Chapter Six

It was as if the room was spinning before her eyes, the people inside with it, and her own brain was on the fritz as well. Keevan...me...infected...

They were infected with a virus!

She tried not to panic, but how could Vera keep calm? She was too young to die, and so was Keevan. How did this happen? She had never been sick ever since she was still a teenager, and Vorta don't get ill, do they? Keevan certainly was with her ever since they got home. She looked at him and saw him close his eyes as if in despair.

"Julian, how could this happen?" she asked, finding it hard to keep the fear from her voice. He shook his head.

"I don't know exactly, but according to my readings, like any other disease, it was caused by a retrovirus that actually incorporated itself into the bloodstream. It couldn't have begun with the brain, because it's not Altarian encephalitis which Commander William Riker once had."

"It's not natural," Keevan repeated at last, eyes still closed, remaining that way until he reopened them and looked at the doctor, his face an expressionless mask. "It's man-made, isn't it?"

The room immediately went silent. Both Julian and Ezri, as well as Nurse Jabara - and Vera herself - now believed he seemed to know more about this man-made virus that didn't seem to have a name of its own. "Keevan, what do you know?" Ezri asked, seeming to have a theory that it had been HE who carried it. Vera's brain clicked then and there.

Keevan had carried this virus with him when he was exiled from the Gamma Quadrant, and as a result...passed it onto HER. Her blood chilled. She supposed she would be angry, but did he know he had it all this time? He would have told her if he did. Keevan had never once lied to her before; he promised on their wedding night they would never keep secrets from each other.

"I honestly do not know how this happened, but it's historic in the Dominion's history, commonly amongst the Vorta. It was called the Crimson Shadow Virus, a deadly disease that remains dormant within the body until..." He paused there and swallowed, shaking his head. "...sexual contact brings its devastating effects to the surface. The symptoms are always a high fever, nausea and a tremendous pain in the groin area." His eyes widened then and there, and he jerked his face ahead, avoiding looking at them altogether.

"By the Founders, why did I not notice sooner?!"

Vera curled into her seat, leaning against Ezri and wanting to cry as she could not think anymore and just watch the scene before her. Julian leaned over and put a hand on the Vorta's shoulder, but Keevan shrugged him off. "Keevan, you didn't know you had it when you came here, did you? Most viruses are unnoticeable in the first stages. Diabolical...sneaky," he said with his brows knitted together in deep thought. "You said this virus was...ancient?"

Keevan nodded. "For two hundred years, the Crimson Shadow Virus plagued my people and killed fifty Vorta in a single year, until the Founders and Vorta scientists as well as a handful of our Dominion allies found a miraculous way to eradicate the ailment, contain it and destroy it for good. It was never seen, heard of or spoken of again...I suppose until now."

"Could someone in the Dominion be...recreating it, and then tested you as their first guinea pig?" Ezri asked angrily. "You're not a favorite of theirs that you had to be the obvious choice, and so they sent you here to die alone and not give a damn. And Vera, too."

She was going to die with Keevan then. She moaned. Dying so soon at age twenty, with her second husband and last love - just their luck.

"Vera won't be as unfortunate as I."

She jolted backwards so her back arched a little against the chair, Dax's hand holding hers tightly. D-did he mean she would make it through the illness and he wouldn't? No no no no NOOOO! her mind screamed. She couldn't stand to lose him like this - she wouldn't...!

"You mean, she'll survive?" Julian asked, mildly surprised. "But she won't be cured without the proper medicines and procedures -"

"Not if you can get her to a doctor with this knowledge in time," Keevan interrupted, coughing briefly before continuing. "The system slowly shuts down and leads to a painless death that you never see coming. However, the inflicted being has only three weeks to live. Maybe less. We just ran the course of the second week. My wife is not Vorta, but my kind never make it."

Something inside Vera broke that she wanted to run over to him and hold him close. "No, Keevan I don't want you to die!" she cried. "I don't want to lose you, lose another I love so much!"

Julian sighed. "Ezri, Nurse, please take her for rest."

~o~

In all his years of medicine, Julian Bashir could not imagine two people with this love enduring such a tragedy - nor had he ever seen it in person before. Vera was broken and weeping for her husband than for herself, but it begged the question of a cure if any Vorta doctors or anyone from the Dominion could even agree to this, once they learned she was the wife of the one they banished. They could very much let her die like they did to Keevan.

He was left alone with the Vorta on the bio-bed. He barely acknowledged his wife taken out, trying to shut everything out and probably spare her from his pain. He wanted to die - or was he just trying to hide it? It was selfish to want to leave your spouse alone when you barely started your lives together.

Bashir had also never seen a virus like this, as he said before. If it killed many Vorta without leaving any alive, then there must be no cure for Vera, but she wasn't Vorta. He could really use Keevan's help, starting with anyone he was in close contact with if not sexually before he was exiled. "Keevan, this is your wife's life and yours depending on everything. It's very important that you remember being so close to anyone, or an event in particular that might have caused the virus to be in your system if not sexually. For example, maybe a blood transfusion or anything you ingested..."

Keevan's monotonous voice interrupted him. "It takes over a month for the malady to develop before it is complete and patiently awaiting for me to make carnal contact with the woman I love..." His eyes flew open at once, and Julian saw the realization glowing vivid in his eyes - as well as the horror in them.

"Gods have mercy. It was Yutaron and Sadara."

~o~

"Keevan, you're awake," breathed the soft voice of Sadara, the Vorta physician who was kind to all of her patients. He winced, wanting to sit up, but she helped him lay back down. "Please, ease. You're still weak and you lost a lot of blood. But I performed the transfusion. You'll be out of here in a few days."

"Ironic, isn't it, Doctor?" he asked sarcastically. "I deserve the Jem'Hadar torture for the Founders' pleasure. I know what you must be thinking: what was I thinking, voicing that the Vorta are a single race that should be treated as equal like the Federation treats their own kind? The Founders want me an example of renegade Vorta, not that I am not already."

She scoffed. "I admit, it was foolish. But Keevan, your tongue is stronger than most of our people. But you're just one man, and you know how one man can't make much of a difference in the Dominion lest he faces the wrath of the gods..."

He cut her off sharply. "Weyoun is one man, and he is our leader - at the Founders' side, of course. But he is a puppet whose strings are pulled, like the rest of us," he sneered. Sadara looked at him, shocked.

"Keevan, you shouldn't say such things! That is why I have heard Kilana and Gelnon talking about you. They do not like it any more than you and I do, and Eris, too, but the Founders don't want to kill your line - they want you to leave the Dominion forever."

He inhaled and let it out sharply; what more could he think or feel? He wasn't going to be executed...he was being banished. His people and "makers" were getting rid of him in a sure way worse than death. They were laughing at him, making him an example. He was a worthless excuse of a Field Supervisor; how had he proved himself so far? Trading his unit's lives for his own, allowed himself to be taken prisoner and not killing himself for the Changelings, then protesting his people's existence in his current life...

He had to say he agreed. But he was an individual. He wasn't defective, and he knew it. He would not give his own life up for another hundred years if he had to. Perhaps getting beaten by Jem'Hadar and left to bleed unconscious until someone else found him might be worth the trouble. No one liked him or praised him, no one treated him with respect - not mutual respect, but something more than was forbidden in the Founders' eyes - and certainly did not want him to be a "bad influence" on the rest. Whatever fate lay ahead for him, he would gladly accept it.

"Then I won't have to call it the will of the Founders," he said coldly to a shocked Sadara. "I call it the will of no one and nothing in particular. If that's what it is, then so be it. I'll take it better than I take serving shape-shifters playing gods."

~o~

"Sadara and Yutaron," Dr. Bashir repeated. "The...doctors, if I'm not mistaken?"

Keevan nodded. How could he not have suspected before? But it wasn't like the Dominion ever did anything without warning, and they always had good reasons that were obvious enough or were not known at all. "A couple days before I was sent away, and it was for reasons of my outspoken voice heard, I was taken and assaulted by a unit of Jem'Hadar - the Founders deemed it amusing to see me beaten to a pulp. I remember nothing but pain and losing blood, and I woke in the infirmary, having a transfusion performed and my injuries repaired - and to the news I was being expelled from the Gamma Quadrant. That is where my journey began," he said sarcastically, yet again. He thought he was making a joke of his own, but he took everything seriously. "Sadara was the doctor, and Yutaron was a scientist. I have no knowledge, but I believe he must have recreated the virus. He's renowned and respected, bringing back old methods and updating for today's technological and medicinal specializations."

"So, Dr. Sadara must have gotten a sample of the retrovirus from Yutaron and placed it into your new blood, transferred it into your system," Julian mused, disgusted, his lip curling. "It seems I now have a place to start." He moved to stand beside Keevan's bed and leaned down over him. "Keevan, you still have your personal communication system?"

He felt his eyes widen in horror. Unspoken, but Bashir was asking him to put him in contact with Sadara. The line would be traced for sure, but not unless the channel could be secured and coded. "Of course I do."

Julian's face split into a grin. "We're going to call your old friend, the good doctor."

~o~

"You going to tell your mother?" Ezri asked as she helped Vera back to her and Keevan's quarters after Bashir gave her pain suppressants and a drug to counteract any more nausea. He was keeping Keevan beside him a little while longer, needing his help in contacting an "old friend" from the Gamma Quadrant. She feared exciting the attention of the Founders if they discovered this...

"No," she said in response to Dax's question. "My mother should not know of my illness. She's been burdened enough. But if she needs to find out soon, then it won't be from me. She's bothered me long enough."

"Vera, that sounds harsh even coming from you." The Trill gasped. "She's your mother, no matter how much you might still hate her."

"Coming from someone who hates her own mother," Vera returned, pulling her hand gently from Ezri's hand and palming her quarters open. She was about to take a step inside before her brain snapped at remembering something. "Oh, God, how could I forget?"

"What?"

"I forgot to ask Julian about having a baby, or if this disease is making it impossible now."

Ezri smiled softly. "You can always go back later and ask. It won't be too late."

~o~

He could not believe he had almost forgotten about Sadara and Yutaron. Life had been so good he forgot about the bad times of his old life, and everyone in it. He had shunned all memories to the back of his mental recesses so well...until he found out his wife was sick with what he had, only he was the one going to die.

He had not wanted Vera to suffer with him on this, but it was too late. He was afraid of losing her more than himself now - or rather, afraid to die and leaving her alone to suffer his death. He was the last in his line, presumably, and the Founders did not trust him anymore they had to order his DNA template destroyed. He would be done for certain; his body was deteriorating each second that passed, in a few more days.

"Keevan," Bashir said after a moment as he allowed the Vorta to lock onto the channel, secure it and code it, "what if there IS a cure, but the Founders did not want one, just to make an example of your people for their own amusement? That's all the Changelings are, with Odo being the exception."

He snorted. "What do you know about Odo, Bashir? As far as I am concerned now, he is only one shape-shifter out of the hundreds of thousands in the Great Link. He won't be taken seriously anyway; I was a fool to think I could do what I did that day because of him."

"I've known Odo for years, including the last couple after the war ended even though he returned to his people," Julian said. "He's a good man no matter what his people have done. In fact, family is messy business. We all have had our shares, haven't we?" He was referring to his own estranged parents, Ezri's family problems herself and Vera involving her own, now Keevan and his people - the good doctor had a point. Family was messy.

"Keevan?"

The communications screen had beeped and showed the face of a Vorta female with her hair cropped close to her head like Eris, her features sharper though, and her eyes as wide as Keevan's. "Hello, Doctor," he said with a coy smile. "Never thought you would see my face again, did you?"

She visibly swallowed. "But what if the line is traced? What do you want from me? I have not heard from you in almost seven months..."

"Pardon me," Bashir interrupted, showing his face, "but we can discuss old friends and foes later. Dr. Sadara, my name is Julian Bashir, Chief Medical Officer of Deep Space 9, calling with Keevan here regarding an emergency involving -"

"The Crimson Shadow Virus," she finished, guilt and regret mingled in her entire face and eyes. Both men stiffened and briefly looked at each other before back at her.

"You've known along," Keevan accused, betrayal and anger coming to light at the confirmation. Sadara was supposed to care for her patients, not subject them to a deadly disease, but it was the Dominion. Yutaron was obviously the one behind the making of the virus, but it would be too simple to name him as the one who authorized it. The Founders gave the permission, but there also had to be a very important Vorta to first authorize the research above the scientist.

Sadara bowed her head. "I'm sorry, Keevan. The Founders did not want you to know, nor did they want me to tell you. I know it's hardly an excuse, but I'm not the only one to blame. Yutaron -" She paused and looked over her shoulder. "Gentlemen, I really cannot be online for this long. I'll return when the day is over so the lines are safer, but know that Yutaron was the one who came to me after your assault, gave me the infected protein to put into your donated blood, but he was not the only Vorta."

With that, she was about to cut the line off before Keevan halted her for one more second. "Sadara, the lives of both myself and my new wife are on the line; time is precious. Who was the other Vorta?"

Her answer was fearful, and Keevan could have sworn she was breaking out into a sweat any time soon.

"Weyoun."

The screen went back to the Starfleet symbol.

"Weyoun," both he and Bashir said in unison, disgust evident - but then Julian halted and looked back at him.

"Weyoun 8 was killed by Garak when he and Colonel Kira captured the Female Changeling. The cloning facilities were destroyed, so he was the last. How could he be alive?" he asked. Keevan lifted a single shoulder in a shrug. Inwardly as well as outwardly, he trembled with rage as he should have guessed. How else could it be him? Weyoun was conniving, sickly sweet, but not uncommon in Vorta. It was why Keevan despised him for being a favorite of the Female Founder in their years of history.

"There was still a copy of his DNA information in the Gamma Quadrant, along with others of us," he answered, half-closing his eyes when he felt himself clench between the legs again. "Oh, Julian, could you help me stand? I think Vera is wondering where I am."

Julian helped him stand. "When Dr. Sadara contacts again, leave it to me, I promise. Don't you lose hope, and tell Vera I said so. I never give up on anyone - not even you two."

Keevan was startled by this passion. The doctor was disgusted with him regarding the incident three years ago, but now he was kind to him and helping him and his wife. Julian saw him as a friend, and he remembered swearing to have nothing to do with him, his wife, the others on this station - and Vera in the beginning. But now they all meant the universe to him.

~o~

"Vera."

She looked up when she saw him come into their bedroom. She was so tired she could not go into the shop today, and her mother was angry that she was losing her daughter every day. But Vera was keeping this secret for her own reasons, and to protect Keevan. Knowing her mother, Norah would curse at him for infecting her "child" and give that a good enough excuse to go to Colonel Kira to separate the bridal pair. She didn't want that to happen, and it made her wrench inside.

"Coming to bed?" she asked softly, moving over so he could crawl beside her and lean against her shoulder. He was more distant than she was, like he had failed in protecting her, and he was dying while she might make it. Tears pricked her eyes again as she wrapped her arms around him.

"I'm so sorry," he whispered.

Vera kissed his moist forehead. "I love you, Keevan. You didn't know about this. Stop blaming yourself." In truth, she was suffering more than he was and she knew it. She didn't want to lose him, trusted Julian with everything, but she loathed Keevan's people for doing this to him. If she had the power, she'd make them pay for this. But all she could do was spend whatever time left with her husband until Julian managed to get a trusting Vorta doctor without exciting the attention of the Founders.

"I was afraid to love, for so many reasons," he went on, resting his cheek over her breast and placing one arm around her waist. "I did not want to be hurt, and I did not want the other hurt. I don't regret falling in love and marrying you, but now I'm afraid again like I was then. I want to be here with you, but this ailment is taking me from you. I'm not a clone anymore, so I can't return to you in the end. I get one shot now like you do."

"Stop talking like this," she whispered sharply. "Stop feeling sorry for yourself and just spend more time with me now. I don't want to live in this nightmare anymore, and I want to believe there is a cure no matter what. We're both too tired to make love anymore, so let's just sleep in each other's arms." Keevan looked up at her and gave her another weak smile before raising his head to chastely kiss her on the lips and falling asleep against her steadily beating heart.

~o~

Julian Bashir once more was speaking to Dr. Sadara on coded transmission later when the day was over, when no one monitored the communications channel. "Hello again, Dr. Sadara," he said. "Now, Weyoun is the one who is responsible besides the Founders."

She nodded somberly. "Of course, Julian - if I may call you that," she added hastily, and he nodded. "Weyoun is not a man to trifle with, as you know yourself. He authorized not only Keevan's sickness but three others before him. One was a female who died along with her partner; three more have recently finished their time. Keevan was the latest. The Founders can no longer conquer the Alpha Quadrant with the peace treaty, but they could experiment with the rebirth of the ancient Crimson Shadow Virus. But Weyoun thinks this is another construction of a new weapon for another attempted take-over, not the fact that it is going to eradicate much of his people's population as it almost did in the ancient times."

Julian closed his eyes. So, the Founders were not as conquering as they used to be, so they must have decided to recreate an extinct Vorta disease to try and eradicate the people. Odo must be trying to stop them despite attempting to get them to live in peace with the solids to no avail thus far. That meant the Federation had to intercede now, no matter the peace treaty - which meant violating the truce. But there were two lives at stake, and might as well be the entire Vorta population no matter being engineered to serve...

"Doctor, Keevan and his wife need help, and if we can find a cure to this disease, maybe get our hands on Yutaron and destroy what has been done of the virus so we can prevent a spread of this throughout the Gamma Quadrant -" he started only for her to cut him off.

"Julian, it won't be easy. It means another war in violation of the treaty. I want to help Keevan, but my head will be had at Weyoun's order..."

His brain finally began to get a hold of a new theory altogether. He began to suspect what if the Founders knew nothing about this experimentation, that Weyoun somehow decided to disobey them - especially Odo - but then again he might be wrong, as Weyoun was too loyal to do such a thing. Unless Yutaron had concocted something that brainwashed Weyoun...

"Sadara, no time has to be wasted. An entire section of the galaxy as well as two people we both love most are depending on us. You need to gather as many of your trusted physicians and scientists to come immediately to Deep Space 9. And Odo - he is the only Founder you can count on."

Her thoughtful expression was enough to tell him she knew she could not argue further. Chewing her lower lip briefly, she nodded her agreement.

In Star Wars: The Clone Wars at some point as it has been awhile since I saw the show, there was a deadly virus on the planet Naboo being recreated that the Jedi and Senator Padme Amidala had to stop, called the Blue Shadow Virus. It was very deadly, killed the victim slowly. I had to use the name as inspiration. :) My boyfriend even said Crimson Shadow sounded badass and with a darker meaning behind it - and to me, crimson was a passionate color, tying with the sexual part.

Now things are taking a turn for the worse, and the plot thickens. This is where "fatal" comes into the story title.