a small white room - pyrrhic_victory - Star Trek: Deep Space Nine [Archive of Our Own]
"The man who stands in front of him and lowers his hands from Garak’s face is older than the one Garak always pictures in his head. He’s tired. The edges of him are full of shadows that followed him from the prison camp. The bright, shining naivety that Garak used to chide and adore in equal measure has faded now. And his virulent insistence that the world is a good place has changed too - changed into an angrier, darker kind of optimism that Garak has never seen in anyone else - the world can be better than it is, and it will be, or it will have to answer to Julian Bashir."











