Chapter Text
Martok watched the human work, hands steady despite the tremor exhaustion forced upon him. Five days now since the Jem'Hadar had dragged Bashir from solitary yet again, yet general population was perhaps a worse cruelty for the little healer. If he was not in their cell, he was moving from body to body of the unfortunate prisoners selected for combat, trying desperately to heal broken limbs and snapped tendons and once—unfortunately, dishonorably, a shoulder wrenched out of place—with nothing but his hands and whatever scraps could be spared.
No, solitary would be better. Then the little healer could turn his attentions inward, and be spared Ikat'ika’s eye and wrath another day.
"You should rest," Martok said, crouching beside him. His hand found Bashir’s flank; the touch was habit after all these months, bridging them together in the darkness, when cold and loneliness drove them together. The Breen in their cell, inscrutable as it was, seemed to hate it. The old Cardassian who grew frailer by the day despised it more. A loss to them both. The Romulan Bashir was treating glanced up at Martok, frustrated. Perhaps it was the familiarity, or the interruption, Martok couldn't say. Romulans were prudish that way.
"After this one," Bashir murmured, though he did not pull away. He still sounded too Federation-soft for this place, but Martok better than to let it fool him.
He had learned enough about the human in six months that contradicted his soft appearance.
"Just cracked, not broken," Bashir concluded to his patient. “Try not to exert yourself. Deep breaths will hurt for a week or two."
The Romulan’s bitter scowl revealed exactly what he thought of that.
Bah, a broken creature. A different species from the magnificent thing that shared his cot. So many others in this camp curled up and waited for death; others sought out the ring to meet a hastened, more glorious end.
Bashir walked his own path. He healed.
He set a Cardassian's broken arm not a week prior. The pa’taQ spat at him, called him Federaji filth, and Bashir simply waited for him to finish before explaining what he needed to do and why it would hurt. The Cardassian had wept through the whole ordeal, yet Bashir stayed with him through the end when the ridge was reset.
The hands that intertwined with Martok’s great mountains were the same that cupped his hollow socket, soothing the inflamed skin those days after the worst fight. The closest fight.
"Brave little healer," Martok called him that first night together, when Bashir collapsed, hands crusted with the blood of four different species. All the colors ran, then dried, a deep ugly brown. Bashir tried to protest—prideful to the end, sweet thing—as Martok hoisted him up. Yet words scraped raw when Martok carried him past Bashir’s cot, and stopped altogether when he deposited him on his own.
He turned into Martok's warmth without hesitation after that; that night, and the next, and each wherein they came together.
"Not brave. Just busy."
But it was. Martok knew bravery when he saw it; it was in Bashir's eyes when the guards beat a Cardassian for swiping another prisoner’s rations and Bashir stepped between them, hands raised. He took blows before Martok pulled him back. The Jem’Hadar didn’t understand honor; they only understood orders and their biological call for ketracel-white.
He tasted his bravery, too, in the desperate times they tasted each other’s mouths as they pretended to be somewhere else. Martok's hand spanned half the human's ribcage. Kahless, his heart fluttered so fast. Bashir's clever fingers tracing the ridges of Martok's brow with a healer's precision and a lover's tenderness.
"You are treasure," Martok had told him once.
Bashir just smiled up at him, an increasingly rare gleam glittering in the dim. "Subtlety’s lost on Klingons, isn’t it?"
Watching Bashir finish with the Romulan, pride and dread flittered in all the chambers of his heart. Bashir had no fear. Or perhaps he buried it so deep it didn't matter. He was clearly born in the wrong skin, to the wrong people.
The Black Fleet always collected its crew, but Bashir was determined to make his commander of the afterlife wait, and Martok found himself just as determined to keep him breathing one more night, one more dawn, doing the work he was made to do.
The alarm came at mid-cycle: entertainment for the Jem’Hadar and horror for everyone else.
Martok was on his feet immediately, moving to cover Bashir. His human froze like a targ who caught a scent. Their eyes met across the space.
"They won't choose you," Martok said, though he knew it was a lie. "You're too valuable."
"That's exactly why they'll choose me." Bashir's scoffed. "I've been keeping people alive. They'll want to see if I can do the same for myself."
The Jem'Hadar came in a line, led by Ikat'ika. Selection for the ring. He scanned the crowd for potential selections: a Cardassian soldier, a Klingon who’d only been there two days, then falling upon—
--Bashir.
"No," Martok demanded, stepping in front of Bashir. "Take me instead."
The First didn't so much as look at him, just grunted for another Jem'Hadar to grab Bashir by the arm, haul him forward. Martok reared up, ready to cut and yell and hit, but Bashir just looked back at Martok with apology in his eyes.
"Don't," Bashir insisted. "Don't make them take you, too."
They started to drag him away.
Martok roared, and control slipped its tether. It was the blood-rage all knew from the sagas, the very fire Kahless himself burned with, the echoes of his house’s kin howling beneath. He lunged, tried to follow, got a disruptor butt to his diaphragm for his trouble.
The insult of it was almost worse than the pain, and he dropped him hard onto hands and knees, lungs seizing. By the time he could breathe again, Bashir was in the arena and Varak and Janok were blocking him from advancing.
Bashir looked impossibly small in the center of it all.
Across from Bashir, Ikat'ika. The worst of the possibilities.
"This is not an honorable fight!" Martok roared. "Give him a weapon!"
Deyos, sadistic little shit that he was, just smiled. By the great barge, his eyes held no soul. "The doctor has his hands. Let's see if they're as useful for fighting as they are other things.
Ikat'ika charged.
Bashir moved.
He was faster than Martok expected, ducking under the first swing, barely skirting the second. He tried to throw his own punches, landed a lucky glance to Ikat'ika’s solar plexus, and the Jem'Hadar stumbled.
The crowd roared, none so loud as Martok himself. See! He fights with determination, though he was born to no house of warriors! Bashir pressed his advantage, landing a blow to his gut, his face, his—
Ikat'ika’s hand flew up. White-fed reflex sprang back to action, and before Bashir could even become confused he has seized his arm on the next strike and answered with a blow of his own—a fist to the ribs—punctuated with a crack—an elbow that bent him in half—a blow to the jaw that had him staggering—
And Bashir was swaying on his feet, trying to blink through it, without even the breath to release his surprise, his pian.
Then Ikat'ika caught him.
His hand closed around Bashir's throat, and then he was lifting him off. Those clever hands scrabbled at the grip—uselessly, weaker, weaker—
"Put him down!" Martok raged, hands still holding him back. "Fight with honor!"
Ikat'ika didn’t listen; honor was a word wasted on a thing bred in a tube. He slammed Bashir into the ground once, twice, with the crack of bone, spray of blood, spreading beneath his body—
He let Bashir go, stepped back, the pa’taQ, observed the fruits of his destruction as Bashir tried to stand.
He made it to his hands and knees. His arms shook worse than they ever had with exhaustion, elbows buckling and catching again and again, a grint pup finding its legs for the first time. When he finally managed to lift his swaying head his eyes searched hazily past Ikat'ika, past Deyos, far off beyond the walls and atmospheric bubble, and a trickle of spit and blood swung from his chin as he swayed as if already boarded the Barge of the Dead.
Stay down, Martok willed. Stay down, little healer. There is no dishonor to yield if your greatest fight is yet ahead of you.
Bashir stood.
Ikat'ika struck him once more.
Cruel, contemptuous in its carelessness. The entertainment had come to an end. A wet crunch, and Bashir's bent inward before falling once more.
As always, the Jem’Hadar did not dispose of the bodies after. They departed but left his near-corpse lay, a warning to the rest of the prisoners. Varak and Janok released him; there was no need to hold him back further, and he gathered the broken body into his arms.
"Martok." Julian’s words emerged half-drowed from his mouth. "I don’t think… I’m not coming back from this."
"You fought gloriously," Martok assured him. He may have known little of humans—whether they found this the greatest words one could leave the galaxy with—but it was all he could say that could hope to capture all he wished the little healer to know. He cradled Bashir against his chest the way he had in the darkness. "You fought with honor. You—"
"Liar." A bloody smile, anyway. "I lost."
"But you were never broken." Martok smoothed back the human's blood-dampened hair. "You gave me—"
Everything.
"Sorry." Barely breath now. "Sorry I… I couldn't stay… until our… rescue."
"Brave little healer," Martok whispered, pressing his ridges to Bashir's in. Let the camp bear them witness. Let it be known that a warrior lay here, whatever else the Federation called him. "You will be remembered. This I swear on my name, my house, on Kahless's own blade.”
He finished with a growl. Bashir's hand found his, squeezed weakly.
"Good," Bashir breathed. "Get out. Be free. Be...."
Martok placed a hand over his chest.
"I will see you in Sto-vo-kor.”
Bashir's eyes closed. His chest crackled once more, up and down, then stopped.
Martok tilted his head back to the sky and keened, raw and wordless, the grief and rage that predated Klingon language that every warrior knew in their soul. All will hear, and it shall pass into their stone hearts. Let every Jem’Hadar know they a have made an enemy of a great warrior, and that the enemies of the House of Martok do not sleep easy, however drugged their blood. Let them post double guards at his bunks from then on; may they look twice before turning their backs. He wanted them to fear the way he wanted air.
The cry sounded into the death howl. He did not know if the gates of Sto-Vo-Kor opened for humans, or if some quieter Federation afterlife waited instead, but with his call he would beseech Kahless to overlook the technicalities of birth and welcome him. When all was done, Martok held Bashir as his body grew cold. Colder than those coldest of nights, a body he could never warm again.
When the Jem’Hadar eventually came to came to take the corpse away, it took three to pry it from his arms.