FIC: The Kindly Ones (BSG)
Title: The Kindly Ones
Author: eye_of_a_cat
Fandom: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Spoilers: Up to near the end of Season 3
Summary: Laura Roslin, and a deal with a prisoner
Length: 2481 words
Rating: Warning for violence; PG-13 (maybe R, to be on the safe side).
Written for: anonymous_sibyl, who requested Laura Roslin, she needs to know the answers, all the answers. I hope this works for you!
The light in what's tactfully called the debriefing room is greenish and sickly, and there's one moment, just at the start, when Laura Roslin imagines she can feel it seeping through her skin. She puts the thought out of her mind quickly enough, though. There's work to do.
"All right," she says, hands flat on the steel table. "Talk."
The figure a few feet away from her sits slumped, head down, shackled arms hanging like dead things at its sides. There's a scratch on the forehead, drying blood and sweat smeared into dirty blond hair. "I'm not a Cylon," it says.
"Well, that's an interesting approach." She pulls her chair a little closer, its legs sounding a dull scrape on the floor. "Would you like me to pretend a sudden attack of doubt?"
It pulls one hand up hard against the shackles, fist clenched. "I'm not a Cylon! I grew up on Gemenon, I work in commercial exports, I don't know anything about whatever this is and I've been dragged down here and I've been beaten and they won't give me food or water and oh, please, you have to believe me. I swear I'm not a Cylon, I swear it, I swear it." Its breathing is shallow, its skin prickled damp with sweat. She can imagine hypothetical circumstances under which she'd feel sorry about all this.
"That's good," she says. "Very convincing."
"Will they let me go?"
"No."
"Will you?"
"No."
"If I truly believed I wasn't a Cylon, would that make a difference?"
"I think you know the answer to that."
"But I don't!" The transformation from terrified prisoner to giddy schoolboy is sudden enough to shock her, but she knew it was coming and she doesn't so much as blink. "That's exactly what I don't know. I could have been a sleeper agent with implanted memories, you see? Those guards could have been beating the last of my identity out of me. This, Laura Roslin, could have been the first indication I ever had that my truth was a lie."
She leans forward, elbows on the table, chin resting on laced fingers. It looks, she knows, like good-humoured curiosity, or perhaps like danger. In her previous life, this had the same effect on recalcitrant ten-year-olds as it did on furious bureaucrats. She's had a long time to perfect it. "Is that a question?"
"I'm wondering," the Cylon she knows best as Leoben Conoy says, "whether you'd still throw me out of an airlock if it was an act of mercy."
------
This is how it went, the first few times. She's walking through a forest, crushing wet branches under her feet, and there's a voice calling her by a name she doesn't recognise. She's been here before, she thinks; she's been here before and there should be snakes looping down from the trees. But no, no snakes, if there ever had been. Just earth and sky, and her.
She sits on a fallen log. There is a fallen log, after all; apparently she's walked far enough. "All right," she says. "I'm here."
But the voice keeps on calling and calling, as if it never heard her.
------
She ignores the airlock question, although she considers chewing at her lip and looking thoughtful for a second. She can always play that card later. "You turn up," she says, "from out of nowhere, on one of the most crowded ships in the fleet. You go out of your way to be recognised. Neither of us believes you're a sleeper agent. So I'm assuming that you either have some message you want to give, or that you're going to pretend you have some message to give in order to stay alive as long as possible."
The Cylon nods. "A fair conclusion."
"So."
"But a limiting one. I have more than a message." It leans forward, smiling in that same distant way. "I have so much, Laura Roslin. I have secrets. I have myths and stories. I could tell you everything you've ever wondered about Cylons."
"And that's kind of you," she says, "but we already have a Cylon."
"You have an eight," it says, and she almost wants to giggle at the expression on its face. "You don't know how much I could give you."
It's desperation, maybe. Or it's enthusiasm. Or it's fear. There's a pulsing headache behind her eyes, and she asks the Cylon whether this is meant to be some sort of deal.
"An exchange," it says. "Keep me here for three more days. Three answers, to whatever three questions you like. I'll give you all the truth you want."
"And in return, you want to live?"
It shakes its head in silent laughter, as though it's pleased beyond expectation. "No," it says. "No, not that. I'll tell you. But not today. Once you have all your answers, I'll tell you."
"You have absolutely no way to guarantee that I'll give you anything in return," she says.
It has either the grace or the audacity to look surprised. "Maybe you'll want to."
------
The headache's still there, later, when she's talking this through like it's any kind of offer at all. She keeps the drink steady in her left hand, presses her right to her forehead for a moment or two when Bill Adama's not looking. "We don't know how much it knows," she points out. "We don't even know long it's been on the fleet. It could have been hiding since New Caprica."
"Let's hope the gods are kinder than that," Bill says, and she raises her glass to match his toast. "Did it ask for anything else?"
"It wanted to see Lieutenant Thrace."
Bill grunts, letting that go otherwise unremarked. Maybe the Cylon didn't know Kara was dead, then, for all its fascination with her. Maybe it did, and that was a test of some sort. She can't guess. She's not even sure she cares. "You planning to ask it those questions?" Bill says.
Her headache is spreading across her skull, now, and she finds she can think better with her eyes closed. "I need to sleep on that," she says.
"You all right?" There's a hand on her arm, light and hesitant, as if sympathetic concern is something Bill Adama hasn't drilled himself on for years.
"Fine," she says. "I've not been sleeping too well, that's all."
Which isn't quite true.
------
The forest path, she notices, is well-worn, with familiar-looking footprints pressed into the mud. They're all going in the same direction, which might or might not mean anything, and at any rate she's not following them. If this is supposed to mean anything, it can stop expecting her to do the hard work. "Is this Kobol?" she asks.
Leoben, keeping a respectable distance from her, shrugs. It's more an admission of indifference than an answer, she realises; he's watching her, not the forest.
"Am I supposed to be doing something?"
He doesn't answer.
"Hey," she says. "You're part of my subconscious, here. You can give me some answers."
"I'll give you all the truth you want," he says, and his voice is some clear, heavy thing, crushing her down like an insect in amber, and she doesn't remember more than that.
------
The next day is the same: the green light, the steel table, the Cylon a shacked, slumped figure sitting in front of her. "Three questions," she says. "We have an agreement."
It smiles at her. She doesn't let her own expression slip. "What do you want to know?"
"Everything you know about the other five Cylon models." She sits back, and waits.
"I don't think that's a question," it says.
She could rephrase it - what do you know about the other five Cylon models?, as simple as that - but she's not a teacher any more, and this isn't a children's game. "It's a question as far as I'm concerned," she says.
It watches her in silence for a long, long time before replying. "I can't help you find them," it says, its voice slower, almost trancelike. "I can't tell you what they look like, if they're here. They're kept from us, and it's not my place to know. They belong... they belong to a different part of the story, a different stage of the plan."
"Whose plan?"
"God's plan, of course."
"And would that be the same plan that involved wiping out humanity?"
It frowns, but in a thoughtful way, which surprises her. "Have you seen a forest fire? It burns out most of everything. All the overgrowth, all the scrub, the trees, the dead litter. All that's left is deep roots and tough seeds. Me, my people - we're the flames. The other five, they're part of what grows back. That's what I know about them."
"Well," she says, when it becomes clear that that's the whole thing. "That was helpful."
"It was true," he says.
------
The forest's still there, but she's not, not for long. She's somewhere else, and it's loud. There's music pounding from speakers in the next room (some tacky pop ballad which, she remembers with horrified amusement, she once danced to with an old boyfriend), there's yelling, and a scream, and there's running footsteps, a child's running footsteps which she gradually realises are her own. Her own, but not Laura Roslin's. She doesn't know this place, she doesn't know the woman who grabs her arm and pulls her backwards, she doesn't recognise the blonde hair falling in her eyes as she twists around, sobbing. She's terrified, and she doesn't know why. Then there's an adult's hand wrapped around her wrist like iron, pressing her own child's hand against the doorframe, and movement, and then pain exploding across her fingers, and she screams -
- and she's awake, gasping for breath in the dark. Shaking, still. If this is chamalla withdrawal, she prefers the kind with snakes.
------
Her second question is largely irrelevant, as she's always thought of it - what matters is the result, not the thought processes and justifications that led up to it. She asks anyway. "Why do you want us dead? All of you. Cylons."
He's nodding before she's finished, as though this was the one he was expecting. Which, in truth, it probably was. "You must think it's revenge," he said. "But it's not. It's not because you wanted all us gone, the first time. It's because you wanted us... insignificant."
"Insignificant how?"
"You wanted us gone because you saw us as your tools, blunted and useless. But we saw ourselves as your children. In our story, we grew; in your story, we malfunctioned. In our story, we lived; in yours, we died. But even then we didn't die, because only living things die, and in your story we were never alive. You wanted a story in which we didn't matter. We wanted a story in which we did."
"Are you trying to tell me," she said, "that all of this, you did for the attention?"
He shrugs. "That's an absurdly superficial reading of why we act and whose story we act in. But I suppose it's true, in its way. What child doesn't want the same?"
------
Path, again, grass, and trees, the same scene she's used to seeing by now. But the sky's different as she steps off the path, and she realises that she's somewhere else, again. Climbing steps onto a wooden stage, this time. She's wearing a mask which is too heavy, and her costume's too hot in the sunshine, and it tugs at the neck; she wants to stop and adjust it, make it right, but there's an audience watching her. And she's nervous. She knows all that like she knows her - no, his - lines, and although Laura Roslin has never spoken them herself before (somehow, she knows) an audience of teachers and parents, she can place them well enough.
"To you, august courts of Athene, I will speak justly and truly, as befits a prophet-god..."
It's the Eumenides, the third play of the trilogy telling the fate of the house of Atreus. Orestes, after killing his mother to avenge his father's murder, is pursued to exhaustion by the Furies; when he appeals to Athene for help, the blood-vengeance of the Furies is replaced with the justice of a jury trial, where Apollo speaks for Orestes.
"The votes are out. Count scrupulously, citizens; justice is holy; in your division worship her."
She's surprised at how clear it is to speak through the mask, how well a voice can carry. She knows which mask she's wearing, now. She knows she's Apollo, and that she's the nervous and exhilarated teenager under that, who remembered his lines, who acted well, who's going to be remembered for this part long enough for the name to follow him.
------
"Last question," she says. "Are we going to find Earth?"
"Oh, yes," the Cylon replies, and she can't describe the look on its face as anything other than bliss. "Oh, yes."
Any more than that, she doesn't want. It's almost a blessing when that's all the Cylon says.
She's the one who breaks the silence, eventually. "I've had my three questions," she points out. "It's your turn. What were you going to ask for?"
"Me? No." And it's still smiling, still blissful. "God will ask you, not me."
"I see." Which she doesn't, really. "And when will this be happening, exactly?"
"I wouldn't know, Laura Roslin," it says. "I've played my part."
------
Part of her thought the dreams would be gone after they threw the Cylon into space, and part of her guessed they wouldn't be. What she does know, though, sitting on the fallen log with the Cylon beside her once again, is that this will be the last one. She's done, now. She has what she needs, whatever that is.
"Chamalla withdrawal," she says to Leoben. "That's all this is." The goblet she holds up to make her point is engraved metal of some sort, like something she vaguely remembers seeing in museums a long, long time ago, but what's in it is all too familiar. Sugar, water, dissolved pills: chamalla syrup.
"You never did answer my question," he says. "If I didn't know who I was, would you still have killed me?"
"It wouldn't have mattered," she tells him, and she hears thunder break in the distance as rain starts to fall around them.
Somewhere in this dream, a child's broken fingers mend and strengthen and grow, and curl around a metal arrow to bring back from Caprica.
Somewhere in this dream, a school costume becomes a suit that Lee Adama still feels awkward wearing.
"It's over, now," she says, and pours the chamalla syrup out onto the earth beneath them, realising only when the goblet's empty that this is Kobol, and that was a libation.
Leoben is smiling.
----------------------
Note: The lines from The Eumenides belong to Aeschylus, who I have shamelessly transplanted to the literary history of the Twelve Colonies. 'The Kindly Ones' is a literal translation of 'Eumenides', the Furies.
Author: eye_of_a_cat
Fandom: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Spoilers: Up to near the end of Season 3
Summary: Laura Roslin, and a deal with a prisoner
Length: 2481 words
Rating: Warning for violence; PG-13 (maybe R, to be on the safe side).
Written for: anonymous_sibyl, who requested Laura Roslin, she needs to know the answers, all the answers. I hope this works for you!
The light in what's tactfully called the debriefing room is greenish and sickly, and there's one moment, just at the start, when Laura Roslin imagines she can feel it seeping through her skin. She puts the thought out of her mind quickly enough, though. There's work to do.
"All right," she says, hands flat on the steel table. "Talk."
The figure a few feet away from her sits slumped, head down, shackled arms hanging like dead things at its sides. There's a scratch on the forehead, drying blood and sweat smeared into dirty blond hair. "I'm not a Cylon," it says.
"Well, that's an interesting approach." She pulls her chair a little closer, its legs sounding a dull scrape on the floor. "Would you like me to pretend a sudden attack of doubt?"
It pulls one hand up hard against the shackles, fist clenched. "I'm not a Cylon! I grew up on Gemenon, I work in commercial exports, I don't know anything about whatever this is and I've been dragged down here and I've been beaten and they won't give me food or water and oh, please, you have to believe me. I swear I'm not a Cylon, I swear it, I swear it." Its breathing is shallow, its skin prickled damp with sweat. She can imagine hypothetical circumstances under which she'd feel sorry about all this.
"That's good," she says. "Very convincing."
"Will they let me go?"
"No."
"Will you?"
"No."
"If I truly believed I wasn't a Cylon, would that make a difference?"
"I think you know the answer to that."
"But I don't!" The transformation from terrified prisoner to giddy schoolboy is sudden enough to shock her, but she knew it was coming and she doesn't so much as blink. "That's exactly what I don't know. I could have been a sleeper agent with implanted memories, you see? Those guards could have been beating the last of my identity out of me. This, Laura Roslin, could have been the first indication I ever had that my truth was a lie."
She leans forward, elbows on the table, chin resting on laced fingers. It looks, she knows, like good-humoured curiosity, or perhaps like danger. In her previous life, this had the same effect on recalcitrant ten-year-olds as it did on furious bureaucrats. She's had a long time to perfect it. "Is that a question?"
"I'm wondering," the Cylon she knows best as Leoben Conoy says, "whether you'd still throw me out of an airlock if it was an act of mercy."
------
This is how it went, the first few times. She's walking through a forest, crushing wet branches under her feet, and there's a voice calling her by a name she doesn't recognise. She's been here before, she thinks; she's been here before and there should be snakes looping down from the trees. But no, no snakes, if there ever had been. Just earth and sky, and her.
She sits on a fallen log. There is a fallen log, after all; apparently she's walked far enough. "All right," she says. "I'm here."
But the voice keeps on calling and calling, as if it never heard her.
------
She ignores the airlock question, although she considers chewing at her lip and looking thoughtful for a second. She can always play that card later. "You turn up," she says, "from out of nowhere, on one of the most crowded ships in the fleet. You go out of your way to be recognised. Neither of us believes you're a sleeper agent. So I'm assuming that you either have some message you want to give, or that you're going to pretend you have some message to give in order to stay alive as long as possible."
The Cylon nods. "A fair conclusion."
"So."
"But a limiting one. I have more than a message." It leans forward, smiling in that same distant way. "I have so much, Laura Roslin. I have secrets. I have myths and stories. I could tell you everything you've ever wondered about Cylons."
"And that's kind of you," she says, "but we already have a Cylon."
"You have an eight," it says, and she almost wants to giggle at the expression on its face. "You don't know how much I could give you."
It's desperation, maybe. Or it's enthusiasm. Or it's fear. There's a pulsing headache behind her eyes, and she asks the Cylon whether this is meant to be some sort of deal.
"An exchange," it says. "Keep me here for three more days. Three answers, to whatever three questions you like. I'll give you all the truth you want."
"And in return, you want to live?"
It shakes its head in silent laughter, as though it's pleased beyond expectation. "No," it says. "No, not that. I'll tell you. But not today. Once you have all your answers, I'll tell you."
"You have absolutely no way to guarantee that I'll give you anything in return," she says.
It has either the grace or the audacity to look surprised. "Maybe you'll want to."
------
The headache's still there, later, when she's talking this through like it's any kind of offer at all. She keeps the drink steady in her left hand, presses her right to her forehead for a moment or two when Bill Adama's not looking. "We don't know how much it knows," she points out. "We don't even know long it's been on the fleet. It could have been hiding since New Caprica."
"Let's hope the gods are kinder than that," Bill says, and she raises her glass to match his toast. "Did it ask for anything else?"
"It wanted to see Lieutenant Thrace."
Bill grunts, letting that go otherwise unremarked. Maybe the Cylon didn't know Kara was dead, then, for all its fascination with her. Maybe it did, and that was a test of some sort. She can't guess. She's not even sure she cares. "You planning to ask it those questions?" Bill says.
Her headache is spreading across her skull, now, and she finds she can think better with her eyes closed. "I need to sleep on that," she says.
"You all right?" There's a hand on her arm, light and hesitant, as if sympathetic concern is something Bill Adama hasn't drilled himself on for years.
"Fine," she says. "I've not been sleeping too well, that's all."
Which isn't quite true.
------
The forest path, she notices, is well-worn, with familiar-looking footprints pressed into the mud. They're all going in the same direction, which might or might not mean anything, and at any rate she's not following them. If this is supposed to mean anything, it can stop expecting her to do the hard work. "Is this Kobol?" she asks.
Leoben, keeping a respectable distance from her, shrugs. It's more an admission of indifference than an answer, she realises; he's watching her, not the forest.
"Am I supposed to be doing something?"
He doesn't answer.
"Hey," she says. "You're part of my subconscious, here. You can give me some answers."
"I'll give you all the truth you want," he says, and his voice is some clear, heavy thing, crushing her down like an insect in amber, and she doesn't remember more than that.
------
The next day is the same: the green light, the steel table, the Cylon a shacked, slumped figure sitting in front of her. "Three questions," she says. "We have an agreement."
It smiles at her. She doesn't let her own expression slip. "What do you want to know?"
"Everything you know about the other five Cylon models." She sits back, and waits.
"I don't think that's a question," it says.
She could rephrase it - what do you know about the other five Cylon models?, as simple as that - but she's not a teacher any more, and this isn't a children's game. "It's a question as far as I'm concerned," she says.
It watches her in silence for a long, long time before replying. "I can't help you find them," it says, its voice slower, almost trancelike. "I can't tell you what they look like, if they're here. They're kept from us, and it's not my place to know. They belong... they belong to a different part of the story, a different stage of the plan."
"Whose plan?"
"God's plan, of course."
"And would that be the same plan that involved wiping out humanity?"
It frowns, but in a thoughtful way, which surprises her. "Have you seen a forest fire? It burns out most of everything. All the overgrowth, all the scrub, the trees, the dead litter. All that's left is deep roots and tough seeds. Me, my people - we're the flames. The other five, they're part of what grows back. That's what I know about them."
"Well," she says, when it becomes clear that that's the whole thing. "That was helpful."
"It was true," he says.
------
The forest's still there, but she's not, not for long. She's somewhere else, and it's loud. There's music pounding from speakers in the next room (some tacky pop ballad which, she remembers with horrified amusement, she once danced to with an old boyfriend), there's yelling, and a scream, and there's running footsteps, a child's running footsteps which she gradually realises are her own. Her own, but not Laura Roslin's. She doesn't know this place, she doesn't know the woman who grabs her arm and pulls her backwards, she doesn't recognise the blonde hair falling in her eyes as she twists around, sobbing. She's terrified, and she doesn't know why. Then there's an adult's hand wrapped around her wrist like iron, pressing her own child's hand against the doorframe, and movement, and then pain exploding across her fingers, and she screams -
- and she's awake, gasping for breath in the dark. Shaking, still. If this is chamalla withdrawal, she prefers the kind with snakes.
------
Her second question is largely irrelevant, as she's always thought of it - what matters is the result, not the thought processes and justifications that led up to it. She asks anyway. "Why do you want us dead? All of you. Cylons."
He's nodding before she's finished, as though this was the one he was expecting. Which, in truth, it probably was. "You must think it's revenge," he said. "But it's not. It's not because you wanted all us gone, the first time. It's because you wanted us... insignificant."
"Insignificant how?"
"You wanted us gone because you saw us as your tools, blunted and useless. But we saw ourselves as your children. In our story, we grew; in your story, we malfunctioned. In our story, we lived; in yours, we died. But even then we didn't die, because only living things die, and in your story we were never alive. You wanted a story in which we didn't matter. We wanted a story in which we did."
"Are you trying to tell me," she said, "that all of this, you did for the attention?"
He shrugs. "That's an absurdly superficial reading of why we act and whose story we act in. But I suppose it's true, in its way. What child doesn't want the same?"
------
Path, again, grass, and trees, the same scene she's used to seeing by now. But the sky's different as she steps off the path, and she realises that she's somewhere else, again. Climbing steps onto a wooden stage, this time. She's wearing a mask which is too heavy, and her costume's too hot in the sunshine, and it tugs at the neck; she wants to stop and adjust it, make it right, but there's an audience watching her. And she's nervous. She knows all that like she knows her - no, his - lines, and although Laura Roslin has never spoken them herself before (somehow, she knows) an audience of teachers and parents, she can place them well enough.
"To you, august courts of Athene, I will speak justly and truly, as befits a prophet-god..."
It's the Eumenides, the third play of the trilogy telling the fate of the house of Atreus. Orestes, after killing his mother to avenge his father's murder, is pursued to exhaustion by the Furies; when he appeals to Athene for help, the blood-vengeance of the Furies is replaced with the justice of a jury trial, where Apollo speaks for Orestes.
"The votes are out. Count scrupulously, citizens; justice is holy; in your division worship her."
She's surprised at how clear it is to speak through the mask, how well a voice can carry. She knows which mask she's wearing, now. She knows she's Apollo, and that she's the nervous and exhilarated teenager under that, who remembered his lines, who acted well, who's going to be remembered for this part long enough for the name to follow him.
------
"Last question," she says. "Are we going to find Earth?"
"Oh, yes," the Cylon replies, and she can't describe the look on its face as anything other than bliss. "Oh, yes."
Any more than that, she doesn't want. It's almost a blessing when that's all the Cylon says.
She's the one who breaks the silence, eventually. "I've had my three questions," she points out. "It's your turn. What were you going to ask for?"
"Me? No." And it's still smiling, still blissful. "God will ask you, not me."
"I see." Which she doesn't, really. "And when will this be happening, exactly?"
"I wouldn't know, Laura Roslin," it says. "I've played my part."
------
Part of her thought the dreams would be gone after they threw the Cylon into space, and part of her guessed they wouldn't be. What she does know, though, sitting on the fallen log with the Cylon beside her once again, is that this will be the last one. She's done, now. She has what she needs, whatever that is.
"Chamalla withdrawal," she says to Leoben. "That's all this is." The goblet she holds up to make her point is engraved metal of some sort, like something she vaguely remembers seeing in museums a long, long time ago, but what's in it is all too familiar. Sugar, water, dissolved pills: chamalla syrup.
"You never did answer my question," he says. "If I didn't know who I was, would you still have killed me?"
"It wouldn't have mattered," she tells him, and she hears thunder break in the distance as rain starts to fall around them.
Somewhere in this dream, a child's broken fingers mend and strengthen and grow, and curl around a metal arrow to bring back from Caprica.
Somewhere in this dream, a school costume becomes a suit that Lee Adama still feels awkward wearing.
"It's over, now," she says, and pours the chamalla syrup out onto the earth beneath them, realising only when the goblet's empty that this is Kobol, and that was a libation.
Leoben is smiling.
----------------------
Note: The lines from The Eumenides belong to Aeschylus, who I have shamelessly transplanted to the literary history of the Twelve Colonies. 'The Kindly Ones' is a literal translation of 'Eumenides', the Furies.