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TOO MUCH TOGETHERNESS

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Only in a few universes, peculiarly including ours, did Enabran Tain sit uselessly muttering irrelevantly as the combined Obsidian Order – Tal Shiar – fleet fell apart around him under the relentless assault of the Jem’Hadar.

In the vast majority of universes in which he existed, and in which he’d led the attack on the Founders’ home-world, he promptly, sensibly, and spryly followed Garak to the runabout.

A tense, unnaturally quiet flight ensued, until Tain said to Odo, “Well, I imagine that I can guess why you’re angry with me.”

Odo countered, “And I can guess from whom Garak received his orders.” The just-tortured Odo still stung with bitterness. He kept his eyes straight ahead as he piloted the vessel.

“I suppose that you regret that Garak brought me along. You would’ve preferred to leave me behind. And maybe Garak as well.” Tain was clearly fishing.

Odo offered no reply. Frankly, he’d already made up his mind to forgive Garak, although Tain was altogether another matter. But he had no intention of telling Garak that yet, let alone telling him in front of Tain.

“Not going to answer me, are you?” Tain prompted.

Odo turned to face the two Cardassians for the first time since their escape. “Don’t think that you can force any answers from me. Your vile device blew up with your ship.” It was only then that he saw Tain’s unflappable, unwavering stare, as well as Garak’s concerned expression. Odo harrumphed at both of them, and faced forward again.

 

“I suppose that I see no reason why you can’t remain on the station,” Benjamin Sisko told Enabran Tain later in his office. “Since, as you say, your people will be less than delighted with your loss of the entire Obsidian Order fleet, and since you therefore haven’t those operatives to help in your protection. Ironically, you may join Mr. Garak in exile here, if you like. But let me make one thing clear: we will be watching you very closely for the entirety of your stay, regardless of its length.”

“I would expect nothing less.” Tain was completely unsurprised. “In fact, I would’ve been disappointed in you, if you had simply chosen to trust me.”

“Well now we can’t have that,” Sisko spoke somewhat sardonically.

 

Garak and Tain made a curious pair. Observers on the Promenade saw them alternately dining together or avoiding each other, as they progressed through stages of mutual tolerance, and amity or enmity. Through it all, however, Tain steadily maintained Garak as his restored operative, indeed, the only operative that he had left.

 

One day, Tain happened upon Garak and Bashir lunching together at the Replimat. Garak was startled to see Bashir and Tain greet each other cordially, in evident recognition.

“When could you two have ever met?”

“He came to me for help when you were dying, from that wire in your head,” Tain told him.

As Garak turned his stunned gaze to Bashir, the latter added, “You never asked me how I obtained the necessary medical information to save you. That’s how.”

Garak’s astonished expression returned to Tain. “Thank you.” He was clearly at least somewhat moved.

Bashir didn’t see Tain’s subsequent attitude; he turned away, undoubtedly remembering all too well that Tain had helped him to save Garak, not as a kindness, but as a desire to extend his misery.

 

On another occasion, Tain came upon Garak and Odo together sharing breakfast.

“Well, I see that you two have mended,” commented the head of the former Obsidian Order.

“No thanks to you,” Odo growled, his pleasant expression instantly replaced by one of hostility.

“Well, I won’t offer to join you.”

“A wise choice,” the shapeshifter snapped.

Garak simply listened, wide-eyed, to the exchange.

 

A mere few months later, the Klingons attacked Cardassia in the suspicion that it had been infiltrated by the Dominion, and the Defiant rescued and brought back to DS9 Gul Dukat, his crew, and the Detapa Council.

As Garak set out, weapon in hand, to help Dukat defend the Council members from the imminent Klingon boarding party, Tain demanded of him, “I thought that you told me, aboard that Romulan warbird, that Dukat was one gul whom you wished to kill as soon as you got the chance. Now you intend to go help him??”

Garak sighed. “War does indeed make strange bedfellows, does it not?” He proceeded on down the corridor, leaving Tain to ruefully stare after him.

 

In many universes, the Klingon Empire succeeded in occupying Cardassia Prime for an extended period, exiling Dukat and his entourage aboard DS9.

One evening, in Quark’s, Tain grimly admitted to Garak, Dukat, and his right-hand man Damar, “We are now effectively a government in exile.”

 

Major Kira Nerys, for her part, complained to Sisko that there were entirely too many Cardassians, prominent and otherwise, aboard DS9 for her taste, and remarked, “Reminds me of the time that Dukat tried to blackmail me into allowing a garrison or two to permanently reoccupy the station, in exchange for saving us from destruction by the counter-insurgency program. I told him then that I’d blow up DS9 myself before I’d allow that. But now it almost seems that he’s gradually sneaked nearly that many in anyway!”

“Now, Major, they have no authority here,” Sisko assured her.

“Not yet, they don’t,” she countered.

 

Her mood worsened only a week later, when a Cardassian warship arrogantly demanded to dock, needing repairs, and having nowhere else to go, before returning to the war to retake Cardassia from the Klingons.

A grinning cadaver of a man, Gul Lemec, strutted haughtily through the Promenade, loudly referring to the station as Terok Nor, offending and unnerving Bajorans wherever he encountered them.

“Commander, this is insufferable!” Kira insisted. “Are the Klingons going to provoke a mass-migration of Cardassians back to Bajor?? We’ll have the Occupation all over again, by sheer numbers, and without even fighting back!”

“What do you expect me to do, Major? I already told Tain that he could stay. As for Dukat and Damar, I rescued and brought them here myself!”

“Well, maybe Lemec and his ship are just one problem too many.”

 

Her point was strengthened one night when a Federation-Cardassian brawl broke out in Quark’s. It began with a shouting match between Lemec and O’Brien regarding the efficiency, or supposed lack thereof, of repairs to the gul’s ship. But it rapidly escalated into an all-out free-for-all, including Garak, Dukat, Damar, and of course Lemec, against O’Brien, Bashir, Worf, and Jadzia Dax. Even Enabran Tain, despite his relatively advanced years, managed to get involved, when he bashed Rom over the head, merely for yelling at everyone to stop fighting.

 

Dr. Garani had his hands full afterward, especially since Dr. Bashir himself was one of the patients, and particularly since the verbal sniping went on inside of the infirmary.

“You Cardassians fight without honor!” fumed an embarrassed, defeated Worf.

Garak responded coolly, “We do not hamper ourselves with a set of arbitrary rules designed to guarantee our own defeat, if that’s what you mean.”

“Arbitrary?!” Worf took loud umbrage, even as Garani was insisting that the Klingon lie back down on the biobed, with such a severe concussion. “And you fight entirely too well for a tailor!”

Tain observed with pure cold arrogance, “Surely even a thick-headed Klingon brute like you has figured out that Garak is far more than a mere tailor; that was simply his cover as my most favored protégé.”

Comically, no one in the room looked, or could have looked, more startled by that pronouncement than Garak himself.

Dukat took over the argument against Worf. “And yes, arbitrary. Tell me, Jadzia, do the Trill statutes of honor match those of the Klingons? And Bashir, O’Brien, what about the principles of honor according to Earth? Are they identical to the Klingon precepts?”

All of the addressed had to concede Dukat’s point, if reluctantly.

“There, you see? Arbitrary,” he concluded, satisfied.

“And hindering, to the point of spelling your doom,” concurred Damar.

“You struck me over the head from behind!” Worf roared back at the smug Damar. “Even as I was fighting Dukat!”

“Well, I had nothing better to do, having already easily disposed of O’Brien.”

The latter groaned in response from another bed. “I’m an engineer, not a fighter. And will you guys keep it down? I have my own concussion to deal with. Not to mention my broken arm, which still hurts like hell.”

A nearby nurse assured him, “Sir, we’ve already mended the actual break, but it will still take time for the….”

“Yeah yeah, I know the drill; spare me!”

“Take it easy on her, Miles,” Bashir urged from his own diagnostic bed. But then he addressed the nurse, “Though, you could step up his pain medication a bit.”

“Yes sir,” she told the doctor/patient, as she complied.

“You feeble humans, and your exceedingly low tolerance for pain,” commented Tain disdainfully. “How I would like to get each of you into Garak’s interrogation chamber.”

Bashir looked rueful, and O’Brien rolled his eyes.

Garak managed a peculiar cross between flattered and reluctant. Torturing friends was far from his favorite activity, and had become such a recent sore spot, due to his enforced cruelty upon Odo.

Lemec regarded Jadzia Dax almost fiendishly. “Though easily vanquished, you fought better than I expected, for a female.”

“I practice in the holosuite. Klingon-style,” she told him smoothly.

“Ah, that explains your defeat,” countered Lemec.

Worf growled low in his throat.

Dax stared at her erstwhile opponent pointedly. “I didn’t have my bat’leth.”

“If you had, it would only have hastened my conquest of you. We Cardassians have long practiced the many ways around that particular cumbersome instrument.”

Worf had to be held down by Garani.

Garak was meanwhile observing the evidently-nervous nurse who treated the small cut over his eye. “I never see you inside my shop, my dear.”

Tain guessed, “As a Bajoran, she’s undoubtedly afraid of you.”

“Many of your people frequent my shop,” the “tailor” urged her.

Her uneasily-darting gaze seemed to confirm Tain’s supposition. Her quick glance at the latter revealed that she was certainly relieved that he had no injury for her to treat.

“How’s Rom doing?” asked Bashir of Garani, as the latter was repairing the former’s broken ribs.

“Still unconscious, but stable. He should make a full recovery.”

“Full, but noisy.” O’Brien suggested, “The rest of us had better get fixed up and out of here before he wakes up screaming, in typical Ferengi style.”

The Cardassians seemed to be competing to see who could appear more disgusted at that.

“Gul Dukat,” said Garani, after moving on to him, “all that you have wrong with you is a sprained finger.”

“Undoubtedly due to its impact with a thick Klingon skull,” remarked the patient.

Worf growled anew.

A clearly aggravated Commander Sisko appeared just then in the infirmary entrance, with hands on hips, and bellowed, “All right, people, what is this???”

No one seemed eager to respond at first, so he went on, “Do I have to institute ‘Cardassian Night’ every other night at Quark’s, with a separate ‘Federation Night’ in between?? Can’t we get along any better than that???”

Unbearably smugly, Lemec conjectured, “I doubt if there’ll be any more trouble. Now that we’ve soundly defeated your people, I don’t suppose that they’ll be eager to take us on again.”

“As you were, Mr. Worf!” roared Sisko, as the Klingon provided his predictable response to that challenge. Then the commander redirected his attention. “Mr. Tain!”

“Just Tain.”

Sisko ignored the correction. “You don’t even appear to be injured at all, sitting in that chair, instead of lying on a biobed. Why are you in here??”

“To needle us!” bellowed O’Brien bitterly, who then more quietly tacked on a belated, “Sir.”

“Out!” Sisko ordered Tain, who left, unruffled, even slightly amused.

Sisko fought visibly for calm. “Since I do not wish to place nearly my entire senior staff in the brig, I can’t legally put you Cardassians there, either.” He struggled to ignore the smug grin that passed between Dukat and Damar at that. “However…. Mr. O’Brien!”

“Sir?”

“Please employ all possible speed on Lemec’s ship so that we can get him out of here!”

O’Brien’s jaw went slack, and Lemec responded with a rictus grin. Sisko, of course, had had no way of knowing that that had been the very issue that had sparked the fight in the first place.

The Irish engineer’s, “Yes, sir,” was barely audible.