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aurora-nova-fic · 5 years

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Deleted Scenes: Bittersweet Symphonies

I doubt I’ll be on this much all the time, but I realized this is a great way to share some deleted scenes from Bittersweet Symphonies, the conclusion to my Private Universe series. This series grabbed me and wouldn’t let go for 106k words. I adore the series, even though I now associate one of my favorite writing songs so strongly with Chapter 2 of Bittersweet Symphonies that I struggle to write anything else to it.

So, for my “yay I’m on tumblr” celebration, I present some of the scenes which didn’t make the final edit.

First up, this was originally written as the second-to-last Private Universe Snapshot:

The Interrogation

Garak left the basement to get food and was promptly accosted by Mila. “Tell me about him,” she said.

“Damar is Cardassia’s best chance, notwithstanding his past sins.” Garak would never forgive him for killing Ziyal, but he understood Damar had done so out of his sense of duty to the state. Presently, he saw no point in dredging up the past when they had a future to secure. He also knew that was unlikely to be what Mila meant, but a man could hope.

“Don’t play ignorant with me. You know perfectly well I’m not asking about Damar, and yes, I have a dampening field on. This is a private conversation.”

Really, one would have thought she’d realize now was not the time to pry into his personal affairs. The glare she fixed on him clearly conveyed otherwise. Garak had learned how to break people with his eyes from her, after all.

He gave in to the inevitable. “Julian Bashir, Chief Medical Officer of Deep Space Nine.”

“Human?” She wasn’t disgusted, merely curious.

Garak nodded.

“I’m waiting for details, Elim. I have been for years, so your dinner can wait a few more minutes.”

“It’s not my dinner I’m worried about,” he said. There was the rebellion to consider, foremost, and of course his ongoing quest to not be killed by the Dominion.

“You learned to control the malon anbar, I trust.”

Garak did not appreciate her saying the words aloud, dampening field or not. “Perfectly. And since you’re apparently willing to hold up our activities against the Dominion to satisfy your curiosity…”

“There are no activities to hold up, at the moment.”

“I was hoping to change that, but instead I’m being interrogated about my personal life.”

“I take my opportunities where I can get them.”

“Very well. If you must know, he is an exhilarating conversationalist.”

“That goes without saying, if he held your interest for any length of time.”

“He is in equal measure delightful and impossible. Would you believe he finds The Never Ending Sacrifice dull?”

Mila appeared to believe it. “I’ve always found it overrated myself. I think I like this man, Elim. Keep going.”

Garak hadn’t known she held this shocking opinion. “How can you possibly think it’s overrated?”

“There’s nothing wrong with it, but you have to admit it’s predictable.”

Aghast, Garak could only wonder from where he had gotten his refined taste in literature. Tain never had time for fiction, and now Mila didn’t appreciate The Never Ending Sacrifice. Appalling. “Presuming we survive, I’ll have to give you Shakespeare. Perhaps it will be more to your liking.”

“You’re stalling again.”

Garak grew weary of her insistence. “He is so generous it can hardly be believed. He is clever and mesmerizing and from a race which glorifies tales of people from separate worlds who overcome all obstacles to be together, but I am a realist, so I know better. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a rebellion leader to motivate.” He spun around, deciding he wasn’t hungry after all.

“Elim.”

He paused and looked over his shoulder.

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I,” he said, and went back down to the basement. If they didn’t defeat the Dominion, nothing else would matter anyway.

Why I cut it: I decided three snapshots in a row on the “they belong to different worlds” theme was a bit much, for one thing. I was also unsure if Garak was quite in character enough, though I was going for him being more open with his mother than he would be with anyone else. This was briefly the prologue for Bittersweet Symphonies, but I liked revisiting the Arwen & Aragorn bit from A Chasm in Perspective much better. Some of the dialogue made it into Garak’s flashback in the wedding scene.

Next up, a short bit from the subspace conversation where Julian tells Miles he’s an Augment.

“I hadn’t known it was possible to intimidate my father into silence. Garak is very impressive when he’s in full protective mode.” That he was protecting Julian had charmed his mother even more than it irritated his father.

“Scary as hell, is more like it. He stares at you like he’s thinking of twenty different ways to kill you and dispose of your body.”

This sounds like it’s coming from personal experience. “Something you’d like to share, Miles?”

“You remember right after your parents left, I thought I’d tease you by calling you Jules?”

“That was my name before,” Julian explains quietly. “I couldn’t tell you why it bothers me so much.”

“Sorry about that.”

“You couldn’t have known.”

“But Garak did, and it answers a mystery.”

“What mystery?” asks Julian.

“He came to our quarters and told me I was never to call you Jules again. There was no ‘or else.’ There didn’t need to be. Twenty might be too low an estimate.”

Julian is touched to learn about this unexpected display of concern. “I didn’t know he’d done that.”

“He ‘suggested’ it would be better if you didn’t. I wasn’t about to argue. Anyway, that’s when I knew he really does care about you.”

Why I cut it: Too out of character for Garak.

Here we have a little bit from the beginning of the ka’tur-routzx, the blade ritual.

Garak removes the knife he keeps strapped to his ankle and throws it Julian’s way. The toss is an easy one, spinning lazily through the air, though judging by Dax’s gasp the whole situation looks very bad from a Federation perspective. Julian grabs the hilt of the knife as it tumbles over end toward him. He can manage harder catches – the enhanced hand-eye coordination is useful – but isn’t likely to appreciate an ostentatious display of his abilities. Garak is still working on that.

“You throw knives when you love the person you just married?” O’Brien asks, incredulous.

“That’s not the ritual, it’s Elim showing off the hard work he put into my self-defense lessons.”

Julian finally agreed to the instruction after Interment Camp 371. Starfleet Medical sends its doctors out into the galaxy woefully untrained to face attackers, and Garak has long held a deep interest in keeping Julian alive. Besides, the augmentations did him little to no good when he didn’t know how to best use them to his advantage.

“I hope you practiced in the holosuites first,” says Dax.

“Fake knife, actually,” says Julian as he stands. “Are we going to perform parlor tricks, or are we going to do this?”

Oh, he is glorious. The remark is just forward and inviting enough for the situation without being too blatantly seductive in front of their guests. Garak couldn’t have come up with better himself.

Why I cut it: This one was a real kill your darlings moment, because I love, love “Are we going to perform parlor tricks, or are we going to do this?” But the scene served the line, not the other way around, and I think the final product flows better without this part.

Here’s a bit from Ezri’s POV as she and Kira leave Cardassia after the wedding.

“You and Garak really came to an understanding, didn’t you?” asks Ezri while she starts the runabout’s preflight.

“Yes,” says Nerys. “He’s done terrible things, things I could never condone. But he did them for Cardassia.”

Ezri doesn’t know why that makes Garak’s misdeeds acceptable until Nerys adds quietly, “I’ve done terrible things for Bajor.”

That… actually explains a lot.

In any event, while Ezri could never marry someone like Garak, she appreciates what Julian has with him. “They’re happy,” she says. “I’m glad something good has come of Julian leaving Starfleet. I really think he’s going to be okay. And you know, I don’t think Garak is worried about me anymore.”

“Worried?”

Ezri weighs how much she can say. “Keeping Jadzia’s secrets.”

“So she did know about the two of them.”

“Oh, yes.”

“I figured,” says Nerys. “It seemed like the kind of thing Julian would have told her.”

He had, of course, and then he and Garak developed the private universe and Jadzia was utterly fascinated by the scientific implications. When she was dying, she thought mostly about the people she was leaving behind and the child she’d never have, but she had briefly regretted that she’d never unravel the mysteries of the malon anbar. It was the only science project she thought about, at least before Julian had to remove Dax.

Ezri shakes her head. “Sorry. Memories.” She doesn’t get lost in them very often now, but it does happen, and they’re usually Jadzia’s. “Jadzia was protective of Julian’s relationship with Garak. She thought it was good for him, but she knew most people wouldn’t approve.”

“I wouldn’t have,” agrees Nerys.

Why I cut it: It didn’t fit or add much on its own, and I quickly abandoned the chapter it was going to be part of (which involved Kira collapsing and needing treatment, Julian performing another medical feat, and Garak fretting Starfleet would realize what a good doctor they’d let get away and offer Julian his commission back).

And finally, part of the epilogue which got the axe:

There’s a crate in the middle of their living room. “Is that from Mother?”

“Yes. She seems very concerned about you,” says Elim. “And after I wrote her a respectful letter promising not to let you starve, no less.”

In Cardassian terms, his mother’s habit of sending food expresses deep concern over Elim’s ability to keep him fed. “You know it’s not an insult by human standards, and I may have mentioned that you liked the marmalade she sent two care packages ago.”

Elim’s sweet tooth wins out. “I suppose there are worse problems than a spouse-mother looking to add variety to our diet,” he says, trying for more grudging than he actually manages.

The tentative rapprochement between Julian and his mother, begun on the station before the war intervened and he only rarely remembered to tell her he was still alive, is growing less tenuous. Part of this, he suspects, is that he’s no longer hiding in shame. The rest is due to her unconditional acceptance of everything: choosing to reveal his augmentations, moving to Cardassia, marrying Elim. She’s undemanding and supportive from a distance of light-years, and for the first time since he was a teenager, Julian is willing to give her a role in his life. He’s gotten in the habit of writing monthly.

They don’t speak of Father. As far as Julian is concerned, there’s no paternal relationship left to repair. Not in years, really, but the last straw was the letter he’d received after his wedding expressing Richard Bashir’s selfishness over Julian saving Kira’s life: Your mother and I could go to prison, did you even stop to think about that? As though it’s Julian’s job to protect his parents from the consequences of their actions.

The return address on the care package is Aunt Aya’s for the second box in a row. Mother has been visiting her sister for quite some time now, but Julian isn’t about to pry for details. He opens the box and sure enough, finds three jars of marmalade. Underneath them is his real prize. “Here it is. She said she was sending something to celebrate getting my license, and it arrived just in time.”

“What is that?”

“Her homemade lamb stew. She canned it for us.”

Elim is more interested in the marmalade, but he’s not about to refuse a break from ration bars.

They are better off than many people on Cardassia. Miles, Ezri, and Kira are evidently on a joint mission to ensure Julian, and by extension Elim, escape the worst of the current deprivations.

Why I cut it: This tried to cram way too much into the epilogue. If you’ve read The Tune Without the Words, you’ll see some ideas morphed into that piece.

Well, this is long and, now that I think about it, more than a bit self-indulgent, but blogs are self-indulgent by their very nature, so here it is, internet. ;)

#fanfic #garak/bashir #ds9 #deleted scene

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adigeon · 6 years

Note

15. “Was that supposed to hurt?”

“Elim.”

Garak has always hated those two syllables of his given name. For the bulk of his life, anyone who’s known that name of his has been someone willing to wield it as weapon: Tain, mostly, but Mila, too, when she felt it needed. Bashir, the dear man, had once seemed to have absorbed this – and yet now…

“Elim. Elim Garak!” An altogether unpleasant shove at Garak’s chest, a pause, a shove again. “Don’t leave me here.” A ragged inhale, the sort that would usually leave Garak leaning in, concerned – but now he is too much drawn in by silence, by dark. By rest.

Bashir swears. He steps away from Garak’s body, and for a moment, Garak thinks absolution is his. But, somehow, Bashir’s voice chattering in the distance still registers to him. A command to the ship’s computer. A ragged, terrible pain in the center of Garak’s chest – him gasping as he tries to free himself of it – Bashir holding him by the neck (dear man.)

In his last moments of consciousness, Garak manages to say, “Was that supposed to hurt?”

And Bashir cupping his face with one hand, miserable: “No, Garak, no–”

Garak wakes while the Infirmary is possessed by utmost calm. One of the Bajoran nurses stands at his bedside, hmming to herself. “Welcome back,” she says. She draws a tricorder over where he lies in the biobed, even though the biobed should be monitoring him. “Please, Mr. Garak, relax.”

He does, less because he’s been instructed to and more because he’s weakened enough that *resting*, moons forbid, seems the only thing he’s capable of.

There are countable breaths between his waking and Bashir arriving at his bedside. Bashir pushing his fingers through Garak’s hair, cradling his head in his hands, crying?

What a Human weakness, Garak thinks, even as he leans into the touch.

“Garak, don’t do that to me,” Bashir says; he leans in to press his face against the side of Garak’s head. “Prophets, Garak.” His fingers contract unpleasantly against the back of Garak’s skull.

And yet the touch is welcome.

Garak leans into it. Revels in knowing this young man knows too much about him. Revels in pretending. “Doctor,” he mock-guesses; Bashir takes his face in both hands. Bashir kisses him.

It shouldn’t be unexpected. It’s unexpected. The warmth of the Human’s mouth, the immediacy – even were Garak in full health, could he be expected to resist? Oh, no; he yields; he leaves himself open for Bashir’s taking.

After long minutes, he finds himself dazed, Bashir’s fingernails digging into his scalp, Bashir humming to himself.

Garak should be more alert than this. More suspicious.

And yet after an accidental poisoning, he’s too willing to yield to Starfleet’s care. So long as Bashir is amongst Starfeet’s numbers.

To allow this humiliation of being cared for – of collapsing – it’s easier, knowing Bashir is waiting.

For now, at least.

#hhhhHHHHH #this was.......fun to write #garashir #my fic #ask meme #spyrograph

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