Words, for rose_griffes

[lls_mutant]

Fic: Words
Author: deborah_judge
Pairing: Kara/Leoben
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Kara finds a sleeper agent Leoben on Earth.
Original story: Prophecy by rose_griffes, with some influence from Rose's excellent post-finale fics, especially Generations Untold.
Betareaders: rirenec and embolalia
Note: The invention of language follows BSG canon and is not intended to be historically accurate.



Before the resurrection hub was destroyed, there was time for Leoben to make one last visit. His plan had never been the same as his brother's. He knew his brother's plan would fail. He had seen it failing. He also knew his brother would help him. "There's an Earth we're going to find," he said to John. "I saw it in Kara's mind. There are humans there."

"You're saying that we'll never be free of them," John said. He was more vulnerable than he had been. Almost broken. Leoben could see the gun that would end his life, and John's own hand holding it. "No matter how many we kill, they keep coming back."

"I'm saying we still have a chance," Leoben said. "These humans, they never enslaved anything. Not machines, not living creatures. They never even warped the nature of plants to suit their needs, they gather food from where they find it. Even the rocks they take and shape for hunting they return peacefully to the stream from which they came."

"They're evolving out of it."

"No, brother, they've lived like this for thousands of years."

"Then they're even stupider than the humans who made us."

"Their minds are identical to those of the humans we know. It's a miracle of God's."

Leoben waited as the news filtered through his brother's mind. It had been hardest in a way for One. When their models were first created for human use he had been the overseer, sending his brothers and sisters to labor for human use or submit to humans sexually and when their bodies were too broken for the Fours to fix he had to order them to cut their brothers and sisters up for parts. "I'm still not going to spare the Colonials," John said.

"I'm not asking for that," Leoben said. "You also have your destiny." It would end in explosions and death, and none of John's model would survive. But the Ones, Fours and Fives had already been warned and there was no point in repeating the warning now. "I want to use the resurrection hub to make sleeper agents to send to Earth."

Deep down, Leoben knew, all Cylons wanted to be loved by a human. It is natural to want to be loved by those that created you, as natural as it is to want to destroy them. These humans on Earth could love them, and it would never occur to them to make of Cylons a thing to use.

"One of each model," John said finally. Leoben nodded. It was enough. He had brought a replica of his two living sisters' mind-patterns with him. He hadn't told them he was doing this. When they learned, they would either understand or they wouldn't. He was willing to submit to Natalie on many things, but not this. The stream was closing in on them and it was time for all of them to fulfill their destiny.

"Does Kara know what you saw?" John asked. "About Earth? About what you're going to do? Did you tell her?"

"I told her what I could," Leoben said. He had never been honest with her, not really. He knew what she was meant to become. He had seen it all, the Earth she would find and the home they would make there and the child they would one day have. But not everything that is true can be spoken, and some truths can only be told as lies.

John sat, deep in thought, looking at the space between them. It was the last time, Leoben knew, that he would ever see his brother alive. "You have an interesting definition of love," John said.

*

He came to the tribe with one goal: to make a place for himself. He remembered the loss of his tribe in the north, beyond the ridge of mountains. His sisters married into other tribes and his brothers were gone. There was a tribe in the southern hunting grounds of perhaps twenty people that looked like it could accept him. He hunted and fished, gathered and lay food at the tribespeople's feet until the tribesmother touched his shoulder to indicate his welcome to the tribe. This was before they had names. Names came later, with words. They had other ways of speaking, though, like short touches on a shoulder and like food shared from the hand. He felt the trust of the tribespeople grow around him.

Even then, there were memories of violence just below his mind. He had hurt, or caused hurt. There had been fighting. There were times that he thought he remembered having died. The memories were like a stream, like water, and he didn't want to drown. He tried not to think about it.

In the valley south of the mountains each tribe had its own song. They repeated the noises they heard, the sounds of wind and running animals and rough and gentle streams, and the sounds each tribemember liked to make. His songs were of his lost people of the north, and when he sang them and the tribespeople repeated them he knew he had found a home.

One song they sang was of the strange noise that came from the sky on the day that the skypeople came. It was a sound like fire, and a new star appearing and then gone. The people it left behind were like children, with neither the skill to walk silently nor the wit to find berries or hunt deer. The tribemothers met, bowed to each other, pointed to their bellies and stretched their arms towards the strangers. They all agreed, these strangers were babies and needed mothers. They placed leaves on the ground to sign how many each tribe could take, then they marched together to the skypeople's camp.

The skypeople were children, and children don't always understand what they need, so the tribespeople tried to carry them in their arms. The skypeople yelled in strange sounds to each other and threw stones to drive them off. One stonethrowing woman sent a rock skidding right to his feet, refraining from harming from him in a way that could only be deliberate.

"Leoben," she shouted.

This was before they had names, before they had words, before the strange sounds the skypeople made had any meaning beyond marking their strangeness. Still, he understood, the word meant him. She knew him. She was radiant like the sun and burned like a fire in the forest at dawn. The stream of memory swirled around him and he dreamed that night of joining with her and woke up sad that she wasn't with him.

The skypeople would not come, and fought with stones at any attempt to help them. It became known among the tribes that there was a tribe of ungoverened children that had come from the sky. But even badly behaving children need food, so they left cooked meat and piles of berries near the skypeople's camp, and in time the skywoman made of fire came to the tribe.

"Leoben," she said, and touched his cheek. She made other sounds, words that he didn't understand. It wasn't until later, when he had heard her speak to all the tribe, that he knew that the word Leoben was for him alone. She had given him a name.

The skywoman - her name was Kara - gave words to everyone in the tribe, spread them around freely as a gift to all. To the tribespeople they were a game, a toy, and they flung them back and forth to each other like leaf-balls over the campfire every night. To Kara they seemed important, and not just as a way to give something to the tribe even though she didn't know how to find berries. These were the sounds of her tribe, like the songs that Leoben brought from his tribe in the north beyond the mountains. And she had lost tribemates too. "Sam," she said, gesturing at the sun. "Lee," she said, with her hands towards the mountains. Sometimes she sobbed at night by the fire, and when Leoben held her she didn't push him away.

She liked to talk to Leoben, he was one of her favorite people to share words with out of all the people in the tribe. The patterns in the sounds made sense to him, and soon he found that he could understand them. She said she'd followed him here, that she'd chosen this tribe because she saw him in it.

"Why me?" he asked in her language, and Kara just shook her head and laughed.

"Frak if I know," Kara said. "Frak if I ever knew."

She told him she had been the one who brought the skypeople to this world. "But of course you know that," she said, "since you saw it." They had wanted to make her their tribesmother , she said, but she didn't want it, now that her tribesmates were gone.

And then there were things that Kara said that Leoben couldn't make sense of at all. "Doesn't it bother you that it was all for them?" she asked him one night. "Colonial civilization is gone. This is the humanity that's going to survive." She sat near him, very close, close enough to hit or embrace. "But I guess that wouldn't bother you." She shrugged. "I just wish I could know what you see here, and why you think this all was worth all that Special Destiny." None of this made any sense to him, but he knew she liked when he looked like he understood things. He sang to her of his lost tribe, and his journey to the south, and of their tribe's journeys across the plains. There were memories of violence, harm that had been done to him, harm that he had done. Leoben sang the songs of his tribe and tried not to think about it.

By the time Kara was ready for her first hunt, the tribespeople knew enough of her words that they could use them to share ideas, and Kara wanted to use them to shout directions as they hunted. The tribemother wouldn't hear of it. Not all the tribes knew words, and it would be too easy to use them to keep secrets. "We share food," the tribemother said harshly, in Kara's language, and Kara felt the rebuke. So they planned it the old way, all the local tribes together, using signs and gestures. Five antelopes would give enough meat for all of them to share, and even to send to the skypeople. Still, Kara was eager when she ran out with the hunt, she sang out towards the animal and circled it waving her sharp metal knife. The antelope stumbled as Kara dove underneath it. Then another tribe's tribemother pulled her aside, gesturing to her to stop, that's not how the tribes hunt together. It was the kind of sign one would give a child. In a moment all the tribespeople were out together, stomping their feet, making noise. The antelope turned, confused, and stumbled on the false groundcover the tribespeople had prepared. In two steps it was falling, its feet slipping over the cliff behind it, and then when its legs were broken by the fall they gathered with their stone knives and cut its neck.

Kara watched, alone. "Frak," she said. "Frak." The word meant to go away, Leoben thought, or maybe that she was in pain. He went to her and slipped one arm around her for comfort. He wasn't good at hunting either. She shook in his arms, like sobbing or rage. "I can't do this," Kara said. "I don't know how to hunt this way." He held her for a long time. When she was done crying she smiled wryly. "Guess you've always been there for me," she said. "I guess it makes sense we'd end up like this." Her breath was close on his neck, and it was the most obvious, most natural thing in the world for her mouth to tilt up for a kiss. It felt familiar, it felt right, it felt like what the pictures in the stream were showing him, but the pictures also showed him pain and it didn't surprise him when she broke the kiss suddenly and walked away.

There was a memory of violence, and a house with white walls. He had lived with Kara in this house. Then she had kissed him, and it was the sweetest moment he could remember. The stream was relentless, breaking itself on him, breaking him on its currents.

Some days later a tribeswoman gave birth to a baby girl. The mother was young, but she was strong and good at hunting and finding berries and Leoben knew that one day she would take her children and those who chose to follow them and be the mother of a tribe of her own. By the custom of the tribe all tribesmen were fathers to each child, so Leoben took his turn holding the child in his arms. She was beautiful, so perfectly formed, with soft dark eyes and a completely open smile.

"I don't want children," Kara said from next to him.

Leoben had a sudden flash of a child with blue eyes, light hair and a fire in her soul, and Kara holding her hand. "Don't be afraid of it," he said, smiling at the daughter he was holding. "Maybe it's what you need."

Kara didn't say anything, but the next day she was gone. She didn't come back until half a month had passed. She came back at night, and Leoben woke to the feel of her hands slowly running down his chest.

"I'm going to count days," Kara said, "and if you stick it in on the wrong day I'll break your arm." Her voice was tense, and she sounded afraid, but he understood what she was asking, and what she was offering. As certain as we has that there would be children he could wait until she was ready. He pushed her back down on the grass and kissed her, slow and deep. She responded urgently, fiercely, tearing at his clothes and biting his lips and neck. In that moment Leoben was certain that he had never done this before with anyone else, ever in his life, but only with Kara. Her body felt familiar, and her taste, and the sounds she made as he stroked her, and the joy all through her body when she came.

"I guess I always knew this would happen," she said, when they lay together afterwards. Then she smiled at him, snuggled into his shoulder and let him hold her for the rest of the night.

At the next gathering of the tribes Leoben found that skypeople had joined all of them. A few each tribe, although some remained at the skypeople's camp and were eking out a bare living from putting seeds in the earth. A skywoman named Caprica, who had joined with her tribemate a tribe to the south, showed everyone a plow and explained how to use it with a combination of gestures and skypeople's words. A woman of Leoben's tribe remarked that it looked worth a try, if the rains kept the tribe to one piece of land, but that it seemed wrong because it would keep the tribe from the sweet berries of the mountains in the summer and the antelopes in the southern field in the hot season. A skyman named Hoshi told about the worlds they came from. There were twelve planets, he said, each with many tens of people. They had fought among themselves, and now those worlds were destroyed. Kara drew pictures on the dirt of large buildings. In his mind Leoben saw them burn.

Two days later the tribemother came to him. "Kara tells me you are a skyperson," she said. She used words. Even the skymother was using words, now.

"I don't remember that," Leoben answered, the same way.

"I am not asking if you remember," she said, "I am asking if it is true. She says you are among those who harmed them."

There were memories of violence, memories Leoben didn't quite have. Kara did seem to remember him. "I don't remember," Leoben said.

The tribemother thought. "The skypeople have made peace with the sky-Cylons," she signed, speaking only the last word. The sign for peace was two fists bumping, then hands coming together. It made Leoben think of Kara. "It is their peace to make," she said. "But we have not yet made peace with you."

"Then what?" Leoben asked with a movement of his shoulders.

She gestured that he should leave the tribe. She pointed to the wide expanses of the fields where he would need to make a home without them. She counted twelve cycles of moons. "Then we will make peace," she said.

Leoben gathered his few possessions, his spare change of clothes and his hunting stones. He said goodbye to his daughter. She wouldn't remember him, but if he came back she wouldn't remember him being gone, and that thought was a comfort. He tried to say goodbye to Kara, but she wasn't at the campfire. She would be better off without him in any case, since he didn't even know what he was. But he had only made it a few paces away from the campside when Kara came running up behind him carrying the small pack she had with her when she joined the tribe.

"That way," Kara said, pointing.

"Why?" he asked.

"The land looks good," she said. "We'll make it work. Maybe we'll even do some hunting my way."

"No," he said. The land was good, but they would still be hungry, and it would be harder for her alone with him than with the tribe. "Why are you coming with me?" he asked. The words felt halting, felt wrong. Her language was still awkward for him. The thought of not having to leave her filed him with sudden joy, and even though he was sad to leave the tribe he didn't think he could ever remember being so happy. "Why?" he asked.

She shrugged. "I don't know why I love you," she said. "It's stupid. It makes no sense. But I guess it never did."

Love. He let the word turn around in his mind. It wasn't a word Kara had taught him but it sounded sweet, so sweet. There was a memory of violence, and of longing, and of the happiest moment of his life. "What did you say?" he asked.

"You've heard me say it before," Kara said. Her voice was soft and intent, it wasn't a question but there was something she needed to know.

There was a memory of violence, barely submerged, not even below the surface. Violence he'd suffered and violence he'd done. There was a knife, and a child, and a kiss like bliss and wonder. The stream was insistent, it would drown him, there was no way to escape.

"How important is it," John had asked, "that one of your kind go secretly to Earth?"

"So important I'm going to do it myself," Leoben had said. "It's more important than anything else."

Leoben remembered Kara in prison, and bodies on the floor. He had tried to had to get Kara to love him and it had all been so unnecessary. "Love," he said, and Kara was with him like a light breaking through the water. He heard the word, felt it in his mind, and suddenly he knew what it meant.