Fic: Edge 9/30
Author: Lurker2209
Spoilers: Through Razor, a few references to S4. Nothing for 4.5
Characters/pairing: OC heavy, ultimately K/L
Warnings: Overall it's rated R, for mature themes, violence, profanity, etc
Disclaimer: The show belongs to Ron and Sci-fi, et al. But Petra is all mine!
Summary: What if rough patches are all you’ve ever known? For more a decade the fleet has wandered the wilderness of stars. The hope of promised Earth dims. Destruction seems inevitable, either by the overwhelming force of the cylon armada, or the ravage of cold space. Humanity grows desperate, none so desperate as young Petra Thrace. Survival is a game she knows well, even if it is always rigged against her. “If you wanna to survive here, you gotta always remember one thing: Nobody gives a frak.”
A/N: For the record, I wrote this in November for Nanowrimo, long before 4.5 aired. I'm psychic. And evil, I suppose.
Big thank-you as always to my beta's,
artemis90 and uberscribbler! Also thank-you to everyone who is reading and commenting despite my erratic posting.
Part B
I took a deep breath. The Persephone was crazy dangerous, and the group of men who now surrounded me were exactly the kind of people you heard stories about.
“I can’t believe we found the little brat,” one of the newcomers said as he took my arm firmly. Another man put a menacing hand on Simon’s shoulder. No escape now.
“You shouldn’t have come back here, little girl,” another of the gang added.
Back here?
“Where’s the wire?” the huge man in front of me asked.
“What?”
“Come on Amber; don’t play stupid. We know you’re a smart little brat. Give us the wire, or give us him!”
“Amber?” I asked.
“She’s not the girl.” The man who approached was the leader. It was obvious from the way all the men’s eyes focused on him. Even their stances shifted as they positioned themselves in relation to him.
“But she looks exactly like her!” the hulk protested.
“She’s taller,” he said as he approached me. He bent down to look in my face. I shivered; his eyes were black and empty. There was something about his look that told me he’d kill me in a second and just smile about it. Not laugh maniacally-he’d be less scary if he was crazy-just smile.
“And her eyes are blue,” the boss continued.
“Tell me, little girl, do you know Amber?”
I was too afraid to speak; I shook my head.
“She could be lying,” the big one suggested.
“She’s too afraid to lie, aren’t you?”
I nodded.
“What about the boy? Amber had a boy with her.”
“A blonde boy. Smaller than this one. You children can go.” We stood frozen for a second. “Go!” We turned and almost ran away from them. I thought heard the boss chuckle.
“O my Gods!” Simon said, when we turned the corner. “Do you know who that was?”
“No, do you?”
"That was Linden."
“Really, O Gods!” Everyone knew Linden was the biggest crime boss on the Prometheus, and thus the biggest crime boss period.
“I can’t believe we’re alive.” Simon marveled.
“They were looking for someone else. This whole mistaken identity thing is becoming a real pain in the ass.”
“You sure you don’t have a secret twin sister somewhere?”
“Only child.”
But the question remained. I rolled it around in my head as we found a transport that was making a long circuit including a stop at the Zeusuda. It was the slow way around, several hours with all the loading and unloading, but it was cheap. Amber had to be the girl Lane saw at the bombing. So who was she? And what the frak was she doing running around the fleet blowing things up and getting me blamed for it?
It was midnight when we got to the Zeusuda and I was relieved to be back on its familiar, falling apart decks. Midnight wasn’t exactly the safest time to be wandering through her lower levels, but Simon knew his way around and how to avoid the trouble. It was weird to think that we’d been here just yesterday, picking pockets and planning break-ins like it was no big deal. Now we had FleetSec after us. At least we’d lost Lane.
Our tiny closet of a room was pretty much just as we’d left it. We’d paid three days in advance, so Gowen didn’t have any reason to come in here or try to move someone else in. I grabbed my bag, relieved at the familiar sense of having it close to me.
“Next time we take our stuff with us, even if it’s not convenient.”
“Yeah, smart idea.” Simon, agreed, doing a quick inventory to make sure nothing was missing.
We collapsed on the mattresses. The heating system was acting weird again, so it was cold. We pushed the two mattresses together and fell asleep back to back. It reminded me of when Hera and I were little and would have sleepovers in one of Galactica’s bunks.
In the morning, we took stock. We were running pretty low on cash. Simon was anxious to get Linus as soon as possible, but I pointed out that we’d be able to take a lot better care of him if we weren’t broke. So we ran the familiar snatch and run schemes in the lobby for most of the day.
“Hey, Simon,” a kid I didn’t recognize walked up to us while we were standing in the market, planning our next job.
“Ramil. It’s been a while.” Simon replied.
“Yeah, new friend?” He nodded at me.
“Yeah,” Simon said, not introducing me. I didn’t volunteer my name.
“Look, you might wanna be careful. Whatever you’ve done this time, it’s big. Some FleetSec officer poking around asking questions about you.”
Damn it. Lane. How had known where to find us?
“Anybody talking to him?” Simon asked.
“Naw, man - he’s a real pain in the ass. No one wants him around. What’d you do to piss off FleetSec so much, anyways?”
“Long story. How many of them are there?”
“Cops? Just the one guy. That’s why no one’s taking him seriously.”
“Have they set up a checkpoint on the outgoing traffic?”
“What? No. No way. He’s just nosing around, asking questions. I don’t think he knows you’re here; he’s asking about who you were friends with and all. No one wants to be involved with that.”
“Ok. So if he asks, you didn’t see me?”
“No prob.”
“And do me a favor, will you?”
“If I can.”
“Give these keys to Gowen, ok?” Simon took the keys from our room from his bag and handed them over to the other kid.
“Can do. Good luck.”
He walked off in the opposite direction; Simon turned and swung around to the left. “Come on. We should leave now.”
“You trust him?” I asked.
“More or less. He wouldn’t make this up.”
“It’s gotta be Lane. He came looking for me.” I said, as we turned down a series of corridors and dodged through a wall panel that led to a shortcut through a couple of old maintenance hatches.
“I thought he’d be searching on the Gideon.”
“Maybe he interrogated the captain of the shuttle we took to the Star. Maybe he’s trying to dig up our connections.”
“Not much to dig. He’s not going to find anyone who can say, ‘O yeah, Petra, I know her. She works with that terrorist guy Bob in Deck 2, Section 5’.”
“Bob? For a terrorist? That’s the best you can do?”
“Hey, we are on the run here.” Simon pointed out. I grinned. Simon was fun. And I hadn’t had a real friend since Kasey. It was nice. Of course, if I was a real friend to him, I wouldn’t be keeping a huge secret. I pushed it away from my mind.
“Lane won’t give up. He’s convinced I was involved. Crazy certain. I should have known he’d find me.”
“Let’s just focus on getting out of here.”
We crept further down the passage. Suddenly my foot plunged through the floor, up to my knee.
“O Gods!” Through one of the cracks, I could see the engine room far below. If the rest of the floor gave way it’d be a long fall and a bad landing.
“Petra?” Simon spun around.
“Stay back. The floor’s rusted through.”
“Hand me your bag.” I pulled off the strap and handed it to him. Then I slowly leaned forward, testing my weight on the floor. It held, so I wiggled forward on my belly until I was free.
“You okay?”
“Just scraped up,” I grabbed my bag back. “We gotta hurry before Lane realizes we’re escaping.”
Our path twisted through the maze of passages and catwalks, connected by hatches and holes in the walls. We passed two other people without a word of greeting.
“Down here,” Simon pointed to a ladder. “We’re almost to the hangar.”
We hurried down. Then I heard another snapping sound as Simon fell several feet to the bottom.
“Simon!”
“I’m okay,” he sat up. “Watch the rungs, they’re falling apart.”
I climbed down gingerly.
“The whole fleet’s falling apart. They’re either going to have to scrap this ship or overhaul it soon.” Overhauling was dangerous, since it meant weeks or even months away from Hoddholt docked to an asteroid with the mining ship and the repair ship. I didn’t remember the tense months of Galactica’s desperately needed overhaul; I had been just a baby. I remembered the overhauls of the different civilian ships when Galactica had to stay with the asteroid ship to fight off cylon raids. The way everyone talked, it had been ten times scarier with only Hoddholt to protect the civilian fleet and the newly captured basestar, Liberty, to defend Galactica.
“O frak!” Simon ripped open his bag.
“What is it?”
“Something broke.”
“What?”
“Well, I’ve got the centrifuge, but I smashed a bunch of test tubes and glass vials. I need that stuff to do the transfusions.”
“How hard is it to get?”
“Well, it’s expensive, but we might be able to get into a clinic and swipe it.”
I really, really wanted to point out the irony of this. That just a day ago Simon had thrown a fit because I swiped a few needles in the Gideon’s clinic. For Simon, stealing needles that would end up in the hands of drug addicts was bad, but stealing needles to save his little brother was noble. But the more I got to know Simon, the more it weirdly made sense.
“Can we do it after we get Linus?,” I asked.
“No. I love the him, but he can’t keep his mouth shut to save his life. I want to have everything to help him first.”
“Okay. Any clinic in particular?”
“Not here. We have to get off this ship soon,” Simon frowned. “Actually, most of the places I’m familiar with aren’t really safe to go back to. Any clinics you’ve spent enough time in to know where stuff is kept?”
“Other than Galactica? Wait, actually, I do sort of know my way around Bamdal.”
“The loony bin, really?”
“Yeah. Hey, it’s not like I was a patient.”
“Ok, that works. And Lane won’t expect us to go visit the nuthouse.”
We made our way out of the shaft without a problem. As Ramil said, there were no checkpoints at the hangar deck. We bought tickets on a shuttle making a circuit through the largest civilian ships. Bamdal occupied several decks of the Pyxis. Since we got the tickets last minute, it wiped out most of the money we’d pickpocketted this morning. I was worried how we’d afford the next trip. Then again, no reason we couldn’t pull off petty thievery on the Pyxis just as well as we had on the Zuesuda. The usual overstressed officer checked everyone for proper ID and looked for contraband, but didn’t seem to be looking for us. Maybe Lane hadn’t got our descriptions out yet.
En route, I realized I’d never even asked Simon exactly how the centrifuge and everything worked to help his kid brother. I knew it had something to do with blood, but it didn’t seem like Simon had any medicine. Wasn’t that what sick people needed? So I asked Simon about the equipment. He explained that his blood type was different from Linus’ and in order to ensure that there wasn’t a bad reaction, he had to spin it down and remove the red cells. I remembered on Galactica that they had needed specific people to donate types of blood for transfusions when someone had surgery.
“What about my blood?”
“Do you know what type it is?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s O negative.”
“Really? That’s the same as Linus. I should test it to be sure. They’ll have the stuff for that at the hospital too.”
The shuttle took most of the night. I tried to sleep, but the frequent stops and the noise of all the freight made it hard. It was very early in the morning when we landed on the Pyxis.
“The hospital doesn’t open until seven,” I said. “We should try to get a little more sleep.”
Simon glanced around; the Pyxis was sort of creepy. We were on the same ship as a mental hospital in the dead of night, after all.
“Let’s take turns, keep watch,” he suggested.
“Ok”.
We found a mostly abandoned corridor and I offered to stay awake first. I doodled to keep my eyes open, but I was so tired it all looked like crap. Waste of good paper. So I kept myself away by trying to remember as many viper maneuvers as I could. Finally the two hours were up and I woke Simon. It seemed like only a second later he was waking me to start the day.
Wemade our way to the hospital sections. As we got closer to Bamdal, the crowds thinned. I guessed no one wanted to live too close to the mental hospital, unless they had family inside. Lots of people had breakdowns or something and ended up here for a little while. The ones who really couldn’t cope ended up staying. Doc Cottle once told me that just about everybody in the whole dammed fleet had post-traumatic stress disorder. Well, not so much told me, as said it in the sickbay when he didn’t realize I was listening.
Getting in and out of Bamdal was going to be difficult. Well, not so much getting in, but if you snuck in, you’d have an awful time of getting out without a psych discharge. So I did what I’d always done before and lined up in the visitor’s queue. There was no reason to believe Lane had any idea of my real identity. If someone happened to check the visitor’s logs they might be shocked to see my name, but I doubted anyone would do that.
“Name?” the receptionist said.
“Petra Thrace.”
“Visiting?”
“Samuel T. Anders. He’s in Ward nine.”
“Relationship?”
I paused. The word always sounded strange, “He’s my…dad.”
Simon shot me a look, surprise mixed with pity?
“What about you?” The nurse said to him.
“I’m just with her. Simon Abderra.”
“Alright.” She gave us the visitor’s badges, warned us not to lose them or give them to a patient and asked if we wanted an orderly to show us to ward nine.
I shook my head, “I know the way.”
“Your dad?” Simon asked. “Why’s he in here?”
“You’ll see,” I decided. We may as well actually go up to ward nine. If we were going to steal medical supplies, it’d be better if we weren’t caught in some ward where we didn’t belong. I led Simon through the maze that was Bamdal to Sam’s room. Thankfully, he hadn’t been moved to a different room in all these years..
Sam was…Sam. He was there, but he wasn’t there. He could walk, or sit, or eat if you put food in front of him, although he wasn’t too handy with the spoon. But he never said a word, except to keep humming that same strange tune, over and over and over again. Today he was sitting on the side of the bed, staring at something nobody else could see.
“Hi Sam. It’s me, Petra. I guess it’s been a long time, but maybe that doesn’t matter to you. I suppose you don’t even know I’m here.”
I’d hated coming here when I was little. I had nightmares of Sam chasing me through the halls of Galactica like a zombie. Hera had opened my eyes to the world of shadowed spirits; If nymphs and satyrs were real, so were specters and zombies. And I couldn’t tell my mom about them. Despite my resistance, she brought me each week, like a penance.
It all seemed silly now. Sam couldn’t hurt me; my nightmares were too full of real horrors to spare anxiety for a zombie to wake up and run after me. I wondered, for the first time, what realistically would have happened if Sam had woken up, if he’d been there when mom died. It was too weird to imagine. I didn’t even know him, but how could life with him have been worse?
“This is Sam.” I said to Simon.
“Hello, Sam.”
“He doesn’t talk. I don’t think he can hear you either. I don’t think he hears anything, except the sound of his own humming.”
“I’m so sorry,” Simon said, moved.
“It’s okay, really. He’s been like this since before I was born so…” I shrugged. I had never really thought of Sam as my father, just the man who would have been.
“There was an accident,” I tried to explain more coherently, “when I was a baby. He was working in the algae-production ship and a piece of machinery fell.”
“That explains the arm.”
I nodded. I rarely noticed Sam’s arm, crushed under the same machinery that had damaged his brain so badly. It hung uselessly at his side, but then he never seemed to need to use it for anything.
Simon flipped through the chart that hung on a clipboard by the door.
“Has there been any change in the last few years?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No… no change.” He flipped back to the earlier entries. “Wow…the brain injuries were extensive. I’m not really a doctor, not yet, but with this trauma to the brain stem, I would expect him to be in a coma.”
“The doctors said it was a miracle he even survived, if you call this survival.”
“I’m sorry.” Simon said again, putting a hand on my back.
“It’s alright really,” I shrugged. “I mean, I’ve never known anything else. How do you miss someone you’ve never known?”
“Still,” Simon persisted, “there have to have been times when you wished you had a father.”
“I guess.” The truth was I hadn’t. Maybe because of my silly childish fears, but maybe it was the fact that my mom had always been enough. As long as I had her, I really didn’t need a father. And after she’d died, the only thing I wanted was to have her back.
“Do you want to stay a while?” Simon was being nice. We shouldn’t spend that much time here. I hadn’t even intended to visit Sam in the first place.
“No, we can go. I guess I was just curious. I wanted to know if he was still here.” There was something sort of reassuring about that fact. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected, maybe for him to be dead too. Everyone else was dead. At least Sam was, well, still as catatonic as he’d always been.
“Bye Sam.”
He stopped humming for a minute. I paused, looked back. He was staring right at me, like he actually saw me. Could he really know I was here? He’d never reacted to my presence, or mom’s, when I was a kid.
“Sam?”
Then he started humming again; his eyes unfocused. Maybe I had just imagined it. Or his throat just got dry for a second.
We slipped out of the room and found a supply closet. I kept an eye on the nurse’s station, but the nurse seemed preoccupied with a book. Then she got a call. I worried for a second, but she hurried off in the other direction.
Simon caught up to me a few minutes later.
“Got it. They’re pretty well supplied.”
“Are you going to test my blood?”
“Do you really think it’s O negative?” He asked.
“I’m pretty sure that’s what Cottle said when I was seven and had to have my appendix out.”
“Okay.”
I didn’t understand why he was suddenly so skeptical of my memory, but he grabbed card from the supply closet and we ducked into an empty room. He just needed a little blood for the test. He’d grabbed a little plastic device that had a needle and a spring. I looked away as he stabbed me with it. It didn’t hurt when he pricked my finger, but when he had to squeeze it to get the drops of blood out, it did. There were three spots on the little card and each one needed a drop.
“Each spot has a different antibody. If your blood is O negative, then it won’t have any antigens and it won’t clump.”
We waited, but nothing seemed to happen.
“Is it working?” I asked.
“Huh. I guess your blood is O negative.”
“I told you that’s what I remembered. Why is that so weird?”
He looked at me, then quickly tossed the card in the biohazard waste container and the needle in one for sharps.
“It’s not. It’s, it’s just kind of rare.” He turned to look at me. “This is good. I can only give Linus my blood if I spin it down, but if I needed to, I could just give him your blood as it is. I mean, if you don’t mind donating blood for Linus.”
“No, I mean, I don’t exactly like needles, but I’ll do it.”
“Thanks Petra. That’s cool of you.” He smiled. A real, genuine smile. I hadn’t even realized he had a facial expression like this, something more free than a smirk or a wry grin. Then I remembered I didn’t deserve it. I pushed that thought aside. Why did I care if I deserved it? Simon was getting something he needed; I was getting what I needed. That was the way the world worked, right?