Fic: Light at the End (The Sympathy for the Devil Remix)
Title: Light At The End
Author: prolix_allie
Summary: Whatever happened to Tory Foster
Characters: Tory Foster, ensemble
Pairings: Gen
Rating: R for Mature Themes
Warnings: Nothing Ron didn’t do first
Title, Author and URL of original story: A remix of Comfort, by rivrea
Beta Thanks: Huge thanks to sabaceanbabe and lyssie.
Author Notes: This was written for bsg_remix and originally posted here. I was a bit unsure about remixing a drabble, but Comfort is such a great snapshot of Laura and what makes her tick that I really wanted to see if I could do the same for Tory, who is such an enigma in canon. The story grew from there into an attempt to make as much sense as I could of her character arc in Season Four. Reposting as I think I managed to find all the typos this time. ;)
Tory’s smile always shone brightest when it was least felt. It was something of a point of pride. She certainly didn’t want her new employer - and that was how she tried to think of Laura Roslin at this moment, her new employer, not the President of what some still fondly referred to as the “Twelve Colonies” - to sense her apprehension. She couldn’t gage her success, as Roslin returned her greeting with a warmth that didn’t quite reach her eyes before turning to the whiteboard on her office wall.
“I… I forgot about Billy” she said, and Tory felt a stab of guilt which she quickly suppressed. She’d had her eye on this position for months, had cultivated contacts in the press corp. and the President’s staff, all with the hope of working her way into the inner circle.
“I did put up a picture of him in the gallery,” she continued, “but I didn’t remember that there was one survivor less.” The corner of Tory’s lip curled up despite herself. She gathered it was her presence that had served as the reminder.
“49, 598 now,” she observed brusquely. “Far too few.”
Roslin turned, surprised. Tory was afraid for a moment that she’d offended her, and opened her mouth to say something more appropriate, to tell her how sorry she was for her loss. But beneath the other woman’s startlement she thought she saw a glimmer of appreciation, and somewhere between her brain and her tongue her rote condolences turned into; “I’m ready to get started any time, Madame President.”
This time, the smile was genuine. “Please, call me Laura.”
***
That night Tory dreamed she was in the river, diving as deep as she could, eyes open, arms grasping for the riverbed. Sometimes she thought she caught a glimpse of an orange t-shirt or a curly head, thought she grasped a small hand. But the sunlight and her burning lungs always drew her upward, and she always surfaced clutching weeds.
***
Maya was her idea. Not hers specifically; they had left it to Cottle to select the particular individual. But the plan to steal Hera Agathon away to be fostered among humans, like one of Zeus’s children in the myths, that was Tory's compromise. She knew Laura would never let her remain with the cylon, nor did she want to simply kill her, if she could avoid it. It was Tory’s idea to find the mother of a still-born infant, in the hopes that grief would make her desperate enough not to ask questions. Cold, certainly, but the final outcome was better for all concerned. She had always been a clear thinker.
***
Tory used to joke about her celibacy, back when not having time for sex was a rueful joke and not a daily reality. She would never admit she hated it. It was messy and vaguely disgusting, and frankly, it rarely provided more in the way of physical pleasure than what she could accomplish on her own. But those were rationalizations. It was the closeness she couldn’t bear.
The first time was with her teaching assistant - she couldn’t remember his name, later, though she knew the class was Modern Literature - and things were going reasonably well until he stopped mid-way through and, staring into her eyes, told her she was beautiful. She was certain he was only being polite; he had a reputation for sleeping with his students, and for her part she was hardly in love with him. She was 18 and in college; she wanted to lose her virginity and she wanted to make good grades, and if there was a way to achieve both goals at once, efficiency demanded she take it. She never understood why such a rote display of tenderness could make her feel so exposed. At least that time she could attribute the tears to pain.
”Just something I do…”
***
His name was Jerome, which she shortened to “Germy” when she wanted to tease him. He was two years younger and lived next door, and he and his parents were the kindest people Tory had ever met. She never felt like a guest in their house, which was always filled with people and animals, where one morning Tory found the town drunk crashed out on the sofa. The first time Jerome brought her over to play, his mother hugged her like a long-lost niece, and after that it was as though she was expected there. She took advantage of the implicit invitation as often as she could, soaking up all the warmth and laughter and chaos her house never had.
But once she turned twelve and left the lower school, she rarely allowed him to be seen with her in public. That day was an exception; it was the festival of Hera and most of the town was at temple or taking shelter from the rain elsewhere. A few blocks away from the center of town there was a low footbridge over a deep river, and while the local children weren’t supposed to give in to the obvious temptation, it was more or less accepted that they would. On warm days the lower-school kids would wear their swim-suits underneath their clothes, or else just strip down to their underwear and jump shrieking into the slow-moving water. No one else was there that day, but Tory wanted to swim. Her parents were at home, marking the day with quiet reflection and sacrifices to placate the gods. Father wanted her to offer up some of her favorite books to be burned, as well as the new science kit she’d saved for - the gods only cherished those sacrifices that came dearly. He was disappointed when she flatly refused, and she’d slipped out to escape his quiet disapproval. And as always, Jerome was only too happy to follow her.
Though each time she dreamt of what happened next it was different, her waking memory never changed or faded. They were both dripping wet and giggling on the edge of the bridge. He taunted her playfully, calling her “Vic-tor-ia,” which he knew she hated. Equally playful, she shoved him in the shoulder so he half fell, half jumped into the water, just as they’d both done dozens of times before. She thought he was kidding when he didn’t come back up.
Sometimes in her nightmares, she didn’t try to save him. Sometimes she stood silent on the bridge, watching him struggle and beg for help. Other times she was in the water, holding him under with an unnatural strength until he sank. She never knew why. But the dreams often felt more real to her than her memory of screaming for help and diving into the water. She never knew how long she was in there alone before they finally pulled her out - those few adults who were out and about had long since grown deaf to the screams of children in the river.
Rare, but even more painful were her ‘good’ dreams. Unlike the nightmares, these were always the same. They weren’t fantasies; her subconscious never completely rewrote history, never turned her into a beloved princess or a heroic rescuer. Her father was still distant, but not contemptuous. Her mother was stern, but not unloving. She never saved her friend, and he never grew up and never became her first love once she was old enough to notice him again. Instead, he drowned when she was in bed with a fever, and her parents put off telling her until she was almost well. It amused her, almost, to think that her subconscious was as brutally pragmatic as she was in her waking state.
After New Caprica her river dreams were supplanted by dreams of a baby crying somewhere on an abandoned planet. She would search and search, turning over the abandoned bodies of human and cylon alike. But there were always too many bodies, and the cries grew weaker and weaker until they faded away. She wondered why the dreams didn’t stop when the child returned unharmed. Then she heard the music, and for a while she didn’t dream at all.
It was worse than when the Cylons landed on New Caprica, worse even than the attack on the Colonies. Those were unexpected disasters; their horror was self-contained. The only thing more unbearable than realizing you were the very thing you’d spent the last four years of your life fighting, literally inhuman, was realizing you’d known it all along.
***
Given her less than enthusiastic feelings about sex, Tory never thought she’d experience the pivotal moment of her life with a dick inside of her. Let alone one belonging to a man she still hated, somewhere in the part of her mind that hadn’t yet resigned its humanity, a man who was frakking her and lecturing her about the One True God simultaneously - efficient, that she could appreciate. But she’d known when she’d first spoken to him - ”the distant chaos of an orchestra tuning up”- that he had a message she desperately needed to hear. She just needed to work around the messenger.
“Man may have made them, but God’s at the beginning of the string, isn’t he? It’s God who made the soul. The One, True God.”
Tory didn’t think much about the gods. She believed in them, the way she believed in her own inevitable death, but she tried not to think about either too often. And she knew about the cylon God, or thought she did. She’d heard plenty about him on New Caprica. The cylons believed he’d judged the human race unworthy and corrupt, and ordered them to cleanse the universe of his own creation. She hadn’t been particularly impressed. But now she wondered. The gods she’d been taught to worship were petty and capricious, favoring those who bribed them with prayers and sacrifices, destroying others according to their whims. A perfect God, who strove to make the universe more perfect; she found the idea increasingly compelling.
Baltar wasn’t above stealing from the prophets, even as he fancied himself the one true apostle of the One True God. She loved to hear him talk about the Flood. It wasn’t the story she recalled from childhood, about the ruthlessness of the gods who had nearly wiped out mankind in a fit of jealousy. No, in his version, the Flood was beautiful. A force of nature that rejuvenated humanity, washing away its sins and decay, letting it be born anew. The Flood was both an instrument of god, and divine itself.
***
She was never sure exactly when she decided to kill Galen’s wife. She felt like she’d been walking around in an altered state since that first night with Baltar, drunk on sex and sermons and half-glasses of ambrosia.
“I used to know who I was. Galen Tyrol. Crew chief, husband, father. I look in the mirror nowadays… I don’t even know what I am.” Tory heard the words, but it was like listening to a snatch of conversation in another language, one you’d studied but never truly learned.
“Are you and Cally getting along?” He half-smiled, with a touch of recognition and, she thought, of contempt. Apparently her talents at seduction hadn’t much improved. Or maybe it was just that for the first time, there was a new, fierce part of her that wanted to succeed. She's already slept with Baltar twice since that first night, ready to drink in all the enjoyment she'd been deprived of for so long. Abandoning pretense, she leaned closer, flashing a conspiratorial smile across the small table.
“You know, I never really liked ambrosia before,” she said. “But now it’s as if I’m being flooded with new sensations, new feelings.” Tory noted the way his eyes were following her glass, staring intently at the vibrant green liquid, and her smile widened. “Maybe you are too.”
“Not that I’ve noticed.” Always so stubborn she thought inexplicably, twining her hand around his arm.
“You know in some ways, I don’t hate this. Feeling new, feeling open to things. To change.”
She was laughing at something he’d said in response when Cally showed up, screaming, and threw up all over the floor of Joe’s bar. Tory’s first thought was that she hadn’t known Galen had a daughter. She was so small, too small to be the mother of the chubby not-quite toddler wailing in her arms. Tory would have guessed she was in her late teens if she hadn’t known better; she couldn’t be out of her early 20s. Suddenly she remembered her; she'd seen her once or twice on New Caprica, a lifetime ago.
Her second thought was that she’d been caught. She was dimly aware that she ought to be ashamed. Here she was, seducing another woman’s husband, only to be confronted at the local tavern by the wronged wife herself. Clutching a baby, as if to complete the picture. It was like something out of a bad movie, with herself in the role of the evil harlot. But what she felt, watching Cally practically bite the hands trying to help her off the floor, was power. Tipping her head back, she felt the cool ambrosia slide down her throat, felt the thrill of freedom run through her.
If she were honest with herself, she probably made her decision then.
***
"Politics is like triad. Once you find someone’s tell, you’ll never lose a hand to them again."
She’d been given that advice by the first representative she’d gone to work for, and it had seldom steered her wrong. Sarah Porter’s tell was that her voice dropped slightly when addressing Laura; even in the midst of a heated argument, a part of the Gemenese representative would always regard her as the Dying Leader from the scriptures. Keep her happy on the most fundamental religious matters, and she could be counted on to fall in line.
“I guess you’d better hope there’s a spare body waiting for you.”
She had been afraid she wouldn’t be able to find Cally’s tell soon enough. There was a brief moment of fear as the launch tube sealed behind her, Cally’s hand on the button that would send them all hurtling through the vacuum of space. Her expression was one Tory remembered from her worst nightmares, full of terror and revulsion, as if she beheld a monster. Then she let go of the controls to wrap both arms protectively around the wailing baby in her arms, and Tory knew this was a hand she could win.
“You want to kill me, go ahead,” she spoke softly, spreading her hands in a gesture of helplessness. She had never felt stronger in her life. “Don’t do this to yourself, or to your child.” It took her a moment to remember his name. “To Nicky.”
“Get the frak away! You’re not getting your hands on my son!” Cally was screaming, clutching Nicky so tightly he began to wail in earnest. “Not you, not Galen! The frakker used me!” She kept reaching for the controls, only to let them go with each step Tory took closer, clinging more tightly to her son. Shielding him from her, not from the airless nothing she was ready to take him into. Tory felt her contempt harden into hate.
“He didn’t know. None of us did.” Cally was shaking her head, but her eyes were locked on Tory’s face, as if she were a lifeline she was willing herself not to reach for. “We didn’t know until we entered that Nebula.”
“Oh shut the frak up… triggered...” Cally sobbed, grasping the controls again as Tory slowly approached her.
“All we know, is that we’re cylons. But in every other way, we’re still the same people.”
“You’re frakking machines.” Her voice was plaintive, as if she were trying to reason with Tory. Her hand slipped away again.
“I don’t know.” Tory stared down at her own hands as if asking them for answers. “But I do know that we’re not evil. We’re not inhuman. And we’re just as scared, and confused, as you are.” The same words she’d said to herself, before. It wasn’t hard to infuse them with the requisite sincerity. Cally’s eyes never left her face.
“I can’t live like this. It’s a frakking nightmare,” she pleaded, resting her cheek against Nicky’s head.
Not to worry.
“You don’t want to do this. Cally, he’s your son.”
That was all it took. Cally stared down at her child for a moment, then broke. Distantly, Tory tried not to laugh at how ridiculous her round face looked as she cried.
“Oh gods.” Tory knelt beside her as her legs gave way, watched as she cuddled Nicky closer, covering him in her snot and drool and tears. She tried to touch her, pat her shoulder, but she couldn’t quite bring herself.
“What have I done, I’m so sorry.”
Nicky began to quiet as his mother rocked him back and forth, his frightened cries gradually subsiding into a few hiccupping sobs. She was still holding him tightly, too tightly. Tory weighed her options. Half the ship must have seen or heard about the incident in Joe’s. If Cally went from screaming that she and her husband were having an affair to screaming that they were cylons, and Saul Tigh with them, would anyone believe her? Unlikely, especially after it got out that one the so-called cylons rescued her and her baby from an attempted murder-suicide. Tory would be a hero.
“Let’s just go get some air, okay,” she urged, trying to regain eye-contact as Cally climbed shakily to her feet. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” Cally whispered, instinctively pulling Nicky away from Tory’s outstretched arms. But he was heavy and she was still shaking; she could easily fall and hurt him.
“We can work this out together.” She looked at Tory then, jerked her head in distracted acknowledgment. So close now.
“Here, let me take him.” She gently pulled the wriggling baby out of his mother’s arms. For a moment, Cally clung tighter, and Tory thought that if she could get her to give up her son, she could get her to do anything, including keep quiet. She wouldn’t have to die. It was important that Cally not have to die.
Then Nicky squirmed again, almost falling out of her arms, and she released him with an anguished sob. Handed him to Tory, the monster. Whimpering, he nestled close to her, burying his face in her shoulder. Cally was crying again, that ugly face twisted beyond recognition, eyes nearly closed. Tory’s blow came with the force of an avenging goddess.
There was a nerve-wracking moment when she wasn’t sure which button would open the right door, and the person who could tell her was sprawled unconscious on the floor. Fortunately, the controls were all labeled and color-coded; all the jokes about “military intelligence” were undoubtedly there for a reason. Safely on the other side, she adjusted the baby to a more comfortable position and waited for Cally to wake up. It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes before she started moving again, hands blindly clutching at Nicky’s blanket, looking for her son. Tory had a moment to appreciate the pathetic hilarity of a mother carrying her child to a launch tube, with every intention of flushing him out into the vacuum of space, and wrapping him in a blanket first. Let her see how much good it would do her.
Cally staggered drunkenly to her feet. Once she was sure she had her attention, Tory stroked a hand slowly across Nicky’s face, turning his head ever so gently so that Cally had a clear view, watching her expression turn from bewilderment to heartbreak. The monster had gotten her hands on her son, and she was never going to see him again. Tory felt an almost sexual pleasure as she slowly reached for the controls; murder is an intimate act, and this time there were no tears. As the force of the vacuum swept her out into space, Cally looked like she was trying to swim against a raging current. But she was caught up in the flood, and it washed her away.
***
“And then somebody waves a magic wand, and all of those notes start to slide into place. A grotesque, screeching cacophony becomes a single melody.”
Getting away with it was almost disappointingly easy. Tory had come up with half a dozen contingency plans by the time she reached Galen’s quarters. Things to say, explanations to make. But she found him lying unconscious on the floor of his quarters, face bloodied, though his pulse and breathing were steady. She put a now-sleeping Nicky down in his crib, caught the next shuttle back to Colonial One, and fell asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.
The need to be careful was good for her. It focused her, and soon the rest of the world snapped back into place. She became even better at her job, deftly managing the increased demands brought by Laura’s illness even as she was dividing her time between work, Baltar and the other three. She listened to Baltar - Gaius now - talk about perfection, and wondered if he could truly understand what it meant, the utter freedom it entailed. The only sin would be to betray that freedom with self-doubt.
(Rarely, an image of Cally’s face would flash into her mind, the pain and terror in her eyes just before the end. She would wonder why she couldn’t have killed her while she was unconscious, never knowing what had happened. “I wanted you to see me,” she finally answered, unsure whether she was talking to Cally or to herself.)
Shortly after the funeral the word got out about Galen telling anyone who would listen that his only regret was not killing Cally himself. Going on and on about her dull, vacant eyes and foul stench, cursing himself for settling for her. Tory listened to the gossip as often as she could, pretending to be shocked and saddened as she coaxed ever more appalling details from those who’d heard him, or knew someone who had. Once, in the middle of a particularly colorful recounting, one of her father’s favorite sayings entered her mind unbidden: “there is nothing more natural than for a man to despise one he has hurt.” She stopped asking to hear the story after that.
***
The cylons claimed to have perfect memories. She supposed they had to; when you couldn’t count on inhabiting the same body from one day to the next, your memory was the only stable source of identity you had. Touching the ruins of Earth, Tory felt the ache of familiarity, and wondered exactly how far back she could go before her own memories turned into lies. She suddenly remembered Sam playing that song for her and Galen; they were at a celebration of some sort together, though she didn’t know for what. But they were definitely adults, which meant that everything she remembered about growing up in a village outside Delphi, all the guilt she thought she’d relinquished, none of it was real. She felt strangely cheated.
(It was only later, after Sam took a bullet to the head and remembered everything, that she began to understand. His youth hadn’t been much different from what he’d thought, he told them, but for a few surgical alterations that added up to lead him in a different direction. Then she remembered those dreams of a slightly different life. Cavil was a devious bastard. She wondered if he took after her.)
***
Tory had devoted herself to carrying out God’s plan, but God was maddeningly unspecific. She watched as temporary president Lee Adama took the hand of the cylon rebel leader and thought perhaps she was witnessing God’s Will come to fruition. The thought sent her mind racing; had she been on the wrong side all this time? (If the Fleet could really accept them, now that the truth was out in spite of her, had she done it for nothing?) It almost relieved her when Earth turned out to be ashes. God must have steered them there as a message, to show them that the cylons had a separate path.
Cally was in her dreams that night, the first she spent on the baseship after they found Earth. She was flushed and healthy, the way Tory remembered seeing her on New Caprica. Her smile was open and disarming.
“Don’t be afraid of me.”
“I’m not,” she whispered, bolt upright in her double bed. The walls of her spacious quarters still pulsed a soft red, soothing her slightly.
“Good," she replied. "It’s good that you saved him.” Not sure quite what to say to that, Tory blinked her suddenly stinging eyes. Abruptly, Cally shoved an arm under her nose.
“Tell me, does that smell like cabbage to you?”
Tory gulped. “I don’t think he meant that,” she said, hating the quiver in her voice.
“No?”
“No." She was crying openly now. It was only a dream, after all. “He feels guilty. He’s sorry he hurt you.”
“That’s sweet of him,” Cally shrugged. “But maybe it had to happen. Not all of us are cut out for the Kingdom of God.”
“I’m sorry.”
Cally grinned slyly. “You are?”
“I’m sorry for you, I mean.”
“Oh don’t be,” she giggled. “You of all people.”
“What do you mean - “ but before she could finish her question, Cally was kissing her, tongue gently invading her mouth as Tory sat frozen.
”Not to worry,” she whispered in her ear, releasing her with a wink.
“You’re not - you’re not her,” Tory gasped.
“Never said I was."
And with that she was gone, and Tory was awake, shivering. She scanned the room frantically, but there was only a Leoben, watching her reverently from a few feet away.
“Oh, for frak’s sake.”
***
It was Sam she confessed to. Almost. They were standing by the water, far enough apart from everyone else so she wouldn't be overheard. He clearly wanted to be alone, but he listened.
She had run through a few possible versions of the truth, nearly selecting one in which she’d had to wrest Nicky away from a mother determined to kill her hybrid abomination - good thing she hadn’t gone with that one, as it turned out - accidentally killing her in the process, and flushing her body out of the launch tube in a moment of panic. In the end, she’d decided on a softer version, where Cally relented and begged her to take Nicky to safety, but refused to come with her. Tory had been about to go for help when she opened the launch tube from the inside. She told it well, and by the time she finished Sam was fighting tears. She let him convince her not to tell Galen - he was having a hard enough time of it as it was, and who knew how he’d react to hearing that Cally knew what he was when she killed herself?
And that was the truth she remembered. She of all people understood that the past was ephemeral. If she'd learned anything, she'd learned to let go.
***
"Now for a moment, we're going to know everything there is to know about one another."
Tigh gazed at his wife in wonder and adoration; Galen simply shrugged. Tory wished she could refuse. She had never liked to be looked at.
She placed a hand in the water, and she was standing amid the ruins of Caprica, kissing Kara Thrace and doubting she would ever return. She was riding Cavil, trying to divorce her mind from her body and wondering why it wouldn't work this time. She held a gun to Boomer's head, mad with grief. She was in the launch tube, staring into Cally's terrified eyes.
It was all there, duly recorded in her brain exactly as she knew it had happened. Of all the ironies in her life, this last was the cruelest. She felt the others’ reactions before she saw them; Sam’s pain, Ellen’s horror, Tigh’s contempt. Galen’s rage. His mind battered against hers, demanding more. He tore her open, and for a moment they were one. He was the one kneeling beside Cally, coaxing Nicky away, staring into her eyes as he sent her into the void. Their eyes locked across the water, and Tory knew there would be no forgiveness.
His eyes were the last she saw of this life, burning through her as his hands choked the breath from her body. Even as she struggled, a part of her mind was already detached, seeing there was no hope. She closed her eyes, and let the flood wash her away.
***
When she opened them, she was at the bottom of that same old river. But the water was warm this time, and clear enough to see everything. She saw Cavil floating past her, carried away by the current; Simon and Doral as well. Cylon resurrection died with her, and with it the last wall between the two races fell. At last she knew her purpose; not everyone was intended for the Kingdom of God. Swimming further up, she could see Cally, holding her arms open for a chubby little boy to jump into. Caught up in each other, they never noticed her as she drifted past. Further, and there was Jerome, grinning at her and waving. She wanted to stay for a moment, or forever. But the light kept drawing her upwards, and soon she would be gasping in the morning air.
Author: prolix_allie
Summary: Whatever happened to Tory Foster
Characters: Tory Foster, ensemble
Pairings: Gen
Rating: R for Mature Themes
Warnings: Nothing Ron didn’t do first
Title, Author and URL of original story: A remix of Comfort, by rivrea
Beta Thanks: Huge thanks to sabaceanbabe and lyssie.
Author Notes: This was written for bsg_remix and originally posted here. I was a bit unsure about remixing a drabble, but Comfort is such a great snapshot of Laura and what makes her tick that I really wanted to see if I could do the same for Tory, who is such an enigma in canon. The story grew from there into an attempt to make as much sense as I could of her character arc in Season Four. Reposting as I think I managed to find all the typos this time. ;)
Tory’s smile always shone brightest when it was least felt. It was something of a point of pride. She certainly didn’t want her new employer - and that was how she tried to think of Laura Roslin at this moment, her new employer, not the President of what some still fondly referred to as the “Twelve Colonies” - to sense her apprehension. She couldn’t gage her success, as Roslin returned her greeting with a warmth that didn’t quite reach her eyes before turning to the whiteboard on her office wall.
“I… I forgot about Billy” she said, and Tory felt a stab of guilt which she quickly suppressed. She’d had her eye on this position for months, had cultivated contacts in the press corp. and the President’s staff, all with the hope of working her way into the inner circle.
“I did put up a picture of him in the gallery,” she continued, “but I didn’t remember that there was one survivor less.” The corner of Tory’s lip curled up despite herself. She gathered it was her presence that had served as the reminder.
“49, 598 now,” she observed brusquely. “Far too few.”
Roslin turned, surprised. Tory was afraid for a moment that she’d offended her, and opened her mouth to say something more appropriate, to tell her how sorry she was for her loss. But beneath the other woman’s startlement she thought she saw a glimmer of appreciation, and somewhere between her brain and her tongue her rote condolences turned into; “I’m ready to get started any time, Madame President.”
This time, the smile was genuine. “Please, call me Laura.”
***
That night Tory dreamed she was in the river, diving as deep as she could, eyes open, arms grasping for the riverbed. Sometimes she thought she caught a glimpse of an orange t-shirt or a curly head, thought she grasped a small hand. But the sunlight and her burning lungs always drew her upward, and she always surfaced clutching weeds.
***
Maya was her idea. Not hers specifically; they had left it to Cottle to select the particular individual. But the plan to steal Hera Agathon away to be fostered among humans, like one of Zeus’s children in the myths, that was Tory's compromise. She knew Laura would never let her remain with the cylon, nor did she want to simply kill her, if she could avoid it. It was Tory’s idea to find the mother of a still-born infant, in the hopes that grief would make her desperate enough not to ask questions. Cold, certainly, but the final outcome was better for all concerned. She had always been a clear thinker.
***
Tory used to joke about her celibacy, back when not having time for sex was a rueful joke and not a daily reality. She would never admit she hated it. It was messy and vaguely disgusting, and frankly, it rarely provided more in the way of physical pleasure than what she could accomplish on her own. But those were rationalizations. It was the closeness she couldn’t bear.
The first time was with her teaching assistant - she couldn’t remember his name, later, though she knew the class was Modern Literature - and things were going reasonably well until he stopped mid-way through and, staring into her eyes, told her she was beautiful. She was certain he was only being polite; he had a reputation for sleeping with his students, and for her part she was hardly in love with him. She was 18 and in college; she wanted to lose her virginity and she wanted to make good grades, and if there was a way to achieve both goals at once, efficiency demanded she take it. She never understood why such a rote display of tenderness could make her feel so exposed. At least that time she could attribute the tears to pain.
”Just something I do…”
***
His name was Jerome, which she shortened to “Germy” when she wanted to tease him. He was two years younger and lived next door, and he and his parents were the kindest people Tory had ever met. She never felt like a guest in their house, which was always filled with people and animals, where one morning Tory found the town drunk crashed out on the sofa. The first time Jerome brought her over to play, his mother hugged her like a long-lost niece, and after that it was as though she was expected there. She took advantage of the implicit invitation as often as she could, soaking up all the warmth and laughter and chaos her house never had.
But once she turned twelve and left the lower school, she rarely allowed him to be seen with her in public. That day was an exception; it was the festival of Hera and most of the town was at temple or taking shelter from the rain elsewhere. A few blocks away from the center of town there was a low footbridge over a deep river, and while the local children weren’t supposed to give in to the obvious temptation, it was more or less accepted that they would. On warm days the lower-school kids would wear their swim-suits underneath their clothes, or else just strip down to their underwear and jump shrieking into the slow-moving water. No one else was there that day, but Tory wanted to swim. Her parents were at home, marking the day with quiet reflection and sacrifices to placate the gods. Father wanted her to offer up some of her favorite books to be burned, as well as the new science kit she’d saved for - the gods only cherished those sacrifices that came dearly. He was disappointed when she flatly refused, and she’d slipped out to escape his quiet disapproval. And as always, Jerome was only too happy to follow her.
Though each time she dreamt of what happened next it was different, her waking memory never changed or faded. They were both dripping wet and giggling on the edge of the bridge. He taunted her playfully, calling her “Vic-tor-ia,” which he knew she hated. Equally playful, she shoved him in the shoulder so he half fell, half jumped into the water, just as they’d both done dozens of times before. She thought he was kidding when he didn’t come back up.
Sometimes in her nightmares, she didn’t try to save him. Sometimes she stood silent on the bridge, watching him struggle and beg for help. Other times she was in the water, holding him under with an unnatural strength until he sank. She never knew why. But the dreams often felt more real to her than her memory of screaming for help and diving into the water. She never knew how long she was in there alone before they finally pulled her out - those few adults who were out and about had long since grown deaf to the screams of children in the river.
Rare, but even more painful were her ‘good’ dreams. Unlike the nightmares, these were always the same. They weren’t fantasies; her subconscious never completely rewrote history, never turned her into a beloved princess or a heroic rescuer. Her father was still distant, but not contemptuous. Her mother was stern, but not unloving. She never saved her friend, and he never grew up and never became her first love once she was old enough to notice him again. Instead, he drowned when she was in bed with a fever, and her parents put off telling her until she was almost well. It amused her, almost, to think that her subconscious was as brutally pragmatic as she was in her waking state.
After New Caprica her river dreams were supplanted by dreams of a baby crying somewhere on an abandoned planet. She would search and search, turning over the abandoned bodies of human and cylon alike. But there were always too many bodies, and the cries grew weaker and weaker until they faded away. She wondered why the dreams didn’t stop when the child returned unharmed. Then she heard the music, and for a while she didn’t dream at all.
It was worse than when the Cylons landed on New Caprica, worse even than the attack on the Colonies. Those were unexpected disasters; their horror was self-contained. The only thing more unbearable than realizing you were the very thing you’d spent the last four years of your life fighting, literally inhuman, was realizing you’d known it all along.
***
Given her less than enthusiastic feelings about sex, Tory never thought she’d experience the pivotal moment of her life with a dick inside of her. Let alone one belonging to a man she still hated, somewhere in the part of her mind that hadn’t yet resigned its humanity, a man who was frakking her and lecturing her about the One True God simultaneously - efficient, that she could appreciate. But she’d known when she’d first spoken to him - ”the distant chaos of an orchestra tuning up”- that he had a message she desperately needed to hear. She just needed to work around the messenger.
“Man may have made them, but God’s at the beginning of the string, isn’t he? It’s God who made the soul. The One, True God.”
Tory didn’t think much about the gods. She believed in them, the way she believed in her own inevitable death, but she tried not to think about either too often. And she knew about the cylon God, or thought she did. She’d heard plenty about him on New Caprica. The cylons believed he’d judged the human race unworthy and corrupt, and ordered them to cleanse the universe of his own creation. She hadn’t been particularly impressed. But now she wondered. The gods she’d been taught to worship were petty and capricious, favoring those who bribed them with prayers and sacrifices, destroying others according to their whims. A perfect God, who strove to make the universe more perfect; she found the idea increasingly compelling.
Baltar wasn’t above stealing from the prophets, even as he fancied himself the one true apostle of the One True God. She loved to hear him talk about the Flood. It wasn’t the story she recalled from childhood, about the ruthlessness of the gods who had nearly wiped out mankind in a fit of jealousy. No, in his version, the Flood was beautiful. A force of nature that rejuvenated humanity, washing away its sins and decay, letting it be born anew. The Flood was both an instrument of god, and divine itself.
***
She was never sure exactly when she decided to kill Galen’s wife. She felt like she’d been walking around in an altered state since that first night with Baltar, drunk on sex and sermons and half-glasses of ambrosia.
“I used to know who I was. Galen Tyrol. Crew chief, husband, father. I look in the mirror nowadays… I don’t even know what I am.” Tory heard the words, but it was like listening to a snatch of conversation in another language, one you’d studied but never truly learned.
“Are you and Cally getting along?” He half-smiled, with a touch of recognition and, she thought, of contempt. Apparently her talents at seduction hadn’t much improved. Or maybe it was just that for the first time, there was a new, fierce part of her that wanted to succeed. She's already slept with Baltar twice since that first night, ready to drink in all the enjoyment she'd been deprived of for so long. Abandoning pretense, she leaned closer, flashing a conspiratorial smile across the small table.
“You know, I never really liked ambrosia before,” she said. “But now it’s as if I’m being flooded with new sensations, new feelings.” Tory noted the way his eyes were following her glass, staring intently at the vibrant green liquid, and her smile widened. “Maybe you are too.”
“Not that I’ve noticed.” Always so stubborn she thought inexplicably, twining her hand around his arm.
“You know in some ways, I don’t hate this. Feeling new, feeling open to things. To change.”
She was laughing at something he’d said in response when Cally showed up, screaming, and threw up all over the floor of Joe’s bar. Tory’s first thought was that she hadn’t known Galen had a daughter. She was so small, too small to be the mother of the chubby not-quite toddler wailing in her arms. Tory would have guessed she was in her late teens if she hadn’t known better; she couldn’t be out of her early 20s. Suddenly she remembered her; she'd seen her once or twice on New Caprica, a lifetime ago.
Her second thought was that she’d been caught. She was dimly aware that she ought to be ashamed. Here she was, seducing another woman’s husband, only to be confronted at the local tavern by the wronged wife herself. Clutching a baby, as if to complete the picture. It was like something out of a bad movie, with herself in the role of the evil harlot. But what she felt, watching Cally practically bite the hands trying to help her off the floor, was power. Tipping her head back, she felt the cool ambrosia slide down her throat, felt the thrill of freedom run through her.
If she were honest with herself, she probably made her decision then.
***
"Politics is like triad. Once you find someone’s tell, you’ll never lose a hand to them again."
She’d been given that advice by the first representative she’d gone to work for, and it had seldom steered her wrong. Sarah Porter’s tell was that her voice dropped slightly when addressing Laura; even in the midst of a heated argument, a part of the Gemenese representative would always regard her as the Dying Leader from the scriptures. Keep her happy on the most fundamental religious matters, and she could be counted on to fall in line.
“I guess you’d better hope there’s a spare body waiting for you.”
She had been afraid she wouldn’t be able to find Cally’s tell soon enough. There was a brief moment of fear as the launch tube sealed behind her, Cally’s hand on the button that would send them all hurtling through the vacuum of space. Her expression was one Tory remembered from her worst nightmares, full of terror and revulsion, as if she beheld a monster. Then she let go of the controls to wrap both arms protectively around the wailing baby in her arms, and Tory knew this was a hand she could win.
“You want to kill me, go ahead,” she spoke softly, spreading her hands in a gesture of helplessness. She had never felt stronger in her life. “Don’t do this to yourself, or to your child.” It took her a moment to remember his name. “To Nicky.”
“Get the frak away! You’re not getting your hands on my son!” Cally was screaming, clutching Nicky so tightly he began to wail in earnest. “Not you, not Galen! The frakker used me!” She kept reaching for the controls, only to let them go with each step Tory took closer, clinging more tightly to her son. Shielding him from her, not from the airless nothing she was ready to take him into. Tory felt her contempt harden into hate.
“He didn’t know. None of us did.” Cally was shaking her head, but her eyes were locked on Tory’s face, as if she were a lifeline she was willing herself not to reach for. “We didn’t know until we entered that Nebula.”
“Oh shut the frak up… triggered...” Cally sobbed, grasping the controls again as Tory slowly approached her.
“All we know, is that we’re cylons. But in every other way, we’re still the same people.”
“You’re frakking machines.” Her voice was plaintive, as if she were trying to reason with Tory. Her hand slipped away again.
“I don’t know.” Tory stared down at her own hands as if asking them for answers. “But I do know that we’re not evil. We’re not inhuman. And we’re just as scared, and confused, as you are.” The same words she’d said to herself, before. It wasn’t hard to infuse them with the requisite sincerity. Cally’s eyes never left her face.
“I can’t live like this. It’s a frakking nightmare,” she pleaded, resting her cheek against Nicky’s head.
Not to worry.
“You don’t want to do this. Cally, he’s your son.”
That was all it took. Cally stared down at her child for a moment, then broke. Distantly, Tory tried not to laugh at how ridiculous her round face looked as she cried.
“Oh gods.” Tory knelt beside her as her legs gave way, watched as she cuddled Nicky closer, covering him in her snot and drool and tears. She tried to touch her, pat her shoulder, but she couldn’t quite bring herself.
“What have I done, I’m so sorry.”
Nicky began to quiet as his mother rocked him back and forth, his frightened cries gradually subsiding into a few hiccupping sobs. She was still holding him tightly, too tightly. Tory weighed her options. Half the ship must have seen or heard about the incident in Joe’s. If Cally went from screaming that she and her husband were having an affair to screaming that they were cylons, and Saul Tigh with them, would anyone believe her? Unlikely, especially after it got out that one the so-called cylons rescued her and her baby from an attempted murder-suicide. Tory would be a hero.
“Let’s just go get some air, okay,” she urged, trying to regain eye-contact as Cally climbed shakily to her feet. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” Cally whispered, instinctively pulling Nicky away from Tory’s outstretched arms. But he was heavy and she was still shaking; she could easily fall and hurt him.
“We can work this out together.” She looked at Tory then, jerked her head in distracted acknowledgment. So close now.
“Here, let me take him.” She gently pulled the wriggling baby out of his mother’s arms. For a moment, Cally clung tighter, and Tory thought that if she could get her to give up her son, she could get her to do anything, including keep quiet. She wouldn’t have to die. It was important that Cally not have to die.
Then Nicky squirmed again, almost falling out of her arms, and she released him with an anguished sob. Handed him to Tory, the monster. Whimpering, he nestled close to her, burying his face in her shoulder. Cally was crying again, that ugly face twisted beyond recognition, eyes nearly closed. Tory’s blow came with the force of an avenging goddess.
There was a nerve-wracking moment when she wasn’t sure which button would open the right door, and the person who could tell her was sprawled unconscious on the floor. Fortunately, the controls were all labeled and color-coded; all the jokes about “military intelligence” were undoubtedly there for a reason. Safely on the other side, she adjusted the baby to a more comfortable position and waited for Cally to wake up. It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes before she started moving again, hands blindly clutching at Nicky’s blanket, looking for her son. Tory had a moment to appreciate the pathetic hilarity of a mother carrying her child to a launch tube, with every intention of flushing him out into the vacuum of space, and wrapping him in a blanket first. Let her see how much good it would do her.
Cally staggered drunkenly to her feet. Once she was sure she had her attention, Tory stroked a hand slowly across Nicky’s face, turning his head ever so gently so that Cally had a clear view, watching her expression turn from bewilderment to heartbreak. The monster had gotten her hands on her son, and she was never going to see him again. Tory felt an almost sexual pleasure as she slowly reached for the controls; murder is an intimate act, and this time there were no tears. As the force of the vacuum swept her out into space, Cally looked like she was trying to swim against a raging current. But she was caught up in the flood, and it washed her away.
***
“And then somebody waves a magic wand, and all of those notes start to slide into place. A grotesque, screeching cacophony becomes a single melody.”
Getting away with it was almost disappointingly easy. Tory had come up with half a dozen contingency plans by the time she reached Galen’s quarters. Things to say, explanations to make. But she found him lying unconscious on the floor of his quarters, face bloodied, though his pulse and breathing were steady. She put a now-sleeping Nicky down in his crib, caught the next shuttle back to Colonial One, and fell asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.
The need to be careful was good for her. It focused her, and soon the rest of the world snapped back into place. She became even better at her job, deftly managing the increased demands brought by Laura’s illness even as she was dividing her time between work, Baltar and the other three. She listened to Baltar - Gaius now - talk about perfection, and wondered if he could truly understand what it meant, the utter freedom it entailed. The only sin would be to betray that freedom with self-doubt.
(Rarely, an image of Cally’s face would flash into her mind, the pain and terror in her eyes just before the end. She would wonder why she couldn’t have killed her while she was unconscious, never knowing what had happened. “I wanted you to see me,” she finally answered, unsure whether she was talking to Cally or to herself.)
Shortly after the funeral the word got out about Galen telling anyone who would listen that his only regret was not killing Cally himself. Going on and on about her dull, vacant eyes and foul stench, cursing himself for settling for her. Tory listened to the gossip as often as she could, pretending to be shocked and saddened as she coaxed ever more appalling details from those who’d heard him, or knew someone who had. Once, in the middle of a particularly colorful recounting, one of her father’s favorite sayings entered her mind unbidden: “there is nothing more natural than for a man to despise one he has hurt.” She stopped asking to hear the story after that.
***
The cylons claimed to have perfect memories. She supposed they had to; when you couldn’t count on inhabiting the same body from one day to the next, your memory was the only stable source of identity you had. Touching the ruins of Earth, Tory felt the ache of familiarity, and wondered exactly how far back she could go before her own memories turned into lies. She suddenly remembered Sam playing that song for her and Galen; they were at a celebration of some sort together, though she didn’t know for what. But they were definitely adults, which meant that everything she remembered about growing up in a village outside Delphi, all the guilt she thought she’d relinquished, none of it was real. She felt strangely cheated.
(It was only later, after Sam took a bullet to the head and remembered everything, that she began to understand. His youth hadn’t been much different from what he’d thought, he told them, but for a few surgical alterations that added up to lead him in a different direction. Then she remembered those dreams of a slightly different life. Cavil was a devious bastard. She wondered if he took after her.)
***
Tory had devoted herself to carrying out God’s plan, but God was maddeningly unspecific. She watched as temporary president Lee Adama took the hand of the cylon rebel leader and thought perhaps she was witnessing God’s Will come to fruition. The thought sent her mind racing; had she been on the wrong side all this time? (If the Fleet could really accept them, now that the truth was out in spite of her, had she done it for nothing?) It almost relieved her when Earth turned out to be ashes. God must have steered them there as a message, to show them that the cylons had a separate path.
Cally was in her dreams that night, the first she spent on the baseship after they found Earth. She was flushed and healthy, the way Tory remembered seeing her on New Caprica. Her smile was open and disarming.
“Don’t be afraid of me.”
“I’m not,” she whispered, bolt upright in her double bed. The walls of her spacious quarters still pulsed a soft red, soothing her slightly.
“Good," she replied. "It’s good that you saved him.” Not sure quite what to say to that, Tory blinked her suddenly stinging eyes. Abruptly, Cally shoved an arm under her nose.
“Tell me, does that smell like cabbage to you?”
Tory gulped. “I don’t think he meant that,” she said, hating the quiver in her voice.
“No?”
“No." She was crying openly now. It was only a dream, after all. “He feels guilty. He’s sorry he hurt you.”
“That’s sweet of him,” Cally shrugged. “But maybe it had to happen. Not all of us are cut out for the Kingdom of God.”
“I’m sorry.”
Cally grinned slyly. “You are?”
“I’m sorry for you, I mean.”
“Oh don’t be,” she giggled. “You of all people.”
“What do you mean - “ but before she could finish her question, Cally was kissing her, tongue gently invading her mouth as Tory sat frozen.
”Not to worry,” she whispered in her ear, releasing her with a wink.
“You’re not - you’re not her,” Tory gasped.
“Never said I was."
And with that she was gone, and Tory was awake, shivering. She scanned the room frantically, but there was only a Leoben, watching her reverently from a few feet away.
“Oh, for frak’s sake.”
***
It was Sam she confessed to. Almost. They were standing by the water, far enough apart from everyone else so she wouldn't be overheard. He clearly wanted to be alone, but he listened.
She had run through a few possible versions of the truth, nearly selecting one in which she’d had to wrest Nicky away from a mother determined to kill her hybrid abomination - good thing she hadn’t gone with that one, as it turned out - accidentally killing her in the process, and flushing her body out of the launch tube in a moment of panic. In the end, she’d decided on a softer version, where Cally relented and begged her to take Nicky to safety, but refused to come with her. Tory had been about to go for help when she opened the launch tube from the inside. She told it well, and by the time she finished Sam was fighting tears. She let him convince her not to tell Galen - he was having a hard enough time of it as it was, and who knew how he’d react to hearing that Cally knew what he was when she killed herself?
And that was the truth she remembered. She of all people understood that the past was ephemeral. If she'd learned anything, she'd learned to let go.
***
"Now for a moment, we're going to know everything there is to know about one another."
Tigh gazed at his wife in wonder and adoration; Galen simply shrugged. Tory wished she could refuse. She had never liked to be looked at.
She placed a hand in the water, and she was standing amid the ruins of Caprica, kissing Kara Thrace and doubting she would ever return. She was riding Cavil, trying to divorce her mind from her body and wondering why it wouldn't work this time. She held a gun to Boomer's head, mad with grief. She was in the launch tube, staring into Cally's terrified eyes.
It was all there, duly recorded in her brain exactly as she knew it had happened. Of all the ironies in her life, this last was the cruelest. She felt the others’ reactions before she saw them; Sam’s pain, Ellen’s horror, Tigh’s contempt. Galen’s rage. His mind battered against hers, demanding more. He tore her open, and for a moment they were one. He was the one kneeling beside Cally, coaxing Nicky away, staring into her eyes as he sent her into the void. Their eyes locked across the water, and Tory knew there would be no forgiveness.
His eyes were the last she saw of this life, burning through her as his hands choked the breath from her body. Even as she struggled, a part of her mind was already detached, seeing there was no hope. She closed her eyes, and let the flood wash her away.
***
When she opened them, she was at the bottom of that same old river. But the water was warm this time, and clear enough to see everything. She saw Cavil floating past her, carried away by the current; Simon and Doral as well. Cylon resurrection died with her, and with it the last wall between the two races fell. At last she knew her purpose; not everyone was intended for the Kingdom of God. Swimming further up, she could see Cally, holding her arms open for a chubby little boy to jump into. Caught up in each other, they never noticed her as she drifted past. Further, and there was Jerome, grinning at her and waving. She wanted to stay for a moment, or forever. But the light kept drawing her upwards, and soon she would be gasping in the morning air.