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TITLE: The Weeds in Your Heart SUMMARY: Ten years later, Bashir goes to Cardassia. DISCLAIMERS: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is the intellectual property of Paramount Television. This original work of fan fiction is copyright 2002 Mosca. As my only reward is the fact that the GBFF maven will not kick my ass, this story is protected in the US of A by the fair use provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976. All rights reserved. All wrongs reversed. The city on the river is a girl without a dream. NOTES: This was written for the Garak/Bashir Fuh-q Fest, in response to the following challenge: "10 years after 'What You Leave Behind,' Julian Bashir finally realizes that he's been in love with Garak all these years and takes an extended leave on Cardassia intent on winning Garak's heart. Garak, who has not heard from Bashir at all since the end of the Dominion War, is not at all receptive. Is it too late for the boys to get together?" I'm sure I've answered it in a way that will leave everyone irritated and dissatisfied. Many thanks to Mark Russell Stanley for the beta, and to k for the usual. And a different kind of thanks to Roberta, Gwen, and Sonda, for dropping bits of wisdom where I could find them. The title is from the Tom Waits song "Time," and much inspiration and imagery came from the R.E.M. song "So. Central Rain." **** I didn't think of him that often anymore. By "him," I mean Garak, and by "not that often," I mean a few times a week rather than a few times an hour. It's amazing how good we are at lying to ourselves, and I had become an expert in telling myself that I was thinking of him only because he wasn't around anymore and not because I cared about him all that much. I convinced myself that if I cut him out of my life, my mind would quiet. I'd move on. I'd love Ezri the way I wanted to love her. I would find some source of affection and intellectual stimulation other than him. In the days when alcoholism was a condition managed through willpower rather than with receptor therapy, it was said that while the addiction's urgency dulled over time, the thirst never died. Ten years after Garak left Deep Space Nine to serve his home world, I showed all the signs of long-controlled addiction. I reread my favorite novels and remembered how he'd dismissed them: their neat and overoptimistic endings, their spare and unevocative language. There's nothing to put a damper on Jane Austen like an unromantic Cardassian. He was romantic about some things. He was romantic about country and identity; He was romantic about words and their power. But he was unromantic about love. For ten years, I had assumed that meant he felt little or nothing for me. I was starting to doubt that. Maybe it was some sort of reaction to the laugh lines deepening around my mouth and the extra weight that had taken up permanent residence around my belly. I had let myself live in the illusion that I would live forever, but I was showing all the symptoms of middle age. And Garak-- Garak had to be nearly sixty by now. I wondered whether time had yet turned his hair to that bright gunmetal gray that Cardassians get as they age. I was no longer sure that thinking of Garak was a self-destructive exercise. I'd stopped being sure of a lot of things. I'd seen a lot of patients die. I'd listened to a few tell me about their deathbed regrets. Most of those regrets had something to do with unconfessed love, and I began to fear that I would be telling one of those stories someday. I had seen a lot of deaths, and I had learned that some deaths are peaceful, even merciful. If I was going to die eventually (and I had decided that was a safe assumption) I wanted it to be one of those most peaceful deaths. I made a list of all the things I wanted to do before I died. Garak's name appeared on that list a lot. I was working on Starbase 49 at the time, doing neuroregenerative research. I'd made some breakthroughs early on, but it had been a few years since I'd arrived at any really useful or innovative findings. It had reached the point where I got the feeling that my research assistants were just being polite. Still, my reputation in Starfleet's medical and scientific circles remained high, and I was able to take unlimited special leave from Starfleet until I figured out what the hell I wanted to do with myself. I went to Cardassia with a week's reservation at a hotel, a tourist visa that expired in three months, and the vague expectation that some hospital or other would have a faculty position available. On the way there, I had planned to contact Garak as soon as I arrived. But soon I was caught up in the frustrations of finding a home and a job, and then the frustrations of moving into my new flat and getting used to fourteen-hour hospital shifts. I'd been on Cardassia for nearly a month before I saw Garak's face on the screen of my transmitter. "And where have *you* been for the past ten years?" he said. Knowing perfectly well that it wasn't the answer he wanted, I told him about my research work on the Starbase. He leaned back in his chair. "I would have thought that after all this time, you would at least have bothered to come up with a more elegant tale than that." "All right," I said. "I... fell in love with a circus performer. An acrobat. I traveled around the Quadrant with him. I sat in the wings every night and watched him tumble through the air. And after the show, we'd beam up to the little starcruiser we shared, and he'd contort himself just for me. We never had much to say to each other, but that didn't really matter. I earned my keep by... by providing medical services to the circus employees. One day, after several years, there was an accident during rehearsal." I hesitated, almost running out of steam on my fable. "My lover... misjudged a distance and-- and crashed into a beam, which fell on him. It was months before he could walk again, and even when he'd recovered it was clear that he could no longer work as an acrobat. I got my research grant and asked him to move to Starbase 49 with me. He did, but he was miserable. He-- he couldn't live that kind of life. He left me... during the day, while I was at work. When I came home, all of his things were gone. There wasn't even a note. And I've been alone ever since." "That's better," Garak said. "I-- I would have-- I wasn't sure that you wanted me to contact you," I said. "If I hadn't wanted you to," he said, "I wouldn't have told you how to reach me." "I'm sorry," I said. "I'm so sorry." "I'm afraid that's not enough," Garak said, and he closed the connection. I planned to give Garak about a week before I contacted him again. Let him stew a bit, realize how much he missed me. He didn't give me the chance to play that game, though. I heard from him the next day. He asked me out to lunch. "Just like old times," I smiled. "Perhaps," he said. We met at a café in the River District of the capital city. It was a cool spring day, and the wind was whipping up noxious smells from the polluted river. Garak insisted on a table towards the back of the restaurant, near the kitchen, although he knew I preferred to sit by the windows. I liked to watch the world. Garak was the type who assumed that everyone else was always watching him. The first thing he asked as we sat down was why I'd come to Cardassia. I wanted to put him in immediate acquaintance with the truth, but he'd never appreciated that tactic. Besides, I was terrified of telling him. "I needed a change of pace," I said. "Come now," he said. "One doesn't quit a comfortable and satisfying life to travel halfway across the quadrant and settle on a war-ravaged and hostile planet." "One does if 'comfortable and satisfying' is what one is trying to escape." He leaned back in his chair, looking like he was trying to disguise the fact that he didn't have a good answer to that. I doubted he'd ever lived a life that was comfortable or satisfying. It's probably an alluring prospect to someone with no frame of reference. "There's nothing *wrong* with a comfortable life," I said, "until it gets boring. At which point it becomes unsatisfying." "At which point one must do something drastic, like move to Cardassia?" "Exactly." "That's a shame," he said. "How so?" "I was hoping," he said, "that it might have had something to do with me." "Don't flatter yourself." "Don't flatter *your*self. You would never have thought to come to Cardassia if not for our friendship." "That still doesn't license you to take credit for it." I realized that I was trying to get him into an argument. Early in our friendship, our arguing had bothered me: I hated to think that anyone thought of me as inadequate. I hated to think that there was someone whose reasoning I couldn't run rings around. Then I'd done a little research into Cardassian mating practices. So here I was, fifteen years down the road from that, flirting on purpose. Loudly, in public, on a planet where no one would assume this was just good-natured bickering. I might as well have been shaking my tail feathers. "Perhaps I wouldn't have come if I hadn't known you," I said. "That's different than saying I came *for* you. I've been here a month, and I've only just let you know. You can believe all you want that I was scared or shy, or that I secretly spent the past ten years pining for you. But the truth is that I didn't love you all that much in the first place." He looked at me like I'd just exploded. Like all that was left of me was scattered, smoldering chunks of ex-Human. "That's-- that's not what I meant to say," I said. "On the contrary," Garak said, "I think it's exactly what you meant to say." I lowered my voice to just above a whisper and spoke Bajoran to throw off our audience of eavesdroppers. "I've been in love with you for a long time," I said. "It's too bad I didn't notice until lately." "Indeed it is," Garak said. "If you had told me only a few years earlier, I would have had no reservations about taking you to bed." "And now?" "After we've finished our meal," he said, "tell me again what you just said to me." He smiled, a little sadly. It seemed that he was putting me off not because he couldn't decide whether to indulge me, but because he wasn't sure whether he could banish his reservations. I feared that this would be a long meal. He continued, "Until then, you must fill the time by telling me absolutely everything that's happened to you since last I saw you." "You first," I said. "Your stories are always so much better than mine." He was willing to humor at least this request. I expected the usual pack of beautiful lies. It was what I'd come to hear. Garak's fairy tales were invariably more interesting than the truth, and frequently, they were truer than any account of what had really happened. But, as if he wanted to undermine my expectations, that wasn't what Garak gave me. He told me about the despair on Cardassia, how despite the best efforts of scientists and social leaders, the planet still ailed with the effects of the Dominion's parting shots. Much of the soil and water was polluted, and heavy elements and unstable isotopes from the fallout were causing birth defects and fertility problems. "Replicators and modern medicine just aren't enough," Garak said. "People don't want to admit they need help, and they don't know how to help themselves. It would take a lot more than our technology to resuscitate people's dead relatives or bring back ruined works of art." And that was what, as a Cabinet member, Garak was supposed to do: to rebuild a civilization that could not be restored to what it had been. "People don't want a new Cardassia to rise from the ashes of the old," he said. "They want the old Cardassia back." "I wish I could just snap my fingers and give it to them," I said. "That's what has always intrigued me about you," Garak said. "For all your protestations to the contrary, a large part of you still believes that you can." By this point, we were almost finished eating, and I needed an excuse to deflect the compliment. "Have I mentioned in the past hour that I have been in love with you for a very long time?" I said. He lifted my hand from the table and brought it to his lips: an extraordinarily un-Cardassian gesture. Cardassians aren't much for kissing, most of the time. "I would very much like to show you the kind of housing that the Cardassian government provides for its officials," he said. Whatever we discussed in the transport to Garak's house must have been inconsequential, because even that night I would not be able to remember what we talked about. His house was a few steps up from my flat's sparse furniture and plague of house lizards. It was a new construction, but made to look like third-renaissance Cardassian architecture, with a façade of wheat-colored brick and eaves that seemed to look up at the sky. Inside, it was spotless and impeccably decorated, but I scarcely had time to look around before Garak was untucking my shirt and biting at my neck. It seemed he, too, had run out of ways to deny the way he felt about me. He was fascinated with my body. In the preceding few years I'd resigned myself to the fact that if I had once been beautiful, that was not so true anymore. But Garak had no frame of reference in that. To him, I might as well have been the paragon of Human form. At least, that's how he treated me: as if I were perfect and priceless, as if he had to calibrate every touch to show me proper respect. He made jokes about the repulsiveness of external genitalia, but when he stroked my penis with his fingers it was like he was reading me in Braille. And sometime in his spying days he must have learned how to kiss, and then some, because when he took me in his mouth it was clear that he knew what he was doing. He seemed shocked that I might want to bestow the same sort of worship on his body. The truth was that I'd spent years honing the fantasy of making love to him. I followed the fractal curves of his scales with my fingers and my lips until his slick penis emerged from its sheath. Running my tongue along it filled my mouth with sweet-salty lubricant and made him shiver with pleasure. He came before I could tell him that I wanted to feel him inside me. "We'll have something to look forward to next time, then," he chuckled afterward, when I expressed my disappointment. I smiled at him eagerly, but I knew that the Cardassian male refractory period isn't quite the shortest in the galaxy, and another round would be too much to ask from one in middle age. I was tired, anyway. I'd worked a graveyard shift the night before, and it had taken some effort to stay awake through lunchtime. He got up to use the toilet, and I must have fallen asleep by the time he returned to bed. When I awoke, it was early evening, and Garak was snoring softly next to me. I caressed his face with the back of my hand, and I realized that I did not recognize him at all. I knew even then that it was a burst of irrationality that pulled me out of his bed. Still, I was utterly certain that I could never be with him. If we'd had a window of opportunity--and I even doubted that-- the window was bolted shut. The tailor of tall tales didn't exist anymore, and neither, for that matter, did the doctor who planned to save the galaxy. The man I loved was not this bureaucrat on the edge of resignation. Part of me nagged that tomorrow I would regret leaving him while he slept, but it was drowned out by the voice that insisted that I would regret staying more. I left him a note to this effect and gathered my clothes. It didn't take long to hail a transport from the front steps of his house. Initially, I told the transport to take me to my flat, but as I neared my neighborhood, it seemed the wrong place to be. I instructed the transport to bring me to a green strip of park that fronted the river. When I arrived there, I found an empty bench and sat watching the gray water churn against its polymer-reinforced banks. I was sitting on the upwind side, and the air was almost scentless. The Lakarian ducks brayed their mating calls. I tried to clear my mind, but I've never been capable of thinking about nothing at all. I thought about the way clouds moved, the wet footprints of river water, people who looked like ducks. I forbade myself to think of Garak. The sun began to set, and I realized that I was in danger of being late for work. I took a transport home, washed up, put on clean clothes. At the hospital, I was distracted; I kept forgetting which patients I'd seen and what ailments they'd presented. I felt sorry for the people I was treating. Mistreating, I whispered to myself, and gave myself a needed laugh. The managing physician, Dr. Berera, must have noticed, because halfway into the night she took me aside and asked if everything was all right. She was not particularly well-liked among her colleagues: she was impatient and temperamental, with a voice that could peel paint. But she'd offered me a good job when others were reluctant to hire an alien, and she'd helped me get acclimated to Cardassia when others had been wary to befriend me. At times, she reminded me a little of Major Kira and made me nostalgic for the last times in my life when I'd felt like I was doing something worthwhile. It took some arm-twisting on her part to get the story out of me, but she was damnably persistent. "I had no idea," she said when she'd heard the whole thing. "I had no idea that was the reason you came here." "And it seems I don't have much of a reason anymore," I said. "Is that so?" "Even if I changed my mind," I said, "there's no way he'd take me back. I doubt I can even salvage the friendship." "You're-- you're an excellent doctor," she said. "Excellent doctors are in short supply on Cardassia. We'd-- *I'd* hate to lose you." "It's been an honor to have the opportunity to work for you," I said, slipping into Cardassian formality. Berera didn't really go in for Cardassian formality, and she dismissed mine with a barely visible shrug of her shoulders. "What you need to decide," she said, "is whether there are other reasons to stay." I spent the next few months staying on Cardassia to see if I wanted to stay on Cardassia. There was nowhere else I particularly wanted to go. I'd like to say that the answer came to me clearly, that there was some moment of epiphany in which I realized that it was my destiny to live out my years here. It would be more correct to say that I got used to the place. I got to know the people I worked with at the hospital, and I found a community of aliens living on Cardassia. I knew the arrangement was more or less permanent when I bought traps to combat the house lizards in my flat. An hour after I nabbed my first lizard and set him free on the riverbank, I contacted Starfleet to let them know that my sabbatical would be permanent. And I'd like to say that I spent the rest of my life mourning my choice to leave Garak. I'd like to say that he was the love of my life. I can say honestly that I would never love anyone the way I loved him, but only because every time a person loves, he loves differently. And there have been others after him: male and female, Cardassian and alien. It would have been romantic if I never saw Garak again, but even that wasn't true. I worked up the courage to apologize a few weeks later, and over time he came to forgive me. We continue to meet for lunch occasionally, talking about literature and politics rather than the things that really matter. The house that I live in now overlooks the river. Government ecologists figured out how to neutralize the pollutants, and on sunny days the river is an impossible blue. That water is the city's blood. By now, most of the water in my body was born on Cardassia; it would not be entirely metaphorical to say that Cardassia runs through my veins. I breathe its air, and I am home. I came here to fall in love, and I have. |