Hc where Garak knows Julian is a liar, but he can't, for the life of him, know what he's lying about.
Like, he has this feeling, given to him by years of training and an observant eyes, that Julian is very purposefully unauthentic, and it seems that no one else notices.
He sees how Julian talks a lot and overshares, but never really says anything, to the point where his friends would have a hard time answering any question about him, like, for fucks sake, it took reading his file to get to know his date of birth because no one knew.
Jadzia thinks he has a brother, Miles is convinced he has a sister, and Garak is fairly sure he is an only child, the problem is, Julian doesn't talk about it. He talks too much and hardly says anything.
Garak also notices how he is always tense, as if holding back, like when he lets himself be punched when he clearly sees it coming, when he let's things break even though Garak is sure he could've caught them mid air, how he seems to calculate the perfect amount of clumsy in a day (once he even bumped into Garak and pretended to be distracted) and no one notices.
But Garak does, Garak knows he is lying about something, he feels it, specially when he looses on games and arguments, like he could not think of something else but Garak sees it in his eyes that he is hiding something.
And Garak constantly gets worried, despite his best knowledge, about him.
He knows how lonely it is, to keep yourself hidden from the world, to not let anyone know you, to hold the weight of a thousand secrets on his body, and constantly he sees this weight taking it's toll on the doctor.
Julian keeps people at arms length, he gets close on condition, he larps with Miles, discuss literature with Garak and converses with Jadzia, but keeps them all compartmentalized, always distant, even his crush on Jadzia being shallow, no real depth to it.
Julian seems skin deep and Garak knows how it feels and aches for him.
So he constantly tries to scratch the surface, aways tries to get Julian out of his lie made shell like Julian does to him, and he doesn't succeed, but he keeps trying.
Specially after he finds out that Julian had been gone for a month and not even him noticed it, he knows it's because no one would, because Julian keeps so much of himself hidden that you can't distinguish him from a fake.
And then, doctor Zimmermann shows up...
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