The nights on Cardassia are dark, but not silent. In the middle of the first summer since the bombardment, they find themselves settled into the dark, rounded atrium in what remains of Tain’s mansion in the capital city. It’s easier that way, to shut the doors off to the wings and throw the curtains over the stained glass. Taxes the life systems less, makes it easier to keep cool as the temperatures climb and climb and climb as a result of the rapid fluctuations in the ecosystem and the atmosphere. 

They sleep on the floor, but often not at the same time. Julian’s shifts at the hospital are long and vary between nights and days and swing, and Garak’s comm is forever going off at every and any hour to call him back to the interim government to solve whatever the newest emergency is. Most nights, they don’t have to confront how close their mattresses—dragged down the opulent spiral staircase from a wing of bedrooms that were hardly ever used—lay on the marble floor. 

Most nights. 

Then there are other nights, when Julian is dispensed from his duties as a Starfleet Medical attache to the relief efforts and when nothing political or otherwise seems to have caught fire. Nights when they raid what remains of Tain’s kanar collection, drinking side by side as the city comes alive around them as they remain quiet. 

Or rather, disquieted. 

They don’t talk about it. Any of it. The fragility of agriculture, the hole in the atmosphere, the toxins in the rainwater. Julian’s failed psych eval or Tain’s legacy, all around them, the nightmares that Garak shakes himself out until he shakes himself apart. They don’t talk about it and it’s working, mostly. 

Mostly. 

It means something, Garak thinks. It means something that Julian failed his Starfleet psych evaluation and came here to Cardassia. Came here to him. Threw himself on his doorstep and threw himself into the relief efforts and threw himself into keeping the hospital’s pediatrics department together with two hands and very little otherwise. It means something that he comes here every night, at the end of every shift, and sleeps beside him. It means something, this trust. But he’s never earned that before from another living being, and doesn’t know what to do with it. No one ever taught him how to hold something fragile in his grip without figuring out how to shatter it. Without following through on the breaking of something delicate. Something precious. 

They get drunk. It’s the thing to do these days, with very little else available to them until they figure out how to grow anything on the planet’s surface. Until they figure out how to rebuild the economy and schools and housing. How to bring enough of the professional class home. How to keep more Cardassians from fleeing to other planets in the Cardassian system. 

There’s talks of revolution on Cardassia III. Separatists on Chin’toka. 

Garak drinks, because it’s familiar when nothing else is. 

He kisses Julian, because his brain is a scrambled regova egg and he wants to feel something, anything good. And then he jerks, pulling away, muttering his apologies. 

Too good. 

Julian blinks blearily, seemingly accepting the mistake for what it is: a momentary lapse in good judgment. 

Or so Garak thinks, until the next evening, when Julian sits beside him on his mattress and they are both sober, too sober to be dealing with it all. 

Gently, too gently, so gently that Garak worries that he might be what shatters, like the petals of an orchid in a child’s fist—Julian bows his fingers into a curl, lets his fingertips trace the ridge of scaling along Garak’s jaw. It’s too much. It’s not enough. He’s going to starve of it before he can get his fill. 

“You kissed me last night,” Julian murmurs, as if he’s been thinking about it all day.

And maybe he has. 

“And you didn’t stop me.” 

Therein lies the problem. Kissing Julian is only tolerable if Julian shudders, pushes him back and away. If Julian is disgusted by him, if Julian sees that he is unworthy of someone like the good doctor, someone so pure and and good that in his howling pain he came to help others, rather than curling up in the darkness and wasting away. But that’s not what Julian did. Julian, who slid a hand up the plane of his chest, who pressed his thumb into the side of his throat and kissed him back, tongue tracing his bottom lip. 

Toomuchtoomuchotoomuch—

Elim Garak has never learned how to accept softness as a condition of his survival.

Shaking his head, Julian leans in and then over him. “Kiss me again, but don’t stop this time.” 

Summer and Julian both taste syrupy sweet, and the neighbors are loud enough that neither of them pay the echo in the atrium any mind. They’re all just learning how to survive. 

He wants to be where Julian’s heart lives.