Fic: "Ear Tuned To The Roar" (BSG)
Ear Tuned To The Roar
Written for the brains_in_a_jar challenge.
Characters: Helo, Lee, Six. Canon pairings.
Rating: PG-13
Goes AU before "The Eye of Jupiter"
Summary: What is human, what is Cylon, what is choice?
So very, very many thanks to glossing, who audienced and beta'd and held my hand through a lot of flailing. I really can't thank you enough for your help, Gloss. I wouldn't have finished it without you. Any and all remaining errors are entirely mine.
We were both hitchhikers but you had your ear tuned to the roar
Of some metal-tempered engine on an alien, distant shore
So you left to find a better reason than the one we were living for
And it ain't that nursery mouth that I came back for
And it's not the way you're stretched out on the floor...
~ For You, Bruce Springsteen
[I'm afraid.
It's the first emotion when I come back to myself, flooding me, filling every space. And I know--I remember--that I was afraid before, before whatever made those spaces, before the quiet and empty and dark.
Dying. I was dying, then.
Memories come back in flashes, disconnected, stuttering information over a loose telephone line or a bad wireless signal. Sharon staring into her own face, a thousand of her own faces, and saying "I understand. Do it." A Raptor twisting and jerking under the controls, flying wounded, fighting broken. An emotionless voice--a man's, just out of sight--saying "These are the terms of the bargain." Fear. Fear. Pain.
Every inch of my body, every fiber, every cell, on fire with pain.
And now...nothing. Nothing hurts. I feel nothing. I am empty, and cool, and my body feels...not wrong, exactly, but not normal. And there's no pain.
But I must not be dead, because I'm afraid. The dead aren't afraid.
Sharon made a deal, the pieces of memory say. A bargain, for something. With them.
Baby, what did you do?]
***
They huddle close around the table in CIC, speaking in gruff, hushed tones as if they expect to be overheard, caught out, like they're naughty kids or something. Lee wants to step back, to speak loudly and clearly, to declare at the top of his voice that they should just pull the trigger and forget about it. Problem vaporized. Problem solved.
But the Old Man is still talking, a low rumble of words that carries all-but-godlike authority here, so Lee clenches his jaw and holds his peace. Dee's elbow bumps his side hard as she comes back to the table and sets another sheet of paper down, and he silently gives way, stepping back and left to make a space for her.
The Admiral picks up the paper and looks it over slowly. Lee watches how the light behind his father brightens the paper, making it thin, almost letting him read the print through it backwards. Not just military challenges this time, demands for recognition codes and name-rank-serial. They've gone off-book, personal challenges, absolute trivia. Kara gave a question, Tigh, the Chief. Lee had even typed one into the transmitter himself.
The light just isn't quite strong enough for him to read the answers.
The Admiral lets the paper fall to the table again. "I'm convinced," he says.
"Are we to assume then, sir, that Helo is a prisoner on that ship?" Dee's voice is clipped, cautiously indifferent, and Lee wonders why she bothers, why she pretends this is academic. Of course she's worried about Helo. He's everyone's frakking friend, except for the people who despise him as a traitor. It's a nice contrast to Lee's own life, where everyone starts with hostility except for the arbitrary few who seem to think he's a hero.
"Do you have another interpretation in mind, Lieutenant?" the Old Man asks, and Dee ducks her head, pressing her lips tightly together. Lee brushes his fingers over her arm and she shrugs him away. Right.
"He and Sharon have been missing for twelve days," he says, because it's true, not because it'll salvage his wife's pride. "We have to assume they've been compromised."
"All of the answers were correct and given nearly instantly," Gaeta says. "Including the more...personal ones."
Everyone's eyes drop to the paper on the table. Lee sees his own question- the score of the Pyramid finals the year he graduated from flight school, Helo's plebe year. Of course, any Cylon agent on Caprica that year would know that. Tigh asked about some obscure demerit Helo's first week on Galactica; but that would be noted in records that a Cylon could access. Tyrol asked about a conversation the two of them had in the brig on Pegasus- that was a good one, harder to write off. And Kara...
Lee's throat tightens at Kara's question, and beside him, Dee rolls her eyes. What color panties was I wearing the night we met?
"I don't think that counts as a difficult question," Tigh says, and from the way everyone around the table twitches in unison, Lee guesses they all had the same thought, and thank the Gods Tigh said it so none of them had to.
The Admiral turns the paper over with a flick of his wrist, and Lee is silently relieved not to have that black-text You weren't staring up anymore.
"Send a message," the Admiral says finally. "Tell them we demand the release of our officer."
"Yes, sir." Gaeta moves back to his station.
"And ask about the location of our other officer," the Admiral goes on, and Lee winces. "Athena."
Gaeta falters for a second, then begins typing. "I don't like that they won't contact us on actual," Lee says. "It feels like they're hiding something."
"Of course they're hiding something, they're Cylons, for frak's sake," Tigh says. "Lying to us either way."
"We should demand to speak to Helo on actual," Lee says, forcing himself to ignore the man. "Sir."
"I'd like to get their response first," the Admiral says, watching the paper spool from the printer at Gaeta's station. "But I'll keep that in mind, Major."
Lee grits his teeth again and waits, watching with the others as Gaeta reads the return message to himself. The lieutenant's brow furrows, and he looks up.
"Sir...it says Athena has returned to her people, for good. And that returning Helo to us is 'impossible.'"
"Want to play rough, then," Tigh mutters.
"That doesn't make any sense," Dee says. "That ship...it isn't like any Cylon ship we've seen, but we can tell it doesn't have any weapons systems."
"If they wanted to play rough, they wouldn't send a sitting duck," Lee finishes.
Tigh shakes his head. "Unless it's a new secret weapon, or a trap, or..."
"Request actual contact, Mr. Gaeta," the Admiral says.
There are a few long, tense moments of silence before the speakers hiss to life. "Admiral," comes a cool, neutral female voice.
"This is Admiral Adama. Who am I speaking to?"
There's another pause, as if the woman is flustered, but her reply comes in the same blank tone. "It's...it's me. Helo. Captain Agathon, sir."
"What the frak-" someone whispers from one of the stations, overridden by Tigh's strident "This is some kind of joke-"
"No. It's not a joke, it's..." The voice falters, which is so inconsistent with its neutrality, it sets Lee's teeth on edge. "It's...complicated."
"You better start explaining," the Admiral says flatly. There's another long silence, and a chill runs down Lee's spine.
He doesn't know where the idea comes from, how he suddenly knows, but he is instantly and entirely certain that they're about to hear a new and fresh horror that will leave a lot of the other ones far behind.
***
[She talks to me.
I didn’t understand, at first. I wasn’t used to hearing that way. It’s not hearing at all, is the problem; it’s…I don’t know what it is. Like there’s a wire between her head and mine and she’s thinking right into me. She tells me not to worry about it, just to listen to her, and talk to her, and it’ll be all right.
She tells me she’s here to take care of me. I don’t really know what to do with that.
But I guess I do need to be taken care of now, because I don’t know what to do and I don’t understand. I feel like I’m trapped, tied down and caged and I need to get away. I need to fight, I need to run. But I can’t.
She tells me to calm down, be still, listen to her. I’m doing the best I can.
She does…something. If I’m calm and still, she thinks pictures into me instead of just words. What she sees, and what she projects. Sharon told me about projection, but I never really got what she meant. Now, though, this new woman, the voice, she’ll do it for me, let me watch her turn the dull gray walls into forests and ice fields and stars.
She asks me what I’d like to see, sometimes, but I don’t know how to answer that. I’d like to see Sharon. I’d like to see Galactica. I’d like to see home.
I’d like to see myself.
Then I usually stop talking to her at all for a while. She’s still there, though. I can feel her.
She’s a voice in the dark. I asked her what I should call her and she said she didn’t care. She’s a Six; I remember that from the Basestar. A Six and a voice. I made her name from that.]
***
"You may call me Vox," the Cylon says, watching them warily from the other side of the docking tube.
"The voice." Lee laughs sharply. "How very poetic."
"Helo chose it." She turns her head slightly, looking at her hand against the dull grey metal of her own ship. "The agreement was that only one of you would cross over." She seems to be addressing empty air, and Lee suddenly feels the presence of the Marines behind him like an accusation.
The Admiral nods shortly and rests his hand on Lee's shoulder. "Major Adama will be serving as Galactica's...liaison."
Lee bites his tongue hard and stands up a little straighter. Galactica's liaison is a nice way to put it. Nicer than Galactica's hostage, or Galactica's investigator into what the frak is going on, both of which are more accurate.
I need someone I can trust, his father had said, looking at him with those damn serious eyes, that look that always chokes any protests in Lee's throat. You need someone useless, he thought, someone expendable, but he didn't say it. He just took up his mission, told his wife he was going, packed his bag and reported to the airlock.
The Cylon watches from the corner of her eye as he crosses the connecting bridge. She's the Shelley Godfrey model, he recognizes; the same model who was kept prisoner on Pegasus. This one has dark blonde hair pulled back in a simple braid, and wears a plain dark jumpsuit similar to a Fleet deckhand’s.
He doesn't look back as the airlock doors cycle closed. He has his instructions. He'll assess the situation and report back, and if it's some kind of a trap, well, he's the sacrifice to spring it.
"Welcome," the Cylon--Vox--says. She smiles slightly, stroking her hand along the wall. "He's very happy to see you."
"How can you tell?" he asks, shifting his bag higher on his shoulder. He doesn't believe a word of it, of course, any of the crap she told them before they negotiated this insane little trade. Integrating a human consciousness into a spaceship. Right. Very likely.
She glances at him, annoyed. "Aren't you paying any attention at all?"
He opens his mouth to ask what the frak she means by that, then stops. A current of warm air is racing through the otherwise standard-cool atmosphere of the ship. It gusts around his face and shoulders, ruffling his hair lightly, and when he raises one hand up to its level, it blows faster, winding around his fingers and making him blink hard against it.
"Very happy," she repeats, patting the wall with an odd little smile. He'd call her whole attitude one of affection if she wasn't addressing a frakking spaceship.
"Where can I put my things?" he asks curtly, and the current abruptly dies. The look she gives him now, he has no problem calling murderous.
"Follow me," she says, and he does, through dull metal corridors lined with slow-pulsing red lights that by some trick of his eyes seemed to have been moving faster a minute ago.
***
[She's talking to me. She's very patient, very gentle, very frakking caring, telling me not to give up.]
"He's only human, Helo. Give him time. He'll catch on."
Even if I have to beat it into him.
[She forgets I can hear her think, too, if she isn't careful when she's touching the interface. I just figured that out today, that she can only think at me when she does that. The rest of the time, she has to talk out loud. Except when she's sleeping, she talks to me a lot. I appreciate that. It's so quiet if she doesn't talk.
Lee talks to her in clipped sentences, and not at all otherwise. Lee doesn't believe I'm here.]
"He's only human."
[She strokes the panel. I can feel that, a frisson of heat like someone touching my shoulder. She's projecting nonsense right now, soft light and warm color. I don't want it. I don't think she understands that what she's saying isn't actually a comfort.
I used to be only human, too.]
***
Lee finds Vox on the tiny bridge of the ship, petting an odd-colored panel like it's a cat and gazing off into space.
"The frak is that?" he asks, leaning against the doorframe.
She jumps, startled, but instead of pulling her hand away she presses it harder against the panel. He recognizes it after a minute, from the Cylon plague ship--some translucent dark red substance, shot through with other colors. On the Basestar, though, the panels were murky and dead; columns of light move through this one, making the colors shiver across the walls.
"It's an interface," she says. "It's how I talk to him."
"Right." He nods and looks around the bridge. There are only a few control panels he recognizes, and one wall is mostly taken up by a good-sized readout monitor. Bands of red run around the room at about the level of his knees, light pulsing along them at a sluggish pace. "And how does he talk to you? If he's doing much talking these days, which I guess he isn't, given that he's basically canned corn..."
He forgot how frakking fast Cylons can move. He barely gets the word out and she's on him, shoving him back against the wall. Her fingers are digging painfully into his biceps, and he's hit with the sickening awareness that he can't fight her off, can't defend himself even if he tries. He draws in a breath to try anyway--effort in the face of futility, the unofficial motto of the Colonial Fleet--
And the whole bridge lights up like a supernova.
She pulls away from him instantly, turning her head to look toward the panel, and he shoves her back. The red lights are suddenly twice as bright as they were, and racing along the room a lot faster, now moving with a pulse that matches Lee's pounding heart. White warning lights flash here and there, and a low, keening sound fills the air, like some kind of frakked-up warning klaxon set to sound like a sob.
"I'm sorry," she says, holding up her hands. Apology very much not frakking accepted, he wants to tell her, except she's not talking to him. Her head's tipped back to address the empty air. "He was being disrespectful, and I lost my temper. I'm sorry."
Text forms on the readout monitor, and Lee steps forward, squinting. He expects an error message, or some kind of explanation for the lights and siren, but instead it just says
[Don't.]
The word hangs there for a moment, then fades. Vox draws a shaky breath and lowers her hands, and more text forms.
[Just...please. Don't.]
"The frak is that?" Lee asks, staring at the text as it fades.
"That's him," she says wearily, but he hardly hears it, because new words are appearing, one line forming and holding before fading away and letting new letters swim to the surface.
[Hello, Major.
Thank you for coming.]
And then a long pause before the next. These lines form and disappear fast, echoing his frantic heartbeat as surely as the lights.
[Please, Lee. Please. Listen to her. Believe her.
It's me.]
***
[I can't see, exactly.
There are cameras. I receive digital and optical input, which I can analyze. But it's not seeing the way I did before, not any way that any human--or even a humanoid Cylon--would understand. It's different.
Everything's different.
There are heat sensors, too. Infrared cameras. They add more input to combine with the others and get some kind of a general impression of what's going on on the ship. Inside me.
It's...I'm...this is not a large vessel. There's the airlock. The bridge. A storage locker for tools and supplies. The engine core. What Vox calls the soul room, which is the one place I can't seem to monitor. And two sleeping chambers.
I asked her, when I first realized that, why there were two rooms if it was only supposed to be me and her. The abomination and the martyr to its cause.
She told me it was just chance, that they cobbled this together from random parts and Colonial ships captured in the attacks, and two living chambers happened to be what survived. Now I wonder if maybe they knew I would go back, would try to make contact again. Maybe they know everything. Maybe they're using me.
It scares me that I'm having a hard time caring about that. I'm just so frakking desperate. First it was just to see..."see"...humans again, and now it's to make Lee realize that I'm here. Make him talk to me.
I track him around the ship, inside me. There aren't many places for him to go. But he's always silent, and as far as I can tell, he never looks up.]
***
The Cylon is a pain in the ass. If Lee hadn't come over here under an agreement of truce he would've airlocked her by now. Crazy frakking toaster.
Whatever the deal is here, whatever secret game the Cylons are playing, whatever trap they're baiting with Helo's ghost, she's committed. A true believer. She talks softly as she walks from room to room, fingers brushing along the walls, looking up at the optical sensors and smiling. She spends so much time on the bridge fondling that damn interface panel, Lee isn't sure he shouldn't throw them an engagement party.
He's a pilot. He knows all about anthropomorphizing the birds, giving them personality and face instead of letting them be the metal guts and shells that they are. It's one of the first lessons at flight school--call your bird a she, laugh about it having a bad day, talk it through the tight spots, but if you ever start to really believe it, go sit your ass down at a psych evaluation, because your grip on reality's slipping. End of the day, the planes are machines, and that personality's just a collection of glitches.
Whatever Cylon hive mind was in charge of this scam was thorough, though. That readout screen flares to life every time Lee steps onto the bridge, hopeful text chasing itself across, asking questions, begging attention like a puppy. And the words sound right. The slang, the cadence, the attitude, it's all Karl Agathon, like he's sending wireless messages ship to ship. Lee doesn't know how the Cylons managed to program that, but the frakkers must just be that good.
"Was it Sharon?" he asks, standing on the bridge and watching Vox molest the interface like it's paying her in cash.
"Was what Sharon?" she asks, in the odd, empty voice that she puts on when she's pretending to be Helo.
"Answer me normally, okay? I'm not in the mood to play your little games."
She takes her hand off the panel slowly, and he matches her glare for glare. She looks like if she had her way, he'd be out the airlock too. Nice to know they had something in common. Maybe that would be enough to find common ground and found a peaceful settlement on the nearest planet. Yeah, that plan always ended well.
"You're a cold, insensitive person," she says, and he laughs.
"Coming from you, that's a compliment, isn't it?" Text is flickering wildly across the readout screen, but he ignores it. It's all a mindfrak, and he's done with it. "Was it Sharon?"
"Was what Sharon? I don't understand what you mean." They really are a frakking miracle of programming, these Cylon women. Maybe the men are just as good, he hasn't seen, but he knows the way she's reacting to him the same way he knows Fleet regs and the last sports magazine left in the galaxy. The reined-in violence of her movements as she steps toward him, every line of her body declaring her desire to knock him back until he sees things her way...he's been making people want to do that since he was a kid.
"Was Sharon the one who programmed this ship? Set up your little Helo-impersonation routine. Only way I can figure out you guys could get so many details."
"You're so blind." She keeps coming closer and closer and he holds his ground, pressing his weight down into his heels and not thinking about the injuries people pick up when they go head to head against a Cylon. She won't touch him. There's a truce. "Blind and ignorant and cruel."
"And you're not answering my question."
"Sharon didn't program anything. No one programmed anything. We neurally integrated Karl Agathon into this ship. No other human has ever received such a gift."
Out of the corner of his eye, Lee can see that the red lights are flashing faster, racing around the room, blurring into a solid, unwavering bar. "You're a liar."
She shoves him back hard enough to give him whiplash, and so much for the truce. "Such a child of your race," she says, and the second blow knocks him down on his back on the floor. "So content in your delusions, inside your walls, and anyone who dares to try to give you a window must be a liar."
"It's impossible," he says, voice rough and harsh, bracing himself on his elbows. "Your story's the delusion, because it's impossible."
She shakes her head, the red light now coming solid and steady painting her hair a dirty, muddy shade, blood mixed with dust. "What isn't impossible, to your kind?"
He looks up at her, standing like an avatar of death and war, holy Athena wronged and bearing vengeance. "It can't be," he tells her, the Cylon in front of him and the indifferent and nonexistent goddess in his mind. "It can't be Helo, because Helo was dying."
She falters at that, and the illusion crumbles. It takes him a minute to realize that it's because the red lights have suddenly gone out.
***
[They talk about me like I'm not even here. He doesn't believe I'm here anyway, but now he's got her doing it too, and if neither one of them thinks I'm here...am I?
I want to go away. I want it to stop. I want to go to sleep and not wake up anymore. I want to have been asleep all along and never have woken up here at all.
I want it to all be a bad dream in the moments before I died.]
***
"Follow me." She doesn't offer him her hand, just turns and goes. He drags himself up off the floor and follows, half of his mind noting the quiet of the ship, the absence of the pulsing red lights, the coolness of the air. It's different, but not in any remarkable or significant way, not enough for him to notice more than shallowly.
"He didn't die," she says flatly, leading him down the corridor, past the sleeping quarters and the storage room.
"He had end-stage radiation poisoning." Remembering it brings a sour taste to his throat, sends a shiver of echoed horror down his spine. The whole sickbay smelled like rotting flesh and slow death, the antiseptic not really masking the smell but instead turning it into an even higher level of twisted horror. Images flash through Lee's mind as he follows her--sheets stained with fluid, red and a sick yellow-green, Sharon's face as she sat and watched the bed, Doc Cottle lighting another cigarette and staring stonily ahead as his patient begged for death to come faster. "He couldn't survive. Anybody could see that."
"Not in your care, no." She stops at the only door in the ship he hasn't been able to open. She places her hand flat on a panel like the one on the bridge, then turns a manual handle to open the door. The other doors on the ship jump open when approached, eager to serve, to please. "And yes, Sharon saw that."
"So she took him to die amongst the Cylons?" Lee shakes his head. "I knew Karl. He loved her, but he would've wanted his body honored by his own kind."
She looks over her shoulder at him, frustration in her eyes again under a layer of hard-won patience and deep sorrow. "She didn't bring him to us to die. She brought him to us to save."
***
[They've gone to the one place I can't see, can't monitor, can't follow them. I don't know if she took him there on purpose, or if she just forgot. I don't know which is worse, and I guess it doesn't matter. It feels the same either way.
They left me.
Space is cold and dark and endless, like falling asleep, like I want. I can sense that all along my skin, my outside, my hull. I focus on those sensors, turn myself outward, try to draw it into me. I don't know how to describe it. I don't want to. I just want to stop hurting for a minute.
It's the only way I know for sure that Lee isn't right. I'm not dead yet, because it hurts too much that I've been left behind.]
***
"She came back to us, giving us her memories and experiences, and her maternal bond with her child." Vox steps deeper into the room, and Lee follows. There's a dim, greenish light farther in, but her body blocks most of what it might illuminate. "In exchange for the life of the man she loves."
"Present tense?" His throat is dry for no reason he can think of. The hair's standing up on the back of his neck. He knows, somehow knows, that whatever he sees when she steps aside is going to be something he will spend the rest of his life wishing he could wipe from his mind. And he knows that he isn't going to look away.
"Eternally." She stops and turns to face him. "What you are about to see is sacred, do you understand? It is our greatest gift. It is a sacrament. It deserves your reverence, if you can't manage compassion."
He has to force the words out. "Let me see."
The tub is shallow, holding no more than a hand's breadth of thick, viscous fluid over the body inside. If it is a body.
Lee steps closer, fascinated and repelled, and looks because he is a soldier and has been taught never to look away. "Radiation causes mutation, damage, decay," Vox says, her fingers brushing along the edge of the tank in restless, anxious motions. "We cut back to the healthiest tissue we could, and the solution prevents further deterioration. Essentially, he's suspended in time."
What's left of him. One arm ends--cut back; the term is clinical, sterile, mechanical--above the elbow, the other just past the shoulder. Both legs are precisely clubbed at what Lee guesses was the halfway point of the femur. There's very little skin left, on limbs, torso, or even the head. Bones poke through muscles ragged as lace. And yet Lee can see the dense green fluid moving, circulating sluggishly through the form. The tubes running in and out carry bubbles of oxygen, and darker liquid that might very well once have been blood. And the screen at one end of the tank, reading out input from the wires that snake away from it and down into the half-exposed skull, shows information not entirely unlike an EEG.
"My gods," he whispers, and that hurts too, burns his throat like the bile he's already choking down. "What the frak did you do?"
"We saved him." Her hand is still moving, tracing the edge of the tank in long, slow strokes, caresses. "We raised him up. Made him a child of God."
***
The red lights are still dead. Lee doesn't know what that means, but it must not be good, because Vox is panicking. Or something like it; the Cylon equivalent, maybe. Both of her hands are flat against the interface, her eyes wide and scared, her lips pressed into a thin line.
"What's going on?" he asks, coming up behind her. The changing colors of the interface panel don't mean anything to him, but he watches them anyway, tries to find patterns. That's Fleet training too. Find the patterns, find the answers, save the day.
"He's not answering me," she says, shaking her head. Wisps of hair have come loose from the braid, falling down around her face, and she blows out a sharp huff of air to stir them aside, to no effect. It's a tiny action, but something he's seen a million times--Dee does that, and Kara, and any other woman he's ever met--and he finds himself moving up beside her, leaning in over the workstation in an echo of her posture, zeroing in on the task at hand, on working the problem.
"Okay, what does that mean?" She shoots him a razor-edged glare, and he corrects. "What does it indicate? Is there some kind of a...a malfunction, or...I don't know, did we screw something up by going down there to the...to where he's..." He exhales sharply. "Did we do something to the body?"
"No." Her eyes go back to the panel, searching the moving lights and colors. "No, it's not anything like that. He's just...he's withdrawing, he's ignoring me, and that's..."
"Insulting?" he offers, because he'd be relieved if it was just that simple, if instead of panic that look on her face meant that she's offended. Considering that she glares at him again, though, maybe not.
"Unusual," she says, shaking her head. "And possibly dangerous."
"How so?" He moves to stand beside her, staring at the panel in fascination. He can't suss out any pattern or meaning to the lights, but there must be one, underneath.
"Are you being deliberately difficult?" He shakes his head and she sighs. "The human mind...if he withdraws for too long, and refuses to communicate, he might forget how."
"And that would mean what?"
"It would mean brain-death, Major. Loss of the soul, the consciousness."
"You mean...he'd die." That would be mercy, wouldn't it? That would be a gift. Releasing him from that...from this, from all of this. Setting him free from the horror and torment of a half-life. Frak, if Lee had any claim to being human at all, he ought to be running back to that room and ripping the tubes out of the body. But maybe Helo's taken the burden out of his hands. "He'd finally be allowed to die."
"Why must you see things only in black and white?" she growls, and he shakes his head.
"If that's his choice, I don't see how we have any right to..."
She grabs his wrist before he can finish the sentence, and he gasps at the strength of her hand, grinding the bones together without care. She shoves his palm against the interface, holding her own hand over his to pin it down flat.
***
[lightheatcolorpulsevoice
It's her--her voice strident and insistent and angry. Gods, she's mad at me. And at Lee. And...possibly at the entire universe. Oh, frak. Really angry.
But her voice--her thoughts--are being filtered, bent, warped along the way. And the layer between her and me is...hot and messy and chaotic and human. I can't get a clear sense; no words, no pictures, just feeling. And it's a jolt all the way through me, pain and pleasure and amazing, even though it's just the slightest taste, just a hint of everything I've lost and missed and stuff I didn't realize was gone, bleeding through her anger and her voice.
Gods, it tastes like being alive. Feels like turning my face to the sun.]
***
"Well," Vox says softly, her voice hoarse as if she's been shouting, even though there's been nothing but silence. "I hope you both learned a lesson from that."
"From what?" Lee asks, struggling to catch his breath. He's pretty sure his brain wasn't meant to do what it just did, and that he'll forget it fast in self-defense. And he's thankful for it. "What...what lesson?"
[Yeah, what?] flickers across the screen, and the red lights jump in tempo.
"Don't frakking test me," she says, and stalks off the bridge. Lee watches her go and then looks back at the screen. He doesn't know where the cameras are, exactly, and the screen must be close enough.
"I think we made her mad," he says, experimentally.
[Yep.]
Lee exhales shakily and closes his eyes. Then he forces them open again, and looks up toward the ceiling.
"Hi, Karl. How...how are you doing?"
***
[He fills in the blanks for me--the accident and the aftermath. Racetrack and Skulls survived. They got meds in time and they’re fine. Sharon and me being gone puts them two Raptor pilots down, but since the bird we went out in ended up unsalvageable, irradiated scrap, it’s not as much of a problem as it could’ve been.
He tells me other stories, bits and pieces of life on Galactica, the walk and the talk and all the stupid details I miss. I missed them on Caprica, so much, and it’s worse now, without that tiny stubborn thread of hope that somehow I’d get back again. There’s no going back for me now, no more guessing how many fingers of whiskey went into Tigh’s breakfast, no who’s-frakking-who gossip traded like currency over the table in the pilots’ rec, no going down to the launch tubes with the knuckledraggers to fix some damn thing or another and looking out at a planet spinning slow against a field of stars.
I can still see the planet, and the stars, but there’s nobody looking out at it with me.
Lee’s not all that good at telling stories; his voice stumbles and catches and trips, because he corrects himself as he goes along instead of just talking, just saying what he wants to say. It’s all right, though. It’s…better, actually, that he’s still the same, still can’t just go with it, still is Lee, same as always. Same as before.]
***
It would be easier if he could close his eyes, if he could pretend. He could summon up a picture in his mind--Karl sprawled out in one of the chairs in the pilots’ rec, or sitting on the edge of the catwalk swinging his feet over the flight deck, or anywhere at all, grinning broad and easy like he always did. Talking trash and laughing and Lee isn’t sure if that ever actually happened, if there ever actually was even a single minute like that since they’ve both been on Galactica. But it’s how he sees Helo in his head, right or wrong. If he could pretend that was the man talking to him now, it would be a hell of a lot easier. All of this would.
But he has to keep his eyes open, has to sit up straight and watch words track across a screen, because that Helo is gone and the parts that are left can’t smile, can’t laugh, can’t do anything.
He can end this. It would be so frakking simple. He doesn’t even have to pull the plugs or the tubes or any of that, doesn’t have to look at what’s left of Helo when he does it.
All he has to do is go see the Admiral and make his report, and formally state a recommendation that Galactica open fire.
No blood on his hands.
It would be a gift. It would be mercy, not murder.
Lights flicker and dance on that panel he doesn’t understand, and looking at it makes his hand tingle and burn at the memory. He doesn’t know exactly what it was that happened there; it had been like looking through thick glass, old and dirty and warping all the light that managed to pass through it. Everything was distorted, changed, alien.
Or maybe he was the glass, getting between her and the ship, interfering in their connection. Maybe he’s the alien here, in all his humanity.
More questions flicker across the screen, hopeful and eager and so desperate to know. He answers as best he can, and he tries not to lie. Whatever happened wasn’t Helo’s choice, so he doesn’t deserve to be lied to.
But he deserves to die?
“I have to go report in,” he says, clenching his hands into fists and relaxing them again, then sliding them into his pockets where they can’t be seen. Nothing on my hands. “I’ll be…we can talk some more later.”
[Oh.] The lights dim enough that he has to squint, and then brighten again. Gods, and now he feels guilty. Hell of a day. [Sure, of course. Tell everyone I miss them and…well, I guess that would make them kind of uncomfortable.]
“I’ll get her for you before I go.” Lee walks quickly off the bridge, his hand burning in his pocket, trying to block out the words in his head. Sometimes you’ve got to roll the hard six. A man makes a decision and lives with it.
I pulled the trigger. That’s mine.
***
[He's been gone for hours.]
"I imagine the Admiral is being difficult."
[Her voice is gentle again, soothing. She's not mad at me anymore. I probably shouldn’t abuse that by nagging at her like this, but well, it’s not like I have anyone else to talk to.]
"I can hear you thinking, Helo."
[She's smiling now. Laughing a little bit. That feels good, red and gold light moving through me.]
"Oh. That's lovely."
[You can see it?]
"Of course, Helo. When we're connected, it goes both ways."
[So you can feel what flying is like?]
"Yes."
[Aw, now I get why you stay with me.]
[She takes her hand away, but not before the warm and red and gold twist green and violet and damp.]
"Not the only reason."
[She doesn't put her hand back, and when I ask her what she means, she pretends not to see.]
***
Vox meets him at the airlock again. “How did it go?”
He watches her hand slide over the metal. She probably isn’t even aware she’s doing it anymore--petting, touching, keeping contact.
“It went,” he says, looking over her shoulder, down the corridor that led to the room with the body at the heart of the ship.
“I assume that since you’ve come back, we’re not going to die in a nuclear explosion any time soon.”
He looks at her again. There’s not a trace of a smile on her face. His either.
“Not in the next ten minutes, anyway,” he finally says, and steps past her. “Give me two minutes to talk to him in private.”
***
[“Not in the next ten minutes”? Do they still not believe? Does he still not believe?
If I was still dealing with my normal ears and brain, I probably wouldn’t even have heard him over my own panic, and even like this it’s hard to concentrate on what he’s saying, and even harder on what he means, since they’re not always the same with Lee.]
“If you want out, Karl, you tell me. Got it?”
[Want out? What? Want out of what?]
“If you want to…end it.” [He’s upset; on the infrared sensors, he’s glowing with heat, and on the audio his breathing is tense and ragged.] “You tell me. And I’ll…take care of it. I’ll help you. If you ask me, I will.”
[If I want to die.]
[He exhales, a shaky breath, and looks away from the screen. It’s a learned response, a human one; he thinks he’s looking away from me.]
“Yeah. If you…want to die, I’ll help you. I promise.”
[I…]
[He closes his eyes and shoves his hands deeper in his pockets. I remember his face when he came aboard after the evacuation of New Caprica, after he sacrificed his ship. I bet if I could see his eyes, they’d look like that again now.]
“If it’s what you want.”
[I can’t answer until he looks at the screen. After a minute he remembers that.]
[I don’t…I’m not there yet.]
[He blinks and nods, and I hope he gets what I meant, even though I don’t think I said it right. I want to be alive. If this is as close as I can get…it’s better than nothing. For now it’s enough.]
“Just remember, okay? You can…you can count on me.”
[I will.
I know.]
***
Lee still watches Vox out of the corner of his eye when he asks the questions, though he addresses them to the open air now. He’s getting the hang of things, bit by bit, day by day by week. The learning curve is probably slower than she’d like, but Cylons must place a pretty high stock on manners because she doesn’t say anything.
He still feels ridiculous thinking don’t hurt the ship’s feelings, but he’s trying to do better about it. To be more polite. “So what’s it like to do an FTL jump?”
Her fingers flex against the panel, her eyes distant. “It’s like playing Pyramid,” she says, and he wonders when she lost the emotionless, neutral inflection to her voice. The words are colored now, and he can actually hear Helo in them, in where the emphasis falls and where laughter gets caught and what words are chosen. It’s really frakking weird, but…almost in a good way.
“Like playing Pyramid?” he echoes, puzzled, turning to face her without thinking about it.
“Yeah.” Laughter bubbles up through that word, and she smiles, sliding her palm against the interface. “Like making a shot in Pyramid.”
“I still don’t get it,” Lee admits, leaning back against the wall. The bulkhead is warm and he rests one palm against it absently. He did that over on Galactica, this morning, ran his hand over the sheet metal (cooler there, like the air, and weirdly…empty) like he was petting a horse. Everyone looked at him funny. They probably think he’s cracking up over here, or getting brainwashed. Great. Well, call it a problem for another day, and worry about it then.
Her eyes go distant again as she starts speaking. “Making a shot,” she repeats. “Except instead of throwing the ball, I’m throwing myself. And instead of aiming for the goal, I’m aiming for a point in space.”
“That makes absolutely no sense.”
She shrugs, and it’s Helo’s loose-limbed awkward gesture, not the razor-edged smoothness she has when she's herself, when she’s not speaking for the ship. “It’s how I think about it.”
“You have to think about it? You don’t just…do it?”
“It’s kind of a complicated thing, Lee.” He has to smile at that, the indignant tone. “I’d like to see you try it.”
The smile leaves Lee’s face so fast, it hurts. “I’ll pass,” he says.
She frowns and shakes her head. "I didn't mean it like that."
"I know." He sighs and rubs at his eyes, wonders why he's doing this, why it doesn't feel insane. Her breath catches and he glances up, puzzled, to see her taking her hand away from the panel.
"He wants to talk to you in private," she says. Her voice actually sounds hurt, even shakes, and he does her the courtesy of pretending not to notice.
***
[What did the Admiral say?]
"He wants me to keep monitoring the situation." [He paces the length of the bridge, one side to the other, carefully even strides. He mentioned once that he was on the drill team at the Academy; they probably trained that into him.]
[Did he believe you?]
"He trusts my judgment." [I know that tone, the irony and the self-mocking. I heard it plenty down in the gym with him, after Pegasus.] "Or so he says."
[I'm sure he won't make you stay too much longer.]
"We'll see." [His voice is neutral, empty, cold. I should leave him alone; I know that tone means he wants me to leave it be. But I just…can’t. I have to pick and dig and pry. It’s not like he can take a swing at me now, right?]
[You must be pretty ready to go back.]
"Why do you say that?"
[Well, your wife is there. Your dad. Your actual job. Everything.]
[He laughs a little. It sounds tired.] "Everything is relative, Karl, my friend. Very, very relative."
[I'm pretty sure that if I ask him what he means, he won't tell me. I adjust the air currents instead, and the lights, just a little, just so it feels like a really light hug around him. Or at least, that's how it felt to her, when I tried it. I hope it's the same for the both of them.]
***
Watch the Cylon, be watched in return. Monitor the Cylon, say the orders. She probably has orders of her own, in binary code.
He has to actively work to remember that, now and then. She doesn't act like a Cylon. She doesn't prophesy and speechify. She doesn't threaten or destroy. She hovers over that panel on the bridge like a cat with kittens, and she goes down to the body room--soul room, she calls it, but all he can think of is the body--and does Gods know what. He hasn't accompanied her again.
His suspicions form slowly, taking shape and then fading when he moves his eyes. They come back an hour or two later in a slightly different skin, new worries, a stronger twist in his stomach. He isn't sure. Can't be sure without asking her, and it's the kind of question that might relieve him of his mission by relieving him of his life.
"Does he miss Sharon?" he asks her one day, when she's finally leaving the bridge to get some sleep. She slowly flexes her hand, working out the cramps from so much time held against the panel, and looks at him like he's crazy.
"Of course he does." She pushes past him and strides off into the ship. "Don't you miss your wife?"
***
[Lee doesn't answer her. The image data from the cameras doesn't tell me much.
The infrared sensors note that his body temperature rises, his heart speeds up.
I have no idea what that means.]
***
[Of course I miss having a body.]
"Yeah?" Lee settles deeper in his seat, watching the text form and vanish on the screen. "I thought you enjoyed being indestructible, and flying, and all that."
[It's not a one or the other kind of thing, you moron. Not all good or all bad.]
"Careful."
[I don't think you outrank me anymore, do you?]
"I don't really know how that works," Lee admits. He traces his finger absently along the edge of the screen. "So what do you miss about having a body?"
[Simple things. Little things.]
"Like what? Give me some specifics."
There's a slight pause. [It really is the simple stuff.] That text fades to be replaced by new lines that chase each other off the screen in rapid succession. [Getting sweaty. Getting hungry. Getting turned on. All that stuff, the basic things, the stuff that means you're just...human and healthy and working right.]
"Yeah," Lee says softly. "I guess you don't have any of that anymore."
[It makes sense, though.]
"What?"
[Well, those were the things the Cylons must've wanted. The original Cylons, I mean. Why they figured out how to make human bodies, why they *wanted* them. To have things like food and sex and sweat.] Lee swallows and says nothing, and after a moment of blankness Helo speaks on the screen again.
If you think about it, they didn't save me. I'm their greatest fear. I'm the step backwards, to just being a machine. They told Sharon they'd save me, but they lied. This is the worst possible thing they can do to anyone. I'm stuck in this body, and I can't touch or taste or any of the human things that they want so much, and there's no downloading for me. This existence, being like this...it's the Cylon hell.]
"You can't know that."
The screen flashes briefly and somehow Lee hears it as sad laughter in his head. [Can't I? Tell you what, when she wakes up, why don't you ask her for me.]
***
[She's so damn patient with me, with my inability to tell.]
"Let me see." [She's coaxing, gentle, calm. Ice fields stretching out forever.] "No, let me in, Helo. Let me feel it. Show me."
[I have to let walls down that I'm only just learning to build, the tricks of keeping my thoughts to myself, of guarding my own mind. It's strange. But she's patient. Her hand moves over the panel, soothing, light. Warm.]
"Oh." [She nods, and the wave of sympathy and understanding that comes back to me makes me want to shudder. To bow my head.] "I...I don't know if that was their intention. We don't share everything. They don't choose to share everything, the ones who decide. It's courteous to, but..."
[It doesn't matter, not really. I'll get over it. I'll forget how it felt, and then I'll forget to want it. I'm already forgetting.]
"No, don't do that." [Blue flash of determination, and worry, and...something deep dark autumn-bright that slips away from me.] "I can help, maybe. If you...if you want. If you'll let me try."
[I don't understand.]
"It's okay." [She's smiling, gently, warm and red and gold, deeper than her laughter but from the same place.] "Let me try."
[Try what? Please. I’m…I’m a little tired of not knowing what’s happening to me.]
[She goes still at that, and for a second I’m so afraid she’s going to take her hand away.] “Of course you are. I’m sorry.”
[Just tell me what…what you want to do.]
“You can still feel things,” [she whispers, and she lifts her free hand to her mouth. She breathes across the skin, and I feel it, the sensation crosses through the interface to me. Gods, why do I have to break it down that way? I feel it.]
“You can feel things through me, Helo, if you want to. As much as you want. Whatever you want. Just…trust me.”
[I do trust her. She’s...well, she’s a part of me, in a way. She’s my voice.
Maybe she’s more.]
***
He follows her to visit the body, where Helo can't see or overhear. He stands far enough back in the shadows that he can't see the tank, and she keeps her back to him, but that's all right. These are questions better asked without seeing one another's eyes.
"You're in love with him." Or maybe they're not questions at all.
"Don't be ridiculous." Her fingers move over tubes and sensors, checking, correcting. "He's Sharon's."
"Yeah, and she left him."
"She saved his--"
"She left him and you chose him." It's cold and hard in the air, outside his throat, and he swallows hard against the weight of the new silence. Her hands have gone still. "Were you assigned to help him, or did you choose?"
"It's none of your business."
"Or were you assigned and then you chose to stay?"
"It doesn't matter. It's irrelevant."
"Is this a secret mission to destroy us, or one Cylon model discovering pity?"
"You don't know what you're talking about." Her voice shakes, just a little, just a hint, and he reminds himself that she could break his neck without blinking. He lets the silence hold, getting thicker and heavier and harder to breathe through, until she turns to face him. Her eyes are huge, and wild, and blue. "You don't know anything."
"I saw you." It sounds like a threat; he didn't mean it that way. "I saw what you...did."
She tilts her head a bit, brow furrowed. A bit too late it occurs to him that he's talking to a Cylon, that meanings might shift and get lost in the gap between. But he can't say it. I saw you, on the bridge, one hand pressed flat, connecting you to him. You standing like a statue in a holy place, naked and pale and light dancing over your skin, your other hand between your legs and you were gasping, whispering, I couldn't hear you but I know those words, and red light racing along your spine at the same tempo as the lights in the walls. Like he was coming with you. Like you were…together.
"Are you in love with him?" he asks instead, looking away.
"It doesn't matter," she says again, and he leaves.
He goes to the bridge and leans against the wall, eyes closed, trying to sort out all the crap in his head. There’s too much; he’ll never reach the bottom. But frak. What does it mean that a walking toaster and a brain in a bucket can form some kind of a Gods-damned emotional connection and he…and he…
The klaxon buzzes softly, and he looks up, wiping the back of his hand across his eyes. He translates that sound in his head to Take a look at the panel, jackass, I’m trying to talk to you.
[I know you saw.]
He exhales and shrugs. “Fine. Yeah. I saw.”
There’s a long moment of silence, on his part, and blankness, on Helo’s. Then the screen flickers to life again.
[I’m telling you, man, if I could, I would be calling up so many of my old girlfriends right now and apologizing up, down, and sideways.]
Lee hasn’t really laughed in a long time. And now he finds he can’t quite seem to stop, not until he’s a helpless lump on the floor, and Vox is standing in the doorway, looking at him like he’s crazy while the lights dance and flash and flicker, as Helo laughs with him.
***
[She's distant, holding things back, and I don't know why. But I can’t pry at her the way I might with Lee; that isn’t…what we do. It just seems like it would be rude to do that to her. She lets me into her mind, she hardly ever keeps anything from me. I have no right to that, much less to ask for more.
So I'm quiet, just sending her the slow steady pulse of the stars, the impossible feeling of flight.]
"We say that the Hybrids can see God."
[I'm quiet, I give her stars and flying, I let her tell me what she wants and no more.]
"What we...what they did...creating you." [She takes her hand away, steps away from me, and her voice carries on through the empty space she leaves.] "It's...similar to the creation of a Hybrid. I thought perhaps that made you an angel, too, in a way."
[I'm not an angel.]
"But you're not, are you?" [Her voice is wistful, and...tearful, I think. I wish she would touch me again, so I could know. I want to know what's wrong.] "You're human. Flawed. Just like any of us."
[I send the words to the screen, so she can see--I'm sorry.]
"Don't be." [She touches me again and I feel her shake her head.] "It was just something I needed to understand."
[Are you going to go away?]
"No, Helo." [She's smiling, but there's no gold. Red, deep and rich and warm as a body.] "I'm not going anywhere. I'm your voice. I’m…yours. I chose to be."
[Thank you.]
[I take the barriers down again, let her feel how very very grateful I am that she's here. Her breath catches, and she takes her hand away.
Then she puts it back, and I wrap warm air around her, and she cries.]
***
"I chose it as a penance."
He looks up from his bed, startled by her voice. She stands silhouetted in the doorway, her face made invisible by the light behind her.
"I was offered mercy, once. In another body. Another life." She shakes her head, wisps of hair forming a blurred halo. "And I repaid it with betrayal. So I felt it was...necessary to show mercy to someone else."
"And he was there."
"He's certainly worthy." She runs her hand along the doorframe and Lee's reminded that Helo can see this, hear it, is present for this indirect confession. "And when you offer mercy to one who deserves it...how can you not love them? It would be..."
"Inhuman?" he offers, and she actually laughs, a tiny fractured sound.
"Perhaps."
***
[Are you going back to Galactica?]
"I don't know yet." [He shakes his head, and his hand brushes across the panel, but without her hand behind it, forcing the connection through his flesh and blood, I feel nothing.] "The Admiral wants me to, but I can come up with reasons to continue recon for as long as I want, pretty much."
[And you want to? Stay, I mean? You want to stay?]
"It's safe here." [I don't think he meant to say that; his body temperature spikes and he pulls his hand away, so I don't say anything.]
"I don't know."
[What about Dee?]
"I don't know."
[Kara?]
"I don't know."
[I'm sorry.]
"Don't." [He paces the bridge and I wait. I can wait forever. I have eternity all around me, and if I let it, it seeps inside.] "Is it hiding, to stay here? Am I being a coward?"
[What are you afraid of?]
"I don't know." [He laughs. I race the lights faster, laughing with him.] "You know, I've been thinking. You and...her, Vox, you've been making me think."
[About what?]
"Oh, lots of things." [He laughs again. Lee's never been one to laugh all that much, and sometimes it means he's hurting more than it means he's glad.] "But I guess what I'm talking about right now is that you've been making me think about...humanity. Being human."
[I'll take that as a compliment.]
[He doesn't laugh this time. He twists the wedding ring on his finger, and stares down at the floor.] "I think...maybe...being human has something to do with making a choice. Choosing to stay. You can choose to go, you can choose to let go and be gone and just disappear, but...if you choose to stay, that's..."
[You're going awfully philosophical on me, man.]
"Yeah." [His hands drop to his sides and he looks over his shoulder. Vox is standing in the door.] "I guess I have to decide how human I want to be."
"You're entirely human," [she says, and he laughs again.]
[I want you to stay.]
[He nods, and she looks down at the floor, but I'm not done.]
[But if you need to go, Lee...I would be good with just maybe a visit once in a while.]
***
Lee leaves the bridge for his bunk, needing space and silence, needing to think.
He hesitates for just a breath when he hears Vox speak behind him, her voice low and uncertain. "And me? Do you want me to stay?"
The red lights lining the corridor all race toward the bridge, and the wave of heat against his back makes Lee close his eyes and find his left hand with his right, turning the ring on his finger again.
Yeah. He needs to go home. He chose, a long time ago, and again when he was adrift in space, and again and again and again through every day, every battle when it would've been so easy to make one little motion that everyone else would call a mistake, and be gone.
He'll come back here again. He'll be their advocate and their connection, and if it ever comes down to it, he'll keep his promise.
But he needs to go home.
***
[Her hand moves over the panel lightly, colors and music drifting through her to fill his mind. She's talking, a low constant stream of words, and he doesn't grasp all of what she says but that's all right. They have a long time to work their way through it.]
"There is no virtue in choosing to be alone in a universe that seeks to bring things together."
[Even bizarre and frakked-up things?]
[She laughs.] "I'm not sure that's what I'd call it, Helo."
[She touches warm and soft and gentle, and he remembers again how to feel, as she wraps him in red and gold and autumn-bright orange that holds away the fear.]
"Strange and wondrous things."
Written for the brains_in_a_jar challenge.
Characters: Helo, Lee, Six. Canon pairings.
Rating: PG-13
Goes AU before "The Eye of Jupiter"
Summary: What is human, what is Cylon, what is choice?
So very, very many thanks to glossing, who audienced and beta'd and held my hand through a lot of flailing. I really can't thank you enough for your help, Gloss. I wouldn't have finished it without you. Any and all remaining errors are entirely mine.
We were both hitchhikers but you had your ear tuned to the roar
Of some metal-tempered engine on an alien, distant shore
So you left to find a better reason than the one we were living for
And it ain't that nursery mouth that I came back for
And it's not the way you're stretched out on the floor...
~ For You, Bruce Springsteen
[I'm afraid.
It's the first emotion when I come back to myself, flooding me, filling every space. And I know--I remember--that I was afraid before, before whatever made those spaces, before the quiet and empty and dark.
Dying. I was dying, then.
Memories come back in flashes, disconnected, stuttering information over a loose telephone line or a bad wireless signal. Sharon staring into her own face, a thousand of her own faces, and saying "I understand. Do it." A Raptor twisting and jerking under the controls, flying wounded, fighting broken. An emotionless voice--a man's, just out of sight--saying "These are the terms of the bargain." Fear. Fear. Pain.
Every inch of my body, every fiber, every cell, on fire with pain.
And now...nothing. Nothing hurts. I feel nothing. I am empty, and cool, and my body feels...not wrong, exactly, but not normal. And there's no pain.
But I must not be dead, because I'm afraid. The dead aren't afraid.
Sharon made a deal, the pieces of memory say. A bargain, for something. With them.
Baby, what did you do?]
***
They huddle close around the table in CIC, speaking in gruff, hushed tones as if they expect to be overheard, caught out, like they're naughty kids or something. Lee wants to step back, to speak loudly and clearly, to declare at the top of his voice that they should just pull the trigger and forget about it. Problem vaporized. Problem solved.
But the Old Man is still talking, a low rumble of words that carries all-but-godlike authority here, so Lee clenches his jaw and holds his peace. Dee's elbow bumps his side hard as she comes back to the table and sets another sheet of paper down, and he silently gives way, stepping back and left to make a space for her.
The Admiral picks up the paper and looks it over slowly. Lee watches how the light behind his father brightens the paper, making it thin, almost letting him read the print through it backwards. Not just military challenges this time, demands for recognition codes and name-rank-serial. They've gone off-book, personal challenges, absolute trivia. Kara gave a question, Tigh, the Chief. Lee had even typed one into the transmitter himself.
The light just isn't quite strong enough for him to read the answers.
The Admiral lets the paper fall to the table again. "I'm convinced," he says.
"Are we to assume then, sir, that Helo is a prisoner on that ship?" Dee's voice is clipped, cautiously indifferent, and Lee wonders why she bothers, why she pretends this is academic. Of course she's worried about Helo. He's everyone's frakking friend, except for the people who despise him as a traitor. It's a nice contrast to Lee's own life, where everyone starts with hostility except for the arbitrary few who seem to think he's a hero.
"Do you have another interpretation in mind, Lieutenant?" the Old Man asks, and Dee ducks her head, pressing her lips tightly together. Lee brushes his fingers over her arm and she shrugs him away. Right.
"He and Sharon have been missing for twelve days," he says, because it's true, not because it'll salvage his wife's pride. "We have to assume they've been compromised."
"All of the answers were correct and given nearly instantly," Gaeta says. "Including the more...personal ones."
Everyone's eyes drop to the paper on the table. Lee sees his own question- the score of the Pyramid finals the year he graduated from flight school, Helo's plebe year. Of course, any Cylon agent on Caprica that year would know that. Tigh asked about some obscure demerit Helo's first week on Galactica; but that would be noted in records that a Cylon could access. Tyrol asked about a conversation the two of them had in the brig on Pegasus- that was a good one, harder to write off. And Kara...
Lee's throat tightens at Kara's question, and beside him, Dee rolls her eyes. What color panties was I wearing the night we met?
"I don't think that counts as a difficult question," Tigh says, and from the way everyone around the table twitches in unison, Lee guesses they all had the same thought, and thank the Gods Tigh said it so none of them had to.
The Admiral turns the paper over with a flick of his wrist, and Lee is silently relieved not to have that black-text You weren't staring up anymore.
"Send a message," the Admiral says finally. "Tell them we demand the release of our officer."
"Yes, sir." Gaeta moves back to his station.
"And ask about the location of our other officer," the Admiral goes on, and Lee winces. "Athena."
Gaeta falters for a second, then begins typing. "I don't like that they won't contact us on actual," Lee says. "It feels like they're hiding something."
"Of course they're hiding something, they're Cylons, for frak's sake," Tigh says. "Lying to us either way."
"We should demand to speak to Helo on actual," Lee says, forcing himself to ignore the man. "Sir."
"I'd like to get their response first," the Admiral says, watching the paper spool from the printer at Gaeta's station. "But I'll keep that in mind, Major."
Lee grits his teeth again and waits, watching with the others as Gaeta reads the return message to himself. The lieutenant's brow furrows, and he looks up.
"Sir...it says Athena has returned to her people, for good. And that returning Helo to us is 'impossible.'"
"Want to play rough, then," Tigh mutters.
"That doesn't make any sense," Dee says. "That ship...it isn't like any Cylon ship we've seen, but we can tell it doesn't have any weapons systems."
"If they wanted to play rough, they wouldn't send a sitting duck," Lee finishes.
Tigh shakes his head. "Unless it's a new secret weapon, or a trap, or..."
"Request actual contact, Mr. Gaeta," the Admiral says.
There are a few long, tense moments of silence before the speakers hiss to life. "Admiral," comes a cool, neutral female voice.
"This is Admiral Adama. Who am I speaking to?"
There's another pause, as if the woman is flustered, but her reply comes in the same blank tone. "It's...it's me. Helo. Captain Agathon, sir."
"What the frak-" someone whispers from one of the stations, overridden by Tigh's strident "This is some kind of joke-"
"No. It's not a joke, it's..." The voice falters, which is so inconsistent with its neutrality, it sets Lee's teeth on edge. "It's...complicated."
"You better start explaining," the Admiral says flatly. There's another long silence, and a chill runs down Lee's spine.
He doesn't know where the idea comes from, how he suddenly knows, but he is instantly and entirely certain that they're about to hear a new and fresh horror that will leave a lot of the other ones far behind.
***
[She talks to me.
I didn’t understand, at first. I wasn’t used to hearing that way. It’s not hearing at all, is the problem; it’s…I don’t know what it is. Like there’s a wire between her head and mine and she’s thinking right into me. She tells me not to worry about it, just to listen to her, and talk to her, and it’ll be all right.
She tells me she’s here to take care of me. I don’t really know what to do with that.
But I guess I do need to be taken care of now, because I don’t know what to do and I don’t understand. I feel like I’m trapped, tied down and caged and I need to get away. I need to fight, I need to run. But I can’t.
She tells me to calm down, be still, listen to her. I’m doing the best I can.
She does…something. If I’m calm and still, she thinks pictures into me instead of just words. What she sees, and what she projects. Sharon told me about projection, but I never really got what she meant. Now, though, this new woman, the voice, she’ll do it for me, let me watch her turn the dull gray walls into forests and ice fields and stars.
She asks me what I’d like to see, sometimes, but I don’t know how to answer that. I’d like to see Sharon. I’d like to see Galactica. I’d like to see home.
I’d like to see myself.
Then I usually stop talking to her at all for a while. She’s still there, though. I can feel her.
She’s a voice in the dark. I asked her what I should call her and she said she didn’t care. She’s a Six; I remember that from the Basestar. A Six and a voice. I made her name from that.]
***
"You may call me Vox," the Cylon says, watching them warily from the other side of the docking tube.
"The voice." Lee laughs sharply. "How very poetic."
"Helo chose it." She turns her head slightly, looking at her hand against the dull grey metal of her own ship. "The agreement was that only one of you would cross over." She seems to be addressing empty air, and Lee suddenly feels the presence of the Marines behind him like an accusation.
The Admiral nods shortly and rests his hand on Lee's shoulder. "Major Adama will be serving as Galactica's...liaison."
Lee bites his tongue hard and stands up a little straighter. Galactica's liaison is a nice way to put it. Nicer than Galactica's hostage, or Galactica's investigator into what the frak is going on, both of which are more accurate.
I need someone I can trust, his father had said, looking at him with those damn serious eyes, that look that always chokes any protests in Lee's throat. You need someone useless, he thought, someone expendable, but he didn't say it. He just took up his mission, told his wife he was going, packed his bag and reported to the airlock.
The Cylon watches from the corner of her eye as he crosses the connecting bridge. She's the Shelley Godfrey model, he recognizes; the same model who was kept prisoner on Pegasus. This one has dark blonde hair pulled back in a simple braid, and wears a plain dark jumpsuit similar to a Fleet deckhand’s.
He doesn't look back as the airlock doors cycle closed. He has his instructions. He'll assess the situation and report back, and if it's some kind of a trap, well, he's the sacrifice to spring it.
"Welcome," the Cylon--Vox--says. She smiles slightly, stroking her hand along the wall. "He's very happy to see you."
"How can you tell?" he asks, shifting his bag higher on his shoulder. He doesn't believe a word of it, of course, any of the crap she told them before they negotiated this insane little trade. Integrating a human consciousness into a spaceship. Right. Very likely.
She glances at him, annoyed. "Aren't you paying any attention at all?"
He opens his mouth to ask what the frak she means by that, then stops. A current of warm air is racing through the otherwise standard-cool atmosphere of the ship. It gusts around his face and shoulders, ruffling his hair lightly, and when he raises one hand up to its level, it blows faster, winding around his fingers and making him blink hard against it.
"Very happy," she repeats, patting the wall with an odd little smile. He'd call her whole attitude one of affection if she wasn't addressing a frakking spaceship.
"Where can I put my things?" he asks curtly, and the current abruptly dies. The look she gives him now, he has no problem calling murderous.
"Follow me," she says, and he does, through dull metal corridors lined with slow-pulsing red lights that by some trick of his eyes seemed to have been moving faster a minute ago.
***
[She's talking to me. She's very patient, very gentle, very frakking caring, telling me not to give up.]
"He's only human, Helo. Give him time. He'll catch on."
Even if I have to beat it into him.
[She forgets I can hear her think, too, if she isn't careful when she's touching the interface. I just figured that out today, that she can only think at me when she does that. The rest of the time, she has to talk out loud. Except when she's sleeping, she talks to me a lot. I appreciate that. It's so quiet if she doesn't talk.
Lee talks to her in clipped sentences, and not at all otherwise. Lee doesn't believe I'm here.]
"He's only human."
[She strokes the panel. I can feel that, a frisson of heat like someone touching my shoulder. She's projecting nonsense right now, soft light and warm color. I don't want it. I don't think she understands that what she's saying isn't actually a comfort.
I used to be only human, too.]
***
Lee finds Vox on the tiny bridge of the ship, petting an odd-colored panel like it's a cat and gazing off into space.
"The frak is that?" he asks, leaning against the doorframe.
She jumps, startled, but instead of pulling her hand away she presses it harder against the panel. He recognizes it after a minute, from the Cylon plague ship--some translucent dark red substance, shot through with other colors. On the Basestar, though, the panels were murky and dead; columns of light move through this one, making the colors shiver across the walls.
"It's an interface," she says. "It's how I talk to him."
"Right." He nods and looks around the bridge. There are only a few control panels he recognizes, and one wall is mostly taken up by a good-sized readout monitor. Bands of red run around the room at about the level of his knees, light pulsing along them at a sluggish pace. "And how does he talk to you? If he's doing much talking these days, which I guess he isn't, given that he's basically canned corn..."
He forgot how frakking fast Cylons can move. He barely gets the word out and she's on him, shoving him back against the wall. Her fingers are digging painfully into his biceps, and he's hit with the sickening awareness that he can't fight her off, can't defend himself even if he tries. He draws in a breath to try anyway--effort in the face of futility, the unofficial motto of the Colonial Fleet--
And the whole bridge lights up like a supernova.
She pulls away from him instantly, turning her head to look toward the panel, and he shoves her back. The red lights are suddenly twice as bright as they were, and racing along the room a lot faster, now moving with a pulse that matches Lee's pounding heart. White warning lights flash here and there, and a low, keening sound fills the air, like some kind of frakked-up warning klaxon set to sound like a sob.
"I'm sorry," she says, holding up her hands. Apology very much not frakking accepted, he wants to tell her, except she's not talking to him. Her head's tipped back to address the empty air. "He was being disrespectful, and I lost my temper. I'm sorry."
Text forms on the readout monitor, and Lee steps forward, squinting. He expects an error message, or some kind of explanation for the lights and siren, but instead it just says
[Don't.]
The word hangs there for a moment, then fades. Vox draws a shaky breath and lowers her hands, and more text forms.
[Just...please. Don't.]
"The frak is that?" Lee asks, staring at the text as it fades.
"That's him," she says wearily, but he hardly hears it, because new words are appearing, one line forming and holding before fading away and letting new letters swim to the surface.
[Hello, Major.
Thank you for coming.]
And then a long pause before the next. These lines form and disappear fast, echoing his frantic heartbeat as surely as the lights.
[Please, Lee. Please. Listen to her. Believe her.
It's me.]
***
[I can't see, exactly.
There are cameras. I receive digital and optical input, which I can analyze. But it's not seeing the way I did before, not any way that any human--or even a humanoid Cylon--would understand. It's different.
Everything's different.
There are heat sensors, too. Infrared cameras. They add more input to combine with the others and get some kind of a general impression of what's going on on the ship. Inside me.
It's...I'm...this is not a large vessel. There's the airlock. The bridge. A storage locker for tools and supplies. The engine core. What Vox calls the soul room, which is the one place I can't seem to monitor. And two sleeping chambers.
I asked her, when I first realized that, why there were two rooms if it was only supposed to be me and her. The abomination and the martyr to its cause.
She told me it was just chance, that they cobbled this together from random parts and Colonial ships captured in the attacks, and two living chambers happened to be what survived. Now I wonder if maybe they knew I would go back, would try to make contact again. Maybe they know everything. Maybe they're using me.
It scares me that I'm having a hard time caring about that. I'm just so frakking desperate. First it was just to see..."see"...humans again, and now it's to make Lee realize that I'm here. Make him talk to me.
I track him around the ship, inside me. There aren't many places for him to go. But he's always silent, and as far as I can tell, he never looks up.]
***
The Cylon is a pain in the ass. If Lee hadn't come over here under an agreement of truce he would've airlocked her by now. Crazy frakking toaster.
Whatever the deal is here, whatever secret game the Cylons are playing, whatever trap they're baiting with Helo's ghost, she's committed. A true believer. She talks softly as she walks from room to room, fingers brushing along the walls, looking up at the optical sensors and smiling. She spends so much time on the bridge fondling that damn interface panel, Lee isn't sure he shouldn't throw them an engagement party.
He's a pilot. He knows all about anthropomorphizing the birds, giving them personality and face instead of letting them be the metal guts and shells that they are. It's one of the first lessons at flight school--call your bird a she, laugh about it having a bad day, talk it through the tight spots, but if you ever start to really believe it, go sit your ass down at a psych evaluation, because your grip on reality's slipping. End of the day, the planes are machines, and that personality's just a collection of glitches.
Whatever Cylon hive mind was in charge of this scam was thorough, though. That readout screen flares to life every time Lee steps onto the bridge, hopeful text chasing itself across, asking questions, begging attention like a puppy. And the words sound right. The slang, the cadence, the attitude, it's all Karl Agathon, like he's sending wireless messages ship to ship. Lee doesn't know how the Cylons managed to program that, but the frakkers must just be that good.
"Was it Sharon?" he asks, standing on the bridge and watching Vox molest the interface like it's paying her in cash.
"Was what Sharon?" she asks, in the odd, empty voice that she puts on when she's pretending to be Helo.
"Answer me normally, okay? I'm not in the mood to play your little games."
She takes her hand off the panel slowly, and he matches her glare for glare. She looks like if she had her way, he'd be out the airlock too. Nice to know they had something in common. Maybe that would be enough to find common ground and found a peaceful settlement on the nearest planet. Yeah, that plan always ended well.
"You're a cold, insensitive person," she says, and he laughs.
"Coming from you, that's a compliment, isn't it?" Text is flickering wildly across the readout screen, but he ignores it. It's all a mindfrak, and he's done with it. "Was it Sharon?"
"Was what Sharon? I don't understand what you mean." They really are a frakking miracle of programming, these Cylon women. Maybe the men are just as good, he hasn't seen, but he knows the way she's reacting to him the same way he knows Fleet regs and the last sports magazine left in the galaxy. The reined-in violence of her movements as she steps toward him, every line of her body declaring her desire to knock him back until he sees things her way...he's been making people want to do that since he was a kid.
"Was Sharon the one who programmed this ship? Set up your little Helo-impersonation routine. Only way I can figure out you guys could get so many details."
"You're so blind." She keeps coming closer and closer and he holds his ground, pressing his weight down into his heels and not thinking about the injuries people pick up when they go head to head against a Cylon. She won't touch him. There's a truce. "Blind and ignorant and cruel."
"And you're not answering my question."
"Sharon didn't program anything. No one programmed anything. We neurally integrated Karl Agathon into this ship. No other human has ever received such a gift."
Out of the corner of his eye, Lee can see that the red lights are flashing faster, racing around the room, blurring into a solid, unwavering bar. "You're a liar."
She shoves him back hard enough to give him whiplash, and so much for the truce. "Such a child of your race," she says, and the second blow knocks him down on his back on the floor. "So content in your delusions, inside your walls, and anyone who dares to try to give you a window must be a liar."
"It's impossible," he says, voice rough and harsh, bracing himself on his elbows. "Your story's the delusion, because it's impossible."
She shakes her head, the red light now coming solid and steady painting her hair a dirty, muddy shade, blood mixed with dust. "What isn't impossible, to your kind?"
He looks up at her, standing like an avatar of death and war, holy Athena wronged and bearing vengeance. "It can't be," he tells her, the Cylon in front of him and the indifferent and nonexistent goddess in his mind. "It can't be Helo, because Helo was dying."
She falters at that, and the illusion crumbles. It takes him a minute to realize that it's because the red lights have suddenly gone out.
***
[They talk about me like I'm not even here. He doesn't believe I'm here anyway, but now he's got her doing it too, and if neither one of them thinks I'm here...am I?
I want to go away. I want it to stop. I want to go to sleep and not wake up anymore. I want to have been asleep all along and never have woken up here at all.
I want it to all be a bad dream in the moments before I died.]
***
"Follow me." She doesn't offer him her hand, just turns and goes. He drags himself up off the floor and follows, half of his mind noting the quiet of the ship, the absence of the pulsing red lights, the coolness of the air. It's different, but not in any remarkable or significant way, not enough for him to notice more than shallowly.
"He didn't die," she says flatly, leading him down the corridor, past the sleeping quarters and the storage room.
"He had end-stage radiation poisoning." Remembering it brings a sour taste to his throat, sends a shiver of echoed horror down his spine. The whole sickbay smelled like rotting flesh and slow death, the antiseptic not really masking the smell but instead turning it into an even higher level of twisted horror. Images flash through Lee's mind as he follows her--sheets stained with fluid, red and a sick yellow-green, Sharon's face as she sat and watched the bed, Doc Cottle lighting another cigarette and staring stonily ahead as his patient begged for death to come faster. "He couldn't survive. Anybody could see that."
"Not in your care, no." She stops at the only door in the ship he hasn't been able to open. She places her hand flat on a panel like the one on the bridge, then turns a manual handle to open the door. The other doors on the ship jump open when approached, eager to serve, to please. "And yes, Sharon saw that."
"So she took him to die amongst the Cylons?" Lee shakes his head. "I knew Karl. He loved her, but he would've wanted his body honored by his own kind."
She looks over her shoulder at him, frustration in her eyes again under a layer of hard-won patience and deep sorrow. "She didn't bring him to us to die. She brought him to us to save."
***
[They've gone to the one place I can't see, can't monitor, can't follow them. I don't know if she took him there on purpose, or if she just forgot. I don't know which is worse, and I guess it doesn't matter. It feels the same either way.
They left me.
Space is cold and dark and endless, like falling asleep, like I want. I can sense that all along my skin, my outside, my hull. I focus on those sensors, turn myself outward, try to draw it into me. I don't know how to describe it. I don't want to. I just want to stop hurting for a minute.
It's the only way I know for sure that Lee isn't right. I'm not dead yet, because it hurts too much that I've been left behind.]
***
"She came back to us, giving us her memories and experiences, and her maternal bond with her child." Vox steps deeper into the room, and Lee follows. There's a dim, greenish light farther in, but her body blocks most of what it might illuminate. "In exchange for the life of the man she loves."
"Present tense?" His throat is dry for no reason he can think of. The hair's standing up on the back of his neck. He knows, somehow knows, that whatever he sees when she steps aside is going to be something he will spend the rest of his life wishing he could wipe from his mind. And he knows that he isn't going to look away.
"Eternally." She stops and turns to face him. "What you are about to see is sacred, do you understand? It is our greatest gift. It is a sacrament. It deserves your reverence, if you can't manage compassion."
He has to force the words out. "Let me see."
The tub is shallow, holding no more than a hand's breadth of thick, viscous fluid over the body inside. If it is a body.
Lee steps closer, fascinated and repelled, and looks because he is a soldier and has been taught never to look away. "Radiation causes mutation, damage, decay," Vox says, her fingers brushing along the edge of the tank in restless, anxious motions. "We cut back to the healthiest tissue we could, and the solution prevents further deterioration. Essentially, he's suspended in time."
What's left of him. One arm ends--cut back; the term is clinical, sterile, mechanical--above the elbow, the other just past the shoulder. Both legs are precisely clubbed at what Lee guesses was the halfway point of the femur. There's very little skin left, on limbs, torso, or even the head. Bones poke through muscles ragged as lace. And yet Lee can see the dense green fluid moving, circulating sluggishly through the form. The tubes running in and out carry bubbles of oxygen, and darker liquid that might very well once have been blood. And the screen at one end of the tank, reading out input from the wires that snake away from it and down into the half-exposed skull, shows information not entirely unlike an EEG.
"My gods," he whispers, and that hurts too, burns his throat like the bile he's already choking down. "What the frak did you do?"
"We saved him." Her hand is still moving, tracing the edge of the tank in long, slow strokes, caresses. "We raised him up. Made him a child of God."
***
The red lights are still dead. Lee doesn't know what that means, but it must not be good, because Vox is panicking. Or something like it; the Cylon equivalent, maybe. Both of her hands are flat against the interface, her eyes wide and scared, her lips pressed into a thin line.
"What's going on?" he asks, coming up behind her. The changing colors of the interface panel don't mean anything to him, but he watches them anyway, tries to find patterns. That's Fleet training too. Find the patterns, find the answers, save the day.
"He's not answering me," she says, shaking her head. Wisps of hair have come loose from the braid, falling down around her face, and she blows out a sharp huff of air to stir them aside, to no effect. It's a tiny action, but something he's seen a million times--Dee does that, and Kara, and any other woman he's ever met--and he finds himself moving up beside her, leaning in over the workstation in an echo of her posture, zeroing in on the task at hand, on working the problem.
"Okay, what does that mean?" She shoots him a razor-edged glare, and he corrects. "What does it indicate? Is there some kind of a...a malfunction, or...I don't know, did we screw something up by going down there to the...to where he's..." He exhales sharply. "Did we do something to the body?"
"No." Her eyes go back to the panel, searching the moving lights and colors. "No, it's not anything like that. He's just...he's withdrawing, he's ignoring me, and that's..."
"Insulting?" he offers, because he'd be relieved if it was just that simple, if instead of panic that look on her face meant that she's offended. Considering that she glares at him again, though, maybe not.
"Unusual," she says, shaking her head. "And possibly dangerous."
"How so?" He moves to stand beside her, staring at the panel in fascination. He can't suss out any pattern or meaning to the lights, but there must be one, underneath.
"Are you being deliberately difficult?" He shakes his head and she sighs. "The human mind...if he withdraws for too long, and refuses to communicate, he might forget how."
"And that would mean what?"
"It would mean brain-death, Major. Loss of the soul, the consciousness."
"You mean...he'd die." That would be mercy, wouldn't it? That would be a gift. Releasing him from that...from this, from all of this. Setting him free from the horror and torment of a half-life. Frak, if Lee had any claim to being human at all, he ought to be running back to that room and ripping the tubes out of the body. But maybe Helo's taken the burden out of his hands. "He'd finally be allowed to die."
"Why must you see things only in black and white?" she growls, and he shakes his head.
"If that's his choice, I don't see how we have any right to..."
She grabs his wrist before he can finish the sentence, and he gasps at the strength of her hand, grinding the bones together without care. She shoves his palm against the interface, holding her own hand over his to pin it down flat.
***
[lightheatcolorpulsevoice
It's her--her voice strident and insistent and angry. Gods, she's mad at me. And at Lee. And...possibly at the entire universe. Oh, frak. Really angry.
But her voice--her thoughts--are being filtered, bent, warped along the way. And the layer between her and me is...hot and messy and chaotic and human. I can't get a clear sense; no words, no pictures, just feeling. And it's a jolt all the way through me, pain and pleasure and amazing, even though it's just the slightest taste, just a hint of everything I've lost and missed and stuff I didn't realize was gone, bleeding through her anger and her voice.
Gods, it tastes like being alive. Feels like turning my face to the sun.]
***
"Well," Vox says softly, her voice hoarse as if she's been shouting, even though there's been nothing but silence. "I hope you both learned a lesson from that."
"From what?" Lee asks, struggling to catch his breath. He's pretty sure his brain wasn't meant to do what it just did, and that he'll forget it fast in self-defense. And he's thankful for it. "What...what lesson?"
[Yeah, what?] flickers across the screen, and the red lights jump in tempo.
"Don't frakking test me," she says, and stalks off the bridge. Lee watches her go and then looks back at the screen. He doesn't know where the cameras are, exactly, and the screen must be close enough.
"I think we made her mad," he says, experimentally.
[Yep.]
Lee exhales shakily and closes his eyes. Then he forces them open again, and looks up toward the ceiling.
"Hi, Karl. How...how are you doing?"
***
[He fills in the blanks for me--the accident and the aftermath. Racetrack and Skulls survived. They got meds in time and they’re fine. Sharon and me being gone puts them two Raptor pilots down, but since the bird we went out in ended up unsalvageable, irradiated scrap, it’s not as much of a problem as it could’ve been.
He tells me other stories, bits and pieces of life on Galactica, the walk and the talk and all the stupid details I miss. I missed them on Caprica, so much, and it’s worse now, without that tiny stubborn thread of hope that somehow I’d get back again. There’s no going back for me now, no more guessing how many fingers of whiskey went into Tigh’s breakfast, no who’s-frakking-who gossip traded like currency over the table in the pilots’ rec, no going down to the launch tubes with the knuckledraggers to fix some damn thing or another and looking out at a planet spinning slow against a field of stars.
I can still see the planet, and the stars, but there’s nobody looking out at it with me.
Lee’s not all that good at telling stories; his voice stumbles and catches and trips, because he corrects himself as he goes along instead of just talking, just saying what he wants to say. It’s all right, though. It’s…better, actually, that he’s still the same, still can’t just go with it, still is Lee, same as always. Same as before.]
***
It would be easier if he could close his eyes, if he could pretend. He could summon up a picture in his mind--Karl sprawled out in one of the chairs in the pilots’ rec, or sitting on the edge of the catwalk swinging his feet over the flight deck, or anywhere at all, grinning broad and easy like he always did. Talking trash and laughing and Lee isn’t sure if that ever actually happened, if there ever actually was even a single minute like that since they’ve both been on Galactica. But it’s how he sees Helo in his head, right or wrong. If he could pretend that was the man talking to him now, it would be a hell of a lot easier. All of this would.
But he has to keep his eyes open, has to sit up straight and watch words track across a screen, because that Helo is gone and the parts that are left can’t smile, can’t laugh, can’t do anything.
He can end this. It would be so frakking simple. He doesn’t even have to pull the plugs or the tubes or any of that, doesn’t have to look at what’s left of Helo when he does it.
All he has to do is go see the Admiral and make his report, and formally state a recommendation that Galactica open fire.
No blood on his hands.
It would be a gift. It would be mercy, not murder.
Lights flicker and dance on that panel he doesn’t understand, and looking at it makes his hand tingle and burn at the memory. He doesn’t know exactly what it was that happened there; it had been like looking through thick glass, old and dirty and warping all the light that managed to pass through it. Everything was distorted, changed, alien.
Or maybe he was the glass, getting between her and the ship, interfering in their connection. Maybe he’s the alien here, in all his humanity.
More questions flicker across the screen, hopeful and eager and so desperate to know. He answers as best he can, and he tries not to lie. Whatever happened wasn’t Helo’s choice, so he doesn’t deserve to be lied to.
But he deserves to die?
“I have to go report in,” he says, clenching his hands into fists and relaxing them again, then sliding them into his pockets where they can’t be seen. Nothing on my hands. “I’ll be…we can talk some more later.”
[Oh.] The lights dim enough that he has to squint, and then brighten again. Gods, and now he feels guilty. Hell of a day. [Sure, of course. Tell everyone I miss them and…well, I guess that would make them kind of uncomfortable.]
“I’ll get her for you before I go.” Lee walks quickly off the bridge, his hand burning in his pocket, trying to block out the words in his head. Sometimes you’ve got to roll the hard six. A man makes a decision and lives with it.
I pulled the trigger. That’s mine.
***
[He's been gone for hours.]
"I imagine the Admiral is being difficult."
[Her voice is gentle again, soothing. She's not mad at me anymore. I probably shouldn’t abuse that by nagging at her like this, but well, it’s not like I have anyone else to talk to.]
"I can hear you thinking, Helo."
[She's smiling now. Laughing a little bit. That feels good, red and gold light moving through me.]
"Oh. That's lovely."
[You can see it?]
"Of course, Helo. When we're connected, it goes both ways."
[So you can feel what flying is like?]
"Yes."
[Aw, now I get why you stay with me.]
[She takes her hand away, but not before the warm and red and gold twist green and violet and damp.]
"Not the only reason."
[She doesn't put her hand back, and when I ask her what she means, she pretends not to see.]
***
Vox meets him at the airlock again. “How did it go?”
He watches her hand slide over the metal. She probably isn’t even aware she’s doing it anymore--petting, touching, keeping contact.
“It went,” he says, looking over her shoulder, down the corridor that led to the room with the body at the heart of the ship.
“I assume that since you’ve come back, we’re not going to die in a nuclear explosion any time soon.”
He looks at her again. There’s not a trace of a smile on her face. His either.
“Not in the next ten minutes, anyway,” he finally says, and steps past her. “Give me two minutes to talk to him in private.”
***
[“Not in the next ten minutes”? Do they still not believe? Does he still not believe?
If I was still dealing with my normal ears and brain, I probably wouldn’t even have heard him over my own panic, and even like this it’s hard to concentrate on what he’s saying, and even harder on what he means, since they’re not always the same with Lee.]
“If you want out, Karl, you tell me. Got it?”
[Want out? What? Want out of what?]
“If you want to…end it.” [He’s upset; on the infrared sensors, he’s glowing with heat, and on the audio his breathing is tense and ragged.] “You tell me. And I’ll…take care of it. I’ll help you. If you ask me, I will.”
[If I want to die.]
[He exhales, a shaky breath, and looks away from the screen. It’s a learned response, a human one; he thinks he’s looking away from me.]
“Yeah. If you…want to die, I’ll help you. I promise.”
[I…]
[He closes his eyes and shoves his hands deeper in his pockets. I remember his face when he came aboard after the evacuation of New Caprica, after he sacrificed his ship. I bet if I could see his eyes, they’d look like that again now.]
“If it’s what you want.”
[I can’t answer until he looks at the screen. After a minute he remembers that.]
[I don’t…I’m not there yet.]
[He blinks and nods, and I hope he gets what I meant, even though I don’t think I said it right. I want to be alive. If this is as close as I can get…it’s better than nothing. For now it’s enough.]
“Just remember, okay? You can…you can count on me.”
[I will.
I know.]
***
Lee still watches Vox out of the corner of his eye when he asks the questions, though he addresses them to the open air now. He’s getting the hang of things, bit by bit, day by day by week. The learning curve is probably slower than she’d like, but Cylons must place a pretty high stock on manners because she doesn’t say anything.
He still feels ridiculous thinking don’t hurt the ship’s feelings, but he’s trying to do better about it. To be more polite. “So what’s it like to do an FTL jump?”
Her fingers flex against the panel, her eyes distant. “It’s like playing Pyramid,” she says, and he wonders when she lost the emotionless, neutral inflection to her voice. The words are colored now, and he can actually hear Helo in them, in where the emphasis falls and where laughter gets caught and what words are chosen. It’s really frakking weird, but…almost in a good way.
“Like playing Pyramid?” he echoes, puzzled, turning to face her without thinking about it.
“Yeah.” Laughter bubbles up through that word, and she smiles, sliding her palm against the interface. “Like making a shot in Pyramid.”
“I still don’t get it,” Lee admits, leaning back against the wall. The bulkhead is warm and he rests one palm against it absently. He did that over on Galactica, this morning, ran his hand over the sheet metal (cooler there, like the air, and weirdly…empty) like he was petting a horse. Everyone looked at him funny. They probably think he’s cracking up over here, or getting brainwashed. Great. Well, call it a problem for another day, and worry about it then.
Her eyes go distant again as she starts speaking. “Making a shot,” she repeats. “Except instead of throwing the ball, I’m throwing myself. And instead of aiming for the goal, I’m aiming for a point in space.”
“That makes absolutely no sense.”
She shrugs, and it’s Helo’s loose-limbed awkward gesture, not the razor-edged smoothness she has when she's herself, when she’s not speaking for the ship. “It’s how I think about it.”
“You have to think about it? You don’t just…do it?”
“It’s kind of a complicated thing, Lee.” He has to smile at that, the indignant tone. “I’d like to see you try it.”
The smile leaves Lee’s face so fast, it hurts. “I’ll pass,” he says.
She frowns and shakes her head. "I didn't mean it like that."
"I know." He sighs and rubs at his eyes, wonders why he's doing this, why it doesn't feel insane. Her breath catches and he glances up, puzzled, to see her taking her hand away from the panel.
"He wants to talk to you in private," she says. Her voice actually sounds hurt, even shakes, and he does her the courtesy of pretending not to notice.
***
[What did the Admiral say?]
"He wants me to keep monitoring the situation." [He paces the length of the bridge, one side to the other, carefully even strides. He mentioned once that he was on the drill team at the Academy; they probably trained that into him.]
[Did he believe you?]
"He trusts my judgment." [I know that tone, the irony and the self-mocking. I heard it plenty down in the gym with him, after Pegasus.] "Or so he says."
[I'm sure he won't make you stay too much longer.]
"We'll see." [His voice is neutral, empty, cold. I should leave him alone; I know that tone means he wants me to leave it be. But I just…can’t. I have to pick and dig and pry. It’s not like he can take a swing at me now, right?]
[You must be pretty ready to go back.]
"Why do you say that?"
[Well, your wife is there. Your dad. Your actual job. Everything.]
[He laughs a little. It sounds tired.] "Everything is relative, Karl, my friend. Very, very relative."
[I'm pretty sure that if I ask him what he means, he won't tell me. I adjust the air currents instead, and the lights, just a little, just so it feels like a really light hug around him. Or at least, that's how it felt to her, when I tried it. I hope it's the same for the both of them.]
***
Watch the Cylon, be watched in return. Monitor the Cylon, say the orders. She probably has orders of her own, in binary code.
He has to actively work to remember that, now and then. She doesn't act like a Cylon. She doesn't prophesy and speechify. She doesn't threaten or destroy. She hovers over that panel on the bridge like a cat with kittens, and she goes down to the body room--soul room, she calls it, but all he can think of is the body--and does Gods know what. He hasn't accompanied her again.
His suspicions form slowly, taking shape and then fading when he moves his eyes. They come back an hour or two later in a slightly different skin, new worries, a stronger twist in his stomach. He isn't sure. Can't be sure without asking her, and it's the kind of question that might relieve him of his mission by relieving him of his life.
"Does he miss Sharon?" he asks her one day, when she's finally leaving the bridge to get some sleep. She slowly flexes her hand, working out the cramps from so much time held against the panel, and looks at him like he's crazy.
"Of course he does." She pushes past him and strides off into the ship. "Don't you miss your wife?"
***
[Lee doesn't answer her. The image data from the cameras doesn't tell me much.
The infrared sensors note that his body temperature rises, his heart speeds up.
I have no idea what that means.]
***
[Of course I miss having a body.]
"Yeah?" Lee settles deeper in his seat, watching the text form and vanish on the screen. "I thought you enjoyed being indestructible, and flying, and all that."
[It's not a one or the other kind of thing, you moron. Not all good or all bad.]
"Careful."
[I don't think you outrank me anymore, do you?]
"I don't really know how that works," Lee admits. He traces his finger absently along the edge of the screen. "So what do you miss about having a body?"
[Simple things. Little things.]
"Like what? Give me some specifics."
There's a slight pause. [It really is the simple stuff.] That text fades to be replaced by new lines that chase each other off the screen in rapid succession. [Getting sweaty. Getting hungry. Getting turned on. All that stuff, the basic things, the stuff that means you're just...human and healthy and working right.]
"Yeah," Lee says softly. "I guess you don't have any of that anymore."
[It makes sense, though.]
"What?"
[Well, those were the things the Cylons must've wanted. The original Cylons, I mean. Why they figured out how to make human bodies, why they *wanted* them. To have things like food and sex and sweat.] Lee swallows and says nothing, and after a moment of blankness Helo speaks on the screen again.
If you think about it, they didn't save me. I'm their greatest fear. I'm the step backwards, to just being a machine. They told Sharon they'd save me, but they lied. This is the worst possible thing they can do to anyone. I'm stuck in this body, and I can't touch or taste or any of the human things that they want so much, and there's no downloading for me. This existence, being like this...it's the Cylon hell.]
"You can't know that."
The screen flashes briefly and somehow Lee hears it as sad laughter in his head. [Can't I? Tell you what, when she wakes up, why don't you ask her for me.]
***
[She's so damn patient with me, with my inability to tell.]
"Let me see." [She's coaxing, gentle, calm. Ice fields stretching out forever.] "No, let me in, Helo. Let me feel it. Show me."
[I have to let walls down that I'm only just learning to build, the tricks of keeping my thoughts to myself, of guarding my own mind. It's strange. But she's patient. Her hand moves over the panel, soothing, light. Warm.]
"Oh." [She nods, and the wave of sympathy and understanding that comes back to me makes me want to shudder. To bow my head.] "I...I don't know if that was their intention. We don't share everything. They don't choose to share everything, the ones who decide. It's courteous to, but..."
[It doesn't matter, not really. I'll get over it. I'll forget how it felt, and then I'll forget to want it. I'm already forgetting.]
"No, don't do that." [Blue flash of determination, and worry, and...something deep dark autumn-bright that slips away from me.] "I can help, maybe. If you...if you want. If you'll let me try."
[I don't understand.]
"It's okay." [She's smiling, gently, warm and red and gold, deeper than her laughter but from the same place.] "Let me try."
[Try what? Please. I’m…I’m a little tired of not knowing what’s happening to me.]
[She goes still at that, and for a second I’m so afraid she’s going to take her hand away.] “Of course you are. I’m sorry.”
[Just tell me what…what you want to do.]
“You can still feel things,” [she whispers, and she lifts her free hand to her mouth. She breathes across the skin, and I feel it, the sensation crosses through the interface to me. Gods, why do I have to break it down that way? I feel it.]
“You can feel things through me, Helo, if you want to. As much as you want. Whatever you want. Just…trust me.”
[I do trust her. She’s...well, she’s a part of me, in a way. She’s my voice.
Maybe she’s more.]
***
He follows her to visit the body, where Helo can't see or overhear. He stands far enough back in the shadows that he can't see the tank, and she keeps her back to him, but that's all right. These are questions better asked without seeing one another's eyes.
"You're in love with him." Or maybe they're not questions at all.
"Don't be ridiculous." Her fingers move over tubes and sensors, checking, correcting. "He's Sharon's."
"Yeah, and she left him."
"She saved his--"
"She left him and you chose him." It's cold and hard in the air, outside his throat, and he swallows hard against the weight of the new silence. Her hands have gone still. "Were you assigned to help him, or did you choose?"
"It's none of your business."
"Or were you assigned and then you chose to stay?"
"It doesn't matter. It's irrelevant."
"Is this a secret mission to destroy us, or one Cylon model discovering pity?"
"You don't know what you're talking about." Her voice shakes, just a little, just a hint, and he reminds himself that she could break his neck without blinking. He lets the silence hold, getting thicker and heavier and harder to breathe through, until she turns to face him. Her eyes are huge, and wild, and blue. "You don't know anything."
"I saw you." It sounds like a threat; he didn't mean it that way. "I saw what you...did."
She tilts her head a bit, brow furrowed. A bit too late it occurs to him that he's talking to a Cylon, that meanings might shift and get lost in the gap between. But he can't say it. I saw you, on the bridge, one hand pressed flat, connecting you to him. You standing like a statue in a holy place, naked and pale and light dancing over your skin, your other hand between your legs and you were gasping, whispering, I couldn't hear you but I know those words, and red light racing along your spine at the same tempo as the lights in the walls. Like he was coming with you. Like you were…together.
"Are you in love with him?" he asks instead, looking away.
"It doesn't matter," she says again, and he leaves.
He goes to the bridge and leans against the wall, eyes closed, trying to sort out all the crap in his head. There’s too much; he’ll never reach the bottom. But frak. What does it mean that a walking toaster and a brain in a bucket can form some kind of a Gods-damned emotional connection and he…and he…
The klaxon buzzes softly, and he looks up, wiping the back of his hand across his eyes. He translates that sound in his head to Take a look at the panel, jackass, I’m trying to talk to you.
[I know you saw.]
He exhales and shrugs. “Fine. Yeah. I saw.”
There’s a long moment of silence, on his part, and blankness, on Helo’s. Then the screen flickers to life again.
[I’m telling you, man, if I could, I would be calling up so many of my old girlfriends right now and apologizing up, down, and sideways.]
Lee hasn’t really laughed in a long time. And now he finds he can’t quite seem to stop, not until he’s a helpless lump on the floor, and Vox is standing in the doorway, looking at him like he’s crazy while the lights dance and flash and flicker, as Helo laughs with him.
***
[She's distant, holding things back, and I don't know why. But I can’t pry at her the way I might with Lee; that isn’t…what we do. It just seems like it would be rude to do that to her. She lets me into her mind, she hardly ever keeps anything from me. I have no right to that, much less to ask for more.
So I'm quiet, just sending her the slow steady pulse of the stars, the impossible feeling of flight.]
"We say that the Hybrids can see God."
[I'm quiet, I give her stars and flying, I let her tell me what she wants and no more.]
"What we...what they did...creating you." [She takes her hand away, steps away from me, and her voice carries on through the empty space she leaves.] "It's...similar to the creation of a Hybrid. I thought perhaps that made you an angel, too, in a way."
[I'm not an angel.]
"But you're not, are you?" [Her voice is wistful, and...tearful, I think. I wish she would touch me again, so I could know. I want to know what's wrong.] "You're human. Flawed. Just like any of us."
[I send the words to the screen, so she can see--I'm sorry.]
"Don't be." [She touches me again and I feel her shake her head.] "It was just something I needed to understand."
[Are you going to go away?]
"No, Helo." [She's smiling, but there's no gold. Red, deep and rich and warm as a body.] "I'm not going anywhere. I'm your voice. I’m…yours. I chose to be."
[Thank you.]
[I take the barriers down again, let her feel how very very grateful I am that she's here. Her breath catches, and she takes her hand away.
Then she puts it back, and I wrap warm air around her, and she cries.]
***
"I chose it as a penance."
He looks up from his bed, startled by her voice. She stands silhouetted in the doorway, her face made invisible by the light behind her.
"I was offered mercy, once. In another body. Another life." She shakes her head, wisps of hair forming a blurred halo. "And I repaid it with betrayal. So I felt it was...necessary to show mercy to someone else."
"And he was there."
"He's certainly worthy." She runs her hand along the doorframe and Lee's reminded that Helo can see this, hear it, is present for this indirect confession. "And when you offer mercy to one who deserves it...how can you not love them? It would be..."
"Inhuman?" he offers, and she actually laughs, a tiny fractured sound.
"Perhaps."
***
[Are you going back to Galactica?]
"I don't know yet." [He shakes his head, and his hand brushes across the panel, but without her hand behind it, forcing the connection through his flesh and blood, I feel nothing.] "The Admiral wants me to, but I can come up with reasons to continue recon for as long as I want, pretty much."
[And you want to? Stay, I mean? You want to stay?]
"It's safe here." [I don't think he meant to say that; his body temperature spikes and he pulls his hand away, so I don't say anything.]
"I don't know."
[What about Dee?]
"I don't know."
[Kara?]
"I don't know."
[I'm sorry.]
"Don't." [He paces the bridge and I wait. I can wait forever. I have eternity all around me, and if I let it, it seeps inside.] "Is it hiding, to stay here? Am I being a coward?"
[What are you afraid of?]
"I don't know." [He laughs. I race the lights faster, laughing with him.] "You know, I've been thinking. You and...her, Vox, you've been making me think."
[About what?]
"Oh, lots of things." [He laughs again. Lee's never been one to laugh all that much, and sometimes it means he's hurting more than it means he's glad.] "But I guess what I'm talking about right now is that you've been making me think about...humanity. Being human."
[I'll take that as a compliment.]
[He doesn't laugh this time. He twists the wedding ring on his finger, and stares down at the floor.] "I think...maybe...being human has something to do with making a choice. Choosing to stay. You can choose to go, you can choose to let go and be gone and just disappear, but...if you choose to stay, that's..."
[You're going awfully philosophical on me, man.]
"Yeah." [His hands drop to his sides and he looks over his shoulder. Vox is standing in the door.] "I guess I have to decide how human I want to be."
"You're entirely human," [she says, and he laughs again.]
[I want you to stay.]
[He nods, and she looks down at the floor, but I'm not done.]
[But if you need to go, Lee...I would be good with just maybe a visit once in a while.]
***
Lee leaves the bridge for his bunk, needing space and silence, needing to think.
He hesitates for just a breath when he hears Vox speak behind him, her voice low and uncertain. "And me? Do you want me to stay?"
The red lights lining the corridor all race toward the bridge, and the wave of heat against his back makes Lee close his eyes and find his left hand with his right, turning the ring on his finger again.
Yeah. He needs to go home. He chose, a long time ago, and again when he was adrift in space, and again and again and again through every day, every battle when it would've been so easy to make one little motion that everyone else would call a mistake, and be gone.
He'll come back here again. He'll be their advocate and their connection, and if it ever comes down to it, he'll keep his promise.
But he needs to go home.
***
[Her hand moves over the panel lightly, colors and music drifting through her to fill his mind. She's talking, a low constant stream of words, and he doesn't grasp all of what she says but that's all right. They have a long time to work their way through it.]
"There is no virtue in choosing to be alone in a universe that seeks to bring things together."
[Even bizarre and frakked-up things?]
[She laughs.] "I'm not sure that's what I'd call it, Helo."
[She touches warm and soft and gentle, and he remembers again how to feel, as she wraps him in red and gold and autumn-bright orange that holds away the fear.]
"Strange and wondrous things."