#'Who We Are': 60k word dax fic where j@dzia loses the symbiont & has to learn to live without it as kira & jul1an angst in the background

[nebulouscoffee]

The thing about Jadzia Dax and Elim Garak is I know they are such, such different characters, but I also just know I am drawn to them for the exact same reasons. Like- idk, they both just have this very specific ✨quality✨ to them that makes me go "BESTIE!! What is UP with you!!!" and break out the sixty thousand word character study multichapters dissecting their brains under a microscope

I mean, flirty gay aliens!! Flirty gay aliens who drop the craziest lore about their lives all the time but when you actually sit down and think about them, you realise you barely know anything about them at all- flirty gay aliens who wear masks of camp and Performance held together by 6342 quips because they don't quite know who they are without it and honestly most days they feel more like collections of interesting Characters than people, and they cover this up with Spectacle and Duty because they are scared to interrogate this, scared to be visible, scared to be boring, and furthermore they feel like they can never truly be known, never truly go back home, because they're so proud of and defined by what species they are but in reality have such fraught relationships to their home worlds- flirty gay aliens whose complicated relationships with the idea of "family" made them construct their whole lives and their concepts of "worth" around One Specific Goal and are scared to ask who they are without it because they fear that the answer is no one, so instead they just smile and drop some more crazy lore and 352 jokes per minute