Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Falcon crashed through the frosted glass pane, its stately floor-to-ceiling form shattering into tiny glitter-like shards and tinkling to the floor, a cacophony of high-pitched pinging quickly absorbed by the lushly piled rug. He lay there unmoving on his back, surrounded by the remnants of the pane scattered on the tile, like freshly fallen snow or perhaps more accurately, hail. Julie stepped calmly behind him, casually brushing the dust from their little kerfuffle off the sleeves of her well-fitted tuxedo. She strolled around the broken furniture, routing towards the generically attractive blonde waiting by the champagne bucket. She was wearing a very slinky red dress that showed off her very respectably sized bosom.

They had their backs turned to Falcon; Julie picked up a bottle and spotted Falcon’s reflection in the glass among the beads of ice water slowly trickling down. He was stumbling to his feet. Julie played it cool, pretending she was going to pour a glass for her love interest, and prepared to pop the cork. Falcon snuck towards them, knife raised.

At the last second, she spun on her heel, directing the popped cork at Falcon — it hit him directly between the eyes (well, the one eye and the eyepatch) and he immediately dropped his knife and crumpled to the floor as if he’d been hit on the head with a hammer. This time, he didn’t get up again.

Julie held the bottle with a smirk, ignoring the frothed champagne flowing down over her fingers. “Lot of kick for a ’45 Dom,” she said, suavely.

She began to pour them both celebratory glasses. The blonde looked at her with very deep and obvious appreciation. “Thank you, miss…” she said, “miss…?”

Julie flashed her her most roguish grin. “Bashir,” she said, “Julie Bashir.”

The blonde approached her as if she was going to take the champagne glass out of her hand, but kept going, cradling Julie’s face in her hands instead. Julie put the champagne down and kissed her. Her mouth was flavorless, but warm.

Someone started clapping. Julie pulled back from the blonde with a quiet curse.

“Who’s that?” the blonde said, looking over curiously.

“I think I’m in a lot of trouble,” Julie groaned.

Garak, who was wearing an oversized and admittedly very ‘60s ankle-length fur coat, continued applauding with a very opaque smile on her face while Julie picked her way over to her. She finally stopped when Julie came to stand next to her.

“Nice coat,” Julie said.

“Thank you,” Garak replied, sounding genuinely pleased about the compliment.

“I can explain.”

“Oh, no,” said Garak cheerfully, “I think very little explanation is needed.”

Julie glanced over her shoulder at the blonde, who was watching them blank-faced, and turned back to Garak again. “Actually,” she said, “we can talk about this later. Right now I think you should just leave.”

Garak put on an expression of mock offense. “But Doctor, I've only just arrived!”

“Garak, breaking into a holosuite during someone's program is not only rude, it's illegal. If Odo got wind of this, he’d probably arrest you - or at least have you banned from Quark’s.”

“What an extreme reaction that would be,” Garak tittered. “Especially considering you invited me.”

“You refused!” Julie exclaimed, “very bluntly, as I recall! You made it quite clear you have no interest!”

“My, my, now you’re getting defensive,” Garak said, and looked around the simulated nightclub VIP room very unsubtly. “You must be quite embarrassed by this program…”

“I’m not embarrassed,” Julie said stiffly. “Why would I have invited you in the first place if I were embarrassed?”

“Because you knew I’d decline, dear! Surely you realized from the start that I would have absolutely no desire to participate in a role-playing game about spies. You stood to lose absolutely nothing by inviting me just to be polite!”

“And yet,” Julie said, really annoyed now, “here you are anyway.”

Garak smiled brightly at her. “Yes,” she said. “Ever since you received this new program, you've been spending virtually all of your free time in the holosuite. But you’ve hardly told me anything about it except for the program’s very basic premise and what era of clothing you wanted your costume modeled off of.”

“Garak, you were practically offended by the concept of a spy game. Why would I give you any more details?”

“Well, dear, you are a - forgive me - a rather talkative woman. It’s unusual for you to keep secrets.”

“I must’ve picked up the habit from you,” Julie snapped. “And it’s not a secret, anyway! I just wanted to keep it private after you turned me down! There’s nothing wrong with wanting to do my own thing!”

“That really depends on what you’re doing, though, doesn’t it? Or whom?” Garak said, staring over Julie’s shoulder at, presumably, the holographic blonde she had just been snogging.

Julie sighed. “Look, Garak—“

“Oh, no, dear, I’m not upset,” Garak obviously lied. “If anything, you’ve piqued my curiosity. Is this fantasy of yours really that revealing of your inner psyche?”

“What?”

“Is that why you're so protective? Afraid that I might learn some humiliating secret about the real Juliet Bashir?”

Julie cringed. “This is just a fantasy, Garak. And you could have been here with me this entire time if you hadn’t dismissed the whole thing as ‘childish, myopic nonsense’ and sent me on my way.”

“Nothing I’ve seen so far would seem to disprove that judgment, my little isca blossom.”

I’m not going to win this one, Julie realized, and groaned again. “Alright,” she surrendered, “you can stay. But I've only got another two hours before I go on duty and I want to enjoy myself. So keep quiet and don't rain on my parade.”

“Parade?” Garak said, blinking politely.

“Nevermind…”

“Ah, don’t worry, Doctor,” she said, taking Julie by the arm, “I can be quite discreet. You'll barely know I'm here.”

“That’s what worries me,” Julie muttered.

“But if I may make one observation?”

“Garak…”

“I just wanted to point out,” Garak said innocently, “that your whore companion is leaving.”

Julie whirled around just in time to see the blonde exit the room and, almost certainly, deactivate. Fantastic.

“Odd,” Garak went on, like she didn’t know exactly what she was doing. “She seemed so interested in your advances only a moment ago. I wonder what scared her off?”

Julie turned to glare at her.

Garak reacted with poorly-acted surprise, raising a hand to her chest and opening her mouth in an ‘o’. “Oh, no. I do apologize,” she said, extremely insincerely. “You must be incensed. In fact, if I were in your shoes, I would... grab a bottle of champagne, and shoot me.” She was unable to finish the sentence without devolving into surprisingly girlish giggles.

Julie sighed, aggravated. “I brought this upon myself, didn’t I?” she said.

Garak chuckled, grabbing Julie’s arm and hugging it tightly to herself (despite the thickness of the fur coat she was wearing, Julie could distinctly feel the press of Garak’s breasts against her elbow. Damn, it was hard to stay mad at her). “Come on, Doctor,” she cooed, “we’re going to have a wonderful time. After all, what could possibly go wrong?”

“Don’t say that,” Julie protested weakly. “That’s the keyword phrase for increasing the difficulty…”

“Oh? Do tell me more, dear.”

At least with the conceit of being a holoprogram, moving from location to location was done in seamless transitions instead of actual travel. A short walk outside changed the environment from Paris to Hong Kong so smoothly that one would only have noticed the shift if paying very close attention… or had a brain naturally inclined to catalogue such useless details. Felix didn’t know that about Julie, of course. Garak only seemed mildly interested in the holoprogram itself and was clearly more focused on Julie (though she didn’t say anything to her) as she took her back to the Kowloon apartment that functioned as, essentially, what would have been the game’s main menu if this had not been a holoprogram.

Julie had been trying to answer Garak’s superficial questions about the game’s setting when they were interrupted by Julie’s valet who, Julie was now realizing, looked really bad. Not that he was ugly or anything, rather, quite the opposite - which was the problem. He was exceptionally handsome and his clothing was designed to emphasize his extraordinarily masculine build to a degree that Julie now found, yes, embarrassing.

“Miss Bashir,” he said placidly, “I didn't expect you home so soon.”

“I decided to leave Paris a little early,” Julie said. “Allow me to introduce my partner, Miss Garak. Garak, this is…” and here she had to stop and brace herself for Garak’s imminent reaction, “Andy Feltherbush. My personal valet.”

Surprisingly, Garak didn’t react to Andy’s absurd name outside of fixing him with a slightly bewildered stare.

“I’m pleased to make your acquaintance,” Andy said to Garak, then turned back to Julie. “Would you like to change into something more comfortable?”

“That would be perfect,” Julie mumbled. “See if you can find something for Miss Garak as well.”

“Ah,” Garak spoke up, “just taking my coat off my hands would do fine.”

Andy nodded politely. “Certainly, miss,” he said, then to Julie, indicating the long hard-sided case he had been carrying ever since he walked in: “Shall I put this away first?”

“Please,” Julie said.

Garak observed very intently as Andy walked over to the wall and opened up the rotating arsenal. She even brushed off Julie’s offer of a drink in favor of watching Andy remove a large sniper rifle from the case and hang it in its designated place.

“Is he your valet,” Garak said, “or your personal assassin?”

“Valet,” Julie said, mixing herself a martini at the bar for lack of anything better to do. To be honest, the drinks in this game was not exactly great. She hadn’t bothered to pay Quark for the privilege of getting real alcohol sent up, so instead she had to make do with whatever poor substitutes the holosuite could replicate on its own. “And Andy’s very capable. Speaks seven languages, has degrees in chemistry, physics, and biology, can fly anything from jets to helicopters... and he makes an excellent martini.”

“Your coat, miss?” Andy said, returning to Garak.

“Oh, certainly,” Garak said - clearly somewhat unaccustomed to interacting with holograms - and shrugged off the heavy fur coat to hand it to him. Julie felt her brain stutter to a halt. Underneath the coat, Garak had squeezed herself into the most scandalous possible cocktail dress that could still broadly fit the circa-1964 theme. It was a shimmery blue, the shade of which was almost certainly the most lurid and sexually coded that a Cardassian could come up with, and it was cut so dramatically that Julie was fairly certain the only times she’d seen Garak baring this much skin had been when she was literally naked.

No wonder she wore the coat up here, Julie thought, trying to cover her shock by taking a sip of her martini and somehow managing to miss her mouth and spill half of it down the front of her tux. Garak turned and raised an eyeridge at her.

“That— you, you look really good in that,” Julie managed, fruitlessly wiping the front of her shirt with one hand.

“Thank you,” Garak said blandly. Evidently this was one of those times when Garak decided to pretend to be completely oblivious to how absurdly attractive her girlfriend found her. “You know, you did give me the impression that this is a spy game, dear. And yet, your character appears to be more of a rich dilettante with questionable priorities…”

Julie cleared her throat. “Actually, I work for one of the nation-states of this era - Great Britain - which is battling various other nations in what was called the Cold War. This apartment, my clothes, weapons, even my valet were all provided to me by the government.”

Garak pursed her lips thoughtfully. “I think I joined the wrong intelligence service…”

Julie fidgeted a little, uncomfortable now. It wasn’t like she was unaware of why Garak had initially reacted to the invitation with something like offense, despite the fact that Julie had been very up-front about the fact that the game was in no way intended to be realistic or reflective of actual espionage work. Thankfully, Garak seemed to be keeping an open mind right now — aside from her disdain for the period-accurate decor, anyway.

With his usual excellent timing, Andy chose that moment to return with Julie’s change of clothes. Julie hadn’t even noticed him leave. It was kind of hard to look away from Garak’s… gown.

“Isn't this a somewhat ostentatious life for a spy?” Garak asked once Julie had changed into a more casual (and, more importantly, clean) pale grey suit, which she didn’t seem to approve much of. Julie supposed that Garak had been hoping to see her in a skirt.

Julie just shrugged. “It's all part of my cover. I'm posing as a wealthy jet-setter, so I have to act like one.”

“‘Jet-setter’?”

“People of this era used to travel in—“

Thump. That sounded like the plot starting. Julie held up a hand for silence, pulled out a pistol, and crept towards the bar - the apparent origin of the thumping sound. She motioned for Garak to take a few steps back then pressed the button to activate the rotation feature. The hidden bed swung into view.

And lying on it, dramatically and seductively posed, was… Worfe. In a pale pink silk nightgown. Her eyes were closed but as the bed finished rotating into its final position, she stretched luxuriantly and looked up at Julie from beneath heavy eyelids.

“Julie,” she said, in a comically bad Russian accent, which was weird because Miles had said that Worfe actually was from Russia. “I must haff fallen asleep.”

For some reason Julie was thinking about apperceptive agnosia, the stroke symptom which impacted a patient’s ability to process information they received about an object, for example being unable to identify what they were looking at despite it being more or less a familiar sight. She turned to Garak incredulously, but Garak looked just as confused as she did.

“You didn’t do this somehow, did you?” Julie asked anyway.

Garak shook her head without taking her eyes off of Worfe. “I can’t imagine how you think I could have convinced her, dear,” she said, then, to Worfe: “Commander?”

“Colonel, actually,” Worfe said, still with the terrible accent. “Colonel Anastasia Komananov. KGB.”

Uh-oh, Julie thought. She should have recognized the nightgown.

“I newer t’ought I'd see you alife again,” Worfe was saying, slinking off of the bed and prowling towards Julie. “After you fell out of that dirigible ower Iceland.”

“I had a parachute, and there was a submarine there waiting for me,” Julie mumbled, confused, then shook herself. “Wait a minute - how do you know about that? Have you been downloading my holosuite programs??”

Worfe got close enough to actually run her hand through Julie’s hair; Julie genuinely did not know how to react, so she just stood there without moving. “Oh, Julie,” Worfe simpered slavicly, “you are not feeling vell. Vhy don’t ve lie down?” she added, batting her eyelashes.

She leaned forward and tried to kiss Julie’s face - Julie recoiled, which Worfe didn’t seem to really notice. “Commander Worfe’s certainly throwing herself into the role, Doctor,” Garak commented blithely.

“Commander, please!” Julie said desperately, finally managing to push her away. “Isn’t this dishonorable or something?”

“Vhat are you talking about? Vhat does that matter?” Worfe said, her eyebrows furrowing.

Julie blinked. “Perhaps this isn't Commander Worfe after all,” said Garak.

“I'm beginning to think you're right,” Julie said. “Computer, restore the image of Colonel Komananov to its original parameters.”

The computer beeped. “Unable to comply. The character parameters of Colonel Komananov are correct.”

Drat. “I'd say someone has been tampering with your program, dear,” Garak said.

Julie shot her a suspicious look. If that were the case, then a certain upset Cardassian girlfriend was most certainly at the top of the suspects list. Unfortunately, before Julie could point that out, Worfe/Anastasia threw her arms around Julie’s neck. “Julie, ve don't haff time for games,” she said insistently. “Ve haff much to talk about.”

“Excuse me,” Julie said, trying to worm her way out of Worfestasia’s clutches. “Computer, freeze program.”

“Unable to comply. Computer control has been disrupted due to a stationwide emergency.”

“Emergency?” Garak said with surprise.

“Bashir to ops — what’s going on?”

Thankfully, she actually got a response. It was Odo speaking. “We have our hands full right now, doctor. Stand by.”

“Wait, Odo,” said Lt. Cmdr. Eddington. The tension in her voice was a lot more obvious than in Odo’s. “Doctor, where are you? And do you have access to a working computer console?”

“We’re in holosuite three,” Julie reported, “and the program's running, but the computer won't comply with my commands.”

“The program is still running?”

“I demand to know who you are talking to!” Worfestasia interrupted.

“That sounded like Worfe,” Odo said.

“Well, not exactly,” Julie said, watching Worfestasia carefully. “Someone has replaced one of the characters with the image of Commander Worfe. What’s going on?” she asked again, for good measure.

The answer was slightly belated, but Eddington did explain: Due to some kind of transporter accident, the holosuite memory core was now holding the transporter patterns of not only Worfe, but also Sisko, Kira, Miles, and Jeddwyn. Julie understood how that was theoretically possible, considering the data profiles for the body models of holographic characters had to be pretty similar to the physical side of transporter patterns, but why they would be in the holoprogram Eddington chose not to explain. Odo further told her that doing anything to disrupt the holo-imaging array - including calling for the door to exit the program - could possibly result in the whole thing crashing and taking the transporter patterns with it, effectively killing the five of them. The program had to keep running unimpeded until they could fix things.

Which, hey, no pressure. Julie sat herself on the edge of the bed with a sigh, and Worfestasia quickly took up a position behind her, sensually rubbing her shoulders. “Julie,” she purred, “you’re so tense…”

“It's been one of those days,” Julie sighed.

“I vish I could… relax you,” Worfestasia said, then suddenly became all professional - or what passed for being all professional for this kind of character archetype - and slapped Julie on the back. “But I am here on business.” She arched herself back rather unnecessarily to retrieve a paper file from underneath the pillow and hand it to Julie. “In the past tventy-four hours, a series of eart’quakes haff struck cities from Vladivostok to New York. Our seismologists haff analyzed them and come to the conclusion that the eart’quakes vere artificial.”

Lovely, Julie thought, flipping through the file disinterestedly. While she hadn’t played through this specific storyline before, its overall structure was already quite obvious. To be fair, there were only so many different kinds of plots a holoprogram could procedurally generate. ‘Various disasters caused by some rich supervillain and/or evil organization somewhere, necessitating East and West to work together’ was very flexible premise.

Garak, who was probably not as genre-savvy as Julie, seemed a little more curious about it. “So?” she said, “It's not that difficult. One only has to—“

“Garak,” Julie cut her off. There was no need to confuse Worfestasia with anachronisms. Garak seemed a little annoyed.

“Your friend seems to know somet’ing,” Worfestasia suspiciously.

“Believe me,” Julie sighed, “she doesn’t know anything.”

Garak looked even more annoyed now.

“If you say so,” Worfestasia said, somewhat disbelievingly, but then she moved on. “Because of the global nature of this crisis, my gowernment and yours haff decided to cooperate. Ve'll be vorking... wery closely.”

“I’m sure we will,” Julie said tiredly.

“Our assignment is to find out who is behind these eart’quakes and vhat they vant.”

“A pretty vague assignment,” Garak said dubiously.

Worfestasia ignored her. “Ve do haff one clue: one of the leading seismologists in the vorld, Professor Honey Bare, has wanished. Ve beliefe she's been kidnapped.”

As was typical in these programs, the information in the file that Julie was flipping through didn’t actually manage to show up until the exposition character had started to exposit about it. Right on cue, Julie turned a page to find a picture of this Professor Honey Bare — or, as she was apparently known in real life, Major Kira Nerys. Julie shot to her feet in surprise.

Worfestasia looked at her with curiosity and a little disapproval. “I didn’t t’ink she vas your type,” she commented archly.

“You said she’s been kidnapped,” Julie said, ignoring the implications.

“Ve t’ink so. She disappeared only a few hours before the first quake struck New York City.”

“Doctor, dear,” Garak said, “we're in the middle of an emergency. Is this really the time to be playing games?” Julie hurried over to show her Kira’s picture. “Interesting. She’s quite cute with those vision-aides, don’t you think?”

Why did she feel the need to comment on that? Not that she was wrong or anything, but… “If Honey Bare is killed,” Julie explained urgently, “the computer will erase her character from the program. But since the program thinks that Kira is Honey Bare…”

“The computer would actually be erasing Major Kira’s pattern,” Garak finished.

“Worfe— er, Ana. Do you have any idea where to start looking for Professor Bare?”

“She vas last seen,” Worfestasia started dramatically, but was interrupted by the door to the room opening. Andy was standing there, his expression unreadable, holding Julie’s now-cleaned tuxedo.

Julie barely glanced at him. “I’ll be right with you, Andy,” she said.

Andy flumped over. There was a knife sticking out of his back. He was dead. This actually happened to Andy quite a lot. Thankfully, his model had not been replaced with one of the transporter patterns, although Julie wasn’t completely sure it would have mattered much if it had — since Andy always somehow came back for the next adventure, it was possible that his pattern was not going to be erased at all even once they left the corpse behind.

Much more concerning was the return of Falcon. Or rather, not Falcon, but Jeddwyn Dax wearing Falcon’s clothes - including the eyepatch. It didn’t really suit him, Julie thought. He did look really good in that outfit, but Falcon was the sort of gruff, stout character who would have been better portrayed by a Chief O’Brien type.

Wait, Julie thought, annoyed with herself, did Felix do that on purpose?

“Good to see you again, Miss Bashir,” Falcwyn rumbled with a nasty grin. He was aiming a pistol of his own at her. “Now... I think we have some unfinished business.”

Julie pinched the bridge of her nose.

Falcwyn reacted with a sardonic chuckle. “Surprised to see me?” he said, stomping up to her.

“You could say that,” Julie sighed.

“You should've used something a little more lethal than a champagne cork. Something like this…” He raised the pistol to Julie’s face, gently stroking its muzzle along her jaw. Julie swallowed hard and refused to so much as glance Garak’s way. She could practically feel the murderous intent radiating off of her.

“Vait, vait please!” Worfestasia begged, “let us haff one last kiss…” which was probably the only worse thing that could have happened in this situation right now. Julie was now completely certain that she would never hear the end of this later.

“Why not?” Falcwyn said, raising his eyebrows. “I've always been a romantic at heart.”

Great. Just great. Falcwyn handed Julie off to Worfestasia like a piece of meat and Worfestasia immediately went in for it, pausing only to whisper “Earring” very unsubtly against Julie’s ear before putting her tongue in her mouth. Julie imagined that she could literally hear Garak ticking down like a bomb about to explode.

Oh wait, bomb. Right. Reaching up to snag Worfestasia’s earring was easily disguised as merely bringing her hand up to the side of her face, so when Falcwyn tried to pull them apart with an “Alright, Bashir, that’s enough!”, it was a trivial matter to activate the explosive earring and throw it to the floor. It conveniently didn’t affect Julie, Garak, or Worfestasia while it blew Falcwyn and his minions off their feet, flinging them back against the wall. It didn’t go all the way with rendering them unconscious, but a quick round of hand-to-hand combat took care of that. To be honest, it was pretty implausible that three unarmed women could take out three adult males without much trouble or any injuries on their part, but this program wasn’t written for realism. (And, of course, Felix had balanced it under the assumption that Julie possessed the physical capabilities of an average human woman, which she didn’t. Julie had adjusted the fighting controls a little but it was still within the parameters of ‘Probably not noticeable to a combat-trained Cardassian’.)

“Interesting jewelry,” Garak said, pushing a dislodged lock of hair back behind her earridge with almost excessive poise.

Julie had to chuckle a little to herself. “I gave those to Anastasia for Christmas last year,” she said, then did a double take at Garak. “You’re bleeding!”

Garak blinked, then sat still as Julie touched her face. There was a dribble of blood from the corner of her mouth. “The holosuite safeties must be off,” she said.

This wasn’t good. But before Julie had the chance to say anything, they heard Worfestasia behind them: “It's time to clip this bird's vings…”

Julie whirled around. Worfestasia was aiming Falcwyn’s own pistol at his head while he was sprawled out knocked out on the floor. “No!” She rushed over and grabbed the pistol away from her.

“Julie,” Worfestasia cried, “vhat are you doing?!”

“We can’t kill him!”

“Vhat are you talking about? Falcon has been trying to kill you for nine years!”

“I wouldn’t dismiss her idea so quickly, Doctor,” Garak said.

Julie turned to her in surprise. “Garak,” she said, “that’s Jeddwyn.” While she suspected that Garak might harbor some less-than-friendly feelings towards the station’s resident Trill, on account of Julie’s relatively short-lived crush on him when she’d first come to DS9, she never would have expected Garak express any homicidal tendencies towards him.

Garak’s expression was flat and pitiless, not angry, though. She was looking at a spot of blood on her fingers where she had wiped her lips, instead of at Julie and Worfestasia. “No,” Garak said bluntly. “As you pointed out, he's Falcon - a hired assassin who's going to do everything he can to kill you. And without the holosuite safeties in place, he may do just that.”

Julie stared at her. “What do you want me to do?” she said, “kill him??”

“I want you to stop treating this like a game where everything's going to turn out all right in the end. Real spies have to make hard choices. You want to save Kira? Fine. But you may not have the luxury of saving everyone.”

“Who’s Kira?” Worfestasia asked quizzically.

They both ignored her. “Eventually,” Garak said, “you may have to let someone die.”

“I'll deal with that situation if and when it happens,” Julie said shortly. “In the meantime, we have to find Kira.”

Garak let the decision stand without comment. Julie heavily suspected this wouldn’t be the last time she made this argument, though. At a minimum, knowing this program, they were going to see Falcwyn again… unless, of course, Odo and Eddington managed to put things right before they got to that point in the plot.

I’m not sure we can count on that, though, Julie thought, eyeing Garak and Worfestasia uneasily.

Chapter Text

When the travel was part of a plotline and not just a return-to-base after the (occasionally abrupt) conclusion of one, the method of locomotion tended to be a bit more complex than simply walking down a fade-transition street. In this case, the most common routine was employed: they took a private jet with an unseen pilot. It lifted off as soon as everyone was aboard (something which, so far as Julie understood, real jets hadn’t been able to do) and was going to land at an airstrip within convenient walking distance of their destination. (Sometimes there was a car with a chauffeur, but since their destination was a nightclub in Paris, Julie assumed they would be walking.) As for the few minutes of flight time in between, usually it was intended to be a bit of a break - a chance to have a drink or maybe canoodle a little with the love interest. Right now, though, they were all sitting in awkward silence. It was unlikely that Worfestasia actually cared too much since it was a part of her programming to be mysteriously relaxed during these breaks in the narrative, but her programming was also sufficient to be able to tell when Julie was not in the mood.

Which she really wasn’t. This was just too bizarre. Obviously a station-wide emergency was stressful, especially since said emergency was directly endangering the lives of most of the rest of the senior staff if Julie wasn’t careful. Plus, the holosuite safeties being off added a whole new dimension of horror: This program was designed to put Julie Bashir, secret agent, in “mortal” peril on a regular basis. She completely understood where Garak was coming from when she’d suggested letting Falcwyn die — though she still didn’t approve of it, and was determined to find a way to make sure nobody was going to lose their lives. Including Garak and herself.

In the meantime, she was stuck in a plane with Garak (who was also obviously in a stroppy mood) and Worfestasia. Julie couldn’t stop staring at the latter. This was just so wrong. The character of Anastasia Komananov just didn’t suit Worfe at all, and not in the least because her off-the-shoulder dark pink gown looked ridiculous on her muscular build. The elbow-length silk gloves emphasized her biceps and triceps in a particularly unflattering way. The ostentatious diamond earrings also somehow managed to clash with the forehead ridges. Julie was uncertain if this wouldn’t have been an acceptable look on some other, more delicate Klingon, but it just wasn’t Worfe at all. The ill-fitting appearance only served to underscore the mismatch of personalities as well: Anastasia was a classy, seductive, quick-witted and silver-tongued lady - more of a Garak-like character, if Julie was being brutally honest with herself - while Worfe was extremely blunt, socially wrong-footed, and… not exactly feminine.

Garak hmphed. Julie glanced over at her. It seemed that she had been watching Julie watch Worfestasia, and wasn’t very happy about it. Her arms and legs were both crossed sulkily, which had a side effect of pulling Julie’s mind right into the gutter, since the folded arms pushed her ample tits up into more prominence and having one knee resting on top of the other mostly served to spread the slit in the skirt of her dress even wider, exposing considerably more plush, scaled thigh. She could almost make out her ridges…

Julie rubbed her forehead with a sigh. Now was definitely not the time. “Garak,” she said quietly, hoping not to draw Worfestasia into the conversation, “er, listen.”

“Hm?” Garak cocked her head prissily. “Do you have something to say?”

“I did mean it when I invited you to join me. I did want you here.”

“Your… cavorting around would seem to imply otherwise, dear.”

“Well, obviously, I wouldn’t be doing that if you were here. You would have been playing the love interest instead of some hologram.” Julie paused. “Or the villain,” she said, “or the valet. Whatever role you want.”

Garak just looked unimpressed. “And yet, lacking me, there is a hologram,” she said tartly.

“It’s a part of the genre,” Julie said defensively. “It’s based off of— well, the point is, it wouldn’t be much of a story if my character didn’t get the chance to… fool around a little. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Hm.”

“Garak, I’m serious. They’re holograms. They’re not real people.”

“I think they’re close enough,” Garak said, her voice very cold and brittle. “How would you feel if I loaded up some holograms of pretty Cardassian females and had my way with them?“

“I wouldn’t care,” Julie said with complete honesty. “It’s just fantasy. You’re allowed to have fantasies that aren’t about me.”

“Hmph.”

There was a long pause. Garak turned and stared out the window, where the Earth below was passing at a speed inconsistent with going from Hong Kong to Paris in under five minutes. Worfestasia was studiously ignoring them; Julie kept hoping they would land soon, but it seemed that the computer had detected that the conversation wasn’t really over yet.

“Do you mate with them?” Garak said suddenly, still looking out the window.

Julie inhaled through her teeth. “It’s not mating,” she said carefully, “it’s more like… er… masturbation, really. Considering I’m the only actual person here. The hologram is just an elaborate masturbatory aid.”

“Hm.”

“Again, if you did this, I wouldn’t mind it at all. Hell, if you’d actually come with me when I’d invited you, and started messing around with a hologram while I was in the holosuite with you— if anything, I’d think it was kind of hot…”

Garak gave a fake little cough that sounded suspiciously like “Pervert!”

Julie didn’t try to argue. Apparently that was that, too, because less than a minute later the plane touched down in Paris.

They walked to the nightclub and got past the maître d' easily; Worfestasia was hanging off of one of Julie’s arms and Garak (obviously still miffed and feeling territorial) off the other. Julie had asked to see a Dr. Noah, because Worfestasia had explained earlier that all the missing scientists and artisans had last been seen coming to this particular nightclub to speak to this particular person. Which did somewhat poke a hole in the premise of Julie’s assignment being to find out who was kidnapping the scientists. They kind of already knew.

At any rate, claiming to have an invitation from Dr. Noah had gotten them escorted to a card table in the back, where they ran into Miles O’Brien in a white suit, who introduced himself as Duchamps. “Dr. Noah’s assistant,” he said, taking a puff of his cigar. It was weird to hear him using a generic middle-American accent, like the one the Universal Translator tended to assign, instead of his normal Irish brogue.

Again, a character that didn’t really suit the person, in Julie’s opinion. It didn’t really matter that much. Hopefully, Duchamps was the sort of character who wasn’t placed in jeopardy by the plot. “My name is Merriweather,” she said, taking the offered seat at the baccarat table. “Flora Merriweather. This is Anastasia, and Miss Garak.” She decided not to try to characterize her relationship with either of them; while period-accurate homophobia had not been included in the holoprogram, Julie did still feel that outright admitting to having a girlfriend would have been a little out of place in the setting. Plus, depending on how she referred to Worfestasia, Garak might get mad again.

Worfestasia held out a hand expectantly and O’Brichamps took it and kissed her knuckles without hesitation. “Charmed,” he said, then glanced at Garak, who didn’t move; finally he turned back to Julie, with apparently no intention of trying to kiss her hand, which really was just as well considering it was… well… Miles. “Your invitation, Ms. Merriweather?”

“I don’t have one,” Julie said flatly.

“The doctor doesn't like... unexpected guests.”

“I beliefe Dr. Noah vould be wery interested in meeting Ms. Merriweather,” Worfestasia piped up. “She's one of the leading geologists in the vorld.”

“Why would that interest Dr. Noah?”

“We understand Dr. Noah has a special interest in the sciences,” Garak said. Julie was actually a little surprised she was willing to play her part. “He’s…? She’s,” Garak caught Worfestasia’s mildly confused look, “invited some of the world's top scientists to this club. Isn't that true?”

O’Brichamps didn’t respond, just puffed his cigar. Julie frowned. “I must say I felt a little insulted by being left out of such an illustrious group,” she tried.

“How unfortunate,” O’Brichamps said dryly. Then, “Of course, a meeting can still be arranged…”

“Oh…?”

“For a price. Five million francs.”

That was something of a relief. Julie suspected that Garak would have absolutely lost it if Julie had been propositioned by a holocharacter wearing Miles’ face. “No problem,” Julie said confidently.

The money note that she found in her wallet (the wallet that she had most certainly not put in her tuxedo pocket and had only spawned into existence when demanded by the plot) was basically meaningless to Julie. Even if she did understand money - which she didn’t - this currency had gone out of use centuries ago. All she really knew was that it had a fifty and not a five million printed on it. She handed it to the croupier, who exchanged it from ‘pounds’ to ‘francs’. The numbers on the notes still didn’t add up to five million.

“I don’t understand,” O’Brichamps said. “Where's the rest of your money?”

“Right there,” Julie said, pointing to the pile of currency in front of O’Brichamps. “Shall we begin?”

There was no doubt that that was a smooth move. Even Garak looked a little impressed. Julie, of course, did not actually know how to play baccarat. She could have figured it out without much difficulty, but it wasn’t really necessary. The plot demanded that Julie come into contact with Dr. Noah - the most expedient route was bribing O’Brichamps for an invitation - Julie had selected this method to get the requisite money for said bribe — the plot demanded that Julie do well enough at baccarat to win five million francs. Actually playing it was not relevant. She could pick cards at random, entirely ignore the rules, and would still somehow “win” within a few minutes so they could get back to the action.

Which was, of course, exactly what happened. She’d even been able to somehow bet on five million despite not having five million herself to pay out if she lost. Naturally, she ended up with O’Brichamps’ entire stack of cash.

He sat back in his chair, obviously frustrated. “You are quite a baccarat player, Ms. Merriweather.”

“Baccarat and geology are my life,” Julie said with a straight face. “Now then, when do we leave?”

O’Brichamps pulled out a cigar and clipped the tip of it. “Right now,” he said casually, putting the cigar between his lips — then, instead of lighting it, blew into it, resulting in a rather implausibly large cloud of fine white powder spreading throughout the room. Worfestasia went down first, then Garak - oh, she was definitely not going to be happy about this — and finally, everything went black for Julie as well. Her last thought before losing consciousness was I wonder if this sort of mechanic is a bad idea when the safeties are off?

…

When she woke up, she felt fine. She knew how this worked. Unconsciousness only lasted for a few seconds. The location was completely different now, of course - they were in a luxuriously-decorated sitting room, with wood paneling and very large windows which showed them to be in a snowy mountainous region. Julie was on one couch with Worfestasia, while Garak was sprawled on another sofa directly opposite from them. Her hair had come a bit loose when she’d fallen to the floor, or perhaps when the holosuite forcefields had pushed her up onto the couch, but Julie frankly considered that more attractive than her usual careful updo and hoped that she wouldn’t notice and try to fix it.

Worfestasia said something irritable in Russian. Garak stirred and looked around. “Another decorator's nightmare,” she muttered. “This era has a distinct lack of taste.”

Julie got to her feet, swaying a little. “Where are we?” she wondered out loud.

“Welcome to Paradise, Ms. Merriweather.”

Oh, dammit. That was Sisko.

On the plus side, Sisko actually fit this sort of obvious supervillain character quite well… which was, now that Julie thought about it, maybe a little worrying. Still, she was clearly pulling it off. She was wearing a sort of burgundy qipao with matching trousers, and the holoprogram had even managed to coordinate her lipstick with the outfit. Sisko herself probably would have appreciated it.

“I believe you’ve been looking for me,” she said, showing an awful lot of teeth while she talked. “My name is Agnodice Noah. I must apologize for the unorthodox travel arrangements. But you see, I value my privacy.”

“I completely understand,” Julie said warily.

“May I offer you brandy... cigarettes?”

Worfestasia stepped forward. “Cigar,” she said.

Siskoah looked at her appreciatively. “An unusual request for a woman,” she said with amusement.

“I’m an unusual voman,” Worfestasia purred.

Worfestasia got her cigar. Julie wondered if the lines generated for this character had been made under the assumption that Dr. Noah was going to be a male character; she’d noticed that the computer tended to spit out males when it was a lone wolf villain, with female antagonists usually leading malevolent organizations instead. Then again, she had gotten a clearly feminine first name. “I understand your field is geology, Ms. Merriweather,” Siskoah was saying.

“That’s right,” Julie said, just to move this along.

“Then I'm sure you'll appreciate the stones in my most recent acquisition.” Siskoah gestured to a golden vase of some sort standing on a small table in the middle of the room; it was encrusted with gemstones of various hues, to the point where even Julie had to admit it was kind of tacky.

She inspected it closely anyway. She actually didn’t know much about gemstones or stones in general, so she decided to just wing it based on the colors. “Yes,” she said as knowledgeably as possible, “a most striking collection of rubies, tourmaline, sapphires, topaz. From the high chromium content in the rubies, I'd say they're from the hydrothermal deposits of the Tibetan plateau, which isn't surprising, considering we're on the southeastern slope of Mount Everest. At about... twenty-two thousand feet, I should say.”

She didn’t know if the Tibetan plateau even had hydrothermal deposits. She just recognized the Himalayas from looking out that really big window. Still, Siskoah looked impressed. “Twenty-five, actually,” she said.

“You must not get many tourists.”

Siskoah smiled. “My guests and I place a premium on our privacy. We don't want any... unwelcomed guests… such as agents sent by governments who disagree with my political philosophy.”

“And vhat is your philosophy?” Worfestasia said, still chomping that cigar. “Are you some kind of anarchist?”

“Anarchist? Quite the opposite,” Siskoah said crisply, walking over to the window to gaze out upon the mountains. “I believe in an orderly world. A far cry from the chaos we find ourselves in today. We're building a new future here. A new beginning for mankind. A new chapter in human history will open... right here on my island.”

“Island?” Julie said.

Siskoah turned and looked at her for a moment, with as piercing a gaze as a holocharacter could manage, before grinning again. “Forgive me,” she said, “sometimes I get ahead of myself. Allow me to explain.” With that, she hit a button, and one of the room’s interior walls slid away to reveal an old-timey computer setup with an enormous map of the Earth. More relevantly, there was an entire person waiting behind the wall, standing there meekly holding a clipboard: Kira, wearing a lab coat, and horn-rimmed glasses.

…Garak had been right. She was cute with those on.

“We're almost ready,” Professor Honerys Kibarea said. “I’m making some last-minute adjustments to a South American site.”

Siskoah took Honerys’ hand. Honerys’ cheeks visibly reddened. “I have every confidence in you, my dear,” Siskoah said smoothly.

“She’s vorking vith her,” Worfestasia whispered loudly, like Julie and Garak couldn’t have possibly realized this on their own, which funnily enough was actually kind of in-character for Worfe.

“You see, Ms. Merriweather,” Siskoah said imperiously, turning back around to face them, “I intend not only to create a new future... I intend to create a new world.” She then proceeded to monologue for several minutes about her plan to release magma from the Earth’s mantle until all the tectonic plates buckled and the planet effectively shrank, allowing the oceans to spread out over the land, leaving only the very highest mountains behind as isolated islands populated by Siskoah’s hand-picked group of elites. Listing all of the practical reasons for why no part of this plan would even remotely work in real life would have probably taken longer than it was going to end up taking to stop Siskoah; honestly, Julie usually preferred these sorts of completely ridiculous schemes, but under the circumstances it mostly just made her feel like she was banging her head against a wall.

Anyway, its impossibility didn’t actually matter: So far as the holoprogram was concerned, Siskoah was capable of doing everything she wanted to. If she pulled off her plan, then people would die. People possibly including Falcwyn left behind in Hong Kong, or O’Brichamps in Paris.

“A pity you won’t be able to join us,” Siskoah finally finished her spiel.

Julie shook herself. “Are you revoking my invitation?”

“I intend to do more than that... Miss Bashir.”

While she had absolutely seen this coming, Julie still reacted with surprise on instinct. She was just too much of a gamer girl.

“You see,” said Siskoah, very self-satisfied, “I’ve not only brought the greatest minds to my mountain retreat... I've also hired the greatest protection money can buy. I believe you already know my newest employee.”

Falcwyn entered the room on cue. That was… something of a relief. It did at least mean that, should Julie fail to stop Siskoah’s diabolical plan, Falcwyn was unlikely to be killed by the lava or the flooding. On the other hand, Garak’s previous point about how Falcwyn posed a very real threat to Julie’s life had suddenly become extremely pertinent.

“What do you want me to do with them, doc?” Falcwyn said, covering Julie, Garak, and Worfestasia with the same pistol that Worfestasia had tried to shoot him with… what, an hour ago? Holosuites always tended to let Julie lose track of time if she didn’t focus on it.

“Let’s take them downstairs,” Siskoah said with another grin. “Ah, but only Miss Bashir and this one in the blue dress. Let me show you the way.”

“You heard the doctor,” Falcwyn said, jerking the muzzle of his gun between Julie and Garak.

Garak looked rather put out as they were forced at gunpoint to follow Siskoah down a winding, downward-sloped hallway, leaving Worfestasia behind. Julie wasn’t entirely thrilled about the situation either - classic ‘main character has to escape trap’ setup, usually fun but downright terrifying knowing the safeties were off — still, to Garak her inclusion in it probably seemed utterly arbitrary. Julie was at least the spy/hero. Garak was just getting sent along purely because she was the other player character.

“This is one of a seventy-four lasers that I've deployed,” Siskoah bragged while Falcwyn handcuffed Garak and Julie to adjoining support struts. “When I throw this switch, it will begin a five minute countdown that even I won't be able to stop. And once this laser fires... this cave will be filled with molten lava.”

“Where's Colonel Komananov?” Julie asked, hoping that there wasn’t going to some kind of twist where the KGB love interest got randomly executed offscreen.

Siskoah just shrugged carelessly. “She's a spirited individual. Young... healthy... we'll be needing women like her to help propagate the second human race.”

Garak audibly scoffed. Siskoah threw a switch on the nearby computer bank, and a large digital read-out lit up, conveniently right in Julie’s line of sight. It was in fact a five minute countdown.

“Try to stay cool, Miss Bashir,” Siskoah quipped. Falcwyn laughed evilly. They both left the chamber. The puzzle segment had started.

They were actually, for real going to die if Julie didn’t solve the puzzle.

“Dear,” Garak said, “I don't know if I've made this explicit to you or not... but I really don't want to die chained to a twentieth century laser.”

Julie bit her tongue, trying to concentrate on seeing if she could wriggle her way out of the cuffs somehow. Garak yapping was certainly not going to help, but telling her to shut up would almost certainly make things worse.

“I think it's time to end the program,” Garak said.

“We can't do that,” Julie said shortly. “We'd wipe out the patterns of Sisko and the others.”

“Well, then may I suggest calling for Commander Eddington and having her send someone in here to remove these handcuffs?”

“No. You heard what Odo said. We don't know what'll happen if we interrupt the holo-imaging array by calling for the doors. The entire program might collapse and kill them all.”

“The only thing I know for sure, Doctor,” Garak said, her voice rising a little, “is that when molten lava comes pouring into this cave, you and I are going to be very uncomfortable.”

Footsteps gradually became audible. Julie glanced down the adjoining tunnel, which she could sort of see into; Garak turned her head this way and that, completely unable to see from her angle.

“Who is it?” she hissed.

“Our ticket out of here,” Julie said.

Honerys entered the scene, scurrying along hunched over her clipboard to check the readouts on the computer bank. There was no plausible reason for her to be here, even within the context of Siskoah’s insane plan; she had obviously come for Julie’s sake. Julie licked her lips, psyching herself up. Garak was going to absolutely hate this, but it was certainly going to be better than dying.

“What a waste,” Julie said, pitching her voice as sultrily as possible.

Honerys glanced up at her.

“That no one can see what a beautiful woman you are,” Julie clarified.

“This is your plan?” Garak whispered in horror.

“Shut up,” Julie hissed back, then refocused on Honerys. “Noah only wants you for your mind... she can't appreciate the woman within the scientist.”

Honerys was still focused on the instruments, but it was obviously faked, and she was clearly listening to Julie intently.

Julie sighed mawkishly. “Honey,” she said, “would you grant me one last request? Take off those glasses.”

There was a pause, then Honerys shyly removed them and looked at Julie, her eyelashes fluttering. “Like this?” she said quietly.

Garak scoffed. Julie ignored her. “Yes,” she said, trying to think of what to say next. Normally the next move would be to comment on her hair, but unlike most of the standard female models in this program, Kira kept hers very short. “And you know,” Julie settled on, “you would look so much better if you undid the top button or two of your shirt.”

Behind her, Julie heard Garak clank around a little as she violently jerked against the handcuffs. She was obviously quite fed up. Still, Julie didn’t acknowledge her and Honerys followed that lead. She shyly reached up, undid the bow at her collar, and popped the first two buttons. It wasn’t even enough to show cleavage.

“There,” Julie cooed anyway, “there. That's the last thing I want to remember before I die.”

Honerys gave a timid, but genuinely touched, little smile. “Thank you,” she said.

She began to leave. Julie held her breath. Then Honerys stopped, turned and looked at Julie for a long contemplative moment, then hurried back over to her and planted a big passionate wet one right on Julie’s mouth.

“I'd give the two of you some privacy if I could,” Garak commented. It sounded like she was speaking through a clenched jaw.

Honerys pulled back, gazing longingly into Julie’s eyes, then just as quickly as she had kissed her she turned and practically ran out of the room without another word. Julie ran her tongue over her teeth rather self-consciously.

“Great plan,” Garak said archly. “Now can we call Eddington?”

“That won't be necessary. Honey's given me all we need,” Julie said, and unlocked her handcuffs with the key that Honerys had just given her.

Garak, unfortunately, didn’t look particularly impressed, even when Julie moved on to uncuffing her. “This program was written by a man, wasn’t it?” she said.

“Yes, actually. A friend of mine from the Academy. How’d you know?”

“…call it a hunch, dear.”

Chapter Text

They fled the cavern just as the timer ran out - because that was how it always worked - and the laser went off. The whole cave system shook violently around them, streams of dust and tiny rocks falling from the ceiling of the tunnel they had run into. Garak stumbled - Julie suspected the shoes she was wearing had not been selected with athletics or uneven ground in mind - and Julie caught her, cradling her against her chest and bracing them both against the wall. They stayed like that for a moment until the rumbling stopped, then Garak pulled away from Julie rather abruptly, leaning against the wall again just a few feet away. She was pale and breathing hard, her hair completely loose and starting to curl haphazardly in spots where the oil had begun to rub off, and she looked absolutely furious.

Unfortunately, it couldn’t be helped. Julie started assembling the miniature gun hidden in her shoe and fountain pen. “We've got to get back to the control room,” she said evenly.

“What?” Garak snapped.

“If this program ends like the others, either Komananov or Honey Bare will be killed by Dr. Noah. The other one's supposed to end up with me. But in this case, we have to make sure they both survive.”

Garak stared at Julie, then her eyes flicked down to her gadget gun and an expression of intense distaste crossed her face. “You expect to take on Noah and her men with that?“

“Look,” Julie said, “it’s my fantasy. Just trust me.”

“Trust you! I suppose I should have trusted you when you ‘seduced’ Kira, hm??”

“That gave us the key we needed to get out of there before the laser went off,” Julie said, aiming for steady and patient but somewhat missing the mark.

That only seemed to rile Garak up even more. She snarled. “That’s how it always works in this program, then? You bat your eyelashes and deliver some stupid line about-“

“Garak, we don’t have time for this.”

“But this is utterly ridiculous! How could you possibly have such a… such an idiotic view of espionage! You actually want to play the role of a honeypot — because of course all your marks are conveniently attractive, close to your age, with no interest in hurting or humiliating you for their own gain—“

“I— Jesus, Garak, it’s just a game, of course I know real honeypotting is-“

“But you don’t! You don’t know, Doctor!” Garak hissed, getting up in her face and poking an accusing finger against her chest. Julie was pretty sure she hadn’t seen her this mad since the cranial implant had failed. “Would you like to know? What it’s really like? Because the stories I could tell you! The average target one might get orders to seduce isn’t some vapid pretty young thing who just swoons into your arms - it’s a half-senile old man with strange oozing sores around his vent who tries to drown you in the sink because he’s worried he’s sired a bastard on you, or feed you to his riding hounds because he has a fetish for—“

“Garak!” Julie said, grabbing her wrist. “Look, I’m sorry! This is why I didn’t insist when you turned down the invitation - I knew you might take some of these plots the wrong way.”

“The wrong way!“ Garak said shrilly, yanking her hand back from Julie and taking a few steps away. She frenetically ran her hands back through her hair, tousling it even more, with her teeth bared. “What other way is there to take it?! What am I supposed to do, confronted with the fact that the woman who claims to love me is really only with me because she fetishizes my past!”

“That is not what is going on!” Julie barked. “And now is not the time for this! We can talk about this later—“

“If there is a later,” Garak scoffed.

“—but right now, we've got to get to that control room! Kira or Jeddwyn could be killed while you’re busy yelling at me about your hurt feelings!”

“How unfortunate,” Garak hissed, “but there comes a point when the odds are against you and the only reasonable course of action is to quit.”

“What?“

“You heard me, darling. This has gone far enough. It's time to cut our losses.”

“You want to quit?“ Julie said incredulously, and more than a little angrily. “Is that what they taught you in the Obsidian Order? To give up when things get tough?”

“As a matter of fact, they did,” Garak snapped. “That's why I’ve stayed alive and so many of my colleagues are dead. Because I know when to walk away. And that time is now, Doctor. You would know that if you were a real intelligence agent.”

Julie was getting the impression that Garak was now talking about more than just the holoprogram. Still, despite that - or perhaps because of it - Julie held firm. “You’re not going anywhere,” she said.

“Oh? And what are you going to do? Stop me?”

“If I must. By whatever means necessary.”

Garak stared her down, then her lip curled. “You couldn’t if you tried,” she said in a low voice. “You know, dear, that’s something else you haven’t learned. A real intelligence agent has no ego, no dignity to wound - and no conscience and no remorse. She only has her sense of professionalism. And mine is telling me it's time to go.” She turned halfway away. “Computer—“

Julie raised her gun, aiming it directly at Garak’s throat. “Don’t,” she said flatly.

Garak barely glanced at the weapon. “Or what?” she said carelessly, “you’ll kill me?”

“If you call for the exit, you might kill Sisko and the others. I can't risk that.”

There was a pause. Julie could feel her palms starting to sweat, but her hand held perfectly steady — because of course it did. If there was one thing Julie had, it was steady hands. Garak was watching her closely, her expression now shuttered and unreadable.

Then she sneered. “I'm afraid I don't believe you'll pull that trigger.”

“I wouldn't be too sure about that,” Julie said in a quiet, even tone.

“It’s time to face reality, Doctor. Nothing of this is as romantic as you think,” Garak said. “And I’m not some broken little animal that you can nurse back to health. Espionage is brutal, and ugly, and I’m still the same person now that I was in the Order.” She paused, holding Julie’s gaze. “Not a hero, Doctor, nor a victim, but merely a woman who knows how to make choices. And I’m choosing to save myself.”

Julie’s heart was pounding. She exhaled slowly.

“Computer, show me the—-!“

At the end of the exhale, Julie squeezed the trigger, there was a loud crack and Garak was on the ground before she was able to finish her sentence. The holo-imaging array remained undisrupted. Julie hurried over to Garak, who was crumpled with one hand clapped to her left neckridge.

Julie gently batted Garak’s hand away and gave the wound a cursory inspection. Good. The bullet had only grazed her, like Julie had intended. It was bleeding sluggishly; no major blood vessels had been impacted. The middle one of the large scales lining Garak’s neck appeared to have been blown clean off, so it probably hurt like hell and would be a bitch to heal later, but right now Garak honestly seemed more shocked than in pain.

“You’re fine,” Julie said. “Just a flesh wound.”

“That was awfully close, Doctor,” Garak said, her voice high and wavering slightly. “What if you'd killed me?”

“What makes you think I wasn't trying?”

Garak stared up at her, her eyes wide and pupils huge. Julie wasn’t entirely sure what emotion her expression was conveying, but at least she didn’t look angry anymore. “Doctor, dear,” Garak said, starting to smile very slowly, “I believe there's hope for you yet.”

“I’m so relieved,” Julie sighed, not entirely sarcastic. “Now, we have to get to the control room. Are you coming or not?”

“Who am I to question Julie Bashir, secret agent?” Garak said, and let Julie help her to her feet. “Lead the way, dear.” She stumbled almost immediately, but waved off Julie’s offer of her arm, instead opting to kick off her shoes and tear the slit in her skirt right up to her hip, giving her full range of mobility.

They moved quickly back up to the control room after that. Damn, Julie kept thinking. Damn, damn, damn. She isn’t even wearing socks!

…

It was at least a suitably heroic scene when Julie kicked the door open to the control room, Garak at her side. She got Falcwyn to drop his pistol - which was immediately picked up by Garak - and both Worfestasia and Honerys exclaimed in delight upon seeing her. Unfortunately, the situation fell apart quickly when Julie had to physically prevent Worfestasia from killing Siskoah (had she jinxed herself when she’d noted that Colonel Komananov was surprisingly similar to Garak?) and then O’Brichamps showed up and completely turned the tables on them, holding Garak at gunpoint so that both she and Julie had to drop their newly-acquired weapons.

Well, on the plus side, this meant everyone was in the same place. It still would have been really helpful if Odo and Eddington had already found a way to get the transporter patterns back in the transporter where they belonged and not the holosuite, though.

“Eddington to Bashir,” the comm suddenly cut in. “We're going to try rematerializing their patterns in about two minutes.”

Huh. Usually the good timing and funny coincidences in these games were the result of scripted events, not an actual person just genuinely managing to accidentally pick the most dramatic moment to chime in. “Understood,” Julie said.

“What is it you understand, Miss Bashir?” Siskoah said, because holograms weren’t actually able to parse intrastation communications. “That you should've killed me when you had the chance? I agree. But then again, I suppose that wouldn't have been very heroic.” Siskoah picked up Julie’s miniature gadget gun and pointed it at her forehead. “I, on the other hand, have no pretensions about being a hero.”

Dammit. This was not going well. More to the point, this was an objectively ridiculous way to die, and to make matters worse Garak was looking at her reproachfully, still with Falcwyn’s pistol pointed at her head. If Julie could just stall for two damned minutes… “Wait!” she blurted out as soon as she saw Siskoah’s trigger finger start to move. “Maybe I'm tired of being a hero. Maybe I've thought over what you said and decided that you're absolutely right.”

Siskoah paused. “About what?” she said, clearly having no idea where Julie was going with this. Hell, Julie had no idea either.

“Everything. The decadence of the world, the need for order,” Julie kept talking anyway. “The more I think about it, the more I realize that your way may be the only way.”

Siskoah stared at her for a long moment, her painted lips curving into a small frown, then let out a single high-pitched Ha! “You expect me to believe that?” she finally said. “You're Julie Bashir - a woman whose entire life has been dedicated to fighting against—“

“Yes, but all that's about to end now, isn't it?” Julie interrupted forcefully. “You're going to destroy this world and start a new one. So what's the use of me continuing to protect a doomed planet? Does that make any sense to you?”

“…no,” Siskoah said thoughtfully.

“I'm an intelligence agent, doctor. And if there's one thing I've learned, it's that there comes a point when the odds are against you and the only reasonable course of action... is to quit.” Julie pretended she didn’t notice the sidelong, slightly exasperated yet somehow pleased look that Garak was giving her at that. “How do you think I've managed to stay alive so long when all my compatriots are dead? It's because I know when to walk away.”

Again, Siskoah just stared at her. Julie was starting to wonder if the holoprogram wasn’t have a hard time processing this turn of events - after all, Julie was not supposed to heel turn. She’d certainly never tried it before. (Then again, it would have been odd for Felix to not include it as at least a joke option. Maybe the holosuite was just starting to chug under the weight of all the transporter patterns in the same room.) “You make an interesting argument, Miss Bashir,” Siskoah said at length. “But I'm afraid that I've been looking forward to killing you for a long time.”

Despite never having been a villain in a Julie Bashir, Secret Agent story before, yeah, yeah. “You need to move beyond that,” Julie insisted. “Start thinking about your new world order. You're going to need someone like me. God knows I can't do any worse than these two,” she added, gesturing towards Falcwyn and O’Brichamps, who both looked rather offended.

“If you're moving over there so you can destroy my control console,” Siskoah said, evidently only now realizing that Julie had been edging across the room over the course of that whole conversation, “you're wasting your time.”

“Oh, I don't intend to destroy your console,” Julie said. “I intend to use it.” And then before anyone could stop her, or even say anything, she reached out and smacked the comically obvious bright red button on the console. The points of light on the giant map which indicated the laser sights began to flash.

“Julie,” said Honerys in horror, “you just activated the final laser sequence.”

“You’fe destroyed the Eart’!” Worfestasia exclaimed in dismay.

A rumbling sound began to play from somewhere outside the control room walls. The oceans on the map began to overtake the land, slowly spreading until the whole panel was almost completely blue, with only a few dots of green. Entire continents were now completely underwater. Finally, only Mount Everest remained, and the rumbling stopped.

“You’ve done it, doctor,” Falcwyn said with excitement.

Siskoah just looked genuinely puzzled. “Yes. Although, somehow… I didn't expect to win.”

Ah, so Felix didn’t code this in after all, Julie thought, a little disappointed. Maybe she should suggest a patch once all this was over.

“I guess the only thing left to do now,” Siskoah said, tapping Julie’s gun against her chin in thought, “is… kill you!” She turned on Julie, too fast for her to really react even if she’d had a weapon right now, which she didn’t, and Julie braced herself and—

Everyone except Garak and herself dematerialized in a sparkle of transporter effects.

“Eddington to Bashir. We've got them, doctor. You can leave the holosuite now.”

Julie let out a great sigh, leaning her hip against the control console. “Thank you,” she said.

Garak brushed herself off performatively - it did absolutely nothing to address the completely disheveled state she was still in - and wandered over to the map with her hands tucked contemplatively behind her back. “Interesting,” she said. “You saved the day by destroying the world.”

Julie snorted. “I bet they didn't teach you that in the Obsidian Order.”

“No. But it seems there's a great deal they didn't teach me…” she trailed off.

Julie sighed and smiled ruefully to herself, standing up straight. “I’m really sorry about… all of this, Garak,” she said. “I didn’t realize you felt I was… fetishizing what’s happened to you in the past. To be honest, I thought you were mostly mad because you were jealous of the holograms.”

Garak hummed noncommittally, still looking at the map. “You never answered me when I asked, you know,” she said. “Do you mate with them? The male ones, I mean?”

“…of course not, love. They’re just here for decoration. And, er, I’ll play on the… less adult settings from now on if you’d prefer me to. I didn’t realize that you were jealous.”

“Thank you, dear,” Garak said, finally turning back around to face her. Her eyes flicked around Julie’s form as she looked her up and down. “You do look very good in that tuxedo, you know.”

“Well, I have a very good seamstress.”

“Mmm.” She - rather coquettishly - adjusted Julie’s bowtie for a moment, then apparently changed her mind and untied it, slipping from around her neck and fingering open her collar. “While we’re on the subject, darling - I don’t suppose you would consider simply playing less of this program in general?”

“Yes, of course,” Julie said apologetically, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to neglect you. It’s just that it’s a new program, I was having a lot of fun with it, and I, erm, got a little carried away, I suppose…”

“I could tell,” Garak said, and pulled Julie forward by the lapels to kiss her.

Julie relaxed into the kiss for a moment, then stiffened again, blinking her eyes open and pulling back. “Um, Garak,” she said, “shouldn’t we go to the infirmary now?”

“Why?”

“Because of that gunshot wound on your neckridge? That was a rhetorical question, by the way. We should go to the infirmary.”

Garak twisted her head a little, experimentally stretching her neck and wincing slightly. Despite that, she said, “I don’t think we need to, dear.”

“But doesn’t that hurt?”

“Exquisitely.”

Julie sighed, opened her mouth to comment, and promptly got kissed again. She let it go for a little longer this time before withdrawing, grasping Garak’s wrists. “I have wondered if you weren’t a masochist,” she said, somewhat awkwardly. “That’s probably only to be expected, right? You had that implant for a long time…”

Garak shrugged with forced casualness, though she seemed slightly embarrassed now. “If you suspected, dear, why didn’t you say anything?”

“You didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to be the one to bring it up first. Especially since I assumed that you, uh, aren’t exactly into the ‘light spanking and body-safe candle wax’ variety of masochism.”

“…a fair assumption,” Garak said, stretching her neck again. Julie squeezed her wrists.

“Don’t do that,” she said sternly. “I know it’s not a serious wound, but you shouldn’t mess with it. We do need to go to the infirmary.”

“And yet you haven’t physically dragged me there, Doctor. How curious!”

“That’s because I get the feeling we’re not done talking yet,” Julie muttered, “I just want you to stand still and not making the bleeding worse—“

“What else is there to talk about?” Garak said, leaning forward. Julie craned her head back enough to stop Garak from kissing her again but she wasn’t able to prevent Garak from trapping both of their hands between their chests. The shimmery fabric of her gown was slightly cooler to the touch than Garak’s skin.

Julie swallowed. “About the fetishizing thing,” she said. “Look, I’m not… it wasn’t… well, I’ll admit that when we met, I was mostly fascinated by the rumors about you being a spy and all… well, maybe not mostly… I’m not blind. But even then, even though back then I’m certain my view on espionage was still… quite naïve and maybe a little romanticized, it’s not like I ever thought that James Bond was an accurate depiction of—“

“It’s sufficient to say you were intrigued, dear,” Garak said.

“Yes, I was intrigued. But it was more about the prospect of… getting involved in something exciting and important. It wasn’t some kind of kink.”

Garak managed to look down her nose at her despite being several inches shorter, especially without shoes.

Julie let out an aggravated sigh. “Alright, maybe a little bit of a kink,” she said, “but I do know there’s a difference between the kind of kinky, fantasy, pulp adventure ‘espionage’ in this program, and what you actually went through in real life. I’d never even compare them!”

“Of course, Doctor,” Garak said, still clearly not believing her.

“You know, Ian Fleming himself was a spy during World War Two, which is still one of the most devastating conflicts to ever happen on Earth. He must have seen and maybe even done some terrible things. And while the original books are a little less sanitized than most of their adaptations… they are still quite fantastical. That was a deliberate choice he made.”

Garak seemed a little surprised at this. “That’s… interesting,” she said, and appeared to genuinely mean it.

Julie took an uncertain breath. “That’s part of the reason why I invited you,” she said. “I thought that maybe this silly program would… help you, in some way. I didn’t mean for it to be a place where you had to relive your trauma - no, don’t argue with me, let’s just refer to it as trauma for convenience’s sake, you’re obviously still affected by it — I just hoped that a program where you could engage with… this sort of thing… with it being completely under your control might be something of a relief.”

“And you would sexually benefit from it as well,” Garak said, in a surprisingly nonjudgemental tone.

“God. Fine. Yes, I want to make love to you in the James Bond holoprogram. But that is secondary.”

“Yes, dear.” Garak pulled her arms out of their trap and immediately started sliding Julie’s tuxedo jacket off. “So, Miss Bashir, do you consider yourself the seducer or the seduced?”

“I think this conversation has gotten away from me,” Julie said.

“Answer the question.”

“I didn’t mean I want to make love now. You still have a bleeding open wound on your neck!”

“I know, dear.” Garak grabbed Julie’s hand and lead it unsubtly between her legs; her vent was comparatively warm, and apparently Garak was so turned on already that her seam was palpably swollen. Slick fluid gathered against Julie’s fingers.

Julie let out a quiet moan without really meaning to. “I thought I was just imagining things when you ripped your skirt and I didn’t see any undergarments…”

“I didn’t see the point of wearing any today,” Garak said smugly.

“You’re insane. Wait, are you ovulating right now? You always get unbelievably randy when you’re ovulating.”

“Keeping track of that is your hobby, dear, not mine,” she said, and looped her other arm around Julie’s neck to pull her into another kiss. The movement must have jostled her neck, because she let out a short, pained gasp against Julie’s mouth - then immediately pressed even closer, kissing her more deeply.

Oh, what the hell, Julie thought, curling the fingers pressed against Garak’s vent slightly upwards and starting to stroke her. The infirmary’s not going anywhere.

Chapter Text

It quickly became apparent that Garak wasn’t just turned on, she was downright desperate. It wasn’t even that she had become terribly aroused after Julie had shot her - though that was clearly part of it - but she had obviously come to the holosuite in the first place with the intention of getting ravished and/or ravishing Julie into next week. Honestly, it was a little surprising, since Julie had never taken Garak as one for holosuite sex.

And maybe she normally wasn’t, but perhaps the combination of a lack of attention lately and (presumably) ovulation hormones had caused her to lose some of her inhibitions. The pain of a gunshot wound to her sensitive neckridge, and possibly whatever psychosexual dynamic she had read into Julie being the one to shoot her, had evidently caused her to drop the rest of them. While Julie still wanted to be as careful with the wound as possible, she nonetheless quickly found herself being divested of her entire tuxedo and pushed back onto Dr. Noah’s ostentatious overstuffed couch. Garak didn’t even bother to peel her gown off and instead just flipped the skirt up and straddled Julie’s lap.

“Hey, don’t do that,” Julie hissed, intercepting Garak’s hand when she had made to touch her wound. Somehow her fingers kept drifting back up there. “You’ll give yourself an infection at this rate. God, and this is probably already going to scar…”

“I don’t take medical advice from naked women,” Garak said, tossing her hair back over her shoulder - and wincing again at the movement of her neck. “Mmmhh.”

“And whose fault is that,” Julie muttered, pulling the front of Garak’s dress down enough to completely expose her breasts. Her enormous, magnificent, scrumptious breasts that had been hopelessly distracting her from the moment she had removed her oversized fur coat. If only there had been time before now to—

Wait. Fuck.

Julie groaned and rested her forehead against Garak’s clavicle. “What is it now?” Garak said impatiently.

“I just remembered,” Julie mumbled. “This program has a built-in soft pause feature for sex scenes.”

“A what, dear?”

“A soft pause. To prevent anything from interrupting, er, anything. As soon as the player character takes her knickers off, all countdowns and timers stop and every uninvolved NPC finds something else to do with their time until it’s over. The plot can’t move forward at all.” Julie hid her face against Garak’s chest, dreadfully embarrassed. “And I was so caught up in it all that this mechanic completely slipped my mind…”

“Well,” Garak said, sounding a little bemused, “we did try pausing the game, and it didn’t work. Computer control was disrupted.”

“Yes, but I’m talking about a built-in feature! It’s included with the holoprogram, not the holosuite. It’s not necessarily governed by computer control. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t have worked!” Julie leaned back against the sofa and stared up at the ceiling, groaning again. “And you were right there! I could have been shagging the living daylights out of you this whole time and nobody would have ever been in any danger!”

Garak just laughed at that and petted Julie’s hair. “My poor forgetful little regnar,” she said, “there’s no reason to worry about that now. Everything went well in the end…”

“Everything went well?! I shot you!”

“You impressed me,” Garak corrected, and pulled Julie tightly against her. “And now my deeply-ingrained animal instincts are insisting that you’ve proved yourself a strong and worthy mate and I need you to breed me right now.”

“…maybe we should go to the infirmary. I’m starting to worry that the gunshot caused a thrombosis of some kind and the clot has travelled to your brain.”

“I already told you I don’t take medical advice from naked women.”

This was a clear ‘The only way out is through’ situation and it was hard to argue with a lapful of horny Cardassian girlfriend. Especially when said girlfriend wiggled her hips, pressing down against Julie’s lap. She could feel her leaking against her leg. “Alright, alright,” Julie said, and gave a somewhat resigned kiss to her unharmed neckridge. “Bleh. You taste like talcum powder— how much makeup are you wearing?”

“Hm? It doesn’t matter, dear.”

“Right.” Julie rubbed the scale with her thumb, frowning at the damp gray powder that smeared off. Underneath, the naked scale was flushed almost black. “Don’t tell me you put on such a thick coat of foundation so that no one would be able to see your ridges darkening…”

“You’d be surprised how often that’s necessary,” Garak said, then when Julie shot a look up at her, clarified: “There are other reasons why one’s ridges might darken, you know. It isn’t necessarily related to arousal.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I don’t want to ingest it.” Julie wiped her hand off on the couch, then licked her fingers and started scrubbing the makeup off of a respectable patch of scale for her to chew on. Garak moaned appreciatively.

Garak always tended to seem like she was in a bit of a rush during sex (which she still refused to actually acknowledge as sex, which required a male in her mind) despite the way she favored savoring other things, such as meals or books. Sometimes Julie thought that Garak was subconsciously or even consciously afraid that Julie might change her mind. Times like this she just recognized that Garak was rather easily aroused and simply impatient and frantic once she got going. Julie had no theories as to the source of this idiosyncrasy. Honestly, she didn’t much care, since she was a little bit like that herself. If she wasn’t, she definitely would have dragged Garak to the infirmary. As it stood, she still kept having to stop Garak from fingering her own wound. It was obviously still causing her a significant amount of pain which in turn was obviously cranking her warp core like hell.

I really shouldn’t enable this, Julie thought dimly, circling her fingertips against Garak’s clits and making her shudder. “How do you feel about light spanking and body-safe candle wax, anyway?” she asked.

“Hmm?” Garak looked hazily down at her, her pupils utterly blown. “Oh… that’s boring. It really has to hurt.”

“Er… yeah, I… don’t want to hurt you, Garak.”

“You did shoot me.”

“Because you made me— god, that sounds bad,” Julie mumbled. “…but it is true. You had that coming.”

“Oh, yes,” Garak said, nuzzling against Julie’s neck. “Mmm… please, dear, I want more…”

“Get your hand off your neckridge,” Julie said, pushing a finger into Garak. She made a high whine - she ground down against Julie’s hand, but she was still a little tight, so Julie nudged her with her chin until she presented her cotas’hU, which Julie bit carefully. Garak relaxed against her with a sigh, and Julie’s finger slid the rest of the way in very easily.

She let go, kissing the back of Garak’s neck and stroking inside her. Garak clenched around her, whimpering a little - and still twisting her head and shoulders in an effort to keep irritating her wound. She kept rubbing it up against Julie’s shoulder, leaving a trail of sticky cool blood on the skin here.

“Stop that,” Julie scolded, and bit her cotas’hU again.

“More,” Garak mumbled a bit later, once Julie released her again. “Doctor, please, I need m-more…”

“Now, what are you being so demanding for…?” Julie said, “does being in pain really do that much for you? I can give you a referral for a therapist, you know.”

Garak hissed. “Doctor, I’m begging you to have your way with me— and you’re mocking me—-“

“I genuinely don’t know what you mean by ‘more’, Garak. I’ve already got three fingers in you. You usually don’t let me go even that far.”

“You h-have to fuck me.”

“Uh-huh. With what?”

“I don’t care. Something. Anything. One of those… stupid firearms.”

Julie raised an eyebrow. But Garak wasn’t even looking at her; she was curled against her shoulder, still twitching about her injury, panting and circling her hips against Julie’s hand. “You can’t be serious.”

“I am! Y-You could just remove the ammunition from it, it’s fine—“

“No, I mean you’re really not serious. You’re talking nonsense, love.” Julie paused. “I’m sort of amazed, really. You’re so masochistic it’s scrambling your brain.”

Garak whined.

“After this, we’re going to the infirmary to fix your neck and then we’ll look up a counselor for you,” Julie threatened, and pushed Garak back on her knees slightly to give her a little more room to maneuver — then started pumping her fingers into Garak more vigorously, pushing as deep inside her as she was comfortable doing, and making sure the sides of her fingers stroked hard against both clits with every movement.

Garak gasped and hissed and started purring, squirming in Julie’s lap and clinging to her. Her face was buried against Julie’s neck and her hands roamed her body, grabbing onto anything she could grab onto, as if she were desperately clawing at a lifeline off a breached hull. Julie was pretty sure she was going to end up with finger-shaped bruises on her tits from this.

“Doctor,” Garak whined, “Doctor, I don’t— ah, I need… something…”

“Something different?” Julie guessed, slowing her hand.

Garak nodded against her neck. “Y-Yes…”

Julie was actually not surprised. Unhinged verbal requests aside - being turned on enough to accept much more intense fingering than she usually allowed was one thing, but actually being able to come from it was probably quite another. Julie slid her (very wet) fingers back out of Garak, resting a fingertip against each clit and massaging gently. “Alright, love,” Julie said, and kissed Garak’s earridge. “Let’s do something different.”

“Mhhnn…”

“Sit up… come on, Garak. Stop touching your injury. Sit back on the couch here…” Julie maneuvered them into swapped positions, so that Garak was the one sprawled on the sofa instead of herself. Garak blinked at her muzzily, her face flushed blue and her hair all over the place - a chunk of her hair was clumped with blood and there were several strands plastered to the wound. Julie carefully brushed them away.

“Do you want me to— use my mouth on you?” Garak said very quietly.

Julie huffed out a surprised laugh. “No,” she said, “I know you’d regret it later if I said yes. Do you want me to use my mouth on you?“

Garak nodded mutely.

Julie slid to her knees between Garak’s legs, lacing their fingers together with both hands to keep Garak from touching anything she wasn’t supposed to. Garak still kept twitching her head, moving like she was trying to rub her ear against her shoulder, and her breath stuttered in pain and pleasure each time she did. Julie grudgingly allowed it, instead leaning forward to lap against Garak’s slit. This was actually an even more reliable way of settling Garak down than biting the cotas’hU was — Garak was still uncomfortable with how dominant of an act she perceived receiving oral sex to be, and apparently coped with that by acting as undominant as possible whenever Julie ate her out. Which was to say, she got rather quiet and significantly less fussy, made no demands, and just writhed and mewled and probably would have done literally anything Julie told her to do if Julie’s mouth were free to actually tell her to do things.

Not that Julie particularly wanted to or anything. She didn’t really think of herself as an especially commandeering lover and didn’t place much sexual value on following instructions. She was just a little curious sometimes as to how far she could push Garak.

Granted, after today, she had to admit that that “how far” was probably a lot farther than she would ever be comfortable pushing.

It didn’t take very long for Julie to bring Garak to orgasm under her tongue; she must have been absurdly close already. Afterwards Julie climbed back on the sofa, straddled Garak, and starting humping her for all she was worth (she felt like she was going to explode if she didn’t do this). Garak thankfully had enough presence of mind left to worm a hand between them and wedge her fingers around Julie’s clit for her to rut against; she also gratefully nuzzled Julie’s bust, kissing and giving tiny bites occasionally, her tongue cold and smooth against Julie’s nipples.

Way better than any hologram.

…

“How was that for your spy kink, dear?” Garak murmured, later, when they were cuddled together on the moderately sodden sofa. Garak’s dress resembled a belt more than a gown, being worn mostly about the waist and leaving her chest as well as everything below her hips still exposed.

Julie blinked for a long moment, then glanced up at Garak. She’d been resting her head on her remarkably soft baps. “What?” she said.

“Did I perform well?” Garak yawned. “Were you sufficiently seduced? Or seduced me sufficiently, I still can’t tell what sort of role you wanted.”

“…if you’re trying to convince me that you only said that ridiculous thing about the gun as part of an act, it’s not working. I don’t believe you.”

“Hm.” Garak lazily ran a hand through Julie’s sweat-damp hair. “Well, still…”

“This isn’t about a spy kink, Garak. I mean, I’m not sleeping with you because I have a spy kink. I genuinely fell in love with you, in case you’ve forgotten.”

Garak hummed. “I suppose I do appreciate the reminder once in a while…”

“I love you, you impossible woman.” Julie leaned up to peck Garak on the lips. Garak made a vaguely disgusted face at coming so close to tasting herself. “I’d love you even if you weren’t a spy,” Julie added.

Garak snorted. “The Order isn’t around anymore, dear,” she said. “I’m not a spy. I wasn’t even one when I met you in the first place.”

“There, you see? That proves it was about you all along, and not some hypothetical fringe sexual interest you can’t prove I even have in the first place,” Julie grinned.

“Very funny,” Garak said, though her annoyance was clearly faked and did little hide her affection.

Dr. Noah’s lair suddenly disappeared, leaving them both sprawled on the floor of the empty, deactivated holosuite. Their clothes - or rather, Julie’s clothes and Garak’s coat and shoes - were scattered haphazardly around them. They blinked at each other in surprise.

The holosuite door opened. Quark was standing there, one hand still on the door control panel, looking extremely annoyed.

Julie scrambled for the nearest article of clothing - her white tux shirt - and hurried to cover herself as much as she could; it was only when she noticed that Garak had not responded to Quark’s appearance at all and seemed perfectly content to just sit there basically naked that Julie remembered that, to a Ferengi, seeing her scrambling to cover herself was almost certainly more erotic than the nudity.

Indeed, Quark wasn’t even reacting to catching them practically in flagrante delicto aside from unabashedly not looking away. “If you’re done,” he said, “I kinda need you both to leave the holosuite now.”

“Dr. Bashir said she had two hours left less than two hours ago,” Garak said, casually tucking her skirt back over her leg to cover her groin; she was apparently completely unconcerned about her boobs still being on full display. “Shouldn’t we still have at least fifteen minutes?”

“The holosuite needs fixing,” Quark said. “You should be thanking me for waiting until the moaning stopped before telling you to get out.”

“Are you at least going to give Dr. Bashir a refund?”

“No.”

“It’s fine,” Julie squeaked. “We’ll go. We need to go to the infirmary anyway— Quark, can you please leave so I can get dressed??”

“You females are always so whiny about that,” Quark complained, but closed the holosuite door again.

Julie exhaled loudly. “So much for the afterglow…”

“I still think he should have given you a refund,” Garak said, more focused on pinning her hair back into place than on fixing her gown. “Or at least credit towards future holosuite sessions. It’s a bit rude to just throw us out with no compensation…”

“Oh, what does it matter? I already agreed to come here less,” Julie said, then paused, halfway through stepping into her trousers, and shot Garak a curious glance. “Unless you want to come here with me?” she said hopefully.

Garak made a noncommittal little hum. “I’ll think about it,” she said.

“—and so, in the end,” Julie explained to Miles, sitting nearby while he worked on repairing one of the infirmary consoles the next day, “she decided that she wasn’t interested after all, and now I’m stuck playing on my own.”

“Figures,” Miles said, his voice echoing slightly from his position on the floor under the console. “How is she, by the way? I saw her on the Promenade with a bandage on her neck - did she get hurt?”

“Er, yes. It wasn’t serious, though.”

“Why the bandage, then? I don’t need to fix the dermal regenerators too, do I?”

“No, no,” Julie said, waving a hand even though Miles couldn’t see her. “It’s just that it took out a whole scale, and using a regenerator on a missing scale gives kind of ugly results, so Garak decided she would rather just let it heal on its own.” This was even technically true - while slow natural healing still wouldn’t give the wound site back an entire scale until Garak’s next shed was coming up, the temporary scar tissue would still look like a scale from a distance, and that wouldn’t necessarily be the case if healing were accelerated with a regenerator. Of course, Garak’s insistence on only disinfectant and a bandage had blatantly had little if anything to do with that. Julie had only agreed to not use the regenerator after badgering Garak into agreeing to not intentionally interfere with the damn thing. “But anyway, that’s beside the point. I was just saying I think it’s a little unfair that, after all that, I still don’t have anyone to play the program with…”

“Yeah, well, I’m not surprised,” Miles said, sliding himself out from under the console and sitting up. “About Garak, I mean.”

“Huh?”

“I’m not surprised that she doesn’t like the program.”

“Because of the spy thing?” Julie said, “she was a little offended by it at first, but by the end of it she did pretty clearly understand that it’s abstracted…”

“No, I get that,” Miles said, “I’ve fought in a war myself, but I still enjoy historical battle holoprograms… nowadays, anyway. No, I just meant that I figured James Bond would be too… chauvinistic for Garak. She doesn’t exactly have the best relationship with anything male.”

“But I’m the one who plays James Bond,” Julie complained.

“Yeah, and you’re probably weird about it.”

Julie pouted. “Look, I just wanted to ask you if maybe you wanted to play it with me sometime, Chief.”

Miles raised his eyebrows. “Me?” he said, “why me? …don’t tell me it’s because seeing my pattern in the program gave you the idea.”

“Errr… well, maybe a little. But the character that you replaced didn’t really suit you…”

“I thought you said I was a cardshark? I like card games, Julie. I used to play a lot of poker on the Enterprise, you can ask Worfe about it sometime.”

“No, that’s not it,” Julie said, “I guess it was just the accent that was throwing me off — and the fact that you could have just as easily been Falcon, but you weren’t. I think you would have made a really good Falcon. The role was practically made for you!” She paused. “To be honest, I believe it might actually have been made for you. I’ve told Felix a bit about you, it wouldn’t really be surprising that he wrote a character sort of based off of you…” (She decided that she would never mention the part where Falcon was a ‘hidden’ love interest whom she had already seduced multiple times.)

“A bit?” Miles said dubiously, “and isn’t Falcon your character’s recurring arch-rival who keeps trying to kill you?”

“Pleeeease, Chief?” Julie said, clasping her hands together and trying to look as adorable as possible. “It would be so fun! And you’d get to wear a cool eyepatch and everything!”

“Eh… right. You’re sure Garak’s okay with you inviting me to the holosuite?”

Julie blinked. “Why wouldn’t she be?”

“I— I dunno,” Miles transparently lied. “You know, just in case. I wouldn’t say yes to this until I’ve cleared it with Keiko first.”

“Huh? Did you have to get permission from Keiko before we started playing racquetball or darts? That’s strange…”

“No, but,” Miles huffed. “Look, I just know how Cardassians are, and I don’t want to be on the wrong end of that.”

“But I don’t think Garak has a problem with you, Miles… and Keiko doesn’t have a problem with me, right?”

“Keiko thinks you’re cute,” he deadpanned. “Look, just— if you can be sure that Garak’s not going to take it the wrong way, then I guess I could at least check out the program. It might be interesting.”

Julie grinned. “You’re the best, Chief,” she said. For some reason Miles just looked exasperated and rolled his eyes.