Icon by @ThatSpookyAgent. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. The X-Files. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
If I stay here, at least I know what the future is going to be like. You stay here, you’re going to die. Not all at once, but little by little. Eventually, you’ll become as hollow as I am.
No but…Boromir loves him. Accepts him. That’s his brother, his little brother, who is talented and brave and skilled in his own ways.
Denethor accepts him in name, ‘indulges’ him with livery of the Tower Guard (the livery passed to Pippin later). He prefers sons, after all. But Faramir will never be the same as Boromir. Denethor constantly tests him, pushes him, because Faramir will never be a true son to him—not in the same way. Because he holds him to impossible standards.
Faramir literally rides out to try and recapture Osgiliath, to prove that he is the perfect definition of a man who has never existed and will never exist, strong and infallible. He rides toward what he is sure will be his death, to show that he is a man, the man his father has tried to force him to be.
And when he survives, he finds love and healing in the arms and eyes of Éowyn, a woman who has chafed against her own constraints and the constraints of femininity and who has come back to that identity on her own terms, who sees him as an equal and holds him to no ideas or symbols or impossible standards beyond himself.
“Can you see it from here?” Julian asked softly. Garak did not turn. He had not heard Julian’s approach, but the opening of the door had flooded light into the dark, empty space.
“See what, my dear?” He knew. They both did.
“Cardassia.”
Cardassia Prime twinkled to the right of the viewscreen. Garak could have pointed to it without even looking. He had become a compass, during exile; no matter where he was, he could always point out Cardassia in relation. His anchor, no matter how far into space he sailed.
What does post-canon Garak watch on Cardassian television when he’s home alone of an evening because his husband has a late shift at the hospital?
There are three levels to what Garak watches. The first is what he watches when Julian is around – the news, symphonies, ridiculous political dramas that Garak ridicules for their inaccuracy more than he watches them. The second is reality t.v., but things like Cardassian Big Brother where everyone is trying to stab everyone else in the back and alliances are made and destroyed by the second. This is what he’ll quickly change away from when Julian comes home and look sheepish about until Julian confronts him and tells him it’s ok to watch trashy television if that’s what makes him happy.
When he’s sure he’s absolutely alone, and you can’t convince me that he doesn’t have some way of tracking Julian, he uses an encrypted padd to watch Cardassian Hallmark movies. Most of them are about the tension between love of family and love of state with the peculiarity that oftentimes family wins out in these dramas. The general will abandon his political career to go make kanar with the woman of his dreams. The famed scientist will leave her studies behind to go planet hopping with a burly ship captain. He keeps tissues nearby and will occasionally indulge in a box of Delavian chocolates as he watches the whirlwind romance.
Julian has caught him a total of once. Garak had been hard at work pushing some new bills for housing reform through the senate and thought he could catch the tail end of The Uzantine Promise before Julian came home. Julian came home early and found a passed-out Garak sleeping on a padd that was portraying a drawn-out love confession between a Cardassian Glinn and a baker from a small fishing town. When Garak woke up, the padd was off (apparently out of battery) and a blanket was draped over his shoulders.
Julian is still saving his husband’s fondness for romances for a day when Garak gets upset with himself and declares himself as a heartless cog in the political machinery – something which happens about once a year at this point – and he can’t find another way to prove to him that he does have a heart.
I started The Lost Years, and thereβs a scene where Kirk is trying toοΏΌ nudge Spock into taking a captain promotion, and they dance around the topic for a while, but then Spock is like βwhy did youοΏΌ request me as your first officer on your next captain assignmentοΏΌοΏΌβ
And they get into this whole thing like where Kirk is like βI want what was best for you!β and Spock is like βwhatβs best for me is standing next to you!!β and it makes me emotional
“Sleep heavily and know that I am here with you now. The past is gone, and cannot harm you anymore. And while the future is fast coming for you, it always flinches first and settles in as the gentle present. This now, this us? We can cope with that. We can do this together. You and I, drowsily, but comfortably.”
— Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, Welcome to Night Vale
