To start a career in the web development field, you need to choose either front-end web development or back-end web development and if you want to be a full-stack developer you can choose both. Here we will discuss both paths. First, we will talk about what things you should learn and use to go on either path.
Here are some core technologies and tools you need to learn for both frontend and backend roadmap tasks.
Git -
One of the most popular version control systems. It's not possible to live without Git anymore. Git is a software for tracking changes in any set of files, usually used for coordinating work among programmers. It’s goals include speed, data integrity and non-linear workflows.
SSH -
SSH stands for Secure Shell. It is a Cryptographic Network Protocol for operating network services securely over an unsecured network. Typically applications include Remote Command Line, Login and Remote Command Execution. Every network service can be secured with SSH.
It is a popular networking concept every web developer should know.
HTTP/HTTPS -
HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol and HTTPS stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure.
Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure is an Extension of Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It is widely used over the Internet. For Secure Communication over a computer network, HTTPS is a good way to communicate. HTTP Protocol is the Backbone of the web, and to be a Web Developer you should have good knowledge of both HTTP and HTTPS.
Linux Command - Basic Terminal Uses -
Linux command is the utility of the Linux Operating System. All basic and advanced tasks can be done by executing commands. The commands are executed on the Linux Terminal. The terminal is a Command Line Interface. It is used to interact with the system, it is similar to Command Prompt in Windows.
Not just a Web Developer but for any Programmer, Command Line is a very important factor.
Data Structures & Algorithms -
A Data Structure is a named location which can be used to store and organize data. An Algorithm is a collection of steps which help you to solve a problem. Learning Data Structure and Algorithms allows us to write efficient and optimized computer programs
These are the building blocks for every program and better knowledge of data structure and algorithm. It is vital for your next job or doing well at your current job..
Character Encoding -
If you are creating global applications that show information in multiple languages, across the world then you should have a good knowledge of character encoding.
Character Encoding is used in Computing, Data Storage and Data Transmission to represent a collection of characters by some kind of encoding system. This technique assigns a number to each character for digital representation.
Github -
There is no doubt that every developer or programmer uses Github and Git for getting code information and give some mock tests to check the performance in coding.
Both Git and Github are the standard terms in code repositories.
Github is a provider of internet hosting for software development and version control using Git. It offers the Distributed Version Control and Source Code management functionality.
Now we will discuss both the roadmaps, step by step.
Frontend Developer Roadmap -
If you want to become a Frontend Developer then you should have knowledge in some coding technologies.
In the starting phase, you should have knowledge about some basics of HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
In HTML you should know about the basics of html, semantic html, basic seo and accessibility.
In CSS you should know about the basics of css, making layout, media queries and also CSS3. You should know roots, positioning, display, box model, css grid and flex box.
In JavaScript, you should have a knowledge about syntax and basic constructs, learn dom manipulation, learn fetch api, ajax, ecmascript 6 and modular javascript.
Then you need to start learning about Package Managers, in this you can learn npm and yarn. npm is the latest technology, but still behind yarn in some features. You can select one of them.
Then you have to learn about CSS Preprocessors, which should be SASS and PostCSS.
You can learn about CSS Frameworks, in this you should know about Bootstrap 4.
You can start learning about CSS Architecture, with modern frontend frameworks, there is more push towards CSS in JS methodologies.
Now you can build tools, Task Runners, Module Bundlers, Linters and Formatters. In task runners, you can use npm scripts. In module bundlers, you can use webpack and rollers.
After completing all these steps you need to choose a Framework, it should be Reactjs, Angular and Vue.js. Then use CSS in JS and then test your apps.
Web Development Basics -
It's pretty apparent that if you want to become a web developer, then you should know the basics of the internet, web applications, protocols like http. In general you have knowledge about web development.
HTML and CSS -
HTML and CSS are the backbones of any website, html provides the structure and css provides the style and helps them to look better. If you want to become a serious frontend developer then you must master these two.
JavaScript -
Just like the four pillars of object oriented programming, encapsulation, abstraction, polymorphism and inheritance. Web Development has three pillars, which are HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
HTML and CSS provide structure and style but Javascript makes them alive by adding Interactiveness.
TypeScript -
Just like in programming, we should know about C and C++, the same as TypeScript, which is considered as JavaScript++.
TypeScript is also a programming language developed by Microsoft and also maintained by Microsoft. It is a superset of JavaScript. It is designed for the development of large applications.
Angular -
Angular is a web application framework. It is a typescript based free and open source framework. It is developed by the Angular Team of Google. Angular is an enhanced form of AngularJS, it is completely rewrite.
In the starting phase you should have knowledge about HTML, CSS and JavaScript. But these days, most of them work on Angular, Vue.js, Reactjs and Typescript.
They provide short and simple code which consumes low storage.
Reactjs -
Like Angular, Reactjs is also a very popular library to develop web applications. Reactjs is developed and maintained by Facebook Team. Most people work on reactjs instead of php and other programming languages.
Reactjs is an enhanced form of PHP and we can also include HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Backend Web Developer Roadmap -
To become a backend web developer, you need to know about some languages.
So the first step is to pick a language.
It should be Functional Language and Scripting Language.
In functional language you need to learn about Java and .Net and in Scripting language you need to learn about Python, Ruby, PHP, Node.js and Typescript.
After learning all these languages, you need to start doing practice, as a beginner you need to do the practice.
Implement those commands you have learned. Learn about the Package manager and start implementing this. Learn about Testing and Bug Fixing.
Start knowing about Relational Database and Framework. You can learn MongoDB Database, it is enough to know about databases and uses of databases. Then start gaining knowledge of Web Server like Apache.
Node.js -
Same as reactjs, node.js is mostly used by maximum web developers. Like reactjs, node.js allows you to make complete web applications using a single language which is Node.js.
Java -
Mostly in the starting phase, people start learning about java. And almost all made their first application using java. Java is a very old language but its popularity is not gone till now like C. Java provides 99% features of object-oriented programming.
Python -
Python is a trending Language, you should have a focus on python. You can make your career bright by learning Python. If you want to develop the back-end code using python then you can use Django. It is a Full Stack Web Development Framework for Python Programmers.
10 benefits of outsourcing Apparel Photo Editing for e-commerce business
Taking note of the powerful ecommerce businesses services have in common is that they all know how to distribute their goods to their customers. Marketing and other forms of online business promotion are needed. Photos or videos are crucial to achieving positive outcomes whether selling digitally or in the long run. Significant money, technology, or facility expenditures would be needed for in-house image editing services.
Image editing outsourcing service providers, on the other hand, may complete some kind of picture editing job at a reduced cost or in a very short amount of time. It is for this reason that photo editing should be delegated. As a result, my intention in this article is to discuss some additional benefits of outsourcing photo editing services.
1.Develop credibility:
Like no other, picture editing assists in the acquisition of authenticity. Ghost mannequin, True images, rather than stock pictures for the website, create a lot of confidence for a new business.
2. High-quality photos:
The most critical feature of any commodity is its high quality. Alternatively, a high-quality photograph may be the organization's magic bullet. Setting it up correctly for images will have a significant impact on the company's image or the whole item on the market. Ghost mannequin photography plays a vital role in the editing of high quality images, If you assign the tasks, you'll collaborate with photo editing experts who specialize in a particular area. This means that the item images for the online store are of the highest quality. Delegating the mission is a smart thing to do if you want to boost your company's reputation or just lower the cost of your product.
3.Large financial savings:
To process images efficiently, you'll need to use high-end technology instruments or applications that can cost thousands of dollars, as well as expensive computing machines. Alternatively, outsourcing will assist you in eliminating these costs. You also don't need to hire a full-time photo editing team in-house. Through Ghost mannequin photography you can save a lot of money. Image editing facilities offered by specialist photo editing agencies are either more intensively determined or more cost-effective than making one in-house. This will help you boost your profits while keeping your expenses low.
4.Enhance in Return on investment:
Since your company will waste less money on photo editing, you'll be able to invest more in expanding the firm, resulting in a better Return on Investment for each dollar invested.
5. Allows you to advertise your item much better:
The use of a great brand name has a huge influence on online purchases. When it comes to selling online, photographs will make or break a deal. By establishing a team you can carry out ghost mannequin photography in a very decent way. Customers would be enticed to buy the products if they have clear images of the goods. Alternatively, by doing that, the buyers would be able to buy the item again or provide you with feedback.
6.Touch into latest talent:
The demand for photo editing is immense. There are a range of companies or independent photo editing professionals that are very good at what they do.
If you're only interested in hiring employees from within your business, you're missing out on the better talent available in the wider market. You not only save a lot of time by contracting item images to picture editing firms, but you also start delegating responsibilities to professionals who are well-versed in the type of picture editing service that the business may need.
7. Achieve efficiency:
In every type of enterprise, efficiency is critical. The best way to make a company profitable is to execute assignments on schedule. Outsourcing certain resources will help you save time. Today's planet is a global village where people work every hour. And if working 24 hours a day isn't possible for you, having someone to assist you with a few tasks isn't difficult. Outsourcing work involves negotiating projects with people all over the globe and, as a result, obtaining benefits such as time productivity. Outsourcing allows you to spend more time on tasks that aren't directly related to your company and, as a result, achieve broader business goals.
8. Acquisition of new consumers:
With appealing item images, you can boost your marketing and sales routines and produce a lot more business. Image best editing will not only help you maintain a good relationship with your existing clients, but it will also definitely help you draw new ones.
9.Much better concentrate on primary business:
If dealing with pictures isn't your primary business, it's best to leave it to the pros. If image processing isn't your primary sector, it's best to outsource it.
10.Devoted services:
Outsourcing picture processing services may assist companies in producing beautiful photographs or pictures that represent their brand. Outsourcing not only saves you time but also allows you easy access to specialist photo editing services.
11. Brand Building
In order to create a brand, you'll need a lot of photos. To create a brand-aware edited image, businesses will focus on a particular style of editing, such as focusing on saturation of specific colors, displaying architecture, nature of images, topics used, concentrating designs, and so on.
And this leads to much higher customer recall for business decisions, as well as making them feel much more secure when purchasing a service or product.
12. Better Sales
The aim of photo editing is to improve the overall quality of the images. Great photo editors may quickly alter the complexion or quality of a picture to make it look more attractive to the general public, as seen in fast-food ads or how brands like McDonald's, among others, do it. High-quality images may have a significant impact on sales.
Conclusion:
Consumers in the civilized world rely solely on online retailers to make transactions because they not only save time but also provide them with multiple choices without having to leave their homes. Alternatively, virtually any company with an online footprint nowadays requires high-quality images to advertise, sell, or make their products popular with customers. As a result, if you want high-quality pictures for your website, delegate picture editing services to Belief eCommerce, as it will play a critical role in the success of your business.
You stood in front of the door, biting your lower lip and staring at the message on your phone. You'd been up for hours debating whether or not this could wait until morning. Waking up Steve Rogers in the middle of the was not something you wanted to do. Still, every instinct in your being screamed to do something.
Taking a deep breath, you rapped on the door a couple times and stood back to wait. It only took a moment for Cap to open the door wearing old sweatpants and a tank. He looked half asleep until he got a look at you. His eyes perked up and he stood a little straighter.
"Y/N," his voice sounded rough with sleep. "Are you okay?"
"I'm really sorry to bother you, but I just need to..." you stalled, not sure how to explain the problem without opening a can of worms.
“Wait,” he stepped aside. “Please, come in. Sit down.”
Moving over to the sofa, you lowered yourself onto the edge of the seat. “I’m really sorry to wake you, Steve.”
“It’s alright.” He joined you on the sofa. “What’s wrong?”
“Okay,” You rubbed your forehead. “I know that I don’t have clearance to know what Bucky is doing on some of his missions.”
“I don’t really care what he tells you. I trust his judgement.” He shrugged.
“Thanks for that.” You smiled, but it didn’t reach your eyes. The frown returned quickly. “Thing is, I don’t know what he’s doing this time or where he is. I need to know if you do.”
“Why?”
“We’ve worked out keeping in touch. Codes for texts. Call times.” You turned in your seat to face him. “This morning he didn’t answer. I send a message, but he never answered. Then he never called when he was supposed to call tonight.”
“Y/N, I’m sure that...”
You cut him off. “Steve, when I tried to call after he didn’t call me, I got this message.”
Showing him the phone, he read ‘This number cannot be reached. The number may have been disconnected or is no longer in service.’
“I know enough about Tony’s infrastructure. That message would only show up if someone deleted his phone from Stark’s database, if the satellite is totally down, or if someone is ghosting his communications.”
Steve handed you back your phone, his face growing hard.
“I’m right, aren’t I? Something is wrong.” You found yourself holding the phone close to your chest. “Bucky would have told me if he was burning his number. He would have sent a message. Hell, we have a plan for that.”
“What?” Steve stood up to get his own phone from the kitchen counter. “What plan?”
“If I need him and he’s not supposed to communicate, I have a burner phone that I’m supposed to use to text him a bogus confirmation. If it’s medical, I send a prescription refill confirmation. If it’s something here in the tower, I send a spa confirmation. If it’s something else and I need him to call, I send a package delivery confirmation. He uses the same ones, but if he’s going off the grid, he sends me a cancellation of services confirmation. If we use C to confirm in the message, then we can call the burner phone. If we use a number to confirm, then there’s no contact.”
“Wow. You guys have it covered.” Steve dialed the two numbers he had for Bucky. Both kicked back the same message. “Okay, yeah. Something’s not right.”
“Steve. I’m not supposed to know. Bucky wasn’t supposed to set up our communication like he did.” You slumped back into the seat. “I know you’re going to go do everything you can, and I don’t want to put you in a bad situation-”
His hand rubbed your shoulder. “I’m going to make sure you’re kept in the loop. In fact, I’ll go have a talk with Tony about your clearance.”
“Thank you.” You got up and he held out his arms for a tight hug.
“Try to get some rest. Keep those phones close.” He ran his hand through his hair. “I’ll let you know as soon as I have anything.”
As soon as you left, Steve threw on some clothes before leaving for the command room. The halls were empty and dark, only the building’s AI lighting his way. Upon entering the command room, default start up protocols began booting computers and turning on monitors.
“Good morning, Captain.” F.R.I.D.A.Y.’s voice filled the room. “How may I be of assistance?”
“I need an update on Bucky and Clint’s mission.”
“According to their last communique, they tracked Mihov to Tasucu, Turkey anticipating he would lead them to the target within 24 hours.”
“Can you reach Barton?” Steve leaned on the smart table.
“Agent Barton’s telephone has been deactivated.”
“Other means?”
“No, Captain. His computer’s satellite connection is offline. There are no other mobility devices assigned for this mission.”
“Dammit.”
“F.R.I.D.A.Y., begin bio-locator protocol for Agency Barton and Seargent Barnes, authorization Rogers two-one-papa-six-juliet.”
“Yes, Captain. Search in progress.”
He moved to the window, looking out at the night sky. Twenty-four hours. They’d dealt with longer periods off line. At least they had a solid time frame of their disappearance, thanks to the communications arrangement Bucky set up. Still, a lot of ground could be covered in that amount of time.
“What the hell has you up at this seriously un-godly hour?” Tony walked in.
“Clint and Buck are missing.” Steve frowned. “Somehow their phones, everything are totally unresponsive to the network.”
“What?” Tony called up a virtual screen, flying through data and system architecture at a pace that made Steve dizzy. “Son of a bitch.”
Cap just gave him a ‘what’ look.
“They weren’t destroyed. I have a damage report protocol on all our toys. They’re not just powered off. I can power them up from here. They’ve just been, wiped. Whoever did this knew what would trigger an alert and how to make them unreachable.” Tony turned fully to Steve. “How did you know?”
Steve lowered himself in a chair. “Y/N.”
He explained the system you and Bucky worked out. Tony chuckled. “Well, the Doc has it down.”
“Yeah,” Steve agreed. “We need to talk about her security clearance.”
“Hey,” Tony held up his hands. “I’m the last one to bitch. Do you have any idea how much Pepper knows? That woman could run the world if she wanted to. I’ll back you. Whatever you want to let her in on.”
“We’re going to need to send in an extraction team as soon as we have a location.” Steve chewed his lip.
Tony sighed. “You take care of it. Take whomever you need. I’ll give Rhody a call and we can take care of the Senators.” He tossed a sarcastic grin. “I’ll take them to lunch and watch them have a coronary when I act like I’m going to slide them the bill.”
“Thanks, Tony.”
“No problem, Cap.” He typed in a few more commands on the interface. “This will kick of the detailed analysis of their mission so far. Locations, contacts, all of it. If you run into anything F.R.I.D.A.Y. can’t provide, have her call me.”
“I will.”
“You going to tell the Doc what’s going on, or wait until you have something?”
“I think she’d rather deal with the facts than be left wondering.” Steve sighed. “I’ll call her.”
o o o o o
You curled around Bucky’s pillow, but sleep would not come. There could be no doubt that Bucky was counted among the most dangerous people in the world, one of the greatest survivors ever. If something bad happened, every logical argument could be made that if anyone would, survive, Bucky would. You should not be so worried.
Flopping over on your back you stared at the ceiling. Waiting sucked. Doing nothing sucked worse. You weren’t a soldier, or a strategist, or even a technician. Being a doctor proved to be no help in this situation. Waiting sucked balls.
Giving up on sleep altogether, you got up. Pulling on your yoga pants and one of Bucky’s sweatshirts, you moved to the sofa and flipped on the television. It turned on to one of the movie channels. You smiled at the scene.
Inigo Montoya fought Wesley, as the Dread Pirate Roberts, on top of the Cliffs of Insanity.
You’d shown Bucky this movie a few weeks ago. He laughed at the Pit of Despair and thought Wesley should have just killed Humperdinck. Even explaining it was essentially a children's story, didn’t make a difference. The Prince should have died.
It’d been a great night, relaxed, and curled up on the sofa. He’d always been fine with casual touches in public, a hand on your back, touches on your shoulders, even a chaste kiss. But when you were alone Bucky had two speeds, full on fuck me mode or endless cuddles, No in between. You really wanted to be wrapped in his embrace.
Lost deep in thought you physically jumped when the phone rang. You answered immediately. “Steve.”
“Hey, Y/N. You were right. The mission went sideways. I’m pulling the team together. If you want to hear what’s going on get up to the command briefing room. Do you know where?”
“Eighty-sixth floor. That’s all I know, I don’t have clearance to be up there.”
“You do now.” Steve assured you. “How long will you be? I can meet you at the elevators.”
“I’m leaving the apartment now.”
As you stepped off the elevator on the high security floor, Steve wrapped his arms around you again, whispering in your ear. “Don’t worry. I’ll bring him home, no matter what.”
“Thanks.” You squeezed him back.
“Come on.”
You walked into the room where Sam, Natasha, Wanda and Vision waited. They all looked at you with a bit of shock, all except Sam. He got up and met you half way across the room, giving you a brief hug. “Hey Doc, how you holding up?”
“I’m... okay.” You sat down in the seat Steve held out for you.
“Captain Rogers,” Vision spoke up. “I was not aware that Dr. Y/L/N held a sufficient security clearance for this briefing.”
“Vision.” Wanda shook her head with a roll of her eyes. “Sorry, Y/N.”
“She does now.” Steve answered Vision. “In fact, her clearance has been increased beyond this briefing.”
“Very well.” Vision nodded a greeting your way.
Over the next hour you learned everything about the mission, who Bucky and Clint were chancing down and why. It turned your stomach to think they were searching for someone who was selling reverse engineered space weapons to the highest bidder. Apparently, things went wrong somewhere on the coast of Turkey approximately nineteen hours ago.
“Captain Rogers.” F.R.I.D.A.Y.’s voice interrupted. “I have narrowed down the location of Agent Barton and Sergeant Barnes.”
“Report.”
The AI projected satellite footage of a small town, on the outskirts of which were a complex of modern warehouse and ancient stone buildings. It was approximately one hundred miles inland from where they were last reported.
The team listened to a detailed breakdown of the area and all potential threats. They asked questions, formulated a search and extraction plan. You barely heard any of it. Your eyes were focused on the image. Bucky was there somewhere.
“Suit up.” Steve stood. “We leave in fifteen.”
He stopped at your seat, “Y/N, do you want to come with us? You can stay at the safe house.”
“Okay.” You stood up, taking a deep breath. “I may not be a trauma doctor, but I could be of use in a pinch.”
“It’s not going to come to that.” Steve squeezed your shoulder.
o o o o o
You paced around the room. The clean minimalist design gave you nothing to focus on. Out in the middle of nowhere, Stark’s safe house looked like any other rich industrial mansion, but the interior held secret garages, a quinjet bay, and subterranean levels full of labs, storage and medical bays.
A tone alerted you to the landing of the quinjet. You ran down to the bay entrance, waiting for the jet to land and the outer doors to close. As the rear ramp to the quinjet lowered, you ran out.
Natasha and Wanda pushed Clint out on a stretcher. He was unconscious, filthy and had several fresh trauma dressings applied. Steve and Bucky came down next. Your eyes looked on him. A trauma dressing was wrapped around his right arm.
His blue eyes went from confusion to an unreadable intensity. He strode forward taking your face in his hands and kissing you hard.
“Doc!” Natasha yelled. “Barton needs help!”
You pulled away from Bucky, eyes locked on his. “Med Room! I’m coming!” You turned and followed them at a run.
Natasha helped you cut away the clothes from his wounds. He had a gunshot wound to the left shoulder and wound to the back of his head. Evidence of restraint and abuse littered his body.
“The shoulder is a through and through.” Natasha reported.
“Okay, let’s focus on the head wound.” You checked his pupils, they were even. Good. Beginning to pull out the mobile scanners, you directed Nat to help you get set up. Soon you confirmed he was lucky. No sub cranial swelling. No skull fractures.
You had Nat start him on an IV while you began suturing up his head wound. All you could do was stabilize his shoulder and temporarily close up the wound.
“Y/N?” Steve came in.
“He’s going to be fine. Lost a lot of blood. He should come around now that we’re getting fluids in him. No lasting head trauma that I can assess with what I have. I’ve immobilized the shoulder, he’s going to need an orthopedic in there sooner than later. He will be okay to fly as soon as we get his pressure back up.” You reported.
“Good.” Steve stepped a little closer. “As soon as you’re done your other patient won’t let anyone else touch him.”
You looked up into Steve’s eyes. Something between worry and amusement looked back at you. “He okay?”
“He thanked me for bringing you, and told me he was going to beat my ass for doing it.” Steve half smiled. “He’s going to need his arm cleaned and taped up until it heals. He wouldn’t let me do it.”
“Okay, I’ll be right there.” You pulled off your latex gloves.
You found Bucky in a room down the hall. It was just like any other basic examine room with an exam table, a wall cabinets, a counter with a sink and more storage. There were no windows, being underground. You locked the door when you came in.
As soon as the lock clicked over, he was on you.
Bucky’s hands buried in your hair. His mouth crashed into yours, desperately drinking down your kiss. Tongues and teeth, you met his need with your own. He smelled of dirt, sweat and gunpowder. Still, you wanted to drink him down.
His powerful body pinned you to the door, thigh pressing between your legs and practically lifting you off your feet. You pulled at his shirt, desperate for even more contact. Bucky leaned back enough to pull the shirt over his head.
“Your arm.”
“Later.” Bucky growled as he tugged your clothes off. “Need you.”
His mouth latched onto your neck. Your breasts pressed into his chest, skin hot. The sound of his breath, the feel of skin, the press of his body, it anchored that he was safe. He was here, in your arms, setting you on fire.
Bucky dropped to his knees, laying wet open mouth kisses across your belly as he undid and pushed down you pants. You toed off your shoes and he tossed your clothes away. The intense look in his eyes, as he ran his hands up your thighs, over your hips, your breath hitched.
He guided your right leg over his shoulder and growled as his mouth descended on your wet cunt. Bucky’s tongue delved between your folds, lapping up your honey. He sucked roughly at your clit, causing your back to arch and mewls of pleasure to pour from your mouth.
“Oh shit, Bucky.” You panted. “Need you. Yes.”
He suddenly stood, lifting you off your feet and planting your ass on the table. Bucky didn’t even loose the rest of his clothes, he just released his cock. You reached down, stroking him hard. He moaned, pulling you by the hair to possess your mouth again. Hitching your leg over his hip, you rubbed the head of his cock against your wet cunt. He growled.
Grabbing your ass, Bucky pushed into you. Inch by inch, you savored every sensation. The stretch, the weight. Your hands gripped his hair, teeth nipped his lip. “Fuck me, Buck. Hard.”
A raw feral sound erupted from his chest. His fingers dug into your ass, cock slamming into you with raw power. Yes. You just held on. Bucky’s groans and growled breaths filled your ears. “Fuck. Yes. Mine.”
“Yes!” Fear, worry, anger exploded into overwhelm need. Pleasure tinged with pain swirled through your core, flooding your body in heat. Legs shaking. Fingers pulling at his hair. Skin slapped on skin. Your orgasm hit you hard, fast, sending a flood over Bucky’s cock. He pound into deep as you clenched around him.
“Oh, shit, yes, Doll.” He panted. Buck press into you hard, hold you against him as he came. “Oh, fuck, yes!”
You clung to each other, not wanting to let go. Your breath slowed. Bucky’s lips trailed gentle kisses along your neck and shoulder. Tears you’d been holding back began to fall, only now they ran down your cheeks with relief.
Still holding you tight to his chest, Bucky whispered. “How are you here?”
“Steve.” You sighed, rubbing your nose along his neck. “I went to him.”
“I need to thank him,” he breathed. “Then I’m kicking his ass for bringing you into the field.”
Since Google Plus is going away, I’m going to back up Steve Yegge’s platform rant. And confirm the opening paragraph.
One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It's pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly.
Looooooong text below the cut
Stevey's Google Platforms Rant
I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It's pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.
I mean, just to give you a very brief taste: Amazon's recruiting process is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire for themselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despite various efforts they've made to level it out. And their operations are a mess; they don't really have SREs and they make engineers pretty much do everything, which leaves almost no time for coding - though again this varies by group, so it's luck of the draw. They don't give a single shit about charity or helping the needy or community contributions or anything like that. Never comes up there, except maybe to laugh about it. Their facilities are dirt-smeared cube farms without a dime spent on decor or common meeting areas. Their pay and benefits suck, although much less so lately due to local competition from Google and Facebook. But they don't have any of our perks or extras -- they just try to match the offer-letter numbers, and that's the end of it. Their code base is a disaster, with no engineering standards whatsoever except what individual teams choose to put in place.
To be fair, they do have a nice versioned-library system that we really ought to emulate, and a nice publish-subscribe system that we also have no equivalent for. But for the most part they just have a bunch of crappy tools that read and write state machine information into relational databases. We wouldn't take most of it even if it were free.
I think the pubsub system and their library-shelf system were two out of the grand total of three things Amazon does better than google.
I guess you could make an argument that their bias for launching early and iterating like mad is also something they do well, but you can argue it either way. They prioritize launching early over everything else, including retention and engineering discipline and a bunch of other stuff that turns out to matter in the long run. So even though it's given them some competitive advantages in the marketplace, it's created enough other problems to make it something less than a slam-dunk.
But there's one thing they do really really well that pretty much makes up for ALL of their political, philosophical and technical screw-ups.
Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not.
Micro-managing isn't that third thing that Amazon does better than us, by the way. I mean, yeah, they micro-manage really well, but I wouldn't list it as a strength or anything. I'm just trying to set the context here, to help you understand what happened. We're talking about a guy who in all seriousness has said on many public occasions that people should be paying him to work at Amazon. He hands out little yellow stickies with his name on them, reminding people "who runs the company" when they disagree with him. The guy is a regular... well, Steve Jobs, I guess. Except without the fashion or design sense. Bezos is super smart; don't get me wrong. He just makes ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies.
So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses.
His Big Mandate went something along these lines:
1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
4) It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.
5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
6) Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.
7) Thank you; have a nice day!
Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not give a shit about your day.
#6, however, was quite real, so people went to work. Bezos assigned a couple of Chief Bulldogs to oversee the effort and ensure forward progress, headed up by Uber-Chief Bear Bulldog Rick Dalzell. Rick is an ex-Armgy Ranger, West Point Academy graduate, ex-boxer, ex-Chief Torturer slash CIO at Wal*Mart, and is a big genial scary man who used the word "hardened interface" a lot. Rick was a walking, talking hardened interface himself, so needless to say, everyone made LOTS of forward progress and made sure Rick knew about it.
Over the next couple of years, Amazon transformed internally into a service-oriented architecture. They learned a tremendous amount while effecting this transformation. There was lots of existing documentation and lore about SOAs, but at Amazon's vast scale it was about as useful as telling Indiana Jones to look both ways before crossing the street. Amazon's dev staff made a lot of discoveries along the way. A teeny tiny sampling of these discoveries included:
- pager escalation gets way harder, because a ticket might bounce through 20 service calls before the real owner is identified. If each bounce goes through a team with a 15-minute response time, it can be hours before the right team finally finds out, unless you build a lot of scaffolding and metrics and reporting.
- every single one of your peer teams suddenly becomes a potential DOS attacker. Nobody can make any real forward progress until very serious quotas and throttling are put in place in every single service.
- monitoring and QA are the same thing. You'd never think so until you try doing a big SOA. But when your service says "oh yes, I'm fine", it may well be the case that the only thing still functioning in the server is the little component that knows how to say "I'm fine, roger roger, over and out" in a cheery droid voice. In order to tell whether the service is actually responding, you have to make individual calls. The problem continues recursively until your monitoring is doing comprehensive semantics checking of your entire range of services and data, at which point it's indistinguishable from automated QA. So they're a continuum.
- if you have hundreds of services, and your code MUST communicate with other groups' code via these services, then you won't be able to find any of them without a service-discovery mechanism. And you can't have that without a service registration mechanism, which itself is another service. So Amazon has a universal service registry where you can find out reflectively (programmatically) about every service, what its APIs are, and also whether it is currently up, and where.
- debugging problems with someone else's code gets a LOT harder, and is basically impossible unless there is a universal standard way to run every service in a debuggable sandbox.
That's just a very small sample. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of individual learnings like these that Amazon had to discover organically. There were a lot of wacky ones around externalizing services, but not as many as you might think. Organizing into services taught teams not to trust each other in most of the same ways they're not supposed to trust external developers.
This effort was still underway when I left to join Google in mid-2005, but it was pretty far advanced. From the time Bezos issued his edict through the time I left, Amazon had transformed culturally into a company that thinks about everything in a services-first fashion. It is now fundamental to how they approach all designs, including internal designs for stuff that might never see the light of day externally.
At this point they don't even do it out of fear of being fired. I mean, they're still afraid of that; it's pretty much part of daily life there, working for the Dread Pirate Bezos and all. But they do services because they've come to understand that it's the Right Thing. There are without question pros and cons to the SOA approach, and some of the cons are pretty long. But overall it's the right thing because SOA-driven design enables Platforms.
That's what Bezos was up to with his edict, of course. He didn't (and doesn't) care even a tiny bit about the well-being of the teams, nor about what technologies they use, nor in fact any detail whatsoever about how they go about their business unless they happen to be screwing up. But Bezos realized long before the vast majority of Amazonians that Amazon needs to be a platform.
You wouldn't really think that an online bookstore needs to be an extensible, programmable platform. Would you?
Well, the first big thing Bezos realized is that the infrastructure they'd built for selling and shipping books and sundry could be transformed an excellent repurposable computing platform. So now they have the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, and the Amazon Elastic MapReduce, and the Amazon Relational Database Service, and a whole passel' o' other services browsable at aws.amazon.com. These services host the backends for some pretty successful companies, reddit being my personal favorite of the bunch.
The other big realization he had was that he can't always build the right thing. I think Larry Tesler might have struck some kind of chord in Bezos when he said his mom couldn't use the goddamn website. It's not even super clear whose mom he was talking about, and doesn't really matter, because nobody's mom can use the goddamn website. In fact I myself find the website disturbingly daunting, and I worked there for over half a decade. I've just learned to kinda defocus my eyes and concentrate on the million or so pixels near the center of the page above the fold.
I'm not really sure how Bezos came to this realization -- the insight that he can't build one product and have it be right for everyone. But it doesn't matter, because he gets it. There's actually a formal name for this phenomenon. It's called Accessibility, and it's the most important thing in the computing world.
The. Most. Important. Thing.
If you're sorta thinking, "huh? You mean like, blind and deaf people Accessibility?" then you're not alone, because I've come to understand that there are lots and LOTS of people just like you: people for whom this idea does not have the right Accessibility, so it hasn't been able to get through to you yet. It's not your fault for not understanding, any more than it would be your fault for being blind or deaf or motion-restricted or living with any other disability. When software -- or idea-ware for that matter -- fails to be accessible to anyone for any reason, it is the fault of the software or of the messaging of the idea. It is an Accessibility failure.
Like anything else big and important in life, Accessibility has an evil twin who, jilted by the unbalanced affection displayed by their parents in their youth, has grown into an equally powerful Arch-Nemesis (yes, there's more than one nemesis to accessibility) named Security. And boy howdy are the two ever at odds.
But I'll argue that Accessibility is actually more important than Security because dialing Accessibility to zero means you have no product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network.
So yeah. In case you hadn't noticed, I could actually write a book on this topic. A fat one, filled with amusing anecdotes about ants and rubber mallets at companies I've worked at. But I will never get this little rant published, and you'll never get it read, unless I start to wrap up.
That one last thing that Google doesn't do well is Platforms. We don't understand platforms. We don't "get" platforms. Some of you do, but you are the minority. This has become painfully clear to me over the past six years. I was kind of hoping that competitive pressure from Microsoft and Amazon and more recently Facebook would make us wake up collectively and start doing universal services. Not in some sort of ad-hoc, half-assed way, but in more or less the same way Amazon did it: all at once, for real, no cheating, and treating it as our top priority from now on.
But no. No, it's like our tenth or eleventh priority. Or fifteenth, I don't know. It's pretty low. There are a few teams who treat the idea very seriously, but most teams either don't think about it all, ever, or only a small percentage of them think about it in a very small way.
It's a big stretch even to get most teams to offer a stubby service to get programmatic access to their data and computations. Most of them think they're building products. And a stubby service is a pretty pathetic service. Go back and look at that partial list of learnings from Amazon, and tell me which ones Stubby gives you out of the box. As far as I'm concerned, it's none of them. Stubby's great, but it's like parts when you need a car.
A product is useless without a platform, or more precisely and accurately, a platform-less product will always be replaced by an equivalent platform-ized product.
Google+ is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership (hi Larry, Sergey, Eric, Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leaf workers (hey yo). We all don't get it. The Golden Rule of platforms is that you Eat Your Own Dogfood. The Google+ platform is a pathetic afterthought. We had no API at all at launch, and last I checked, we had one measly API call. One of the team members marched in and told me about it when they launched, and I asked: "So is it the Stalker API?" She got all glum and said "Yeah." I mean, I was joking, but no... the only API call we offer is to get someone's stream. So I guess the joke was on me.
Microsoft has known about the Dogfood rule for at least twenty years. It's been part of their culture for a whole generation now. You don't eat People Food and give your developers Dog Food. Doing that is simply robbing your long-term platform value for short-term successes. Platforms are all about long-term thinking.
Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that's not why they are successful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work. So Facebook is different for everyone. Some people spend all their time on Mafia Wars. Some spend all their time on Farmville. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of different high-quality time sinks available, so there's something there for everyone.
Our Google+ team took a look at the aftermarket and said: "Gosh, it looks like we need some games. Let's go contract someone to, um, write some games for us." Do you begin to see how incredibly wrong that thinking is now? The problem is that we are trying to predict what people want and deliver it for them.
You can't do that. Not really. Not reliably. There have been precious few people in the world, over the entire history of computing, who have been able to do it reliably. Steve Jobs was one of them. We don't have a Steve Jobs here. I'm sorry, but we don't.
Larry Tesler may have convinced Bezos that he was no Steve Jobs, but Bezos realized that he didn't need to be a Steve Jobs in order to provide everyone with the right products: interfaces and workflows that they liked and felt at ease with. He just needed to enable third-party developers to do it, and it would happen automatically.
I apologize to those (many) of you for whom all this stuff I'm saying is incredibly obvious, because yeah. It's incredibly frigging obvious. Except we're not doing it. We don't get Platforms, and we don't get Accessibility. The two are basically the same thing, because platforms solve accessibility. A platform is accessibility.
So yeah, Microsoft gets it. And you know as well as I do how surprising that is, because they don't "get" much of anything, really. But they understand platforms as a purely accidental outgrowth of having started life in the business of providing platforms. So they have thirty-plus years of learning in this space. And if you go to msdn.com, and spend some time browsing, and you've never seen it before, prepare to be amazed. Because it's staggeringly huge. They have thousands, and thousands, and THOUSANDS of API calls. They have a HUGE platform. Too big in fact, because they can't design for squat, but at least they're doing it.
Amazon gets it. Amazon's AWS (aws.amazon.com) is incredible. Just go look at it. Click around. It's embarrassing. We don't have any of that stuff.
Apple gets it, obviously. They've made some fundamentally non-open choices, particularly around their mobile platform. But they understand accessibility and they understand the power of third-party development and they eat their dogfood. And you know what? They make pretty good dogfood. Their APIs are a hell of a lot cleaner than Microsoft's, and have been since time immemorial.
Facebook gets it. That's what really worries me. That's what got me off my lazy butt to write this thing. I hate blogging. I hate... plussing, or whatever it's called when you do a massive rant in Google+ even though it's a terrible venue for it but you do it anyway because in the end you really do want Google to be successful. And I do! I mean, Facebook wants me there, and it'd be pretty easy to just go. But Google is home, so I'm insisting that we have this little family intervention, uncomfortable as it might be.
After you've marveled at the platform offerings of Microsoft and Amazon, and Facebook I guess (I didn't look because I didn't want to get too depressed), head over to developers.google.com and browse a little. Pretty big difference, eh? It's like what your fifth-grade nephew might mock up if he were doing an assignment to demonstrate what a big powerful platform company might be building if all they had, resource-wise, was one fifth grader.
Please don't get me wrong here -- I know for a fact that the dev-rel team has had to FIGHT to get even this much available externally. They're kicking ass as far as I'm concerned, because they DO get platforms, and they are struggling heroically to try to create one in an environment that is at best platform-apathetic, and at worst often openly hostile to the idea.
I'm just frankly describing what developers.google.com looks like to an outsider. It looks childish. Where's the Maps APIs in there for Christ's sake? Some of the things in there are labs projects. And the APIs for everything I clicked were... they were paltry. They were obviously dog food. Not even good organic stuff. Compared to our internal APIs it's all snouts and horse hooves.
And also don't get me wrong about Google+. They're far from the only offenders. This is a cultural thing. What we have going on internally is basically a war, with the underdog minority Platformers fighting a more or less losing battle against the Mighty Funded Confident Producters.
Any teams that have successfully internalized the notion that they should be externally programmable platforms from the ground up are underdogs -- Maps and Docs come to mind, and I know GMail is making overtures in that direction. But it's hard for them to get funding for it because it's not part of our culture. Maestro's funding is a feeble thing compared to the gargantuan Microsoft Office programming platform: it's a fluffy rabbit versus a T-Rex. The Docs team knows they'll never be competitive with Office until they can match its scripting facilities, but they're not getting any resource love. I mean, I assume they're not, given that Apps Script only works in Spreadsheet right now, and it doesn't even have keyboard shortcuts as part of its API. That team looks pretty unloved to me.
Ironically enough, Wave was a great platform, may they rest in peace. But making something a platform is not going to make you an instant success. A platform needs a killer app. Facebook -- that is, the stock service they offer with walls and friends and such -- is the killer app for the Facebook Platform. And it is a very serious mistake to conclude that the Facebook App could have been anywhere near as successful without the Facebook Platform.
You know how people are always saying Google is arrogant? I'm a Googler, so I get as irritated as you do when people say that. We're not arrogant, by and large. We're, like, 99% Arrogance-Free. I did start this post -- if you'll reach back into distant memory -- by describing Google as "doing everything right". We do mean well, and for the most part when people say we're arrogant it's because we didn't hire them, or they're unhappy with our policies, or something along those lines. They're inferring arrogance because it makes them feel better.
But when we take the stance that we know how to design the perfect product for everyone, and believe you me, I hear that a lot, then we're being fools. You can attribute it to arrogance, or naivete, or whatever -- it doesn't matter in the end, because it's foolishness. There IS no perfect product for everyone.
And so we wind up with a browser that doesn't let you set the default font size. Talk about an affront to Accessibility. I mean, as I get older I'm actually going blind. For real. I've been nearsighted all my life, and once you hit 40 years old you stop being able to see things up close. So font selection becomes this life-or-death thing: it can lock you out of the product completely. But the Chrome team is flat-out arrogant here: they want to build a zero-configuration product, and they're quite brazen about it, and Fuck You if you're blind or deaf or whatever. Hit Ctrl-+ on every single page visit for the rest of your life.
It's not just them. It's everyone. The problem is that we're a Product Company through and through. We built a successful product with broad appeal -- our search, that is -- and that wild success has biased us.
Amazon was a product company too, so it took an out-of-band force to make Bezos understand the need for a platform. That force was their evaporating margins; he was cornered and had to think of a way out. But all he had was a bunch of engineers and all these computers... if only they could be monetized somehow... you can see how he arrived at AWS, in hindsight.
Microsoft started out as a platform, so they've just had lots of practice at it.
Facebook, though: they worry me. I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure they started off as a Product and they rode that success pretty far. So I'm not sure exactly how they made the transition to a platform. It was a relatively long time ago, since they had to be a platform before (now very old) things like Mafia Wars could come along.
Maybe they just looked at us and asked: "How can we beat Google? What are they missing?"
The problem we face is pretty huge, because it will take a dramatic cultural change in order for us to start catching up. We don't do internal service-oriented platforms, and we just as equally don't do external ones. This means that the "not getting it" is endemic across the company: the PMs don't get it, the engineers don't get it, the product teams don't get it, nobody gets it. Even if individuals do, even if YOU do, it doesn't matter one bit unless we're treating it as an all-hands-on-deck emergency. We can't keep launching products and pretending we'll turn them into magical beautiful extensible platforms later. We've tried that and it's not working.
The Golden Rule of Platforms, "Eat Your Own Dogfood", can be rephrased as "Start with a Platform, and Then Use it for Everything." You can't just bolt it on later. Certainly not easily at any rate -- ask anyone who worked on platformizing MS Office. Or anyone who worked on platformizing Amazon. If you delay it, it'll be ten times as much work as just doing it correctly up front. You can't cheat. You can't have secret back doors for internal apps to get special priority access, not for ANY reason. You need to solve the hard problems up front.
I'm not saying it's too late for us, but the longer we wait, the closer we get to being Too Late.
I honestly don't know how to wrap this up. I've said pretty much everything I came here to say today. This post has been six years in the making. I'm sorry if I wasn't gentle enough, or if I misrepresented some product or team or person, or if we're actually doing LOTS of platform stuff and it just so happens that I and everyone I ever talk to has just never heard about it. I'm sorry.
But we've gotta start doing this right.
Architecture On The LAMP Environment AWS Existing Stack
The data layer of the solution consists of fully managed, scalable and highly available services such as DynamoDB and Amazon S3. DynamoDB provides a NoSQL datastore for storing structured data with low latency access. Amazon S3 offers an extremely robust and scalable archive of objects for storing photos, videos, binary data and other files that can be accessed directly via HTTP. Data stored in Amazon S3 can be stored in the Amazon Glacier service by applying a storage policy to the S3 bucket. Identity Management Amazon Cognito can simplify user authentication and authorization, and gives customers the ability to authenticate users with Amazon Cognito user pools, social identity providers, or their own identity management system. Amazon Cognito offers users access capabilities and integrates with Identity and Access Management AWS, adding additional security features to the mobile backend and simplifying the management of important security features for your app. Interface to access the user interface Log in with Facebook, Google and Twitter Add user access and access workflows to your applications for onboarding customers by supporting your apps with a fully managed multi-factor authentication service. You can also authenticate users through social identifiers such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+. This feature is provided by Amazon Cognito. Architecture Guided by Events AWS Lambda simplifies the implementation of event-based architectures that do not require permanent resources. Lambda hosts the backend logic for mobile apps. Lambda automatically runs the code in response to events and assigns resources to resolve requests as needed. In this way, you can provide the mobile application with a minimum logic to simplify scaling and updating. AWS Lambda automatically monitors lambda functions in your order and reports metrics via Amazon CloudWatch. To help troubleshoot problems, Lambda logs all feature requests and automatically logs logs through the Amazon CloudWatch logs. App Store Amazon Cognito Sync supports reading and writing in a local data store. This means that your app can work the same way, regardless of whether the device is online or offline. You can also save user data such as user preferences, logins and game status and then synchronize that data on the user's device for a consistent experience. Amazon DynamoDB offers a managed and highly available NoSQL database for storing and querying app data by eliminating unnecessary client and content mining downloads. Amazon DynamoDB includes granular access control to follow best practices of minimum privileges for lambda functions that query specific data Mobile Push Notifications Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is a fast, flexible and managed push notification service that allows you to send push notifications to mobile users, email recipients or send messages to other simple and inexpensive distributed services. Mobile push notifications send messages directly to apps on mobile devices that can be viewed in the mobile app such as message notifications, badge updates, or even audible notification. Disaster recovery planning The underlying AWS services used by the solution provide built-in fault tolerance and high availability using multiple zones of availability in each area to protect against single computer or data center failures. For better understanding visit
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. Conclusion Serverless architectures with PaaS offers from the leading public cloud AWS offers the ability to deploy scalable and available applications without the need for capacity planning and server configuration. The ability to independently scale the web, logic, and data levels allows optimal performance of the overall solution.
We’ve all read the post-canon Cardassia fic where Bashir is either visiting or living with Garak while doing medical work on the planet. They’re not really in a relationship yet, but they’re friendly. Well, imagine this... but then imagine if Bashir happens upon two teenagers who are the last people Garak or any other upstanding or even half-upstanding Cardassian would want to associate themselves with -- and Bashir of course wants to help them. It could ruin their friendship... or maybe transform it? Without giving away all the twists and turns of this trilogy, I’ll reveal that it’s the latter; their lives, and the teens’ lives, are transformed in all kinds of ways. Nothing comes easy, though.
Background:
I came across this amazing three-parter, by Henrietta Wotton, a couple of years ago and I was all set to share it last summer when nooooooo! I got a 404 on it. But thanks to the waybackmachine, I found it again -- all three parts. And rather than risk losing them to the sands of time, posting them here below. Inevitably somebody will have to use waybackmachine to find this too, but at least it’s 14 years later. I have read this over and over on the copy I put on Instapaper (imported from waybackmachine) and I sooooo think it’s worth saving.
Note:
The poll I posted earlier today is running 96% saying “We want more fic recs!” so I’m immediately giving people what they want! :)
Metadata
Title: “Taking In Trouble” | “Letting In Love” | “Kudos”
Author: Henrietta Wotton
Year Posted: 2004
Approx. Word Count: 23,000
Chapters: 3 (stories)
GB - Slash or Platonic: Slash
My Rating (1-5): 5
Keywords: Post-Canon Cardassia, Cardassian Class System, Friends to Lovers, Teenage Prostitution, Cultural Misunderstandings, Sexual Hangups, Deafness
Taking in Trouble
The two moons orbiting Cardassia Prime stood high above the horizon, casting grotesque shadows onto the winding paths of the ruined Park of State Heroes. Now, a year after the end of the Dominion War, most of the rubble to which the planet had been reduced by the Jem'Hadar had been vaporized or recycled. The new ruling council had decreed that the blasted statuary of the looming war memorials here remain as they were, however. The purpose, the plaque at the park's entrance stated, was "to remind all Cardassians of the consequences of our past." The only addition took the shape of a new statue, honoring Damar as the martyred leader of the Cardassian Resistance. It stood at the center point where all the paths converged. Surrounding it were a grove of bacherben bushes, their silver petals and waxy green-black leaves glistening in the moonlight.
Dr. Julian Bashir paused to contemplate the memorial, as the heavy, warm breezes of Cardassia Prime rattled through the foliage. He'd often felt the urge to tear off his suffocating Starfleet uniform during the past five weeks that he'd been in the Cardassian system. Thankfully he was off-duty now. He had changed into the open-weave turquoise Tholian tunic and navy blue silk shorts he'd bought the last time he and Ezri had been on Risa. But he wasn't thinking of Ezri now, or of the victims of the Cardassian holocaust, but of his old friend Garak. More precisely he was thinking of a certain path their relationship had appeared destined to follow, and the detour it had taken instead.
Bashir had known from the minute they met that Garak was interested in a sexual relationship, and he had also known that there would never be one unless he himself made the first move. That he had not done, for a host of reasons, not least that someone with a very dangerous secret in his own past didn't need to invite the stepped-up Starfleet intelligence scrutiny that a liaison with a former Cardassian spy would inevitably bring about. Many times he told himself that he should simply back off from the friendship, since he wasn't prepared to take it through to a physical level. Jadzia used to chide him frequently about "leading poor Garak on," and he had to agree that she was right. Yet he had persisted in their lunches, a relationship by appointment only, feeling that the absence of any spontaneous invitations to get together on other occasions would give Garak fair warning that any further intimacy wasn't in the offing. Did Bashir himself desire further intimacy? He resolutely refused to consider the question, since it couldn't happen, no matter what he desired.
Then the secret of his genetic enhancements came to light, and everything changed. But Garak changed, too, mocking him as computer or Vulcan and spending ever more time with Ziyal. What did you expect, Julian, old man? he had thought. It's the rare person who isn't put off by the idea of sleeping with some unnatural freak, re-invented in a laboratory. So he had taken comfort in the acceptance shown by Miles and both Daxes and consigned any longing for Garak to the category of transient fantasy.
Recently, however, that longing had ambushed him in a very odd fashion. After the Cardassian holocaust, Starfleet Medical had rushed in personnel to treat the survivors, and the Cardassians had at long last made all their medical, biological, and physiological databases available to outsiders. Bashir kept finding himself drifting away from the sections on infectious diseases and the effects of cold and hunger, and instead studying in great detail everything he could download on Cardassian sexuality. He recalled his surprise, given the strict Cardassian prohibitions against "non-procreative practices," that both Cardassian males and females came equipped with self-lubricating anal passages lined with highly sensitive nerve clusters quite as capable of producing pleasure as those found in their genitalia. What a waste! he mused. And then came the further realization: You've wanted nothing these past eight years, Julian Bashir, so much as to aim your dart squarely at the center of that inviting, round Cardassian backside of Garak's.
Bashir had cursed himself for arriving at this realization only after Garak had left the station, but he knew that physical distance wasn't the main obstacle to their becoming lovers.. He and Garak had in fact been together a number of times since Bashir had returned to DS9, leaving behind the tailor, spy and Resistance fighter to begin the mammoth task of restoring his devastated planet. The ruling council had appointed Garak its special envoy to Bajor, and he often came to the station en route to various contentious meetings with first minister Shakaar and the new Kai. Twice Julian and Ezri had joined him and Col. Kira for dinner.
No, it wasn't physical distance, it was emotional distance. Garak and Bashir had replaced their weekly lunch appointments with weekly subspace conversations. Yet Bashir always felt a certain awkwardness between them in these instances, as if they were going through the motions of having once been friends, but were friends no longer. This awkwardness convinced him that he had irretrievably lost the moment at which he and Garak might have consummated their relationship. Therefore, when the doctor was assigned to assess whether the Cardassian medical infrastructure had recovered sufficiently for Starfleet to reassign the many physicians, nurses, and health technicians it had stationed throughout the system during the past year, he almost hesitated to inform Garak that he would be "in the neighborhood." Bashir had considerable doubts whether the Cardassian would welcome him.
As it turned out, the doctor was glad he had informed him, because the announcement brought a warm invitation to visit Garak on Cardassia Prime if he could find time to take "a little vacation" between performing his inspections and returning to Deep Space Nine. The Garak who greeted him at the spaceport, however, was the same distant Garak of the subspace chats. He had no sooner taken Bashir to his house and shown him the guest quarters, than he announced that he would be involved in long discussions with a Klingon delegation until late into the evening.
Bashir had killed some time exploring Garak's new dwelling. The Federation had rebuilt the house of Enabran Tain upon its old, ruined foundation, an acknowledgment of his friend's great service during the Dominion War. They'd worked from the original plans, but Garak complained that "Federation utilitarianism" had crept into the design, and that the beauty of the original had been lost. Julian studied the architecture carefully, so as to be prepared for the debate about the Federation's lack of taste that would no doubt accompany their dinner. Then he took a very long sonic shower, changed into his civvies, and, feeling restless and not a little apprehensive at soon being alone with Garak, went for a walk that brought him here to the memorial park. Part of him felt that he had judged correctly, that it was too late for intimacy. Another part, though, more stubbornly hopeful than the first, knew that it wasn't only the Cardassian heat that had made him put on this particular outfit.
"Hey, Terran, want some scales?"
Bashir jumped. It was as if someone had just been reading his thoughts. The voice came from behind the bacherben thicket. Bashir instinctively reached for his phaser. Garak had warned that the catastrophe had obliterated the once vaunted safety of Cardassian streets. "Who's there?" he called out in his sternest tones.
"Don't ruffle yourself. This studder's no robber." Two figures emerged from the shadows. Both had unkempt, shoulder-length hair and nearly identical height, build and features. They looked to be only a year or two past puberty. That they were a boy and a girl became apparent only from the trousers on the one who was speaking, and the dress on the one who was not. As they slowly approached him, the boy kept talking in what were obviously meant to be seductive tones.
"Any sport that appeals, we can do." He grabbed his crotch and gyrated suggestively. At the same time, the girl fondled her breasts through the thin material that revealed her utter lack of undergarments. "Want a girl, Moxh is game. Want a boy, Kadz is ready. Or we'll do each other and let you watch. Only one strip of latinum. Want us both, that's just another strip."
Bashir gazed at them horrified. They were little more than children. He'd read about abandoned urchins selling themselves on city streets on hundreds of worlds throughout hundreds of centuries, but he had never come up against the sordid fact of it like this. All he wanted to do was get away from them. "Sorry, not interested," he said, turning and heading swiftly for the path out of the park.
But the boy ran after him, persisting in his sales pitch. "You know you're curious how the Cardies do it. We always leave our sports satisfied." He stationed the girl in front of Bashir, blocking his way, and began to raise her dress over her head. "Don't go before you see what you're missing," he cajoled, giving the doctor a lewd wink.
"I told you I was not interested," Bashir repeated, pushing both of them aside. As a result, the girl lost her balance and fell, triggering a spasm of gasping and coughing. The doctor halted, raising her to her feet and taking a good look at her for the first time. Her eyes were red, and the tips of the scales on her neck looked white and brittle. He'd seen the symptoms often enough in the Federation resettlement centers for homeless Cardassians. In the crowded conditions a fairly minor respiratory virus had mutated into a potentially fatal disease. Many Cardassians had perished before a combined Federation-Cardassian research team developed an anti-viral agent.
"Listen," Bashir said to the boy, "your friend--"
"My sister, my pouch mate.. Pretty game sportin' with two of a kind, eh?"
"Your sister is very ill." Bashir resolutely put to one side the fact that the boy had offered to "do" his twin for a customer's amusement. "She shouldn't be out... sporting... in her condition."
"Some of them do, as a matter of fact." Bashir couldn't suppress a grin at the boy's expression of medical certainties. "But you're right, azmeri fever doesn't jump from Cardassians to humans."
"How do you know?" Kadz asked suspiciously.
"I'm a Federation doctor, and I'm telling you that you should get your sister to the nearest hospital immediately."
"Oh, no. Hospitals don't take accies, 'less it's to cut us up." The boy grasped his sister's hand and began to lead her back to their lair behind the statue.
Suddenly Bashir found himself doing the following, as he pursued the retreating pair. "Wait. What do you mean? What are accies?" His universal translator didn't seem to be coping very well with the boy's slang-filled street patois.
Kadz stopped and looked at him as if he were extremely stupid. "Acci-dentals, you know." Bashir shook his head, still not comprehending. "Kids not meant to be born, accies with no parents," the boy explained with a world-weary air.
Ah, now Bashir understood. Garak had long ago told him that children without parents had no place in Cardassian society. Somehow the doctor had never considered thoroughly just how appalling the end results of such a social policy could be. "Well at least take her home, put her to bed with lots of blankets, and give her plenty of liquids to drink."
"How long you been on Prime, Fedder, you think accies got homes and blankets?" The boy inquired sarcastically. "Half the gitters is homeless these moons. Me and Moxh live in those bushes there. And we'd best go back to them and wait for some sport that's eager."
"She could die if she doesn't get the proper care, " Bashir implored. "Back where I'm staying, I've got some medicines that can help her. What do you say, Moxh? Will you come with me?"
"She might, for the overnight rate," Kadz replied, his expression showing renewed interest in the possibility of profiting from the "Fedder."
Bashir had to restrain himself from punching the insolent street urchin in the mouth. "I want to help Moxh, not sleep with her. And I'm talking to your sister, not you. Let her answer," he insisted.
"Can't. Doesn't talk. Doesn't hear. Born that way. But Kadz takes care of her, he does."
Take care of her, by turning her into a whore? Bashir thought to himself. Could the situation get any more dismal, he wondered, torn between pity and revulsion. "Fine. I'll pay the overnight rate. Both of you just follow me."
"That's more like it, sport. Good time guaranteed. Coulda saved lots of time if you'd just said you wanted to do it at home in the first place, though," Kadz said in reproachful tones as he fell in behind the doctor with his sister in tow. Bashir ignored him, except to sigh a very deep sigh.
"Tell your sister to lie down on that sofa there," Bashir instructed Kadz, once he'd accomplished the considerable feat of getting Garak's multi-access-code-encumbered front door to open and ushered the two young people into the Cardassian's living room. "I'll go get my medical bag."
Retrieving the bag from the guest room, Bashir also picked up a blanket that was folded at the foot of the bed. When he came back to the living room Kadz was sitting cross-legged in the center of the room, while Moxh had herself posed seductively on the couch, totally naked. Just as Bashir had suspected. It was the reason he'd brought the blanket. The doctor quickly covered her with it, took out some of his medical scanners, and began his examination. He immediately ascertained that his diagnosis of azmeri fever had been correct, so he filled a hypospray with the antiviral agent and put it to her neck.
"Don't have to drug her up to make her willing," Kadz offered. "Unless playing doctor gets you excited."
"Look, I am not playing doctor. I am a doctor. I am treating your sister for an illness, and I have no intention of having sex with her."
"Sure, sure," the boy replied, totally unconvinced. His sister was evidently of the same mind, because she grabbed Bashir's hand and pulled it under the blanket to rest on her breast. He snatched it away and turned to the boy. "Please tell her just to lie still and keep her hands to herself."
"If that's the way you like it," Kadz said, making gestures in his sister's direction. "She'll be as quiet as the dead now."
Bashir leaned down and ran his scanner over the boy, who amazingly showed no infection from the virus. He refilled the hypospray and pressed it to Kadz's neck. "Hey, hey," the boy squealed, rising to his feet and putting several meters between himself and Bashir. "Kadz don't need drugging up either."
"This will simply help prevent your catching what Moxh has," Bashir reassured him. "Now, why don't you come into the kitchen and get something to eat while I finish my examination."
"Thought you'd want privacy at some point."
Bashir stifled an angry response and led the boy to the replicator in the adjoining kitchen. "Just tell the computer what you want."
"Heard of these. Never used one." For the first time, the boy actually seemed somewhat uncertain of himself. "Two zabu steaks?" When they materialized, he jumped back a few centimeters, then laughed and removed the food to the table. "A dozen regova eggs. A larish pie. A cup of yamok sauce. A bottle of kanar."
"That's quite an appetite you have," Bashir grinned.
"Got to save some for Moxh."
"I'd go easy on the kanar, though. Aren't you a little young for that?"
"Been drinking it since I got my second molars. Moxh too. Helps on cold nights."
"Well, cheers and bon appetit, then," Bashir said darkly. The boy only raised a quizzical eye-ridge and fell to with relish. The doctor returned to his patient.
Moxh was indeed lying as motionless as the dead. Bashir's scanner hummed as its data readouts told the depressing story. Malnutrition, no surprise. Complete absence of the auditory nerve, a congenital deafness that no advanced medical wizardry could fix. A number of ulcers and topical infections, a secondary effect of the azmeri fever. He pulled down the blanket and treated each one in turn with a sonic debrider and a dermal regenerator. There was a particularly nasty accumulation of peccant matter around the hinge of her birthing pouch, and after he had cleaned it out, he knew why. The two lips of the pouch were still about a centimeter apart. Bashir cursed inwardly, tried to give the girl a smile that conveyed reassurance, and charged straight ahead to where Kadz was wolfing down his feast.
"Your sister's had a baby recently. Where is it?" Bashir hissed.
"Mff," Kadz hastily swallowed half a regova egg. "Don't ruffle. Came early, came dead," he responded matter-of-factly. He took a mouthful of kanar and looked up at the doctor's scowling face. "Good thing. Saved me getting rid of it. My mate Zanto showed me with his girl's first acci, how to cover up the nose and mouth till it stops breathing, but turned out I didn't have to."
"I'm sure you were terribly disappointed at not being able to show off your skills at infanticide." Bashir made no effort to conceal his disgust.
The boy glanced away, but not before the doctor thought he spotted a flicker of genuine emotion in the until-now hard, bright eyes and belligerent features. "No. Wasn't looking forward to it." Then Kadz glared back at him in defiance. "Would have done it, though, don't you doubt it. No choice in bad times. But Moxh would have been hard to manage after. Had herself set on keeping it. Must have caught some of our mo-mo's soft-headedness. I mean," he continued expansively as the kanar took effect, "Can you grab it, two accies at once, and the girl a dummy besides, and she don't throttle either?" The boy shook his head in bewilderment and took another drink.
"Where is your mother now?" Bashir asked.
"Gone. One, two moons after the Jemmies came. Went out to find sporters, never came back. Maybe she got grabbed by sec, maybe she got cracked by a bad one, maybe she found a keeper with no taste for accies hanging around."
"Surely you don't imagine that your mother would just abandon you to become some man's mistress?"
"Why not?" Kadz shot back. "Moxh and me was earning our keep. Good for mo-mo, if she finds a keeper 'fore her sporting days are over."
In the unforgiving street life the boy had been born into, his sentiments were perfectly logical, Bashir reflected. The fewer children born into such a life, the better. "I'm going to give Moxh another injection, one that will make sure she doesn't have any accies for at least a year," he told the brother.
"You got that stuff, Fedder?" For the first time, Kadz seemed to take him seriously as a doctor. "Ara Beldon on Kheramka Square sells it, but most of us studders can't pay her price."
"It's free of charge from me," Bashir returned with a smile. "You finish your meal here, and I'll go inject your sister with the contraceptive and offer her a few eggs and a slice of pie. Then I'll give her something so she can sleep--alone."
When Bashir returned to the girl, she'd made a good start toward falling asleep without requiring any of his healing arts. Her eyes were half closed and her breathing regular. He put the hypospray to her neck and then shook her gently. She blinked and flashed a sleepy smile. The provocative seductress was nowhere to be seen. This was only an exhausted child. Bashir helped her sit up and offered her the plate. She snatched at it eagerly and began cramming in the food with both hands. The doctor patted her on the head and turned back toward the kitchen to keep his eye on Kadz.
Kadz had left the kitchen, however, and Bashir's eyes met the boy striding toward him, barechested, his tunic cast over one shoulder.
"If you've not jumped Moxh yet, I'd say it's the boys that gets you worked up, eh, Fedder?" the young Cardassian smirked, as he sinuously stepped out of his trousers. "Kadz is ready to pay for the meal, he is." He displayed himself front and back to Bashir. "Is the coin to your liking?"
"Don't be ridiculous. Put your clothes back on at once!"
"You've not said how the scales and ridges strike your fancy." The boy had moved to within half a meter and was undoing the fasteners on Bashir's shorts. Whatever protest the doctor was preparing to make next died in his throat, however, as the door slid open and Garak walked in. Good God, there go my hopes for a romantic evening, the doctor thought, dismayed.
"Uh . . . this isn't what it looks like, Garak." Bashir stammered. The Cardassian's understandable expression of surprise had not turned into amusement at Bashir's plight, as the doctor had expected. His features were tight with anger, more naked anger than Bashir had ever seen him display. He hurriedly poured out further explanation, "Or rather it is what it looks like but... you see Kadz's sister there has azmeri fever and when I brought her here for treatment, Kadz got the wrong idea and... oh, for heaven's sake, Kadz, put your clothes back on."
Still Garak stared at the two of them in anger and did not speak. The tense situation did nothing to curb the ever-voluble Kadz, however. "Didn't tell me you had a keeper, Fedder," he said as he lazily stepped into one trouser leg, "And a jealous one too, by the look of him."
Garak fixed the boy with a malevolent stare of the most icy imaginable blueness. "I am not Dr. Bashir's keeper. He and I are old friends, and I am offering him my hospitality while he is on Cardassia Prime as part of his duties to Starfleet Medical." The words were all cordiality, the tone all threat.
Kadz appeared oblivious to the danger. "Sure, sure, all you twofie gitters got some story." He finally pulled his trousers all the way up, but, remaining shirtless, approached Bashir and draped himself over his shoulders. "You're a bit of an old one to keep him all to yourself," the boy remarked to Garak. "Sure you're not going to rob him of a nice young pretty like Kadz. You can always join the fun too, or just watch, if that's your sport."
Bashir hastily disengaged himself. "Kadz, how many times do I have to tell you that you've got this all wrong--" Suddenly Garak sprang, like a razorcat, grabbed the boy by the shoulders and shoved him up against the far wall. "Dr. Bashir is in no mood for your street boy impudence, and neither am I," he hissed. "Is that understood?"
Kadz thrashed and kicked in Garak's grasp, earning a knee to his groin. He gasped in pain and fell still. "Is that understood?" Garak repeated. The boy nodded vigorously, eyes wide and struggling for breath. Garak continued to hold him pinned to the wall, a look on his face that reminded Bashir of Miles's account of the time Garak had lost his reason on Empok Nor. The doctor moved to the Cardassian and put his hand on his shoulder. "Garak," he said, trying to sound calm. "Let him go."
Garak took a couple of deep breaths and then favored Bashir with his customary urbane smile. "Of course, doctor." He released his hold, ambled over to a chair, sat down, and crossed his legs, the picture of casualness. Yet Bashir saw clearly that he was trembling with rage.
Kadz had scurried over to where his tunic lay on the floor. He pulled it over his head, retrieved his sister's dress, and then grabbed Moxh up off the couch, where she had huddled in terror while the confrontation was in progress. "Can't say that Kadz stays where he's not wanted," the boy whispered to Bashir as they headed for the door.
"You can't go," Bashir implored him. "Moxh still needs more treatments." Kadz glanced sideways at Garak and shook his head. Bashir turned to Garak also. "Please, Garak, she's very ill."
"She may stay if you think it best, doctor." The Cardassian's tone hardened. "But not him."
The boy shook his head again. "Kadz and Moxh is a team--unless you're meaning to keep her. Kadz wouldn't stand in her way, if you make it worth his while."
"You'd sell us your sister, just like that?" Bashir exploded, but Garak rose calmly and addressed the boy. "Wait here," he said. He disappeared into his bedroom and emerged a minute later carrying a bar of latinum. "I think this will more than compensate you."
"No lies!" Kadz exclaimed, his eye-ridges rising half way up to his hairline. "Just let me give Moxh the score." He began to communicate with his sister in their private sign language, at some length. She nodded several times and signed back briefly. "She's game," the boy said to Bashir and Garak and then walked out of the house without looking back. Moxh returned to the couch, crawled under the blanket, and appeared to settle down for a nap. No teary good-byes, no last embraces, just a business deal concluded to the satisfaction of all parties. A Ferengi couldn't have done it better, thought Bashir.
Garak rubbed his hands together and turned to his friend, all smiles. "Ah, now that we've settled that delicate matter, I'm taking you out to dinner. There's a charming restaurant at the Federation recreation compound on the third moon of Cardassia Five-- the place all the dedicated relief workers repair to when the dust and the stench become too much for them. We heroes of the Cardassian Resistance have honorary guest privileges, of course."
Bashir stared at him in disbelief, at the mood change, at his decision to act as if nothing out of the way had happened. "But Garak, surely you don't think we should go off and leave the girl here alone?"
"Of course we should. She's asleep already, probably won't even realize we're gone. She'd doubtless prefer not to be disturbed by strangers in any event."
Bashir would have thought it impossible for Garak to grow any more inscrutable than he had been on the station, but clearly it had happened. The doctor had no idea what could be motivating him to treat the presence of a naked and feverish child prostitute on his living room couch as a matter of no importance. But he'd violated Garak's hospitality by bringing the two of them here in the first place, and he had no choice but to go along with what his host had planned. "I suppose I should change clothes before we go to this restaurant," Bashir asked, "something a bit more formal?"
"That would be appropriate," Garak concurred. "Oh, and while you're changing, my dear doctor, a cold sonic shower would also be advisable." His gaze halted deliberately at the decided bulge barely masked by the silk shorts.
"Uh, right, it won't take a minute," Bashir replied, blushing furiously.
"Take all the time you need, doctor," Garak purred.
They travelled to the moon in the runabout that the ruling council had assigned to Garak to facilitate his diplomatic efforts. All the way there, and through the appetizers, and the main course, and the dessert Garak made relentless small talk. He regaled Bashir with pointed barbs about Klingon intransigence and Bajoran grudge-holding and inquired about Kira and Ezri and Miles and the recent progress of the Sisko baby. Bashir numbly returned equally superficial answers, feeling more and more that he was in one of his holosuite programs talking to a mere simulacrum of his Cardassian friend. The doctor waited for some acknowledgment of that rage he had seen in Garak's eyes hours before and some kind of explanation for it. None was forthcoming.
Finally, on the return trip, he brought the subject up himself. Walking back from the replicator with a cup of Tarkalean tea in hand, he said. "I'm sorry for bringing those street children into your home, Garak. I never should have done it without your permission."
"No, you should not have, doctor. But when you see healing to be done, you don't ever stop for social niceties, do you? At any rate, there's no permanent harm done."
"You certainly seemed angry at the time."
"That little vermin's insolence could try anyone's patience. I was angry at him, not at you," Garak replied, in a manner that suggested there was nothing more to say.
Bashir tried another tack. "You know, those two have very odd names. Kadz and Moxh don't sound like any Cardassians I've ever encountered."
"They aren't names in the ordinary sense of the term. Sometimes these trash haven't even been given a name, just dumped on the street with no identity. Most of them usually pick up some slang nickname and use it, as our young visitors have," Garak chuckled.
"Why do you laugh?" the doctor asked, perplexed at Garak's complete lack of feeling for the twins' plight.
"'Kadz' and 'Moxh' are particularly vulgar street terms for male and female genitalia."
Bashir practically choked on his tea. "My God! I suppose they believe in truth in advertising."
"Apparently."
"That slang of Kadz's is pretty impenetrable. Half the time I didn't know what he was talking about. When he called us "twofie gitters," for instance."
Garak let Bashir's comment hang in the air for several seconds. To explicate it apparently meant committing himself to discussing the incident in depth, and the doctor had concluded from all the evening's evasions that he decidedly did not want to do so. Garak shifted in his seat uneasily. At length he spoke in subdued tones, staring out the view screen. "A twofie gitter is a bisexual of legitimate birth, the class of men that makes up the bulk of Kadz's clients, the class to which the boy erroneously presumed you and I belong, doctor." Then the Cardassian sucked in his breath and looked Bashir in the eye, "At least I presume that he is in error?"
"Garak, you can't believe that I wanted that boy, that I brought him back with me for any other purpose than to help his sister?" Bashir hadn't expected the conversation to take this turn.
"No, I never thought that," Garak smiled enigmatically.
"I know that's what it looked like when I became aroused," Bashir rushed on. "But I can assure you I felt no attraction for him whatsoever."
"Of course you didn't. Kadz makes his living arousing the bodies of men who have no attraction whatsoever toward him. I'm sure his hands are very skilled--"
"No, Garak, it wasn't like that--"
"I once knew a pain technician in the Order, Groblo," Garak continued, as if he hadn't heard the doctor's denial. "He had grown up like Kadz, servicing men on the streets. Sometimes when interrogations were dragging on and getting nowhere, he'd put down the instrument, pass his hands over the subject's body a few times, and bring him to arousal and climax, just like that. These were men in agony, mind you, an agony this fellow had inflicted. Yet he could get their bodies to respond just as if the touch were that of a lover rather than a torturer. Groblo said these little exercises of his helped ease the tension. Although I'm afraid I always thought them in questionable taste. An interrogation room is no place for parlor tricks, wouldn't you agree, doctor?"
"I'm afraid I have little use for anything that goes on in Cardassian interrogation rooms," Bashir returned with some heat. Why had Garak told him this chilling anecdote? Was this his friend's revenge for broaching the subject of Kadz and his advances?
"I was simply trying to show you that I understood the effect our young visitor could produce," Garak explained amiably, "not to defend my former profession."
"I'm surprised that someone with an 'acci's' background would be employed by the Order," Bashir pushed the point. "You've told me that these street children have no legitimate place in your society."
"Ah, the Order was always a special case. These accies have no scruples, as you've seen. That can make them very useful as informers, assassins or torturers. Of course, there was never a question of trusting them with any of the higher-level activities, those involving sensitive state secrets. Anyone that would sell his mother--or his sister--without qualm, wouldn't hesitate to sell out Cardassia if the price were right."
Bashir nodded, but did not otherwise comment. The conversation was too depressing to continue. Apparently any hope he'd had of restoring his friendship with Garak to its previous level of intimacy had vanished at the moment Garak saw Kadz standing there naked. He set his teacup down and idly glanced over at the navigational array. They were only a few minutes from entering orbit around Cardassia Prime. It was going to be damned uncomfortable with the girl still there in Garak's house. Once the reality of her situation sank in, she was bound to get agitated, and neither of them even knew how to communicate with her. What a mess he'd made of things!
"It's hard to believe that Moxh won't panic when she realizes that her brother really has abandoned her for good," he said softly, thinking aloud.
"Oh, don't concern yourself about that," Garak replied while making some course adjustments. "He hasn't abandoned her at all. The minute we were out of sight, she will have opened the door for him, and the two of them will have spent an hour or so looting my house. I made sure to secure anything of real value, but you'll have to get Starfleet to reimburse me for a depleted replicator power unit, which I'm sure they've quite used up in provisioning themselves."
"What?" Bashir exclaimed. "How can you know that?"
Garak smiled one of his patented infuriating smiles. "It's a very old street trick. That's how Mila ended up becoming Tain's housekeeper. He'd brought her home for an evening's pleasure and found her unconscious inside his front door the next morning, still grasping a bag full of the contents of his safe. She'd not anticipated his disrupter field that triggered every time anyone tried to exit the house without giving the proper security code. When she failed to divulge the identity of her accomplice, despite Tain's most persuasive entreaties, he decided that someone who could keep a secret that well might be of use to him. So he let her stay rather than turn her over to the security forces."
"So you think we'll return to find Kadz and Moxh unconscious inside your door?"
"Not at all, doctor. We'll find them gone. I deactivated my disrupter field."
"But the girl is ill, she can't just go back to the streets," Bashir protested.
"I'm sorry to annul your generous impulse, but I can't allow either of those creatures to remain in my house. They will at least leave better-supplied for survival than when you found them." Garak's tone left no doubt that the subject was closed.
Bashir had no intention of letting the matter drop, however. Nevertheless, he judged that a slight change of tactics was in order. "You seem to know quite a bit about the way these 'creatures' operate. Did Mila share the secrets of her past with you?"
Garak glared at him. "You are one of the most infuriatingly persistent young men I have ever met," he said. "No, Mila did not care to speak of her past with me, and no, I did not engage in long conversational sessions in which Order operatives who came up from the streets reminisced about the good old days." His features hardened, as he went on, "It was Tain who made sure that I was intimately familiar with the kinds of lives that children lived on the streets, so that I would appreciate what he had spared me by taking me under his protection. Of course, there was always the implied threat that he could send me out there to fend for myself if I didn't please him."
I should have suspected that Tain had something to do with this, Bashir thought. Whenever Garak starts behaving irrationally, it always seems to go back to Tain. "I can see why having those 'accies' in the house disturbed you then," the doctor murmured.
"Good, I'm glad you do--at last," Garak replied. "Now, we've achieved docking orbit, and we're going to beam down to my residence. I trust that as a thoughtful guest you will not bring up this subject again."
The place was a shambles, or at least the kitchen and living room were. (Garak had not disabled the security system that blocked off the other rooms with force fields upon attempted unauthorized entry.) As Garak had predicted, the replicator's power cell was completely exhausted, the blanket and sofa pillows gone and every drawer opened and looted, with items of no interest tossed all about the floor. The Cardassian went back to his bedroom and returned with a replacement cell. "Doctor, if you would go into the replicator menu and reproduce my couch cushions and the blanket, I'll tidy up the rest."
After the pillows materialized, the doctor repositioned them on the sofa. As he backed up to see if they were properly aligned, he inadvertently brushed his buttocks against those of Garak, who was bending over to pick up some of the items from the floor. The physical contact produced an overwhelming desire that astonished Bashir with its force. No matter how unpropitious the evening had been thus far, he had to disclose his true feelings to Garak.
The Cardassian was returning several PADDs to a drawer in his computer workstation. Bashir stepped in front of the desk and leaned forward. "Garak, it wasn't Kadz's skills that gave me an erection earlier," he began.
"My dear doctor, I told you I don't want to talk about Kadz any further," Garak said, his voice rising.
"Just hear me out. What aroused me was seeing how angry you were, how jealous of him, because that told me that you wanted me again."
Bashir saw a dozen subtle changes come over Garak's posture and features, as if he were a vessel that had suddenly lowered its shields. "Wanted you again, doctor?" he said in a whisper.
"You can't expect me to believe that you didn't want me once. But after you found out about--" Two elegant gray fingers were suddenly pressed to his lips. "Shh, shh. I'm not denying that I had once wanted you, I am telling you that I've never stopped wanting you." Garak caressed Bashir's lips with a brush of the fingertips and stepped back a few paces. "But am I now to understand that you want me?"
Bashir broke out into a broad grin. "Of course! Why do you think I brought this up?"
Garak cocked a skeptical brow-ridge. "And what do you think Counselor Dax will make of all this?"
"A month ago Ezri told me that she wanted to put our relationship on hold till I properly sorted out my feelings for Miles and for you. Now, the thought of making Miles my lover, it was ridiculous. I couldn't even begin to imagine myself in bed with him. When I thought about you that way, however, the scenario seemed perfectly logical. After all, for weeks before I'd been reacting to Cardassian anatomical schematics as if they were pornographic pictures." Bashir stepped to the side of the desk while the Cardassian moved out from behind it to meet him. The doctor took Garak's head in both hands and kissed him hard, reveling in the leathery texture of the lips and then the sensations of the strong and agile tongue that soon thrust itself inside his mouth. At length the Cardassian broke off the kiss, and when Bashir caught his breath and leaned forward again, Garak pushed him back with a soft touch of his hand to the doctor's chest.
"I've thought about this moment for so long, my dear boy," Garak began a little hesitantly. "And I'm afraid I've constructed a rather elaborate ritual fantasy of how I would want us to begin. Will you humor me in this? I think you'll find it very pleasurable."
Bashir paused to consider for a split second. What would it be like to live out one of Garak's fantasies? Immediately the answer came, it will be bliss--you wouldn't have kept longing for him all this while if you didn't trust it to be so.
"I am completely at your disposal," Bashir replied, smiling. "Just tell me what you want me to do."
Garak took his hand and led him into the bedroom. "Why, doctor, I don't want you to do anything at all." The Cardassian helped him out of the white linen jacket Bashir had put on over the oatmeal colored, open-necked shirt that Garak had made for him for a birthday present when he turned thirty-five. He folded it neatly on a chair, then unbuttoned the shirt and slipped it off Bashir as well. Placing each of his hands on his partner's shoulders, Garak applied to each a series of brief patting motions, as if he were straightening a garment on one of the mannequins in his tailor shop. He stared into the younger man's eyes with an expression of tenderness Bashir had never seen on his face before. Slowly one hand moved down Bashir's breast-bone and continued on to his navel, while the other massaged each of his vertebrae in turn. Bashir inhaled sharply at the intense and totally unexpected pleasure these motions produced in him. Soon Garak was covering him with light caresses to all sorts of places that Bashir had never considered very erogenous--the flesh inside his upper arms, the hollow at the base of his skull, his collarbones. With every touch the pleasure grew more and more exquisite. He moaned softly, and his legs felt weak. Garak put an arm around his waist to keep him from falling and guided him expertly to the bed. Bashir sat down and leaned back, balancing himself on his forearms and elbows. Garak deftly relieved him of his linen trousers, made a soft sound of surprise when he found no underwear beneath them, and then used a few vigorous strokes of his hands to relieve him also of the pressure that had built up in his eagerly awaiting cock. Bashir groaned with delight as he reclined fully on the bed.
"Did you find my little fantasy enjoyable?" Garak whispered as he leaned over and kissed Bashir lightly on the lips. Bashir reached up and pulled the Cardassian down beside him. "Indescribably so," the doctor said. He was, and was not, telling the truth. Certainly the pure physical sensations had been breath-taking. Garak was a master of technique. Yet there was something distant and remote about the whole experience--Garak making him stand there like a mannequin while the Cardassian remained fully clothed, receiving no stimulation himself, using only his hands, not his mouth or his cock. I suppose it's meant to be a special gift, giving all the pleasure and taking none yourself. And Garak does like to control situations. Still, I'd expect any man's fantasy to involve pleasure for himself, first and foremost.
Bashir's own fantasies were definitely less refined and predicated on more mutual satisfaction. Well, his moment had arrived. "Now it's my turn, Garak," he said, breathing heavily. "I can't promise to do it quite so . . . artistically as you." His eager hands pushed up Garak's tunic till it gathered just above the breast ridge. Then he thrust his thumbs under the fourth rib bones on either side. There he felt the small patches of scaleless skin his research had told him were there.. He pressured the area again and again with his fingertips while his mouth worked the scales on Garak's neck-ridges. The Cardassian gripped him hard across the back and thrust his body up to meet his lover's touch. Bashir kept on until he felt Garak grow hard beneath him. He slid off the bed, pulling down the Cardassian's trousers and loincloth as he went. His tongue worked the delicate edges of the softer scales at the base of the cock while his hands returned to the even softer skin beneath the ribcage. "Ah... doctor... uhh..." Garak groaned, "I see... you... ahhh... studied the schematics... ohh... very well."
Bashir raised his head. "Elim, don't you think it's about time you called me Julian?"
"I think you have a point, Julian," Garak nodded and pushed the human's head down to his crotch. Bashir took the Cardassian's cock into his mouth and slid his tongue up and down the shaft. "Oh, yesss, Julian, ohh yess," Garak repeated as he writhed beneath his lover, while gripping him tightly with strong calf muscles. His climax came quickly thereafter, all in a rush of gray foam that made Julian pull back a little as it streamed against the back of his throat.
Garak gave a contented sigh and released the grip of his legs, letting them dangle over the edge of the bed. The doctor rose to his feet, gratified that his efforts at pleasuring Garak had reinstated his own ability to act out his long-cherished fantasy, what he had been so impatient to do that all that had gone before seemed mere foreplay. He trembled at the thought of sliding his organ between the rippling scales that fanned out on both sides of the Cardassian's buttocks. Julian launched himself with a little spring onto the bed, rolled the panting Garak over, and climbed astride him, hands reaching inside the cleft--only to find himself flat on the floor a second later, expertly tossed off with one motion of Garak's left leg. He gave an inquiring look at his partner, wondering if this were some kind of Cardassian love play. Garak had sat up and was looking back at him with a serious expression. "No, Julian, there will be none of that," he said, calmly but firmly.
"None of what? Do you mean no fucking?" Bashir asked incredulously.
"Precisely. In Cardassian culture, no man would ever even consider fucking a man who was his equal. Such impulses are generally worked off with the assistance of little vermin like your friend Kadz."
Bashir clambered up and sat beside Garak. "It doesn't mean that in my culture at all. I had no intention of trying to assert my superiority over you. To me it's just the way of achieving complete closeness, getting inside your lover--figuratively as well as literally. If it will make you feel more comfortable, you can fuck me first."
"I would never take what I was not prepared to give, Julian." Garak sighed. "Because I have always kept my origins... mysterious... many of the Cardassian men with whom I became involved believed that they had a right to master me. None of them ever succeeded. It is a violation I could never allow, no matter how desperately I wished to satisfy a lover. The situation became so frustrating that I had resolved to restrict my sexual partners to women. Then I saw you sitting there in the Replimat, my dear boy, and my resolve evaporated. But even for you, this is something I cannot tolerate."
Julian struggled to hide his massive disappointment. He would not try to manipulate the situation by playing on Garak's fear of displeasing him. Now that they were finally lovers, the last thing he would risk was to hurt Garak through insisting on his own kind of gratification, no matter how fervently his cock was calling out for it. "I would never ask you to, Elim," he said, running his fingers through the Cardassian's sleek black hair and planting a kiss on his "spoon."
Garak responded by tracing the outline of Julian's right ear with his expert forefinger and flicking his tongue over the doctor's slightly parted lips, making the doctor's erection ache even more. "Don't despair, my dear. I can guarantee you that you will nevertheless not lack for pleasures while we're together." And with that he bent down his head and proved his point.
Letting in Love
Lake Ent'rakh sat in a small valley formed midway up the face of the tallest mountain of the Shimat chain that ran along the coastline of the northernmost tip of Cardassia Prime's northern continent. Here temperatures rarely exceeded 10 C. in full daylight--an unusually bright daylight--and fell well below freezing during the very long nights. Hardly a climate for heat-loving Cardassians, and no permanent Kardasi settlements had ever been established here. However, Lake Ent'rakh held a secret that the ancient Hebitians had discovered. Beneath it churned the molten core of a volcano not yet gone dead, as all the others in the Shimat chain had. Its waters therefore maintained a constant 27 C. temperature, and the Hebitians had duly established a combination resort and retreat here in the otherwise deserted mountains, its purpose to "chill the fevered spirit and warm the cold heart."
It must have been a remarkable sight in its day, Bashir reflected. A wall four meters thick and twenty meters high had ringed the entire lake. Archways opened out of it every ten meters, their interiors decorated in intricate patterns with thousands of tiny, multi-colored gemstones. At the portion of the wall which faced the entrance into the valley, a curving stairway led to the top. Garak told him that eight swaying rope bridges had allowed passage from one side of the wall to the other, but that a true spiritual experience required that a visitor walk the entire circumference, a distance of more than ten kilometers, before descending by these same stairs and then diving into the warm and welcoming waters. Now only about a fifth of the wall remained, in a dozen freestanding sections. The stairs no longer existed, the rope bridges had rotted centuries ago, and the gemstones had been torn out by generations of desperate men and women hoping to stave off starvation during one or the other of Cardassia's recurrent famines. And yet, even in it's ruined state, the place was magnificent. Garak had planned the excursion even before they became lovers. "I wanted you to see what we were before nature conspired against us and we lost our way," he had said solemnly upon their arrival. "Fortunately, they had no energy weapons when the Hebitian civilization fell, and its traces still linger. All that was ancient and beautiful in my Cardassia has been vaporized clean and replaced with bright new Federation functional."
Their first day here they had hiked the entire perimeter of the lake in the four hours of daylight that came around between 26 hour stretches of chill darkness. Today, the second and last of their camping trip, they had spent in the water. Bashir's enhanced reflexes enabled him to catch in his bare hands a dozen of the silver and rose colored fish that darted everywhere in the azure green water. They planned to cook them over an actual fire when night fell and hunger beckoned. Then Garak had suggested they swim to the opposite shore and back. It surprised Julian somewhat how strong a swimmer Garak was for a man of his years. As long as the doctor did not particularly exert himself, the Cardassian kept pace at his side. Three-quarters of the way back, however, Bashir's exuberance took hold, and he crossed the remaining meters at the maximum speed his special gifts allowed, leaving Garak far behind.
Now he treaded water a small distance from shore and studied his lover's approach. Garak swam in a very peculiar way, at least to human eyes. He held the top of his head out of the water just below his nostrils, leaving the rest submerged. All four limbs churned underneath the surface as well, rarely causing the slightest wave or ripple. As Bashir watched, he realized that all those racist jokes about "Cardies" as lizards or snakes had got their reptiles mixed. What the man swimming toward him resembled was more powerful, more dangerous by far. And Julian had to admit that he had always been attracted to danger. Ah, my clever, charming crocodile, he said to himself, as he set out with rapid strokes to enfold the Cardassian in an embrace. Then, like a rescuer pulling a drowning man to safety, he practically dragged Garak ashore, where they made passionate love just as the sun began to dip beneath the horizon.
They were ironically spending the nights in pure Federation functional, a small emergency tent, thousands of which spread across the emptied landscape of Prime to house homeless Cardassians. They'd brought four portable heating units, and the interior temperature, even at night, was for Bashir a comfortable 15 C., but Garak complained constantly of the cold, and spent all his time wrapped in or huddled underneath three superinsulated thermal blankets. Julian felt lucky he had been able to persuade Elim to sleep naked under the blankets, but he found snuggling beneath them so stifling that he kept having to get up and cool off. They'd only been asleep an hour when he fought his way out of the covers, went over to the water container, and poured a cup of the icy liquid over his head. He dried off with a towel, stepped out into the cold night for a few seconds, and only then felt shivery enough to dive back into the overheated cocoon with Elim. The Cardassian was sleeping heavily, his breathing deep and regular. Julian slipped in beside him, his chest nestled against the scaly back, his head resting on the shoulder just where the neck bones stopped. Garak shifted slightly but soon grew still.
Why did I wait so long for this? I'm so happy, Julian's no longer sleepy mind told him. Unfortunately, his body told him something else. What was the matter with him, that he still longed to fuck Garak. Hadn't his lover shown him countless ways to experience exquisite pleasure without any necessity for penetration? Was it because most of his previous partners had been women, that he didn't think you'd really made love unless you'd stuck your cock in someone's hole? He could just hear Elim saying, "What an unimaginative notion, my dear boy, so narrow-minded." Nevertheless his cock was now definitely ready to poke itself in between those silver gray buttocks. Bashir cursed his weakness and reached down to do something about the situation. As if it had a will of its own, however, his hand instead delved down into the scale-lined crevice. Garak stirred and murmured softly. Julian let his index and middle fingers probe further, past the guardian muscles, to stimulate the pleasure cluster he knew lay right beyond. The Cardassian's body jerked as if an electric current had passed through it. Now fully awake, he arched his back and moaned loudly. Julian rubbed harder and faster, and his lover's cries increased in tempo accordingly. "Oohh, my dear, go deeper, deeper," Garak whimpered.
"I'd have to use my cock for that," Julian said ruefully.
"Yes, yes, do it."
What the hell was going on? After all Elim's protestations about not tolerating anal penetration? Was this another of his elaborate obfuscations, designed to work Bashir up into this very state? Well, he certainly wasn't going to refuse the long hoped for invitation. He quickly straddled his lover and thrust eagerly as Garak writhed in apparent ecstasy. Try as he might, Julian couldn't prolong the experience to the extent his partner would obviously have preferred. He came in a convulsive rush, and withdrew, rolling over on his back in a haze of bliss.
Without a word, Garak was on him, flipping him onto his back and pinioning his wrists with a powerful grip while he used his knees to spread Bashir's legs so that he could, seconds later, slam into him hard. Bashir was momentarily puzzled. Garak had shown absolutely no interest previously in playing rough, but then he had shown complete aversion to fucking, too. Obviously their sex games were simply being switched into a different register. Just enjoy the excitement, Bashir, he told himself.
Human anal clefts were definitely not self-lubricating, but fortunately the fine scales that lined a Cardassian's organ ruffled out, soft and moist, when the man was fully aroused. The first time he saw it, Bashir had thought "feather duster"; the first time he had taken it into his mouth, he revised the metaphor to "cotton candy on a stick." Still, the impact of Garak pounding away at him, coupled with the uncomfortable position of his arms, was not making this the most pleasant fuck he'd ever experienced. "Elim, can you take it a little easier?" he said.
For an answer, Elim jerked his arms back in an extremely painful way, and, matching his syllables to the rhythm of his thrusts, barked, "Doc... tor... for... once... in... your... life... just... shut... up."
Julian felt a little frisson of fear. This seemed to be something other than his partner's desire for new kinds of sexual stimulation. Everything in Garak's voice said rage, not passion. The doctor reassured himself with the knowledge that his superior strength and agility would allow him to break free if he felt in danger of serious injury. Besides, how much longer could the Cardassian keep this up? He had always come very rapidly in Julian's hands or mouth. Now, however, he seemed unwilling or unable to let go. He grunted with each thrust like a man chopping away with an ancient axe at a tree that refused to fall.
For what seemed like an eternity to his partner, the Cardassian labored, until at last his body stiffened. He gave a shrill cry like that of an animal howling at the moon, and Julian felt the rush of warm liquid inside him. Then Garak uttered another cry, almost like a sob. He let go of Julian's wrists and clambered up. The doctor rolled over and got to his feet, seeing that Garak had retreated to the far corner of the tent. He was standing there naked, his back turned, and his whole body heaving convulsively. Partly it was the cold, but the rest of it was either grief or anger. Bashir couldn't tell. He gathered up one of the thermal blankets and made to wrap it around Elim's shoulders. Without turning to look at him, Garak pushed him away savagely.
"Elim, what's wrong?"
"Wrong?" came a strangled reply. "Surely you cannot have failed to notice that I just raped you."
"Raped me? How can it be rape when I've been begging you to fuck me for the past five days. Granted you were a little more forceful than--"
Garak turned around then, his face anguished. "Oh, please, doctor, spare me the hair-splitting. It was my intention to violate you, to master you utterly, and I know that you are quite intelligent enough to realize it."
"All right," Bashir went on, carefully measuring his words. "You warned me that you wouldn't tolerate being fucked, and I pressed on anyway. Your reaction wasn't exactly welcome, but it's psychologically understandable. I shouldn't have been so eager to take a few drowsy syllables as consent. Although you certainly did seem to enjoy the whole process."
"Oh yes, I did enjoy it. I've never felt anything so erotic in my life. That was the problem." Garak's voice was filled with a bitterness and self-loathing Bashir had only heard once before, when the Cardassian was having his worst moments of withdrawal from the endorphin implant. "And just as my pleasure was about to crest, I heard HIM, as clearly as if he were standing in this tent. He laughed at me. 'So, Elim, at last we see you for what you really are. All that veneer of sophistication and cleverness, all that fine appreciation of literature and art you acquired under my protection, it can't hide the fact that you're the bastard son of a street whore who can find no greater joy than letting himself be fucked up the ass by his betters.' Suddenly I was overcome with the irresistible urge to take you and dominate you and prove to Tain that he was wrong, that I belonged on top, that I was nothing like that contemptible piece of filth, Kadz."
"Kadz?" Bashir said incredulously. "Do you mean to tell me that you hate him so much because you think you might have become him?"
"Of course. Isn't that the obvious reaction? Suppose you were to encounter a young man who had been born with limitations similar to yours, and had not had the good fortune to be genetically enhanced. Wouldn't the sight of him fill you with hatred?"
Bashir shivered. The unreconstructed Jules was a figure who stalked his nightmares. "I think he might frighten me, Elim, but I wouldn't hate him. I would hope that I would simply feel sympathy for him."
"Pity," Garak snorted. "No thank you."
"Not pity, compassion. Is that not an emotion known to Cardassians?"
Garak didn't answer. Instead he began to put on his clothes, then to roll up the blankets. "Gather your things, doctor," he said at length. "I can't bear to remain here. I'll drop you off at the nearest starbase."
Julian gripped him by the shoulders and forced him to look him in the eye. "I agree we should get out of here, but I won't leave you like this. We'll return to your house. I'll move back into the guest room. We'll forego being intimate until we can rebuild each other's a trust, a step at a time. I won't give up on us, Elim."
"Always the optimist," Garak whispered, his face a picture of hopelessness. "Very well, we'll go home together, for all the good it will do us. Although I can't fathom how you can stand to be anywhere near me, after what I've done."
Julian had lain in his bed sleepless, replaying the disturbing events over and over in his mind. So he leapt up immediately when the security alarm sounded. But Garak had reacted even more quickly. The Cardassian stood checking out the video feed from his external security cameras. Underneath the whine of the alarm, the doctor's ears discerned a series of dull thuds. Someone was pounding on the front door. Bashir came up behind Garak and looked at the screen as the rate of the pounding accelerated. Its source was about the last he would have imagined. Moxh stood outside, kicking at the door desperately while struggling to hold up Kadz, who leaned against his sister, supporting all his weight on his right leg, while the left dangled a few centimeters off the ground, twisted into an unnatural shape. A bone protruded at mid-calf. The boy's head lolled like a rag doll's upon the girl's shoulder. His face was a blur of blood and bruises.
"Garak, what are you waiting for? Let them in," the doctor insisted.
"Not so fast. It might be a trap."
"I doubt that he beat himself to a pulp just so he could get another crack at your replicator."
"No, but whoever did this to him might be using those creatures to gain entry." Garak gestured at Bashir with his disrupter. "Get your weapon also, and we'll risk opening the door."
Julian went to his room, shaking his head at Garak's paranoia. Still, he supposed that his friend had made plenty of enemies with very long memories during his career in the Obsidian Order. He would probably never be able to let his guard down. The doctor retrieved his phaser from his luggage and stood to one side of the door, covering Garak, as the Cardassian programmed it to open. The two young people stumbled inside as the door immediately slid back and locked behind them. Moxh looked around in dismay at the two men's weapons and froze for several seconds before pushing her brother toward the doctor. She uttered strangled cries of distress while imploring him with frightened brown eyes, still rheumy with the after-effects of her illness.
"My God!" Bashir exclaimed after getting a close look at Kadz's injuries. He swept the boy up in his arms and started barking orders, not now lover or houseguest but CMO. "Garak, beam up to your runabout and bring down the emergency medkit. I'm taking him into the guestroom. When you get back, I'll need all the blankets you have in the house." The doctor half expected a protest, but Garak only nodded silently and did as he had been requested.
That Kadz had made it to Garak's house from the park, the assumed location of the attack, was nothing short of a miracle. The cuts and bruises looked to be a day or two old. His sister must have dragged him here slowly, meter by meter. The boy was now only semi-conscious, dehydrated and delirious. And in excruciating pain. Every step Bashir made, every arrangement of his patient on the bed brought a little bleat of agony. The doctor fumbled through his bag, took out the most powerful painkiller he had and injected Kadz with the maximum dose. By this time Garak had returned with the medkit. The doctor started some intravenous fluids and then began the arduous task of trying to repair the damage.
He found his efforts impeded, however, by Moxh, who was clinging to his robe and addressing him with a series of incomprehensible grunts. "Garak, take the girl into the kitchen and try to quiet her down, will you," he asked. But when the Cardassian approached, Moxh screamed and dived under the bed.
"She hasn't seen me at my most ingratiating,"Garak apologized with a shrug of his shoulders. "One has to admire her courage, returning to a house they had robbed, risking immediate confinement in a labor camp. She must love her brother very much. And trust in your compassion even more."
Julian smiled at Elim's managing to say "compassion" without a sneer. "Well, she's at least out of the way at present. It's probably best just to leave her there."
Refocusing his attention after the interruption, Bashir rechecked the readouts on his diagnostic instruments. They gave a grim account. There was internal bleeding where a cracked rib had punctured a lung and more from a lacerated organ that served Cardassians as both spleen and liver. He injected cloptamarine to slow the blood flow; to stop it would require surgery. An operation would also be needed on the crushed and mangled leg. For now he simply straightened it out as best he could, made preliminary repairs with a bone regenerator, and immobilized the limb in a cast. The other fractures, and there were many, fortunately had come as clean breaks, and the bone regenerator sufficed to mend them. Finally Bashir took out his dermal regenerator and worked carefully to restore Kadz's battered face, to reduce his swollen eyes and mouth to normal proportions.
Just as he erased the last bruise, Kadz stirred to consciousness. "Fedder?" he asked, confused. "Where's Moxh?"
"She brought you here, she's just fine," Bashir said in soothing tones. "What the hell happened to you?"
The boy tried to scoot up into a sitting position, but the effort soon caused him to groan and lie still. "Mmmmmmm. Head hurts, dizzy." he gasped. "What happened? Klingon. Made him mad."
"You certainly did," Bashir observed. "Whatever did you say to him?"
"Klingon asked... that I do Moxh for him... wanted to watch how Cardies sport. Then, he's not pleased... Said I don't do it like a real man--he's going to show me how... Fine I say, but that's one strip more... Klingon just laughs, says it's free, 'cause I'm such a... disappointment." Kadz paused and struggled for breath. "No one cheats Kadz out of what's his, though. So I pulled him off her. Said cheaters got no honor. He grabbed me up by the leg... Don't remember much else..." he trailed off into a wracking cough that brought up a trickle of fresh blood to the corner of his mouth. "Not easy to talk," he gurgled.
"Don't try. I shouldn't have asked you to. Here, I'm going to give you something that will let you rest." Bashir filled a hypospray with a strong sedative and put it to Kadz's neck. The boy's eyelids fluttered a few times, and then he drifted off to sleep. The doctor bent down and gently pulled Moxh from under the bed, lifting her up to have a look at Kadz. She reacted with a happy chirp at seeing her brother's face returned more or less to its usual appearance and then climbed in carefully beside him, draping one arm over his shoulder. Bashir covered both of them with two of the blankets Garak had brought in and then beckoned the Cardassian to leave the room with him. "I can't believe he'd take on a Klingon-- all for one strip of latinum," Bashir confided as they walked into the living room.
"Oh, it wasn't just the latinum, my dear doctor. Poor Kadz was defending his manhood. I suppose there's been no one to tell him that he lost it the first time he bent over for a twofie gitter."
"I think he'll live," the doctor said as he reclined on the couch with his feet propped up on its arm. He stifled a yawn. "When his vital signs have stabilized, I'll beam over with him to the nearest hospital, because he'll need surgery for the internal bleeding and a major reconstruction job on the leg."
"Julian, there isn't a hospital on Cardassia that would admit him. He won't ever have had his birth registered. He'll never pass the DNA scan."
Bashir shot him a disbelieving look. "You can't be serious," he exclaimed. "When they see how much he's suffering, they certainly won't turn him away just because he's illegitimate."
"The most they will do is offer him a lethal injection to end that suffering," Garak explained calmly.
"Good heavens, it's not as if he were some animal who'd been run down in the road."
"That's precisely what he is, to Cardassian eyes."
"With all the people you lost in the Dominion exterminations, you'd think that every surviving Cardassian life would be precious," Bashir said accusingly.
"Yes, but we lost an even greater percentage of our resources," Garak responded. "If the hospitals wouldn't treat accies during prosperous times, they're hardly likely to change now that everything from hyposprays to biobeds are in short supply."
It was true that the Cardassian medical institutions had only returned to a subsistence level of care, capable of handling the life-and-death cases, but little else. The doctor had noted in his report that the less seriously ill should be accepted into Federation hospitals for elective treatments for at least another year. Otherwise it would be unconscionable for Starfleet Medical to pull out completely, which had been the recommendation of the commission he had served on. "I suppose I could evacuate him out to the Infirmary on Starbase 419," Bashir mused, "but he really doesn't need to be dragged about again." Then his eyes lit up. "Wait, I've got a plan. The big medical supply depot for the relief effort is on Cardassia Two. If you've got space you could clear, I can get what I need from the industrial replicators there, load them on your runabout, and perform the surgery here. It will only take a few hours."
"If I pack up the materials in my sewing room, it could serve your purpose," Garak replied.
"You don't mind?" Bashir felt a twinge of guilt. He'd landed Garak with these two unwanted guests, and now he was about to turn his lover's home into an outpatient clinic.
"Consider it a small recompense--for what happened earlier."
"Right." Bashir ducked his head, feeling awkward. He dared to give Garak's hand a little squeeze. "Uh, I'll go dress and then be off immediately. Kadz should stay asleep the whole time, with all the sedation he's under, but you might check in on him every half hour or so, to be on the safe side. Sorry to keep you up all night."
"I don't think I would have slept in any event," Garak said with a tight smile.
"No, nor I." The doctor took two steps toward the door, then stopped. "Um, Garak," he began, regarding the Cardassian with slight apprehension, "I hate even to ask this, but I can trust you not to give him a lethal injection, can't I?"
Garak's face relaxed into a more genuine smile. "It would be the best solution for all concerned, but you need have no fears. You will find him just as you left him."
Bashir piled the three supply containers onto the biobed, hopped up beside them, and beamed down from the runabout into Garak's sewing room. The Cardassian had moved all the rooms's regular furnishings up against the walls, leaving ample space for the doctor to set up his surgery. He activated the biobed's energy source and opened the first container, sorting its contents by the order of the planned procedures. He hadn't been there for more than a minute or two, however, when he heard several piercing screams, followed by a repeated anxious cry of "He's going to catch me, he's going to catch me." Damn, Bashir swore. Kadz must be that one in a thousand Cardassians in whom cloptamarine induces nightmarish hallucinations. Elim will be delighted if he's been having to listen to that for long!
He had to open the second container and rummage through it before he came up with the anesthetic he planned to use for the boy's surgery. Loading a hypospray, he took off at a brisk pace for the guest room at the other end of the hall. By the time he reached the doorway, however, the screaming had died down into a few whimpers. The doctor halted at the threshold to take in an unexpected tableau. Garak was seated by Kadz's bed, his back to Bashir. His index and middle fingers were stroking the two bone-ridges that ran along the boy's jawline and met at a thirty degree angle just below the ear. "Shh, shh now," he said softly. "You're safe here. He can't hurt you any more." With his other hand, Garak was caressing the youngster's hair. Moxh, sensing her brother's distress, had retreated to a corner of the room, where she was signing emphatically to no one in particular.
Kadz's own hands groped about wildly until he grabbed onto the one with which Garak was stroking his face. He nuzzled against it with his cheek, heaving several contented sighs. "Mmm Mo-mo, Mo-mo," he finally whispered.
Julian stepped deliberately into the room and laid his hand on Garak's shoulder. The Cardassian didn't flinch. Well, Julian hadn't really imagined that he could sneak up on one of the Obsidian Order's finest. "He's not always a contemptible piece of filth, is he, Elim?" he said, leaning down to inject Kadz with the anesthetic.
Garak extracted his hand from the boy's grasp with great care and got up. "No, not always," he replied. Then he shook off his tender mood and gave the doctor that little smirk so familiar from countless lunch table debates. "Only when he's awake."
The surgery took three hours. Bashir did the trickiest procedure first, the one that required Garak's hands in support of his own: the reconstruction of the shattered leg. He had to piece the fragments together and then attach the ragged bone ends one to the other with synthetic skeletal grafts. Both knee and ankle also had to be replaced. To assure that the limb would heal straight, he put pins through the two artificial joints and attached four external knee to ankle rods to brace the leg and hold it immobile. This done, he sent Garak off to bed. Moxh had evidently been impressed sufficiently by the Cardassian's recent solicitude toward Kadz that she allowed him to lead her to the couch and tuck her in for what little was left of the night before he retired himself.
Bashir's genetic enhancements allowed him to function at his peak through extended periods with very little sleep, but he was more than ready to crawl into his own bed as the first murky light appeared above the horizon. He took off his uniform and threw it into a chair, told the computer to awake him in two hours, and was snoring softly two seconds after his head settled into the pillow.
He awoke to what passed for blazing sunlight on Cardassia Prime and knew that he had slept for far more than two hours. A check of the chronometer revealed his slumber's duration to be in fact nearly six. He scrambled up to go check on his patient, but before he'd even got his shirt on,
he encountered Garak at the door bearing a tray of hot Tarkalean tea and buttered scones
"Just sit back down on your bed, doctor. Your breakfast is right here," his friend said.
"I have to see if Kadz is doing all right,"Bashir protested.
"He is. I've been checking on him regularly."
"But you're not a doctor."
"No, but I do know what normal Cardassian life signs look like, and which abnormalities indicate a crisis," Garak responded smoothly. "I can assure you that the boy's condition is quite stable." He produced a PADD from under the napkin, "This is the last five hours' readout from the biobed. You can look it over while you drink your tea."
Julian reluctantly got back into bed and took up the PADD in one hand and the teacup in the other. Garak was right, the life signs were just as they should be. But they indicated that the patient had come out of the anesthesia three hours earlier. "He's been conscious?" the doctor inquired, taking a bite out of a scone.
"Not entirely focused, but conscious, yes. A little scared, too, although he tried to hide it. Whether the source of the fear was me or that contraption on his leg, I'm not sure." Garak observed with his customary irony. "I told him that you would explain everything to him shortly and gave him a bowl of taspar broth. He ate about half of it before he dropped off to sleep again."
Bashir wolfed down the second scone and drained the rest of the tea. "Thanks for playing nurse and letting me sleep, Elim. I'll go see to him myself now."
"Julian, don't, not yet." Garak's tone was half command and half plea. As the doctor's brow creased in puzzlement, the Cardassian quickly divested himself of his clothes and slid into the bed, his agile fingers moving over those places that produced in Julian the swiftest arousal. Then he turned over on his belly and spread out his legs. "My dear, I want you to come inside me, I want us to be as close as lovers can be."
"Elim, how can you be asking me this, after what happened last night?" Julian's mouth was hanging open in disbelief. "We agreed we would take things slowly from now on."
"Please, don't argue with me," Garak urged. "It's what I want, and I want it now."
Bashir bent over and massaged the powerful neck. His cock ached to find its way into the welcoming cleft, but he held himself back. "You're sure?" he whispered into Garak's ear. "I don't want you to subject yourself to something that feels like a violation, just to please me."
Garak thrust his hips upward, brushing his buttocks against the doctor's erect organ. "A silly prejudice," he gasped. "Please, Julian, come inside me now."
Bashir hardly needed further persuasion, his own desire had grown so powerful. Yet he couldn't get rid of the fear that he would make some false move that would sunder them forever. You can't be overpowering him in any way. It's a joining. You're becoming one. Every moment of pleasure must be secondary to that, he told himself. He entered slowly, gently, wrapping his legs around Garak's as he ran his hands rhythmically up and down the Cardassian's powerful gray arms. Very gradually the force and speed of his thrusts increased as their reciprocal sounds of pleasure struck up an almost musical counterpoint. As Julian approached his release, Garak took his lover's hand and drew it to his own fully expressed cotton candy. The Cardassian came in the doctor's hand a fraction of a second before Bashir stiffened and then relaxed with the rhythm of his own orgasm. He withdrew quickly and tumbled off Garak, seeking his lover's face and covering it with wave after wave of kisses. He felt absolutely overwhelmed with pure joy. "Oh, Elim, I've never loved anyone so much as I love you now," he sighed.
Garak stroked Julian's hair with both hands and sent his tongue probing deliciously deep into the human's mouth, but suddenly the doctor broke off the kiss and sat upright, clutching the discarded covers to him. "Uh oh, we've got company," he yelped, pointing to the doorway, where Moxh was standing, studying them with rapt attention. The minute Bashir's eyes lighted on her she skittered away.
Garak laughed heartily. "You can tell, my dear boy, that I'm not used to having children in the house. I never even thought to lock the door."
Before Julian could say anything further, the voice of Kadz echoed from the end of the hall. "Hey, hey, if you twofies is through fucking each other, this studder here is starving."
Garak got out of bed and put his clothes back on. "The operation has been a success, doctor, and your patient obviously is on the way to a full recovery," he observed, with an amusement tempered by an equal dose of annoyance. "Shall I prepare the meal for his highness?"
Julian still had eight days leave to spend with Elim, but it was clear that they were also going to have to share the precious time together with Kadz and Moxh. Garak immediately laid down some ground rules, which he asked the doctor to communicate to their guests, since both children were still deeply distrustful of their host. They were to learn and observe the rudimentary elements of Cardassian hygiene. The makeshift infirmary would be the place they both ate and slept; they were under no circumstances to intrude on Garak's bedroom when both he and his lover were in it. Nor were they to interrupt the meals Garak and Bashir shared in the kitchen.
The twins' ragged clothing was filthy and blood-stained beyond restoration, so Garak made them each a set of sleeping robes, two daytime outfits, and also provided the unfamiliar novelty of several pairs of underwear. He also replicated for each a tooth polisher, a scale buffer, and a comb. Moxh, especially, was delighted with these new toys, and spent hours grooming her bed-ridden brother, who tolerated her efforts without protest, although he was obviously mortified at the spectacle he presented every time Bashir walked in to check up on him.
Today was the third since the surgery. Garak had a council meeting that promised to take up the entire afternoon. Julian, reading in the living room, had just managed to sort out all the guilts in one of the enigma tales in Garak's library--his first complete success after struggling through a half dozen of the damned things. He rose and stretched, then decided to go in and examine his patient. The doctor had by observation picked up the meaning of a number of Moxh's signs, and he gestured to her to leave off styling her brother's hair so that he could make his examination. She hopped down with a smile and took up one of the sewing tools Garak had shown her how to use after he noticed her fascination with how he pieced the various cloth shapes together in order to produce their garments. She had gathered some of the scraps from his recycle basket, and, climbing onto her own bed, the girl took up again her project of attaching them together in a number of fantastic configurations.
The doctor ran his scanner over Kadz's leg and smiled with satisfaction at what it told him. The natural and synthetic bones were knitting together well. He clapped the boy on the shoulder. "Your leg is coming along splendidly, Kadz. Tomorrow I think we'll start letting you put some weight on it. I imagine you're more than ready to get out of bed, eh?
"Sure, sure," the boy replied without enthusiasm, his attention focused not on his physician but on his sister. Then he turned toward Bashir with an unusually earnest expression. "Fedder, the old twofie bought Moxh fair up. I know the girls don't excite him, but maybe he could keep her as his slavey, let her clean and fix, so's he don't have to mind about the dirty work?"
"Garak wouldn't want her here, Kadz. He only pretended to buy Moxh so he could get you both out of his home as quickly as possible."
"Oh, that's a ruffler." The boy's countenance was glum.
"Why would you want her to be his 'slavey' anyway?"
"Sure you've grabbed it, Fedder, how happy she is in this gitter house. Soft bed, clean clothes, food for the asking. Kadz won't ever get her those, no matter how hard he sports. She's never been as strong as me, and ever since her acci died, she don't have much heart for the work. After that Klingon, I don't think she'll ever do a sport again. Kadz can't get enough on his own to keep us both." He lifted up his broken leg and tapped it up and down on the bed several times. "Can't even get enough to keep myself these moons. Moxh stays with the twofie, at least Moxh don't starve."
The doctor just stared at him for a second. What have you been thinking Bashir? You're going home in less than a week, and you know that Elim's only letting them stay here to indulge you. What exactly did you suppose was going to happen to them when you'd gone? Maybe Elim is right to distrust compassion. Shaking off such doubts, however, he grasped the boy's shoulder and said to him earnestly, "Don't worry. I'll see to it that neither one of you starves."
Kadz shook his head. "That Damar, the one in our park, used to come on the big screens. Once he told us, those Fedders always think they can save everyone just by wishing. Kardasi know there's plenty of things--nobody can save," he said pointedly.
"Well, despite Damar, I prefer to cling to my Federation delusions a little longer," Bashir responded stiffly, and left the room.
He went immediately to Garak's comm console and logged on. The girl's deafness might actually provide an opportunity for placing her. He searched his enhanced memory. Which one of his medical school classmates was it who had gone into speech and audiology? Right, Bhatt, the one with the hearing-impaired parents. "Computer, find comm location for Bhatt, Dr. Adger V...
"So Adger Bhatt told me about the research his sister was doing into gestural communication, and she told me about the Institute on Camerzion." Julian was in full explanatory mode, excitedly filling Garak in over dinner of the positive results of his search for a better life for Moxh. "The Camerz have no vocal chords--their mouths go directly into their stomachs. They communicate with their hands and their facial expressions. They're the leading experts on all kinds of sign language in the galaxy, and they maintain a training program for gestural speakers from non-gestural species. Of course there's a waiting list a kilometer long, but they reserve spaces for any subjects needed by their resident scholars. As luck would have it, Professor Bhatt is a linguist who studies gestural systems unique to a few individuals. She'll take Moxh to the Institute and map out the system she and Kadz use with each other. In return she'll teach the girl one of the standard gestural languages that universal translators can handle. And the Camerz are also working on a chip that can be implanted behind the retina and then convert speech into sign. She might not want to go that far, but at least she'll have the choice and--" Bashir stopped for breath, at the same time noticing Garak's preoccupied air "--you stopped listening to me about five minutes ago."
"You've found the girl a school where she will learn to communicate with someone other than that reprobate brother of hers," Garak said. "I've heard every word you've said. I don't suppose they are going to invite him to Camerzion also?"
"Professor Bhatt will want to observe the two together. I was hoping that you'd let them stay on here until she arrives next week. But, no, she won't be taking Kadz with her. I-I suspect you'll have to send him to me on the station. He'll probably cause as many problems as that young Jem'Hadar Odo tried to tame, but I can't think of any other alternative until his leg heals."
"I think it would be better for all concerned if Kadz remained here."
"I agree that he shouldn't necessarily leave Cardassia, but there's no way he can survive on the streets now," Bashir replied.
"You misunderstand, Julian. I meant that Kadz should remain here, in my house."
"You can't be serious," Bashir exclaimed. "The very sight of him makes you livid."
"Ah, but the sight of you makes me indescribably happy. You'll want to check up on him often, like the dedicated physician you are. If he's here, that gives you an excellent excuse to come see me. You know I'm never without my ulterior motives."
"I don't need any excuses to come see you. I love you."
"Not an excuse, then, but an explanation-- to your colleagues, in case you'd rather not tell them about your devious Cardassian lover," Garak said.
"Look, Elim, I'm not ashamed of our relationship. If this is about my not resigning my post on DS9--"
Garak put his hand to Bashir's lips. "Of course it's not. I don't expect you to change everything in your life just because we're lovers. As Preloc says, 'To have one's beloved in one's arms for only an hour suffices if one's beloved dwells always in one's heart.' Besides, I'm probably doomed to end up Cardassian ambassador to Bajor, and you'll eventually have more than enough of me in your quarters every night complaining about quarrelsome Kais and Vedeks and First Ministers. In the meantime, you must allow me my little intrigues. I can't let my skills get rusty." He folded his napkin and reached for Julian's empty plate . "I'll clear up, and then we can go find out how well our guests take to the new futures we have mapped out for them."
The doctor went in alone to tell Kadz of the plans for Moxh. The boy listened to him intently. When Bashir had completed his recitation, he inquired, "This Ins-ti-tute that will study Moxh, you're sure it's no hospital to cut her up?"
"Of course not! It's really a school. The researchers will learn from Moxh, and she'll learn from them. She'll have a room all to herself and everything she wants to eat."
"Can't say no then," Kadz beamed.
"Now Kadz, you do realize that Camerzion is very far away. You and Moxh may not see each other for a very long time. I know how close you are. It may be hard." The doctor didn't want to deceive the boy that the advantages of the proposition came without any cost.
"Hard, yes, but has to be," Kadz said. "Better that Moxh gets close to other studders than Kadz. Lately she's been talking that no one does her like her brother, wants us to go off by ourselves and have some accies. Guess she thinks their food's going to fall from the sky. But even if it did, we can't be doing the rest. Ara Beldon, the one that knows all about how babies come, she says that it's not the best thing for sisters to have accies with their brothers." He turned an inquiring countenance toward Bashir. "That true, Fedder?"
The doctor did everything in his power not to sound judgmental. "Yes, it's not at all the best thing , Kadz."
The boy sucked in his breath sharply. "Then she'll go to the Institute, and Kadz will stay behind. If I tell her slow, she'll be ready when the study woman comes to take her."
"Good man," Bashir said, impressed at this unexpected capacity for self-sacrifice. "It's not just Moxh who'll be well cared for, though. Garak has agreed to let you stay with him until your leg is better. Here he is to tell you about it himself." This was the cue for Garak to enter, but before he had taken two steps into the room, Kadz delivered his analysis of the situation.
"It's fair, I nabbed his keepings, cheated him out of the latinum rock. He gets more from working me than calling sec." He looked Garak up and down with an appraising eye. "Won't be so bad. Kadz been fucked by half the twofies on Prime, lots of them older and uglier than he is."
"No, no, you've got it all wrong. Garak isn't demanding anything in return for his hospitality--certainly not sexual favors."
"Why else would a gitter keep an acci around?" Kadz asked skeptically.
Behind him, Bashir heard Garak suck in his breath, much as Kadz had done moments before. "No other reason Kadz. Except that I'm not a gitter, I'm an acci, just like you."
"You lie!" the boy declared.
"Frequently. However, this happens to be the truth." Kadz looked with incredulity at Bashir, seeking confirmation. The doctor nodded.
"Can't grab it. No acci gets a big house like this. 'Cept maybe the Jemmies got his keeper, and he's just squatting."
"My mother's... keeper took an interest in me when I was small," Garak explained. "He gave me the opportunity to learn what he could teach me, so I could become an asset to the state, rather than a nuisance to it. I'm willing to pass on that opportunity to you."
"Why? You don't even like me."
"And I imagine I will like you even less before our time together has ended. However, these days Cardassia is in no position to throw away any of its people, even impudent street boys."
"I hope you can appreciate the chance Garak is offering you," Bashir intoned sententiously, all the while wondering why this was the first he was hearing of this motivation for Elim to keep the boy with him.
Garak raised his eye-ridges slightly at Julian's pronouncement. "The doctor has, however, mislead you in respect to my requiring nothing in return for my hospitality. Becoming capable of productive service to the state will require extremely hard work from you."
Kadz hardly looked overjoyed at the prospect. "Kadz says no thanks, you call sec, right?"
Garak grabbed Bashir hard by the wrist to forestall any indignant denial by the doctor. "That's right. Hard work for me or hard labor for the security forces."
"Guess you win then, old twofie."
Garak stepped forward and grabbed both the boy's wrists even harder than he had Bashir's. "All right Kadz. We're going to have your first lesson right now. Kardasi is a rich and beautiful language. You will use it properly and respectfully in this house. The correct response is "I accept your offer, Garak."
"I accept your offer, Garak," the boy spat out, his eyes blazing defiance.
"Good." The Cardassian released his grip. He gave Kadz his characteristic little mocking bow of the head and walked out.
Whew, what a battle of wills this is going to be, Bashir thought to himself. Before going out himself, he bent down and said to his patient. "Before you think about taking Garak on, Kadz, let me give you a little advice. He's the man who made it possible for your Damar to drive the Jemmies out. After facing down the leader of the whole Dominion, I don't think he'll have any trouble with you."
And Kadz, his eyes as big as Prime's two moons at full, for once had not a word to say.
The day he had to return to Deep Space Nine came all too soon for Julian Bashir. Being apart from Elim, having to explain things to Ezri--it wasn't going to be easy. Yet the joy these past days had given him made any future difficulties appear eminently surmountable. He smiled as he folded each of the six pairs of the briefest of silver silk briefs his lover had made for him and packed them at the top of his travel bag. "The more I have to peel off that lovely body of yours," Elim had said, "the more satisfying it is." Julian then closed the bag's fasteners, picked up his uniform jacket from the bed and put it on. A glance at the antique Cardassian chronometer told him that they wouldn't have to leave for the spaceport for another quarter hour. He sighed and went into the living room.
Garak was sitting on the couch studying a PADD; Moxh, curled up beside him, was concentrating on piecing together a pile of colored cloth squares according to a simple pattern Garak had provided. In contrast to these two still figures was Kadz, fidgeting like mad in his seat in front of the computer console. The boy took Bashir's entrance as a welcome cue to swivel his chair around and hop up on his good leg. He limped energetically toward the doctor and reached for his bag. "Ready to go, Fedder? Kadz will take that out and beam it to the runabout."
Garak rose and put his hand on Kadz's shoulder. "Kadz will do no such thing. Kadz will go back to the computer and attend to his lessons."
"Lessons? Stupid time-wasting more like--ugh" As the boy was in the middle of his protest, Garak's hand slid up the neck bones, provided a little pressure, and Kadz was suddenly flailing like a sea-gettle washed up on shore. Garak caught him before he fell, dragged him back to the computer, and with another touch to his neck restored his muscle control.
Despite the painful correction, Kadz was unrepentant. "Aw, Garak, what's the good of lessons for an acci?"
"I've told you that you'll have no chance of getting off the streets and being of service to the state unless you acquire some useful skills."
"Sure, sure. And then what? Cleaner at Central Waste Extraction's the best state service they'd trust to the likes of Kadz. I'd rather stay with the sportin'."
"Until another Klingon you insult decides to finish the job?" Garak inquired acidly. This reminder of his failure finally sufficed to quell the boy. He leaned forward, crossing his arms on the desk and balancing his chin on them with a surly expression. "Kadz got honor too, not just those Klingon gitters," he muttered.
Julian patted him on the head. "Of course you do," he said earnestly, casting a reproachful look at Garak, who however showed no remorse. True, that it's a hard case to make when you've named yourself after your own testicles, the doctor thought. That thought led to a question. "Kadz, did your mother ever call you and Moxh by different names than you have now?"
The boy nodded, "Jilana"--he motioned toward his sister-- "and Jogal. Rich gitter names. Our mo-mo was a dreamer." Kadz gave a little snort. "How our street mates laughed when we said 'em. Dropped 'em soon enough for names more fitting."
Garak knelt beside the boy and held him with his famous interrogator's stare. "Listen, you learn what I can teach you, and I promise you that I'll find you work far more to your liking than either sporting or waste extraction maintenance."
The boy regarded him with suspicion. "No lies, Garak?"
"No lies, Jogal." Garak insisted. "Now, while I take Dr. Bashir to the spaceport, you will therefore memorize every single symbol on those five screens and be able to reproduce them for me, in order, by the time I return. Is that understood?"
"Understood, Garak." Kadz sighed loudly and screwed up his face into an exaggerated representation of concentration as he stared at the computer.
"And the next time I come back to check on your leg, you can amaze me with your powers of recall," Bashir said.
The boy's face brightened. "Will do Fedder. And you can count on Kadz to see the old twofie here don't get too lonesome those moons, case you're worried."
Garak's hand hovered over the boy's shoulder again. "Ah, my dear pupil, another lesson you're going to learn is the positive effect of abstinence in cultivating self-discipline."
"Hey, hey, a sport can't do lessons all the time."
The hand moved lower, but did not go for the nerve. "True. And when you need some relaxation, you can do some needlework. Perhaps you have as natural an aptitude as your sister."
Kadz laughed. "Studders don't do no sewing, not this one at least."
"I hardly think that someone who boasts that he's 'been fucked by half the twofies on Prime' is going to suffer any further damage to his masculinity because he knows how to hem a pair of trousers in an emergency." The hand rested lightly on the boy's shoulder. Kadz lowered his eyes and chewed on his lip. He reached up and carefully removed Garak's hand. "Kadz has to work on his screens," he muttered. Garak stepped back and said, "I think we should be going, Julian."
Bashir clapped Kadz heartily on the back, but the boy shrugged him off and continued to stare at the computer display. The doctor then went over to Moxh and gave her a hug and planted a kiss on her forehead. She favored him with a dazzling smile and one of her little happy sounds. He'd figured out the sign she used for good-bye and made the gesture to her. The smile faded. The girl bent down and returned to her sewing. Evidently she and her brother handled partings by ignoring them. Garak had already stepped outside, and Bashir, feeling ever more reluctant to go, nevertheless saw no further reason to linger.
Garak carefully programmed the outside door locks and then tilted the transporter device around his wrist toward Bashir. "Shall we?" he asked.
In these last few minutes alone together in the runabout before they would have to part for at least a month, Julian knew he should not breathe a word about Kadz, who always seemed to be annoyingly tangled up in their relationship. Yet he had nagging doubts as to whether leaving the boy with Garak was a good idea. "Elim," he ventured, "don't you think you're being awfully hard on Kadz- on Jogal?"
"Julian, every day of that boy's life he's learned that gentleness, that compassion are weaknesses he should relentlessly exploit in others and crush absolutely in himself if he's going to survive. He never thanked you for saving his life, did he? And he never will. If there is even the slightest chance he is to learn to respect himself, to set worthy goals and persevere until he meets them, to become anything more meaningful to his devastated planet than a sexual parasite, then I cannot afford to let up on him for a minute." Garak paused and shook his head. "It's probably too late. He's done as he pleases during all the years that properly raised Cardassian children learn to subordinate their wilfulness to the greater good of the state."
"What will happen to him, if you fail?"
"When his injuries are healed, I'll send him back where he came from. He'll be no worse off there for my tutelage. On the slight chance that he applies himself to his lessons in good faith--well, the government is establishing residential schools for the many orphans the Dominion has left us with, and if the boy had my recommendation, the authorities would probably not look too closely into his background. I warn you though, my dear Julian, if that happens, and he should come to us on his holidays, I will not have you destroy all my hard work by infecting him with your sentimental Federation ideas."
Bashir leaned over and kissed him. "Oh, Elim, I do love you," he said.
"So you have convinced me."
Bashir felt a twinge of disappointment. Come on, you didn't really expect him to say he loved you, not this soon. That would be just as likely as an expression of gratitude from Kadz.
However, Garak had already deciphered his lover's countenance. "You're unhappy, are you, that I didn't return your declaration of affection?"
"No, it's all right, Elim. I know you're not the type to wear your heart on your sleeve."
"What a gruesome expression!" Garak said with a teasing air. "But surely you're aware how often I've told you I love you."
Bashir wrinkled his nose to nearly Bajoran proportions to express his exasperation. "Really, Elim, I don't think that's something I would have forgot!"
"Why, Julian, my dear, I tell you I love you every time I ask you to come inside."
Kudos
"A toast now, everyone," said Miles O'Brien, holding his glass of champagne aloft. "To my old chum Julian Bashir. We've got used to his winning every biochemistry prize in the quadrant for his cures for genetically engineered diseases. But even the venerable Nobel pales beside this one. The Federation has only awarded the Leonard McCoy medal for medical practice as a humane discipline twice in the last hundred years. Garak, why don't you read the inscription?"
The Cardassian's blue eyes sparkled as he proclaimed in a voice husky with emotion, "To Dr. Julian Subatoi Bashir, whose brilliant research has given hope that no power will ever again willfully induce suffering in entire peoples, secure in the knowledge that nothing can end that suffering, but whose true greatness is revealed in the words of the former patient who nominated him for this award, 'There was never a hurt so small or a sufferer so base that he would not stop to heal.'" Garak touched his glass to O'Brien's and said, "Gh'mak entar, praise to the praiseworthy."
"Gh'mak entar," repeated the small circle of friends who surrounded the doctor-- Miles and Keiko, Ezri and Jake, Jilana and Jogal. Then they all touched glasses and downed the bubbly liquor. Julian embraced Elim and clapped Miles on the back. "I, uh, want to thank all of you for being with me tonight. Honors don't mean much unless you've someone to share them with.
And Elim's not lost his touch, bringing you all to Cardassia without my ever suspecting a thing. I do know that the replicator's been working overtime, so let's all go into the kitchen and see what delicacies are on offer."
"Wait a minute," O'Brien put in. "We've had the Cardassian sentiment, now it's time for the human." With that he launched into a rousing version of "For he's a jolly good fellow" in his slightly off-key baritone. Keiko and Jake joined in enthusiastically, while the Trill and the three Cardassians maintained a slightly puzzled silence.
Just as the singers were stretching out the last syllable of the last repetition of "And so say all of us," a small girl ran into the room from the hallway. She was wearing a bright print nightgown whose background matched her shock of flaming red hair. The hair came as quite a contrast to her slate blue complexion and the white nubby antennae that protruded from her forehead. She made her way to Jilana's side and signed to her, in words converted to speech by everyone's universal translators, "Mo-mo, these people are too loud. I can't sleep."
"Shh, Trel'ammi, it's a party for Doctor Julian, remember?" Jilana signed back. "Don't insult all his friends who've come from so far away."
The child extended her lower lip in a pout. "You tell me always to let you know if sounds keep me awake, so you can get my ear shields."
"That's right," Julian intervened. "We've got to protect those super sensitive ears of yours." He
swept the girl up in his arms. "But you're in luck, Trel'ammi, because now that all my noisy friends have awakened you, we're going to get you some of Takkon Garak's sweeties." She nodded her head and gave him a dazzling smile as he led the other guests to the dessert table.
Garak had asked all the invited guests to send him the replicator formulas for their favorite desserts, so the table was laden with everything from Idanian spice pudding to larish pie to trifle. Julian even caught sight of the date and honey cake his mother always made for him as a boy. Of course Amsha and Elim had been exchanging recipes for years, and Julian had laughed long and hard at his lover's discomfiture when one of them came inscribed to "the best daughter-in-law any fond mother could have."
Julian picked up an Andorrian confection made of menala seeds rolled into balls of spun sugar made from the sap of the menala tree. "Open wide Trel'ammi, " he said, popping it into the little girl's mouth. He planned to dig into the keva-flavored sponge cake topped with Delavian chocolate icing that Garak always made for him on special occasions, but he wanted to wait for his guests to serve themselves first. As he stood popping still more menala balls into Trel'ammi's eagerly anticipatory mouth, he saw Jogal cut a slice of the larish pie and hurriedly return with it and a glass of kanar into the living room. Trying to stay well out of Elim's way, Julian concluded with a sigh.
The relationships he and Elim had maintained with these twin Cardassian street children whom they had rescued ten years ago couldn't be more different. Jilana had stayed five years at the Institute for Gestural Communication on Camerzion, and the instant she had learned a standard sign language, she had kept in regular touch with them both (although she was in many respects noticeably partial to Garak). She visited two or three times a year, had invited them to her wedding to Telar, a mute Andorrian fellow student at the Institute, and had insisted that Julian deliver her baby. She behaved, in general, as if she were their daughter.
Jogal, on the other hand--it had been one melodrama after another. He had spent a half year under Garak's tutelage, demonstrating a quick intelligence and aptitude for computer codes, and a complete unwillingness to cultivate self-discipline. He and Garak battled constantly, and Julian wasn't at all pleased by how often his lover would resort to physical punishment to control the boy. Finally Garak, with decided misgivings, managed to enroll his charge in a state-sponsored boarding school, from which he was promptly expelled two months later for "being a corrupting influence on the other students." The school had provided Jogal with transit vouchers to return to Bajor, where Garak was serving as the Cardassian ambassador, but he never showed up.
Julian had been frantic, Elim resigned. "We did our best for him, and he chose his own gratification instead," the Cardassian said. "He's no doubt gone back to the streets where he belongs."
Three weeks after Jogal had disappeared, he turned up completely unexpectedly at the Infirmary on DS9, looking decidedly the worse for wear. Gradually Julian got out of him that the boy had indeed returned to selling himself on the streets of Cardassia Prime, only to find that the business was not what it had been. He no longer could offer the novelty of being part of a twin act, there were fewer curious aliens on Prime now that Cardassia was beginning to be self-sufficient again, and, he confessed, "there's younger and prettier studders out there in Kadz's park these moons." He begged Bashir just to let him live with him on the station, away from that "horrible old twofie," but the Doctor couldn't agree. While Jogal had in a peculiar way brought him and Elim together, he wasn't going to allow the boy to play them against each other and thus drive them apart. "Elim will be coming here in four hours. You'll have to make your peace with him before we can talk about your future."
Elim had no sooner caught sight of Jogal than he said, "Well, have you come crawling back so soon?" Without waiting for an answer, which the boy seemed unlikely to supply, he then told Julian, "Go entertain yourself at Quark's for an hour, my dear. Jogal and I have matters to discuss." The boy had pleaded for Julian to stay, claiming that Garak was bound to kill him.
"I will not lay a finger on him, I promise you," Garak insisted, and Julian took him at his word and left.
When he returned, Jogal wasn't in his and Elim's quarters. Garak explained that he had found the boy his own accommodations on the station for now and that he was planning to enroll him in a training school for computer technicians in the Chin'toka system. He had made it clear that this was absolutely the last chance he would offer Jogal but that no matter how things worked out, he refused ever to let the boy enter his residence again. "I know you are fond of him, Julian, and I don't object to your maintaining contact, but I refuse to have anything more to do with him myself."
Bashir had never got Jogal to tell him what had transpired during the interview with Garak. The boy shipped out for Chin'toka without protest the next day. He communicated with the doctor on a haphazard basis and occasionally dropped by the station when his school holidays and Garak's trips back to Prime coincided. He claimed to have been awarded a certificate for completing his training course two years later, and to have been flooded with job offers to serve as a data systems designer, although Bashir never saw any hard and fast proof of these stories. The only fact about Jogal's post-graduation activities that Julian could verify was that he had for the past three years been working as a sales representative for a Ferengi wholesaler whom he had met one day at Quark's. His product was "pleasure enhancers"--sex toys-- and he had his own runabout, "The Kadz," with which he traveled from Orion to Risa to Earth and dozens of systems in between to contact potential clients. Bashir couldn't help laughing at the appropriateness of the young Cardassian's career choice, but Garak had been furious to hear of it. "The State invests in his training and then he abandons Cardassia for a life of promoting degeneracy," his lover had thundered, and he couldn't be teased out of his anger by Julian calling him a prude and asking whether he might buy one of Jogal's wares for Elim's birthday.
Julian reflected that it proved Elim's great love for him that he would have invited Jogal once more to enter his home on Cardassia Prime, where he now served as Minister of Culture, in order to have their entire "family" present to celebrate the great honor Starfleet had bestowed upon the doctor. Ever since Jogal's arrival with Jilana and Trel'ammi this morning, however, he and Garak had devoted most of their energies to avoiding each other. They had exchanged at best a few perfunctory phrases. The doctor wished he knew why these two people who were both dear to him could not get over their deep-seated animosity toward each other.
A hand on his arm brought him out of his reverie. "Julian," Jilana signed, "how much candy have you been feeding Trel'ammi?" While he had been lost in thought, the little girl had stuffed her mouth full to bursting with the Andorrian delicacies. "If she gets sick, you're the doctor who's going to deal with it while I enjoy the party," her mother joked.
"Uh, sorry, I got distracted," he replied apologetically.
Jilana reached up to take the girl from him and shook her head with an affectionate smile. She expertly balanced the child on one arm as she carried her plate and drink in her other hand on the way back to the living room.
Julian glanced around and saw that he was the sole remaining inhabitant of the kitchen. He cut himself a sizable piece of the sponge cake, poured a glass of the very old port Miles had brought, and rejoined his friends.
The party had resolved itself into three little clusters. Jilana sat on the couch with Trel'ammi on her lap while Miles stood in front of her demonstrating something on a PADD. Engineering talk, Julian concluded. Jilana did structural designs for large industrial installations. Over in the corner by the window, Garak was engaged in animated conversation with Keiko. Since his return to his native planet, Garak had gradually let gardening overtake sewing as his passion, and he was no doubt taking advantage of Dr. O'Brien's skills as a botanist. Up against the bookcases that lined the rear wall, Ezri and Jake were talking to Jogal. Julian decided that this conversation would be the most congenial and walked over to them.
"So how's the man of the hour?" Ezri said with a smile, and then a kiss on the cheek. Julian saw Jake stiffen. Although Garak and Bashir had been together for ten years now, and Jake and Ezri had been married for four, the young human never seemed totally comfortable about the doctor's previous relationship with his wife.
"Rather overwhelmed at all the fuss, to be honest," Julian muttered, ducking his head. "Jake must know what it's like, after all the praise he got for his definitive history of the Dominion War last year."
"Yeah," Jogal chimed in. "It seems every planet I land on to make my sales, you see his book in the shops, or find out he's coming to give a lecture. Got to read it when I get the chance. We didn't exactly hear the full story on Cardassia, with the Jemmies and Vorta saying what was what."
"I'm not sure even my book gets at the full story," Jake said. "I've never been satisfied with the chapter on how the Romulans came into the war against the Founders. Senator Vreenak's ship blowing up, that stolen data rod--it always seemed too, too... convenient. I've always wondered if some anti-Dominion faction of the Romulan senate in fact arranged the whole thing, to get rid of opposition at home. Maybe I should ask Garak what he thinks. He knows a lot about the Romulans, doesn't he?"
"He knows a lot about everything, if you can believe what he tells you," Jogal replied dismissively. There was an awkward silence, until Ezri launched an obvious attempt to change the subject. "So, Julian, are you enjoying your work on Starbase 274?"
"Yes, it's very challenging. We gather data on any illness that makes a first occurrence in Federation space, track epidemics, do research on vaccines. And besides its quarantine wing for infectious disease patients, the Infirmary that's affiliated with the laboratory also receives any trauma cases that occur on ships in the entire sector. There's really never a dull moment. Still, I must admit that the main attraction is that it's only an hour from Cardassia Prime, instead of twenty. Now I can come home to Elim every evening I'm not on duty."
"Wouldn't trade that for Quark's holosuites myself," Jogal said. Julian shot him a disapproving look. "Speaking of which," the Cardassian added, unrepentant, "how's that wreck of a Kardasi station doing without the services of the Fedder doc here?"
"Oh, it's very grim," Ezri intoned with mock solemnity. "The new CMO is a Vulcan--very skilled, but absolutely no bedside manner. Patients of hers no sooner check out of the Infirmary than they come straight to me to receive counseling for depression."
"Let's have no talk of depression on such a festive occasion!" Garak had come up behind them, putting his arm around Julian. "I hope you're all enjoying yourselves."
"I think I'll get some more pie," Jogal answered, bolting for the kitchen.
"All the desserts are great," Jake said. "It's the best Idanian spice pudding I've had in years."
"A secret ingredient I learned from some Idanians themselves, many years ago. I'm glad it pleases you. Julian and I have both been fascinated by your account of the War in that history you so kindly sent us."
"Elim is especially fascinated that you gave him an entire chapter to himself," Julian teased. Elim responded by making those small motions with his fingers on his lover's collar bone that usually were a signal for them to retire to the bedroom. The doctor disengaged himself, breathing hard to keep his composure. "I'd better go mingle with the rest of the guests," he gasped out.
"Always so polite, my Julian," Garak observed with a smirk.
Julian found Jilana still sitting on the sofa with Trel'ammi, but now her conversational partner was Keiko rather than Miles. The two women were deeply engaged in "mother" discussions. "I haven't seen hair as red as Trel'ammi's since Miles' last family reunion in Dublin. It's quite amazing," Keiko was saying as the doctor approached. "You'd think Cardassians and Andorrians would produce gray haired children somehow."
It wasn't really so amazing, Julian reflected. All you had to do was understand the peculiar properties of the chromosome sequence that determined Andorrian pigmentation. Red hair had actually been the most likely result of this particular cross-species mating.. He refrained from saying so, however. Elim was always chiding him afterwards when he became too explanatory: "My dear boy, when people say in casual conversation how miraculous they find some occurrence, they really do not want you to tell them that it is in fact quite commonplace to anyone who has a brain."
Jilana smiled as he came up and stood beside Keiko's chair. "Not as amazing as Trel'ammi's having hearing. Isn't that right, Julian?"
"That's right. The genetic tests placed the likelihood of Jilana and Telar having a deaf and mute child at 95% and of the child having hearing without speech at less than .0001%."
"Of course, we would have been perfectly content if she hadn't been able to hear, but Telar speaks so eloquently through his music, they tell me, that it's a truly special gift his child can share that with him, since his wife cannot. Of course," Jilana continued, noticing that her daughter was fidgeting and rubbing at her ears, "the gift is sometimes too much of a good thing. There are definite drawbacks to raising a little one whose hearing would, how do you say it, Julian, put a Ferengi to shame?"
Jogal returned from the kitchen at this point, engaged in an animated conversation with Miles about sending him "a catalog and some free samples." But O'Brien turned beet red and shushed him once they were in range of the others. Jogal laughed and scooped up his niece, then settled down next to his sister with the child on his lap. "Believe me, there's very little that would put a Ferengi to shame," he said, "and certainly not Uncle Kadz's own little sharp-eared gettle here." He tickled Trel'ammi's stomach, evoking peals of silent laughter.
"Kadz?" Keiko asked. "I thought your name was Jogal."
"Oh, it is, but Kadz is the nickname I had as a kid, and I've always thought it suited me better than my given name." He winked at Julian, who fervently hoped that no further explanations of the nickname's origins would be forthcoming. To forestall that possibility he hurried to say to the little girl, "And where did you get that pretty nightgown you're wearing, Trel'ammi?"
"Grandpa Elim made it for me," the child signed, casting her eyes over to where Garak stood with Ezri and Jake. "Come say to everyone where the pieces came from, Grandpa Elim."
Not daring refuse this august summons, Garak ambled over and knelt in front of Trel'ammi. With the child on his lap, Jogal for once had no way to escape, but leaned back as far as he could get, with a surly expression on his face. Garak pointed to various fabrics that made up the child's garment. "Here's a piece of Cardassian ilm for where your mo-mo was born, and here's a piece of Andorrian tilapo seed cloth for where your rakka was born, and here's some Camerzion leather for where they met. And here's some Terran cotton from the Federation hospital where Doctor Julian delivered you, and underneath there's a lining of Tholian silk, because that's Takkon Elim's favorite fabricl in the whole galaxy."
"And this is Trel'ammi's favorite thing to wear in the whole galaxy," the child said and then bent forward to kiss him on his spoon.
"Of course Elim never got over my becoming a structural engineer instead of a fashion designer,"
Jilana chuckled.
"You had such a talent for putting patterns together, my dear, but then the Cardassian female's predilection for working in metals and polymers led you astray from satins and velvets," Garak replied with mock regret.
"Grandpa, don't fight with mo-mo," Trel'ammi said with an anxious expression.
"Grandpa is only teasing mo-mo, don't worry," Julian hastened to reassure her.
"So how come Garak is her 'grandpa' and you're not?" Miles asked with some amusement.
"That's very complicated." Bashir answered. "Andorrians define family with almost complete disregard to actual blood relationships. All adults who are involved in raising a child qualify as a rakka or rakke, a father or mother. The same goes for takkons and takkens, grandparents who've helped raise the child's parents. However, Andorrians feel about species the way Cardassians feel about biological parentage. So, as a human, I don't qualify for any kinship relation to Jilana or her child. I just have to settle for being Doctor Julian."
"I'll take the Cardassian way anytime," Jogal interjected with a scowl. "No way I'd want anyone to think Garak was my rakka."
"Kadz!" Jilana exclaimed. Then she began to sign in their own private gestural language, which the translators couldn't decode. Bashir had gotten pretty rusty on understanding those signs, but there was no mistaking Jilana's anger at her brother's rudeness and hostility toward their host. He was signing back just as angrily. As the other guests studiously attended to their refreshments, Garak picked up Trel'ammi and retreated with her out of the line of fire. However, the child soon began to cry and wriggled free. She ran to her mother and grabbed her hands, thus stopping
the conversation. When Jilana gathered her into her arms, the little girl then grabbed the eyeglass-type device that her mother wore to translate oral speech into sign and threw it to the floor. Then she covered her ears with her own little hands and started rocking back and forth in Jilana's arms.
Jogal got up and said in Alpha Quadrant standard sign language, "Here, she's tired. Let me put her to bed." His sister handed her daughter over with a glare, and no one protested when the young Cardassian and his niece left the room.
There wasn't much that could be done to rescue the evening after that. The O'Briens and the Siskos made embarrassed good-byes and returned to the orbiting transport that had brought them to Prime. Jilana started to clean up, pausing every few minutes to make apologies to Garak for her brother's conduct. When Jogal failed to reappear after a half hour, Julian went looking for him. The doctor found him sitting in a chair beside his sleeping niece's bed, apparently lost in thought. Bashir tiptoed in and motioned Jogal out into the hall.
"You can't hide from Elim forever, you know," Julian began.
"Oh, no? I've done a good enough job of it until now. It was a mistake for me to come, doc, even for your sake. I'm leaving early in the morning. Telar's concert tour is over in a couple of days, and he'll fetch Moxh and Trel'ammi back home."
Julian didn't know what else to say about Jogal's feud with Garak beyond what he had said to both of them, to no avail, throughout the years. "Did Trel'ammi calm down right away," he asked instead.
"No, she's always gets upset around oral speakers, even if she can hear. Specially when the voices overlap. She does like it, though, when her uncle Kadz reads her the tale of the ghostly riding hound of the Ghetakeret plain and imitates the wail of the hound as it hunts down the unwary enemies of Cardassia. I had to read it through four times before she dropped off, and I've put on the ear shields to keep her from waking up this time." Jogal shook his head. "To think of my Moxh married and with her own little gitter. Wouldn't have grabbed that as anyway possible when we first met all that time ago."
"Trel'ammi is a very special child," Julian agreed. "I'm just sorry they live so far away, and we see them so rarely. I wish they'd chosen to settle on Cardassia. Have you ever thought about coming home, Jogal? I can't imagine the cold, damp climate of Ferenginar would be very attractive to a Cardassian."
"I'm travelling nine days out of ten, plenty of hot dry planets on my route. Besides, I've no love for Cardassia. It's still no place for an acci."
"How can you say that? They repealed the bastardy laws six years ago. You'd be a full citizen now."
"Didn't repeal people's opinions," Jogal retorted. "Those will never change. Look how they've treated Garak. First he has to wrangle with those ungrateful Bajorans, then they bring him home to be Minister of Culture. Running around giving speeches and opening museums and libraries! If he'd been a gitter, it would have been different. He'd be in charge of everyone. Even that human Jake thinks more of him than his own people do."
"This human thinks pretty much of him, too, as you well know," Julian laughed. "Besides, Elim loves giving lectures and dedicating libraries. He's in his element." Then he realized the oddness of what Jogal had just said. "Since when do you care whether he gets the respect he deserves from Cardassia," the doctor asked. "You can't manage to stay in the same room with him for more than a quarter hour."
"Just because I still think he's a right bloody bastard, as your friend Miles would say, doesn't change the fact of him driving the Jemmies out and getting nothing in return for it. He should have stayed on that station with you and left those Cardie gitters to fend for themselves. That's what this acci is doing."
Suddenly Bashir's communicator chirped: "Level five emergency at Starbase 274 trauma center. All off-duty staff report at once."
Bashir hurriedly changed into his uniform and summoned his runabout from orbit. He paused briefly to say his good-byes to Elim, who was still putting dishes in the recycler and leftovers in the preserver. "There's been a rupture of the main plasma conduit that runs the length of deck five on the Starship Verdun. The area's been sealed off, but the bridge has lost communications with the trapped crewmen. The ship's traveling to Starbase 274 at Warp 8.5. They think there may be hundreds of casualties. I expect to be in surgery most of the night, so I'll just sleep over in my quarters on the base. I'll call you in the morning about when I'll be back, as soon as I know myself."
Elim kissed him passionately on the lips. "I hope it's soon," he said a little wistfully.
"I'm sorry the party fell apart on us Elim," Julian commiserated, returning the kiss. "It was a wonderful idea, and I love you for planning it." Then he pressed his communicator and beamed up to the runabout.
Bashir arrived at the base a few minutes after the Verdun docked, only to discover that, thankfully, the casualties had been far fewer than anticipated. A young assistant engineer had contained the plasma eruption before it contaminated the whole deck. There turned out to be a ratio of only one trauma patient per doctor, so Bashir was released from duty about midnight, Cardassian time.
There was no need to stay on the base, he reasoned. What could be better than surprising Elim by slipping into his bed with hours of darkness still before them? It would make up a bit for the party debacle. Besides, the doctor felt decidedly uneasy about the prospect of Jogal and Elim in the same house without him there to mediate.
Garak's security was such that even the residents of his house couldn't beam directly inside. You had to transport down to the front door and then enter the access codes. As Julian programmed in one complex series of letters, numbers and symbols after another, he heard voices and male laughter. Who could be visiting so late, he wondered. Finally the door sprang open and he walked into the living room, where Elim and Jogal were sitting on the couch, smiles on their faces, toasting each other with glasses of kanar. They turned and regarded Bashir with surprised expressions.
"Julian, you're back early, how delightful," Garak beamed, not missing a beat. "As you can see, Jogal and I have finally decided to put this feud of ours behind us."
The truth of it hit Bashir in a flash. How could he have been so blind all these years? Jogal's job, servicing a clientele that no doubt specialized in pleasuring some of the most influential people on dozens of Alpha Quadrant worlds--it was a perfect cover.
"You can drop the pretense, Elim," he said, his face dark with anger.
Jogal and Garak exchanged meaningful glances. "Oh my, I've stayed up much too late," the younger Cardassian mumbled. "I'd better get to sleep--since I'm shipping out so early. Night, doc." He scrambled up and hurried off down the hall.
Bashir plopped down into the nearest chair, clenching and unclenching his fists. He stared straight into Garak's eyes. "You turned him into a spy, didn't you?"
The Cardassian smiled, "I promised long ago that I would teach him what I knew. Since he absolutely refused to take up the needle, and his taste in literature was even worse than yours, what else was there left for me to do? "
"It's not funny, Elim," Bashir returned with a snort.
"I don't know.. I find it most amusing that you've only now figured things out. I must congratulate Jogal on his performance."
"And yourself. He learned from the master."
"Thank you very kindly, my love. I did worry through the years that both of us might have overplayed our parts."
"Perhaps you did," Julian replied. "I'm obviously not much of a drama critic. How could you do this to him, Elim, after all the Obsidian Order did to you?"
Garak finally grew serious. "Every great power has to have an intelligence service, your precious Federation included. I've never been able to fathom your fascination with espionage as a fantasy and your contempt for it as a reality."
Julian absorbed the rebuke for several seconds. "And you don't care whether the memories will make him wake up screaming thirty years from now, as they do you?" he asked, his voice almost breaking.
Garak leaned forward and took the doctor's hand. "I've not trained him to be a torturer or an assassin, believe me. He simply gathers intelligence. That's all."
"Right you are Garak," Jogal chimed in, returning from the corridor from which he had been listening in on their conversation, like the able spy he was. "I only kill them in self-defense, doc, so don't ruffle." He perched on the arm of Bashir's chair, grinning broadly. "So, Julian here has tumbled to our little charade at last?"
"He has," Garak said.
"About time I'd say. Wasn't any fun keeping up the pretense. But I thought you were Mr. Superbrain, doc. What took you so long?"
"I suppose I didn't want to see it, so I didn't see it."
"I never grabbed why Garak wanted you in the dark in the first place. I mean, we could trust you. Now, it would have blown my cover the first week if people thought too closely about my being virtually the adopted son of Garak of the Obsidian Order, but you could have still told them how much he and I hated each other, even if it was just a game."
"He's not a very good liar, Kadz," Garak said. "I've told you that often enough."
"Well, I hope some of the skill's rubbed off from being with you all this time, 'cause he's going to have to keep our secret now."
"Or you could quit the business, now that your cover's blown," Bashir suggested.
"Doc, don't make me do that," the young man pleaded. "I was born to be a spy. At least I took to it like a wompet to alcara trees."
"And you've no regrets?"
"Not a one. Plus I really am the quadrant's leading profit generator for Graks and Zag Pleasure Enhancers, Ltd. It's a great life. Only--" Jogal's exuberance dimmed slightly.
"Only what?"
"Only, don't tell Moxh, all right? She'd worry herself sick."
Julian could see that he had long ago lost this battle. "Your secret is safe with me, from your sister and everyone else."
Jogal clapped him on the back heartily. "I knew you'd go along. Kept telling Garak we shouldn't wait till you found out on your own. And now that we're all of us friends again, how about a threesome? I've got a number of my top of the line accessories in my sample kit."
"Kadz! Go to bed," both Garak and Bashir shouted in unison. "And we do mean alone," Garak added, once he stopped laughing.
"You are the most conventional pair of old twofies I've ever met." the young man exclaimed in annoyance. "But I'll seduce the pair of you yet. 'Cause, till you've done it with Kadz, you don't know what you're missing." He caressed each of them on the neck in his most provocative manner, planted a kiss square on each of their lips, and then dashed off to his bedroom before they could retaliate.
"That boy is utterly shameless, always has been," Julian observed after Kadz had departed.
"It helps him in the work, of course," Garak said, as he began caressing Julian's face and working to unfasten his uniform.
"Ummm," Julian replied breathlessly, as he reached inside Elim's trousers. "With all the action he sees, I don't understand why he's set on getting 'two old twofies' like us into his bed."
"Isn't it obvious, my dear?" Garak purred as he maneuvered his lover to their bedroom. "He knows full well that he is the one who is missing out on something very special."
I would love to see something about hanzo with a s/o who uses nicknames a lot? Like maybe where they accidentally call hanzo "sweetie" or something and he surprisingly, melts. Thank u 💙💛💚 u r too good for us
You know, this reminds me of a story. I once called someone “sweetheart” out of habit–working at a restaurant does that to you–and the person was so flustered and happy. It actually confused me that people get happy about being called it because to me, it’s almost like calling someone “mister” or “lady”. But language and culture and perception is interesting that way. Is there anything that you get called that makes you happy?
Call to Me Sweetly (Drabble)
It’s everyone’s job to pitch in at the various Watchpoints that they occupy. Winston, ever so optimistic in his plans, hopes to have most of the Watchpoints liveable by the time more agents answer the Recall. When that is, no one knows (and no one has the heart to tell him that this group of ragtag vigilantes and fallen heroes are probably as good as he’s going to get). Hanzo, being one of the new recruits without any history with the previous Overwatch, takes to these chores surprisingly well.
The Watchpoints themselves have fallen into such disrepair, there was no shortage of jobs to be done when on site even with the help of the cleaning bots. Laundry, electrical work, cleaning, terrain checks; the list is extensive. It is only a small miracle that the meals are being handled by a designated chef–there’s no need to argue kitchen duty in such cases.
It’s also fortunate for Overwatch that you’ve returned, a former apprentice of the contracting company that designed the Watchpoints. It was under your mentor’s tutelage that you learned architecture and have become familiar with the large constructs that oversaw various parts of the world. With your knowledge, even the most damaged Watchpoint could be rebuilt–maybe even stronger, better, and bigger. So that’s why you’re currently cross-legged on the floor of Watchpoint: Gibraltar, trying to assess the damages and the best course of action with Tracer’s, Reinhardt’s, and Hanzo’s assistance.
“Got the plans for ya!” Tracer dumps the paperwork onto the desk; Hanzo’s vaguely surprised that the plans would be written on paper rather than done on the computer like most work of this nature. But he shouldn’t talk, his family still insists on ink brushes and paper.
“Thanks, my love,” you call out, “could you also fetch me the book over there? The one about automatic doors?”
“Sure thing!”
“And how may I be of assistance?” The burly crusader mocks a bow.
You smile at the kindly giant’s gesture. “Standby, please. Satya’s going to come back with the details of the damages done to the West Wing and we’ll need help dismantling it soon with your hammer. So, could you just standby in the meantime, herr knight?”
“Certainly, my hammer is at your service,” he chuckles heartily.
Hanzo was assigned to help you calculate the material required for the Watchpoint. Luckily enough, Athena has been keeping a meticulous inventory of the remaining scraps of material and the funds that they still had in some reserve and away from any auditing agencies.
He turns his tablet at you, numbers and materials neatly calculated in a table that was color-coded for better reading. He has noticed that you liked things a particular way, and he could appreciate that very much. It’s nice to find someone else around here who is so meticulous and devoted to their work–very similar to Satya herself, but with a less prickly attitude (though she’s very good company when the mood calls for it).
“Here are the calculations.”
The archer doesn’t miss the ways your eyes light up at the numbers, a clear sign that this pleases you and that you could definitely work with these seemingly dismal conditions.
“Mm-hm, they’re perfect. Thank you, my sweetheart.”
He couldn’t help but be secretly pleased that you liked his work. “It’s not a problem–”
His brain screeches to a halt.
‘Thank you, my sweetheart.’
His heartbeat becomes a fierce staccato, loud and furious in his ears. He holds a hand to his mouth to prevent it from leaping out, trying to feign thoughtfulness when he’s doing his best to hide the beginnings of a shy smile that he feels making its way onto his face.
“Hey, Hanzo? What’s wrong, luv?” Tracer’s face intrudes his vision and he jerks back immediately with a strangled noise. That catches the attention of yourself and Reinhardt hard immediately. He could see the curious way all there of you stare at him and his neck prickles in panic.
“Sweetheart?” Your voice coaxes him out of his stupor, though it only serves to make him more aware of your loose affection.
“Excuse me.” Without waiting for a reply, he disappears. He couldn’t know the sly way that Tracer and Reinhardt suddenly look at you and waggle their eyebrows eagerly and suggestively at you, who is more than confused by the sudden change in atmosphere.
You couldn’t possibly have meant that for him personally. You call everyone by some sort of name that isn’t truly their own. It’s just a mark of camaraderie or endearment–to show that you are comfortable around that person. Just like how he calls Hana, “Hana-chan”, and how Ana flippantly calls the mysterious Soldier: 76, “Jack”. It didn’t mean anything beyond friendship.
Though, he’d be lying if he didn’t like the easy way these endearments spilled from your lips so easily like water from a fountain. They weren’t normally meant for him, but he sees the way your recipients would brighten up when you addressed them so. There was a magic in the simple words you hold, and there were times he would wonder if they would affect him, too. Though, the nagging reminder of “Sparrow” and how his father never gave him something so sentimental or endearing (just old traditions and responsibilities for the next ‘head of the clan’ rather than to Hanzo himself) weighs on his mind. But this is different.
‘–My sweetheart.’
He slaps a hand over his face and drags it down, pulling a frustrated groan from his throat. This is different.
And if only he could get his traitorous mind to understand that and stop conjuring the memory of your voice, clearly distorted by his mind’s delusions, calling him “sweetheart” in more and more gentle, personal, alluring tones. It makes his chest light and warm, and even he cannot deny it.
Cybertron is a metallic planet devoid of any “organic”, or non-mechanical, life. While the planet does not rotate around a star, it does rotate around the galaxy it inhibits (undecided), thus occasionally gets light wind and debris. The atmosphere of Cybertron is made up of gases that come from the “pores” all throughout it and from Cybertronians themselves. The gases are not exactly like Earth’s, but are known to protect the planet from the winds. They are also known to create auroras of colors invisible to the human eye. There is no sunlight reflecting off the atmosphere, so Cybertron’s sky mostly appears as the space around it. The planet is not suitable for life for most other species. The most important aspect of Cybertron is buried underneath multiple thick metal layers, a mass called the Allspark.
At the center of Cybertron is the Allspark, a massive center of heat. The Allspark is where all the Cybertronian sparks are made. Sparks are the “essence” of all Cybertronians, the embodiment of life, as well as the powerhouse. As far as appearance goes, they appear as balls of light plasma. They tend to be orange red to yellow. In rare occasion, they can be light to dark blue.
All sparks are formed as tiny buds on the Allspark’s surface. Some buds continue to grow to large proportions, while some stay small. These buds eventually come off, and due to mass of the core, try to “find” their way out. These sparks go through a vast tunnel until they reach a smaller, yet very massive, spark known as a Hot Spark.
Hot Sparks are the sparks of Cybertronian cities. These sparks started off as every other spark, but grew large and, on the journey to the surface, settled underneath the surface of Cybertron, unable to advance further due to size. A Hot Spark instead helps power the city they are underneath and help transfer sparks to the surface. The traveling sparks get an extra layer of heat from this action, as the Hot Spark in turn gets rid of excess heat. The tiny sparks travel through a Hot Spark seamlessly, until they reach the area near the planet’s surface.
From there, the sparks are funneled upwards towards the surface of Cybertron through the hot tunnels, and gather at the surface in flat platforms called Hot Spots. These Hot Spots are not all out in the open of Cybertron’s surface, but embedded in the layers that make up Cybertronian cities. At normal times, they appear as giant barren circles in the ground, but when activated with sparks, they glow with all kinds of colors. Some cities have one Hot Spot, some have various. In either case, sparks rise to these openings in unpredictable fashion, sometimes sparks occur sparsely, sometimes sparks occur in what is called a Sparkrush.
After sparks reach their Hot Spot, they are sent to Vector Sigma, a massive supercomputer at the northernmost region of Cybertron. All sparks are sent in mass waves to be scanned by the computer, which assesses the sparks and determines what alt mode that they will take. The sparks are then put into protoform shapes, made of mixes of various metals as well as Hot Spot liquid. The sparks are absorbed and get surrounded by the shapes.They resemble a stunning array of geometric shapes, and have the texture of clay.These are what are called Sparklings. The Sparklings are put into their assigned frames, called vessels…
It is said that Cybertronians do not gain sentience until they reach their vessels and experience life for a while. Thus, some say that cities have no sentience. However, this is debatable, as some could say that the city is a vessel, and such vessel interacts and learns all the time...Regardless, cities do in fact feel alive. Cybertronians can feel the spark underneath the city pulsating and feel the ground humming at all times. It's a very comforting feeling for them, the equivalent of a security blanket.
Cities
Cities are built close and interconnected...or, at least,they are supposed to be. The planet appears to be missing some cities, as there are large gaps in between them which reveal some of Cybertron’s deeper layers. Some city structures have been built in the gaps.
On Cybertron, materialism isn’t a big concept--as in, no one really has a need or want for lots of land or property. Cybertronian own items, but don’t necessarily feel a need to have houses. (As with most updated species, all Cybertronians have what is called a Black Hole Account, which is basically a rented little device that can open a “hole in space” that can hold nearly an infinite amount of items. This will be explained in later posts). A lot of functions that a house would serve are done on Cybertron through communal services. For example, there are designated buildings for recharging, as there are buildings for different occupations, maintenance, and so on.
Each Cybertronian is connected to the city through what basically is like wifi connection. When a Cybertronian travels through a city, they must connect to the city’s connection server. This connection is done through their vessel. Cybertronians interact with the city’s software for a variety of reasons, like to get informed of news, directly communicate with local authorities such as Guardian Bots, get a basic check up inspection, and to track destination. The city has to make a literal light path for bots walk/run/drive/fly over. This not only looks aesthetic but also is functional, as it prevents crashes. The planet would be completely dark, had it not been for the long streams of light that cities and bots emit…
Every city connects to Cybertron’s surface in puzzle-like fashion with blocky outgrowths called Connectors. The Connectors are on the bottom of cities, and these pieces attach to various hollow tunnels on Cybertron’s surface. These Connectors are like plugs, allowing the cities to attach to Cybertron and receive energy. When Connectors connect to their tunnels, Hot Spots activate, and Receptors come out.
Receptors are long, thin, microscopic appendages that are vital to cities. These appendages sprout out from city Connectors in masses. Receptors distribute messages and power in all scales of Cybertronian activity, be it for Sparkrushes or for a simple city path. They are spread throughout the city’s building material and Cybertron’s metallic layer. They are the power lines of Cybertron.
Any occupation related to Cybertronian architecture is a complicated field to be in. Not just because of math and material knowledge, but also because an architect has to “work with the city”. Cybertronians cities are built in the fashion of its people...as in, structures are built like as it if could transform. This requires a lot of patience and critical thinking, as the Receptors of a city are complex. They often can reach sizes that overlap Cybertron’s surface area multiple times, connecting and disconnecting each other, working in complicated ways. If these Receptors come into contact with material that cause unfavorable reactions, or are moved in an incorrect way, Cybertron could be at jeopardy. As well, size has to be taken into account. City structures themselves have to be extremely large to accommodate Cybertronian types below Guardian class. Space in between buildings also has to be vast, to allow Guardian Bots to pass by with ease.
Concept
There is speculation as to the nature of Cybertron. Most accept the idea that they did not rise from the abiogenesis nature that organics have. The Hte Pok-Pok, for example, have a similar system of “life essence”, that a source of life comes from the center of the planet, and buds off and inhibits a vessel on the surface. However, Cybertronians have the ability to change their shape according to environment, and are able to be hacked into and replace parts with.
There are various theories, one being “Quint Theory”. These beings are known as “Quintessons”. This theory states that Cybertronians are just machine technology made by another species, with Cybertron being a giant factory called Prioma Cybere.
How this factory runs depends on what the core is theorized to be. It could run on a complex function of technochemical reactions in its core (if the core is said to be an artificial creation, with its acting as a giant memory center), or could run on its core star energy (if the core of the planet is a literal star, the metal built to contain and harvest energy). The empty spots throughout Cybertron are due to the deployment of the cities. These cities were extremely powerful beings with unimaginable strength and size. They were used to colonize and destroy other worlds.
The Cybertronians were not originally given personalities or a “soul”, but these came about from a corruption in the programming. The Cybertronians were made to be machines that did work, but eventually figured out how much stronger they were than their creators, eventually revolting and destroying these beings. After that, they created their own societies...The Allspark is the beginning and the end of Cybertronians. Extinguished Cybertronian sparks fade, but everything a Cybertronian has ever done is recorded in the Allspark, like a giant massive computer..
Another concept is “Primus Theory”. This theory states that Cybertron is, indeed, one of the many living celestial bodies. Living planets are not special, as they do exist, and have been known to be particularly hard to communicate with. Prioma Cybere, in this case, is not a living planet, but a living star. Prioma Cybere is sentient, but not the kind that could manufacture organic life, or one with a “personality”. It overtime was surrounded in materials from dead stars and space debris, and, slowly but surely, formed a rudimentary rock surface. Instead of being one huge but emotionless being, this star decided to live life through much smaller vessels to experience existence. Prioma made massive Cybertronians, that serve to protect ver and produce and care for the much smaller beings ve would make, those beings becoming the cities. In theory, the Allspark is every Cybertronian, and every Cybertronian is just one tiny aspect of Primus, a sentient embodiment of Prioma. There is no place where any memories are recorded, but the Allspark is symbolic for Cybertronian unity.
There is quite a bit of debate between the two theories, but its not a top priority to the general population of Cybertron. They mostly just accept the fact that they exist, and go on from there. There are Cybertronians who do like to make stories and discuss this.
There are some characters, however, who really know the truth...
The basics of Cybertronian nature! But, who are the Cybertronians, and how are they like?? And that’s for next time on aTFAUomo!
AAaaAAaaand finally! That took a while to finish...and I did not pen it! I figured that perhaps pen ink would be better spent on much more detailed drawings, as opposed to a general layout.
Now to explain the drawings...
To the top left is a basic concept idea of what Cybertron looks like from a distance, a planet with a straight up axis and various gaps and lights. To the top right is what the Allspark actually looks like if observed. Thus, the larger model below those two is a simple demonstration of spark creation, as well as minimal detail of city Connectors. To the bottom left is a sketch of a Hot Spark. To the bottom right is a sketch showing Receptors, which in reality should look like a wired mess. None of the drawings are too scale, especially with the Allspark’s size compared to the surface of Cybertron.
Hopefully I will be able to post more regularly, but no promises. I spent a lot of time on trying to shorten the text part of the post and not a lot on details? I hope it makes sense at least?
Hmm, one day I will actually talk about the Autobot and Decepticon governments, and characters. However, I feel like explaining the background of this AU makes more sense...I have to set up everything first. ;)
