your sartorial critique? To understand my species?” Julian shrugs. “These are as good reasons as any arent they.”
“Besides, you may notice, if you cared to look into it, that you are one of the very few people on this station who don’t see me as some kind of irritating but unfortunately necessary interface for the medical equipment. No, my friend. You won’t be rid of me that easily!”
Somewhere during the tirade he’s wandered into Garak’s personal space. Meanwhile the Cardassian’s expression had moved smoothly from incredulous to neutral and instead of trying to read something of the man’s reaction he is forced to catalog how his pupils are faintly larger in the dim lighting, betraying their oval shape. What other things are there left to notice that Julian would have missed if it hadn’t worked, if the surgery hadn’t succeeded? There must be hundreds, at least. He wants to find them all.
“Well, well. When I am asked to continue a ‘friendship’ so forcefully…” the rich amusement vanishes completely with his next sentence, which is said with such faux-amiable coldness that Julian can’t help but sense a resemblance, the mentor behind the man.
“And anyway he’s seen your face. He has noted you down as a person in my orbit so frankly any hopes of our acquaintance going unremarked were quite in vain. If we continue our association or if we never speak another word to each other there might come a time when he will have you killed regardless.”
“What, between the away missions and the space anomalies and the occasional Klingon attack? He can get in line.”
There, now he sounds brave. It’s something he can picture the famous Dr. McCoy saying. Didn’t Dr. McCoy once have Khan Noonien Singh himself holding a knife to his throat and then told him to ‘get on with it or stop wasting time?’ Julian wonders what Dr. McCoy would think of an entire planet of Khans covered in scales...
“Bravo, Doctor. We’ll make a realist of you yet!” Though the tone is mocking Garak’s face grows momentarily wistful and then arranges itself into a sly narrow-eyed look. “So, I suppose I ought to be similarly pragmatic and make the best of every moment we have left together!”
“Well then, shall we?” With a little bow of his head he gestures to the door.
Julian, who was just picking up steam for a bloody fantastic row, finding himself thus disarmed only manages to nod shakily and leads the way out.
Station controls have dimmed the lights for ‘night.’ Patrol rotations are elsewhere. No one else is around as they walk down the Promenade and it was easy to pretend that the rest of the station had emptied out, peace and silence descending on its vaguely sinister architecture. Just the two of us, and our little conspiracy Julian thought. I thought it would be difficult to make friends as an adult, but this is really something else.
That same stillness seems to have slithered into his chest, displacing his earlier panic. For once neither of them are in a hurry to say anything. It’s just... still, and comfortable to be walking a well-known route, having someone else’s barely-audible footsteps echo his every step. Was Garak making noise for his benefit? Or maybe that was such a deep part of his ‘shopkeeper’ cover that he was careful to never walk silently where others could hear it.
Garak’s section of the residential quarters is mostly uninhabited and even darker than the Promenade. Funny, if he was with anyone else he could almost be afraid.
“Now that I think of it I do remember some codes to override the night lighting here.” Garak says quietly at his shoulder “It would be unkind of me to let you stumble in the dark.”
“Actually, for a Human, I have excellent night vision.”
And that, for the moment, is that.
- - -
On the surface things stay the same. A kind of playful bite returns to their literary discussions. They even go to the holosuites together. Though that had been tricky to set up.
Quark, naturally, had the lonely-Starfleet-Officer selection: Risa, deeply fictional Ancient Bajoran ‘massage parlors’, and a much-handled copy of Vulcan Love Slave 2 that Julian had an immediate urge to scrape down for bacteria samples and then violently disinfect. Of course all of these were out of the question. Luckily, Julian had brought his own favorite programs and a few more varied ones copied from the Academy archives, just in case he found himself with a classier sort of date.
None of them got quite the reaction that he planned for. Garak was not a person lacking in imagination, but in every programme his //unique// mentality and set of experiences caused some kind of friction. It was a little bizarre to bring him into a James Bond-esque adventure and end up drinking at the bar (over the virtual corpses of the mission-starting assassins), talking about materialism and the 60’s aesthetic.
There is a memorable day when Garak avenges himself for the Regency Murder Mystery programme by translating a Cardassian one and wheedling Julian into trying it. Billed as a ‘nature hike’ it actually involved the two of them climbing up a downright vertical cliff, guided along the proper path to the top by snippets of rhyming poetry. The ones that don’t fit the theme of the epic led to false-paths and dead ends that would leave a climber suspended at an uncomfortable virtual height, cursing both their smirking companion, and their own limited powers of reading comprehension.
In the end Julian found himself sweat soaked and flat on the rim of the summit while Garak, with barely a hair out of place, indulgently read him the end of the verse.
Slowly, given time, a lie can wake up and find itself a truth. Julian’s best friend of the station, in his new life, is none other than the person everyone warned him to stay away from.
He knows enough to sketch out a very vague outline of the other man’s secrets and Garak probably reads a few of his off his face every time he browses the replimat menu. But that’s allright. He can have as many of Julian’s smaller secrets as he likes. Maybe he’ll even tell him the lack-of-Mark one at some point.
If he hasn’t guessed it already. Honestly it’s funny, here’s Julian thinking the world revolves around him and his little drama with the strip of tape. It’s extremely likely that no one on the station knows his thaumo-romantic status, or gives a damn one one way or the other.
Certainly no one’s asked about it. Chief O’Brien still clearly has him on social probation, Major Kira couldn’t give a whit about his love life and when Jadzia Dax sees him flirting with a new Dabo girl she raises a glass in his direction from her table with a mischievous little quirk of her eyebrow that says ‘better her than me!’ Lately that doesn’t even sting at all.
To be sure it’s a very strange friendship. It would make more sense to everyone else if they knew the pertinent inner architecture of one Julian Subatoi Bashir, CMO but they don’t, and in a childish way he enjoys being a little bit of a mystery. Befriending possible-but-I-know-for-sure spies! Skirting deadly danger! Reading banned Cardassian books!
At least he enjoys this image until he overhears one of his nurses say ‘Ah but Doctor Bashir is such a sweet, naive young man. No wonder he still talks to the Cardassian. He will believe the best in anyone!’ and he sulks for half a day and then makes a breakthrough on a rare rhinovirus and immediately forgets about it.
- - -
A week and a half before a mid-sized Alpha Quadrant diplomatic ball that the Bajoran vedeks had somehow cleverly outsourced to their Emissary, Garak is absurdly busy with orders - everyone wants a gown or a suit with a cutout to showcase their Mark, ranging from subtle, to playful, to blatant.
“What if it’s on their rear?”
“Beg pardon?”
“What if someone’s Mark is on their ass? There’s a 2.3% chance of that, actually.” Julian perches on the empty high stool by the work table.
“No one like that so far. Though in that case it is a shopkeeper’s duty to be accommodating...”
Garak perks up theatrically. “Why, are you looking to commission something?” his eyes are wide and his mouth is primly pursed even as he blinks flirtatiously. Typical.
Julian smirks, but the expression is somewhat on auto-pilot. It’s one thing to idly think about blurting out ‘oh by the way Garak, I’m un-matchabale too’ and quite another to find the conversation suddenly accommodating it. Luckily he can sometimes be witty on auto-pilot.
“My limited credit stipend would certainly appreciate a Lunch-Companion Discount. But no.”
That gets him a gently interrogative sidelong glance. “I heard that all senior officers were strongly encouraged to attend the gathering.”
There. Now. What better opening can he ask for?
“I don’t need a new suit for it.” He says, meeting Garak’s eyes for a heavy beat of his heart, and then walking out of the shop.
He gets a suit anyway, in grey and a dark green that looks criminally good with his skintone. He finds it pressed and hanging on the back of his door as he leaves.
For a few minutes of his morning shift he’s a bit useless imagining how Garak got his measurements.
- - -
“How did you even get in here?” he whispers, a week and a half later, around a sip of champagne.
As infiltrations go, it’s not completely ridiculous. Garak is not even the only Cardassian at the ball. Though he is the only one on this side of the room. You’d think he’d try to blend in, wear one of his usual woolen earth-toned numbers but the cut of his jacket is, if anything, just a touch cleaner and more modern than those of the Cardassian diplomats. Julian has managed to absorb a surprising amount of background tailoring knowledge, clearly a sign that they’ve been spending too much time together. Though he also wouldn’t put it past Garak to have been subtly teaching him this whole time.
Suddenly the little boy in Julian wants to see what would happen if Garak just kept following their Union guests. Would they have to find a way to extricate themselves from their conversations and move away? Did the official Cardassian protocol for interacting with an Exile include stringently avoiding any chance of physical contact while pretending that the other person didn’t exist at the same time? The comedic potential alone... He pictures Garak subtly herding the Cardassian diplomatic delegation in circles around the party space and a little champagne goes up his nose as he giggles.
Garak, meanwhile, plucks something orange in a tall glass off a passing tray and, after taking a delicate sip, commences lying.
“Would you believe the Andorian ambassador’s second husband had an emergency with his gown? Some people really shouldn’t commission ruched hemlines from a competitor unless they know what they’re doing.”
“Very plausible. Though I’m not sure Odo’s security team is equally sensitive to fashion emergencies...”
“Then it seems equally plausible that I may imitate the fable and leave shortly before the hour is over. Or risk turning into a... pumpkin, was it? Yes, transforming from a living person into an edible vegetable - what a disturbing story!”
Julian laughs again, has to muffle it with the back of his hand. Tension is leaving his shoulders. He’d been a bit bored frankly, and then a little anxious.
Almost against his will, and only after many conversations with someone who exuded contagious conscientiousness, he was beginning to get, well, not an instinct that would be too much, but the beginnings of an improved system for reading people. Therefore, after overhearing many of the conversations around him, cross referenced against information about those on the guestlist, he understood that his latest prion research or his medical exam story would find few takers here.
So instead of striking up a conversation in the usual way; forcefully, with the first person who made eye contact, he’d found himself alone leaning against a pillar, looking at everyone who passed by and trying to come up with a topic guaranteed to engage their interest. Every other member of the senior staff didn’t seem to have any problems starting conversations with the guests and for a moment he had the uncomfortable echo sensation of failing an invisible test, of being the odd man out.
As a distraction against self-pity he’d set himself a goal of talking with the stern-faced Romulan woman that was elegantly haunting the punch bowl, with a secondary goal of getting her to smile or at least to surprise her in some way. Maybe to make her re-evaluate her low opinion of Humans and handsome Human medical professionals in particular? Research has been eating up a lot of his potential date evenings lately…
But it doesn’t seem so important now. Garak is here. He has someone to talk to and even if their conversation doesn’t touch anything other than the unfortunate color choices of the other guests or digs at the political undercurrent( look at the sour-faced Andorian currently being barreled over by the full weight of Sisko’s ‘gracious host’ persona over there in the far corner!) Julian is now guaranteed to have a good time.
Of course this is when the Romulan woman sweeps up one perfect angled eyebrow and makes a beeline for them. Out of the blue Julian feels a pang of annoyance. Another corner of his brain springs up like a panicked hare, spinning out elaborate pulp novel fantasies; she’s an enemy agent, or someone from Garak’s past, or one of Tain’s fiendishly diversified stable of assassins. This is not helped by how Garak seems to have mysteriously disappeared from his earlier place at Julian’s left elbow. He looks at the empty champagne glass in his hand, assessing its’ possible future as an improvised weapon for Garak’s defense. He may be a trifle tipsy.
Rescue comes from an unexpected quarter; the magnificent Jadzia Dax slinks out from behind a group of voluminous, taffeta-swathed Benzites, moving lightly on terrifyingly sharp graphene heels and quips something to the Romulan woman, who stops in her tracks at the phrase. Or maybe at the slit that goes daringly up Jadzia’s thigh, showcasing the elegant looping column of the names of her prior hosts’ soulmates.
Julian mouths ‘thank you” and gets another of her famous winks. Garak re-materializes at his prior location so smoothly that Julian could swear he imagined the last ten seconds entirely.
“Now, my dear Doctor. If I may direct your attention over there…”
And they’re off.
- - -
At some point someone had sensibly decided that people probably shouldn’t eat finger foods and hammer out the fate of the Alpha Quadrant for more than two and a half hours at a time. The lights dimmed, the drinks kept coming. Everyone was just as glittering but also a little more relaxed. Diplomats metaphorically loosened cuffs and collars around a variety of necks and limbs, now that those in their number who clearly detested parties on principle and had just attended to flatter, threaten or spit legalese had gone back to their rooms.
The band began to play. First elegant melodies that had a natural talent of fading into the background, then drifting into songs with actual lyrics; the galactic equivalent of classy lounge tunes. It makes Julian grin into his third glass of the evening.
At least until he hears the lyrics of the next one. They float subtly through the gaps between the people. ‘I am waiting for you~~~ To read my name from your hands, to see myself in another set of eyes~~~’
It always seemed dishonest for him to dance to these kind of songs. False hope and false advertising. His good mood starts ebbing away slowly, like blood from a micro-tear.
He sneaks a glance at Garak to see if he’s in any way affected, but no. Garak cocks his head subtly in the direction of the violin solo but his face keeps the same false, amiably mild expression, that Julian suspects he would show to Death itself, if only to annoy it.
One day I’ll have to have him teach me the trick.
But what he says next leaves Julian’s mouth dry and his expression anything but unaffected..
“The universe, it seems, in its’ haste to arrange matters for everyone else has decided to leave us both unchaperoned.”
Oh.
“Well, bugger the universe. My dear Mr. Garak, may I have this dance?”
Garak lets him lead and Julian knows that he lets him, that really it’s a challenge, another little game but it’s just that he follows so neatly, takes such delicate little steps to anchor them into the pattern of the waltz. Julian’s new suit has a neckline much lower than his standard uniforms and so when Garak’s hand is on his shoulder the very tips of his fingers - cool pads and thick reptilian nails buffed and polished into civilization, are brushing his skin.
Until they do a very dignified spin that somehow pushes his hand upward, that somehow leaves Julian with a more secure grip around Garak’s waist, that leaves so little space between them.
Having the full texture of Garak’s palm on that exposed part of his neck brings it to the fore, the tension underneath everything they do
‘I might want to leave early.’ That’s the line. Julian’s a little dizzy, not just from the waltz, but because the moment is here, that this could actually happen between them. It’s at the tip of his tongue. A little naive, a little unsubtle but he thinks Garak will forgive him. All he has to do is say it. He doesn’t.
The party winds down. Everyone who has shifts tomorrow has long since peeled off leaving only the visitors, people who don’t know them at all.
They stay, and flirt, and dance.
- - -
It happens anyway.
“You can bite.” Is what he says to Garak, three hours later, when a certain inevitability has deposited them both in Julian’s quarters. “Erm, you can bite me, if you want. I understand that’s rather essential to the, um, process.”
He’s got no excuse for how subtlety and charm have completely deserted him. Well, the onset of sobriety maybe - it’s been long enough that his augmented physiology has probably metabolized his last drink ages ago. No, the fizz and spark in his belly and under his collar is entirely self-generated.
And for once the expression on Garak’s face is anything but mild.
Afterward Julian feels like he’s done this momentously physically significant thing, like he’s climbed a mountain or run a dozen miles across the desert which. And um certainly, significance. A lot of firsts here. First time with a friend of such long standing, with another Unmarked person, among other things. Also he’s a little bit bruised and scraped after having two bouts of enthusiastic sex with a man whose topography has rough edges.
Aside from the preliminary foreplay and the temporary satisfaction of skin-hunger and the orgasms and all the other fine points of sex it’s the letting go of physical distance that Julian likes best. Once you’ve slept with someone certain barriers come down. It takes weeks and months of talking and shared activity and not making too many social misses until someone will feel comfortable enough to let you sit close and bump ankles but once you’ve made someone come there is usually nothing to stop you from snuggling up next to them like a terrifically accomplished Human barnacle. Or in this specific, case ducking under an inhumanly heavy scaled arm, pressing your hip against a underbelly as you are efficiently bundled in blankets in such a way as to preserve maximum Human-hot-water-bottle function and also kissed on the neck.
“Can I call you by your name?” He whispers into the dark. “Not all the time, I quite like your last name and I know you prefer it. Just very rarely, In private.”
That gets him a searching look that turns incredulous, soft. He supposes it’s as good an answer as any. Julian is happy and warm and surrounded by wonderful textures and the sort of pine-and-sandalwood perfume Garak uses on his hair, and if his shoulder with its new impression of teeth throbs a little, even that is a warm sort of hurt.
To be sure it is a strange relationship - easy in a way no one could suspect and complicated in all the predictable places. They are both of them worse people than others might think and sometimes better than they give themselves credit for. It pushes them to places neither would have thought to visit (but nevertheless steadily, if vaguely upward) - this thing that the Universe at large did not write out, did not prepare them for - and it endures.
- - -
By the time the war is over and they are married, Garak has bitten that shoulder so many times there is a scar.
~