Fic: Awake The Nation: Chapter II

[speak_me_fair]

ii: {the desert refused my history}

Flowers were nice, Ariadne thought distantly, retreating to somewhere beyond her rage, to a place where she was still capable of thought. Flowers were nice. Pleasant. Soothing to the eye. A source of tranquility. Even Arthur liked them.

And right now they gave her something to do with her hands besides put them on shoulders and shaking until some sense came back into the empty head set so arrogantly between said shoulders.

Because really? The space station? He wanted to go back to the space-station?

She jammed the stalk of the anthurium down into the vase, breaking the wisp of fern it was next to. She'd have to replace that or the whole thing would look droopy and lopsided. Rather like that damned space-station -

Quadrant thirty, Station Nine, she could hear Eames's mod-slurred voice say, as it sometimes did in her rare but violent nightmares -

with all its tacked-on bits.

"Seriously, Arthur, do you think that's such a good idea?" Ariadne was very proud of how calm her voice sounded. Then again, she'd had a lot of time to practice sounding calm in far worse situations than this, so perhaps she shouldn't have been quite so proud of herself. Habit, after all, was hardly something which merited praise.

"No, I think it's a really shit idea, as it happens," Arthur said, not calm at all. "But as it also happens, it's all I've got to work with. So it's the idea."

"I wouldn't go as far as calling it an idea, honestly," Ariadne said, still calm. She started pulling out the too closely-packed flowers, having given up on trying to shift them away from each other. They looked even more beautiful, spread out against the glass of the table, rather than contained within the narrow vase.

Like navigating my way through the stars ahead of me, rather than having to see them far away, kept away from me, trapped up in the sky above my head.

"No?" Arthur sounded almost amused.

"No," Ariadne said, ghosting her scarred hand over the leaves, straightening them where they had been pressed together a little too closely, feeling the half-sharp touch of them where they brushed across the raised ash-and-ink marked skin. "Just- bad. Not a bad idea, not a bad plan, just bad. We talked about this. About going back to things, going over things, trying to fix things that got irretrievably shattered too long ago to even remember properly what happened to them. About how it can't be done."

"Sometimes you have to go back before you go forward, Ari." Arthur told her.

Great, and now Arthur's beginning to sound like some dead ancient philosopher or something.

And he still wasn't listening.

"Yeah. I get that. But this is the stupid pirates-who-aren't base, Arthur. Full of people who kill other people for money or just because they don't like your face."

Arthur snorted with inexplicable amusement at that, ducking his head to hide his face and laughing down at the floor, and she could have thrown the vase at him. And possibly then picked up the table and hurled that at him, too, just to follow it and emphasize her feelings. She settled for glaring at his shaking shoulders until he looked up at her. With, she was frustrated to note, not even a trace of repentance in his expression.

"Yeah," he managed, "that's not really going to be one of the problems, I don't think."

"Maybe not for you," Ariadne said grimly, "but for Eames? Or is he going to ask Yusuf for holo-patches, and go back to hiding who he is?" She saw his amusement flash into equally quick anger, and thought fiercely Good! Good, you start thinking about what you're doing!- but only said aloud, in the detached tones of the General, of the Academe, of Saito's favorite warlord, "It's a reasonable question, Arthur. And one somebody needs to ask, someone who knows and cares about you both. Stars and all hells, you must know he'd do that for you if he thought it would keep you safe."

Arthur nodded slowly, "Maybe that's something we should both do, since we're keeping this on the low down. Our faces are getting to be a bit too well known for undercover work."

Of course he would think of that rather than the danger or of Eames's feelings.

No, she had to be fair, he did think of Eames's feelings, just not- he never had, not before, not that she knew of, not when it came to gathering information that he thought they needed.

"Or you could, let me think, you could not go?" she said sweetly. "What could possibly be so important, Arthur? If there was a threat, I'd know about it. At least I damn well hope I would, and if there is one and you're being mysterious about it, I really will hit you." With something even heavier than a table, if I can find it.

Talk of the space-station had left her almost, if not quite, wishing she were back there herself, or at least back in a time when threats of battering the heads of the oblivious men surrounding her- usually with hotplates or wrenches- were not empty and a source of mild amusement, but instead easily achievable and ready to hand when needed.

"Are you under the impression that I'm asking your permission?" Arthur's face was blank, the expression that he usually reserved for people he didn't like or at least didn't trust. It was one that she hadn't seen for a long time and had hoped she'd never see again. "I'm not."

"No," Ariadne said slowly, swallowing down the old feelings of hurt that always came with knowing she would never really be one of them, that while she thought of them as family, it was not how they saw her, and it never would be. "No, I know. I thought you wanted to know my opinion. That's it. I don't think you should go back there. I think it's the worst place anyone can think of. I think being there left us all fucked up in ways even Mal and the whole of Cobol didn't manage. It screwed with our morality and our priorities, and no, okay, of course I wouldn't change where we are now, but. But. I hate that place. I'm always going to. And I don't like the idea of anyone I care about going there at all, never mind back there. I'd say the same to Yusuf, to Dom, even Saito."

"But not to Eames," Arthur said, his voice flat and uninviting to further confidences.

"No," Ariadne said quietly. "Not to Eames."

"Why, because you think he had no morality to screw with?"

Ariadne gave him a look which she hoped conveyed her feeling of pure contempt at that. "Don't be ridiculous," she said shortly. "No. Because when Eames talks about going somewhere, it might not be about a place. It might be about a time. And that's a different argument, and it's one that never goes away. Don't insult my intelligence, Arthur. I'm frightened for Eames all the time, because he got a pretty major choice as to what he can do and who he is taken away from him back when I was still learning letters, and after what he did for Mal I'm never going to stop worrying about his damn time-jack, or him- but it takes something a bit more definite, like this plan of yours, to make me worry about you guys."

That took some of the steam out of him, she could tell, along with a long slow exhale of breath. "This is for Eames, Ari. He needs the answers I might get. Needs them more than he'll admit. I'd go without him if I could, but somehow I don't think that's happening."

She had to agree with that. The only way Arthur would go to that station without Eames was if he tied Eames up and locked him in a closet. Then again, this was Eames. He'd probably gnaw through the ropes, pick the lock and still somehow manage to beat Arthur there anyway. The man was nothing if not determined.

And knowing that made what she had to say next seem like a betrayal, even though it was as much as she was prepared to give in, as much as she could bear to relinquish of her principles.

Because she might worry over them and their insane, fucked-up ways of prioritizing, and she might love them more dearly than the family who belonged to her by blood, but she knew, as well, that she was right; that to go back to the space-station was something more insidious and worse than a suicide run; that the place was the slow degradation of values and hope and belief.

She could not lend herself to it.

"You'll need a good ship," she said, swallowing past the aching misery that was trapped in her throat. "And things for trade. I can help with that."

Arthur looked at her searchingly, and then nodded, accepting the offer and the words she wasn't saying- because she couldn't bear to.

But you'll be going on your own. I can't and won't offer to come with you. Even if I could, I wouldn't. No. Worse. More than that. Worse. So much worse. I can, I could, and I still won't. I won't. Not even for you.

"I'm sorry," she said, but it didn't sound like the apology she wanted it to be, not at all.

It sounded like condolences at a funeral.

~*~

It was really quite beautiful, the intricate connections of wire to terminal to chip, especially on the tiny close-up visions that he was currently working with. Beautiful and sexy. Okay, maybe he was strange... yeah, definitely strange... but he still thought that working with something that touched people as intimately as his mods did was damnably sexy. He hadn't managed to convince many people to agree with him, but Yusuf kept trying.

"Yusuf..."

Ari came the closest to understanding it, but he was pretty sure that was due to how strongly she had conjoined with her own mods.

He had been careful, so very, very careful when he designed them, balancing power with control in all the best and lightest of ways he had ever even dreamed of devising- because no one ever, ever wanted to see another Mal. And he thought he might love Ari just as much as Dom had loved his insanely brilliant wife. He would do anything for her, and therein lay the danger; he would do anything to save her, and therein lay their strength as a partnership- and the dichotomy of it.

"Yusuf..."

And this new development he was working with would just only add to the sexiness that his mods held- form and function combining to form something so perfect that-

"Yusuf!"

It was Eames. Of course it was Eames. It always was Eames, because everyone else chose life and fucked off when he was working.

"How do you always do this to me?" Yusuf moaned, his train of thought completely broken, and looked up from his work with what he hoped was a very effective glare. Unfortunately, he still had the goggles on, and while wires and terminals looked exquisite beneath their faceted magnifications, Eames did not. "Ugh," he added unhappily.

"And 'Ugh' to you too, mate." Eames snorted. "Another minute there and I thought you'd be humping the work bench, so you really should be thanking me. Splinters in sensitive areas are never considered a good thing."

"Bah." Yusuf pulled off the goggles, blinking his eyes to refocus them under normal magnification. "My sexual proclivities aside, why are you even here, Eames? I thought you and Arthur were still off... some place."

It was possible that he got just the tiniest bit tied up in his work, but losing a few semi-cycles (whole cycles!) here and there wasn't that big a problem, was it?

"Yeah, no, we got back a while ago, I came in and said we were back, you said 'Mffff', I said more loudly that hello, we were back, and you just waved a hand at me, so I said even louder 'Hey, Yusuf, you wanker, I'm back and Arthur's back too and we're all going out for dinner' and you said 'Pass me the tweezer-thingy', so I did, and then I asked very precisely if that meant you wanted to come to dinner, then, since we were back, and you started singing to a piece of wire that it was the most beautiful girl in the world, so I left. I did," he added smugly, "bring you a doggie bag. You seem to have eaten it."

"The bag?" Yusuf was sure he'd remember eating a bag.

"No, the food in the bag, although..." Eames made a show of peering around him. "Nope, bag's still on the bench."

"That's... probably good," Yusuf agreed. He wasn't relieved, exactly, since if he had eaten a bag, it obviously hadn't done him any lasting damage, but it was always better to know about these things. "Why?"

"Why didn't you eat the bag? Fuck knows, Yusuf, I don't keep track of what you consider normal."

"No, why are you back?"

"Er," said Eames. "'Cos... we did what we went to do?"

"A sudden feeling of terrible dread has come over me," Yusuf said, and meant it. Eames being vague never meant anything good. It hadn't meant anything good when he disguised himself beneath Yusuf's best holos, it hadn't meant anything good on the Gates-Planet, it hadn't meant anything good on the space-station, or when they first arrived on Seisui, and it certainly meant nothing good now. "And what was it that you went to do, and did, o enigmatic one?"

"Went to see a man who wanted to fuck Arthur, or maybe whip Arthur, I'm not sure but neither happened, so it's all good." Eames picked the tweezer-thingy up off of the work bench and twirled it absently in one hand. "Asked some questions, didn't get much in the way of answers, and came home. Job done."

"Uh-huh." Yusuf waited for more. He was good at waiting. He just thought about other things, letting his mind work over the surface of some never-ending insoluble problem or other, until the other person started talking again, and he could do that for hours at a time if he needed to.

"Yeah, we- seems we might need to go to the space-station," Eames said at last. "Do need to, I mean."

"The space-station," Yusuf said blankly. "Which space-station?"

"Station Nine. The space-station," Eames said, none too patiently. "You must remember it, you spent the same amount of time there as everyone else..."

"Are you taking the piss?" Yusuf demanded. "Is this some giant wind-up to punish me for not coming to dinner and lavishing you with your due amount of attention? Or have you just lost your fucking mind? You can't go back there!"

"Seems we can," Eames's voice was level and deceptively calm. "And are."

"Well, fuck."

"Yeah."

It had to be Arthur's idea, Yusuf decided, because as smart and meticulous as the man was, he never seemed to get the idea that some things were just not a good idea, and some things were beyond that and went into fuck no territory. And this seemed to Yusuf to be as close to fuck no as Arthur had been in a long time.

"But why?"

Eames just sighed, falling back into silence, and prodded the workbench with a very small fine screwdriver, which promptly bent at an angle which ensured Yusuf would never be able to use it again.

"Great, thanks," Yusuf said, taking it away from him. "And I repeat, why?"

Eames looked up from the bench, and his expression was bleak and unhappy and more closed off than Yusuf had seen it since the Boneyard.

"You're really," he said dismally, "really gonna yell. A lot."

Yusuf closed his eyes briefly. Wonderful. So we're back to 'it's all fucked and I have to kill Mal before we both lose Dom and Arthur' style bad, then. "Okay," he said calmly. "That'll be fun too. So tell me."

And Eames told him, and he was right.

Yusuf did yell.

He yelled a lot more than he thought even Eames had expected him to.

He yelled because he was furious with Arthur, and Eames, and this unknown possible-Psion, and life, and Saito, and the Gates-Planet, and even with Ariadne, who didn't carry any guilt on her shoulders for any of this, though she felt she should.

Your people, he had said to her, on the Boneyard, the dead planetoid, the mass grave of the Psions, and seen the stark hurt of his words, reflecting out of her dark eyes.

The hurt- and the acknowledgement of the truth.

He knew that what he had told her there, the information he had so callously dumped in one batch of download to her young, untrained, Academe's mind; that the information she had so suddenly received all at once about the Psions and the City-Corps and the Ivory-born and the houses of the dead beyond the Horn Gate, and what they had all been responsible for, would haunt her until her death, and perhaps (for he knew little of what came after death) would stay with her even then. He knew that it was the words he had used which had driven her to carving the raised ash-tat on her palm when they got to Seisui, that it was his words which had set her on the path that had led her to her position as Saito's General, and he felt no guilt for that at all.

Because in moments like this, where he was reminded again of how her people and his people (our people, he reminded himself, because that was what he and Ari had made of the broken Gates-Planet, a new people, each others' people) and even Arthur's beloved City-Corps, who had only been bought and paid for and done what they were told, had destroyed everything Eames knew and loved, he was furious with himself, too.

"Cold and seven hells, why can people never learn how to leave the past in the past?" Yusuf had to know. "How can we heal, how will we ever heal, if we are forced to keep ripping the scab off?"

And how could Eames settle in to a better future, Yusuf also wanted to know, though he had more sense than to ask such a thing aloud, one where he wasn't alone even if it seemed like it, because Eames had him and Arthur and Ari and damn it, even Dom and Saito. James and Philippa and Yumi thought the sun rose and set with Eames's arrivals and departures. How much more did the man need?

"It's not just that," Eames's voice grew rougher as the Onyx crept back into his tones. "I've got to the now, Yusuf. Then's fading, y'know? But- Psions aren't good alone, neither. You know that. The time-jacks made us that, keep us that."

"No-one's good alone," Yusuf said. "You just described the human condition, not the Psions. Time-jacks have nothing to do with it, I'll tell you that now, and for nothing. What got screwed up for you is you were told- as if it was that easy, that simple!- that Psions are alone unless they are with each other. And you know, or you should know, I hope you have learned so much if nothing else, that it is a lie."

"Yeah," Eames agreed. "I do know. But I'm doubting he does. And if he's thinking he's alone, then he is. You know that's just as true, Yusuf. You know because you were the one who bothered teaching me otherwise."

"I did not teach you," Yusuf said, with a tired and mostly feigned flicker of arrogance. "I proved fact, thank you very much, which is a different and more arduous task."

"Same difference." A bit of amusement quirked at the corner of Eames's mouth, much to Yusuf's relief. If he could get the man to actually laugh, maybe he'd think better of taking this step. "But it's not so much the belief as the reaction. A Psion has a jack and uses it. Simple picture, simple threat."

Ah, yes, there was that.

"But has he? The Boneyard happened quite a few years ago, Eames, wouldn't we know?"

"Depends on what he did, big or little. Little stones make little waves. Little waves grow to tsunamis. Just takes time."

Psion doctrine stated bluntly and darkly. It made Yusuf shiver.

"Everything takes time, and yet time takes everything," he murmured, and Eames's smile turned bitter.

"Yeah. But Psions are the only ones who can steal back from it."

"Setting a thief to catch a thief," Yusuf agreed, for that much at least he understood.

"Like you say. So you see-"

"You have to go. You have to try. I do see." Yusuf sighed. "But Eames. I do not like it. I like it even less than I liked making the patch which sent you to Mal- ah." One look at Eames confirmed his suspicions, and he dropped his head into his hands with a groan. "What in all hells do you need me to conjure out of thin air to send you to almost certain death this time?"

~*~

Dom wanted to unequivocally state that he hated political gatherings. He had shaken hands with so many minor officials and toadying monarchs that he wanted to go have a bath- a long bath with scalding water and disinfecting soap. It wasn't as though their kissing ass was going to get them anything anyway. He and Saito had settled their plans and their rules and things were going to head in that direction in spite of attempted bribery, attempted blackmail or threats.

He almost preferred the threats, because at least they were honest. Or he had preferred them until the time someone had attempted to snatch Philippa. Luckily for him, his daughter was no shrinking violet and had smashed the would-be kidnapper in the balls- with her fist. The man was still writhing on the floor when security had crashed in, Pip and James both doing their best to tie him up with a curtain holder.

Dom still wasn't certain as to whether he should have been more worried by his daughter's penchant for violent solutions, or his son's eagerness to try out 'Interrogation 101, Dad, can I, please?'. In the end he settled for explaining to Philippa that while he was exceptionally proud of her, he'd rather she didn't practice her moves on anyone she knew (like him, please, stars and lords of all, please not on him) and to James that Arthur had been joking about there being an Interrogation 101, and even if it did exist, James hadn't passed the exam, so no.

Sometimes he found himself using exactly the same tones and method to the officials and wrangling politicians- a simplistic explanation, followed by 'No.' Disturbingly, it worked better on them than on James, which Dom supposed he should have expected, but still seemed somehow terribly wrong.

"You look rather pensive, Dominic," Saito's calm voice drifted to Dom from rather closer than he expected, causing him to blink himself back to the present.

"I much prefer leaving all this to Ari. You know that." But still, Dom spared the other man a smile. He and Saito were proving to be a much better team than he had expected they would when the idea had first been put to him. Dom considered himself more of a theoretician than a politician, but he was finding more parallels than he wanted to admit.

"I am aware," Saito tipped his head in acknowledgement, "and very grateful that you are here, just the same. As is the Sebastian monarch, I am sure."

Dom snorted. The Sebastian monarch was twenty years his senior and the woman had more hands than an octopus. He'd found himself cornered more than once since she had arrived, and would have seriously contemplated trying out Philippa's self-defense tactic, if only he'd thought it would work.

"And her gratitude is the only reason you asked me to come, I take it?"

"But of course," Saito agreed. "Self-preservation is one of my strongest attributes." The man who had managed to uphold the pretence of being an AI for over a City-Planet year, and demanded a perm-mod that allowed him to actually function as just that on the gate-ships, seemed to see no irony or dichotomy in his statement.

"Right," Dom said in disbelief.

Saito gave him a disturbingly pleasant smile. "Self-preservation at home," he elaborated. "You, as yet, have found no-one to whom you will have to explain the placement of certain... marks."

Yes, well, there was that. Dom couldn't really imagine a point in time where the bruises left by the too-friendly pinches the monarch liked to bestow on his sides and ass could have been explained to Mal, and he doubted that Kazue was any different.

On the other hand, she might simply have found it hysterically funny, and neither option was exactly conducive to Saito retaining his dignity.

"There is that." Dom agreed out loud. "Nor am I looking."

Well, not actively at least. There were times when he saw Arthur and Eames together, or Ari and Yusuf, that he felt the weight of his loneliness, but it was usually interrupted by one of the children, or one of the children-caused problems that Kazue simply did not want to deal with, or by Saito himself, who, it seemed, had made it one of his goals to keep Dom from brooding.

Usually he was grateful for it, no matter the motivation.

"I understand." Saito nodded again. "But sometimes we must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us."

"And if I've done that and have it?" Dom could never resist teasing Saito when he became overly philosophical. "Not that it's always enjoyable, I'll grant you, but this was waiting for me, and I'm definitely living it."

"And worlds gaze in astonishment at your good fortune," Saito agreed dryly, though there was an unsettling look in his eyes that showed quite clearly he had seen through Dom's evasive tactics and intended to return to his original topic at some future date- probably and hideously at a far-too-early hour, and before coffee could be consumed.

"Speaking of good fortune, or more of the incredibly lucky they're not dead yet," Dom said, feigning ignorance as the better part of valor, "you do realize that everyone else is now officially planet-side and yet still managed to get out of this, don't you? What happened, are you getting less immune to their tricks over time, rather than more?"

"Perhaps it is just that I prefer your company," Saito gave a half smile. "Or perhaps it is simply that your complaints are less of an annoyance."

Dom had to laugh at that. As much as Arthur loved to dress up, he had no patience for fools, and Eames had even less- and besides which, Eames had no patience whatsoever, even of the politely fake variety involving clenched teeth and monosyllabic responses, for people who annoyed Arthur. Yusuf, who could be simultaneously better and worse than the pair of them, had, at the last gathering he was supposedly presiding over, gone into a vociferously erogenous description of his latest mod theory which had alternately appalled and fascinated the visiting dignitaries.

Given those multiple reasons as to why none of the three of them should ever be allowed to attend these things as any sort of representative whatsoever, it was, as Dom had said earlier, usually Ariadne who attended them, but she had begged off with some excuse tonight. He couldn't begrudge her the time, really, so here he was.

"Damning with faint praise, is it?" Dom chuckled.

"Oh, believe me, that is hardly faint praise," Saito said with some energy, leaving Dom to wonder just how much his misfit former crew had been getting on Saito's nerves in recent ten-days. Considering that some of those days had included a perplexing vid-silence from Eames and an equally strange joint disappearance from him and Arthur both that wasn't on any of the schedules (and while, yes, they occasionally liked to vanish from public view, they tended to give someone prior warning before doing so), and that Dom himself had been fairly annoyed by that, he suspected the answer was 'a lot, really'.

"I take it you have no idea what they're up to either?" he asked with entirely unfeigned sympathy.

"I do not. Have you any theories?"

"No," Dom said honestly, "mostly because I try hard never to have them. Too dangerous and also I might end up being right, finding out, or generally breaking my hard and fast rule of 'don't tell me because I don't want to know'."

"Perhaps, I should attempt to emulate you in that regard." Saito smiled briefly. "It would most probably relieve some of my trepidation."

"It would." Dom had to agree. Then again, he had come to realize that sometimes what he didn't know could, actually, hurt him. "But perhaps a few discreet inquiries wouldn't go amiss?"

"Perhaps not," Saito agreed, moving to rejoin their other guests. "And now, I mingle."

Dom lifted one hand in a farewell salute to the doomed, then looked around the rest of the room. The Sebastian monarch was to his left, so he moved off toward the right, snagging a glass of champagne off of a tray. It was very good champagne too, but wasted on this crowd. He would much rather have taken the whole tray and retreated to the family quarters and shared it with Kazue, and maybe sent word to Arthur and the rest that they were welcome to join them. And maybe, then, asked the right questions to find out exactly what the hell they were plotting. Alas, he still had several hours of placating and pointed comments ahead of him, which might be at an adjacent angle to plots, but was infinitely less interesting to him personally.

"And now, I mingle." Dom grinned to himself, repeating Saito's words.

He could, surely, keep up for a few hours the appearance of a man who was stable enough and intrinsically powerful enough to be a desirable conquest to make?

And as ever, he held his own private litany in his head, as he walked over to the next group of slightly out of place ambassadors. The litany of memories and people that kept him from reaching out and actually strangling the next person who pretended to incomprehension for the sake of just a few more days, or weeks, or months where they didn't have to change one single thing about how they thought or acted.

Or how the laws and structures of their City-Planet might benefit from such a change.

I could not have loved you more. I am so glad I never loved you less.

Mal. Mal who had once been the ghost at his shoulder, a lost love still present in his everyday living, keeping him closer to the grave than she had been herself.

Mal who only came to him now in dreams as a presence, though she often occupied his thoughts.

He could agree with a young and over-eager, slightly nervous representative of the commerce sector as to the benefits of a slight alteration on one of the old taxation schemes, and still hold his last sight of her in his mind, blazing amidst the wires of her auto-da-fe, think of the certainty with which he had left her.

Time no longer passed in nightmare-balances, too swift and too slow in irregularly alternating moments that encapsulated cycle after cycle, day after day, but steadily; moment by moment slipping through his awareness- sometimes under the radar of that awareness, true, but never so strangely, so painfully, that he wanted them lost or forgotten or drowned out by work.

He could function, he was real, he was alive, he had James and Philippa and reality to his hand, and the air no longer tasted of rust and salt, even when it shuddered under the weight of his grief.

"Goodbye, my dear one. Good night."

His last words to her.

The curtain of her doomed certainty, falling between them, closing her mind to him just as his perm-mods, designed for her from love and repaying them both with war, had long since isolated her heart.

The light of the time-port, illuminating their last lucid moments of marriage and belief and love; the light descending and diminishing, the blaze extinguished.

The coffin of wires, the coffin of heavenly annihilation, her death so profound, so complete, that even the dark he had expected (had wanted) had fled before it.

He could live with that. He did live with that; and life could be sweet, and he loved its sweetness. Even when he raged, grieved, wept in private, longed for his ghost to return, he could live with that.

And sometimes, when it grew too much to bear, when there was almost too much anger and fear in him not to lash out, not to force those around him to listen, to see- those so-essential people who nevertheless had no idea of what he had done, of what they had all done, who didn't know what the cost had been- and worse, had no idea of how much higher it had almost been, could have been, would have been but for the impossible presence in their lives of the last surviving member of a dead race; at those times when he wanted the politicians and the upper-echelon guests to face up to their impossible inadequacies and accept the help that was being offered to them, again and again, he thought

Saito.

There was no shame in that. It had, after all, been Mal's last word.

Dom smiled, and chatted of surface pleasantries, and repeated his vows in the depths of his mind, and- mingled. Mingled, and functioned, and knew that he was losing himself less and less with every day, every hour, every time he let the memories come, and used them for fuel, and let them pass.

He was aware, and was made even more aware (and was perhaps a little pleased to be confirmed in his belief) when he met Saito's tight, approving smile in one of their rare moments of silent communication from across the room, that he was doing a superlative job.

~*~

The music drifting down from the ballroom was being expertly played, loud enough to be enjoyed but not loud enough to inhibit pleasant conversation. It was a style that was recent enough to feel comfortable but too old to distract people with remembered lyrics or tunes. In other words it was perfect and bland and just a bit boring and Arthur was more than thrilled that Dom was the one enjoying it rather than him. Annoyed as he was with Ariadne, he imagined that she must be too, as the one on whose shoulders such things usually rested.

"If there were such a thing as beige music, that's it." Arthur shook his head as he entered the suite that he and Eames shared.

"It's colorless, tasteless and odorless... rather like tofu," Eames commented from the sofa he was draped over in a boneless sprawl. "And hello, darling."

"Tofu does taste of things," Arthur protested vaguely, feeling that someone should stand up for a substance that actually possessed useful qualities. "Like, um."

"What you put it with. In. Whatever."

"Yes," Arthur agreed dispiritedly, his boredom quotient increasing just at the thought of tofu as an actual presence in his life, and went and sat heavily on Eames's shins as a sort of general greeting-cum-disagreement-with-everything. "How's Yusuf?"

"Wet hen. You know. Mad. At me. World. Things. Worrying. Being Yusuf-ish." Eames tugged at him until he was equally sprawled and vaguely more comfortable, and palpably registered his protest from the amount of effort Arthur had decided should be put into the process, because Arthur was not feeling in anyway yielding. "Ah, and I take it our beautiful General is not in the mood for compromise this evening."

It wasn't a question.

"She arranged flowers at me." Arthur gestured, vaguely. "With clippers and... things."

"Ah..." Eames's comment was as bland and non-committal as the music they could still hear drifting in.

"Yeah, exactly," Arthur replied, tensely. He wished he could stop there, but there was no point in keeping the rest from Eames. "She'll give us a ship."

"And that's all." Eames guessed.

"And that's all."

"Can't blame her for that," Eames said. "She got shafted worse'n any of us back at the station. Stuck it out, good for her, but- she couldn't do anything. Makes it worse for her to think about."

"None of us could do anything," Arthur pointed out tightly, in no mood to be soothed over Ariadne's intransigence. He felt Eames sigh. It ran through him, under him, was part of him. He even agreed with it, for the main part, but the frustration of earlier was still running too hard in his blood for one little deep exhalation to bring him out of his dark mood.

Eames was still talking.

"Shouldn't have been able to, no, true enough, except we did, and we couldn't about the station itself, no. But we could do more than fix scrap metal in return for living space. Even Dom, bad as he was then, he could do something useful. You've got to let her hate that time, or she'll stop thinking she can fight it."

Arthur thought about Ariadne, stuck in her little workshop, grumbling about how 'all I do is fix stupid junk to make more stupid junk', thought about the day Yusuf and his scrappy yet all-purpose temp-mods made it rain at everyone, thought then about the day Yusuf had managed to make everything taste like headache, and felt a little more forgiving. "Yeah. I get that, mostly. I do, Eames, honestly. But does she have to fight us?"

"Well, yeah. 'Cos we want to go back there," Eames said simply, and yeah, when he put it like that, Arthur could sort of see why Ariadne was so upset by the idea. But she still didn't have the right-

"She asked me if I was going to make you wear holos," Arthur said, and by giving the words sound, felt abruptly even more annoyed and miserable than he had when Ariadne had not-quite-asked him if that was what he intended.

"Make me?" Eames had the gall to sound amused. "Since when do you- oh no, don't you dare, you've never asked me to do anything that I-"

"Yeah, but you do, though," Arthur pointed out. "If I asked you to, you would. And you wouldn't want to." He felt sick.

"Not quite," Eames said, infuriatingly calm. "I don't do a fucking thing just because you want it, you know that. If it makes more sense to wear 'em, though? Yeah, course I will, 's got nothing to do with whether you ask for it or not."

"I suppose." But Arthur felt neither convincing nor convinced. "I don't know, Eames. Maybe I should just go by myself. See what I can pick up and then if I do find anything concrete we can work from-"

"No."

"- that. What do you mean, no?"

"I mean no, Arthur. It's a simple enough word."

"Look, it's obvious that it's not safe-" Arthur started, and realized, too late, what an intensely stupid choice of words he had just made, as Eames's previously accommodating sprawl turned into a cage of iron-tense muscle and bone, with Arthur locked quite absolutely and definitively on the outside of his hard anger.

"And you going off to find out about a Psion on your own is so, so secure-"

"That's not what I meant-" Arthur, hopeless as ever at reassurance, found himself arguing instead.

"Yeah, go on, teach me, Corps-man, teach me how you go a-hunting-"

"Will you shut the fuck up!" Arthur twisted to the side and glared down at Eames, not angry with him as much as at himself, but angry all the same. He hadn't meant to shout any more than he'd meant to use the stupid word 'safe', but while he had been wrong the first time, he was exactly right the second, as Eames clamped his mouth shut in a white line over his teeth, and glared right back. "You hated it there worse than Ari did, and I know that. So why can't I give you the allowance you're giving her?"

"Because I'm not Ari," Eames said, after a long silence. His eyelids fluttered closed, but not in defeat, never in defeat- Arthur, even terrified out of his calm and into a weird false rage, knew better than that. "We promised to wake up together, Arthur. I can't do that if you're not here. And we never made those promises to her. Neither of us, not even you in the Onyx-cycles you had with her, made those promises to her."

"You can't wake up with me if you're dead, either," Arthur said hopelessly.

"I told you once your logic was cracked right down the middle," Eames reminded him. "It hasn't mended one scrap, you know."

Arthur leant sideways and thumped his head into Eames's shoulder. "Sorry."

"Fucking right you should be," Eames said. "My choice too, remember. So as to make it us."

"I keep forgetting to remember that," Arthur said nonsensically, and thought Eames could probably feel the heat of his embarrassment right through both their clothing.

"And there was me, thinking I was the one with forgetting rights," Eames grumbled, but he'd stopped feeling uncomfortably like the outside of a prison door as Arthur leant on him, and after a bit, one of his hands came up and rubbed awkwardly at the back of Arthur's neck.

Lust and kindness and even love, Eames could show- affection was almost impossible for him, and Arthur was never, even in the middle of feeling like a complete idiot, unconscious of the effort when it was made, nor of the reality of the feelings that lay behind those small and telling gestures.

"I want to wake up with you and you with me..."Arthur voiced the promise against the warmth of Eames's neck. "That hasn't changed. Will never change."

"Nor for me," Eames agreed, rubbing his face against the top of Arthur's head where it lay against him.

There was silence between them then, thoughtful and warm, although Arthur knew it wouldn't last long. There were too many things they needed to take care of, and too many things they needed to plan.

It was bare moments later that Eames spoke, "So... what kind of ship?"

"Would it be too blatant to ask for the Mandell, do you think?"

"She can piss for it if she thinks it's hers to keep," Eames snorted. "Might as well be our ship. I sorted it and you jumped us when we left."

"There is that." Arthur agreed.

"Yusuf wasn't as bad," Eames said after a bit. "Worried, mad, but not-"

"Not the General," Arthur said bitterly, not moving from where he lay. Eames rubbed the back of his neck again, less tentative this time and more professional, his fingers digging in a little to the tense muscles that overlaid Arthur's spine.

Arthur hissed, and Eames pushed at his resistance with fingers that almost jabbed, and Arthur dropped his head even further, and let himself be worked on, and felt himself go ridiculously limp, the pain-pleasure of all the myriad of little knots being undone singing through his nerves like a high note in glass. He wondered when he would shatter.

He knew that if and when he did, those same hands would put him back together with never a crack to be seen or even imaginable.

"No, he never is," Eames agreed, his fingers never stopping their assault on the thin, tight pain that felt it was the only thing holding the layer over Arthur's back in one piece; softening the silk-knot stitching-weave layers of shuddering flesh with nothing but persistence and warmth and a deeper, duller onslaught on impossibly brittle-held tendons and muscles; and Arthur let him, let him and wanted him to continue, knowing that he was being manipulated in every way, and not caring, focusing only upon breathing deeply and slowly and wonderfully, unbelievably (and yet no, no disbelief, this was Eames, who would become whatever he needed as soon as it was even thought of) feeling his twisting, taut misery begin to dissolve.

He stayed silent, and simply listened, wondering if that rich, Onyx-underlaid voice could do the same to his tangled mind as it was doing to his knotted back.

"Being the General's lover must be worse, sometimes," Eames said thoughtfully, "but yeah, no, he's still Yusuf. He's... There's a new temp-mod he's working on, Arthur. And we had a chat about what we might need when we go to the station, and, well, he thinks- he thinks that it might, maybe it could work on you."

Those words were almost enough to undo all the hard work that Eames had put into Arthur's back, cold steel and tenseness grabbing him at once. "I don't want to be fixed," he said flatly. "I don't ever want to not see you."

"Hey. It's Yusuf we're talking about here, yeah, not Dom. Temp-mod, Arthur, a temp-mod you can power down whenever you choose. Think you could work with that?"

"Why would we need it?" Arthur asked. "Why would I ever need to not see you as you are?"

"It's not just me though, is it?" Eames asked. "A whole station full of people- Onyx-runners and spacers and bad-faith traders and everyone, everyone that you have to interact with, you have to react to as if they were wearing their born-face. There's other things you'd need to keep track of, when we go there, more important things, stuff that's so much more than you needing to worry about whether you gripped a mod's hand or the mod-user's hand. And seeing someone else... someone like me-"

"There is no one like you, Eames," Arthur tried for a joke but it came out flat. Tasteless. Tofu joke. "But, yeah, I get what you mean."

"So you'll try it?" Eames wasn't pushing. He never did. But he sounded- hopeful. And that on its own was rare enough these days for Arthur to simply concede.

"Yeah, of course I will," he said, and kissed Eames over the too-tight tendons in his neck, breathing in the feel of the strong pulse under them. One day I won't have this. Because of death, or Yusuf, there will come a day when I don't get to have this. "What harm is there in trying?"

He knew by the relieved little exhale of held breath, moving his hair apart just enough for his scalp to almost crawl, that he'd made the right choice, given the right answer.

Then why did it feel as though he'd started to build a pyre?

Fire and ash, he thought. The Boneyard.

"We'll talk to Yusuf in the morning," he said, registering dimly that the music had still failed to give them any peace from its far away beige-tofu droning below.

"Okay," Eames said, and it was agreement, it was relief, it was an acquiescence to needed security, and yet, and yet -

Arthur could not shake the feeling that they'd made their first mistake.

He buried it in kissing Eames, deliberately covering each pulse point, each sensitive area of neck and ear and shoulder and thin skin over hard bone and harder muscle, instead. He buried it in outlining the names of the dead with his tongue, and only once, just before Eames finally grew tired of being tormented and rolled him over on the deep couch, did he think -

Which one of us will wear the name, after this? Or have we even met the one who will, as yet?

He did not need to think at all, after that. Only to feel, and Eames, as he always had, made it easy to feel.

And later- a little later, they would keep their promise, and wake up together, and that- that was enough, that was real, that was truth, and Arthur could live with that truth for as long as he could hold onto it; he would tie it to himself with fine wires, tightly enough to embed those bonds to his bones; he would tear it out of the future's razor-edged veils with clawed hands and bloody teeth, if he had to.

That one truth was the only religion he admitted to, after all.

~*~

"Well, it's very... interesting?" Yusuf ventured. "Or maybe unique is the term."

He was circling the little dining table in their suite, looking at the odd flower arrangement that held place of honor in its center.

"I've certainly never seen another quite like it," Yusuf said. His lip twitched because, really, it looked rather like one of James's creations- all bent leaves and flowers held up with wire and florist's tape.

"Fuck you," Ariadne said pithily.

"Yes, indeed, but if you would be very kind and not use... that... thing to do so, I would appreciate the kindness," Yusuf pointed out, and smirked.

Ariadne glared at him. Yusuf smiled back at her benignly, and the room suddenly felt very crowded indeed, as Ariadne convinced it that it had a lot more carbon dioxide and the walls were much closer together. Yusuf waved it away, despite what he could see and feel, and chuckled.

"Designed it, chick. Can't hurt the designer."

Ariadne actually growled. "Oh, I know! Nor Dom, who gets fascinated. Nor Arthur, who can't see or feel it. Nor Saito, who ignores it. But Eames I could-"

Yusuf, with a speed born of experience rather than ability, grabbed her around her small waist with both his arms, and reeled her in, struggling. "Not today, I think," he said evenly.

"But it would keep him from doing this stupid-" Ari interrupted herself. "He did tell you about the scheme the two of them have cooked up, didn't he?"

"He did." Yusuf nodded slowly.

"That's it? That's all you have to say?"

"Do I actually have to say that I think it's a stupid idea? Or can we just accept it as a given?"

"Right," Ari nodded. "How can they even think of going back to that place?"

"Hm." Yusuf paused, wondering how best to say this. "I think that for them there are monsters under the bed that still include Eames," he said at last, carefully.

"Oh seven hells!" Ariadne spun around in his arms and gripped his shoulders, too obviously terrified to be feigning stupidity or ignorance. "But you said the time-port couldn't be changed, you said it couldn't be shut down, Yusuf, tell me they're not rushing after some miracle cure that stops him being what he is, fuck, I have to go talk to them, I-"

"Include," Yusuf repeated, still holding onto her. "Include, Ariadne."

"Inc-" Ari stopped. "Oh stars and lights and God of old. They think there's another."

"They do."

"They're going to find him- her? Can it be a her, could it-"

"Yes, but he'll still call her his brother," Yusuf said, "so it is probably not a relevant-"

"Well then, him. I suppose. And then-"

"And then it is none of our business. I will help with a mod Eames has asked for- no, chick, I can't and won't tell you until we know it works, you know me better than to ask before you try- and you will, I think, give them a ship you promised."

"To go to the space-station," Ari said, and her voice shook. "They'll do this on the space-station."

"On the space station first, and then I don't know. Nor will we, I think, ever know. Until it is over in some way."

"You don't think they'll tell us?" Ariadne's face was the picture of puzzlement. "But they always tell us."

"Perhaps not this time," Yusuf put a sympathetic arm around her shoulder. "I don't want them to go any more than you do, but they are going. And I'm sure Arthur will tell us, when he is able."

"Arthur," Ariadne said, and he was reminded all over again of why he loved her, as she came out from under his arm, and took his hands in hers. "Arthur will tell us? Not Eames?"

And Yusuf repeated, somewhat shakily, "No, I think not this time," and shook his head, and kept shaking it, and when Ariadne dropped his hands so that she could wrap her arms around him, he felt nothing but relief that here, for once, when he needed her, was the one person in any universe who could understand both his fear and his perhaps-unnecessary grief and his strange conviction that he was doing both the best he could and the entirely wrong thing, all at once.

"I love you," she said, quiet and clear. "I wish that could help, right now."

Yusuf sighed, and let her take a little of his weight.

"It doesn't help with what I've agreed to, no," he said honestly. "But it makes me feel infinitely less so- very- appalling- a person."

And Ariadne put her hands up to cup his face, with both her palms, the scar-and-ash mangled one and the whole one, diverging textures against his skin, petering out over his beard into a mere brushstroke of warmth, and leant in and kissed him.

"You're the centre of my labyrinth," she said. "The perfect centre of the perfect round. The rose in the heart of my maze."

"And you are my people," said Yusuf, for he knew it had become true, and there was nothing he loved to tell her more, nor that she loved to hear.

Ariadne smiled, the little private smile that was for him and only for him, and kissed him again. "For luck," she said. "Before I lose you to your work."

Yusuf laughed. "But I need more luck than that," he pointed out, and picked her up, his Ariadne, not the General nor the Academe, but Ariadne, his Ari, his own private illusion-mod that no-one else would ever be allowed to see or feel, Ari who was protesting his actions even as her legs wrapped around his waist; and took her through from the little living-room, past the thickly-embroidered screen-walls, and into their bedroom.

He didn't stop kissing her as he walked across the floor, nor as he laid her down on the bed, nor as they worked impatiently against buttons and buckles and leather, and were at last illuminated and clothed only by the lights of her mods and the glow of his strapped control-gauntlet, telling him the timers of every piece he had worked on.

He never stopped, not until all her naked skin was close to his, and his to hers; and the choice of touch was theirs to make in utter freedom; and it was finally their world, and no-one else's; their world, where they at once controlled thousands- and relinquished them to the safety of their designs and the infallibility of their skills- with each touch and breath and caress they trusted they had time for.

We steal time, and time steals from us,, Yusuf thought, and shivered.

And yet -

There is only time. You move through it.

The curse had been meant for Eames's ears alone. A curse, a warning, a benediction, even, from the dead and to the dead. But it applied to the rest of them just as well.

"But oh," he murmured against the curve of Ariadne's hip, drawing his tongue slowly down the line between her thigh and the Venus mound, along that tiny shallow crease where even she could sometimes taste of salt and sweat and so very much of herself, "oh, we will, Ari, I promise we will make that movement run for us."

And when he raised his head once more, to kiss her, and aligned their bodies to the teasing, sweat-slick point where she could no longer resist her own desires, and rolled them both over so that she could sit astride him, they laughed; and when after what felt like days of rolling delirium, wave after wave of fog and haze and the mad flickering shapes of the ignis fatui that danced behind his closing eyes; when after each grasped-for and agonizingly-close moment had peaked, and retreated, and he had half-wailed in desperation; when she had at last cried out, sharp and sweet and strangely delighted, and he had followed her, his voice a deep hoarse groan of relief and release and gasping adrenaline; when they lay still at last, her strong legs clamped on either side of his, her hair, shorter than it used to be, but still down from all its intricate ties for once and the long bangs sweeping across his chest as her head bowed in the last relinquishment of pure physical pleasure, little shivers and twitches still running through her as her body came down from its ultimate high, he was the one who said, "Mine."

and she, laughing, breathless, resting on his chest as her heartbeat slowed to match his, retorted -

"Ours."

Yusuf smiled, and pulled her closer, and let them both drift into a kind of hypnotic somnolence, where it was not quite sleep and not quite waking, but was still movement among and between and above and below those things.

And he thought- I have this, what man needs more?

And then he was reminded of how very much more indeed two men needed that was not this dreaming-dear delight, and slid himself out from under Ariadne's small, pliant body, dressing in his oldest protective leather, and preparing to go out to his workshop, in order to make his newest, and most precious, and most beautiful creation into something that might just maybe save his friends' lives.

She only sighed a little in her sleep, her body registering his departure even though her still-drowsy-mind accepted it without fear or concern or question, the feathered ends of her hair fanning out across the pillows as she shifted and curled and stretched into the centre and the lingering warmth of both their bodies, and Yusuf could only smile, and look at her for a little while, and wonder at his good fortune.

And when he summoned up the stamina to look away, and thought more clearly about just what he was doing, and was less inclined to curl back up in bed with his lover, and more inclined to think about risks to himself, he went into the little tall, thin, metal cupboard that was bolted to the two stone flags in the corner of his room, and took out a gun that he had also modified, a very long time ago, a gun for which the brace and its contained mod had lain dormant on his arm for a long, long time.

Since the space-station his conscience reminded him. And you removed it enough times that no-one thinks you rely on it.

The other leather half-gauntlet, the one that kept the time-decay of others' mods flickering in constant reminder, he had never removed and never would.

People tended to think that the permanently-worn one was the dangerous one, that the one they saw every day with all its unknown quantities might one day be a threat; that it was possibly linked to Eames's time-port, though they never actually got up the courage to ask him. It was not. It was the safest thing anyone who used his temp-mods would ever see, because it meant that whatever they were wearing was still functioning.

Yusuf, now activating both gun and arm-gauntlet, could not help but smile at their idiocy.

He went back to his workshop armed, and determined, and, as he always was, even in the worst of times, he was utterly himself.

Although as he walked, there were times when he thought of Ariadne, shifting and curling toward and into the warmth that he had left in their bed, and his walk became, just slightly, the swagger of a justly proud man.

He knew that when she woke, she would move to the same rhythm and beat, and he grinned to himself.

People looked at his grin, and the gauntlet, and avoided him for the rest of the day, after that.

Yusuf found the solitude a remarkable help.

~*~

chapter iii

~*~