well...fuck...
Julian had been doing his best to put up a facade of everything being fine. He figured that maybe if he pretended for long enough, he might even convince himself it was true. Sure, he didn't sleep much, and when he did it wasn't restful. Sure he'd been throwing himself into helping set up the clinic so that he didn't have to think about anything else. But it was fine because he was fine and as long as nobody thought different, eventually he would be able to trick himself into actually being fine.
It had always worked before.
After the Harvesters and the Mirror Universe. After the Dominion Situation and the Lethean attack. After Bareil's death and the Teplan blight. After Ajilon Prime and Camp 371 and the reveal of his status as an Augment and the Dominion attack. After the other Augments and Section 31 and so many little comments and actions reminding him that he wasn't really human in the eyes of the others. Even years ago, when he'd learned the truth of what his parents had done to him and with every hurtful thing they said and did. He'd shored himself up and pulled himself together and convinced everyone he was fine until he'd managed to convince himself too. He could do it again now.
He could learn to live with the fact that he'd let Jadzia die.
Because that was the reality of it. He'd saved the symbiont because it was the right thing to do. Because it was what Jadzia wanted and what any Trill in that situation would have wanted. Because it was a fact of Trill society that the symbiont always came first. Because his own feelings didn't matter. Worf's feelings and Sisko's feelings and everyone's feelings had to come second to what was right. But it didn't stop him from hating himself. He'd loved Jadzia. Sure it was a hopeless kind of love - the sort that lived in the knowledge that she would never feel the same way, and that was okay because the reality of her friendship was more important to him than the fantasy of a relationship could ever be - but he still loved her. And she was gone because he couldn't save her. Even with his augmentations, even with the fact that he'd been made into something both more and less than human, he couldn't save her. And now he had to live with that fact.
And he'd been managing, before Garak came. He'd been happy to see him - that hadn't been faked. Not entirely. It had felt good to have someone he knew, when he'd spent long enough without any familiar faces around. But Garak was complicated. He'd been Julian's first friend on the Station and the two of them knew more about one another than perhaps anyone else did. Julian had thought that meant something. He wasn't blind to the tailor's flirtations. He'd even responded. But things had never moved forward and then Garak had been distracted by Ziyal. He tried not to think ill of her - she had been a kind person and now she was dead - but he could acknowledge he'd been jealous. Then Garak had been locked in a holding cell for six months for trying to wipe out the founders.
Perhaps that should have been the end of it, but Julian could hardly blame him for being true to his nature. Garak had always been loyal to Cardassia first and foremost, and had never pretended otherwise. The Founders had threatened to exterminate his people, so why shouldn't he try to wipe out a threat to Cardassia? Julian wasn't even particularly bothered that if Garak had succeeded, he would have died as well. He had no illusions that he meant more to his friend than Cardassia. It would have been unspeakably arrogant to think otherwise. Besides, he liked to think his death, as willing as Garak was to cause it, would have at least given his friend pause.