Chapter Text
He distracts himself with work until, to his horror, he stumbles onto the solution. An antigraviton beam would do it. He knows it, just as he knows, in a moment of pure clarity, that he cannot allow it to happen. There’s no more uncertainty now. The Dominion cannot be allowed its reinforcements from the Gamma quadrant. Cardassia will survive only if the Dominion is defeated.
Damar doesn’t know if Weyoun will agree. He wants him to agree, badly. But it’s one thing to lose faith in a god, and another to go against everything bred into a Vorta. There are other scientists working on the problem of the minefield, and sooner or later, one of them will discover what he has. That means he needs to move quickly.
The first step—the obvious one—is easy. When the—unrest—has ended, Damar goes to Quark’s. “Quark! Kanar!” he announces. “No, reach a little higher on your shelf!”
“You must be celebrating,” Quark says as he pours the glass.
“Let’s just say that things are—about to improve for the Dominion.” The words feel slimy in his mouth. Quark plays his part, pressing more liquor onto Damar with sly encouragement, until Damar tells him, “I’ve discovered how to deactivate the mines.”
Quark laughs, even as Damar sees real fear in his eyes. “No offense, Damar, but you’ve been trying to do that for months.”
Damar grabs his wrist tight as Quark goes to refill his glass and squeezes hard, just to make sure Quark will remember, before releasing him. “Yes, but I’ve done it.” Quark feeds him two more glasses of kanar before he leans close and says, “Quark, you understand, this is just between a man and his bartender.”
Quark puts a hand over his heart. “Damar! You wound me. I would never repeat anything you say to me.”
Damar’s neck prickles and he turns to see that Weyoun is sitting at a table, alternately staring at Damar and a glass of whiskey. It’s too late to turn back now, though. “The key is an antigraviton beam,” he whispers. “It’s so simple, I don’t know why I didn’t see it so much earlier. Do you know, that Vorta threatened to kill me if I didn’t find the answer? Me!”
“I certainly hope he can’t hear you,” Quark says. “I understand they have very good hearing.”
Damar makes a dismissive noise and reaches for his glass of kanar. It’s only Quark’s quick reflexes that keep him from knocking it off the bar. Damar takes it back and raises it in a toast. “You’re a good man, Quark. A good businessman. One week, and the war will be over!”
“A good man,” Quark repeats. “Yes. Can I get you anything else?”
“Give me that bottle of kanar and—a bottle of whiskey! For my executioner!” Damar is only a little less drunk than he’s playing, but he’s delivered the message that he needs to and his heart is still pounding from his choice to betray the Dominion. Quark will take his message to the little knot of rebellion on this station. They must have contact with the Federation. They’ll get the message to the Federation. And, with any luck, someone on this station will find a way to prevent the use of an antigraviton beam anyway, just in case the Federation takes too long to reach the station.
When Damar reaches his table with two bottles in hand, Weyoun says, “I see you’re in your usual condition.” There’s sorrow rather than bite in his words.
“I brought you more whiskey!” Damar pours too enthusiastically, slopping it over the edge of Weyoun’s glass.
Weyoun wrinkles his nose. “How thoughtful of you. And more kanar for yourself.”
“Haven’t you heard?” Damar fills his own glass, too full. “I’ve saved the Dominion. I’ve won the war.”
Weyoun’s hand closes almost convulsively on his glass. “You’ve done what?”
“To the Dominion!” Damar raises his glass and toasts Weyoun aggressively. The Jem’Hadar in the bar stare briefly before turning away. “I figured out how to disable the minefield.”
“My predecessor was sure you would never do it.” Weyoun’s voice is very quiet. “He was sure.”
“Apparently I’m just too smart for my conscience to stop me.” The kanar goes down easier with every glass. “Aren’t you happy, Weyoun?”
“We can have this conversation somewhere else, later,” Weyoun hisses. “You’re drunk.”
“Oh, yes,” Damar says. He drapes an arm over Weyoun’s shoulder and leans in close. “I just need you to do one thing.” He’s misjudged the distance and he’s not even an inch from Weyoun’s ear.
“What’s that?” Weyoun’s voice is thick.
“Your predecessor was blocking Jake Sisko’s little journalism reports,” Damar says. His mouth brushes Weyoun’s ear and he remembers the way that Weyoun shuddered against him earlier. Maybe this is obscene in Vorta society. “You need to let them through.”
“How do you expect me to do that?”
Damar laughs and he wants nothing so much as to lick along the edge of Weyoun’s ear to see if he’ll make those noises again. “You’re the mouthpiece of the gods, Weyoun. You can have anything you want.”
“Anything?”
Damar pulls away and pours himself another glass of kanar to avoid doing something that everyone in the bar would consider obscene. “That’s what I said.”
Weyoun looks almost appalled. “You know a woman died on the promenade right outside not twelve hours ago.”
“Your Dominion has allowed seven million Cardassians to die in its service,” Damar says. “What’s one Bajoran?” He’s at that beautiful point when everything sharp inside him is coated smooth in kanar, when his bones are turning warm and liquid. Where cruelty is easy. Soon he’ll need to leave, before he begins to say things even more dangerous than that. “You have soldiers bred to do nothing but kill, and instead you throw Cardassian parents and children into the blades of your war machine.” The last he heard, his son and his former wife are still alive, but nowhere is safe now.
“You’re drunk,” Weyoun tells him. “I think you should leave.” He grabs Damar’s arm and Damar yanks away from him.
“I can walk myself,” he says. He knocks his chair over when he stands up, but at least he’s standing on his own. He grabs the bottle of kanar as he goes, and it barely causes a stir. People here are used to seeing him like this. He would be the station’s drunken joke if not for the fact that he’s Dukat’s second.
“Of course you can.” Weyoun’s snide tone is familiar, at least. He manhandles Damar along out of Quark’s. Someone has already set up a shrine to the dead woman; her earring hangs from a post, encircled by flowers and trinkets. The kanar rises in Damar’s throat again and he swallows it back angrily. His fuzzy mind can’t track their progress; he only realizes where he is when Weyoun is peeling off his armor. Damar reaches for Weyoun’s shirt and Weyoun brushes his hand away. “No, not right now,” he says. He strips off the rest of Damar’s clothes and pushes him into the sonic shower. “Don’t fall.”
Damar doesn’t know if he’s left or not. A moment after the shower starts, he’s vomiting up the kanar, bracing himself against the shower wall to keep from collapsing to his knees. He keeps retching even after there’s nothing left in his stomach, convulsions racking his body. This has happened before, plenty of times, but this is the worst by far. Eventually he does allow himself to slide down the wall to sit in the shower and it’s miserable, almost painful. Clean, though. He gropes at the edge of the wall for the ever-present bottle and then realizes that he must be in Weyoun’s quarters instead. His own must stink of kanar and sweat and sex.
The shower turns off. Weyoun sits down next to him and leans his shoulder against Damar’s bare one, now over-sensitized from the sonic shower. “What happened?”
“I told you. I solved the problem. I know how to let the Jem’Hadar reinforcements through the wormhole.” His voice is hoarse; his throat aches. “We should all be happy.”
“You’re not.”
“Are you surprised? You always believed I could do it. You just thought I had some—subconscious resistance to figuring it out.”
Weyoun is unnaturally still. “I did. I don’t believe that you want this.”
Damar laughs. He can hear the edge of hysteria in his own voice. “How can I not want it? Aren’t we loyal servants of the Dominion?”
Weyoun is barely breathing. “Are we?”
Damar draws his knees up and props his face in his hands. The floor and the wall are chilly against his body. Weyoun’s shoulder is the only point of warmth. “I…allowed the specifics of my discovery to fall into Federation hands. I let them find out how soon the minefield will come down.” He’s started to shiver. Weakness. “So now I’m a traitor. To Dukat and to—you and the Dominion.”
“Damar.” Weyoun stands and helps him up. “Come out of there.” He walks Damar over to the bed, where Damar sits numbly. He’s replicated clean clothes for Damar and dresses him as best he can without Damar’s help. “So the Federation will come here.”
“To retake Terok Nor before the minefield comes down, yes. They’ll have to. And meanwhile the rebels in the station will begin work to destroy the antigraviton beam so that the Dominion can’t physically use it. All because I’ve betrayed—the Dominion.” He can’t say ‘you’ again.
“Why?” Weyoun’s expression is so much like his predecessor that it makes something deep in Damar ache.
“The Dominion would sacrifice every single Cardassian life to win this war.”
Weyoun doesn’t deny it. “The Founders would say that those are Dominion lives now, not Cardassian lives. My predecessor would say that. That they should be happy to sacrifice in service of the Dominion.”
Damar very nearly strikes him. “Dukat sold our lives to the Dominion. He never should have done that.”
“Many Cardassians will die without those Jem’Hadar reinforcements,” Weyoun says. “Hundreds of thousands. Maybe millions. More may die if Cardassia tries to leave the Dominion.”
“At least they’ll die for Cardassia, instead of being thrown away for nothing.” Weyoun touches his chin and turns Damar’s head to face him. “You don’t believe that the Founders are gods,” Damar says. Weyoun’s wide eyes are a little frightened, even though he said the same thing earlier. “If you were with me—”
Weyoun is frozen again. “If I were with you,” he repeats, barely moving his mouth. “They are not gods, but they are my makers—”
“They made you deficient.” Damar runs his finger along the place where Weyoun’s ear meets his face, and Weyoun’s eyes fall closed. “Did I betray you when I betrayed the Dominion?”
Weyoun Five would have laughed at that, because of course that would have been a betrayal of Weyoun Five. Weyoun Five didn’t want to terminate him, but would have done it without hesitation. Weyoun Six says slowly, “I don’t know.”
“Are you going to tell Dukat?”
Any expression disappears from Weyoun’s face. “I don’t feel the need to tell Dukat anything,” he says, and his fingers tighten on Damar’s face. “Anything.”
“He guessed after the first time. About us. He thought I was—letting you fuck me to distract you from my failures.”
Weyoun releases his chin and seems to shrink back. “Were you?”
“I wish,” Damar says. “That would have been much easier.” It’s hard to smile, the way he feels, so he just brushes a kiss to the tip of Weyoun’s ear. Weyoun leans into it almost unwillingly and Damar finds himself admitting, “I love when you do that.” There’s a hard knot of fear forming in his chest. “I have to free Cardassia. The only way to do that is to break our treaty with the Dominion.”
“What do you want me to do?” Weyoun’s voice is rough. “If I—help?”
“You know Weyoun Five was refusing to allow Jake Sisko to transmit his little news reports,” Damar says. “Like I told you, find a way to let Sisko transmit them. He’ll be able to communicate what he needs to, to the Federation. What we need to communicate.”
“To save Cardassia.”
“To—save me,” Damar says. It’s wrong to play on whatever Weyoun feels for him. “I’m going to—pursue this, with or without your help. I’ll be caught eventually if you don’t help.”
Weyoun’s eyes are very dark. “My predecessor would have expected something in return. If he had even been willing to entertain the idea.”
“I would have given him anything.” Damar takes a deep breath. “What do you want?”
Weyoun shakes his head. “I want you to—live. I want you not to drink yourself to death because you’re at fault for whatever happens.”
“That’s unrealistic.” Damar fully expects to die before Cardassia is free. He plans to cope with that expectation with many bottles of kanar.
“That’s my price.”
Damar hesitates. “I can try.”
“Promise me.”
“You know I can’t promise not to die. If you don’t want me to die, you have to help.” What a strange Weyoun he is, compared to Weyoun Five. “That’s my price.”
“All right,” Weyoun says slowly, like each word is venomous. “I will help. Will you tell the—rebellion here?”
“Not yet. They’ll think it’s a trick. We’ll have to stage that carefully.”