Chapter Text
It has been some weeks.
Uncharacteristically, I find myself with nothing at all to say. I have spent much time in oppressive silence, only prolonged because any alternatives are more oppressive. Everything is small, too small, mockingly crushingly miniscule, my house, my planet, my life. I cannot breathe, much less speak.
Even if I could, what purpose do words serve without anyone to perceive them? Truth is in the eye of the beholder, and cannot be found elsewhere; without an eye to behold, there is nothing. Anything I have to say to you is obsolete.
But Kelas says I should mourn - what a ridiculous notion! To have once, not long ago, spent each day digging corpses from rubble and giving children with commonplace waterborne diseases terminal diagnoses, all in the ashes and dust of one's home, and to be arrogant enough to think pathetically lamenting one's personal losses is worth the time it wastes! Still, if there's one thing you and Kelas don't have in common, it is that I have never been able to argue with him.
Even when he is wrong.
As I said, it has been some weeks. Five, give or take a few days. Five weeks, that is, since I was notified. One line of text: Julian Bashir permanently paralyzed, unresponsive, presumed brain dead. Details classified. They did not even allow you your rightful title, Doctor. You can imagine my response.
Five weeks since I received the message, yes, but whatever the specific date was, it was twenty-three hours after that I became convinced the correspondence was legitimate. Twenty-three hours of cross-checking, verifying, calling in of favors, illicit hacking, denial, panic.
I cannot clearly remember the days after that. The effects of discreetly brewed backyard kanar on a pathetic, middle aged politician, formerly tailor, formerly agent.
Five weeks since I received the message, yes, but you were lost to me long before that. It took three weeks for the message to reach me on Cardassia Prime. Three weeks of commonplace existence, ignorance anything but bliss but at least simple, repetitive, forgettable even to my Cardassian memory. Three weeks Julian Bashir was dead and the planet continued to spin, time continued to pass, neither having any difficulties despite being deprived of your vibrance.
Even before that, you were lost to me. You had not sent correspondence in months, having departed for fool's errands in the name of that wretched, deplorable Section 31.
Tell me, was any of it worth it? Did you not understand? Were you younger and more obtuse than I took you for? I told you, time and time again, do not play the game, Julian. The game eats you. It tears you apart, piece by piece, starting with your innocence, then your joy, then your ideals. It breaks you into crumbs and rebuilds you in its hideous image, makes you a tool, an object, kills everything that makes you you before it ever kills your body, but eventually it does that as well. There are potentially trillions of spies in this inscrutable universe of ours, and ever single one of them are wasting their lives. There hasn't been anything left of Elim Garak in decades, but I thought, perhaps, this new man I had created was better, kinder, a more fulfilling facsimile than anything before. The lie that became the truth. You are gone, and so is that man.
Perhaps I lost you even before then.
Was it the day Cardassia was destroyed? The day you used that mind probe on Sloan? Earlier still, perhaps? In the holosuite, with the gun? Internment Camp 371? The day your enhancements were revealed, and you no longer had to keep up pretences of ignorance, or naivete, or friendship with an aging fool? When I tried to wipe out the Founders?
Maybe I lost you earlier still. Perhaps I'm a besotted idiot who mistook a pitying smile from a beautiful man for something more meaningful. As hazy as thought feels in this cloud of alcohol and weak, almost laughable despair in which I've been floating for five useless weeks, when I allow memory to overwhelm me, I realize how little our fraternization was. Seven years with you in that freezing, hellish cell is nothing to the grand scheme of my lifetime. I was only your close friend for what, the first three? An amusing filler to be discarded once more appealing, younger, more pitifully human friends came along.
Of course, I lie. A painful one, to be sure, but one that prevents further anguish. One cannot agonize over the things that could have been if there was never anything in the first place worthy of speculation over.
Somehow a lie is less helpful when I'm telling it to a blank page. There's nobody else to believe it for me.
I certainly can't. Nobody who met you even once would dare argue that you went about any part of your life without caring. Your care was an obvious thing about you. And an endearing one, if occasionally dangerous. Many times I could've hurt you, killed you, a few times I tried, and still you cared, with all the bright enthusiasm that would've been cloying and irritating in anyone else but was beautiful in you. The husk that is left of you may share your admittedly attractive features, but it does not have any of your true beauty because it cannot care.
Why am I burning? And choking, and crumbling, and feeling a tight band constrict around my chest, depriving me of air, however dusty, and making me want nothing more than to collapse and never again rise? I have no right! I have always been aware that my devotion to my home exceeded anything I felt for anything or anyone else, but the cold, empty numbness of the Fire is nothing to this. What kind of man am I to mourn one over millions? What kind of Cardassian?
Five weeks of hell, and I have said nothing but a few empty words to Kelas. One would think years in a labor camp would harden him, but instead he kept his empathy and care in the face of everything. He is a stronger man than me. As were you, steadfastly healing and hoping after a lifetime of fear and years of a war that went against ever fiber of your being. I am a lesser creature, one who has lost itself. I should have died long ago. Instead, I am condemned to watch all the good people around me fade away. Mila. Ziyal. Damar. Ghemor. And now you.
I may as well say whatever I want. I was writing you letters I never sent long before I knew what had happened, and five weeks of silence begs to be broken with a bang. You were the best man I ever had the luxury to lay eyes upon, much less befriend. You probably assumed I had as vibrant and varied a life as you, outside our weekly lunches (not often enough, not long enough, not enough in their own right but still the sparks of light in that dark prison sentence of an existence). The truth is, besides tailoring, I spent my hours reading books to discuss with you and constructing a pathetic fantasy of showing you Cardassia. You were the hope I held, and resented to hold, that one day I might live unfettered by expectations and the bleakness of daily survival, and instead exist on my own terms, warm, content, never lacking conversation or care.
Love is another meaningless word, one of the many that Federation Standard touts as "abstract" and "complex" when nobody can agree on its definition. What I felt for you cannot be adequately expressed in your language. Nonetheless, it is gone. Permanently stilled along with you and replaced by a persistent, suffocating tightness.
I have requested your body be brought to Cardassia. I have told myself it is only reasonable, since you would want your parents and therefore Earth as far as possible, and there are no acceptable facilities on Deep Space Nine. I have also refused with my every ounce of political sway to let you be snapped up by an institution. You spent too long denying yourself in order to avoid them.
Yes, I tell myself these things, but maybe my true reasons are far more selfish. Some asinine part of me would like to believe you'll be back to yourself someday. And then we can be as close as before, perhaps closer, and I can bask in your light like a regnar in the sun. Asinine, like I said. I deserve no less than my current anguish for this stupidity.
I was certainly wrong about at least one thing. I did not truly have nothing to say.
Or perhaps I did. None of this is meaningful anyway. It was only your participation that made anything I had to say matter.
Yours, forever and despite it all,
Elim (unsent)