Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
I have to tell my “I was there, Gandalf” story about this:
Before Wrath of Khan originally came out in theaters, there was a rumor going around that Spock dies in the movie. WHAT??? So then, we go see the movie, full of trepidation–and Spock dies in the very first scene! WHAT!!!
And THEN, turns out the Kobayashi Maru mission was just a simulator test, and Spock gets up, and everything’s fine. And Kirk saunters in here and says this line, and Spock gives that face and the giant LAUGH OF RELIEF that went up in the theater! Haaaahahahaha so this is where that rumor came from, LOL, ahhhh, now we can all relax.
As if it wasn’t bad enough that Kelas was woken up regualy by the pain in his joints sometimes his brain would turn against him as well. He’s feel the chill of the bank white room. He’d see those eyes. Sometime it would start before he’d even fallen asleep. As he was drifting off he’d see Regnar sitting in the chair in the corner of his room. He’d try to pull himself up to meet the man in the eye, but be unable to move.
After this has happened a few times he’d moved the chair out of his room. Regnar had appeared standing in the shadow of the door after that. Sometimes Kelas welcomed being woken up by his body. Although he’d heard on his return that Reganr was no where near Cardassia, who could be sure with such a man? Exiled, dead? People whispered any number of things. These days people whispered any number of things. These days Kelas tried not to listen to whispers. Whispers had been part of what got him here in the first place.
An exile. Working for Starfleet. A tailor. What use would Statfleet have for a tailor? What use would Starfleet have for an Cardassian. It would be nice to believe that
The Ancient Herbarian’s, allegedly, used to say that a maiden would dream of the man she was going to marry on Unification Days Eve.
Tbh there is an overabundance of media about a nonhuman creature’s deep desire and journey to become human, and so very few of the opposite
Many of those movies/shows are very good and I like them but the whole time I’m feeling like it’s tragic in a way. The thought of a creature giving up its otherness to assimilate into humanity is really fuckin sad to me. Or a human getting the chance to be something else freaking out and rejecting it.
Just makes me feel all the more alienated, y'know. Like “damn why don’t I relate to this allegedly universal enthusiasm for being human” and “why is the desire to be anything else always wrong”
He’d only ever made friends in Arabic. Made love in Arabic. Simply could not bring himself, naked in the dark, to reach for a blowtorch when he wanted candlelight. Oh, there was pain there for sure, and scars: his father’s voice, his mother’s eyes. But they were human hurts, small and furry in his hands. Nothing like Standard’s indiscriminate, devouring gleam.
It was hard to think about the fact that he dreamt in Standard. Harder still, perhaps, to listen to himself speak Arabic and hear a turn of phrase, a way of framing an idea, that had been lifted from Standard wholesale. Always, when he spoke, in whatever language he picked, he was translating himself. Garak had asked him, once, after he’d yet again put his foot in his mouth during one of their lunches: “What, my dear doctor, could you possibly know about exile?” He still wasn’t sure how he would formulate an answer to that question. He knew this: in one of Garak’s very first post-war letters, immediately after he’d returned to Cardassia, he had told Julian about a doli player he had met, the beautiful, winding songs he had played. “I listened to him standing on the streets of Kardasi'or and I missed Cardassia”, Garak had written, and Julian had understood this with visceral clarity.
He could teach Elim Arabic; Elim could learn. The idea was an intoxicating, shameful impossibility. The Arabic he spoke was incomplete: a language of home, of chores, a language that reminded you to buy milk. He’d never tried, but he knew with perfect certainty that he could never present a paper or discuss literature in Arabic. Sometimes he would be in the middle of formulating an idea and the sentence would suddenly slip away from him - holes where words should be. It was getting worse, he knew. Back on Deep Space Nine he’d tried to practice through the universal translator, making himself use Arabic whenever he could since everyone could understand him even if he didn’t speak Standard, but that lonely, quiet pouring of words into a filter was not language. He didn’t need to speak: he needed to speak with.
excerpt from “arms” by lenn (eitch), part 6 of their post-canon cardassia series from the rubble
When Donna Tartt said Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not, and M. L. Rio said How tremendous the agony of unmade decisions.
