FIC: Edge 2/?
Edge (2/?)
Author: Lurker2209
Spoilers: Through S3 and some oblique references to Razor
Rating: PG-13, for now.
Characters/pairings: Lots of OC’s, L/K (be patient, very patient!)
Timeline: About 13 years after the Second Exodus; this goes AU somewhere after Rapture, although the rest of S3 did or will happen, just differently.
Disclaimer: It all belongs to Ron who generously lets us play in his universe.
Summary: For years the fleet has wandered in the wilderness and one girl has wandered from placement to placement.
A/N: Thanks to all three of my wonderful Beta's. This is the second part of the first chapter. I anticipate that each chapter will be 3 or 4 posts.
Chapter 1: Orphans
Part A
Part B
Simon woke me every few hours, insisting on checking my pupils each time. My half-conscious mind puzzled over this, until the third time when I woke to a faint beep, instead of a bright light. He had a watch. The Faru Sadin had produced a brief run of wall clocks during a long peaceful stretch. One of my former foster mothers-was it Anne or Olivia?-had stood in line for two days to get one. But a working watch had to be pre-Holocaust, which made Simon either more vicious or more clever than I’d figured.
But it would be stupid to let on that I’d heard it, so I pretended to sleep until he flicked the light on.
“How’s your head?”
“Better.” I’d said it every time, but now it was really true. I didn’t think there’d be any more gaps in my memories. It was still unsettling to not remember taking pinching the ration bars. After he checked my eyes, I pushed myself into a sitting position.
“Staying awake?” He retreated to his side of our niche.
“I’ve slept enough.”
He nodded. We fell into a tense silence. He fiddled with the flashlight briefly, as if considering shutting it off to save the valuable batteries. I almost wished he would. There was nothing to see here, except watch the other and try to pretend we weren’t.
But I couldn’t just sit here much longer.
“You happen to find the nearest head when you disappeared last night?”
He glanced at me, surprised that I had noticed his disappearance.
“Yeah, out the hatch, turn right, about 10 meters down on the left.”
I tried standing, slowly, testing how much weight my right ankle would hold. It felt as though my ass had taken the brunt of the fall, but the ankle was definitely tender.
“I could wrap that for you,” Simon said. His eyes flicked from mine to the remaining half of the ration bar on the floor. So I sat down, tossed it to him, and extended my right leg in his direction. I wasn’t too hungry after all, and no one really ever starved in the fleet. As Simon cut a strip off my oversized coat and wrapped my ankle, I found the obvious conclusion: If Simon was doing all this for food, he had to be avoiding the Gideon’s mess halls. So he was definitely running from some sort of big trouble, much bigger than simply running away from a foster home.
Ankle wrapped, I grabbed my bag with my good arm and stood, much easier than before.
“You have to jimmy the latch to open it from the inside. Make sure no one sees you.” That sealed it. On a ship like the Gideon people slipping in and out of the walls would be commonplace. He was definitely scared of something.
The blade of the knife slipped easily into the mechanism of the hatch, and I was careful to listen for footsteps before cracking it open to verify no one was there. The head was where he said it was and after relieving my bladder I stood again in front of a mirror.
I stared into my own blue eyes, no longer red or swollen. My nose was still larger than normal, but apparently not broken. The bruises on my chin had resolved themselves into four oval knuckle-marks. I pulled up my sleave to see the similar fingerprints on my wrist where Evelyn had twisted and pulled the arm away from my body. They were fading. I was done with her, done with the system, forever.
While I tried to wash my hair in the sink-a futile effort really, without soap-I contemplated my next steps. It was probably stupid to go back. Whatever trouble Simon was in could be really big and there was no reason for me to get mixed into shit like that. A woman came into the head, eyes sweeping over me and pausing with interest on my bag. I stared her down evenly until she slipped into one of the stalls.
On the other hand, I was injured and knew no one here. Eventually someone would decide I was an easy mark. Simon was trouble, but he was also desperate. And I had the knife. If he did decide that he’d rather take my stuff than trade medical help for it, I might be able to take him. A gang of locals would be far more than my match.
The hair would dry quickly. It had been cut to the nape of my neck a few years ago when head lice broke out at school. I’d found it easier to keep it short, easier to look in the mirror and squint and see her face in place of mine. But I didn’t have time today to try to hold onto memories, so I pulled up the hood of my coat.
I ventured towards the nearest cross-corridor. It was much busier than the empty hall my hatch opened onto, but the people passed quickly, anxious about the Cylons’ reappearance. FleetSec was nowhere to be seen, regrouping or pulled into service elsewhere repairing the damage from the last attack. I spotted a bum sitting in an odd alcove with two empty metal jugs. I offered him enough cash for one of them to half-fill the other with cheep moonshine, and carried it back to the head. Rinsed, it still smelled a little like stale algae-beer, but it didn’t leak.
The jug and the bag were a bit tricky to carry in one hand, but I managed enough stealth to slip back through the hatch unseen.
There was no light inside. Coming back here might have been a big mistake.
“Simon?” I called. If he was going to jump me, he would have done it by now.
“Petra?”
“Yeah?” What kind of game were we playing?
Finally he flicked on his flashlight.
“I can’t say I was really expecting you.”
“Well, I did find this place first.” I pushed past him to sit back down. I was annoyed, and I wasn’t even really sure why. But it wasn’t as if I needed to act friendly. Coming back was enough.
We settled into another uncomfortable silence. Simon suggested I keep my arm in a sling so it would heal faster, so we cut another piece off my coat. Then there wasn’t much else to do, and Simon shut off the light.
I thought maybe he’d gone to sleep, when he spoke.
“Heading anywhere in particular?”
I thought about it for a second. I’d started running without even really thinking, just needing to be somewhere else. Eventually I’d worked out the how of running away. I hadn’t really thought about where.
“Here’s a good as anywhere I guess.”
“No family?”
I didn’t say anything. Why the hell should he care?
“I have a brother and a sister, Linus and Lilly,” he continued. “They’re somewhere in the system. I think I know how to find them.”
Was that why he was running? Because he broke into an office and stole some case files? It couldn’t be. The caseworkers would barely even notice they were missing, let alone put FleetSec out on a manhunt. Of course, he hadn’t ever said he was running from FleetSec; given their current level of distraction, it was probably someone else.
“I might be able to find other people too.”
I took the bait, stupid maybe, but I couldn’t see the harm. “I sort of had a sister once. Before we went into the system, I lived with her and her mom. Her mom knew mine before-before she died. I haven’t seen Kasey since the first group home.” I stopped. I hadn’t meant to say that much, but there was something about the dark that made it easy to forget anyone was there.
The familiar shrill ring of the alarm startled me out of the uncomfortable aftermath of my confession.
“Cylons.” Simon muttered. I nodded in reply, then remembered he couldn’t see me.
“Yeah.” We waited, tense, nothing to listen to but the alarm, nothing to do but sit. On Galactica everything seemed to begin when the Cylons attacked. Here in the fleet, everything came to a halt.
And then I heard the faintest hum, only an instant before the deck and bulkheads rocked violently. I scrambled for a grip on bundles of ripped wire and sharp metal, but my hands slipped and slid across the now sloped floor to collide with Simon. His elbow caught me square in the gut and my breath caught.
The tremors stopped. The alarms changed from a shrill single note to the sharp two-tone evacuation call. I gasped as my lungs remembered how to breathe.
Simon was already scrambling to his feet, moving towards the shaft. I reached back to where my bag had tumbled and hurried after his light. The decking had warped around the ladder’s shaft, leaving a larger hole to cross.
He turned for the first time, “Toss me my bag and yours; I’ll wait.”
I nodded, but after he jumped I tossed my own bag first. He set it down by the door, caught his own and turned to the tricky door with the screwdriver. In the end, it took both of us pushing the metal hatch to open against the flood of people rushing through the corridor. We slipped into the panicking crowd and tried to avoid being crushed against the bulkheads or trampled underfoot. I caught my balance on his arm, as a man pushed past, his hand on my shoulder almost pushing me to the floor. We kept moving, half running, half pushing with the crowd until we came to the cross-corridor.
Simon went down.
I instinctively reached for him, pulling back on his feet by the strap of his duffle. Then he was abruptly wrenched away from me, pulled left by the chaotic crowds as I was shoved right. I struggled for half a second but then stepped right to avoid being trampled by a large man. I dodged him, evaded a woman’s sharp elbow and then risked a look back.
Simon had disappeared.
Something was almost wrenched out of my left hand and I pulled it from between two figures. It was Simon’s bag. I slung it over my shoulder and focused on keeping my step in the press of the crowd. We pushed and were pushed along until I came to a larger room where the crush abated a little. Two fleet FleetSec officers were enforcing a mostly orderly line up a steep circular stairwell to the next deck. The impact must have been somewhere below us then.
Some sort of disturbance threw me abruptly backwards and I fell back against someone who pushed me onto my knees. I scrambled to my feet, but couldn’t see anything in the crowd.
“Stay back or I’ll shoot!” one of the officers yelled above the crowd. More people filled this room, shoving everyone forward. I looked up and saw another officer leading a small group of civilians, some wounded, up from the deck below. The last of them past and the mob surged forward.
“I said stand back!” One of the officers stepped up a couple of steps, coming into my view and fired into the air. I could tell from the sound that the he was firing blanks. Ammunition was tight in the fleet, you never knew if a FleetSec officer would have live rounds or not. But the crowd didn’t seem to know the difference and held back, momentarily subdued.
I understood the reason for the delay when another group of officers rushed down the stairs, laden with emergency equipment. Finally, we began again a somewhat orderly ascent.
It took some work to avoid being shoved aside, but I squished and squeezed my way forward until I was close enough for one of the officers to roughly grab me out of the crowd and shove me up the steps. I followed an older woman up one deck and then another where another officer was directing the crowd down another long corridor and into a large mess hall.
I sank to my feet, half underneath a table and took stock. I wasn’t really hurt, although the crush of people had no doubt left more bruises. I had my bag, and I had Simon’s.
Oddly, though, I felt bereft.