he expected as much to find damar here. he’d stuck his head out of the storeroom, and saw his imposing silhouette hunched over cup and bottle. (he hadn’t had quark’s permission to be in there, in the first place. mutt simply remembered what rom had shown him a few years prior, opening the lockseal in under fifteen seconds. what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.)
it is odd how many times he and damar had opportunities to speak with each other. it is almost as if the legate sought him out. mutt wonders why. figures he feels guilty. knows he does. everything about the defeated hang of his shoulders and constant reeking of alcohol read deep, gnawing guilt. (there’s that saying of only the dead seeing the end of a war, and mutt thinks of it, now.) but they’d already had that conversation, and mutt hoped this one went better than the last, even if getting damar to storm away had made him feel triumphant.
i don’t want to think at all. how familiar that sentiment is. the grey days are the worse. days where he feels neither good or bad. where he doesn’t even want to think about how much he hates himself. it’s those days, the days of doing nothing, that’ll kill a person. a hand reaches out, covers the glass’s rim. the other grabs, quick, at the bottle’s neck when it is released for a few seconds. he slides them away before any protest can be made, never breaking eye contact. he takes them with him when he goes behind the bar. the used glass is thrown into a pile of other unwashed items, what mutt will occupy himself with while talking. the kanar bottle is placed with other miscellaneous bottles on the display rack.
“ then do something about it. your second chance. even if you get it wrong, takes guts to admit you did. “ mutt, stubborn as he is, might be a touch hypocritical. damar needn’t bring it up, if he notices. “ you doing all of this on an empty stomach? “ it is mutt’s way of asking if he wants anything.
IT’S DELAYED, like static over an intergalactic transmission; Mutt’s already put the bottle away by the time Damar makes an uncoordinated effort to reach for it, fingertips outstretched into nothing before he gives up and drops his arm with a clatter onto the countertop.
( somehow, desperately reaching for nothing is a succinct metaphor for damar’s life. every triumph -- every victory -- every mistake -- every defeat. no matter what he did or didn’t do, he is still just a miserable drunk drowning his sorrows at the bar. )
❝ WHAT, AND I’m supposed to let you lecture me about my -- bad habits ? ❞ he scoffs, vivid scorn alight on his voice, every syllable bleeding into one another as he struggles to maintain coherency. ❝ Oh, but of course. I need your advice, more than anyone’s, about the best way to drink myself to death. ❞
MUTT HAS patience beyond what Damar ought to be allotted. An apology gnaws at his bones, and he knows he just has to spit it out like a rotten tooth. He’s sorry. He’s so terribly sorry. He might not be kinder or gentler or any better with his words than he was when he was Dukat’s lackey, but he is sorry. Not just about Ziyal -- not just about the blood Cardassia left on Bajoran soil. Those are things this Terran could never absolve him of. He’s sorry about how he treated Mutt, during the Occupation, when he failed to see personhood beneath the grime, beneath that pinkish mammalian skin and those odd round pupils in those strange, alien eyes. But the apology refuses to surface: the only time he’ll spill his guts is when he stumbles back to his quarters in the morning and pukes.
❝ WEYOUN WAS obsessed with you. ❞ It comes as an awkward segue, but Damar’s charisma is lacking even when he hasn’t been drinking. ❝ He had this whole psychographic -- profile -- something -- on you. He was desperate for an excuse to throw you off the station, kept telling everyone to watch you and catch you the moment you did anything suspicious. He thought you were dangerous. ❞ He wasn’t necessarily wrong.
❝ ... I READ about what happened. ❞ This is his second chance, as Mutt put it so quaintly. ❝ About Thoutania. ❞ And this is the first step of said second chance -- there’s something there, on the tip of that forked tongue, but the Legate resigns himself to a grim, bitter smile, coughing slightly into his elbow. ❝ No. You don’t want my pity. You’ve made it this far -- lived through that, and you didn’t turn into this, ❞ he grouses, vaguely gesturing to himself, a self-pitying mess, an infected laceration wasting away through pain he refuses to heal. ❝ No pity, ❞ he assures him, ❝ but -- respect. Give me that glass. I’ll raise a toast to you. ❞
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