#doctor garak

“What-”

As the door whooshed open, he stopped in his tracks once more. A small space had been cleared out for a checkered tablecloth, on top of which there was a covered plate, a glass and a little vase with an iris.

Garak couldn't stop staring at it. A strange, delightfully pleasant warmth washed over him and

“Surprise!” Julian said, stepping back in the room with a bowl of sweet buns for dessert. “Welcome back! Are you hungry? I mean—of course you are, you’re carbon-based, after all but would you like to join me for dinner? I mean, I guess I’m joining you for dinner as I won’t eat and-”

Garak just stood there, watching Julian. He couldn't move, he couldn't think, he could hardly keep breathing normally as that warmth coiled in his gut like a tenacious, impossible plant.

Julian had made him dinner

Julian nodded, scrolling through the text. Then, as he gathered his courage, he looked up. "I was thinking perhaps the first exchange between Benedick and Beatrice? It establishes their... relationship quite clearly."

And there it was again, Garak’s smile, sending a strange shiver down his spine he couldn't quite classify.

It's not a fever. I can't develop fevers.

"Ah, the 'merry war' passage," Garak said, his eyes glinting with something Julian couldn't quite categorize. "Very well."

Julian's program provided instant line memorization. The words were there, he could even see old, human actors playing exactly those lines. He just needed to copy them, that was all.

And yet, when he opened his mouth, his breath caught in his chest and the resulting line sounded wobbly, uncertain.

“What, my dear Lady Disdain! Are you yet living?"

The transformation in Garak was instantaneous. His posture shifted, his expression sharpened with practiced disdain as he delivered Beatrice's response. "Is it possible disdain should die, while she hath such meet food to feed it as Signior Benedick?”

Garak shifted slightly closer to him.

His eyes were locked with his.

“Courtesy itself must convert to disdain, if you come in her presence."

We are just playing. We are literary just playing.

Julian leaned forward slightly.

"Then is courtesy a turncoat. But it is certain I am loved of all ladies, only you excepted; and I would I could find in my heart that I had not a hard heart, for truly I love none."

“Doctor, doctor, please,” Garak said, breaking out of character as he softly grabbed Julian’s forearm. “You are as stiff as a board.”

“No, I’m not!” Julian replied, instinctively. A sudden anger washed over him, making him want to shout at Garak for interrupting the scene, for daring to-

“Oh yes, you are my dear, you are just reading the lines your program is telling you to say.”

Please state the nature of your medical emergency.

“Isn't that what reading lines means?” Julian replied, crossing his arms to his chest, retreating away from Garak as far as he could go.

“But we are performing. We are not just reading these lines, we are feeling them.”

“I…I can't-”

“Oh, but you can imagine, can't you? How it must feel like to have a deep, gut wrenching desire, and run away from it, burying it deeply under wit and charm and-”

“Let's try again,” Julian interrupted him. He shouldn't be feeling warm, and yet he was, and the sudden terror of being about to self combust led him to the only possible course of action.

Aka: a doctor and a hologram practicing lines from Much Ado About Nothing