Fic: Awake The Nation: Epilogue
epilogue {the dawn rain}
Tea, Saito thought in contentment, was such a versatile drink. One could share it with friends or drink it alone, and never be given the side-eye for it. It could be plainly or elaborately made, and it came in hundreds, even thousands of varieties. Tea could be used to soothe and comfort or to awaken and invigorate. It was a staple on nearly every planet in known space and one of his main trading commodities, stable and always profitable.
Truth be known, Saito preferred coffee, but with Dom and Ariadne in the house, his morning cup was often emptied before he could even pour it, which was only one of the joys of a joint household full of such... unique personalities.
No-one, though, other than Eames on rare and irritating occasions, and now and again Yusuf, who was simply a locust in human form, seeking where he might to devour, ever went after the teapot.
Sometimes he wondered if it was simply too wide for their morning-narrowed vision to encompass it, rather than any sort of fear of his reaction or response to blatant theft- then again, since his reaction or response to blatant theft was more usually resigned acceptance, it was possible that they had no fear of anything whatsoever he might do.
Therefore, he conceded, teapots were too wide for morning vision.
He wondered if perhaps he could have some made that were even wider, and prevent a sudden onset of unwanted focus.
Saito also wondered if Eames felt the same way as the putative teapot at the moment. Eames was settled against Arthur, who was ignoring him in favor of the incoming morning news on his interface, but no one else in the room was pretending to do anything but stare at him with speculative looks on their faces. Yusuf, especially, was determined to learn what he could about the adjustments Cato had done to Eames's jack- how it was programmed, how it was controlled from outside, how it was controlled from inside, what did it feel like, Eames, really?
Saito could only be relieved that such interest was not focused on him.
At least Robert Fischer and his spacer... companion had left, Saito thought in relief, even if he was sure they'd been given an open invitation to return whenever they wanted or needed to. Less than a day in their company had proved to him that there were, indeed, worse things in life than watching Ariadne and Yusuf be most- unwarlike, was the only term he could think of- in each other's company, a new and in his mind highly unwelcome development.
He was unsure of what had changed there. It was not their alliance, nor their closeness: so much everyone had taken for granted now for a while- but there was a softness about them, these days, one which he did not think anyone else in the room would ever find or want.
It was as though Ariadne's brief bout of inexplicable wariness, her innate suspicion of all around her, had removed some part of her General's carapace, and in doing so made Yusuf more aware of the world around him.
No, Saito thought, it was not altogether unwelcome. Nor was it, as he had initially assumed, exclusive.
It did, however, exclude him, and he was not entirely convinced that such a change was what he would have wanted.
He was on the outside, waiting in the wings, or possibly behind the curtain, like that wizard-who-was-not in Pip's favorite storybook- homesick but making the best of it. It was a strange feeling.
"I swear, Yusuf, if you don't leave Eames alone, I'm going to rip your ears off and hang them from a chain around my neck," Arthur growled, never looking up from the news.
"They would look terrible," Yusuf said cheerfully, and Eames, bizarrely, actually laughed at that.
"What?" he asked a surprised-looking Arthur. "They would. And creepy, too."
"They'd smell," Ariadne said drowsily, holding her cup in both hands as she blinked into its depths. "Oh, preservative, right?"
"That was not a stunning defence of my person," Yusuf said to her drily, and she yawned at him in response. "Did you sleep at all last night, chick?"
"Mm, ish," Ariadne agreed, leaning against him. "Want more. Want all the sleep. Saito stole it."
Saito looked at her in surprise.
"I did? How so?"
"You want all the things," Ariadne said, and yawned again. "So you must've started with the sleep. My sleep. Bad Saito."
"Your theory is not... without merit," Saito said dryly as a hand clamped down on his shoulder.
"Merit perhaps," Dom chuckled as he patted Saito's shoulder, "but I think your hypothesis falls short. If Saito took all the sleep, you would have had none and he would have had more... and I know for a fact that he couldn't have had more than three hours last night."
"Really, Dominic. Have you set spies on me?"
"Why? Do you believe I need to?" Dom looked far too serious for the tone of the discussion.
"I do not," Saito said carefully, going by Dom's expression rather than his words as to what approach he needed to take. "I may consider later the fact that you seem to want to, however."
"Mm-hm," was all Dom responded with, but he left his hand on Saito's shoulder, which was something Saito had noticed his strange little team did to one another for all sorts of reasons- to reassure, to question, to remind -
To control.
"Dominic?"
"Nothing," Dom said easily, and leant over him to- all stars take him to the depths- steal his tea. And leant back over to put it back after one sip and a disgusted grimace, which suited Saito perfectly, because he truly did not think he could stand to have Dom become as much of an addict of tea as he was of coffee.
And then he said quietly in Saito's ear, as he took just longer than he should to replace the teacup, "Tread lightly, Saito. No-one's ready, yet."
Ah, so that was it. Leave it to Dom to understand his thoughts.
There were so many reasons that Saito had placed Dom in the position he had, why Dom stood in his place rather than any of his ministers or advisors, and this was the main one. If Saito could understand in a flash what it could mean to the consolidation of his powers, to the plans he had for a peaceful and better future, to have an amenable and friendly Psion with a working time-jack under his direction, then Dom was barely one step behind. Saito had the world-changing, far-reaching plans and Dominic kept him on the proper road to enact them, kept him moving smoothly between the lines with no jarring stops or false turns.
And Dom, as Saito had long since realized, had a true affection for that same Psion- not the same as he did for Arthur, Saito also knew that. Had the unthinkable occurred, and Dom too been made a Psion, back in a youth when he had known no more than any child what choice truly meant, it would have still made him and Arthur no less brothers than Dom felt now- and him and Eames no more so. And yet, Saito knew, all that aside, Dom had enough affection for Eames that he had gone from Station Nine to the Boneyard, and not even thought twice about why or whether he should do so.
Saito had observed them all, back when they were all living out their terrible devil's bargain on that same space-station, and he had watched how they all pulled Dom out of his wilderness of barren, hellish despair.
He had come to appreciate them for it, and come to know their value.
Saito tended to forget that while he was not sure Dom was capable of fully doing either; that while he suspected Dom was neither capable of knowing the true value of his strange little team, nor able to appreciate all they had done for him, he did more than that- so much more that perhaps knowledge or appreciation was not truly required.
Dom loved them, instead.
And what was more, Dom didn't seem to need to quantify that love the way that Saito wanted to. Did Dom love Arthur more? Did he love them like a brother? Like a father? Saito was certain, at least, that there was nothing sexual in it; Dom wasn't going to develop a sudden yearning to sleep with Ariadne (or with any of the others, he mentally amended, quite sure for some reason that Dom, despite his marriage to Mal, was almost entirely without a specific sexual orientation) but there were certain... romantic feelings involved, it appeared. Their whole relationship was complex- and constantly evolving. One day Dom was berating them all as though they were playmates of James and Philippa, and the next he was trusting them to do things that Saito would not ever delegate to anyone.
And the next he was flying Saito's best ship off into nowhere, out into horrors that he knew all too well and too personally, to make sure that those he loved had a chance of coming home.
Saito just wondered how he fit into this equation.
And then he thought of Eames teasing him, back when everyone else thought of him as being an AI, teasing him about his life of luxury and 'gold bathtubs'; of Arthur devising the strange staring contest with him, which Saito always lost and denied having lost to everyone, no matter how much Arthur protested the truth of it, and claimed loudly, much to Saito's amusement, that AIs could blink; he thought of Yusuf coming in to his designated private time because he knew that Saito could and would help, without fear or thought of favor; he thought of Ariadne, his General, saying to him as they fled the Gates-City, 'Hello, Saito,' quiet and shy and formal, treating him as another man before she had ever known he was not in fact a construct of some distant machinery; he thought of Dom, calmly entrusting him with the care of James and Philippa before he went to what he had thought would be his death.
All of it such a long time before, all of it now become so integral to his life that he could not imagine how it had been before they came into it.
They had fit him in, and the fact that he did not know how was irrelevant.
There was the sound of a sudden percussion, Arthur's hand slapping against Yusuf's chest when he came too close to Eames's jack, "Ears, Yusuf. I'm not joking."
Saito was fairly sure he was... mostly. Sometimes it was difficult to judge just what level of violence Arthur would actually commit. If Ariadne was his general then Arthur was, in a way, his assassin. Not that he sent Arthur out to kill people (that would be rather counter-productive to his plans) but Arthur could portray cold ruthlessness in a way that had people agreeing to things they never thought they would.
It made him wonder how Cato had managed to capture them and keep them under control. It had to, he supposed, have been a combination of surprise and unequal odds... or a threat to Eames.
Obviously there had been a very basic kind of threat to Eames, he knew that much, no-one could survive repeated time-jumps to the same point while refusing to interact each time, not without severe damage. And from one or two things he had managed to overhear, despite their care, he knew that Eames had been damaged at some point- and then healed to a degree where he could overpower Cato, and drag him back through time to the beginning of the Psions' destruction.
It did not explain Arthur's reticence during that period- nor why, while he seemed to be the one who was playing such an almost overblown, overtly protective role, it was Eames who was always the watchful one, these days.
Have you set spies on me? he had asked Dom, and no, Dom would not think of it, but was he being watched, and by someone who had undoubtedly told Dom the truth of what had happened out there on the Boneyard?
Yes. He knew that to be a fact.
Saito glanced across the room to find Eames watching him with intense interest, but when he raised a questioning eyebrow, the man just smirked and gave Yusuf an elbow shot that finally backed him off, at least temporarily.
Hmmm, perhaps Dom was correct. Time and careful handling would be the best way to approach Eames. That he would approach him was not in doubt.
He supposed the only question was, what would he do if Eames refused?
He looked at Ariadne, yawning into her coffee again, at Dom's half-laughter as he fended off Yusuf's flailing, at Arthur's studied disinterest as he pretended to be focused back on the news.
No, there would be no help there.
But from Eames himself, from the man who had refused to reawake a whole nation for the sake of no more than a flawed and very human kind of love?
Yes, Saito thought. One day I will ask him. And I think on that day, he will not refuse.
He smiled, and drank his tea, and if to himself it was a toast to his own future success, there was, he trusted, no-one to know.
But somewhere in the dazzling emptiness that was all of time and space made tangible, he thought he heard the voice of a woman he had never met say his name, and it was a warning and it was permission and it was the opening shot of a war, all in one.
He had never met her, and yet he knew her voice.
He knew it had been her last word in this life.
Saito, said the voice of Mallorie Cobb, and for one second, time shuddered around him, and even Seisui paused.
"Saito?" Dom said, curious.
Eames looked at him again, unsmiling, clear-eyed. Waiting, he thought, but not for him. For something else.
For time.
He smiled at them, keeping it small and serene and as untroubled as he could manage, and thought of the glow of a time-jack, and the changing of worlds around its light. "Nothing," he said, and turned back to his own interface, skimming through the sounds of his planet, checking for unease, and finding nothing.
Nothing, he thought, and then, almost startling himself, Nothing- yet.
He too would be waiting, as Eames already was, and he would be ready, when it came.
FIN
~*~
'What have you known of loss
That makes you different from other men?'
- Gilgamesh.
When the desert refused my history,
Refused to acknowledge that I had lived
there, with you, among a vanished tribe,
two, three thousand years ago, you parted
the dawn rain, its thickest monsoon curtains,
and beckoned me to the northern canyons.
There, among the red rocks, you lived alone.
I had still not learned the style of nomads:
to walk between the rain drops to keep dry.
Wet and cold, I spoke like a poor man,
without irony. You showed me the relics
of our former life, proof that we'd at last
found each other, but in your arms I felt
singled out for loss. When you lit the fire
and poured the wine, "I am going," I murmured,
repeatedly, "going where no one has been
and no one will be... Will you come with me?"
You took my hand, and we walked through the streets
of an emptied world, vulnerable
to our suddenly bare history in which I was,
but you said won't again be, singled
out for loss in your arms, won't ever again
be exiled, never again, from your arms.