Haha, far be it from me to be held to the limitation of a meme I didn’t author. I’ll paste the relevant bit anyway.
Garak smiles fondly at his glass of water. “Quite. Even then, people who have ‘sides’ or ‘aspects’ like this in literature – especially of the sort that is seen as contrary to their sex – are generally not to be trusted. They’re traitors.”
And then Garak’s eyelids flick and he looks up at Julian and it’s not sweet or pleasant or even romantic. He hardly moves, the glance is all in his eyes, and yet it’s like the entire man is different. Julian isn’t foolish enough to think that he knows Garak extremely well, but he likes to think he sees more than most. Quark certainly doesn’t notice that Garak’s smiles for him are full of venom. Miles wouldn’t recognize sincerity on Garak any more than he’d know a radius from an ulna. Julian sees Garak wearing many faces for others because Julian himself does it so well. But this is a smile he hasn’t seen before.
This one is a dare.
“And are you a traitor?”
“I’m a tailor.” Garak’s smile widens and his eyes narrow. He is very pleased with Julian’s question, as much as he had been at being called ‘irritating,’ and possibly just as pleased that it’s territory they can’t cross in public. Julian can’t go any further with this now, but this has to be an invitation. For now, back to a story about a death.
There’s something in this story, somewhere, about the difference between Cardassian things and Garak things, and that both things are foreign enough to Julian that he’s still sorting them into a nice little venn diagram. This is some of that.
In their current world, Garak doesn’t line up with any of the assigned gender paths no matter what culture he’s sitting in. I thought of the Cardassian scientists we met in the show and how they were very, “Silly man! You don’t have the head for science!” And sure, Garak skews more toward literature, but he certainly can rewire this circuit and reconfigure that computer. And from where Julian is standing, nail polish and fuss about scarf configuration isn’t something he initially expects from a man and is learning to rewrite.
Garak’s interested not only in dropping hints, but seeing how Julian handles them - if he picks them up and then how he deals with them if he does. He’s not interested in direct, but he’s also not interested in being totally hidden from the right people. Julian is revealing himself to be the right people. That Julian asks the single question which would naturally lead to a torrent more and yet presses no further because he’s assessed the nature of the game and the setting in which he’s asked is the exact reaction Garak wanted. He may be the type interested in just letting what he wants Julian to see out letter by letter rather than ever fully pronouncing the word. There will be a time when they both know things without ever having spoken the full extent of the thing aloud. Miles would get very, ‘Okay, you ‘know’, but do you know?’ about it. And Julian may be in the space between ‘know’ and know for a long time until one day he realizes that he didn’t notice when he shifted from one to the other.
This bit was meant to call back to a lot of their gender discussions, but also to get Julian considering Garak’s entire life in the way he’s just seen on stage. Garak can indirectly make comments about his own life through the vehicle of this story, which is how it’s used in his world anyway. Using a story about masks as a mask.
There’s layers to their layers, these assholes.