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It has been four days since the events that have confined him to this suite transpired. Garak spent the first two in a fog of pain and sleep, but now he is firmly in and of the world – and fiercely annoyed that his enjoined is doing the things that should fall to Garak: helping the rescue effort, comforting the populace, conversing with the press.
Kelas – confined with him – reminds Garak that stress delays healing, but Garak cannot stop watching the holo casts – just as his staff cannot help but invade the hotel suite at all hours of the day and night. Garak understands why he needs to see and communicate with them, but he wants only Kelas and Julian. He fantasizes about marshalling all of his Obsidian Order training and disappearing into the night with his mates.
“He will be here,” Kelas murmurs, breath warm on his aural ridge. “And impatience looks terrible on a spy.”
“Former,” Garak grouses.
“It looks worse on the Castellan.”
Garak glares but settles down. (Outwardly, anyway).
As ever, Kelas is right.
It is late in the evening and Julian looks exhausted when he arrives, but he does not come empty-handed. Dinner and treats soon cover the suite’s small table; Julian has even brought flowers. Garak loves flowers – and the deep, abiding emotions that have led Julian to procure them – but his eyes do not rest until he sees Julian’s travel bag, Kukalaka waving one arm from a place where the zipper has failed to meet.
Julian is staying.
Garak relaxes all at once.
Unfortunately, doing so alerts him to the fact that he has a headache, is exhausted, and very much needs to lie down.
Julian must see something in his face, because he shrugs the straps of his bags and lets them fall to the floor. Then, just like that, he is at Garak’s shoulder, helping him back to bed and scanning him with a tricorder.
“Just a little dizzy spell,” he informs Kelas, whom Garak can sense worrying. “I have that effect on Cardassians, you know.”
Kelas squeezes his shoulder. “It’s good that you are here, Mouseling.”
Guilt moves across Julian’s face. “I wanted to be here sooner,” he admits. “I suppose I felt I had to prove myself. To choose the State,” he looks to Elim, “because that’s what you would have done.” It’s a regrettable habit: his need to justify his existence by proving that he is good and useful and benign. The surgeries that he had been subjected to long ago on Adigeon Prime have not left visible scars, but the invisible ones still sometimes sing. “I was getting updates on the pair of you, of course. Every hour.”
Garak opens his arms. It is a Terran gesture, but borrowing it proves worthwhile when Julian surges into his embrace. “I am so very proud of you,” Garak assures him, voice low and harsh with wonder.
“We were following along with your adventures on the holo nets,” Kelas explains.
Julian blinks. It hadn’t occurred to him that he was news; he had only sought to help out because the Castellan could not. He spares a moment to hope that he hasn’t done or said anything too embarrassing, but the way that Garak is holding him suggests that all is well.
Taking charge, Julian shoos off Garak’s aides for the night after teaching them a little about triage. “If nothing is exploding, has a casualty count, or is on fire, find someone in another office to handle it. Not all things are within the purview of the Castellan.”
After that, he sees that his mates have comfortable blankets and good food and plenty of tea (with a few nourishing compounds dissolved therein). His scans show that both Garak and Kelas are healing well, but the terror of those first moments is still with him, making him cautious.
When Kelas and Garak are bedded down in comfort, Julian changes into sleep clothes that Garak despises: a very thin t-shirt and faded, ugly shorts. He dims the lights and beds down on the floor between the two nests, holding one hand out to each of his lovers. Both Kelas and Garak urge him to share one nest or the other, but Julian insists that their healing takes precedence over what he calls his “clinginess.”
“Mouseling,” Kelas says into the dark, “we’ve discussed it, but neither of us quite understand how events unfolded after the quake.”
He is a healer, too, Julian reminds himself. They may not remember, but he thinks that Kelas is asking for him.
Julian’s breath shudders out in a sigh. He doesn’t really want to remember or to speak of it, but curious Cardassians are persistence predators. They will wheedle and cajole and needle and beg and whine, and, finally, ask.
Of course, he is married to Elim Garak. He doesn’t have to answer directly.
“What do you remember?”
It is Garak’s tradition to escape the official residence for the home he has painstakingly built around Tolan’s gardening shed whenever possible. This typically includes several weekday lunches. As Kelas is teaching and doing research rather than acting as an attending physician, he can usually get away to join him.
That’s where they had been – drinking tea from the sun-stand Kelas had installed, its exterior decorated with nectar cups for birds and insect life alike (and the occasional enterprising regnar) – when the quake hit.
They tell him that they remember tea, and the rich light on the flowers. Julian tells them that he remembers sirens. Still raw from the Dominion War, Cardassians are cautious; there are many sirens in Capital City.
“I knew where you would be,” he tells them. “I can’t remember precisely how I got there – if I ran or if I terrified some poor driver into transporting me, but then I was in the garden.” He looks stricken and squeezes Garak’s hand. “I’m so sorry, love! All your beautiful flowers…”
“Can be planted anew,” Garak assures him. “I assure you, the garden was in a far worse state when I first returned. I am sure that all will be well.”
They expect Julian to continue his tale by describing the arrival of emergency services, but he merely grips Kukalaka and stares away into memory as he speaks. Because of his augmentations, Julian’s memory is nearly visceral in its clarity.
He tells his mates – his husbands: the word tickles Kelas beyond measure – about digging into the sandy soil.
“I forgot it was clay underneath, so seeing all that red made my blood freeze,” he admits. “I should have tried the shed for a shovel, but…”
“You should have waited for emergency personnel,” Garak says primly. “For security.”
Julian glares at him so fiercely he edges back. “You wouldn’t have waited! Not if Kelas and I had been trapped underground!”
“And if the ground had caved in over you? If we had already been dead?”
Kelas doesn’t believe that Julian sees it, but he surely does: Garak is terrified. To have lost Julian – to have been the cause of Julian’s death – that is something from which Elim Garak could never recover.
Julian’s gaze and voice are steady and sure and terrible. “Garak, if the two of you had been gone – if I’d lost you – where else in the bloody universe do you imagine I would wish to be but in that hole with you, gone to nurture your damn precious orchids?”
Mostly to lower the temperature, Kelas strokes Julian’s curls. “Oh, Mouseling, they never would have left him there. They would have dug him up to be put in some horrid monument or memorial – and us with him!”
Julian scowls. “Well, it’s perfectly bloody idiotic not to let bodies decompose as they ought to, but I guess I won’t be able to fuss about it when I’m dead.”
“Which no one is, today,” Kelas adds smoothly, “because of you.”
Julian actually shakes himself to escape his memories. Kelas has seen a riding hound shake off water in precisely the same way. “Oh, don’t give me too much credit. Years of medical training and I still went about everything in the worst possible way: no stretcher, no med kit. But crush injuries… they’re, well,” he nods to Kelas, “I don’t have to tell you. Time matters.”
He tells of maneuvering into the hole in the earth, the dust in the air. “It was hard to see. Even after I’d found you, I couldn’t tell if you were breathing. I couldn’t see the damn screen on my tricorder. The intelligent thing to do would have been to move one of you and then come back, but there was no way to know if that quake was isolated – or finished.”
Because of the mass bombings conducted by the Dominion, the very plates below the planet’s surface have been destabilized.
“We should reach out to Risa and Bajor again about those terraforming proposals,” Julian adds, making Kelas smirk because he is such a fine match for Cardassia’s first democratically-appointed leader.
“My dear, I should be delighted to do so,” Garak agrees, eyes twinkling, “provided that we ever reach the end of this story.”
“That’s almost all of it. I found you and I brought you out. I was terrified to leave either of you, though, so I, well… I carried you both. At the same time.” His voice has gone very small, like the mouseling that Kelas calls him – but a mouse cowering beneath a leaf, whiskers twitching with unease.
Garak communicates the emotion that Kelas cannot parse to him with only a look: Julian is ashamed.
But why?
“My dear, I don’t see how that can be possible.”
Julian doesn’t look up. He picks at a loose stitch in the hotel blanket. “Of course you do. It’s the… it’s my bloody modifications, Elim. I’m very strong.”
Garak looks skeptical. “You never alluded to anything near that level of strength.”
“Because I don’t want it!” Julian bursts out. “I didn’t want to be seen as a… as a monster among my own people — I don’t want it here, either! When the emergency team and the cameras arrived, I lied. I told them you’d been caught on the edge of the hole, that the fall must have knocked you unconscious.”
“You know that I always approve of a lie, my dear, but it you must see that it wasn’t necessary.” He also approves of the way Kelas is stroking Julian’s back, seeking to calm him. Julian hasn’t noticed that he’s moved, but Garak thinks that some part of him is grateful for that touch. “You saved your nestmates, my darling boy, with no thought to your own safety. If the holo nets had captured it, someone would even now be writing a play! The only thing oversized or overwhelming about you, Ch’ulian, is the vastness of your heart.”
Warm tears slide over his cheeks. “I just needed you to be okay.”
Much later, Kelas ventures, voice cautious, “I would like to have seen it, though.”
Sensing the approach of something wonderful, Garak hums at him over his PADD without setting it aside. “Hmm?”
“Our Mouseling,” Kelas clarifies, eyes holding Garak’s. “Hefting two grown Cardassians. It makes quite the image, no?”
Julian groans, stands, and lifts Garak with one arm. Shocked, Garak drops his PADD and grabs for a shoulder. With his free hand, Julian beckons Kelas, who scrambles up easily, cradled behind his knees. Garak’s eyes are huge and he shakes his head. “I, ah, I believe you have proven your point, my dear. Please put me down!”
Julian grins at him. “Only if you’ll stop grousing about your weight. You’re perfect.” He leans in to kiss him. “You idiot.”
Kelas steals his own kiss as Julian lowers him gently. “Finally, a public monument I would consider posing for,” he enthuses. “The Unusually Strong Mouseling and His Mates!”
“You are my strength,” Julian says, then. “Any good thing in me… I think, apart from you… if I wasn’t loved by both of you, it would have died out.” His eyes are wet as he gazes up at them. “So no more cave-ins — understood?”
They agree, dropping onto his pallet to hold him. Julian knows he should order them back to bed, but the feel of them – reassuringly warm and solid and present: real – he isn’t in a fit state to give it up. “I love you,” he tells them, “even if danger seems to find you like a regnar sniffing out a red-throat’s nest.” He loves them, also, for making him love the altered parts of himself. Usually, he strives to look past his enhancements, to downplay all he is for fear of making others uncomfortable. Beneath the ground, though, he had been so grateful to be able to half-lift and half-drag both of his nestmates toward the light.
“Well, with someone as strong as you around to look after us…”
Julian lets them draw him – teary, laughing, and so very grateful for his life – down into the covers.
“But I’m serious about the terraforming,” he says just before sleep. Their answering laughter rings off of the ceiling.