2

60,053-60,054 (Kurillian Calendar)

They went out for drinks within the week and managed, to both their credit, Weyoun rather thought, not to talk about the hearing. The official outcome surprised no one—a moratorium had been placed on any construction projects in the Hellad district, and all necessary work would require a thorough excavation and cataloguing of finds prior to ground-breaking. Weyoun had managed to hang onto his position, mostly by virtue of the way he controlled the media narrative post-hearing, though Deimos scoffed that his job was never in jeopardy. Eris—he was getting used to thinking of her as such, instead of by her surname—had asked, and that was the closest they came to discussing their careers.

At the end of the night, they agreed to meet again, which they did, not quite a full week later. There was a rare lull in the rain and hail, so Weyoun hopped off the metro for the last couple blocks and walked to the restaurant where he and Eris were meeting, which was just on the border of the Hellad district. She was waiting outside watching the sky, but when she saw him, she smiled with such unabashed genuineness that his heart raced.

They went in and sat at their table and talked. The prospect of an entire uninterrupted dinner with her was magnificent, and he savored the fact that they had time for decent conversations instead of the stilted chop that occurred without fail at bars.

"So," he asked when their wine arrived, "what is it that you do when you're not slashing through the political ranks with your rapier intelligence?"

She laughed and raised her glass to her lips, taking a sip of the dark rippleberry wine. "I've never heard the political process described in such a swash-buckling way."

"Well, the more thrilling I make it seem, the better of an impression I make," he replied, watching her while trying not to stare. She looked, as usual, beautiful, the dim light of the restaurant shining on her eyes. As on their previous date, she was wearing a high-collared dress—the fashion—which left her arms bare and fell to her knees, and shoes that added several inches to her height so that she was as tall as him.

Eris met his eyes over the rim of her glass, which she kept raised. "I don't think you need to worry about the impression that you're making."

He hadn't been, actually, as it was becoming increasingly obvious to him that by some strange twist of fate, this woman was romantically interested in him, but hearing her say it was a shot that went straight through him. "You know, you should at least let me think I do; otherwise I might stop trying to impress you."

"Oh," she said innocently, "were you trying?"

Weyoun laughed and swallowed a mouthful of wine. "Clearly not hard enough. So. What do you do?"

Setting down her glass, she replied, "I teach at Tira University. I was fortunate enough to be offered a position for the duration of the monsoon, since no one knew how long the hearing would take."

"And what did you do before?"

She looked at him with amused suspicion. "You must know this. I know how thorough political aides need to be."

"Maybe. Humor me, though."

"Before I came to work at Hellad, I taught at Mikrath University in Pegrill."

In truth, he had known all this, but small talk was such an integral part of Vorta culture, and Tira City culture in particular, that it couldn't be dispensed with. "You're an academic through and through, then."

"Oh, very much so."

"Do you mind my asking why you agreed to consult for the Hellad hearing?" Something he didn't know, because no record could tell him, and that he'd been curious about for some time.

She rested her hands on the table. "Because it was important." Tilting her head and narrowing her eyes studiously at him, she added, "When I had just started my anthropology degree at Mikrath University, there was a similar case at one of the university's excavations. No one competent came forward and there's a housing estate there now."

"Ah," he said knowingly, raising an eyebrow, "you're a crusader. A brave champion for the preservation of Kurill's prehistoric sites."

With another laugh, she remarked, "You have a certain flair for making mundane jobs sound gripping."

Inclining his head, he countered, "I have a certain flair for holding people's attention."

"I can't decide if that's one of the most arrogant things I've ever heard or one of the most self-aware."

"Don't decide, then."

She lifted her chin, amusement in her eyes, and said, "I suppose you're going to ask me to wait until we know each other better."

He held her gaze. "Are you implying that you want to get to know me better?"

"Possibly."

The look she gave him as she took another sip of her wine, however, left him in no doubt as to her feelings. Now he needed to start wondering when he could kiss her. Was two dates an inappropriately short amount of time? He had a feeling that it was, but he also had the feeling that if the opportunity presented itself, he wouldn't care, and that Eris might not either.

He realized he was staring at her just as their entrées came and quickly looked down at his utensils, though not before he caught her smile. As they began eating, he asked, "Now that the hearing's over, what are you planning on doing? Five more months at Tira University, and then…?"

Shrugging, she replied, "I may stay here. I miss Pegrill, but there are so many exciting…possibilities here."

Weyoun tried to study her surreptitiously for a moment to see if that statement had held any innuendo. "Hellad, you mean."

"Not just Hellad." She seemed to realize what she'd said and laughed. "So much of Tira is unexplored, I mean. There's been really limited excavation here."

Starting on his meal—a simple bed of honeyed rusi with seared vegetables spread over it; peasant food that had made the jump to haute cuisine—he remarked, "We don't care all that much about what came before us in Tira City."

Eris gave him a probing look. "Ephemera is what's important, then?"

"Sometimes." He looked at her, furrowing his brow thoughtfully. "The past is important because it's something you build on; something you're…better than. Something to improve upon."

"That's the most short-sighted view of history that I've ever heard."

Weyoun grinned. "I'm just distilling the essentials for you."

She shook her head, but there was an irrepressible smile on her face. "And proving why I should stay and work here. Anyway, if I do stay, I think I'd move permanently. It would be much easier to live in Tira City than to maintain a temporary flat here and one in Pegrill."

He wrestled for a moment with the urge to tell her that he, at least, would be extremely happy if she stayed, but in the end didn't. He was infatuated with her, but—well, that just wasn't something that you said to a woman, not on a second date. "You're not worried about a contract extension at Tira University?"

Lowering her eyes, she replied, "It's been one of the advantages of my peers being so…graciously laudatory of my work that I've been able to find gainful employment where I've wanted to." Before giving him a chance to respond, she flashed him a wider smile and asked, "Since we seem to be talking about our jobs, what made you go into politics?"

"I'm from Tira City. Everyone goes into politics in some way or another."

"How glib."

"Well, I have that tendency."

She raised an eyebrow. "I'm sincerely interested. I thought I had you figured out when I first met you, but you're…"

"Disarmingly complex?" he offered.

"…not what I expected," she finished, smiling as he put a melodramatic hand over his heart. "Tell me, why would an intelligent, nice young man devote his life to lying and scheming for political power?"

Weyoun laughed. "We'll have to work on your attitude towards politics." She didn't respond and kept one eyebrow arched, so he asked, leaning across the table towards her, "Do you remember the Clone Protests? About ten years ago?"

"Of course. I was thirteen at the time. I remember watching the telecast feed and worrying that the violence would spread to Pegrill."

Weyoun paused, drew back a little, and looked at her. That made her twenty-three—very, very young for everything that she'd achieved. If he'd been thirteen during the Clone Protests, watching his city tear itself apart, maybe his opinion of the political machine would be more like hers.

He hadn't thought about the Clone Protests for some time. Vorta had been cloning for over a hundred years, long enough that most people thought nothing of it. It was mostly used for agro-industrial purposes, but there were enough Vorta clones that there was nothing unusual about the idea. A Vorta pregnancy was long and difficult—the miscarriage rate was eighty-eight percent for first pregnancies and dropped to just under fifty percent for successive ones. Infertility was common. Vorta physiology was such that surrogacy had proved unfeasible, and in-vitro fertilization was so unreliable that it was rarely attempted anymore. Cloning worked for those wealthy people who couldn't have children but wanted to pass their DNA along to the next generation. While clones could be gestated to any stage of life, it wasn't legal to gestate a Vorta clone past fifteen months (the normal gestation time for a fetus).

That was all well and good. There were groups that took issue with it, claiming the Founders never intended for one individual to lead multiple lives, but they were an insignificant minority, and their qualms were patently ridiculous. Clones may have been a perfect genetic copies, but their personalities were always a product of their environment and as such, were distinct from their progenitors.

The Clone Protests revealed that an insignificant minority, under the right circumstances, could grow to a small, vocal, and violent minority. Some fifteen years ago, scientists had unveiled a sophisticated form of synaptic storage and transfer. It was meant for Vorta who suffered severe brain injuries or from neural diseases. Another obvious application for it was in cloning. Suddenly, the very thing that some people had feared—a sort of immortality; the same personality and memories being passed on to multiple individuals—was possible. Geneticists insisted that it wouldn't happen—after all, gestating clones to adulthood was illegal, and transferring memories into a newborn baby was foolish; a worthless waste of time and research money…though it had surely, somewhere, been done.

Then, ten years ago, the science lobby in the capital had quietly taken on a case that sought to overturn the old legislation prohibiting the gestation of clones past the newborn stage. Rumor had it there'd already been illegal testing of the memory transfer procedure on adult-gestation clones but there was no proof, and the major research centers wanted to do their own tests. It didn't remain quiet for long.

The Capitol Complex exploded as protesters, and inevitably the media, descended on it. The Senate opposition to the legislation was led by one Ara Soltoi, tapping masterfully into religious qualms and societal uneasiness, bringing deep-seated insecurities about the nature of individuality to the fore of the public's mind. The protesters became a mob; the lobbyists, politicians, and scientists inside the Complex were besieged; unable to leave in many cases, because one day those science lobbyists that tried were caught, beaten bloody and half to death, and dragged to Capitol Square. Law enforcement couldn't control the protesters and Kurill had no military because they didn't traffic in that sort of violence. It shook the whole planet profoundly, went on for weeks, and eventually violence spread to a few other regional capitals before the science lobby lost the hearing. The loss was the only thing that disbanded the anarchy, but not before a lobbyist was killed. Officially, the kind of clone that the protesters were so worried about couldn't exist. Unofficially, it surely did; people died alone, with no one to miss them, and if doppelgängers took some of their places before anyone realized they were gone—well, who would know?

Weyoun sat back in his chair. "I was seventeen at the time. The hearing itself tended to get overshadowed by the protests, but it was riveting. So…life or death. Everyone knew about it. Everyone cared."

"That's because science lobbyists were getting beaten in the street," Eris pointed out.

With a fluid shrug, he said, "Yes, but it was more than that. It was politics but it had real ramifications—serious ones—for Kurill." He drank some wine, trying to gauge how it was making him feel. The high alcohol content—Vorta metabolized toxins at a high rate, so anything alcoholic was extremely so—normally didn't affect him, but this wasn't a normal situation for him. He clenched a fist under the table. "I needed to be part of that. It mattered."

For a few minutes, the two of them ate in silence, but finally Eris said, "So we're not all that different after all."

He finished off his glass of wine and poured another, refilling her glass as well. "I don't think you would have had dinner with me if you'd really thought we were all that different."

"Maybe not." She took a final bite of her dinner, then pushed the plate away and looked closely at him. "Are you always this confident with women you barely know?"

"Not at all." Raising his glass to her, he added, "It's just the wine."

She snorted with laughter and pursed her lips to disguise a smile. "Deimos said you were charming; he didn't mention that you're funny."

Weyoun put his glass down with a long-suffering roll of his eyes. "I told him not to say that."

"Yes, he told me that too." She laughed at the look on his face. "It's endearing."

"I won't even dignify that with a response." The truth was that in recent years he'd been far too busy for women, and the few casual romances of his university days were long behind him. He was winging this. Anyway, there was something about her that made it easy to move from small-talk to the more personal. He certainly wasn't someone who had trouble maintaining a conversation, but he, like most Vorta, was hesitant to take a conversation past surface superficialities. He felt no such hesitation with Eris, and he was quite sure that that wasn't the wine.

The two of them continued in the same flirtatious vein for another half an hour while they finished off the bottle of wine and shared dessert. When they were done, Weyoun insisted upon paying the bill and she graciously allowed him to. Then the end of the evening was upon them, and they made their way to the front of the restaurant, where they stood, momentarily silent. The skyway leading out of the tower was filled with people, but he turned his eyes to the plaza outside. The pause in the rain was still holding. Turning to her, he asked, "Would you like to go for a walk?"

She glanced at him, one eyebrow arched slightly in surprise. "Outside?" she asked, following the direction of his gaze.

"Why not? The rain seems to be holding off for the moment." He watched her carefully for her reaction—he didn't think she'd decline, but the distinction between her accepting to be polite and accepting because she really wanted to spend more time with him—well, that was important.

There was a small smile on her face. "Yes. Something about this night seems to encourage taking chances, doesn't it?"

He searched her face for a double-meaning to her words and found nothing but studied innocence. "I couldn't have said it better myself," he replied.

The two of them stepped outside into the warm night. The air was heavy and thick with humidity but the air was still. Before it started raining again, the wind would pick up. There was such a distinctive quality to that wind—the deep, hollow sigh of it, its implacability—that no one could ever mistake it and not run for cover.

The monsoon lasted eight and half of Kurill's fourteen month years, striking up and down the planet's single massive continent almost simultaneously. The clouds blew in from the east, off the Ocean, and took a day or two to blanket the continent, but when they did, daily life shifted drastically for everyone. The monsoon brought torrential, flooding rains that inundated streets and could turn them into raging rivers. More dangerous was the hail; huge chunks of dirty ice that could crack a skull open easily. As a child, Weyoun had had a broken arm from a piece it. One could not count on the ability to go outside; therefore, if one lived in a place that required it, for a commute or some other reason, then a solution needed to be found.

Every building in all Kurillian cities was connected via skyway or underground walkway, and a metro train, protected by a hard duraplastic tube, traversed Tira City. For eight and a half months out of the year, no one felt daylight on their skin, and Vorta pallor showed it. Those who didn't live in a city were forced to during the monsoon, with many people keeping a second home in one of its many residence towers. Transportation into suburban and exurban areas could be had during the monsoon but it was unreliable for all but the most affluent areas—better for most to know that they had a place to sleep.

Those moments when the rain stopped had to be seized. They were unpredictable and precious and could last anywhere from two hours to two days. Weyoun knew precisely what Eris meant about feeling like taking chances. The evanescent ability to breathe air that hadn't passed through a re-circulator, to look straight up into the sky, did tend to induce a feeling of abandon.

He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye, feeling something squirm deep within him as the city light, tinged blue, caught the paleness of her face. Just then, she turned and caught his eye, making him flick his gaze away and cast about for a subject, finally asking, "Why anthropology?"

She smiled. "That's an easy question to answer. I grew up in a house with High Classical foundations and both of my parents are historians—there wasn't much else I could do. And anthropology has a certain mystique that appealed to me as a sixteen-year-old, since so few people study it."

"High Classical," Weyoun repeated, "that's a thousand years ago?"

Looking pleased, Eris said, "I'm impressed."

He didn't think there was anything all that impressive about spouting some basic Vorta history to her, but he certainly wasn't going to complain if she thought so. Turning towards her, he said, "Can I ask you something?"

"Of course."

There was a low, ominous roll of thunder and both of them glanced at the sky, but the respite from the rain held. Looking back to her, Weyoun asked, "Did you mean what you said at the hearing? You really don't believe you've found where Kurill and his family hid the Founder?"

Eris studied him, trying to determine, he was sure, why he was asking. "Because that's what the rumor is, you mean. That we've found Kurill's home."

"I wouldn't even call it a rumor. But yes, that's going around within certain circles."

She stopped walking and turned to face him, her study of him turning frank. Heat lightning flickered high in the clouds, illuminating them pinkish-gray from within. They were not the only people out, but Tira City felt emptier for the few other Vorta braving the break in the rains and hail. "I want to show you something," she finally said, taking his hand and curling her fingers tightly around his.

They were already in the Hellad district and so he wasn't surprised when she brought him to her excavation. The whole site, all thirty square meters of it, was covered with tarps, with water pooled in low spots. Around the perimeter were a few shelters open to the elements of the monsoon, though during the dry season they would provide shade. It was lit brightly by tall security lights, and Weyoun spotted several CCTV cameras monitoring the area.

"The geology of this site is amazing," Eris said as they entered excavation. "You know, I assume, that Tiryn Mountain is a dormant volcano?"

Weyoun raised his eyes in the direction of the conical peak, visible during the day in the dry season. There was no hope of seeing it at night, especially when the air was as heavy and laden with humidity as it was. "I do, as shocking as it may be for a political aide."

She pursed her lips, looking amused. "I would never be showing this to you if I thought you weren't aware of these sorts of basic facts."

"I'm honored."

Smiling a little and leading him through the tarp-draped alleys of the site, she continued, "About sixty thousand years ago, Tiryn erupted and covered everything within a two hundred mile radius in a thick layer of ash. The way the site drains tends to preserve imprints for quite some time—we notice the same thing even now—and when the volcano erupted, the ash covered several sets of footprints and preserved them."

She stopped in front of a small area that had clearly had a low, waist-level shelter constructed over it, then glanced over her shoulder at the roiling clouds overhead. Then, with no further hesitation, she unbolted the tarp from its fastenings and flipped it up, then crouched and slid into the trench that the shelter was covering.

Weyoun spared a moment's thought for the fact that he was wearing one of his nicer suits and that pits in the ground tended to be dirty, and then he followed her.

Inside the trench, a sheet of clear plastic was pinned down over the ground. Here and there, small puddles sat on top of it, but for the most part it was dry. Eris stepped carefully along a path that only she knew and he stayed behind her, taking care to only put his feet where she put hers. Finally, she stopped, staring downwards at a spot several centimeters in front of her.

Eris knelt, smoothing the sheet of plastic gently, so that the ground beneath it became visible. "I uncovered this the day the monsoon started," she said. "No one else on the site knows this is here." Weyoun crouched next to her and looked at the spot that she was framing between her slender hands. A set of footprints was visible there. He didn't think he had much of an eye for this sort of thing, but to him it looked like two separate species—one, a modern Vorta footprint, and the other, something more ape-like, though the species appeared to change mid-stride.

"It looks like two different individuals made these," she said, her tone reverentially hushed. "But there was something odd about it. So I analyzed the stride myself. You can see where the footsteps change from this primitive Vorta shape to this one here. Sixty thousand years ago Vorta were still part arboreal—you see how the shape of the arch of the foot is different? But then, look—" Weyoun did. "—this footprint here, this is modern, and there's no way that these two footprints were made by two different individuals."

He took a moment to process all of this, didn't ask how it was that an anatomically modern footprint could show up in sixty thousand year old sediments, and cut straight to the heart of the matter. "What kind of…being can leave two entirely different sets of footprints?"

She looked at him earnestly. "Only one kind that I know of. These," her fingers twitched, "are the footprints of the Founder that Kurill saved."

Weyoun raised his head and found himself staring into Eris's eyes, which were wide, as though she herself still couldn't believe what she'd found. "These are…a god's footprints?" he asked in a low tone. She gave one affirmative nod, then looked back to the preserved footprints, and he furrowed his brow at her. "Eris, why didn't you mention this at the hearing?"

She set her mouth in a line. "Because I'm the only one who's looked at them. That's not science. I could be wrong."

"But you don't think you are."

"No." Her eyes unfocused for a moment. "I didn't want to have to use Kurill to win. It didn't seem…right." Abruptly, her gaze snapped back into focus, and she drew his attention to another set of footprints that he hadn't been able to see until she smoothed the plastic cover. Whoever had made them had been walking beside the Founder. They were the footprints of the Vorta's arboreal ancestors.

Weyoun looked at her, but she was staring intently at the footprints. "Are those…?" he began. Kurill's, he'd been about to finish, but couldn't, reeling suddenly at the idea that he could be looking at an imprint of their race's progenitor and the central, non-divine figure of Vorta doctrine.

She shook her head. "I don't know. There's no way to. But it's a nice thought, isn't it?" She finally looked up at him and smiled brightly.

Something kept him from speaking, and he reached a hand out to rest his fingers lightly on the raised edges of the Founder's footprints.

He was a religious man, but saying such a thing was akin to saying the sky was blue. Of course he was—he was Vorta and there was no other way to be. He kept a small shrine in his flat, he found at least five minutes every day to pray at the one in the Complex, and he attended services once or twice a week at the district shrine. The Founders weren't demanding gods—they were absent, and Vorta faith was as much about honoring them as it was about hoping for their promised return.

Still touching the footprints, he bowed his head and prayed quickly, then lifted his head to look at her again. "This is…unbelievable."

"It—" A deep stillness outside made her trail off and both of them instinctively looked up. There was, of course, nothing to be seen except pinkish tarp. It rustled slightly, undulating in a wind that had just picked up. Eris stood slowly. "Maybe we should go."

There was a deep rumble of thunder and Weyoun got to his feet as well. "I agree."

They climbed out of the trench, with Eris taking care to seal it behind herself. The wind was gusting by the time they both straightened up and quickly began walking across the site, the hollow echo of it presaging the returning rain. "We're only a few blocks from the Hellad train station, aren't we?" he asked her.

She nodded briskly. "I apologize in advance if a piece of hail breaks any of your bones."

He was about to inform her that it had happened to him once already when a fat, cold droplet of water hit the back of his neck. Raindrops splattered the pavement in front of them and a blast of wind at their backs brought the roar of the fast approaching deluge. "Perhaps we should abandon our dignity and make a run for it?" he asked her with a grin.

"Absolutely," she agreed before both of them broke into a sprint, heading for the isolated shelter of the Hellad train station, which came into sight, two blocks away, as they bolted over an incline.

The rain reached them then, a cold inundation that soaked mercilessly through every article of clothing within seconds. The sidewalk streamed with water so that running became like splashing through a creek; and then a small piece of hail pinged the side of Weyoun's face, stinging as it glanced off his cheek.

Fortunately they were only meters from the station. They reached it and Weyoun wrenched the door open, letting in a pool of water and a spray of rain. A chunk of hail the size of his head ricocheted off the corner of the roof, spraying them with chips of ice just as they ducked inside.

For a moment, he leaned against the tightly shut door, catching his breath, while Eris propped herself on the railing of the staircase immediately inside, one of her feet braced on the lower step, doing the same. Water dripped from Weyoun's saturated shirt and jacket over his wrist and down his fingers. Eris's dress was plastered to her slender frame and his eyes couldn't help but linger as it hugged her slim contours.

Before his gaze turned to ogling, he met her eyes and extended an arm, inviting her to ascend the staircase to the station's main platform, raised off the ground to keep it from flooding during the monsoon. She did so with a nod and he followed her to one of the tightly sealed platform doors. For a minute or two, they stood at the clear, duraplastic-paneled side of the station, peering out into the murk.

"This probably wasn't the night out you were expecting," Eris said, turning to him and smiling self-consciously. A wet curl flopped onto her forehead, and she brushed it back into place. "Nearly getting brained by hail isn't exactly…well, romantic."

Weyoun felt himself leaning towards her. "I can't complain."

She straightened up, clasping her hands in front of her. "Thank you."

"For what?"

"For inviting me. Dinner was wonderful, and…you let me show you what I love."

He wanted to take her hand—no, he wanted to take her in his arms and kiss her, which was insane; they were in a train station, in public even if no one else was around, and that sort of public affection wasn't something that Vorta of their caste, highly educated and trained, intellectual and political, did. Still, he had to swallow hard to stop himself from doing it.

"I should be thanking you," he replied.

"Not for the hail part."

"No, even for the hail part." He reached up and plucked a shard of ice from her wet hair, a piece of the chunk that had bounced off the corner of the station. "I needed the adventure."

"So you consider the fact that we're drenched an adventure?" she asked, raising an eyebrow.

He chuckled, though it came out low. "A minor one on the way to greater things."

The rain pounded on the duraplastic sides of the train station while hail slammed into it intermittently. Eris's eyes were locked on his, the lavender of her irises looking pinpricked with blue and light from something shining behind them. "Greater things?" she asked quietly. "Did you have something in mind?"

He found that they were standing very close to each other, and he wasn't quite sure how that had happened. His hands, at his sides, needed mere centimeters of forward motion to curl around her hips, which they twitched to do before he stopped them. "I have a few ideas."

"Mm," she murmured, as something outside the laws of physics drew them even closer together. "You're a very inventive man."

Then they were kissing—hard, passionately, and not that Weyoun had all that much in the way of experience to compare it to, but kissing a woman had never felt quite so transcendent; he put his hands on her waist, then moved them to her back, sliding one up her spine and pulling her against him. Eris hooked an arm around his neck and ran her fingers through his hair and pulled even closer, and for several heady minutes the whole world consisted of probing lips and tongues and hands, wet clothes pressed into hot skin, and the blazing flare of desire.

Finally they separated by enough that their lips weren't immediately drawn back together, though their noses still brushed against one another's as they opened their eyes. Slowly, she put a finger to one of his ears, tracing the line of it down to his jaw, and his breath hitched at the intimacy of the gesture. "I think we should see each other again," she breathed, her chest heaving a little, "if you'll pardon my understatement."

That startled a laugh out of him, and he cupped his hands around her face, his fingers resting on the delicate ribs of her ears. Then he kissed her again, and this time the only thing that stopped them was the train's arrival, its light cutting through the dark rain like a beacon.

The monsoon went on, soaking Kurill for another four months. Senator Soltoi's five year term was drawing to a close in a year and a half, and so Weyoun began making preparations for her campaign. The work was well suited to the monsoon because in its early stages it was mostly interminable forms that needed to be filled out. As senior aide, he bore the brunt of responsibility for her re-election. He'd been a junior aide three years ago, during her previous campaign, though it was during that time period, just before Soltoi inevitably won her seat again, that she'd promoted him to his current position. During the campaign itself he'd need to work closely with Soltoi's publicity staffer—a woman about his age, Yeroi—which he'd been less than relishing, especially since it was the first re-election campaign he'd run. He and Yeroi had never really gotten along. She was competent, though, and Soltoi didn't require her staff to be friendly with each other, only that they work together and accomplish what she wanted them to.

The senator had always overworked him, but in the aftermath of the Hellad hearing, he'd noticed an increase in the number of tasks she assigned to him. Whether this was his punishment for not winning the case or for…something else, he didn't know. It didn't bother him—he enjoyed being busy. And if his internal drive to succeed wasn't great enough on its own, he now had the added motivation of seeing Eris at the end of the day, whenever the two of them could carve out a slice of time.

The first night Weyoun and Eris spent together was followed by the first morning of his adult life that Weyoun couldn't get himself out of bed, and the first day that he'd ever taken off work. Granted, it was week's end, and no one begrudged a Vorta for taking that day off, but he never had. Waking up with a very naked Eris Arethoi in his arms was the impetus he'd needed to stay out of his office for a day. She filled a gap in his life that he hadn't felt until she'd entered it; made him happy in a way he wasn't aware that he hadn't been.

The physical part of their relationship took him by surprise. He wasn't certain he'd ever quite appreciated sex before having it with Eris. Certainly it had always been enjoyable—he was, after all, a twenty-seven-year-old man, and there had been other women—but the way his nerves screamed with exquisite pain when she touched him; the way she arched her back and moaned when he ran his hands over her…that was new. He'd never been with a woman with whom he felt the same deep well of connection that he did with Eris. There was a…a rightness, and an electricity, when they touched each other, as though everything in him had been waiting for her. A flash of insight told him, that first night, that he'd never want to be with another woman again; that whatever other vices he might fall prey to, this woman was the one he'd always want.

Not everything was carnal. He came to appreciate her intelligence and humor more and more; came to rely on both qualities for balance in his own life. Prior to meeting her, his interest in the history of his world and his city had been minimal, but her passion for her work nurtured his interest in it, and she, after a month or too, admitted with a grudging respect and a sly smile that, considering it was his line of work, politics couldn't be all that bad. And then there was her poise, cool and calm and perfect, which he never tired of. He loved watching her in her thoughtful, quiet moments, her chin tilted upwards, her shoulders swept back in a graceful curve, and her expression unfocused while she gathered her thoughts. Her gaze had a way of being both distant and intimate at once, because she never let that poise slip in public—so when she did it in private, with him, it was like being admitted to the inner sanctum of her confidence.

The value of that confidence wasn't lost on him, and it didn't take him long to realize what had been true for some time—he loved her.

They settled into patterns of domesticity quickly, eschewing dinners out for cooking in and spending the night talking or simply catching up on work. When Deimos discovered this state of affairs he scoffed that Weyoun had no sense of romance, and clearly Eris didn't either, but Weyoun disagreed—well, not necessarily that he had no sense of romance; that may well have been the case, but that their relationship had none. Maybe the real romance was in the quiet way Eris slipped her hand into his without thinking about it, or their slow kisses after making love, or the electric lance when they touched that was more than just the promise of physical sensation.

One night, almost five months to the day since that first kiss, found Eris staring up into the cupboards while Weyoun sliced vegetables and dropped them into the deep-bowled frying pan sitting on the burner. "For someone who's rarely at home, you certainly have a lot of food in here," she remarked. He glanced over his shoulder at her as she rummaged through the very full cabinet. "You could decorate your flat with your spice collection," she teased. "Then it would look like someone lived here, at least."

"I'm sure it would be the next craze in interior design," he replied, grinning at her. "I'll have to keep it in mind if I'm ever considering a change of careers."

Scoffing good-naturedly, she said, "You? You love the Complex too much."

He joined her at the cupboard, his hand going automatically to her hip as he stood next to her. "Yes, but one never knows about life's vicissitudes."

With a quick kiss, she said, "True. Now, you have nine different kinds of honey in here, so I think we should use some of it with dinner."

"Ten, actually; there's one more at the back," he corrected her.

"My point exactly."

With a smile, he said, "Well, I'm sure I can make some sort of halfway-decent sauce."

"I'll do it." She reached up and pulled down the most exotic looking jar, its label proclaiming its provenance in one of Kurill's extreme southern cities. "You're much neater with the sautéing, anyway."

Chuckling, Weyoun said, "I'm glad you think so. I'd hate to overstay my usefulness."

Throwing a glance over her shoulder at him as he went back to the burner and she pulled out a metal bowl, she remarked mischievously, "Oh, you're useful in bed as well, don't worry."

"High praise. Can a man aspire to anything higher than being considered useful both in the kitchen and in the bedroom?"

"Everything else is a bit superfluous, now that you mention it." She busied herself with making a sauce for the vegetables out of what she found in his overstocked cupboard while he cooked, until she dipped a finger into the mixture and stuck it in her mouth to taste it. After she swallowed, she said suddenly, "Speaking of life's vicissitudes—why Soltoi?"

Weyoun glanced over his shoulder at her from the burner. "What do you mean?"

"I mean just that." Eris brought the bowl over and held it over the skillet, though she paused before pouring the mixture in. "The only reason I can see to work in her offices is to draft to a better position than your peers on her power."

"You have a way with words," Weyoun snorted.

Continuing to study him, she said, "There's a very deep hunger in you for a lot of things, Weyoun." He raised his eyebrows inquiringly, but she went on with the faintest hint of a smile, "Your ambition borders on a pathological hunger for power. Why?"

He concentrated on the stir-fry and didn't bother to repeat his earlier observation about her eloquence. Five months ago he would have glibly changed the subject and she would have persisted until he gave her some sort of answer. Now he just didn't know what to say. His hunger for power was no mystery to him. But he hadn't expected such a blunt query about it. "Does it?" he finally asked.

In a second, her eyes flitted from his face, to the still-open cupboard, to the rest of the flat, and understanding dawned across her delicate features. Eris put the bowl down on the counter, the metal bottom clanging. "You were poor."

"Poor," Weyoun laughed, unsurprised by her leap to this conclusion. "Poor would have been luxurious. No, I was less than poor. What's the word?" He knew it well, as it had been hurled his way on more than one occasion, from schoolyard scuffle to university hazing. "I was gutter-scum. Gutter-scum who got lucky. My test scores were good and my parents sent me away to the exarchate school as soon as they could."

Her eyebrows were raised. "That's a good school."

Though the hesitation was minuscule, he heard it in her voice. "For an exarchate boarding school."

"No." Eris sighed harshly through her nose. "The Tira school is an excellent one, period. Probably better than my private school in Pegrilliti."

"I doubt that."

"Oh, Pegrill is extremely provincial." Her sly humor managed to show through the awkwardness of the conversation. Tilting her head, she asked, "Are your parents still alive?"

"No." No one lived long in the slums. They'd been lucky not to have been murdered. "They died just before I finished my degree at university."

"They must have been proud of you."

Weyoun shrugged. "I suppose so. I always got the feeling that they were more baffled at how gutter-scum produced a son like me." There was a mild look in Eris's eyes, as though she could sense that now that he'd said something on the subject—the subject that he avoided like Panouklan plague—that he would have more to say. His gaze slid towards the windows, un-curtained so that rain-washed, hail-filtered monsoon light flooded in—Tira City's clean blue light dirtied as it bounced off the hail. "I'd go back during school holidays, not by any choice of my own. My parents' home was squalid."

He spat the last word as the memory of that place, small, dark, muddy from years of monsoon washing out the alleys and shambles of the slums, repulsed him for a moment. 'Squalid' wasn't strong enough, couldn't possibly describe the state of filthy destitution that he'd been raised in. He could never distance himself enough from it. "People like me spend our lives wanting power because we refuse to go back to that. And if you're good enough at your job, Soltoi guarantees you power." It was a flip way to sum it up, his—Deimos would call them hang-ups, and Eris…well, she wasn't looking at him differently, probably because she'd already suspected half of this.

She didn't address what he'd said. "Do you have siblings?"

Of course he had siblings. Gutter-scum always had siblings, low fertility rate or no. "Two. Younger. I send them money. I haven't seen them in years." He hoped she wouldn't ask him why, or suggest that he should, or express sympathy at this lack of familial affection. Either she would understand or she wouldn't.

Her expression was unreadable, but that was infinitely preferable to pitying. There was no question that Eris had come from a wealthy family, and in his experience, highly educated, comfortable women felt terribly sorry for him. The Vorta caste system wasn't rigid the way it had once been, and it was common and acceptable to raise oneself to a higher caste. Still, there were traditionalists, and he hated his past so much that he preferred to keep it hidden.

But the only thing that happened was that her face went from unreadable to something lighter, and she remarked, sounding almost amused, "You're worried that this will change the way I see you."

"Not really," Weyoun replied, attempting to imbue the words with a nonchalance that he didn't feel.

She smiled and sniffed, moving close to him. "I'm an anthropologist, Weyoun. Social conventions and psychology are my strong suit."

At that, he laughed, then put his arms around her and pulled her closer. "You're a physical anthropologist."

Her smile grew to a mischievous grin as she slid her arms around his neck. "Hm, speaking of physical…I certainly could be."

He laughed again, softly this time, and kissed her harder than he'd intended. Of course he'd been worried. Anyone from the slums worried because those who escaped spent their formative years enduring mockery and ostracization. There were plenty of children from the slums at the exarchate school, the combination of government-funded room, board, and education too tempting to pass up for most parents. But there were other, less poor children there, as well—children who were not quite gutter-scum, but not quite of a high enough caste to be sent to a private school—and a mostly-unspoken but strictly self-enforced segregation had occurred between the two groups during Weyoun's younger years at school. One did not cross those lines unless he or she wanted to fit in with neither caste.

Eris tugged his shirt open and ran her hands up his bare chest, returning the kiss fervently. "You know," Weyoun murmured into her lips, "this stir-fry would really be best eaten hot."

"I think I can sacrifice the taste just this once," she replied, drawing in a sharp breath as he slid a hand under her shirt and cupped it over one of her breasts.

His bedroom had curtains, but neither of them was much inclined to stop what they were doing to close them. The monsoon provided curtain enough, anyway, and the liquid light eddied on their sweat-slicked skin as they made love.

Afterwards, he kept her hand clasped in his, running his thumb along the crease of her palm as she lay, propped on one elbow, watching him. The light brought out the purple tint along her hairline, on her ears, down her sternum, on her nipples. "You're thinking about something," he said, holding her gaze.

She smiled slightly, the blue light from outside shining on her eyes. "I've been told I look distant when I do that."

"Just the opposite, actually."

That seemed to surprise her, and her expression softened. For a long moment, she gazed at him, and then, finally, she said, "I love you, Weyoun."

There was such a sweet pain at hearing her say those words for the first time that he did nothing but squeeze her hand more tightly for a moment. Then, he replied, "I love you too. But you knew that."

She leaned down and kissed him. "And you knew that telling me would make me the happiest woman on Kurill."

"Actually, no." He pulled her on top of him. "Does it?"

"Don't be stupid."

"I pride myself on the fact that I rarely am."

Her laugh was barely more than a breath. "I suppose empirically speaking, some woman somewhere might be happier, if there was a way to measure for happiness—" He cut her off with a deep kiss and felt her smile, and then he put his hands on her hips, his thumbs settling into the groove of her pelvic bone.

She rested her forehead against his. "—the point is," she murmured, "I've been wanting to tell you that, and be told, for a long time."

That put an end to the conversation as their mouths found each other's again. It was some time before they remembered and returned to dinner.

Weyoun opened his eyes the next morning to a delicate periwinkle sky, free of clouds for the first time in eight and a half months, and the sun's rays just beginning to creep into the room. Monsoon's end. He stifled a yawn, smiled, and looked at Eris, who was still sleeping. Though he would have been content to lie there, watching the gentle rise and fall of her chest and her pale features as the sun slowly moved across the floor to the bed—he'd never seen her in the sun, he realized—his small movements must have woken her, because she drew in a deep breath and opened her eyes. Her gaze went to the window for a moment and then to him, and then, with a languid sigh, she stretched and rolled onto her stomach, splaying an arm across him.

He caught her hand. "Good morning."

She smiled at him, resting her chin on his chest. "Your eyes are very lavender in the sunlight," she remarked.

Chuckling, he reached out a hand and traced the line of her ear up into her hair. The tight curls yielded to his touch and he rested a finger right where the top of her ear met her head. "Are they? Fascinating."

"I thought you might like to know," she said, inching further up his body until they were face to face. "They're very handsome."

"You think so?"

"Mm hm." She kissed him softly, and then murmured, "I suppose we should get up and enjoy the day."

For a moment longer, he held onto her, but then, with a sigh, she rolled off of him and sat up, pulling the sheet up across her chest absently. When he reluctantly stood up, she watched him for a moment, then asked broodingly, "Isn't this the morning when most relationships tend to fall apart?" He raised his eyebrows and she leaned back against the headboard, letting the sheet fall into her lap. Sheepishly, she added, "I suppose part of me wondered if this was a monsoon fling."

The term came from the fact that, during the long months of the monsoon, romantic entanglements tended to begin and then abruptly end with the rains themselves. With travel difficult and the overwhelming majority of the time spent indoors, and often with the same people, it was easy to find oneself looking for something to do and finding it with an attractive member of the opposite sex (or the same sex, of course, if one was so inclined). Deimos was something of an expert on the monsoon fling, having had one almost every year since Weyoun had known him.

He pulled a shirt on and buttoned it as he sat down on the bed again. "It never crossed my mind," he replied honestly, putting a hand on her leg. There was a flash of vulnerability on her face that he'd never seen before and for a second she looked…twenty-three. Young, and unsure, and in love—the thought sent a frisson through him—for the first time in her life.

A smile flickered onto her face. "Mine either, until this morning."

"So I need to prepare myself, is that what you're suggesting?" he began, but couldn't add to as she wrapped her arms around him and promptly negated the work he'd accomplished on his shirt buttons.

It was some time later that they finally did get up, shower, and go outside. Eight and a half months of constant rain was followed by five and a half months of cloudless skies, no precipitation, and sun. In the northern hemisphere, the dry season occurred while that hemisphere was tilted away from the sun, which moderated its rays (in the southern hemisphere, as Weyoun understood it, both seasons were miserable, with the monsoon being cold as well as wet and the dry season being scorching hot. This was probably, in addition to the rugged terrain, why the southern hemisphere was so sparsely populated). Still, though, it was always a shock stepping into the light for the first time at monsoon's end, the external warmth a welcome unfamiliarity every year.

This day was, in fact, the most important holiday of the year—the start of the four-day movable festival that took place following the end of the monsoon. When that first cloudless morning came, the long-absent sun peeking over the horizon, the only thing most Vorta wanted to do was to go and stand beneath it. Everything shut down while the entire planet's population prepared for the first night of the Effulgence Festival, celebrating the return of light—and by symbolic extension, the hoped-for return of the Founders one day.

The festival's main tradition was the stringing of paper lanterns and tiny, twinkling electric lights over everything. People hung them from their flat balconies if they could, otherwise every residence tower window was bejeweled with them. Every tree in Tira City sparkled by the time darkness fell, and most people, after the evening religious service, decamped to one of the city's many parks, which shimmered with every color of light in the visible spectrum. With their weak eyesight, this spectacle tended to blur, in the far background, to a smear of brilliance to the Vorta, a deluge of light that was a blazing contrast to the eight and a half months of monsoon that they had endured.

Rippleberry wine flowed in earnest after services and no one abstained, though some people certainly imbibed more than was maybe strictly wise. Hawkers and vendors thronged the streets selling sky lanterns, religious trinkets, cheap holo-arcade programs, and, of course, food. A different edible was being sold every few meters, frying in skillets on portable burners or roasting over grills, the smells of all of it wafting through the district. Bean cakes, roasted and glazed kava nuts, honeycomb, sugar sticks, dulma rolls; anything that could be cooked outside and sold was. Past a certain hour music could be heard throughout the city, harmonies twining upwards into the night in Vorta polyphony. They didn't sing during the monsoon, and hearing the haunting musical lines twisting around each other was a powerful reminder that the sun had finally returned.

Weyoun and Eris stayed late into the small hours of the morning; so late that many people began drifting home. The second day of the festival began with a dawn service and Weyoun had always been one of those people who sensibly had gotten a good night's sleep before it—tonight, as the two of them strolled through the twinkling, glowing trees, hand in hand and sharing a honeycomb, he couldn't imagine going home and sleeping.

Eris stopped and tilted her head back, gazing upwards through the branches of a tree gilded with white and blue lights. Purple paper lanterns swayed from its lowest branches. One was still, and she reached up to delicately set it swinging again.

He just watched her, the way her skin seemed to catch glints of the dancing light and the way her eyes actually did; the delicate lilac at the backs of her ears and below her hairline, the curl of hair at the nape of her neck. Something swelled in his chest and he swallowed, knowing that he didn't have the words to describe what he was feeling. An avowal of love didn't have the immediacy, the visceral-ness, and so he watched her, knowing that whatever it was showed plainly enough in his eyes.

She looked towards him then, meeting his gaze, and searched his face for a moment, her eyes flicking minutely back and forth. She opened her mouth slightly to speak, but then closed it. While music swirled in the background, the two of them held their silence. The tight twining of their fingers around each other's said enough, anyway.

"Now, I'll be out all day tomorrow for the conference at Tira University. Miss Yeroi, are all the details finalized for my session with the media after the keynote?"

Two weeks into the dry season and life had returned to the frenetic pace of the sunny months. Most of the Council vacated the capital for the first few weeks, taking the time to visit their home exarchates, and their constituencies, for the first time in months. Being Tira City's senior senator absolved Soltoi of the traveling, but it didn't make her any less busy. Her days were booked almost solid as she met with constituents, lobbyists, businesspeople, and influential heads of families. A huge percentage of every year's political maneuvering was done in these first three weeks of the dry season. It was one of those times that no one slept very much, or went home very much, for that matter.

Additionally, Tira University held its annual political science conference during the second week of the dry season, which Soltoi was always invited to as a speaker and always attended.

Yeroi nodded briskly to Soltoi from her customary spot at the opposite end of the table, her earrings jingling. "I received the final list of questions the media is expecting to ask you just before I came in here."

"Good." Soltoi nodded. "Make sure to take down the names of those who stray from the list this year. I'll want them barred from any future sessions."

Weyoun watched as Yeroi quickly made a note of it. He could have made a guess at which media personnel would improvise their questions, since he spent plenty of time with them, but that, luckily, wasn't his job tomorrow. One of Soltoi's supporters was interested in expanding her strip-mining operations onto the outer slopes of Tiryn Mountain, and as it was a protected area, her efforts to do so had so far failed. She'd come to Soltoi several days ago and asked what could be done about it; as a result, Soltoi was planning to introduce legislation to diminish the protected area around the peak. Weyoun needed to begin building the case. It would be against the science lobby again, he was sure. They may have beaten him last time, but he was determined to win this round.

"That's all for today's agenda," Soltoi's personal assistant murmured from Soltoi's other side. Weyoun, on the senator's right, had kept silent for most of the meeting, devoting most of his attention to the nascent Tiryn Mountain case, but he glanced up at these words, waiting for Soltoi to indicate that the meeting was over and they were all dismissed.

Soltoi stared around the table at her staff for a moment, the nineteen of them keeping their eyes deferentially lowered. Then, she nodded in satisfaction and flicked a wrist, motioning to them that they could leave. Chairs squeaked as everyone stood up, and the staff began filing out of the briefing room. Before Weyoun reached the door, however, Soltoi said, "Mr. Uldron, a moment, if you please," stopping him. He allowed the others to pass by him while he watched the senator's face from slightly hooded eyes. She didn't speak again until after everyone else had left and she'd motioned to him to close the door.

"You're still seeing Arethoi," Soltoi said, folding her hands in front of her on the table.

The statement took him aback, though he tried not to show it. "I never realized that once I had a life to keep private it would be impossible to actually keep it that way," he remarked wryly.

"Come now, Weyoun, you're in politics. You know as well as anyone that there's no such thing as a private life." Her gaze bored into his. "Are you or aren't you?"

Her use of his first name startled him; she rarely bothered with such personal niceties, and it told him more than anything else, that there was nothing to do but be truthful. She obviously was already fully aware of the truth, anyway. "Yes," he said, feeling as though he was admitting to some wrongdoing. "Why do you ask?"

"Because I wonder if you see the lack of wisdom in what you're doing, considering she was the individual chiefly responsible for us losing the Hellad hearing."

He flicked his eyes downwards to show some measure of deference, but otherwise he held his ground. "I don't see how it matters. The hearing's long over."

Soltoi's lips thinned. "It matters because the media will always find something to talk about. It's unimportant when your…liaison began, the fact is that if you are seen with her, the historical narrative of the Tira City-Hellad hearing will become that Senator Soltoi's senior aide, the man responsible for ninety-five percent of the case, allowed it to collapse because he couldn't keep his eyes off a pair of nice legs." She held up a hand to forestall his defensive rejoinder before it had begun. "Now that excavation work has begun there again, interest is running somewhat high in the site. I don't care if the two of you are carrying on this age's great romantic epic. The press wants a story and you are handing one to them." Her gaze grew even harder. "It isn't the truth that matters, only the public's perception of it. But don't let me stand in the way of what is, no doubt, a grand passion—you'll just have to enjoy it without the benefit of a position in this office."

For a long moment, there was only silence in the room. The room's interface line pinged and she held the call to say to him, "I expect your decision within the week."

Weyoun smoothed every emotion out of his face. "Of course. You'll have it." He turned to go, keeping his expression impassive, but then Soltoi's voice stopped him.

"Oh, and Weyoun, I'd like to set up a meeting to discuss the possibility of you running for office in the upcoming election cycle."

He spun on his heel to face her again, a tendril of anger at her snaking through him at the manipulation, and then a wave of it overtaking him for his own susceptibility to it. There was a knowing smile on Soltoi's face. "As you know, my junior colleague Senator Parnon is reaching the end of his term in six months. You would be an excellent candidate to run against him."

His fists clenched and he forced himself to loosen them, though Soltoi would not have missed either action. He drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly, then looked her in the face. "When did you want to have the meeting?"

Soltoi's smile was cold and victorious. "I'm certain your schedule will be clear some night later this week." For a moment, he stood there, then he nodded curtly and stepped out of the room. "Weyoun," Soltoi said, "close the door on your way out, please."