"A Brief for the Defense" for the Helo shAgathon, Helo/Racetrack
Title: A Brief for the Defense
Author: Alizarin
Fandom: BSG
Pairings: Mainly Helo/Racetrack. Also Helo/Sharon.
Rating: NC-17 Plus warnings for angsty adult themes
Words: around 2900
Written for: The Helo shAgathon, hosted by inlovewithnight!
Recipient: grav_ity
Request: Helo/Racetrack, Prompt: general sense of wrongness, before Helo and Sharon get married...but after Hera "dies". Any treatment of Helo/Sharon. (Something about Adama's words of wisdom got worked in as well.)
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
1.
Their baby was dead. All the more reason to give up. Helo would have liked to give it all up, Sharon included. Sharon, most of all.
It wasn't hard to keep loving her. It was hard to accept that he still did. He’d never had it before - love. People he knew gave it up all the time, for various reasons, but he wasn't like them. And now that he knew the truth about her? Knowing was one thing, feeling was a different matter.
The hard lights and hard rains of Caprica seemed like a dream. Helo remembered running through the forest, the explosions, the fear, the starvation, and of course, Sharon. It was bizarre to think that the Sharon he’d parted with when he’d given his seat to Baltar - of all people! - wasn’t his Sharon.
Helo had only one.
2.
Sharon was taken back to her cell immediately after. You killed her, she kept saying, to anyone who would listen. But why would they kill her? Why would he kill his own child? Who was Sharon talking to?
Racetrack came to his quarters after the news had circulated. Helo had been loyal to whomever he was with - always - despite his friendships with women he found attractive: Kara, Dee, Kat, even Sharon at one point. He’d never thought of Racetrack that way. She was quiet, strong, almost manly sometimes - one of the boys. She rarely took her hair out of the regulation braid. She eschewed markers of personal style that the other girls adopted. He could rely on her.
She entered the private room Helo’d been temporarily assigned without knocking. Helo would have told her to go away if he could have trusted his own voice. Her jaw was clenched as she looked at him, daring him to rebuff her offered comfort. He cuffed his hand over the salt stinging his face.
“I heard,” she said.
Helo’s voice shook, but it was okay, he wasn’t going to care. “I really need to be alone right now.”
“Maybe. Maybe you need a friend.”
“We’re friends?”
He still wasn’t sure he forgave her for what she’d said about Sharon when they'd returned to Galactica. Right now though, he could hardly blame her. She gently laid a hand on his arm and said, “Yes.”
He sighed and moved over on his cot to indicate she could sit. She did, fingering the rough brown blanket in the space between them, suddenly shy.
Her body was warm and her lips were surprisingly lush under his. He didn’t want to take advantage but he didn’t want to do a lot of things lately. He wanted full and complete minutes where he didn’t think about his dead daughter or his Cylon lover at all. She was warm and sweaty underneath him where their bodies met. She was thin and smelled like the barracks, but nothing like Sharon and nothing like Caprica.
Helo wasn’t sure if she smelled like home.
3.
Helo had a lot of work to do to repair relationships with his old shipmates. Friends were uneasy and no one was quite ready to trust him - hadn’t they been burned by Boomer? He couldn’t be with Sharon, couldn’t touch her, couldn’t even talk to her except through a thick plate of glass. He’d barely saved her from those animals from the Pegasus - the bastards who’d wanted to touch his woman - it had made him crazy.
The new feeling of crazy wasn’t familiar. He was known as level-headed, reliable, trustworthy. That was why Starbuck came to him with her drama; she knew she could lay it all out flat in front of him and it wouldn’t buckle under his gaze. He wouldn’t buckle - he’d still be her friend.
Even with Commander Cain dead and the Pegasus threat removed, the fact remained: Sharon was a Cylon. And now, their child was dead.
“Go on when you have no other options,” Adama told him.
The old man was clinking the ice in his drink and he let Helo finger one of his precious fat cigars. Adama lost a son. Helo tried to imagine having two children to lose. How did Adama ever let Lee out of his sight? He wondered why Adama wasted so much time butting heads with Lee then squandering the rest of his affection on his adopted children. People like Kara, like him, like Boomer. Even the children he adopted let him down.
Helo vowed not to let the old man down, even though he knew it was a stupid vow to make.
“Go on.” That was what Adama told him when they met to discuss a return to regular duty after the Pegasus incident. “When you have no other options, go on.” It wasn’t really great advice, it was defeat, but it made Helo feel stronger somehow.
So he worked hard. Every minute of every day. He was a little reckless, and he volunteered for every kind of dangerous recon mission that was available. He’d come in hot and Apollo threatened to ground him, getting right up in his face so that Helo could see the blue in the cords of his neck and feel the spit on his face. It was satisfactory to be able to look down on Apollo and wait until he’d spent his rage and turned away.
Helo cared about the rules, still, sure, but everything was different.
Racetrack was waiting for him outside the hangar bay, having witnessed the exchange.
“As always, Racetrack, your timing sucks.”
“What is your frakking problem, Helo,” she shot back. “At this stage, I’m a better pilot than you… hell, every newbie in the fleet is a better pilot than you.”
Helo walked away and she followed him. She was a persistent fighter, especially when it was personal. Kara learned the hard way that it took a punch to the face to get Racetrack to back off when she was fired up. Kara said she had a hard skull, too.
He had planned to get to his quarters and slam the door in her face, but instead, he pulled her inside and then slammed the door, pushing her up against it. Rage burned up inside, he felt himself spinning out of control. He wanted to feel his feet on solid ground again. He pressed up against her mouth and she opened up to him, giving in, a small moan escaping before he thrust his tongue in and worked his hands up under her tank.
He wanted to feel her bend under him, he wanted to make sure she couldn’t breathe, he wanted to be cruel, like others had been cruel to him, and to Sharon. He needed that release and he needed that control. He pulled at her fly and she gasped.
“Let me… take my boots…”
“Frak it,” Helo said. He got her pants open and pulled them down around her ass. He heard a seam rip as the thin, often-washed fabric tore somewhere. He turned her around to the door and bit and licked the back of her neck. That damn braid. He tugged on it until it came loose and he wound his hands through it, pulling at the tangles, tossing strands free, letting it fly into his mouth as he continued to kiss her neck.
He unzipped himself and did a cursory run of his tongue along his palm, then gripped himself and worked his cock between Margaret’s legs. She moaned and murmured encouraging phrases. He wasn’t gentle going in and he didn’t slow down once he’d started, pressing his hips hard against her, making short stabs until he could feel more of a slide.
With one hand he reached around to cup her small breast, gripping and twisting until she cried out. The other hand he returned to her hair and pulled hard, baring her neck again.
He didn’t think about his child, he didn’t think about Sharon, or Caprica, or even Apollo or Starbuck or Adama or Chief, or any of the rest of his fraught relationships. Not until they were done and he was alone, Margaret leaving him with a quick, hard kiss, whispering, “frakkin’ amazing,” into his ear.
4.
“My family was full of hard workers, I guess I’m no different,” Racetrack said one day in the hangar bay. She was banging on the wing of a Viper as if it had done her wrong, but she didn’t leave a job until it was done to perfection. No room for error in her repair work.
“My family was lazy,” Helo said with the sultriest smile he could manage. Kara heard him and strolled over with a matching wicked grin.
“You’re an Agathon, through and through, no one doubts that,” she said. She punched him in the arm and winked at Racetrack. “Also called LAG-athon, for obvious reasons.”
“Spacey Thrace, isn’t it? For all those times you were caught daydreaming in lectures.” Helo turned back to Racetrack. “Seriously, you must have come from a great line of pilots or scientists, or something special.”
Racetrack grimaced at the obvious flirting. “I have… I had… seven brothers and sisters. You know what? None of us were special. None of us lit up my parents’ lives. We were a bunch of brats with bad manners.” She banged harder on the wing.
“Sounds about right,” Starbuck said over the din, rolling her eyes. She sauntered off, as if suddenly bored with the conversation.
“I wish I’d had the chance to be a parent,” Helo ventured. He wasn't sure he wanted to talk about it, but there it was, he'd said it. “Even to a real brat.”
"Yeah." Racetrack ducked under the wing. "But just so you know, not every child is a miracle." She peered around the wing, looking guilty. "That probably doesn’t help."
“No,” he said, almost cheerfully. “Not at all. My child may have been - the gods knows what - maybe a miracle, maybe just a handful of trouble - but she was mine. I wanted that chance.”
“Her life would have been hell.”
“That does help, a little, that she was spared that.” Fear, hatred, ignorance. Experimentation.
“Karl, I can’t say anything to make it better for you. All I can do…” She put her hand on his arm. He understood. He was grateful.
They took things slow and sweet this time, holding in their release and letting it swing like a pendulum between them until it broke and washed them over in waves of pleasure that seemed unending. She stayed the night in his quarters and slipped out in the early morning hours without waking him. He realized he'd slept without nightmares for the first time in months. But he still woke up alone.
5.
When Hera died, Sharon grieved. Right there in the infirmary, she broke down, she ranted, she raved. Helo held her, but it didn’t matter. He held her, but he didn’t really feel her, he only felt his own pain.
One of the overhead lights shone down on the dead baby. It looked like a thing, a prop, something that never had any life to lose. Sharon’s face swam into his vision and then came under that same light. It was bright, and the harshness of it burned a curve along her neck. A white light crept under skin. Her hair was too black, her jaw a rigid line, her eyes were dark and covered by shadows. Suddenly she was no longer real. She seemed inhuman. In fact, Helo realized for the first time, really and truly, that she wasn’t human.
Eventually the softness returned to her face and once again, he began to see himself reflected here, as she saw him, with love and with trust. That moment though, when he had seen those hard, reflective surfaces, was the moment he would look back on and know: This is a machine.
6.
“You can’t just come in whenever you feel like it,” Helo said as Margaret entered and closed the door behind her. She didn’t say anything for long seconds. This whole thing was going too fast and he just wasn't ready. “I’m not kidding, Maggie,” he said, trying to break whatever it was he saw in her strange stare, the rising feeling of panic in his chest.
“I come to you whenever you feel like it,” she finally said. “That much we both know.”
“It’s not… look, it’s not like that, it’s just that… you’re my friend.”
“I’m pregnant,” she said, eyes still leveled at him like lasers.
“Oh. It’s…”
“Yours.” Of course it was. He knew that, he didn’t know how, but he knew. "Thought you ought to know."
A thousand things went through his head, rotating like the stars outside the windscreen when he took a Viper into a hard roll. Too fast to focus on just one but distinctly there, all of them.
She shut the door behind her, quietly, her head still high. He lowered his.
7.
“When did we first meet?” Helo asked Racetrack. They were in the canteen, playing cards. A few others cursorily joined in, but the game was going nowhere and they kept forgetting whose turn it was. The room stank of smoke and alcohol and Starbuck was on the other side of the room, having some sort of altercation with Kat.
“They should just get a room,” Hot Dog remarked, looking at them.
“We met in Basic, don’t you remember?” Racetrack said, ignoring Hot Dog. “You conspired with X-man, Geronimo and Stinky to come up with a callsign for me before the girls did.”
“Stinky, fuck, I miss that fucker,” Hot Dog said, throwing down a card that was irreconcilable to the game.
“No one could get a handle on you,” Helo said.
“I was shy, if you can believe that. Until you guys found out I liked to bet on the horses.”
“Frak, I miss horses,” Hot Dog said.
“Racetrack was born,” Helo said.
“Or bred, you might say,” she winked at him, her eyes shinier than normal.
8.
Helo had failed to significantly appreciate the moment. That, and all the other moments with her. And particularly when she'd told him she was pregnant.
Banging someone, as Starbuck would crassly say, was what he thought he’d been doing - and banging someone wasn’t real, it had no consequences, it wasn’t love, and it wasn’t enough certainly, to make a child.
Some of the women had mentioned the odd failures of their birth control patches; whispered suspicion that they were out-of-date and could no longer be relied on, some going so far as to say that sabotage was involved “for the sake of the human race.” Helo couldn’t imagine this kind of worry. He could only think of the child he lost. The rest of it was inconceivable.
He went to visit Sharon. She turned her back to him, finally exhausted by the endless conversations about how much he loved her, how he’d wait for Adama to come around, that she wouldn’t be locked up forever.
Helo was exhausted too.
9.
He realized as he ran down the hall that it wouldn’t be easy. It would take time to build a relationship, along with all the relationships he was rebuilding among the crew. But it was all going to be okay. Tough, to have a baby on board Galactica, he knew that, but he didn’t care, he’d never cared.
He was going to have a son or a daughter, one with a chance at a real life, one that was fully human.
He banged his shoulder entering the barracks where Margaret had her bunk. He got looks from a few who were suffering from insomnia, several others shuffled in their bunks. Margaret’s rack had the curtain drawn and the light was out. He knelt down.
“Margaret,” he whispered. Then again, more urgently, “Margaret, Maggie.”
She pulled back the curtain. “Karl.”
“I need to talk to you,” he said. He wanted to climb into her rack with her, but her fingers clutched the curtain tightly, shielding her private space, so all he could see was her face and a halo of sleep-muzzled hair. “I’ve thought about you - about us.”
“Yeah, so?”
“I want to - listen this isn’t very private; I want to talk, I want to be…” he stumbled, he felt his twist with discomfort. Why was she looking at him like that? “I want to be with you. With you and our baby.”
"Karl," she interrupted, looking him full in the face. “It’s over. I saw Doc Cottle today. It’s too late.”
“What,” he asked stupidly, thinking of Doc Cottle with a twinge of rage. “Why is it too late, is the baby okay?”
“It’s not a baby, it’s not anything. I terminated. I’m sorry. It’s for the best. Now just get out of here.”
He wanted to say more, say something, but the words stopped up in his throat. A bottleneck of sadness and shock. Sharon, she would never have done that, he thought, but the truth was, he didn’t know. He didn’t know what anyone would do, he didn’t know who anyone was. He didn’t know what they were.
He went back to his quarters, curled up on the bed, into his own body. He felt the clench of pain in his gut, the fire in his belly, his love for Sharon overwhelming him. He felt the painful love for his children wash over him, and grief for the human race.
Adama said to go on, even when you didn’t know what to do - just go on.
After a while, he realized he had a job to do, a woman he loved, a family to fight for. Sharon was his rock, his true love, and he was lucky.
It was a long time before he stopped waking up in the early morning hours thinking he heard the sound of a baby crying in the dark.
A Brief for the Defense
By Jack Gilbert
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.
from REFUSING HEAVEN (Knopf 2005)
.
Author: Alizarin
Fandom: BSG
Pairings: Mainly Helo/Racetrack. Also Helo/Sharon.
Rating: NC-17 Plus warnings for angsty adult themes
Words: around 2900
Written for: The Helo shAgathon, hosted by inlovewithnight!
Recipient: grav_ity
Request: Helo/Racetrack, Prompt: general sense of wrongness, before Helo and Sharon get married...but after Hera "dies". Any treatment of Helo/Sharon. (Something about Adama's words of wisdom got worked in as well.)
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
1.
Their baby was dead. All the more reason to give up. Helo would have liked to give it all up, Sharon included. Sharon, most of all.
It wasn't hard to keep loving her. It was hard to accept that he still did. He’d never had it before - love. People he knew gave it up all the time, for various reasons, but he wasn't like them. And now that he knew the truth about her? Knowing was one thing, feeling was a different matter.
The hard lights and hard rains of Caprica seemed like a dream. Helo remembered running through the forest, the explosions, the fear, the starvation, and of course, Sharon. It was bizarre to think that the Sharon he’d parted with when he’d given his seat to Baltar - of all people! - wasn’t his Sharon.
Helo had only one.
2.
Sharon was taken back to her cell immediately after. You killed her, she kept saying, to anyone who would listen. But why would they kill her? Why would he kill his own child? Who was Sharon talking to?
Racetrack came to his quarters after the news had circulated. Helo had been loyal to whomever he was with - always - despite his friendships with women he found attractive: Kara, Dee, Kat, even Sharon at one point. He’d never thought of Racetrack that way. She was quiet, strong, almost manly sometimes - one of the boys. She rarely took her hair out of the regulation braid. She eschewed markers of personal style that the other girls adopted. He could rely on her.
She entered the private room Helo’d been temporarily assigned without knocking. Helo would have told her to go away if he could have trusted his own voice. Her jaw was clenched as she looked at him, daring him to rebuff her offered comfort. He cuffed his hand over the salt stinging his face.
“I heard,” she said.
Helo’s voice shook, but it was okay, he wasn’t going to care. “I really need to be alone right now.”
“Maybe. Maybe you need a friend.”
“We’re friends?”
He still wasn’t sure he forgave her for what she’d said about Sharon when they'd returned to Galactica. Right now though, he could hardly blame her. She gently laid a hand on his arm and said, “Yes.”
He sighed and moved over on his cot to indicate she could sit. She did, fingering the rough brown blanket in the space between them, suddenly shy.
Her body was warm and her lips were surprisingly lush under his. He didn’t want to take advantage but he didn’t want to do a lot of things lately. He wanted full and complete minutes where he didn’t think about his dead daughter or his Cylon lover at all. She was warm and sweaty underneath him where their bodies met. She was thin and smelled like the barracks, but nothing like Sharon and nothing like Caprica.
Helo wasn’t sure if she smelled like home.
3.
Helo had a lot of work to do to repair relationships with his old shipmates. Friends were uneasy and no one was quite ready to trust him - hadn’t they been burned by Boomer? He couldn’t be with Sharon, couldn’t touch her, couldn’t even talk to her except through a thick plate of glass. He’d barely saved her from those animals from the Pegasus - the bastards who’d wanted to touch his woman - it had made him crazy.
The new feeling of crazy wasn’t familiar. He was known as level-headed, reliable, trustworthy. That was why Starbuck came to him with her drama; she knew she could lay it all out flat in front of him and it wouldn’t buckle under his gaze. He wouldn’t buckle - he’d still be her friend.
Even with Commander Cain dead and the Pegasus threat removed, the fact remained: Sharon was a Cylon. And now, their child was dead.
“Go on when you have no other options,” Adama told him.
The old man was clinking the ice in his drink and he let Helo finger one of his precious fat cigars. Adama lost a son. Helo tried to imagine having two children to lose. How did Adama ever let Lee out of his sight? He wondered why Adama wasted so much time butting heads with Lee then squandering the rest of his affection on his adopted children. People like Kara, like him, like Boomer. Even the children he adopted let him down.
Helo vowed not to let the old man down, even though he knew it was a stupid vow to make.
“Go on.” That was what Adama told him when they met to discuss a return to regular duty after the Pegasus incident. “When you have no other options, go on.” It wasn’t really great advice, it was defeat, but it made Helo feel stronger somehow.
So he worked hard. Every minute of every day. He was a little reckless, and he volunteered for every kind of dangerous recon mission that was available. He’d come in hot and Apollo threatened to ground him, getting right up in his face so that Helo could see the blue in the cords of his neck and feel the spit on his face. It was satisfactory to be able to look down on Apollo and wait until he’d spent his rage and turned away.
Helo cared about the rules, still, sure, but everything was different.
Racetrack was waiting for him outside the hangar bay, having witnessed the exchange.
“As always, Racetrack, your timing sucks.”
“What is your frakking problem, Helo,” she shot back. “At this stage, I’m a better pilot than you… hell, every newbie in the fleet is a better pilot than you.”
Helo walked away and she followed him. She was a persistent fighter, especially when it was personal. Kara learned the hard way that it took a punch to the face to get Racetrack to back off when she was fired up. Kara said she had a hard skull, too.
He had planned to get to his quarters and slam the door in her face, but instead, he pulled her inside and then slammed the door, pushing her up against it. Rage burned up inside, he felt himself spinning out of control. He wanted to feel his feet on solid ground again. He pressed up against her mouth and she opened up to him, giving in, a small moan escaping before he thrust his tongue in and worked his hands up under her tank.
He wanted to feel her bend under him, he wanted to make sure she couldn’t breathe, he wanted to be cruel, like others had been cruel to him, and to Sharon. He needed that release and he needed that control. He pulled at her fly and she gasped.
“Let me… take my boots…”
“Frak it,” Helo said. He got her pants open and pulled them down around her ass. He heard a seam rip as the thin, often-washed fabric tore somewhere. He turned her around to the door and bit and licked the back of her neck. That damn braid. He tugged on it until it came loose and he wound his hands through it, pulling at the tangles, tossing strands free, letting it fly into his mouth as he continued to kiss her neck.
He unzipped himself and did a cursory run of his tongue along his palm, then gripped himself and worked his cock between Margaret’s legs. She moaned and murmured encouraging phrases. He wasn’t gentle going in and he didn’t slow down once he’d started, pressing his hips hard against her, making short stabs until he could feel more of a slide.
With one hand he reached around to cup her small breast, gripping and twisting until she cried out. The other hand he returned to her hair and pulled hard, baring her neck again.
He didn’t think about his child, he didn’t think about Sharon, or Caprica, or even Apollo or Starbuck or Adama or Chief, or any of the rest of his fraught relationships. Not until they were done and he was alone, Margaret leaving him with a quick, hard kiss, whispering, “frakkin’ amazing,” into his ear.
4.
“My family was full of hard workers, I guess I’m no different,” Racetrack said one day in the hangar bay. She was banging on the wing of a Viper as if it had done her wrong, but she didn’t leave a job until it was done to perfection. No room for error in her repair work.
“My family was lazy,” Helo said with the sultriest smile he could manage. Kara heard him and strolled over with a matching wicked grin.
“You’re an Agathon, through and through, no one doubts that,” she said. She punched him in the arm and winked at Racetrack. “Also called LAG-athon, for obvious reasons.”
“Spacey Thrace, isn’t it? For all those times you were caught daydreaming in lectures.” Helo turned back to Racetrack. “Seriously, you must have come from a great line of pilots or scientists, or something special.”
Racetrack grimaced at the obvious flirting. “I have… I had… seven brothers and sisters. You know what? None of us were special. None of us lit up my parents’ lives. We were a bunch of brats with bad manners.” She banged harder on the wing.
“Sounds about right,” Starbuck said over the din, rolling her eyes. She sauntered off, as if suddenly bored with the conversation.
“I wish I’d had the chance to be a parent,” Helo ventured. He wasn't sure he wanted to talk about it, but there it was, he'd said it. “Even to a real brat.”
"Yeah." Racetrack ducked under the wing. "But just so you know, not every child is a miracle." She peered around the wing, looking guilty. "That probably doesn’t help."
“No,” he said, almost cheerfully. “Not at all. My child may have been - the gods knows what - maybe a miracle, maybe just a handful of trouble - but she was mine. I wanted that chance.”
“Her life would have been hell.”
“That does help, a little, that she was spared that.” Fear, hatred, ignorance. Experimentation.
“Karl, I can’t say anything to make it better for you. All I can do…” She put her hand on his arm. He understood. He was grateful.
They took things slow and sweet this time, holding in their release and letting it swing like a pendulum between them until it broke and washed them over in waves of pleasure that seemed unending. She stayed the night in his quarters and slipped out in the early morning hours without waking him. He realized he'd slept without nightmares for the first time in months. But he still woke up alone.
5.
When Hera died, Sharon grieved. Right there in the infirmary, she broke down, she ranted, she raved. Helo held her, but it didn’t matter. He held her, but he didn’t really feel her, he only felt his own pain.
One of the overhead lights shone down on the dead baby. It looked like a thing, a prop, something that never had any life to lose. Sharon’s face swam into his vision and then came under that same light. It was bright, and the harshness of it burned a curve along her neck. A white light crept under skin. Her hair was too black, her jaw a rigid line, her eyes were dark and covered by shadows. Suddenly she was no longer real. She seemed inhuman. In fact, Helo realized for the first time, really and truly, that she wasn’t human.
Eventually the softness returned to her face and once again, he began to see himself reflected here, as she saw him, with love and with trust. That moment though, when he had seen those hard, reflective surfaces, was the moment he would look back on and know: This is a machine.
6.
“You can’t just come in whenever you feel like it,” Helo said as Margaret entered and closed the door behind her. She didn’t say anything for long seconds. This whole thing was going too fast and he just wasn't ready. “I’m not kidding, Maggie,” he said, trying to break whatever it was he saw in her strange stare, the rising feeling of panic in his chest.
“I come to you whenever you feel like it,” she finally said. “That much we both know.”
“It’s not… look, it’s not like that, it’s just that… you’re my friend.”
“I’m pregnant,” she said, eyes still leveled at him like lasers.
“Oh. It’s…”
“Yours.” Of course it was. He knew that, he didn’t know how, but he knew. "Thought you ought to know."
A thousand things went through his head, rotating like the stars outside the windscreen when he took a Viper into a hard roll. Too fast to focus on just one but distinctly there, all of them.
She shut the door behind her, quietly, her head still high. He lowered his.
7.
“When did we first meet?” Helo asked Racetrack. They were in the canteen, playing cards. A few others cursorily joined in, but the game was going nowhere and they kept forgetting whose turn it was. The room stank of smoke and alcohol and Starbuck was on the other side of the room, having some sort of altercation with Kat.
“They should just get a room,” Hot Dog remarked, looking at them.
“We met in Basic, don’t you remember?” Racetrack said, ignoring Hot Dog. “You conspired with X-man, Geronimo and Stinky to come up with a callsign for me before the girls did.”
“Stinky, fuck, I miss that fucker,” Hot Dog said, throwing down a card that was irreconcilable to the game.
“No one could get a handle on you,” Helo said.
“I was shy, if you can believe that. Until you guys found out I liked to bet on the horses.”
“Frak, I miss horses,” Hot Dog said.
“Racetrack was born,” Helo said.
“Or bred, you might say,” she winked at him, her eyes shinier than normal.
8.
Helo had failed to significantly appreciate the moment. That, and all the other moments with her. And particularly when she'd told him she was pregnant.
Banging someone, as Starbuck would crassly say, was what he thought he’d been doing - and banging someone wasn’t real, it had no consequences, it wasn’t love, and it wasn’t enough certainly, to make a child.
Some of the women had mentioned the odd failures of their birth control patches; whispered suspicion that they were out-of-date and could no longer be relied on, some going so far as to say that sabotage was involved “for the sake of the human race.” Helo couldn’t imagine this kind of worry. He could only think of the child he lost. The rest of it was inconceivable.
He went to visit Sharon. She turned her back to him, finally exhausted by the endless conversations about how much he loved her, how he’d wait for Adama to come around, that she wouldn’t be locked up forever.
Helo was exhausted too.
9.
He realized as he ran down the hall that it wouldn’t be easy. It would take time to build a relationship, along with all the relationships he was rebuilding among the crew. But it was all going to be okay. Tough, to have a baby on board Galactica, he knew that, but he didn’t care, he’d never cared.
He was going to have a son or a daughter, one with a chance at a real life, one that was fully human.
He banged his shoulder entering the barracks where Margaret had her bunk. He got looks from a few who were suffering from insomnia, several others shuffled in their bunks. Margaret’s rack had the curtain drawn and the light was out. He knelt down.
“Margaret,” he whispered. Then again, more urgently, “Margaret, Maggie.”
She pulled back the curtain. “Karl.”
“I need to talk to you,” he said. He wanted to climb into her rack with her, but her fingers clutched the curtain tightly, shielding her private space, so all he could see was her face and a halo of sleep-muzzled hair. “I’ve thought about you - about us.”
“Yeah, so?”
“I want to - listen this isn’t very private; I want to talk, I want to be…” he stumbled, he felt his twist with discomfort. Why was she looking at him like that? “I want to be with you. With you and our baby.”
"Karl," she interrupted, looking him full in the face. “It’s over. I saw Doc Cottle today. It’s too late.”
“What,” he asked stupidly, thinking of Doc Cottle with a twinge of rage. “Why is it too late, is the baby okay?”
“It’s not a baby, it’s not anything. I terminated. I’m sorry. It’s for the best. Now just get out of here.”
He wanted to say more, say something, but the words stopped up in his throat. A bottleneck of sadness and shock. Sharon, she would never have done that, he thought, but the truth was, he didn’t know. He didn’t know what anyone would do, he didn’t know who anyone was. He didn’t know what they were.
He went back to his quarters, curled up on the bed, into his own body. He felt the clench of pain in his gut, the fire in his belly, his love for Sharon overwhelming him. He felt the painful love for his children wash over him, and grief for the human race.
Adama said to go on, even when you didn’t know what to do - just go on.
After a while, he realized he had a job to do, a woman he loved, a family to fight for. Sharon was his rock, his true love, and he was lucky.
It was a long time before he stopped waking up in the early morning hours thinking he heard the sound of a baby crying in the dark.
A Brief for the Defense
By Jack Gilbert
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.
from REFUSING HEAVEN (Knopf 2005)
.