So, Bashir And Garak From Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Won't You?

Doctor Bashir and Garak from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

So, Bashir and Garak from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, won't you?

Bashir is the man who has one big secret and it's his entire life, and he has always assumed it will destroy him if it gets out.

Garak is a man made of fractal secrets. The cast-out student (and secret son) of the head of an empire-wide spy agency. He's stolen secrets from every power in the alpha quadrant. His own personal history is nothing but lies, possibly even to himself. He lies so completely it took Bashir visiting GARAK'S DAD to figure out that "Elim" is his first name.

If truth was a river, Bashir's is wide and free-flowing, with a real big meander where it goes kilometers out of its way to avoid a huge rock that we don't ever talk about.

Garak has dammed his river with endless pebbles of lies. There's no truth there, only more lies. This is a man who lies reflexively, who once claimed (in one of the few true things he ever said) that lying is a skill you must practice constantly.

Garak is such a liar I don't think he really understands how to tell the truth. When he was dying from his addictions, instead of admitting the problem he made of stories to try and scare his doctor off, to let him die. When an assassin showed up to kill him, he got the local police involved by attempting to (almost) assassinate himself first. Garak carries a big hammer labeled "lying" and every problem is a juicy nail.

These are not two different people, this is the same person at different scales. Bashir is one big lie in a Star Fleet uniform, Garak is a multitude of tiny lies in a lizard suit and a very fashionable outfit of his own design.

In Ancient Greek Mythology*, humans were single souls split into two bodies, male and female, forever searching for their other half so they can be whole again.

They may have been wrong about the gender and species, but Bashir and Garak are definitely two parts of the same original material. They were chiseled from the same piece of marble, cut from the same cloth, split from the same soul. They deserve to be together, not because they'd be good for each other (dear God, no. They are terrible for each other in many ways!) but because they're incomplete without each other.