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He’s seen Damar undressed, once. Not entirely—just without a shirt, on a day the man had been late, again, after a night of too much sulking and kanar, and Weyoun had gone to wake him to tell him to get the hell up. But he’d frozen in the doorway, momentarily speechless as Damar blinked up at him with bleary eyes and mussed hair. “What time is it?” Damar had spit out, voice gravelly from sleep, but Weyoun was caught, staring at the ridges on Damar’s chest, the way his neck sloped into his shoulder, the hollowed spoon in the dip of his collar.
He had no sense of aesthetics, so he could not call it beautiful, nor attractive. Unique, perhaps. He must be good-looking by Cardassian standards, or not. Weyoun had no way of knowing.
He straightened, offered Damar a sneer. “Another date with the bottle last night?” he mused. “I wonder when we’ll hear news of an engagement.”
Damar groaned, and Weyoun allowed himself a private little smile as he swept away. His Cardassian puppet was nothing if not easy to rile.
He did not think about the way the light hit the scales of Damar’s chest, not even later that day when Damar finally appeared, fully dressed and irritable as ever, or that night, when Weyoun was finally alone and looking out the windows of his quarters at stars he couldn’t see. It was nothing, he told himself. Not worth thinking about at all.
Later, Damar is the reluctant hero of Cardassia, and the ninth Weyoun clone has nowhere to go. The Federation declares him innocent of the events of the Dominion war—a clone is not responsible for the actions of their past selves, and the Vorta, according to the Federation, are as much victims of the Founders as the many planets they conquered. There’s a sour taste in Weyoun’s mouth at this generous proclamation, but he says nothing, only smiles and bows his head at the appropriate times.
They offer to send him to a rehabilitation colony. “You’ll be able to start a new life there,” says the Federation counsellor assigned to him with a flat and kind smile.
Weyoun does not want to start a new life. He can hardly accept that he has a life at all, that anyone bothered to restore the cloning facility on Rondac III. When he’d woken again, in the same cold chamber that had become too familiar, he’d felt like rubber, like an artificial version of himself. His skin felt wrong, his eyes too dry, his fingertips too smooth. His throat hurt, all the time, and the medication they gave him for headaches proved ineffective. They’d kept him in confinement for weeks, while he scrubbed at his skin in the sonic shower and held a pillow over his head to block out the too-bright lights and clawed away at the life he wasn’t meant to have. His eighth clone was supposed to be his last. He should have died with the Dominion.
“Is there anyone you’d like to contact?” asks Counsellor V’Rana when he refuses rehabilitation. “A friend you could stay with?”
He almost laughs at that. A friend. The Dominion does not have friends; they have enemies, and enemies they can use. Anything else would be an opening of vulnerability.
But he is not the Dominion, not anything, anymore, but the smiling face of a fallen empire that was supposed to be invanquishable. And the only person he knows tried to have him killed. Twice.
Tactfully, he sends an official message to the new Cardassian government, conveying the utmost contrition on behalf of the Founders and the Dominion, and offering whatever assistance a single Vorta diplomat could provide. To his surprise, Damar responds himself, polite and impersonal, to invite him to Cardassia.
This must be a delayed punishment, he thinks from his tiny quarters in the transport ship. Perhaps Damar invited him to deliver the death he deserves.
But Damar isn’t waiting for him in the shuttle bay with a phaser, or a knife, which is what Weyoun would use, for the most satisfaction. Weyoun is lead by a Cardassian guard into quarters in the embassy that look out over a lake in the middle of the capital city, and told that he will be brought dinner in an hour. He wants to ask about Damar, feeling altogether relieved and ignored, but lately he hasn’t felt like being a nuisance, poking his head in where he shouldn’t. He wants to disappear entirely, so he just nods and lets the door slide shut, leaving him alone.
In the hour before dinner, he stands in the sonic shower and tries not to look at his own pale skin, the dark hair that creeps across his limbs and down over his torso. He puts on his Federation issue pajamas and lies face up on the bed perfectly still, which is the best way he has found to not want to crawl out of his own body, or shed a translucent skin. The Founders did not give him an imagination, but if they had, he would imagine peeling away thin, papery layers of himself with sharp claws, down until there’s nothing left of him but bones and a weakly beating purple heart. Let him lose his mind, so he doesn’t have to be here.
When the door chimes, Weyoun only stands out of a belated sense of duty. He is, after all, here in an official capacity, which means not letting the dinner service catch you disassociating on the bed. And it’s good that he does, because when he calls for them to enter Damar steps in, looking tired but healthy, like he’s finally taken a breath of fresh air.
It’s the first time Weyoun’s seen him out of uniform—barring the instance not worth naming—and it suits him. A dark blue surcoat, like the shadows of his face, with a subtle geometric design that echoes the scales of his neck. He looks more relaxed than Weyoun has ever seen him, sure of himself in a way he never was working beneath Dukat, or even Weyoun himself. A guard behind him pushes in a cart of covered dishes, while Damar steps further into the room.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t greet you when you arrived,” he says. “Unfortunately leading a liberation force doesn’t give you much free time.”
Weyoun just stares at him.
Damar blinks back, looking a little unsure suddenly, but then he smiles with half his mouth. “I feel overdressed,” he says.
Weyoun suddenly glances down at his pajamas, feeling once again like his skin wants to kill him from the outside. “I was unaware I would be dining with company,” he says while the guard leaves. “If you will excuse me for a moment, I will…compose myself.”
“It’s fine,” says Damar before Weyoun can escape. “You’ve certainly seen me in a worse state.”
Weyoun shuts down the image in his brain before it can make itself vivid. “So I have,” he says, finally able to put on a thin smile. He gestures to the table. “Please, sit.”
Damar explains several different dishes while he serves them. Weyoun, of course, tastes very little of anything, but his favorite is some kind of curry with tiny dark reddish seeds that make his tongue feel numb with every one he crushes in his mouth. As they eat, he notices that Damar pushes the seeds aside with a spoon instead of eating them. Why bother putting them in at all, then, he wonders.
“I’m sure you’re wondering why I invited you here,” says Damar once Weyoun has run out of polite questions regarding the rebuilding of Cardassia.
Weyoun inclines his head. “I was sure you would get to that.”
Damar leans forward, taking a sip of the pale green tea he’s served them both. No kanar. “The truth is,” he says as he sets the cup down, “I know nothing about running the Cardassian Union. The Central Command is in shambles, the Detapa Council will never be reinstated. Everyone expects me to take up the helm, but bombing Dominion outposts and running a government are hardly alike.” He sighs, and looks at Weyoun. “I need your help.”
Weyoun stares, again. He’s actually glad he’s wearing pajamas, because it properly conveys the ridiculousness of this situation. “You need my help?”
Damar nods. “If we’re being honest, the last person in charge of Cardassia was you.” He leans back in his seat, looking amused at this observation, while Weyoun thinks he feels a headache coming on, insanity-induced this time. “We both know I’m hardly proficient when it comes to treaties and negotiations. I need someone who knows what they’re doing. Someone who won’t fall for anything, who knows how to get what they want.”
“And I suppose engineering my death twice would make me considerate of your needs,” says Weyoun’s mouth before his brain can stop him.
For some reason, Damar looks pleased at this. “My involvement in both of those incidents is debatable,” he says smoothly. “But I remind you that you contacted us. You offered us assistance; I’m accepting your offer.”
He is, unfortunately, right. Without moving, Weyoun says, “You can hardly expect me to have Cardassia’s best interests at heart.”
“Right now, I don’t think you have anyone’s interests at heart,” says Damar, and Weyoun almost wants to slap him, if it weren’t true. “I’m giving you a job and a place to live, and I won’t have a counsellor breathing down your neck in some rehabilitation procedure.” He raises his eyebrows, while Weyoun wonders irately how he knows about the Federation counsellor. Damar says, “I doubt you’ll get a better offer anywhere else.”
And what choice does Weyoun have, but to accept?
It’s not so bad, once he’s been here a few weeks. In the morning he puts on clothes that feel like sandpaper on his skin and combs his hair without looking in the mirror, and at night he lies awake for hours unable to sleep, and immune to the available sleeping medication. But negotiations are what he was engineered to do, even if the original intent was altogether different, so at least he has something useful to do, and if he’s the recipient of glares in hallways and on the streets, it’s no more than he deserves.
Damar seems to be on his best behavior—or perhaps Weyoun just hasn’t felt up to being an adversary. He asks Weyoun’s advice often, and invites him to dinner in his quarters so neither of them have to eat alone. And he doesn’t ask Weyoun how he’s feeling, or what the hell is wrong with him these days, even though Weyoun can tell he sometimes wonders.
When he’s been here a little over a month, Damar brings him to dinner at a restaurant looking out over the city. This is not unusual—although he knows Weyoun can’t taste, he seems determined to find a cuisine he likes, even if just for the texture. What is unusual is that midway through he reaches into his pocket, and passes a little cloth bag across the table. “I brought you something,” he says, looking at Weyoun expectantly.
“How kind of you, Damar,” says Weyoun. “I had no idea you felt this way.”
Damar looks away. “Don’t be ridiculous.” When Weyoun does nothing, he adds, “Just open it.”
The gift is a marble, cool glass in swirling purple that fits perfectly into his palm. It’s perfectly smooth—not a device. It doesn’t do anything, except be what it is.
“I was at a market with the gul of Tekaran City,” says Damar by way of explanation, then shakes his head, rubbing a hand across his chin. “You—used to collect things,” he begins again.
Weyoun did collect things. Does. It’s a weakness he’s had since his second clone, an imbecile fascination with the relics of other cultures. It captivates him, the design of an object, its perceived value. What one keeps and throws away. Weyoun has kept and lost countless artifacts, some of them valuable, some of them commonplace, or refuse. He cannot carry them with him, when he leaves a place, and so his collection dies with each assignment. His fifth clone had suspected that the Founders reassigned him whenever they thought he had grown too attached. A Vorta must defer to the Founders in all things. Nothing is more important than the Dominion, not even a petty collection of items that give him some semblance of being a person.
The sphere is warm in his hand. Damar is still looking at him. “I want you to be happy, here,” he says.
Ah. He’s worried Weyoun isn’t doing his best work. By Damar’s estimation, the most effective staff is a happy one, and Weyoun has been somewhat lacking in the art of performance, as of late. Weyoun doesn’t know how to tell him that it’s not that he’s not happy in Cardassia. It’s that he doesn’t know if he can be happy anywhere, doesn’t know if he’s ever been happy. Proud of his accomplishments, perhaps. Nothing more.
Eventually he pockets the sphere, a comfortable weight against his side, and gives Damar his most pleasant diplomatic smile. “Thank you, Damar,” he says. “I have found Cardassia to be everything I need it to be.”
Damar doesn’t look satisfied, but he doesn’t say anything more.
There’s a ridiculous moment where he finds himself standing in front of Damar’s door late at night, in pajama pants and a burgundy robe, and hair falling awkwardly over his forehead. The heating unit of his sonic shower is broken and he’s been waiting two hours for someone to take a look at it, skin irritated and scalp crawling with imaginary sensations he can’t scratch away. Even his robe, usually the one piece of clothing he can always tolerate, shifts against his arms in a way that makes him quietly want to scream. He’ll just have to channel this energy into ragging on Damar, instead of curling up on the floor and clawing himself out of his body.
When Damar answers he’s not wearing a shirt, and Weyoun is momentarily rendered useless.
“What,” growls Damar, and sees it’s Weyoun. “Is everything alright?”
Weyoun tears his eyes away from the curve of Damar’s chest, and sneers. “I’ve been waiting two hours for your engineers to fix my shower,” he snarks. “I hope you don’t tolerate this kind of negligence in other areas of your government.”
Damar doesn’t rise to this, because they both know he doesn’t. But he steps aside to let Weyoun in. “I’ll call them again,” he says.
“And wait another two hours?”
Damar rolls his eyes. “Use mine, then. Everything’s clean.”
Weyoun glares at him, but then looks away quickly. Damar was clearly asleep, or trying to be, his hair soft around the ridges of his ears and the covers of his bed tossed back. He sits back on the sofa, however, and taps on a padd like it’s what he was doing anyway, and Weyoun scurries into the bathroom before they can make eye contact again.
Damar’s bathroom looks the same as his. Standard issue towels, standard issue soap. All that’s different is the tin of gel sitting on the counter, presumably to slick back that dark hair into that ridiculous Cardassian military style. Weyoun, standing in the hot sonic shower, wonders if Damar is happy in his new role. Weyoun can only assume this isn’t what he wanted for himself, with the way he resisted even replacing Dukat, when he wasn’t really doing anything. The subtleties and manipulations of government work evade him, and he does not enjoy it. He would be happiest, Weyoun muses, as an engineer in some smaller outpost, fixing ship replicators and engine cores.
Weyoun had caught him several times, when first aboard Dukat’s ship, fiddling with piloting controls or sticking his head into bulkhead wiring when he had nothing better to do. Damar always glared at Weyoun’s glances, as if daring him to call him out, but Weyoun hadn’t cared then. Dukat’s subordinates were none of his business.
Against his will, Damar has become his business.
When he emerges from the shower, skin damp and his clothes finally feeling alright again, Damar has not put on a shirt, but he has replicated two mugs of tea. “Sit,” he says.
Weyoun sits. The room is warm, and the tea is bitter in his mouth. He likes bitter things.
He thinks perhaps Damar has something to discuss with him, but they sit in silence for several moments, letting steam rise from their mugs and mingle in the air.
“I’m sorry for killing you,” says Damar quietly, and Weyoun starts.
This is not an apology he thinks warranted. Also, Damar has never admitted to engineering that transporter accident, even though it hardly matters now. Weyoun sips his tea. “I killed him too,” he says, voice still. “It was necessary.”
Damar kills his fifth, he orchestrates the death of his sixth. There is nothing personal about the death of a clone.
He will not apologize for using Damar as a puppet for the Dominion. For one thing, that wasn’t him. And for another, Damar would otherwise never have become so jaded as to defect and start a rebellion force. The world would have been much different.
They are sitting oddly close together, he notices suddenly. Their legs aren’t touching but he can feel the dip of the sofa where Damar sits, and their knees could knock together if one of them leaned forward. He’s never seen Damar’s bare legs, of course, but he probably has ridges across his knees, the same way his elbow does just a few feet away. He wonders if his skin is rough to the touch, or smooth. Where Weyoun has a dark smattering of hair across his arms and chest, Cardassians are hairless except for their heads. Just an expanse of scales across a subtly muscular torso.
Weyoun gulps down the rest of the tea in one go and forces himself to look at Damar’s eyes. “You seem to be adjusting well to the life of a politician,” he says lightly.
“Tch,” says Damar. “It’s not what I would have chosen.” He looks searchingly at Weyoun, which is somewhat unnerving, although his eyes are entirely earnest. “I know I didn’t exactly give you a choice in working for Cardassia.”
That’s true, Weyoun supposes. But really, it was this or the rehabilitation colony, and what kind of an alternative is that? Weyoun was engineered for a singular purpose: to serve the Founders. Without them he is a husk of his former self, but to give up his job as well would strip him of his one consistency, the one thing that makes his life justifiable. Otherwise they shouldn’t have bothered with the ninth clone at all.
But living here he feels…if not happy, then at least fulfilled. His body still doesn’t feel like his, but his bad nights are less bad, and less frequent. He can wake up in the morning and put on clothes that don’t feel like sandpaper and talk circles around the Cardassian guls, and go to dinner with Damar and eat the spiciest food a restaurant will serve him because the sensation is as close to taste as he can get. And even though he can’t see the twinkle in Damar’s eyes as he watches Weyoun cough at the pepper in his throat, he thinks hearing him laugh, low and full, is close enough.
He folds his hands around the cup and tells Damar, without needing to perform the earnestness, “There is nowhere else I would rather be.”
Damar looks at him, nods slowly. He reaches forward, toward the mug in Weyoun’s hands. “Let me take that for you,” he says, but he doesn’t. Instead his hands cover Weyoun’s, warm and large enough to envelop him completely, and stay there while their gazes linger on each other.
Distantly, Weyoun thinks there might be another reason he wants to stay here, another feeling, but that’s too much to think about right now, not as he catches Damar’s eyes drop to the skin of his neck, the dip of the robe that hides his own bare chest.
Weyoun knows he’s supposed to be good looking. He’s used it to his advantage many times, even though he can’t tell himself. He knows what it looks like to be desired, but he’s never had a taste for it before.
Slowly, carefully, he frees one hand and rests it atop Damar’s before running his palm up his wrist. Damar holds his breath, chest going still, while Weyoun lets his hand travel up his arm, stopping to rub his thumb across the pointed ridge of Damar’s elbow. Weyoun scoots closer, hiking a knee up on the sofa so they both lean into the same dip in the cushion. He discards the empty mug next to Damar’s half full one on the table, and leans in, and all the while Damar just watches him with soft eyes half-closed, letting Weyoun explore his body.
His scales are a little rough, but not uncomfortably so. The skin of his stomach is smoother and paler, and jumps when Weyoun brushes his fingers over it, feeling the sturdiness of him, the gentle softness. From somewhere deep within Weyoun an urge arises to grip him there, dig his fingers into Damar’s waist. He resists it, instead running his hands up along the ridges across his chest that taper out to his shoulders, joining with the ridges of his neck.
Damar’s breath hitches when Weyoun fits the pad of his thumb into the hollowed spoon at the base of his neck, eyes fluttering shut. “Weyoun,” he sighs, the first sound in several minutes, and Weyoun shivers at the shape of his own name in Damar’s mouth.
“Damar,” he whispers back, letting his thumb caress the teardrop shape of the spoon.
Damar makes a choking sound, smiles weakly. “Corat,” he says. “My name is Corat.”
Weyoun grins, leans in so his lips brush against the edge of Damar’s ear as he murmurs, “Corat.”
When their lips meet, Weyoun feels like he can taste for the first time in his life. For a brief and invigorating moment he’s the one leading the charge, but then Damar surges forward, pushing Weyoun back against the sofa cushions and gripping his face in two strong palms. Weyoun gasps against his mouth, feeling entirely helpless and utterly shocked at how much he’s enjoying it.
While he squeezes the muscles of Damar’s arms, Damar pushes apart the folds of his robe, presses his palm to Weyoun’s chest and traces a thumb along his collarbones. “You’re so soft,” he murmurs against Weyoun’s mouth.
A whimper fills their shared breath, and Weyoun realizes it came from him, and his eyes are watering, too. Damar stills against him. “I’m sorry,” he says. “Is this too much?”
Weyoun takes a shaky breath. He’s never been touched like this before, hardly been touched at all, and this enveloping gentleness overwhelms him. “Yes,” he breathes, but grips Damar’s shoulders to keep him in place. “And not enough.”
Damar smiles and kisses him again, softer. “Perhaps we should relocate,” he says, tilting his head back towards the bed.
Weyoun nods wordlessly, and then yelps when Damar gathers him into his arms and lifts him easily. “What are you—“ But then Damar lays him down and climbs over him, and Weyoun forgets how to say anything for a long while.
Later, in the dim light of the lamp beside the bed, Weyoun curls into the space between Damar’s arm and torso and presses his face into the scales of his neck. Weyoun has always had a fondness for textures. He feels warm, and sleepy in a way that feels comfortable, something he wants to bask in.
Damar runs his fingertips through the soft hair on Weyoun’s chest. “You’re staying, aren’t you?”
Weyoun isn’t sure if he means in his bed, or on Cardassia. He doesn’t think it matters. “Of course.”
He closes his eyes, and for the first time since he woke up as his new self, his body is exactly where he wants it to be.