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Weyoun isn’t the name of a person, it's the title of an object.
He isn't Weyoun, he is a weyoun, the most current manifestation of a line of recycled DNA that has been slightly modified for different occupations over the course of the Dominion's eternal reign. His face is a mathematical work of art, uncanny and symmetrical, constructed in perfect proportion to best emulate sympathy, emotion, a passable shadow of personhood. His eye color is being reworked through a current test schedule and will be updated in his next clone to better incur responsiveness from conversation partners. “Make them too dark,” he explains, “it looks like I’m hiding something from you. Too light, and the relative size of iris to pupil incurs suspicion.”
“It doesn’t matter what color they make your eyes,” Damar snaps, “you still look like a fucking liar.”
A living science experiment, a pastiche patchwork of synthesized DNA and carefully controlled genetic mutations. He is alive only in the technical sense. What are the Founders if not Gods, and what are Gods if not Creators — Weyoun says the basis of his speciation was taken from a long extinct, ancient alien, simple simians living in trees on a precambrian planet untouched by the fiery sword of war and religion. The Founders liberated them from the shackles of organic evolution, and made them who they are now — administrators, scientists, diplomats, archangels to the gates of heaven, willing slaves for their cruel masters.
“What are your earliest memories?”
Corat remembers being a boy and playing in the river reeds, his uncles hauling nets full of fish. His father and mother worked every day, the epitome of Cardassian diligence and pride even though they were poor. He read his older sisters’ textbooks. He took turns with his younger brothers beating the shit out of each other.
Weyoun looks thoughtful. He remembers the siphoning tube being pushed down his trachea to suction out the artificial amniotic gel he was grown in.
It’s the same for every not-birth. The stasis chamber hiss, the strangled gasp of air in shriveled, new lungs, the thin slide of the needle through his neck to settle the self-termination implant at the base of his skull.
Clones file their teeth. The Founders’ expert geneticists could have easily seen to it they weren't grown with sharp incisors in the first place — but the act reminds them of their devotion, the way they have been uplifted to sacrosanct sapience. A stagnant stigmata of their piety. It is penance for the privilege of being able to live and die for their Gods.
No family. No art. No culture. Can’t see. Can’t smell. Can’t taste. Apparently, when he fucks him, he can't even feel it. “Inconsequential,” the Vorta remarks, as impassive and bored as Damar is flustered, overwhelmed and embarrassed. “This had better improve your work performance. You keep oversleeping and missing meetings. I am sick of rescheduling things for you.”
That night, when Damar is laying in bed staring at the ceiling with a grim look of resignation on his face, Weyoun primly redresses himself and bids him a curt, professional farewell. Damar uses his engineering expertise to plan a — hypothetical — untraceable transporter malfunction.
—
“You murdered me!”
Damar is stunned.
And the new Weyoun laughs, “don’t worry, I don't hold it against you. It’s no different than rebooting a computer, isn’t it?” He grins with freshly filed teeth.
This Weyoun is different. They look the same, sound the same, dress and talk and walk the same. He can't put his finger on it. There's sunny warmth melting the icy impassiveness, fond smiles rather than sneers. Damar staggers into the debriefing room, stinking of alcohol and self loathing, and he sees the council has already been disbanded, Weyoun busy at work on his portable data pad. “Did I miss it?” Damar mumbles, slumping in a chair and dropping his head onto the table with a thud.
A hand on his neck. It brushes through his uncombed hair, fingernails gentle against his scalp. “When you didn't show up, I feigned getting an urgent message from you that you had business to attend to with an emergency delegation. I thanked the generals for their time and promised I would have you contact them when you were available. Then I dismissed them. Please see to it you debrief them later today, whenever you feel better.” The touch follows, over his jaw, brushing his hair out of his face with a tenderness he did not know was possible from the fingertips of a literal abomination against nature.
“Why?” ( ‘d you do that is the rest of the sentence, but he is having a hard time saying words.)
“Would you rather I embarrass you, next time?” Weyoun asks critically, threading fingers into his hair and giving his head a playful little shake. And Damar groans into his folded arms, a headache pulsing at the inside of his skull.
“It’s fine. I’m aware that — yesterday might have been — ” Weyoun hesitates. “Difficult.”
Droves of men died in rotting piles. Damar sent them to their graves. He signed letters for the mourning widows and widowers of all the dead guls until his own name looked like nonsensical scribbles.
“Don’t worry about coming to any meetings for the next few days. If you need anything, please let me know. Take a bit of time to yourself, and I’ll handle things.” A pause. “But let’s not let there be a next time, Corat,” Weyoun suggests, the soft, soothing sibilance of his voice wringing the tension from the Legate. But Damar says nothing. He won’t make promises he can't keep.
The Sixth, like the Fifth, declines corrective lenses or surgery to fix his eyesight— had his benevolent, illustrious Gods intended him to see, he says, they wouldn't have blinded him in the first place — but he feels Corat’s face with his hands, dexterous, questing fingers mapping out the placement of his nose in relation to the philtrum to the curve of his chin cresting up to his sharp, strong jaw. A white thumb pushed too hard against his gray lip nicks itself on his needle-sharp incisor.
“You can’t even see me? You just had no idea what I’ve looked like this entire time?”
“I can see you if I get close, Corat.”
“How close?”
Closer. Closer still. Sitting perched atop his lap, Weyoun thumps his forehead against his chufa, and he feels the Vorta’s breath exhaled through his nose as it ghosts over his own. The little reminder that Weyoun is a living creature startles Corat so much he almost tips the chair over.
—
He should have known something went wrong. To the Founders, the Sixth wasn’t better — he was worse. Aberrant, degenerate, defective . That Weyoun simply wasn’t Weyoun , a functional Weyoun, at least. Whoever he was, he was still a slithering liar and a deceptive little wretch and a master manipulator, conniving little shitty, self-centered vole — but he had a conscience. Impermissible. And even worse, he was no coward.
Weyoun Five called him Da-mar (impersonal, professional, curt).
Weyoun Six called him Co-rat (endearing, attentive, affectionate).
Weyoun Seven only refers to him as Legate.
He wonders how much he remembers. The Sixth was smart enough to fake his required memory transfers and the Seventh rose from the incubation tank with four weeks’ worth of lost history in his freshly formed brain tissue.
He lacked your appetite for cruelty .
The words come out in a slur as he sneers and staggers back, sitting heavily in the chair. He watched him die on that viewscreen. He killed him again. It was necessary; it was not personal. Damar always knew he came second place to Weyoun’s religious delusions. Weyoun should have known he was second place to Cardassia.
The Seventh gave his predecessor the small mercy of dying with some privacy. But Damar saw enough before they cut the feed. The artery in the Sixth’s neck swelled and he grit his jaw so hard he probably split a fissure in his skull. He spasmed and writhed in acute agony as he choked on his own foaming saliva, bleeding to death from the inside.
Weyoun Seven doesn’t deserve to die in a transporter accident. He’ll make it messy, this time, a statement to the Founder about how little he thinks of her pet diplomat. Damar wishes he could kill him with his bare hands and choke him to death with his own viscera. He’d make him as hideous and mutilated on the outside as he is on the inside.
“You don’t like me, do you?”
Vastest understatement in the universe.
“You should kill me,” Weyoun suggests, that manic fervor alight in his artificially violet eyes and serrated smile, “again, and again, and again. Keep doing it until I turn out the way you want! Do you like gambling, Legate? It’d be like spinning a dabo wheel. Maybe you’ll find a Weyoun you like even more than the sixth one.”
His hands are at his throat. He could break his little neck. He entertains the thought. He could grab him and bash that symmetrical, perfect face into a fleshy pulp against the sharp edge of the console until his cartilage splintered like shrapnel and his skull cracked in two like a taspar egg. That’s why he isn’t an engineer, isn’t it? Men are too emotional for the sciences, so Damar should take full advantage of his position as a man of the military and murder his adjutant as many times as he’d like.
The thought is tantalizing, but he finds that he can’t hurt him. They all look the same — that’s the point, because they are all the same — and at first, he thought the Sixth looked too much like the Fifth, but now, the Seventh looks too much like the Sixth. “Get out.” He grabs the bottle. He doesn’t bother with the glass. “Go debrief the Changeling. You talk to me again, you even try to look at me,” he threatens, “I’ll rip that suicide chip straight out of your skull and kill you myself.”
Weyoun, the Seventh, grins with freshly filed teeth.