I am still open to this, yes~! I’m excited that you are someone else letting me words, haha.
The snip quoted here is from Thief, for anyone interested.
This whole piece of writing sort of fell out of me, which doesn’t usually happen with me. You guys know I’m like 80% drawings and 20% writings when I have my shit together, so that a writing project tore its way out of me almost totally formed like this is a bit ‘wow’.
All of this story is inside Garak’s head until the bit you mentioned. I always think Garak’s insides are very different from his outsides, no matter which Garak we’re talking about. This thing was written with DD9 in mind, of course, but since it lacks a lot of specifics, it’s kind of a multi-Garak experience, haha.
Either way, I wanted to show Garak hiding. He spends this whole piece ‘saying’ that he does not believe in fate or destiny or luck or else that he does but has a bad relationship with them, and then Julian trots them all out in what’s supposed to be a romantic or cute sentiment (and I made sure Julian mentioned all three in his only bit of dialog!), Garak says it’s charming.
So of course he’s lying, but it’s probably that he’s lying to Julian and himself. It isn’t malicious, he’s just stalling, hoping that the more time he spends with Julian, the more he fakes being a proper kind of boyfriend or something, the more likely it is that it will stick and he won’t even be faking everything. He is definitely not faking his fondness for Julian, and he still likes teaching him things, but this kind of stuff… I guess he’s a bit weak against that.
I sat with A Stitch In Time for a long time before I made this, I think. The book was largely Garak’s teen angst diary, but it made me very fond of the idea of this man in so many layers that there are some even he hasn’t seen in a long time.
I also have this weird fondness for people desperately trying to keep each other even though some cosmic force disapproves? This is the only manifestation of this weakness that has seen the light of the internet, though there are some elements of it in SWAN/ISH. I like the idea of someone’s personal deity confronting that person’s partner like ‘Hey, fucker, you think you’re good enough for this rad shit of mine? Fight me,’ or something, just more eloquent. So the idea of Garak vs. The Abstract Concepts of Destiny, Luck, and Fate and, through them, Justice, really appeals to me. He’s happy to believe he’s ‘destined’ to have Julian with him if the ultimate goal of the universe is to cause him pain by taking Julian away. And yet he wants to fight it without also ending up resorting to believing it in a sappier way. He both thinks he deserves some kind of emotional martyrdom and wants desperately to have paid already so he can keep watching foreign films with Julian forever. This man is a mess, haha.
I don’t think Julian is really subscribing to the idea that he and Garak were ‘meant to be’ - the text you quoted even includes that he’s joking - but there’s some extreme fondness and cultural upbringing in him making that even something to joke about. Garak would never have said anything like it. Julian definitely feels a solid connection though, and most of his joke about Garak being made several years too early is just derived from all those sorts of ‘ideal’ and ‘fated’ love stories where the lovers are the perfect age for each other and he and Garak are sort of… not, haha.
Contrary to what he says, though, at least in DD9, this is the best and pretty much only time that they could have worked. Any earlier, and Garak would have been significantly shadier, Julian would have been elsewhere/too much younger… So they were ‘made’ at exactly the right ages.
Even if all that destiny and fate and whatsit aren’t real.
chequerootlurks
