Author's note: Just wanted to give a big thank you to everyone who's read and reviewed this. I know I've been terrible about updating it, especially considering I finished this fic 2 years ago (to the weekend!). I also know I've been terrible about responding to reviews. If you've left me one and I never wrote back, please know that I appreciate and value it so much - thank you for taking the time to tell me what you think or feel reading this. :)

EPILOGUE

Orbital bombardment commenced once all Vorta genetic material had been stored and received on the transport ships orbiting Kurill Prime. All cities with a population of more than ten thousand were destroyed from orbit; everything else was dealt with by Jem'Hadar ground troops. Special attention was paid to the slums, where it was known that enclaves of Vorta had stayed, either because they couldn't go to the sampling facilities or because they didn't understand the order. They were dispatched quickly. Within five years, all intelligent life on the planet had been eliminated, including those few Vorta who had hidden in the mountains or forests, blasphemously hoping to avoid the inevitable.

The First who led the fleet was not surprised that some of the pitiful Vorta put up such a fight. The one who'd brought his tiny ship out to the edge of the solar system had done so as well; trying to evade death when it should have been obvious to him that to do so was hopeless. The Jem'Hadar outmatched the Vorta in everything—strength, weaponry, intelligence, hardiness. He was unsure what the Founders saw in this race of weak talkers and politicians.

In fifteen years, when he was considered an Honored Elder, he would find out. The first cloned Vorta would begin taking positions that Jem'Hadar had always held; would give orders to the Jem'Hadar; would eliminate the need for any contact at all between the Jem'Hadar and their gods. And he would lead a massively destructive rebellion that would threaten to tear apart the fabric of the Dominion, at the end of which, long after the First's death, the Dominion would emerge stronger than ever, with the Vorta given an unforeseen task: they would dispense a new drug, Ketracel-white, to the Jem'Hadar, who would be bred to require one of their amino acids from this external source.

Relations between the Vorta and Jem'Hadar had already been somewhat strained. They would deteriorate. It would be the great joke of the Dominion: those who ran it held nothing but contempt for each other, and the Founders didn't care. With the subsuming of the Vorta into their empire, they were finally free to recede into the background, to allow their genetically altered subjects to keep order for them.

There were those Vorta, who, like Dorek'itlan, would rebel against their gods. Some defect in their genetic coding, perhaps, something gone wrong during the activation procedure. There was never any question of what needed to be done with these Vorta.

They were killed.

After all, there was always another clone to take their places.

The whole world, in a single pinprick of an instant, was blinding white glare and choking airlessness; instinct made him fight to breathe in the same moment that consciousness crashed over him and he could hear a high whine, and voices; calm, confident, controlled; and something cool was pressed to his neck and suddenly his airways cleared and he was able to draw in a deep, sustaining breath. The thought slipped through his mind: I'm dying, before he realized—no, it was just the opposite. He was being born.

His stomach lurched and the muscles in his neck worked on instinct, turning his head to one side so that when he vomited a rush of thick liquid, it went splashing away from his mouth and nose. Whatever liquid didn't flow away pooled around his neck, soaking his hair to his skull, and he laid there, gasping, as nausea ebbed and flowed through him. He vomited once more before his stomach was finally emptied of the liquid, and then in that white expanse that wasn't blindness but wasn't yet sight, he stared upwards and breathed in and out, listening to the voices and feeling the swirl of…thoughts, formless, in his mind.

Slowly, his senses began to sort through the world around him, filtering out the meaning from the noise. A harsh antiseptic odor, the whir of computerized machinery, the saline slime of the liquid still coating his mouth and throat. And then the murmur of voices grew more distinct and he realized he could hear substance in them; that they were not just meaningless babble but a rich feast of meaning to a starved mind.

"How do his organ systems look?" one of the voices said, somewhere in that nebulous white space above him.

A beat, and then another voice, differently pitched from the first, "All normal."

"Check his neural responses," the first voice said.

The white glare was slowly dissipating into something less blinding, and he found that by blinking—a sensation that at first was odd but within seconds was as natural as the breathing that he was now able to do so freely—it dimmed further, until he could begin to make out shapes moving around in the brightness.

"Neural responses look normal," the second voice said in a few moments. "Still coalescing. It might take a few minutes since this is the first clone."

"Let's hope there wasn't any mnemonic degradation. This memory rod's been in cryogenic storage for seventeen hundred years."

"There's nothing wrong."

"Sometimes the problem doesn't manifest right away. Remember Foros Two? It took months with him."

There was a sniff. "Foros didn't have mnemonic degradation; he was defective. At least the Foros line has been terminated now. Anyway, the procedure went smoothly with this one. They do shoddy work at DCF22; we don't."

A pause. He could see now—he already felt that he was lying supine, but now his eyes confirmed it. He was in a small room, surrounded by machinery, with a white dome half a meter over his head. The walls were covered in scrolling graphs and readings in a script that he couldn't read; meandering glyphs that flickered past too quickly for him to take in. The voices belonged to two figures—a man and a woman, their short black hair combed neatly away from their faces, and their pale skin and violet eyes marking them as Vorta.

The name came to him with a jolt. He didn't know how he knew, but he just as quickly realized that he was Vorta, that the pale skin and violet eyes were his also, and he was suddenly aware of his place in the cosmos. He was a servant, and his masters—his gods—were the Founders.

"Ask him the question," the first speaker said. It was the woman—he could tell now, from the voice, but he could also see her open her mouth; the way she glanced in his direction and met his eyes coolly, as though checking him for a response.

The other figure, the man, tapped at one of the walls, calling up a display that remained still rather than scrolling away to something else. He was joined there by the woman, who began watching the readings intently. The man approached him, looked straight at him, and asked, "Can you tell me your name?"

It was the first time either of them had addressed him directly. He knew he would need to speak and wondered for a moment how he would do so; he didn't remember knowing how to do it. But like the other things, this was something that came just like instinct.

"Cortical responses are all normal," the woman said without looking away from the display.

He swallowed; once, twice; opened his mouth to try to force something out, but all that emerged was a mangled choking.

"Try again," the man urged gently.

His throat worked, spasming in a motion that he remembered but had never actually performed, not in this body. But finally, with herculean effort, he forced out, "Weyoun."

The details of his progenitor's life were hazy. He was told it was normal; that there was a small, allowable amount of degradation in memory to be expected during the seventeen hundred years between his progenitor's death and Weyoun One's own activation. In the confusing days immediately following his activation, he spent a lot of time in his assigned quarters, staring at the blank wall or out the small window without really seeing either, feeling as though there was something just out of reach in his mind, as though the synapses were firing into empty space.

He was on Kurill Prime's larger moon, he found out, in the cloning facility there. Standard medical procedure gave him up to a week to recover from the activation process. When he wasn't trying to remember something that he couldn't, he was squinting into the black, atmosphere-less sky, trying to see stars. Occasionally, he thought he saw a faint white blur. Whenever he tried to focus on it, it was gone, but it filled him with a surprising joy, nonetheless.

Gradually, this sense of memories-just-out-reach faded. He would, over the centuries, come to associate the feeling with activation itself; just the brain firing itself up, sorting everything into place. What he could remember by then were his predecessors' lives, the tedium of a starbase administrator, their diplomatic negotiations and maneuverings, their commands on Jem'Hadar battle cruisers; all the accomplishments of a servant who excelled at his job. But most of his progenitor's life eluded him, and in that first week of Weyoun One's life, he didn't have lifetimes of memories to occupy him. There were snatches of memory, and sometimes odd things—a sound, or the way the light slanted, or even everyday objects—would bring something back. He knew, though could not recall much beyond a general doomed feeling, that almost every Vorta on Kurill Prime had been wiped out when Mount Tiryn had erupted explosively, causing earthquakes, tsunamis, and deadly clouds of ash. But he didn't remember it.

He was assigned to a base orbiting Kurill Six, the system's outermost gas giant, as a low-level administrative officer. In theory, the Jem'Hadar First in command of the men operating the dilithium mining facilities on several of the planet's moons answered to him—answered to any Vorta, as was the order of things. In practice, he didn't. The First was an Honored Elder and Weyoun was still only five years out of the cloning vat when the former was re-assigned. Though there was something galling about the fact that a Jem'Hadar viewed him as an inferior, deep down, Weyoun understood. The Jem'Hadar spent their whole lives serving the Founders—but serving them through the Vorta, and most of the time those Vorta would have the well-deserved superiority of multiple lifetimes. When, once in awhile, a newly-activated, first clone like him came along, Weyoun grudgingly supposed they couldn't be blamed for acting on their own deeply held sense of superiority.

He thought, now and then, that there was something buried in his past that made him, on occasion, despise the Jem'Hadar, but as was so often the case with his progenitor's memories, he couldn't pinpoint any distinct image. The same muddy haze seemed to pervade so much of that life.

And then some things were crystal clear.

The first time he saw Eris was three decades into his first clone's life, during the consolidation of the Dosi system, when he walked into a conference room on one of the Dosi's orbital docking stations to meet the other Vorta diplomatic operative he'd be working with. She was turned away from him, studying a screen on the wall, and he stopped so abruptly in the doorway that the two Jem'Hadar with him almost bowled him over. The curve of her hip, the line of her arms as she held them behind her back, was instantly recognizable, and as the door hissed shut behind him and the Jem'Hadar, she turned and met his eyes. It was obvious, from the way they widened, that she hadn't expected to see him there, either—but that more importantly, she recognized him. Over the next week, while they facilitated their small part of the diplomatic agreement with the Dosi, everything about her came flooding back to him, and he couldn't understand why she had only been a vague presence in his memories until then. And if this anamnesis wasn't everything, then it was close enough.

They worked well together. Obviously. They'd been married, after all, all those years ago. At the conclusion of the diplomatic negotiations, the sector supervisor said she would mention it in her report to the Founders. Weyoun and Eris glanced at each other, their eyes meeting in a quick flicker of pride. Their new orders would arrive the following day—perhaps, the supervisor suggested, they might like to explore the Dominion's newest acquisition. If they did, it would be wise to bring a few Jem'Hadar—a precaution, nothing more, as the Dosi had proved completely compliant so far.

Dosi was an interesting planet, to be sure, and Weyoun had been looking forward to exploring it. That had been before he'd known he would find Eris there. They sent their Jem'Hadar guards away, went to her quarters, and locked the door.

They hadn't dared be alone together like this while the negotiations were going on. Their interactions, until that moment, had been in front of Dosi or Jem'Hadar, or occasionally other Vorta, and they'd said so much and yet so little to each other. He'd been waiting for this moment all week, and now that it was here, he found that the weight of what he wanted to say was too great. It wasn't awkward, precisely, but neither of them knew what to say or do. They'd been married in a previous life, but they were different now. The question was, how different?

She looked the way he remembered her; her hair still short, her eyes that bluish-purple in a delicate face, but all it meant to him now was familiarity, another member of his species. Recalling that he'd once thought her the most gorgeous thing in the universe, presque vu shot through him as he tried, desperately, to see that now. He couldn't.

Finally, she broke the silence, saying with a wry smile, "Even you seem at a loss for words, and you've always been the more eloquent one between the two of us."

"There's a lot to say," Weyoun said, his own smile a little crooked with amused acknowledgement of her statement.

Her gaze held his. "Or maybe," she said meaningfully, "there isn't very much at all."

He gave her a sidelong look, feeling his heart thudding in his chest in a way he never had before, and not wanting to show it. "Surely there's been something you've wanted to say to me in the past seventeen hundred years."

"I see that your self-confidence hasn't suffered in all that time." The remark made a grin flash across his face, and she added, "Putting aside the fact that I've only been active for the past thirty-four years," a fact which he knew, and that she knew he knew, "I can't begin to imagine what I'd say to you." Her sly smile took any edge off the comment. Then, she grew more serious and admitted, "I didn't remember you, really, until I saw you. That seemed…wrong. You were…important to me." At that, she closed her eyes briefly, then opened them again and met his gaze. "In point of fact, you were everything."

There was something melancholy about that; the memory of it, and knowing that it could never be that way again, because the Founders were everything now.

Still, Weyoun took a step closer to her. "And you've missed me, despite the fact that you didn't know what it was you were missing."

She held his gaze. "Yes."

"That," he said, "is a feeling I understand very well."

He'd thought that it might matter that they could no longer see beauty in each other's faces or bodies. But when he took her hand, running his thumb over her knuckles, and she reached hesitantly towards his face, brushing her fingers from his forehead, down across his cheekbone to his jaw, and then back up the sweep of his ear, watching her own actions as though she needed the visual confirmation, it didn't matter. He drew in a sharp breath as their eyes met, and then the two of them were in each other's arms, clinging with a violence that was at odds with the Vorta personality.

First it was just an embrace, their arms tight around each other, and Eris buried her face in the crook of his neck. Her nose was cold; and it was that sensory detail that made desire flare in him, startling in its brightness and immediacy and demand; and then, though he wasn't quite sure who moved first, their mouths were on each other's. It was the awkwardness of a first kiss stretched over his memories of what this had been like, and then that awkwardness snapped and they found a rhythm that had been buried deep within both of them since their activations. He could hear and feel her heart pounding through layers of uniform—layers that were soon shed—and whatever they lacked in aesthetic sense didn't carry over to their bodies' instincts.

There wasn't enough—he couldn't kiss her hard enough, touch enough of her, to take her in after so many years, and for an instant he envied their gods their ability to really become one with each other. But when they came as close as two Solids could to such a thing, it was blasphemous enough what he was feeling for another Vorta without envying the Founders. Were their gods aware that this kind of intimacy between two Solids evoked some of the same worshipful feelings, the same transcendent ecstasy, as serving them did?

Though he wouldn't contemplate it in that moment—his brain was nothing but a hum of physical sensation that felt like it was overloading all his neural pathways—it was something he'd return to over his lifetimes. Eventually he'd conclude that they couldn't know—and nor should they, in their divinity, be privy, sully themselves, with such a pale shadow of the intimacy that they experienced in the Link.

It didn't stop Eris and him from maintaining their…connection. Maybe they were picking up where their progenitors had left off. More likely this was something new and different—their progenitors would have only had one life together, after all. It would have been easy to go down the sentimental road and insist that their romance was one for the ages. Eternal, profound, and special. Weyoun thought it rather more likely that whatever DNA sequence made Vorta faith in the Founders genetic could also trigger loyalties of a different sort. Not that it made what was between them any less real or powerful, and lying in bed with her after that first time, he didn't care that he was being sentimental. He loved her, and that felt like it was part of his genetic code.

Decades later, a curious fact of the Dominion's absolutist supremacy over its interstellar surroundings started to become clear to Weyoun—things didn't change. The Dominion endured, it marched onwards, it brought order to the chaotic universe around it. And the Founders' order was tantamount. Everything. Vorta and Jem'Hadar alike were sustained by their service, and whatever cultures they had, respectively, whatever outside desires and aspirations they had were allowed only by the Founders' grace.

Cloning brought its own stability. He died—and then he woke again into blinding white light and remembered dying, remembered his predecessor's life, and tried, for a day or two, to decide the best use of pronouns. His predecessors were both him and not him; it was an occasionally jarring way to live. Sometimes his memories told him how to feel about something, but he found that in the present, he felt an entirely different way through some quirk in the cloning process that gave him just enough individuality to distinguish himself from his predecessors, but not enough so that he was truly a separate person.

He never felt differently about Eris. If they were lucky, only months would pass between their meetings. If they were unlucky, it could be more than a year (once it had been two). They had, a few times, won some sort of cosmic lottery and been assigned to the same project or posting, though never for long. More often, they snatched a few hours, or even a few days, if they were both in the galactic neighborhood. It wasn't the way he remembered life with her—but then again, he didn't really remember life with her, not the day to day realities of it, only the fact of her.

Now and then, a memory—more an impression of a memory—flickered through his mind, of a child, and he thought that if he tried, he could grasp it and wrestle some form from it. But he always let it slip by, sensing something…toxic in it. Something that he didn't want to know.

And so the Dominion went on; he went on, through Weyouns One, Two, and Three (a battlecruiser tactical officer, whose successor was rewarded for his valiant sacrifice with a ship of his own).

It was one of those moments between assignments, on a starbase deep in Dominion territory, that Weyoun and Eris found themselves together again, for the first time in his new clone's life, for not the last in her third clone's. Weyoun Four stared vainly out the window, hoping for a glimpse of the nearest star, which would be bright enough, even from this deep space station, to see. But after a few moments of squinting, he determined, with a certain amount of resignation, that his quarters were in the wrong place. He didn't know the spin of the station, or its orbit, or if the star was visible even to those with better eyesight. Perhaps the station offered better views elsewhere.

Somewhere out there was the Kurill system, possibly visible to another species, hopelessly faint to the Vorta from any distance but a myopic barely extra-solar view. He hadn't been back to Kurill Prime for the entirety of his third clone's life and he supposed, with some surprise, that he missed it. There were no cloning facilities on the planet's surface—no Vorta would ever be born there, and yet, if they were like him, they all felt some pull towards it, the kind of pull that only a homeworld could exert. Maybe it was the pull of memories he didn't have, an amnesiac lifetime that he'd never get back.

Weyoun glanced over his shoulder at Eris. She looked at him, an eyebrow arched, waiting for him to speak, though he'd given no indication he was going to. He continued to stare at her for a moment, then asked musingly, "What if there was something terrible in our pasts that we couldn't remember?"

The thought had been nagging at him; ghosts of memories piled up over lifetimes made him suspect that there had been more to his progenitor than the scraps of recollection that had been left to him. But he couldn't force any of them into clarity, and most of the time he didn't think he wanted to. If the Founders didn't want him to remember, then it wasn't for him to try.

Eris's voice came from the floor, from the seating mat that the station's builders seemed to view as an acceptable piece of furniture. There was an amused levity to her tone as she asked, "If we can't remember it, did it even really happen?"

He chuckled and turned halfway, so that he could see both her and the window. "You always were the philosophical one." His gaze drifted back towards the window, and the matte blackness of flatly reflected light, and space beyond it. His reflection was visible as a blurry shadow. "What if it was something about me?"

There was a rustle as Eris rose to her feet and approached him, and he turned his head to watch her. With a slight furrow in her brow, she said, "There isn't anything that could change this."

Weyoun held her gaze. "You should keep that sort of faith in reserve for the Founders."

Her eyes were serious, in stark contrast to her tone only a minute ago, and she tilted her head in apparent thought about what he'd said. Finally, she replied quietly, "This isn't faith."

Raising his eyebrows, Weyoun asked, "No?" He reached out and took her hand and she smiled a little, twining her fingers with his, her grasp cool and sure and familiar and no, not at all about faith, and he asked, holding her gaze, "What is it, then?"

Her smile turned to the one that he felt sure must have made his progenitor fall in love with her, and she said, "Something else."

His fingers tightened around hers.

There was a fierceness to her eyes as she looked into his, and she said, "If I live a hundred lifetimes, this…" She seemed to struggle for words for a moment, and in the end, just gestured to the space between them; that space that seemed an entity all its own because no matter its fullest and widest extent, it always shrank back down to nothing. "This won't ever change. When they put my last clone's body on the decommissionment table and extract her synaptic rod, they'll find a thousand years' worth of memories of…us. Because as long as I serve the Founders, I'll feel this way about you, and nothing that you or I have ever done will ever change that fact."

"What about the one life we can't remember?"

"I remember that my progenitor loved you."

"Is that all that matters?"

She just looked at him, a slight smile on her face, and Weyoun returned it crookedly, saying, "You shouldn't make promises you can't keep, you know."

Eris tightened her hands around his. "I'm not."

But whatever memories he lacked were made up for by one: that moment that he'd walked into the conference room on the Dosi space station and seen her for the first time, deep in conversation with their sector supervisor as she'd turned and met his eyes, and there had been a flare of recognition and amazement.

He'd joined the two women, the supervisor saying, "Weyoun, this is Eris. The two of you will be working together on this assignment." Maybe she'd caught some silent exchange between the two of them, because she had perfunctorily asked, "Have the two of you met?" not sounding all that interested in the answer.

Weyoun had looked into Eris's eyes, returned the tiny smile that was tugging at her lips, and said, "Yes."

fin