My Star Trek One-Shots

Garak

The woman stumbled onto the promenade in combat boots, a plaid flannel tied around her waist and a band tee that read Rage Against the Machine. Disoriented but upright, her wild, curly hair was streaked purple at the ends, and her eyes darted around in disbelief.

"I swear," she muttered, "this is either a very elaborate Comic-Con . . . or I'm very high."

Security was on her in moments, led by a wary Constable Odo. "You're not supposed to be here."

She blinked at his face, her jaw dropping. "Oh my god, did someone put a Face/Off filter on you?"

That's how it began.

Her name was Noa Larkin, a 28-year-old from 2025 with a sarcasm problem, a battered journal in her back pocket, and an instinctive distrust of anyone in a uniform. She'd been walking through a subway tunnel in New York when she stepped into... something. And now here she was, being ushered through a futuristic station called Deep Space Nine and trying very hard not to have a meltdown.

Dr. Julian Bashir was charming, brilliant, and—by Noa's estimation—exactly the kind of man her mother would've loved.

"Scar tissue behind the tympanic membranes," he said after a brief scan. "You had tube surgery as a child?"

"Yeah. Repeated ear infections," Noa replied, still twitching slightly from the hypospray. "Why?"

Bashir's expression twisted into gentle horror. "How barbaric. Surgically inserting synthetic tubes into a child's eardrum to 'drain' fluid? We have regenerative auditory therapy now."

"Cool. Where were you in 2001, dude?" she deadpanned. "I could've used a regen-whatever when I was seven and couldn't hear anything for half a year."

He gave her a pitying smile that somehow made it worse. She rolled her eyes. "Love the futuristic medical superiority complex. Very sci-fi of you."

Her first real conversation with Garak, the station's enigmatic tailor (and not-a-spy), came after she made the mistake of browsing his shop for something to wear besides her flannel and jeans.

He regarded her with amusement. "You wear your rebellion like armor."

"And you wear your secrets like cologne," she fired back.

His eyes twinkled. "Oh, delightful. You're going to be terrible for my blood pressure."

They sparred like flint and steel from the moment they met. He called her impulsive. She called him manipulative. He raised a perfectly ridged brow at her primitive 21st-century moral relativism. She told him his clothes looked like "space-age fascist leisurewear." 

Still, they kept ending up in the same rooms, the same corridors, the same awkward silences that buzzed with unsaid things.

"No offense," she said one night as they both stood in front of a viewport, looking out into the wormhole, "but I think we're . . . kind of the same."

Garak turned slowly, skepticism painted in every line of his face. "How so?"

"You're hiding who you are so people don't reject you. You lie because you think the truth will destroy things. Me? I've just been lying to myself." She paused. "You're all secrets and masks. I'm all broken stuff I pretend doesn't matter."

The silence between them grew heavy.

Then Garak whispered, "The difference is, I have no interest in being known."

And Noa—surprisingly, softly—replied, "Maybe that's the saddest thing I've ever heard."

Falling in love wasn't easy for either of them. She hated Cardassian politics. He hated flannel shirts. She called him a fascist snob. He called her a chaotic gremlin. But when she got sick from temporal destabilization, he was the one who sat by her bed, watching over her.