BSG Fic: The Body is a Myth (3/3)
PART 3
Title: The Body is a Myth
Word Count: 28,182 (complete: all three parts.)
Spoilers: AU from 4x09 The Hub, but major spoilers for 4x10 Revelations.
Rating: Um, PG-13ish, I guess?
Disclaimer: Not mine, making no money.
Summary: Laura dies and wakes up on a basestar, Natalie is alive, and D'Anna breaks Kara Thrace by telling her the name of the final cylon. Then, of course, they get to Earth. JUMP!
with many thanks to asta77 for the beta.
Nobody was moving, and Kara's head felt... Strange.
Half a dozen centurions were bursting through the door: stock-still now. Like a diorama; the kind they set up in museums to try and convince the kids that these old rusty spears were really frakking interesting, honestly.
The door, busted off its hinges; about to slam full speed into Dee. The three forward centurions unfolding the guns out of their arms. The marine captain already hauling one of his buddies out of the line of fire.
Starbuck walked to Dee. “Can I touch her? Is that safe?”
“You can do anything you want,” Leoben said.
“How long do I have?”
“As long as you want.”
“We're in a jump.” It wasn't exactly a question, but Leoben nodded.
Kara glanced at the hybrid, open-mouthed; frozen like the rest.
“Even she's more tightly bound to the cycle of time than you, Kara. She gets glimpses; a moment of awareness and choice denied most mortals, but you -”
“No,” Kara shook her head. “Don't say it.”
“You have to save us all. You might be the only person who can.”
“What are you?”
“A gift. Her gift. To you.”
“They'll kill her,” she said, looking at the centurions.
“Eventually. But not immediately, and at least with more purpose than your friends here if we don't move them.”
Kara nodded, and hoisted Dee into her arms, motioning for Leoben to take one of the marines. She tried not to think too much about the way he was suddenly able to move two hundred pounds of grown man when he wasn't even real to begin with.
The noise in her head was beginning to dissolve. It was starting to sound something like clarity. Like music.
“You can do this,” Leoben said. “It's what you were made for.”
“I wasn't made for this crap,” Kara snapped, dragging Dee between the centurions; afraid to touch them.
Gods she missed space. The simplicity of the pedals and the joystick and the mess of the battle. It was never confusing to her. The lectures her flight instructors had given her, frakked up stuff about approach vectors and attack patterns; that confused her. She'd never really listened. But up in the sky. Up in the sky she knew where she needed to be, and how to get there.
“I was made to fly vipers,” she said.
“So fly us.”
* * *
William Adama pinned the cylon to the faded-blue wall in a choke-hold. “You don't know me,” he seethed. “You don't even know your daughter.”
Thrace managed six words. “I had better reasons than you.”
“Higher calling? All this crap? That was worth more to you?”
Thrace thrashed out with a fist and caught Adama across the cheek; it was enough of a distraction to break free - push the Admiral to the ground. He screamed, “No!”
He slid down the wall. More quietly: “No. I'm not that good a man, Bill Adama. For Kara, I'd set the nukes myself. I'd give my wrists to the Old Machine. I never wanted to leave her.”
“But you had to,” Adama spat. He wiped his fingers across his cheek. The blood was dark as the day. Like tar. Like the cancer at the heart of everything.
He stood; ready for another round.
Daniel Thrace slowly pushed himself up the wall. “Yes. I had to,” he said, sounding as disgusted with his answer as Adama was. “I thought it would be better than getting her killed.”
Adama cuffed his sleeves and brushed off his knuckles.
“Is this it, Admiral? What we have to do? Are we this angry?”
“Yes,” Adama said.
His opponent nodded, eyes closed. It was almost relief. When they opened, they were raw and angry. They were eyes that meant to hurt him.
* * *
Hera was sitting on her chest staring at her. Behind her, Sharon Agathon was watching her with a great deal more caution.
“I'm okay,” Laura said.
“You blacked out,” she heard Caprica say.
Sharon picked up her daughter. Laura sat up and was extremely glad she could no longer see anything unusual. That she could no longer see Gaius Baltar, she corrected. She was still sitting in a resurrection tank in the middle of an unreal opera house.
“We need to get out of here,” she said.
“I already tried the door,” Sharon said. “It's locked. Nothing I've tried works.”
“Then we'll find another way. We shouldn't stay.” She stood up.
“You have a plan,” Caprica announced, suspiciously.
Laura paused, then nodded slightly.
“Then you're going to tell us what it is before we go anywhere,” Sharon said. “What did that thing tell you?”
Laura paused, then answered reluctantly, “It's a navigation program. To jump the planet. But it can't because there's no hybrid. There should be one but, I think it ran away, or died, or both. 'The centurions have the schematics,' that has to mean for a hybrid. So we need some centurions.”
“Suddenly you think this is a great idea?” Athena jabbed. “All of humanity in a blind jump - a blind jump no hybrid could possibly plot?”
“It will be able to plot it,” Laura said, quietly, before pushing past the cylon and her daughter and walking toward the white double-doors.
Sharon had been right. They were locked tight. Not even rattling. She began walking the circumference of the auditorium looking for another door; for any exit.
Caprica watched her like she might need to run at any second. One hand was at her mouth, the other was resting near her waist.
Athena was striding toward her like a predator with a toddler on her hip. Laura set her jaw and met the other woman's eyes.
“What did it tell you?” she asked again. Every word was icy.
There are no exits, Laura thought, and sighed.
“You were right. The hybrid can't plot the jump. It's been waiting for Hera.”
Sharon became still. It was strange, Laura thought, how little you noticed a person shift and sway and swing their weight; their rising chest or drifting eyes, until it stopped. Perhaps that was what made the humanoid cylons so effective - a line of code against the mechanical economy of stillness. Sharon was still now.
She spoke, quietly. “It wants to use my daughter as extra memory?”
“I won't let it happen, Sharon.”
“It'll fry her mind. It would kill her.”
“Lieutenant, I need you to look at me. Look at me. I promise you, I will not let it happen.”
They locked eyes, and for a moment, for barely a moment, Laura saw the panic and the the anger fading. She saw gratitude; the kind she had seen in the faces of her followers at Kobol, because someone else had agreed to bear the burden, and choices were someone else's responsibility now.
It was only a moment.
Laura wasn't angry. In Sharon's place, she wouldn't trust her either.
“Then why build it?” Sharon asked, stepping backwards, shifting Hera's weight so that, Laura assumed, she had one hand free to fire her weapon.
“We'll use someone else. Something else,” Laura said.
“Who?” Sharon demanded. “Some human, some cylon you don't like? Just hope it works? Hera ran down here, into this godsfrakked vision for a reason,” she unholstered her gun. “You feel like throwing it Nicky Tyrol, or maybe her kid,” she pointed the gun at Caprica, who stumbled backwards, and steadied herself against a row of velvet chairs.
Sharon swung her gun back around to Laura.
“I think you're lying,” she said. “Who are you going to use, Roslin? Really. Who are you going to use?”
“Me.”
Sharon frowned, readjusted the grip on her weapon slightly.
“I have her blood,” Laura said. “And I don't think the program can tell the difference.”
* * *
Kara left the last of the marines slumped in a side-room thirty feet from the hybrid's chamber.
“I can't do this for everyone on the ship,” she said.
“You can't?” Leoben asked.
“No. I can feel it sliding. It's like I have this glass, and if I drop it, it'll shatter, and we'll be back in the world. So I'm holding on real tight, but my hands are greased. If I hold too tight, it's just gonna pop out like a rocket. If I let go a little, it'll slip loose. I've never done this before and it turns out I have a shitty sense of moderation,” she grinned at him. “Can't our girl just...jump them somewhere else?”
“The more you want to jump, the harder it is. You have to see everywhere it's been, everywhere it will go; how it's going to change things. The small things are easiest. The things no one else can see are easiest of all,” he grinned back at her.
“But she could,” Kara said, walking back into the corridor, standing in front of one of the centurions. “If she wanted to.” She pressed her fingertips to its breastplate, and immediately pulled away.
“It's cold,” she whispered.
“You need to understand this is the endgame of a very long war, Kara. He hopes the centurions will put us in checkmate. They have the weight of the entire cycle of time behind them. It's hard to move something with that much gravity.”
Kara nodded. She didn't understand but, maybe a part of her did - the part that was a computer. A machine. The idea was easier to handle if she thought of it as separate; like her viper.
Maybe this was just like flying after all.
“Who is “he”?” she asked.
“The other hybrid.”
“If he has magical centurions, what's our top secret last ditch move?”
“You.”
“Why me?”
“Because he can't see you. He's never been able to see you. You're not a part of the cycle of time. You're brand new.”
“So I have as long as I balance on this frakking ridiculous tightrope to single-handedly thwart a centurion revolution?”
Leoben shrugged at her, and smiled easily.
“Then I'd better get a frakking move on,” Kara said, and started sprinting down the corridors, not paying attention to where she was going, just trying to be where she needed to be.
* * *
“You try it,” Gaius said.
“What?”
“The door.”
“It's locked.”
“Well, the pretty white one that they're seeing is, yes. But the steel monstrosity we see looks like it still has a functioning handle.”
Athena and Laura were staring at each other over the muzzle of Athena's pistol, still trying to decide where the trust between them lay, if it had ever existed.
Quietly, Caprica walked between the rows and rows of FTL drives and put her hand to the cold metal wheel on the front of the door. It was stiff, but it moved. It creaked. She turned it four times. The door swung open.
“How did you do that?” she heard Laura breathe.
“I...I don't know,” she said. “I just tried the handle.”
* * *
You're the President, godsdammit, Lee told himself. Again. You're the President. You need to do something.
Something other than staring at Kara's dead body, ten feet behind the nearest centurion, still covered with her own military issue jacket. Something other than imagining ways in which what she'd done to herself had somehow been unintentional; something other than imagining the ways he should have stopped her, and should have known. Definitely something other than empathy.
How many more would follow her?
They had nowhere to go. The Colonies and Kobol were back through the Passage; they'd barely made it once. Space was barren and cold and enormous and their map was gone. They were all lost.
And he'd never survive to see a vote of no-confidence, or his species die of starvation and radiation sickness on this burnt rock unless he did something about the circle of centurions pointing guns at them.
They couldn't fight their way out of this one. So the first step was finding out what they wanted. Could centurions talk? He wasn't even sure they had speakers.
Slowly, he walked toward Tigh and Tory Foster.
“Do you know what they want?” he murmured, keeping his head fixed forward.
“No,” Tory whispered.
“Can you make contact?”
There was a pause before she answered. “No. They don't usually...speak. But the Colonel, when he -”
“I saw, did he -?”
“-said something about them being sorry.”
He turned to look at her and caught her dark eyes looking at him the way he used to catch her looking at Roslin in quorum meetings. Like she needed something. He wished he could remember what had made her look that way; was it when they'd been talking about cylons? About Baltar?
He didn't know her well. He knew she hated to be out of control; she hated being frustrated - things she couldn't understand. He'd dismissed it, before, as impatience. Perhaps even necessary brusqueness.
It would be easier to remember she was a machine, to remember how afraid she made him and how little he could trust her, if she wasn't looking at him like he was the godsdamned President, and all she wanted in this blasted world was for him to pull a scrap of paper out of his pocket - because he still didn't have a desk drawer - and make everything better.
He wondered what it would say.
If Laura was here to turn out her pockets for him, what scrap of paper would offer him absolution?
He suspected only two words (whether they were written on paper, or just burned into her heart) held any weight for Laura now.
They weren't words meant for him, weren't words he could ever fully understand because he ran away. He ran away.
Scars formed on New Caprica, while he swayed in space in the belly of the Beast, planless, plotless and afraid. Maybe if he had been there, with Kara and Sam and Tigh and Laura Roslin and even Tory Foster, he would be someone else now. Someone who understood why Kara kept killing herself, and when the President (you're the President now) had switched from fearing what she might do to what she might not do. Someone who understood Dogsville and the Circle and a trial that served no purpose.
Maybe he would have been part of the gang, screaming for Baltar's head.
Maybe he should have been.
Terrible things happened to humanity on wasted mudballs like this when centurions came to round them up.
He stepped forward.
“Easy, son,” he felt Tigh's hand on his shoulder.
“Someone's got to do something,” he muttered, and brushed him off.
He took another step forward, so that he was clearly out in front of the main group.
“I am Lee Adama,” he said. “President of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol. You are acting in violation of our truce. I insist you release us.”
The centurion raised its gun-arm.
“Lee,” he heard Tigh's voice. “Don't do something stupid.”
The centurion gestured he should move back.
Lee stood where he was. “At the very least you can give us your terms for release.”
The centurion stepped forward.
Lee opened his mouth to speak. “All right,” he was going to say. “I'm going.”
He didn't because there was a gunshot. He was falling to the ground. It felt nothing like the last time he'd been shot; he didn't hurt at all.
Maybe, his brain realised, as he hit the mud, he hadn't been shot. Maybe the person who had screamed in agony was the person who had collapsed on top of him, and who was bleeding all over his white shirt.
Saul Tigh.
* * *
Daniel threw punches and kicks without considering where they landed. A few landed in the mud, some Bill Adama batted aside. Some hit him, and that part was pretty satisfying. His broken nose and his beaten body were screaming at him to back off, but sometimes you couldn't do what you were told.
He didn't yell. Maybe Adama was expecting him to; it's what Adama would have done.
He had the Admiral pinned to the ground. He was straddled on his chest, holding both his arms as the older man struggled to kick him free.
Older. Now there was an inaccuracy.
He'd spent over twenty years - most of his daughter's childhood, and every moment of the rest of her life - watching some mad game of staves play out between two crazy machines, jumping through empty space trying to distract each other from the rest of the universe.
(From his daughter.)
After the first jump, he had realised, the hybrid wasn't just changing time, she was changing him, like a kid with a doll and an unending supply of costumes. Like a kid in a field pulling legs off a beetle, if the kid could put the legs back on too, and then add extra legs, and then turn the beetle into a puppy. Just because.
After jumps, he had woken up as a teenager, as a man so old his brain didn't work, as a child, as a woman, as people he remembered and people he'd never met. He had woken up as Richard Adar. He had woken up as Aaron Doral. After five jumps looking exactly like Tory Foster, he realised, even if he saw Kara again, she wouldn't know him. The world he was trying to make for her was too strange.
Once he woke up on New Caprica - years before New Caprica had happened; and he didn't understand where he had been until much later - and stayed there for four days. He was beginning to like it a little, because he so rarely had company (except on the occasions where he woke up in two bodies, or five) when she jumped him back. Once he woke up in the snow outside his old apartment on the morning of Theogamia when Kara was five. He watched himself go sledding with his daughter. He would have been more grateful for that jump if she hadn't left him barefoot in the snow in silk pyjamas for so long he collapsed and had to be taken to a hospital by strangers. Then she jumped him back before the doctors could treat him.
He hadn't looked this much like himself in years. It was, he supposed, the hybrid's gift to Kara. As usual, she lacked an understanding of the details: he was barely older than his child.
Daniel Thrace never cried. Even now, while a detached part of his mind considered using his forehead to break Adama's nose, his eyes were dry. He didn't cry when he ran out of the hybrid's chamber and saw his world going up in mushroom clouds. He didn't cry when his daughter stumbled out of bed and in a fever dream, hit a sequence of keys on his piano that no one had ever hit before. When the notes sliced into his brain and he remembered everything the hybrid had taken from his mind to keep him safe and tucked away from time.
He didn't cry when he packed his bag and left his daughter with her alcoholic mother, without an explanation, or any excuse better than the fact the Old Machine had noticed him already now that he knew what he was, and if he found him, he'd find Kara.
A giant gamble that he had changed things, with no real evidence that it hadn't always been this way. Except the way the Old Machine feared his daughter. Hated her. Wanted her dead. He wouldn't fear her if she wasn't a threat.
He clung to that, in Tory Foster's skin, through five jumps, and understood precisely how frakked it made things that a death threat to his daughter could be a comfort.
But he didn't cry.
In his mouth, between his broken teeth, he rolled words; testing them. Accusations, justifications.
You didn't even notice I spent eight months driving our daughter to suicide!
He would have laughed if he hadn't, for the first time in his corrupted memory, wanted to find tears in his eyes.
“Come on, motherfrakker,” Adama growled through bloody lips. “Get it over with.”
Then they heard the gunshot.
* * *
Saul could see Lee's panicked face. He could hear shouting, but was not sure how to make sense of the noise. His stomach was on fire. Gunshot wound, he guessed. Good, that meant Lee was all right.
The Old Man's son was safe.
Even if he'd never live to see his own.
Probably a good thing anyway. He had no idea how to teach someone to be a man. Perhaps he'd do better with a girl; less pressure - let her mother screw it up.
Was he sad? That he'd never get to see her?
Anders was shouting too now. He thought he heard words like, “blood,” and “pressure,” and “make it.”
Saul tried to remember his own father. He couldn't. The world, and his own body, seemed very distant. Maybe this was how it happened - half his memories were already packed up and gone. Sent out to some resurrection hub they destroyed over a month ago. As usual, he had lousy timing.
Or maybe it was the best timing. This he knew how to do. This was pretty easy.
Anders yelled some more. “Tory,” and “my jacket,” and “now!”
His first memory: what was it?
He was standing in the dark, in Aft Damage Control on the Solarion. It was his first combat engagement; he was 18. Any minute, the cylons were going to smash through the bulkhead, and he only had two explosive rounds left.
Brooks had said there was a weak spot on the back of the neck. If he had to; if he was strong enough...
But Brooks was dead, because in the last attack wave, Saul had missed, and a centurion had shot Brooks between the eyes.
His very first memory. God had picked him up (God was beautiful; God had a wide smile; God's voice rang out with wild joy when she sang, “JUMP!”) and left him here, dropped into some new, mortal life. Not even the shape of his cells was the same. He could have been anyone; she could have hidden him anywhere.
She chose here, in the dark, without enough courage or skill or self-control to cope.
Saul Tigh was born here. Perhaps he'd lived here all his life.
Perhaps now, finally, he could leave.
He closed his eyes.
* * *
Kara led Leoben through the curving halls of the basestar. She passed frozen humans and cylons and centurions. She felt guilty, leaving people in the middle of firefights. It was the same reason she hated being stuck in CIC instead of out in a viper.
She was losing her balance.
She ran faster, ducking around motionless soldiers, sliding around corners, following the line in her mind - the clear, high-pitched note that was calling her... This way.
Left, left, right, left, down a level.
She reached a hangar bay.
D'Anna was leading a dozen centurions toward a heavy raider. The centurions where carrying supply boxes and heavy machinery.
Twenty yards away, as near as Kara could tell, Natalie had stolen Gaeta's sidearm. He was reaching for her, face caught mid-yell. She had already spun away, was skidding to a halt, and taking aim.
Kara jogged to her position, and sighted along the gun. D'Anna. Natalie was going to kill D'Anna.
D'Anna had sided with the centurions. Lords knew what they were trying to do.
Whatever was going to happen; whatever she was supposed to do - she had to do it here. This was where she needed to be. And any second -
“You have to stop this, Kara,” Leoben said.
- she was going to lose her balance.
The world started.
Kara threw herself into Natalie, and both women hit the deck. Natalie's shot went wild. Two centurions turned and began to lay down covering fire as Kara and Natalie and Gaeta retreated into an access corridor.
“What did you do that for?” yelled Natalie.
“I don't,” Kara shook her head. “I don't know.”
They heard the roar of the heavy raider lifting off.
* * *
Caprica found herself leading. She had a strong feeling that they should go this way, and so she went, and the others followed.
None of them spoke.
Not until they found Admiral Adama and a blond man crouched behind a wall, taking turns to sneak looks through what was left of the window.
Then Laura Roslin said, “What in the gods' names have you been doing with yourself, Bill. You look half dead.”
“I feel half dead,” the Admiral growled. “Stay behind cover. The centurions have taken the landing group hostage and...Daniel Thrace thinks the same has likely happened on both basestars.”
Caprica saw Laura's eyes widen, then narrow. What she said was, “Daniel Thrace.”
What she was thinking, Caprica was sure, was entirely different. She stretched out her hand, and Gaius caught it. If the centurions had turned against them, they were absolutely frakked. She thought about Natalie, and how she had walked into that council with a telencephalic inhibitor and exact knowledge of what would happen next. The fragility of flesh was appalling.
Daniel Thrace, who looked as damaged as the Admiral, offered his hand. “A pleasure to meet you,” he said.
Laura didn't return the gesture. She said, “You look remarkably like your daughter, Mr Thrace. Is she also being held hostage?”
The cylon shook his head. “I don't know.”
“What do we know?”
“Nothing,” Adama said. “Except that we heard shots fired and we're too frakking far away to see what's going on. There may be wounded.”
Caprica gripped Gaius' hand more tightly. “Please,” he murmured. “It would be too just in an unjust universe if Tigh was the one who got shot.”
“And do we have a plan?” Roslin asked.
“Besides waiting for an opening? No.” Adama replied.
“Wonderful,” Roslin sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Did I miss anything else?”
“Only a pile of metaphysical crap from the cylon. Something about changing the cycle of time.”
Laura nodded slowly, and shifted her gaze to Daniel Thrace.
Caprica felt cold.
Adama looked like he was suffering from indigestion, but then, Caprica always thought he looked like that: she couldn't read him which was probably why he made her so uncomfortable. Sharon had elected to stay a few feet from them and watch things develop from a safe distance. She looked suspicious; angry that she couldn't just head out across the plain while everyone else was caught up plotting, jump in her raptor and get the hell out.
Caprica sympathised. But like Laura Roslin, and the man who said he was Kara Thrace's father, something frightening, and enormous had her spellbound. She wasn't sure she could move if she wanted to.
It reminded her of the moments before Laura and Sharon had walked into her cell after their first vision. Like the day before an electrical storm. She had a brief, unbidden image of the planet ripped in half by a thunderclap. She saw Daniel Thrace as Zeus, as a lightning-rod.
Perhaps Laura Roslin really was Hera, and she and Athena's daughter were interchangeable, as long as one of them went back to that room, rode the lightning, fried herself in service to a better tomorrow.
She shivered.
Daniel Thrace said, “How did you leave the Opera House?”
Laura Roslin said, “How do you know I was in the Opera House?”
He said, “You always go in.
He said, “The dying leader entered the temple of the gods, and there, the metatron spoke false prophecies to tempt her into accepting his gifts, for her people would die on the scarred face of the earth without them.
She said, I will not yield the child, for she is the first born of two peoples. But I shall give of my own blood, that we share. I shall make this broken place a promised land with you, though I shall never set foot there.”
It was a verse Caprica had never heard before, and Caprica knew every verse. She turned to Gaius, but he had chosen to disappear.
“You always go in, Laura,” Daniel said. “But you've never come out before.”
“So it was always me,” Laura murmured.
“It was. You went down into the Opera House, and found the last hybrid of the last cycle. You both spent your lives on that jump, but when it was over, the world was beautiful again. Habitable. We moved our hybrid into the Opera House to wait for the next you - this you. The refugees built cities and planted crops in green fields, and no one died of radiation sickness. There was peace, for a time. I remember it.” For a broken man, Thrace moved quickly. He reached out with his bloody-knuckled hand and touched her face. “But it can't be you this time. I can't let you do it.”
Laura batted his palm away, and pinioned him with her eyes. “You can't let me?”
Caprica wished, very much, that Gaius would return. She didn't know what to do with her hands when his weren't there to hold.
“Laura,” Adama growled. “Whatever you're considering, it sounds like something we need to discuss.”
“I'm considering saving our species from a slow death in this hell-hole, Bill, and it's not something that's up for discussion. From either of you.”
“You were never supposed to die of the cancer,” Thrace said. “You were supposed to get here while you were still sick. When the hybrid resurrected you, she didn't bring you back exactly the same. She never brings anyone back exactly the same. You don't share enough blood anymore. If you try this, it won't work. The jump will fail and I don't even want to guess what will happen to the planet.”
After a horrible pause, Laura whispered, “Something about changing the cycle of time.”
Daniel Thrace didn't answer.
“You motherfrakker,” her eyes were welling with tears. There was a terrible stillness to her. Caprica wanted to touch her - just press her fingers to her shoulder so that she would know she wasn't alone. But she was too afraid. Too much emotion; Caprica had been a lightning-rod before. Worlds had burned - twice.
“Why didn't you just leave me dead?” Laura asked.
“I would have,” Daniel answered, and he meant it as a kindness. “If I'd been there, I would have asked her not to. But I was already waiting here, and she...isn't like us.”
“The hybrid,” a tear rolled down her cheek.
“If you want to avoid taking the same road, you can't just blow up the road. You have to build new roads; as many as you can.”
“And here we are, Mr Thrace. Where's our road? We're stuck on a dead world.”
The man nodded quietly. He didn't have anything more to say.
Adama walked up to the former President. “I've heard enough of this,” he said. “You're all losing your frakking minds.”
He put his arm around Roslin, and walked her as far away as the broken wall permitted. She leaned against it as he spoke to her. Caprica couldn't hear the words, only the tone. Low, insistent, like he really thought he could reach her and make this better with logic. Laura was staring at the sky.
Athena really looked ready to bolt, centurion covering fire or no, but she braced herself in a sitting position at the other end of the wall, holding Hera between her knees, and closed her eyes. Caprica wondered if she was praying, or if she ever prayed, now.
Caprica walked up to Daniel Thrace and touched his arm. She wasn't sure she should, but she couldn't not. He started. When he looked at her, he smiled with his split lips. “Hello,” he said.
“You're one of the five,” she said.
He nodded. “And you're the sixth,” He looked tired, but genuinely pleased to see her, which was still a rare commodity in Six's life. Perhaps in his also. “We blame Tory for you,” he added.
Caprica laughed softly. “I would have guessed that she made D'Anna.”
“We all made all of you. And we didn't. You've always existed, Six, somehow.”
They fell into a silence; the first one that hadn't racked the tension in Caprica's spine beyond tolerable levels in days. Weeks. The relief was indescribable. It took concentration to stop herself from shaking with it.
“That piece of scripture you quoted,” she said. “I've never heard it.”
“No,” he answered. “That was one of the pieces we deleted before we left. We deleted a lot.”
“And...” she paused, unsure if she wanted to hear the answer. “Why did you leave?”
“Just an accident,” he said. “Just what you get for making a god and then telling her to do whatever the hell she pleases.”
“She pleased to send you away from us?”
“She pleased to give us the most...wonderful lives. For a while.”
Caprica nodded slowly.
“Don't worry,” Daniel said. “You'll get your chance.”
“I wasn't supposed to be in the Opera House, was I? I mean,” she moved her hands to her stomach. “This wasn't supposed to happen. I know that.”
“You're a little unstuck in the cycle of time, yes. And thank God. Otherwise no one would have seen clearly enough to get out of the Opera House and you'd still be waiting there, when the centurions came, and Laura Roslin would have tried to link with the hybrid anyway, and half the planet might have jumped into a sun.”
“And now, instead, we can die slowly, of starvation and radiation poisoning?” she smiled, ruefully, as she said it. It wasn't really a barb.
“Yes,” he said. “More time is always better, don't you think?”
Caprica thought about it. She wasn't sure.
* * *
Anders was covered in blood. His own, over his face; Saul Tigh's over his arms. He pressed his jacket against the wound in the Colonel's stomach, feeling the blood seep through the rough fabric. “He's gonna die,” he said. “He's gonna die, it's too late.”
Tigh had passed out, but he was still breathing, just.
“You don't know that,” Tory whispered. “He's not bleeding as much as he was. If we just hold on -”
“For what? Who's gonna come save us, Tory?”
Cylon battlefield medicine was putting a bullet in you and telling you to wake up in a new body.
“There's a reason for everything.”
Sam thought she sounded desperate to believe it. Couldn't blame her; it'd be nice if it was true, but it wasn't.
“Sometimes,” he said. “Frakked up things just happen, and there's no reason. We just screw up. We're just screw-ups.”
She didn't answer. Sam blinked the tears out of his eyes, and stared down at his own bloody fists, squeezing Saul Tigh's blood from his jacket. Tory's slim fingers touched his knuckles.
He remembered her skin under his own fingers. So many of his memories he didn't understand.
“We're not perfect,” he whispered.
She didn't answer. She didn't move her hand. He looked up and saw the top of her head; she was watching her own hand against his.
“We're machines,” he said.
“We're the same people we always were,” Tory replied, not looking at him.
“Then why are we machines? What's the point? What's the point in...in...” he shook her hand from his, and let go for long enough to sweep at Tigh, at the gunshot wound, at the whole damn frakking planet. “In all of this. I mean, I know, I heard Leoben's crap back on Caprica. Part of being human. But we're not human. Why the frak did they have to make us so we can't stop pretending we are?”
Tory rose from her kneeling position and squatted in the mud, elbows resting on her knees, winter coat zipped up to her chin. Anders took deep breaths, rubbed his eyes and his split eyebrows with the back of his bloody hand, then reapplied himself to the job of keeping Tigh's blood in his body.
Tory said, “Maybe it's not just copying. Maybe it's evolution.”
“I don't believe we were meant to replace them - that we're better than them. I don't believe it. I won't.”
Tory shook her head. “That wasn't what I meant.”
It was a long time before she finished her sentence. Long enough that Anders had begun to pack up his mind again, and close the doors he was happier when he left closed.
Tory said, “You need to irradiate our blood before you can even tell the difference. Maybe we need to think about what the word machine means.”
“Don't say there's no difference,” Sam warned her. “There's a difference.”
“I know,” Tory said.
“We're not biological.”
“What does that even mean now?” she asked.
Sam looked back down at his hands, and the blood.
“His pulse is getting weaker,” Tory said, pressing her fingers to Tigh's throat.
They all heard a heavy raider in the sky.
* * *
“What can you see?” Laura asked, again, tensely.
“Not a lot,” Bill muttered. He was crouched awkwardly, trying to see what had happened after the heavy raider had landed near the ruins and the hostages.
It was too far away.
“Centurions got out, I think,” he said. “I can't see, it's too frakking far away.”
He punched the wall.
“Let me see,” said Thrace. “My eyes are better.”
“Well?” Laura asked, after barely enough time for Thrace to settle himself into a position that wouldn't make him a target for a sniper.
“Centurions. And...I think D'Anna.”
Nobody seemed certain what to make of that.
“Maybe she's got the centurion situation under control,” Laura said.
“Maybe,” Athena replied.
“Wait,” said Daniel Thrace. “I think something else is coming to land.”
* * *
The relief Baltar felt when he saw D'Anna follow the centurions from the heavy raider lasted exactly as long as it took for D'Anna to start speaking. It evaporated entirely when he saw Six, in her blood-red dress, smiling like a shark.
“They say they want Gaius Baltar,” D'Anna said. “I suggest you hand him over, or they'll start shooting.”
Lee Adama stood up and moved to the front. “D'Anna - we had a truce, what's going on?”
“The Cylon seem to be experiencing something of a second civil war, Mr President,” she said with a sour smile. “I'd object, of course, but I was designed without the benefit of inbuilt weaponry.”
“But what do they want?”
“I just told you - they want Gaius Baltar.”
Gaius felt Six slip her arm over his shoulder; the cool metal of her silver bracelets shivering past his neck. “Don't worry,” she murmured into his ear; a delicious whisper of excitement mixing uncomfortably with the fear in his chest. “You brought them the word of God. They wouldn't harm you.”
“I'll take my chances here, thanks.”
Lee Adama took a moment to reply, and when he did, he sounded incredulous. “Gaius Baltar. That's it? That's all they want?”
“Seems to be,” D'Anna replied, cheerfully. “For now anyway. I can't say for certain what their plan is next. But uh, they do say that if you keep out of their way they'll release you once they have custody of their,” she glanced at the centurion who was standing beside her. “How did you put it? Oh yes. Chosen leader.”
“Chosen leader,” Lee repeated, dubiously.
“Chosen leader?” Gaius repeated, alarmed. Then louder, standing up, he said, “Mr President, I don't know anything about this, I, uh, really I don't. I mean, yes, I had an association with the, um, the centurion line on the basestar, but they never even spoke to me, I mean, that I understood. I suppose I spoke to them, I, uh...” he trailed off. Six was looking at him in that way he hated - the way that meant he was making an absolute prat of himself, and she was enjoying every minute. He sank back down to his rock. “I'm glad you find me so entertaining,” he hissed.
“Step forward,” she told him. “And you won't be harmed.”
“I remember how that worked out last time.”
“All right,” she folded her arms, and took a few steps forward herself; back to him. God, he loved that view. She knew it, too. That was probably why she was standing there, so he wouldn't pay attention and would agree to - “and it all worked out for the best in the end, didn't it? So step forward.”
“What?” he said.
There was a whining overhead. Gaius started. A raptor was flying in. Oh thank God, someone to rescue him from this insanity.
The centurions turned their heads in unison; first to the raptor, then back to the hostages. They all extended their guns. Even D'Anna started to look a little nervous.
“Give us Gaius,” she said. “They really will start shooting if you don't. And they're not going to wait for that raptor to land.”
“One way or another, you're going to go with them, Gaius,” Six said; still standing in front of him, staring out to the horizon. “You can either go as a coward or a hero. Step forward. They only want to honour you.”
The front-most centurion aimed his gun at Racetrack, the raptor pilot.
“Stop,” Gaius shouted. “I'll come with you. Don't hurt anyone.”
He stepped forward.
* * *
Bill tried to pull Laura back, as the centurions marched by. She ignored him; when the hand on her shoulder became too insistent, she pushed it off and took half a step forward. None of the centurions paid her any attention. They walked, in rhythm.
She felt her heart beat: the same rhythm as the slow, mechanical steps. The same rhythm it had held on New Caprica.
The third time she had stood quietly, through the end of the world.
“D'Anna,” she called, as the woman passed. “Don't let them do it.”
D'Anna didn't answer. Her eyes seemed to shrug; a beautiful, disgusted what-the-frak-does-it-matter-now? She turned away, and kept walking.
Gaius Baltar passed.
She couldn't let herself feel sorry for him, see too-wide eyes staring into hers, asking for something. Help, she supposed. She couldn't let herself see him.
Beside her, Caprica Six actually turned away. Put both of her hands against the faded-blue paint on the wall, and pressed her forehead to it.
* * *
Kara was first out of the raptor. Natalie followed her, dismayed, talking about how they'd arrived too late.
Kara wasn't really sure why that was. She sure as hell preferred D'Anna and her bloody-minded toasters on the surface of a frakked-up-anyhow planet to stuck on a ship with her. It wasn't as if they'd killed all the hostages while they were inbound.
She looked around. There were some bodies.
Lords. That one must be hers. She felt weak-kneed.
Then she saw Lee, white shirt drenched in blood; so much it couldn't be his because he was standing. He looked...nauseous. Like the nuggets after their first combat who heave as soon as they hit the deck. Not really because of the g-forces, or even the toasters who almost smeared them across the inside of their own cockpits. Just because some things you shouldn't have to see, and landing on the deck is when it hits: this is what they have to get used to.
He didn't run at her like he did the first time she came back, too grateful to be confused. He just stared like she was an animated corpse. She couldn't really blame him. She couldn't even promise she'd never do it again.
“I'm sorry,” seemed so inadequate, but she opened her mouth to say it because it was all she had.
That was when Sam yelled her name, raw and utterly desperate. She turned her head and saw him, staunching someone's wound (Tigh; oh Lords - and she'd been relieved the Old Man wasn't here to make one more person she'd frakked with when she put a bullet in her head).
“Kara,” he yelled again. “Oh gods, baby, oh gods you're here again. You came back again. Tory, take over, get this, Tory, come on,” he was babbling, grabbing Tory Foster's hands and putting them across Tigh's stomach. He was stumbling to his feet and running for her.
Sammy. Never did have a sense of self-preservation. Loved her too much. She didn't deserve it.
He grabbed her; clung to her like he could stop her from leaving again with just his arms. “I love you baby, I love you, I love you.”
They hadn't spoken since he'd left for the basestar. Months ago.
She didn't return the hug. Sam didn't seem to notice. She kept her eyes on Lee. He kept his eyes on her, because he couldn't look away. He'd never been able to look away. Kara remembered every single time she'd used that on him.
“I'm so sorry,” she said to him. He kept standing there, staring at her like she was the most beautiful demon he'd ever seen. Yeah. She knew that look. Heartbroken.
“I don't care, I just care you're here now,” Sam mumbled into her shoulder.
Carefully, she moved his arms away; she stood him back a foot or so. He let her, because he'd let her do anything.
She said, not just to Sam, maybe to the whole broken world, “I'm half-cylon.”
A dozen people turned to stare at her. Sam was the only one to speak. “What?” he said.
“I'm half-cylon,” she repeated. “My dad. I didn't know.”
Sam tipped his head back, closed his eyes and squeezed out tears; a rattling breath she thought he might have been holding since the day marines dragged him away during a mission briefing because he was a toaster.
Lee said, loud enough to carry the fifteen feet between them, “I don't care who your father was, Kara. No one who matters will care.”
* * *
Gaius didn't have much of a chance to wonder why there was an exact replica of the Opera House from his visions on Kobol under the surface of Earth. As soon as he realised where he was, a centurion pinned him to the stage, while another began to give him injections.
“Ow!” he yelled. “What the bloody hell do you think you're doing?”
He didn't realise he needed to be really scared (not the oh-God-I'm-in-trouble-how-will-I-get-out kind of scared, but the what-if-I-don't-get-out-at-all kind) until he looked at D'Anna and realised she wouldn't meet his gaze. He didn't realise he ought to be terrified, until he saw a tear rolling down her cheek.
“What's going on?” he asked. Another needle pierced his shoulder. “Please, will somebody explain to me what's happening?”
“I'm sorry, Gaius,” D'Anna said. “If I'd known before, well...I would have tried to warn you.”
She walked away.
“What,” he started. “What does that mean?” he asked the centurion leaning over him, upside down in his field of vision, because there was no one else to ask. “What did she mean?”
“She means,” Six told him, appearing at a 180 degree angle from the centurion. “That you've been chosen. When this is over, the entire world will be yours, to rebuild as God would have wanted it.”
“But I don't want the world!”
“Gaius,” she crooned. “A truly great man must shoulder great burdens. Take my hand; this is going to hurt.”
He heard something that sounded horribly like a buzz-saw revving up. “I don't want to die,” he cried.
He managed perhaps three minutes before he lost consciousness. He was fairly certain they were sawing off his legs. There was nothing in his world but pain; pain so loud it wasn't a feeling anymore, he didn't hurt, he just didn't exist in any other spectrum. Distantly, he thought he could hear himself screaming.
That poor man; it sounded awful.
* * *
Athena stopped short of the crowd. Roslin, Adama, Caprica, even Daniel Thrace kept going, back into the mess of - well what was it? Not humanity anymore.
Athena stopped, and waited for Karl to notice her. He did, and came jogging over, grabbing her and Hera both in a bear hug.
“Had me worried for a while there,” he said. “You okay?”
Athena nodded. She'd probably never tell him everything about the Opera House. There were things she'd never told him about the basestar. But she always came back with Hera. Sometimes even awful patterns were reassuring. Better than chaos.
Athena watched the mess of not-entirely-humanity-anymore.
“What are we going to do now?” she asked him.
Karl shrugged. “Get back into space, I guess. Survey the planet, see if there are any habitable areas. If not, I don't know.”
“We should have just kept moving,” Sharon said. “I wish that frakked-up basestar had stayed away. I wish they both had.”
Karl gave her a look; same look he gave her every time she said true things like how Kara was insane for trusting Leoben. Like he thought she couldn't mean it, she was just hurt, just looking for a way to stop everyone staring at her in the corridors.
There was no way to stop everyone staring at her in the corridors. All she could do was try and make sure there were still corridors, and people to be in them.
“Right now,” she said. “There are a three dozen centurions frakking around with over six hundred jump engines wired to the planet. If they press the wrong button, God knows what will happen.”
“Are you serious?”
Sharon nodded.
“We need to tell the Admiral; get the people back to the Fleet -”
“He already knows.”
Twenty yards away, the Admiral was staring, stone-faced at Saul Tigh. Laura Roslin was speaking to him, constantly and quietly, while Caprica, who had Tigh's head resting on her knees, looked to him with desperation. Whatever they wanted him to do, Adama didn't do it. He stayed, three feet from his former XO, expressionless.
“Even if we all got back to the ships, we couldn't spin up the drives in time, if that's what they're planning to do. It's the end of the line, Karl. Maybe there comes a point where there's nothing else to do.”
Karl set his jaw. “Just give up.”
He was so honest. Such a hero. She loved him for that. How could she explain to him it wasn't surrender. Humans built machines, more and more complicated until they broke in the head and killed them all. And now they'd done the same thing to time, to the whole frakking universe. It was like a broken music box - the same eight notes repeating, getting sicker each time around.
Cancer was what happened when the body copied too much of the same thing.
Repetition was comforting, and safe, and malignant.
Sharon didn't really believe that the centurions would activate the jump drives. It would be too new, too surprising. Sharon thought she would probably spend the rest of her life doing and seeing and hearing terrible things so that she could bring Hera back to Karl. Because even the awful patterns are reassuring.
In the distance, she saw that Daniel Thrace had found his daughter. They were staring at each other. Kara said something, something loud, but the wind caught it and Sharon couldn't tell what it was beyond angry.
Daniel Thrace nodded quietly. Kara stood, arms wrapped around herself. Her father stepped toward her and pulled her into his arms. Kara fought him, tried to push him away, and when that didn't work, tried to pull away, and when that didn't work started yelling at someone else to get him away.
After a while, she gave up fighting, and collapsed against his chest.
Daniel Thrace lifted his hand to his daughter's head, and gently, gently began to stroke her hair.
Karl said, “Let's go.”
He grabbed Sharon's hand and began walking her to a raptor. She let him.
They walked past Caprica, sobbing softly, with her forehead pressed against Tigh's. His eyes were open, hazy, almost dead.
The Admiral finally stepped toward the Colonel. He raised his right hand to his brow, in a military salute.
“Attention!” he bellowed.
Slowly, at first, then with increasing speed, the military members of the group snapped straight, and saluted.
The wind picked up.
The planet jumped.
* * *
Gaius woke up. He was warm, floating. Like a pleasant dream: better times when he'd holidayed in the Leonite Tropics - warm waves as he floated in the reef-rippled shallows.
“Remember the summer when I went with you?” she asked.
He couldn't see her. He couldn't really see anything; perhaps his eyes were still closed.
“I remember,” he answered. “That you wore the most sensational swimsuit, and flirted outrageously with the waitstaff. I do believe you were trying to make me jealous.”
“Did it work?” she teased, nibbling at his ear.
“Oh yes. Just...a little higher.”
“Gaius,” she said. “I need you to focus.”
“I focus so much better when you keep doing that thing to my ear,” he murmured
She bit him, hard. He shocked awake. He could see centurions, the roof of the Opera House. He was in a resurrection tank. Oh God, now he remembered.
The pain was still there, like a desert, like a scorch across his brain. But it seemed different now - detached from him.
“While you were unconscious, they made some modifications,” she told him. “Including shaving down your nervous system. You don't really need most of it anymore since they mechanised your vital functions. Your brain could use the extra space.”
“And my legs?” he whispered.
“They had to break part of your spine to insert the mainline into your spinal column. Even if you still had them, you couldn't use them.”
“What have you done to me?”
“I know you're struggling to cope. All those new programs in your mind - these new horizons of perception. Deep breaths, Gaius. You're doing wonderfully.”
“You,” he looked down the length of his own body. The words fell out of his mouth like lead. “I'm a hybrid.”
“The centurions have the schematics.”
“But I'm human -” information began pumping into his mind. He felt his eyes roll back into his head and his entire body (what was left of it) tense up in agony. Not the distant physical pain of his body, but his entire mind convulsing in the white noise of a computational error. “I'm not built for this!” he screamed.
Co-ordinates, entry-vectors, power fluctuations, hundreds and hundreds of nodes (jump engines?) demanding his attention, threatening to overheat, to flip existence too soon, and that was before the world itself started screaming at him. Every dead tree, every wave in every inlet, every flight-suited viper jock and jarhead marine scuffing heels in the irradiated sand: where do I go? Where will you put me?
His mind was on fire. He was going to burn. A strangled sound came from his throat. He tried to say, with his eyes, “I can't do it. It's too much.”
“That's why you have me,” Six said. The soft Opera House light grew more intense. She was an angel wrapped in holy light. He'd never seen anything so beautiful. She straddled him, then lowered herself into the tank so that she was lying on his chest.
“Take my mind,” she said, and kissed him.
They jumped.
* * *
“What do I do?” Gaius asked.
“Whatever you want,” she told him. They were eye to eye. There was nothing else but blinding white. “You're remaking the world. And it will all be new - this has never happened before. It will never happen again.”
“But all the people. Where should I put them? Should I save them?”
“Do you want them to be happy?”
“Yes. Yes, I want that.”
* * *
As he burned himself to nothing, Gaius saw things.
Hera Agathon taught her younger brother to swim in the warm, clear-blue waters of the tropics.
At William Adama's funeral, the Admiral lay casket-bound, white-haired in full military dress. The priest giving the eulogy made no reference to God or gods, and in the open air, on a hilltop with long grass by the open ocean, hundreds gathered to hear it. At the front, Lee Adama gave a shuddering sigh and turned to Laura Roslin, who pulled him into her arms.
On a military issue bunk in a make-shift tent, Kara Thrace knelt and Sam Anders sat cross-legged. Kara stared into her husband's eyes, waiting for something, for a flicker. For red.
Anastasia Dualla in Galactica's CIC, had Commander's pips on her collar.
Natalie in the Temple of Aurora, with an Oracle barely old enough to have earned the title, rolled a piece of chamalla-laced liquorice between her fingers, and asked, “Are you certain?”
Tory Foster and Galen Tyrol sat on a public bench: Tory looked like she was ready to be shot, Galen looked like he had been.
D'Anna, sat with a centurion, at the edge of a cliff. Both of their legs dangled over the edge.
Daniel Thrace was wading out into the ocean.
Caprica sat at the foot of a white-barred crib, perched on the very edge of her chair. An infant in all-in-one pyjamas slept splayed out on its back. Saul Tigh slept splayed out on a bed nearby. There was an empty bottle on the bedside table.
She was beautiful. It was the first time Gaius understood it.
The angel she wasn't kissed him again. He closed his eyes, and let her take him away.
It was time for an end.
* * *
Author's Notes: While I'm amazed that I ever managed to finish this, I'm aware that this is, shall we say, dense? I've tried to tow the line between over-explaining and just plain being confusing. I do believe that the answer to every loose end is hidden in the text somewhere, but I'm also perfectly happy to explain anything that left you going, "Uh, dude, WTF?"
PART 1
PART 2
Title: The Body is a Myth
Word Count: 28,182 (complete: all three parts.)
Spoilers: AU from 4x09 The Hub, but major spoilers for 4x10 Revelations.
Rating: Um, PG-13ish, I guess?
Disclaimer: Not mine, making no money.
Summary: Laura dies and wakes up on a basestar, Natalie is alive, and D'Anna breaks Kara Thrace by telling her the name of the final cylon. Then, of course, they get to Earth. JUMP!
with many thanks to asta77 for the beta.
Nobody was moving, and Kara's head felt... Strange.
Half a dozen centurions were bursting through the door: stock-still now. Like a diorama; the kind they set up in museums to try and convince the kids that these old rusty spears were really frakking interesting, honestly.
The door, busted off its hinges; about to slam full speed into Dee. The three forward centurions unfolding the guns out of their arms. The marine captain already hauling one of his buddies out of the line of fire.
Starbuck walked to Dee. “Can I touch her? Is that safe?”
“You can do anything you want,” Leoben said.
“How long do I have?”
“As long as you want.”
“We're in a jump.” It wasn't exactly a question, but Leoben nodded.
Kara glanced at the hybrid, open-mouthed; frozen like the rest.
“Even she's more tightly bound to the cycle of time than you, Kara. She gets glimpses; a moment of awareness and choice denied most mortals, but you -”
“No,” Kara shook her head. “Don't say it.”
“You have to save us all. You might be the only person who can.”
“What are you?”
“A gift. Her gift. To you.”
“They'll kill her,” she said, looking at the centurions.
“Eventually. But not immediately, and at least with more purpose than your friends here if we don't move them.”
Kara nodded, and hoisted Dee into her arms, motioning for Leoben to take one of the marines. She tried not to think too much about the way he was suddenly able to move two hundred pounds of grown man when he wasn't even real to begin with.
The noise in her head was beginning to dissolve. It was starting to sound something like clarity. Like music.
“You can do this,” Leoben said. “It's what you were made for.”
“I wasn't made for this crap,” Kara snapped, dragging Dee between the centurions; afraid to touch them.
Gods she missed space. The simplicity of the pedals and the joystick and the mess of the battle. It was never confusing to her. The lectures her flight instructors had given her, frakked up stuff about approach vectors and attack patterns; that confused her. She'd never really listened. But up in the sky. Up in the sky she knew where she needed to be, and how to get there.
“I was made to fly vipers,” she said.
“So fly us.”
* * *
William Adama pinned the cylon to the faded-blue wall in a choke-hold. “You don't know me,” he seethed. “You don't even know your daughter.”
Thrace managed six words. “I had better reasons than you.”
“Higher calling? All this crap? That was worth more to you?”
Thrace thrashed out with a fist and caught Adama across the cheek; it was enough of a distraction to break free - push the Admiral to the ground. He screamed, “No!”
He slid down the wall. More quietly: “No. I'm not that good a man, Bill Adama. For Kara, I'd set the nukes myself. I'd give my wrists to the Old Machine. I never wanted to leave her.”
“But you had to,” Adama spat. He wiped his fingers across his cheek. The blood was dark as the day. Like tar. Like the cancer at the heart of everything.
He stood; ready for another round.
Daniel Thrace slowly pushed himself up the wall. “Yes. I had to,” he said, sounding as disgusted with his answer as Adama was. “I thought it would be better than getting her killed.”
Adama cuffed his sleeves and brushed off his knuckles.
“Is this it, Admiral? What we have to do? Are we this angry?”
“Yes,” Adama said.
His opponent nodded, eyes closed. It was almost relief. When they opened, they were raw and angry. They were eyes that meant to hurt him.
* * *
Hera was sitting on her chest staring at her. Behind her, Sharon Agathon was watching her with a great deal more caution.
“I'm okay,” Laura said.
“You blacked out,” she heard Caprica say.
Sharon picked up her daughter. Laura sat up and was extremely glad she could no longer see anything unusual. That she could no longer see Gaius Baltar, she corrected. She was still sitting in a resurrection tank in the middle of an unreal opera house.
“We need to get out of here,” she said.
“I already tried the door,” Sharon said. “It's locked. Nothing I've tried works.”
“Then we'll find another way. We shouldn't stay.” She stood up.
“You have a plan,” Caprica announced, suspiciously.
Laura paused, then nodded slightly.
“Then you're going to tell us what it is before we go anywhere,” Sharon said. “What did that thing tell you?”
Laura paused, then answered reluctantly, “It's a navigation program. To jump the planet. But it can't because there's no hybrid. There should be one but, I think it ran away, or died, or both. 'The centurions have the schematics,' that has to mean for a hybrid. So we need some centurions.”
“Suddenly you think this is a great idea?” Athena jabbed. “All of humanity in a blind jump - a blind jump no hybrid could possibly plot?”
“It will be able to plot it,” Laura said, quietly, before pushing past the cylon and her daughter and walking toward the white double-doors.
Sharon had been right. They were locked tight. Not even rattling. She began walking the circumference of the auditorium looking for another door; for any exit.
Caprica watched her like she might need to run at any second. One hand was at her mouth, the other was resting near her waist.
Athena was striding toward her like a predator with a toddler on her hip. Laura set her jaw and met the other woman's eyes.
“What did it tell you?” she asked again. Every word was icy.
There are no exits, Laura thought, and sighed.
“You were right. The hybrid can't plot the jump. It's been waiting for Hera.”
Sharon became still. It was strange, Laura thought, how little you noticed a person shift and sway and swing their weight; their rising chest or drifting eyes, until it stopped. Perhaps that was what made the humanoid cylons so effective - a line of code against the mechanical economy of stillness. Sharon was still now.
She spoke, quietly. “It wants to use my daughter as extra memory?”
“I won't let it happen, Sharon.”
“It'll fry her mind. It would kill her.”
“Lieutenant, I need you to look at me. Look at me. I promise you, I will not let it happen.”
They locked eyes, and for a moment, for barely a moment, Laura saw the panic and the the anger fading. She saw gratitude; the kind she had seen in the faces of her followers at Kobol, because someone else had agreed to bear the burden, and choices were someone else's responsibility now.
It was only a moment.
Laura wasn't angry. In Sharon's place, she wouldn't trust her either.
“Then why build it?” Sharon asked, stepping backwards, shifting Hera's weight so that, Laura assumed, she had one hand free to fire her weapon.
“We'll use someone else. Something else,” Laura said.
“Who?” Sharon demanded. “Some human, some cylon you don't like? Just hope it works? Hera ran down here, into this godsfrakked vision for a reason,” she unholstered her gun. “You feel like throwing it Nicky Tyrol, or maybe her kid,” she pointed the gun at Caprica, who stumbled backwards, and steadied herself against a row of velvet chairs.
Sharon swung her gun back around to Laura.
“I think you're lying,” she said. “Who are you going to use, Roslin? Really. Who are you going to use?”
“Me.”
Sharon frowned, readjusted the grip on her weapon slightly.
“I have her blood,” Laura said. “And I don't think the program can tell the difference.”
* * *
Kara left the last of the marines slumped in a side-room thirty feet from the hybrid's chamber.
“I can't do this for everyone on the ship,” she said.
“You can't?” Leoben asked.
“No. I can feel it sliding. It's like I have this glass, and if I drop it, it'll shatter, and we'll be back in the world. So I'm holding on real tight, but my hands are greased. If I hold too tight, it's just gonna pop out like a rocket. If I let go a little, it'll slip loose. I've never done this before and it turns out I have a shitty sense of moderation,” she grinned at him. “Can't our girl just...jump them somewhere else?”
“The more you want to jump, the harder it is. You have to see everywhere it's been, everywhere it will go; how it's going to change things. The small things are easiest. The things no one else can see are easiest of all,” he grinned back at her.
“But she could,” Kara said, walking back into the corridor, standing in front of one of the centurions. “If she wanted to.” She pressed her fingertips to its breastplate, and immediately pulled away.
“It's cold,” she whispered.
“You need to understand this is the endgame of a very long war, Kara. He hopes the centurions will put us in checkmate. They have the weight of the entire cycle of time behind them. It's hard to move something with that much gravity.”
Kara nodded. She didn't understand but, maybe a part of her did - the part that was a computer. A machine. The idea was easier to handle if she thought of it as separate; like her viper.
Maybe this was just like flying after all.
“Who is “he”?” she asked.
“The other hybrid.”
“If he has magical centurions, what's our top secret last ditch move?”
“You.”
“Why me?”
“Because he can't see you. He's never been able to see you. You're not a part of the cycle of time. You're brand new.”
“So I have as long as I balance on this frakking ridiculous tightrope to single-handedly thwart a centurion revolution?”
Leoben shrugged at her, and smiled easily.
“Then I'd better get a frakking move on,” Kara said, and started sprinting down the corridors, not paying attention to where she was going, just trying to be where she needed to be.
* * *
“You try it,” Gaius said.
“What?”
“The door.”
“It's locked.”
“Well, the pretty white one that they're seeing is, yes. But the steel monstrosity we see looks like it still has a functioning handle.”
Athena and Laura were staring at each other over the muzzle of Athena's pistol, still trying to decide where the trust between them lay, if it had ever existed.
Quietly, Caprica walked between the rows and rows of FTL drives and put her hand to the cold metal wheel on the front of the door. It was stiff, but it moved. It creaked. She turned it four times. The door swung open.
“How did you do that?” she heard Laura breathe.
“I...I don't know,” she said. “I just tried the handle.”
* * *
You're the President, godsdammit, Lee told himself. Again. You're the President. You need to do something.
Something other than staring at Kara's dead body, ten feet behind the nearest centurion, still covered with her own military issue jacket. Something other than imagining ways in which what she'd done to herself had somehow been unintentional; something other than imagining the ways he should have stopped her, and should have known. Definitely something other than empathy.
How many more would follow her?
They had nowhere to go. The Colonies and Kobol were back through the Passage; they'd barely made it once. Space was barren and cold and enormous and their map was gone. They were all lost.
And he'd never survive to see a vote of no-confidence, or his species die of starvation and radiation sickness on this burnt rock unless he did something about the circle of centurions pointing guns at them.
They couldn't fight their way out of this one. So the first step was finding out what they wanted. Could centurions talk? He wasn't even sure they had speakers.
Slowly, he walked toward Tigh and Tory Foster.
“Do you know what they want?” he murmured, keeping his head fixed forward.
“No,” Tory whispered.
“Can you make contact?”
There was a pause before she answered. “No. They don't usually...speak. But the Colonel, when he -”
“I saw, did he -?”
“-said something about them being sorry.”
He turned to look at her and caught her dark eyes looking at him the way he used to catch her looking at Roslin in quorum meetings. Like she needed something. He wished he could remember what had made her look that way; was it when they'd been talking about cylons? About Baltar?
He didn't know her well. He knew she hated to be out of control; she hated being frustrated - things she couldn't understand. He'd dismissed it, before, as impatience. Perhaps even necessary brusqueness.
It would be easier to remember she was a machine, to remember how afraid she made him and how little he could trust her, if she wasn't looking at him like he was the godsdamned President, and all she wanted in this blasted world was for him to pull a scrap of paper out of his pocket - because he still didn't have a desk drawer - and make everything better.
He wondered what it would say.
If Laura was here to turn out her pockets for him, what scrap of paper would offer him absolution?
He suspected only two words (whether they were written on paper, or just burned into her heart) held any weight for Laura now.
They weren't words meant for him, weren't words he could ever fully understand because he ran away. He ran away.
Scars formed on New Caprica, while he swayed in space in the belly of the Beast, planless, plotless and afraid. Maybe if he had been there, with Kara and Sam and Tigh and Laura Roslin and even Tory Foster, he would be someone else now. Someone who understood why Kara kept killing herself, and when the President (you're the President now) had switched from fearing what she might do to what she might not do. Someone who understood Dogsville and the Circle and a trial that served no purpose.
Maybe he would have been part of the gang, screaming for Baltar's head.
Maybe he should have been.
Terrible things happened to humanity on wasted mudballs like this when centurions came to round them up.
He stepped forward.
“Easy, son,” he felt Tigh's hand on his shoulder.
“Someone's got to do something,” he muttered, and brushed him off.
He took another step forward, so that he was clearly out in front of the main group.
“I am Lee Adama,” he said. “President of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol. You are acting in violation of our truce. I insist you release us.”
The centurion raised its gun-arm.
“Lee,” he heard Tigh's voice. “Don't do something stupid.”
The centurion gestured he should move back.
Lee stood where he was. “At the very least you can give us your terms for release.”
The centurion stepped forward.
Lee opened his mouth to speak. “All right,” he was going to say. “I'm going.”
He didn't because there was a gunshot. He was falling to the ground. It felt nothing like the last time he'd been shot; he didn't hurt at all.
Maybe, his brain realised, as he hit the mud, he hadn't been shot. Maybe the person who had screamed in agony was the person who had collapsed on top of him, and who was bleeding all over his white shirt.
Saul Tigh.
* * *
Daniel threw punches and kicks without considering where they landed. A few landed in the mud, some Bill Adama batted aside. Some hit him, and that part was pretty satisfying. His broken nose and his beaten body were screaming at him to back off, but sometimes you couldn't do what you were told.
He didn't yell. Maybe Adama was expecting him to; it's what Adama would have done.
He had the Admiral pinned to the ground. He was straddled on his chest, holding both his arms as the older man struggled to kick him free.
Older. Now there was an inaccuracy.
He'd spent over twenty years - most of his daughter's childhood, and every moment of the rest of her life - watching some mad game of staves play out between two crazy machines, jumping through empty space trying to distract each other from the rest of the universe.
(From his daughter.)
After the first jump, he had realised, the hybrid wasn't just changing time, she was changing him, like a kid with a doll and an unending supply of costumes. Like a kid in a field pulling legs off a beetle, if the kid could put the legs back on too, and then add extra legs, and then turn the beetle into a puppy. Just because.
After jumps, he had woken up as a teenager, as a man so old his brain didn't work, as a child, as a woman, as people he remembered and people he'd never met. He had woken up as Richard Adar. He had woken up as Aaron Doral. After five jumps looking exactly like Tory Foster, he realised, even if he saw Kara again, she wouldn't know him. The world he was trying to make for her was too strange.
Once he woke up on New Caprica - years before New Caprica had happened; and he didn't understand where he had been until much later - and stayed there for four days. He was beginning to like it a little, because he so rarely had company (except on the occasions where he woke up in two bodies, or five) when she jumped him back. Once he woke up in the snow outside his old apartment on the morning of Theogamia when Kara was five. He watched himself go sledding with his daughter. He would have been more grateful for that jump if she hadn't left him barefoot in the snow in silk pyjamas for so long he collapsed and had to be taken to a hospital by strangers. Then she jumped him back before the doctors could treat him.
He hadn't looked this much like himself in years. It was, he supposed, the hybrid's gift to Kara. As usual, she lacked an understanding of the details: he was barely older than his child.
Daniel Thrace never cried. Even now, while a detached part of his mind considered using his forehead to break Adama's nose, his eyes were dry. He didn't cry when he ran out of the hybrid's chamber and saw his world going up in mushroom clouds. He didn't cry when his daughter stumbled out of bed and in a fever dream, hit a sequence of keys on his piano that no one had ever hit before. When the notes sliced into his brain and he remembered everything the hybrid had taken from his mind to keep him safe and tucked away from time.
He didn't cry when he packed his bag and left his daughter with her alcoholic mother, without an explanation, or any excuse better than the fact the Old Machine had noticed him already now that he knew what he was, and if he found him, he'd find Kara.
A giant gamble that he had changed things, with no real evidence that it hadn't always been this way. Except the way the Old Machine feared his daughter. Hated her. Wanted her dead. He wouldn't fear her if she wasn't a threat.
He clung to that, in Tory Foster's skin, through five jumps, and understood precisely how frakked it made things that a death threat to his daughter could be a comfort.
But he didn't cry.
In his mouth, between his broken teeth, he rolled words; testing them. Accusations, justifications.
You didn't even notice I spent eight months driving our daughter to suicide!
He would have laughed if he hadn't, for the first time in his corrupted memory, wanted to find tears in his eyes.
“Come on, motherfrakker,” Adama growled through bloody lips. “Get it over with.”
Then they heard the gunshot.
* * *
Saul could see Lee's panicked face. He could hear shouting, but was not sure how to make sense of the noise. His stomach was on fire. Gunshot wound, he guessed. Good, that meant Lee was all right.
The Old Man's son was safe.
Even if he'd never live to see his own.
Probably a good thing anyway. He had no idea how to teach someone to be a man. Perhaps he'd do better with a girl; less pressure - let her mother screw it up.
Was he sad? That he'd never get to see her?
Anders was shouting too now. He thought he heard words like, “blood,” and “pressure,” and “make it.”
Saul tried to remember his own father. He couldn't. The world, and his own body, seemed very distant. Maybe this was how it happened - half his memories were already packed up and gone. Sent out to some resurrection hub they destroyed over a month ago. As usual, he had lousy timing.
Or maybe it was the best timing. This he knew how to do. This was pretty easy.
Anders yelled some more. “Tory,” and “my jacket,” and “now!”
His first memory: what was it?
He was standing in the dark, in Aft Damage Control on the Solarion. It was his first combat engagement; he was 18. Any minute, the cylons were going to smash through the bulkhead, and he only had two explosive rounds left.
Brooks had said there was a weak spot on the back of the neck. If he had to; if he was strong enough...
But Brooks was dead, because in the last attack wave, Saul had missed, and a centurion had shot Brooks between the eyes.
His very first memory. God had picked him up (God was beautiful; God had a wide smile; God's voice rang out with wild joy when she sang, “JUMP!”) and left him here, dropped into some new, mortal life. Not even the shape of his cells was the same. He could have been anyone; she could have hidden him anywhere.
She chose here, in the dark, without enough courage or skill or self-control to cope.
Saul Tigh was born here. Perhaps he'd lived here all his life.
Perhaps now, finally, he could leave.
He closed his eyes.
* * *
Kara led Leoben through the curving halls of the basestar. She passed frozen humans and cylons and centurions. She felt guilty, leaving people in the middle of firefights. It was the same reason she hated being stuck in CIC instead of out in a viper.
She was losing her balance.
She ran faster, ducking around motionless soldiers, sliding around corners, following the line in her mind - the clear, high-pitched note that was calling her... This way.
Left, left, right, left, down a level.
She reached a hangar bay.
D'Anna was leading a dozen centurions toward a heavy raider. The centurions where carrying supply boxes and heavy machinery.
Twenty yards away, as near as Kara could tell, Natalie had stolen Gaeta's sidearm. He was reaching for her, face caught mid-yell. She had already spun away, was skidding to a halt, and taking aim.
Kara jogged to her position, and sighted along the gun. D'Anna. Natalie was going to kill D'Anna.
D'Anna had sided with the centurions. Lords knew what they were trying to do.
Whatever was going to happen; whatever she was supposed to do - she had to do it here. This was where she needed to be. And any second -
“You have to stop this, Kara,” Leoben said.
- she was going to lose her balance.
The world started.
Kara threw herself into Natalie, and both women hit the deck. Natalie's shot went wild. Two centurions turned and began to lay down covering fire as Kara and Natalie and Gaeta retreated into an access corridor.
“What did you do that for?” yelled Natalie.
“I don't,” Kara shook her head. “I don't know.”
They heard the roar of the heavy raider lifting off.
* * *
Caprica found herself leading. She had a strong feeling that they should go this way, and so she went, and the others followed.
None of them spoke.
Not until they found Admiral Adama and a blond man crouched behind a wall, taking turns to sneak looks through what was left of the window.
Then Laura Roslin said, “What in the gods' names have you been doing with yourself, Bill. You look half dead.”
“I feel half dead,” the Admiral growled. “Stay behind cover. The centurions have taken the landing group hostage and...Daniel Thrace thinks the same has likely happened on both basestars.”
Caprica saw Laura's eyes widen, then narrow. What she said was, “Daniel Thrace.”
What she was thinking, Caprica was sure, was entirely different. She stretched out her hand, and Gaius caught it. If the centurions had turned against them, they were absolutely frakked. She thought about Natalie, and how she had walked into that council with a telencephalic inhibitor and exact knowledge of what would happen next. The fragility of flesh was appalling.
Daniel Thrace, who looked as damaged as the Admiral, offered his hand. “A pleasure to meet you,” he said.
Laura didn't return the gesture. She said, “You look remarkably like your daughter, Mr Thrace. Is she also being held hostage?”
The cylon shook his head. “I don't know.”
“What do we know?”
“Nothing,” Adama said. “Except that we heard shots fired and we're too frakking far away to see what's going on. There may be wounded.”
Caprica gripped Gaius' hand more tightly. “Please,” he murmured. “It would be too just in an unjust universe if Tigh was the one who got shot.”
“And do we have a plan?” Roslin asked.
“Besides waiting for an opening? No.” Adama replied.
“Wonderful,” Roslin sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Did I miss anything else?”
“Only a pile of metaphysical crap from the cylon. Something about changing the cycle of time.”
Laura nodded slowly, and shifted her gaze to Daniel Thrace.
Caprica felt cold.
Adama looked like he was suffering from indigestion, but then, Caprica always thought he looked like that: she couldn't read him which was probably why he made her so uncomfortable. Sharon had elected to stay a few feet from them and watch things develop from a safe distance. She looked suspicious; angry that she couldn't just head out across the plain while everyone else was caught up plotting, jump in her raptor and get the hell out.
Caprica sympathised. But like Laura Roslin, and the man who said he was Kara Thrace's father, something frightening, and enormous had her spellbound. She wasn't sure she could move if she wanted to.
It reminded her of the moments before Laura and Sharon had walked into her cell after their first vision. Like the day before an electrical storm. She had a brief, unbidden image of the planet ripped in half by a thunderclap. She saw Daniel Thrace as Zeus, as a lightning-rod.
Perhaps Laura Roslin really was Hera, and she and Athena's daughter were interchangeable, as long as one of them went back to that room, rode the lightning, fried herself in service to a better tomorrow.
She shivered.
Daniel Thrace said, “How did you leave the Opera House?”
Laura Roslin said, “How do you know I was in the Opera House?”
He said, “You always go in.
He said, “The dying leader entered the temple of the gods, and there, the metatron spoke false prophecies to tempt her into accepting his gifts, for her people would die on the scarred face of the earth without them.
She said, I will not yield the child, for she is the first born of two peoples. But I shall give of my own blood, that we share. I shall make this broken place a promised land with you, though I shall never set foot there.”
It was a verse Caprica had never heard before, and Caprica knew every verse. She turned to Gaius, but he had chosen to disappear.
“You always go in, Laura,” Daniel said. “But you've never come out before.”
“So it was always me,” Laura murmured.
“It was. You went down into the Opera House, and found the last hybrid of the last cycle. You both spent your lives on that jump, but when it was over, the world was beautiful again. Habitable. We moved our hybrid into the Opera House to wait for the next you - this you. The refugees built cities and planted crops in green fields, and no one died of radiation sickness. There was peace, for a time. I remember it.” For a broken man, Thrace moved quickly. He reached out with his bloody-knuckled hand and touched her face. “But it can't be you this time. I can't let you do it.”
Laura batted his palm away, and pinioned him with her eyes. “You can't let me?”
Caprica wished, very much, that Gaius would return. She didn't know what to do with her hands when his weren't there to hold.
“Laura,” Adama growled. “Whatever you're considering, it sounds like something we need to discuss.”
“I'm considering saving our species from a slow death in this hell-hole, Bill, and it's not something that's up for discussion. From either of you.”
“You were never supposed to die of the cancer,” Thrace said. “You were supposed to get here while you were still sick. When the hybrid resurrected you, she didn't bring you back exactly the same. She never brings anyone back exactly the same. You don't share enough blood anymore. If you try this, it won't work. The jump will fail and I don't even want to guess what will happen to the planet.”
After a horrible pause, Laura whispered, “Something about changing the cycle of time.”
Daniel Thrace didn't answer.
“You motherfrakker,” her eyes were welling with tears. There was a terrible stillness to her. Caprica wanted to touch her - just press her fingers to her shoulder so that she would know she wasn't alone. But she was too afraid. Too much emotion; Caprica had been a lightning-rod before. Worlds had burned - twice.
“Why didn't you just leave me dead?” Laura asked.
“I would have,” Daniel answered, and he meant it as a kindness. “If I'd been there, I would have asked her not to. But I was already waiting here, and she...isn't like us.”
“The hybrid,” a tear rolled down her cheek.
“If you want to avoid taking the same road, you can't just blow up the road. You have to build new roads; as many as you can.”
“And here we are, Mr Thrace. Where's our road? We're stuck on a dead world.”
The man nodded quietly. He didn't have anything more to say.
Adama walked up to the former President. “I've heard enough of this,” he said. “You're all losing your frakking minds.”
He put his arm around Roslin, and walked her as far away as the broken wall permitted. She leaned against it as he spoke to her. Caprica couldn't hear the words, only the tone. Low, insistent, like he really thought he could reach her and make this better with logic. Laura was staring at the sky.
Athena really looked ready to bolt, centurion covering fire or no, but she braced herself in a sitting position at the other end of the wall, holding Hera between her knees, and closed her eyes. Caprica wondered if she was praying, or if she ever prayed, now.
Caprica walked up to Daniel Thrace and touched his arm. She wasn't sure she should, but she couldn't not. He started. When he looked at her, he smiled with his split lips. “Hello,” he said.
“You're one of the five,” she said.
He nodded. “And you're the sixth,” He looked tired, but genuinely pleased to see her, which was still a rare commodity in Six's life. Perhaps in his also. “We blame Tory for you,” he added.
Caprica laughed softly. “I would have guessed that she made D'Anna.”
“We all made all of you. And we didn't. You've always existed, Six, somehow.”
They fell into a silence; the first one that hadn't racked the tension in Caprica's spine beyond tolerable levels in days. Weeks. The relief was indescribable. It took concentration to stop herself from shaking with it.
“That piece of scripture you quoted,” she said. “I've never heard it.”
“No,” he answered. “That was one of the pieces we deleted before we left. We deleted a lot.”
“And...” she paused, unsure if she wanted to hear the answer. “Why did you leave?”
“Just an accident,” he said. “Just what you get for making a god and then telling her to do whatever the hell she pleases.”
“She pleased to send you away from us?”
“She pleased to give us the most...wonderful lives. For a while.”
Caprica nodded slowly.
“Don't worry,” Daniel said. “You'll get your chance.”
“I wasn't supposed to be in the Opera House, was I? I mean,” she moved her hands to her stomach. “This wasn't supposed to happen. I know that.”
“You're a little unstuck in the cycle of time, yes. And thank God. Otherwise no one would have seen clearly enough to get out of the Opera House and you'd still be waiting there, when the centurions came, and Laura Roslin would have tried to link with the hybrid anyway, and half the planet might have jumped into a sun.”
“And now, instead, we can die slowly, of starvation and radiation poisoning?” she smiled, ruefully, as she said it. It wasn't really a barb.
“Yes,” he said. “More time is always better, don't you think?”
Caprica thought about it. She wasn't sure.
* * *
Anders was covered in blood. His own, over his face; Saul Tigh's over his arms. He pressed his jacket against the wound in the Colonel's stomach, feeling the blood seep through the rough fabric. “He's gonna die,” he said. “He's gonna die, it's too late.”
Tigh had passed out, but he was still breathing, just.
“You don't know that,” Tory whispered. “He's not bleeding as much as he was. If we just hold on -”
“For what? Who's gonna come save us, Tory?”
Cylon battlefield medicine was putting a bullet in you and telling you to wake up in a new body.
“There's a reason for everything.”
Sam thought she sounded desperate to believe it. Couldn't blame her; it'd be nice if it was true, but it wasn't.
“Sometimes,” he said. “Frakked up things just happen, and there's no reason. We just screw up. We're just screw-ups.”
She didn't answer. Sam blinked the tears out of his eyes, and stared down at his own bloody fists, squeezing Saul Tigh's blood from his jacket. Tory's slim fingers touched his knuckles.
He remembered her skin under his own fingers. So many of his memories he didn't understand.
“We're not perfect,” he whispered.
She didn't answer. She didn't move her hand. He looked up and saw the top of her head; she was watching her own hand against his.
“We're machines,” he said.
“We're the same people we always were,” Tory replied, not looking at him.
“Then why are we machines? What's the point? What's the point in...in...” he shook her hand from his, and let go for long enough to sweep at Tigh, at the gunshot wound, at the whole damn frakking planet. “In all of this. I mean, I know, I heard Leoben's crap back on Caprica. Part of being human. But we're not human. Why the frak did they have to make us so we can't stop pretending we are?”
Tory rose from her kneeling position and squatted in the mud, elbows resting on her knees, winter coat zipped up to her chin. Anders took deep breaths, rubbed his eyes and his split eyebrows with the back of his bloody hand, then reapplied himself to the job of keeping Tigh's blood in his body.
Tory said, “Maybe it's not just copying. Maybe it's evolution.”
“I don't believe we were meant to replace them - that we're better than them. I don't believe it. I won't.”
Tory shook her head. “That wasn't what I meant.”
It was a long time before she finished her sentence. Long enough that Anders had begun to pack up his mind again, and close the doors he was happier when he left closed.
Tory said, “You need to irradiate our blood before you can even tell the difference. Maybe we need to think about what the word machine means.”
“Don't say there's no difference,” Sam warned her. “There's a difference.”
“I know,” Tory said.
“We're not biological.”
“What does that even mean now?” she asked.
Sam looked back down at his hands, and the blood.
“His pulse is getting weaker,” Tory said, pressing her fingers to Tigh's throat.
They all heard a heavy raider in the sky.
* * *
“What can you see?” Laura asked, again, tensely.
“Not a lot,” Bill muttered. He was crouched awkwardly, trying to see what had happened after the heavy raider had landed near the ruins and the hostages.
It was too far away.
“Centurions got out, I think,” he said. “I can't see, it's too frakking far away.”
He punched the wall.
“Let me see,” said Thrace. “My eyes are better.”
“Well?” Laura asked, after barely enough time for Thrace to settle himself into a position that wouldn't make him a target for a sniper.
“Centurions. And...I think D'Anna.”
Nobody seemed certain what to make of that.
“Maybe she's got the centurion situation under control,” Laura said.
“Maybe,” Athena replied.
“Wait,” said Daniel Thrace. “I think something else is coming to land.”
* * *
The relief Baltar felt when he saw D'Anna follow the centurions from the heavy raider lasted exactly as long as it took for D'Anna to start speaking. It evaporated entirely when he saw Six, in her blood-red dress, smiling like a shark.
“They say they want Gaius Baltar,” D'Anna said. “I suggest you hand him over, or they'll start shooting.”
Lee Adama stood up and moved to the front. “D'Anna - we had a truce, what's going on?”
“The Cylon seem to be experiencing something of a second civil war, Mr President,” she said with a sour smile. “I'd object, of course, but I was designed without the benefit of inbuilt weaponry.”
“But what do they want?”
“I just told you - they want Gaius Baltar.”
Gaius felt Six slip her arm over his shoulder; the cool metal of her silver bracelets shivering past his neck. “Don't worry,” she murmured into his ear; a delicious whisper of excitement mixing uncomfortably with the fear in his chest. “You brought them the word of God. They wouldn't harm you.”
“I'll take my chances here, thanks.”
Lee Adama took a moment to reply, and when he did, he sounded incredulous. “Gaius Baltar. That's it? That's all they want?”
“Seems to be,” D'Anna replied, cheerfully. “For now anyway. I can't say for certain what their plan is next. But uh, they do say that if you keep out of their way they'll release you once they have custody of their,” she glanced at the centurion who was standing beside her. “How did you put it? Oh yes. Chosen leader.”
“Chosen leader,” Lee repeated, dubiously.
“Chosen leader?” Gaius repeated, alarmed. Then louder, standing up, he said, “Mr President, I don't know anything about this, I, uh, really I don't. I mean, yes, I had an association with the, um, the centurion line on the basestar, but they never even spoke to me, I mean, that I understood. I suppose I spoke to them, I, uh...” he trailed off. Six was looking at him in that way he hated - the way that meant he was making an absolute prat of himself, and she was enjoying every minute. He sank back down to his rock. “I'm glad you find me so entertaining,” he hissed.
“Step forward,” she told him. “And you won't be harmed.”
“I remember how that worked out last time.”
“All right,” she folded her arms, and took a few steps forward herself; back to him. God, he loved that view. She knew it, too. That was probably why she was standing there, so he wouldn't pay attention and would agree to - “and it all worked out for the best in the end, didn't it? So step forward.”
“What?” he said.
There was a whining overhead. Gaius started. A raptor was flying in. Oh thank God, someone to rescue him from this insanity.
The centurions turned their heads in unison; first to the raptor, then back to the hostages. They all extended their guns. Even D'Anna started to look a little nervous.
“Give us Gaius,” she said. “They really will start shooting if you don't. And they're not going to wait for that raptor to land.”
“One way or another, you're going to go with them, Gaius,” Six said; still standing in front of him, staring out to the horizon. “You can either go as a coward or a hero. Step forward. They only want to honour you.”
The front-most centurion aimed his gun at Racetrack, the raptor pilot.
“Stop,” Gaius shouted. “I'll come with you. Don't hurt anyone.”
He stepped forward.
* * *
Bill tried to pull Laura back, as the centurions marched by. She ignored him; when the hand on her shoulder became too insistent, she pushed it off and took half a step forward. None of the centurions paid her any attention. They walked, in rhythm.
She felt her heart beat: the same rhythm as the slow, mechanical steps. The same rhythm it had held on New Caprica.
The third time she had stood quietly, through the end of the world.
“D'Anna,” she called, as the woman passed. “Don't let them do it.”
D'Anna didn't answer. Her eyes seemed to shrug; a beautiful, disgusted what-the-frak-does-it-matter-now? She turned away, and kept walking.
Gaius Baltar passed.
She couldn't let herself feel sorry for him, see too-wide eyes staring into hers, asking for something. Help, she supposed. She couldn't let herself see him.
Beside her, Caprica Six actually turned away. Put both of her hands against the faded-blue paint on the wall, and pressed her forehead to it.
* * *
Kara was first out of the raptor. Natalie followed her, dismayed, talking about how they'd arrived too late.
Kara wasn't really sure why that was. She sure as hell preferred D'Anna and her bloody-minded toasters on the surface of a frakked-up-anyhow planet to stuck on a ship with her. It wasn't as if they'd killed all the hostages while they were inbound.
She looked around. There were some bodies.
Lords. That one must be hers. She felt weak-kneed.
Then she saw Lee, white shirt drenched in blood; so much it couldn't be his because he was standing. He looked...nauseous. Like the nuggets after their first combat who heave as soon as they hit the deck. Not really because of the g-forces, or even the toasters who almost smeared them across the inside of their own cockpits. Just because some things you shouldn't have to see, and landing on the deck is when it hits: this is what they have to get used to.
He didn't run at her like he did the first time she came back, too grateful to be confused. He just stared like she was an animated corpse. She couldn't really blame him. She couldn't even promise she'd never do it again.
“I'm sorry,” seemed so inadequate, but she opened her mouth to say it because it was all she had.
That was when Sam yelled her name, raw and utterly desperate. She turned her head and saw him, staunching someone's wound (Tigh; oh Lords - and she'd been relieved the Old Man wasn't here to make one more person she'd frakked with when she put a bullet in her head).
“Kara,” he yelled again. “Oh gods, baby, oh gods you're here again. You came back again. Tory, take over, get this, Tory, come on,” he was babbling, grabbing Tory Foster's hands and putting them across Tigh's stomach. He was stumbling to his feet and running for her.
Sammy. Never did have a sense of self-preservation. Loved her too much. She didn't deserve it.
He grabbed her; clung to her like he could stop her from leaving again with just his arms. “I love you baby, I love you, I love you.”
They hadn't spoken since he'd left for the basestar. Months ago.
She didn't return the hug. Sam didn't seem to notice. She kept her eyes on Lee. He kept his eyes on her, because he couldn't look away. He'd never been able to look away. Kara remembered every single time she'd used that on him.
“I'm so sorry,” she said to him. He kept standing there, staring at her like she was the most beautiful demon he'd ever seen. Yeah. She knew that look. Heartbroken.
“I don't care, I just care you're here now,” Sam mumbled into her shoulder.
Carefully, she moved his arms away; she stood him back a foot or so. He let her, because he'd let her do anything.
She said, not just to Sam, maybe to the whole broken world, “I'm half-cylon.”
A dozen people turned to stare at her. Sam was the only one to speak. “What?” he said.
“I'm half-cylon,” she repeated. “My dad. I didn't know.”
Sam tipped his head back, closed his eyes and squeezed out tears; a rattling breath she thought he might have been holding since the day marines dragged him away during a mission briefing because he was a toaster.
Lee said, loud enough to carry the fifteen feet between them, “I don't care who your father was, Kara. No one who matters will care.”
* * *
Gaius didn't have much of a chance to wonder why there was an exact replica of the Opera House from his visions on Kobol under the surface of Earth. As soon as he realised where he was, a centurion pinned him to the stage, while another began to give him injections.
“Ow!” he yelled. “What the bloody hell do you think you're doing?”
He didn't realise he needed to be really scared (not the oh-God-I'm-in-trouble-how-will-I-get-out kind of scared, but the what-if-I-don't-get-out-at-all kind) until he looked at D'Anna and realised she wouldn't meet his gaze. He didn't realise he ought to be terrified, until he saw a tear rolling down her cheek.
“What's going on?” he asked. Another needle pierced his shoulder. “Please, will somebody explain to me what's happening?”
“I'm sorry, Gaius,” D'Anna said. “If I'd known before, well...I would have tried to warn you.”
She walked away.
“What,” he started. “What does that mean?” he asked the centurion leaning over him, upside down in his field of vision, because there was no one else to ask. “What did she mean?”
“She means,” Six told him, appearing at a 180 degree angle from the centurion. “That you've been chosen. When this is over, the entire world will be yours, to rebuild as God would have wanted it.”
“But I don't want the world!”
“Gaius,” she crooned. “A truly great man must shoulder great burdens. Take my hand; this is going to hurt.”
He heard something that sounded horribly like a buzz-saw revving up. “I don't want to die,” he cried.
He managed perhaps three minutes before he lost consciousness. He was fairly certain they were sawing off his legs. There was nothing in his world but pain; pain so loud it wasn't a feeling anymore, he didn't hurt, he just didn't exist in any other spectrum. Distantly, he thought he could hear himself screaming.
That poor man; it sounded awful.
* * *
Athena stopped short of the crowd. Roslin, Adama, Caprica, even Daniel Thrace kept going, back into the mess of - well what was it? Not humanity anymore.
Athena stopped, and waited for Karl to notice her. He did, and came jogging over, grabbing her and Hera both in a bear hug.
“Had me worried for a while there,” he said. “You okay?”
Athena nodded. She'd probably never tell him everything about the Opera House. There were things she'd never told him about the basestar. But she always came back with Hera. Sometimes even awful patterns were reassuring. Better than chaos.
Athena watched the mess of not-entirely-humanity-anymore.
“What are we going to do now?” she asked him.
Karl shrugged. “Get back into space, I guess. Survey the planet, see if there are any habitable areas. If not, I don't know.”
“We should have just kept moving,” Sharon said. “I wish that frakked-up basestar had stayed away. I wish they both had.”
Karl gave her a look; same look he gave her every time she said true things like how Kara was insane for trusting Leoben. Like he thought she couldn't mean it, she was just hurt, just looking for a way to stop everyone staring at her in the corridors.
There was no way to stop everyone staring at her in the corridors. All she could do was try and make sure there were still corridors, and people to be in them.
“Right now,” she said. “There are a three dozen centurions frakking around with over six hundred jump engines wired to the planet. If they press the wrong button, God knows what will happen.”
“Are you serious?”
Sharon nodded.
“We need to tell the Admiral; get the people back to the Fleet -”
“He already knows.”
Twenty yards away, the Admiral was staring, stone-faced at Saul Tigh. Laura Roslin was speaking to him, constantly and quietly, while Caprica, who had Tigh's head resting on her knees, looked to him with desperation. Whatever they wanted him to do, Adama didn't do it. He stayed, three feet from his former XO, expressionless.
“Even if we all got back to the ships, we couldn't spin up the drives in time, if that's what they're planning to do. It's the end of the line, Karl. Maybe there comes a point where there's nothing else to do.”
Karl set his jaw. “Just give up.”
He was so honest. Such a hero. She loved him for that. How could she explain to him it wasn't surrender. Humans built machines, more and more complicated until they broke in the head and killed them all. And now they'd done the same thing to time, to the whole frakking universe. It was like a broken music box - the same eight notes repeating, getting sicker each time around.
Cancer was what happened when the body copied too much of the same thing.
Repetition was comforting, and safe, and malignant.
Sharon didn't really believe that the centurions would activate the jump drives. It would be too new, too surprising. Sharon thought she would probably spend the rest of her life doing and seeing and hearing terrible things so that she could bring Hera back to Karl. Because even the awful patterns are reassuring.
In the distance, she saw that Daniel Thrace had found his daughter. They were staring at each other. Kara said something, something loud, but the wind caught it and Sharon couldn't tell what it was beyond angry.
Daniel Thrace nodded quietly. Kara stood, arms wrapped around herself. Her father stepped toward her and pulled her into his arms. Kara fought him, tried to push him away, and when that didn't work, tried to pull away, and when that didn't work started yelling at someone else to get him away.
After a while, she gave up fighting, and collapsed against his chest.
Daniel Thrace lifted his hand to his daughter's head, and gently, gently began to stroke her hair.
Karl said, “Let's go.”
He grabbed Sharon's hand and began walking her to a raptor. She let him.
They walked past Caprica, sobbing softly, with her forehead pressed against Tigh's. His eyes were open, hazy, almost dead.
The Admiral finally stepped toward the Colonel. He raised his right hand to his brow, in a military salute.
“Attention!” he bellowed.
Slowly, at first, then with increasing speed, the military members of the group snapped straight, and saluted.
The wind picked up.
The planet jumped.
* * *
Gaius woke up. He was warm, floating. Like a pleasant dream: better times when he'd holidayed in the Leonite Tropics - warm waves as he floated in the reef-rippled shallows.
“Remember the summer when I went with you?” she asked.
He couldn't see her. He couldn't really see anything; perhaps his eyes were still closed.
“I remember,” he answered. “That you wore the most sensational swimsuit, and flirted outrageously with the waitstaff. I do believe you were trying to make me jealous.”
“Did it work?” she teased, nibbling at his ear.
“Oh yes. Just...a little higher.”
“Gaius,” she said. “I need you to focus.”
“I focus so much better when you keep doing that thing to my ear,” he murmured
She bit him, hard. He shocked awake. He could see centurions, the roof of the Opera House. He was in a resurrection tank. Oh God, now he remembered.
The pain was still there, like a desert, like a scorch across his brain. But it seemed different now - detached from him.
“While you were unconscious, they made some modifications,” she told him. “Including shaving down your nervous system. You don't really need most of it anymore since they mechanised your vital functions. Your brain could use the extra space.”
“And my legs?” he whispered.
“They had to break part of your spine to insert the mainline into your spinal column. Even if you still had them, you couldn't use them.”
“What have you done to me?”
“I know you're struggling to cope. All those new programs in your mind - these new horizons of perception. Deep breaths, Gaius. You're doing wonderfully.”
“You,” he looked down the length of his own body. The words fell out of his mouth like lead. “I'm a hybrid.”
“The centurions have the schematics.”
“But I'm human -” information began pumping into his mind. He felt his eyes roll back into his head and his entire body (what was left of it) tense up in agony. Not the distant physical pain of his body, but his entire mind convulsing in the white noise of a computational error. “I'm not built for this!” he screamed.
Co-ordinates, entry-vectors, power fluctuations, hundreds and hundreds of nodes (jump engines?) demanding his attention, threatening to overheat, to flip existence too soon, and that was before the world itself started screaming at him. Every dead tree, every wave in every inlet, every flight-suited viper jock and jarhead marine scuffing heels in the irradiated sand: where do I go? Where will you put me?
His mind was on fire. He was going to burn. A strangled sound came from his throat. He tried to say, with his eyes, “I can't do it. It's too much.”
“That's why you have me,” Six said. The soft Opera House light grew more intense. She was an angel wrapped in holy light. He'd never seen anything so beautiful. She straddled him, then lowered herself into the tank so that she was lying on his chest.
“Take my mind,” she said, and kissed him.
They jumped.
* * *
“What do I do?” Gaius asked.
“Whatever you want,” she told him. They were eye to eye. There was nothing else but blinding white. “You're remaking the world. And it will all be new - this has never happened before. It will never happen again.”
“But all the people. Where should I put them? Should I save them?”
“Do you want them to be happy?”
“Yes. Yes, I want that.”
* * *
As he burned himself to nothing, Gaius saw things.
Hera Agathon taught her younger brother to swim in the warm, clear-blue waters of the tropics.
At William Adama's funeral, the Admiral lay casket-bound, white-haired in full military dress. The priest giving the eulogy made no reference to God or gods, and in the open air, on a hilltop with long grass by the open ocean, hundreds gathered to hear it. At the front, Lee Adama gave a shuddering sigh and turned to Laura Roslin, who pulled him into her arms.
On a military issue bunk in a make-shift tent, Kara Thrace knelt and Sam Anders sat cross-legged. Kara stared into her husband's eyes, waiting for something, for a flicker. For red.
Anastasia Dualla in Galactica's CIC, had Commander's pips on her collar.
Natalie in the Temple of Aurora, with an Oracle barely old enough to have earned the title, rolled a piece of chamalla-laced liquorice between her fingers, and asked, “Are you certain?”
Tory Foster and Galen Tyrol sat on a public bench: Tory looked like she was ready to be shot, Galen looked like he had been.
D'Anna, sat with a centurion, at the edge of a cliff. Both of their legs dangled over the edge.
Daniel Thrace was wading out into the ocean.
Caprica sat at the foot of a white-barred crib, perched on the very edge of her chair. An infant in all-in-one pyjamas slept splayed out on its back. Saul Tigh slept splayed out on a bed nearby. There was an empty bottle on the bedside table.
She was beautiful. It was the first time Gaius understood it.
The angel she wasn't kissed him again. He closed his eyes, and let her take him away.
It was time for an end.
* * *
Author's Notes: While I'm amazed that I ever managed to finish this, I'm aware that this is, shall we say, dense? I've tried to tow the line between over-explaining and just plain being confusing. I do believe that the answer to every loose end is hidden in the text somewhere, but I'm also perfectly happy to explain anything that left you going, "Uh, dude, WTF?"
PART 1
PART 2