what have i done
dear god, what have i done
DD9 Julian is definitely less put together than his DS9 counterpart if only because DS9 Julian has a nice uniform (as opposed to an unflattering and ill-fitting generic pizza one) and, like you said, does not work with food and grease and driving a questionable delivery vehicle. But DD9!Julian is still appreciably pretty, and when he tries even a little (remembering the hat head, for example) it’s more obvious. He definitely is not a dirty person - he bathes and everything! - so with slightly more effort than he currently gives, he can manage lovely. Said lovely definitely was nice for Garak as vague scenery, and it’s certainly something he appreciates, but what you said about it being Julian’s brains rather than pretty that got Garak interested is definitely exactly what I had envisioned for this. Flirting with pretty people is sort of one thing, flirting with pretty *intelligent* people is sort of something else all together. Not to say that pretty people are not intelligent or any garbage like that, just that Garak was not about to take the initial flirting thing seriously because he really had no reason to think he was going to find brilliant conversation in a pretty pizza shop employee. And then yes, Julian makes some sort of blabbery comment about Garak’s book that would bore the socks off of everyone else he knows while they’re waiting for a broken oven to finish Garak’s lunch and suddenly it’s like ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold the phone, the pretty one *knows things*.’
Leeta is actually getting into this soon and it’s … kind of going to go the way you described. I want to make sure she isn’t demonized in any fashion, because people doing that shit is nasty and Leeta is awesome, but while I’m doing vague parallel-ing Leeta is sort of next in the line of people Julian attempts to do a thing with after Jadzia. Leeta is even someone who understands ‘they only like me for my pretty!,’ but she is just not excited about the sort of stuff that Julian cares about, so this will play out predictably. I should probbaly stop talking about what goes down with Leeta because I’ll have a whole chapter/part/whatever that will just not be very interesting if I blab the whole thing here!
I love the ‘old soul’ descriptor, though, and I like that that’s something he can accomplish even while being a dork who likes gaming! He and Garak are definitely of the same kind and neither of them want to walk away from someone they can actually connect with, even if they don’t like exactly the same movies/books/whatevers. They’re both people who know how to try to appreciate things outside their usual realm of interests, though, so it’s a good match. I’ve been thinking of Julian trying to get Garak to look at comics as well. I imagine that Julian is the sort who can appreciate a good cheesy super hero comic as much as he can enjoy something sophisticated like a experimental graphic novel, and he’d be excited to challenge Garak’s ideas of comics. We see so much more of Garak teaching Julian things in the show, I’d like the reverse to happen too! I imagine Garak would actually take some real delight in Julian teaching him something, even. As much as I want them to read the occasional novel, I just keep thinking of Julian’s schedule, and how seeing Garak at all is going to cut into it, let alone seeing him and reading novels, so I keep trying to substitute other lower-time-calorie media pursuits.
Julian is absolutely going to be pissed off about prolonged attempts by other people to make him stop doing what he’s doing. This again sort of stems from the pretty rage - people look and him and see ‘too young and pretty to make sound decisions’. The initial objections he understands are done out of friendship and concern, but after he’s kind of invested in Garak and people are still, “So heeeey, that thing you are doing…? Maybe not so much?” he’s going to be Not Happy.
haha, of course Garak sassily gives no shits about these people’s opinions! They are all grossly uninformed and their opinions are thus invalid anyway! He cares about their opinion of Julian later on down the line - particularly when Miles comes to talk to him - but it’s not his place to go randomly butting into Julian’s relationships, so he lets Julian take care of his own business. Whiiich is something I guess Miles does not do, given that he talks to Garak.
Miles doesn’t FIGHT with a lot of people, just has less-than-pleasant conversations~ And it’s not everyone, or even ‘a lot’ really, it’s just more than I had considered initially.
Daddy Issues (or, more generically, Parent Issues) was something I wanted to carry over as well! He can’t do genetic modification in this world, obviously, but I’ve considered a lot of options for how to translate it. A very simple version of it though is Julian’s parents’ response to his trying to do one thing and then dropping all that and going for a medical degree when it didn’t work out. His father was very much about trying all the things ever in the show, but I’d considered him deeply disapproving of Julian doing the same thing. It’s almost hypocritical, which is how Julian sees it, but it’s also something of a ‘Don’t make the mistakes I did’ sort of thing. This feels like a good element, but I’d really like to find something that they did TO him somehow. All I can think of while sitting here is them shipping him off to some sort of scary boarding school or letting him undergo some weird medical trials in an attempt to make him a child prodigy (and possibly for the monies? who knows). That last one is maybe super analogous to the genetic modification, though. If it had some sort of adverse effect on him - possibly an effect that caused his first attempt at career to bomb - then that could be the source of proper resentment. I may roll with this, because Pizza has already become so dark. I’d be interested to hear your ideas, though I would risk wanting to borrow them! If you feel like sharing though, that’d be rad.
YAY, peanut butter sandwiches! I hope you like the way it comes up in the next bit as much as you like that we had brain twinning! There is ‘oh god what did i just say’ flailing and flirting involved.
I’m excited you are making a thing with the dancing! Are you doing it in your own DD9 land, or attaching it to this one? I don’t mind either way, I’m just curious!
HA, Jadzia DMing, oh my god. That is fantastic. Maybe DnD is what they start doing when more people hear about and want to join in the WoW adventures, but don’t have the right hook up for it. (Also I got a reblog of this earlier in which someone assigned WoW classes to everyone and I am dying. I can’t reblog it because I’m at work and their layout is broken here, but as soon as I get home, I want everyone to see it~) I am currently entertaining the idea of Garak cruising in on a WoW session of Julian’s with a suspiciously high level character who seems more like one of NPCs than a player character in order to vaguely allude to the Our Man Bashir episode.
fun fun fun
cucumber-s
