In the Whole World: Chapter 10, "Chimeras"
“Chimeras”
Chapter 10/13
Word Count: 2,901
Disclaimer: It's come to my attention that the wonderful kag523 also takes up chimerism in her post-finale fic " Pierian Spring" which--aside from her generally being a delightful writer--you should read if only 'cause it's finished, unlike this business here. But no comment on or relationship to her story intended over here!
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They'd had a good time at the beach house, Olivia thought. As she rechecked the landing coordinates from the pilot's chair of the Raptor, she was sorry that she and her husband would be back at camp in a matter of minutes; her guard would have to go back up. She'd have to remember, again, that she was lying.
It didn't feel like a lie, though. All those memories… humans couldn't understand, but she was Sharon Agathon. And others, as well. Just as Sharon Agathon had been, albeit with a different immediacy, and in a different constellation.
Still, that was just ones and zeroes.
She knew in her heart that she was Sharon. Now if she could just convince Hera… and avoid setting foot on the Cylon base star again, ever.
"That's the one good thing about going home," Karl was saying, now. "We'll see how badly Hera freaked Starbuck out while we were gone."
"My money's on Apollo being the frazzled one. Did you see the look he gave Hera when she asked him to draw with her last week? Like she was speaking Leonid." She switched on the landing controls efficiently-no cracks about crash landings today-and began to land the Raptor on the strip alongside Galactica that had been set up for short-range deployments.
"Imagination's never been his long suit. Still, there's fear and there's fear, you know?"
Those words were still ringing in Olivia's ears when she deactivated the hatch mechanisms and lowered the stairway.
It occurred to her later that if she'd been watching the corners and the launch tubes, she would have seen all the Marines crouching in the corners, quite visible even in black because the sun was so brilliantly bright.
She saw them when the door opened, though, and, to her credit, nothing but the truth ever occurred to her: they had come for her.
How was it that now-now that it was over-her heart was so steady?
The Marines ringed the Raptor, and at the center of them, she thought, was Leoben Conoy. It probably was; it made sense that it would be Conoy coming for her. But lately she had a hard time telling the Twos apart.
"Olivia Valerii," he began, and the words shot like a scared bird across her brain. How did he know? "Under the authority of the Cylon Central Council, you're under arrest."
"What the…" Helo ran out of words quickly as he was suddenly out of breath to utter them. He'd heard her name. Her worst fear.He'd heard her name! And now he was frozen in the Raptor behind her as cuffs were roughly slammed onto her wrists.
"Don't do this to him," Olivia was pleading, but calmly. "Please. I'm all he has left of her."
Helo was rapidly catching up. "Is she… what is she… what is she accused of, Conoy?"
Leoben turned unpitying eyes on him. "Identity theft. Fraud. And the murder of Sharon Agathon."
Olivia didn't see Karl's face crumple at that, but she had, burning in those memories she carried with her, an image of him as he'd once prepared to shoot her-to shoot his wife-to shoot… oh, God, she didn't even know. Which of them had he shot, that time? The memory of the terrified look on his face, the terror and the determination and the deep, unsinkable self-loathing… those memories were not not hers.
And she imagined his face looked the same now.
She wanted to howl, but here, at the end of a brief, grand experiment in having a normal life, she knew there was nothing she could say. She didn't understand what she'd done any better than Karl did.
One month later
"Doc Cottle's finished running the samples from the amnio and all of the scans and he says everything's still proceeding normally." Gaius spoke in a flood as he came in their newly-installed front door. He didn't announce himself. His eyes were a tad wild.
His wife's calm expression didn't flicker. "But you weren't satisfied, so you ran the samples yourself," she supplied for him.
He smiled tightly. "Exactly right." Pulling the lab data he'd compiled out of his jacket, he fanned it out on the coffee table in front of her. "And there's…darling, don't panic, but there's an… irregularity."
How did she manage to roll her eyes without actually rolling them? "A half-Cylon half-human child is by definition irregular. What are you comparing him to? Hera? Because a sample size of one doesn't exactly…"
"Thank you, my dear, perhaps you'd like to explain the scientific method, because I'm not sure I'm familiar…"
"Fine." The expressionless eye roll again, but there was wariness in those eyes, now. "What did you find out?"
"Well. Simply put-hush, I know you're more than capable of understanding the complicated version, let's not have this fight again. Let me just say-simply put, he's retained two distinct sets of DNA."
She grasped it quickly, as he'd known she would. "A chimera."
"Exactly right, yes. Not… not quite a hybrid. His whole body is a mosaic, with your DNA walled up cozily around mine throughout, but not intermingled. Biologically male, yes, but not a human-slash-Cylon, more accurately a… human and Cylon, at once." He swallowed. "And yes, different from Hera, our sample size of one."
Her hand was pressed against our abdomen. "Gaius. What do we do?"
"Well, simple. We-"
"He's still a blessing. Whatever he is-I won't hear of-"
"We wait." He crouched down in front of her, and even he didn't know whether he meant it sincerely or for effect when he pressed his hands to either side of her rounded belly and repeated it to the life she had growing in there. "We grow you, and we wait."
Baltar intended to put some contingencies in place, nonetheless.
"So Sarah Porter has proposed that all Cylons have to… what, systematically delete all of their shared memories?" Kara had one foot propped up on the stool in their kitchen, and was munching on one of those fruits that Lee hadn't had a chance to learn the name of yet, her elbow on her knee.
"She's baiting me. She says that her plan will ensure that Cylons think and behave as individuals, and that it would, quote, 'fully humanize them,' end-quote. She's banking her whole campaign on Cylon humanization." Lee was on the floor, doing his last set of push-ups for the day.
"What I don't get is why you're opposing it. Aside from the politics, you know… I mean, c'mon, Apollo, she's not only gotta point, she's got Leoben Conoy and all the Twos on her side about it. Some of the Sixes, too."
"I'll tell you what I told the Colonial Times this morning. If something speaks, bleeds, cries, and laughs, it's already human. And on principle, it isn't the business of the state to make humans, but to recognize them." He heaved himself off his hands and onto his back and began his last set of crunches. "Furthermore, her whole plan is a pathetic, cowardly attempt to appease the anti-Cylon contingent, and Kara, you know as well as I do that those people can't be appeased. They think the Cylons are machines, they blame them for the genocide, and they're coming to fear all technology. There's nothing Cylons can give up that they'll accept and say 'debt paid'."
He was surprised to find she wasn't taunting him-it was rare she let him monologue this long without calling into question the purpose of government, the value of citizenship, and the appeal of talking earnestly about any of it. But she was just chewing the last of that red fruit thoughtfully. She'd been in a bit of a mood all day.
Lee heaved himself through the last thirty. "Sarah Porter is Conoy's puppet, and his game is something more sinister, something we haven't figured out yet."
Kara nodded, and her eyes were dark. He noticed her studious effort to stop them from wandering down to his chest, and almost laughed. That long blade of sexual tension hanging over them-she sharpened it whenever she could get away with seeming not to be trying to. It had all been going on too long. Always arm's length, but never more than an arm. It was funny because the way it hurt had become so predictable.
"Helo's in favor of it. Cylon humanization, I mean," she said abstractedly. But you convinced me, she was saying. Or else I don't want to fight you anymore, which was a lot of what she'd been saying, lately, and it got to him. Some nights he picked fights with her just to remind her she wasn't fragile, as terrifying as it was that she needed that reminder. And to open a valve on that sexual tension, a valve that they both could live with. And because sometimes they both just needed to yell. He did, anyway.
"Gods, Lee, it's all so frakked up. Did he tell you he wants to delete Olivia Valerii's memories personally? Before she's executed, I mean?"
"She hasn't been found guilty yet."
"You think she won't be?"
"Of impersonation and fraud? Sure. Murder? I don't know." He sighed. "I do know the decision in that case could swing the whole election." He concentrated on the tent wall in front of him. "Depending on how closely it coincides with voting."
Unlike everyone else in the camp, he'd never asked Kara when the temple would be finished. It was arguably more important a question to him than to anyone else in camp-it would determine the election date, and his whole future-but he knew Kara thought that finishing the temple would be the culmination of her destiny. That something would happen to her then. And he had no reasons left to doubt her instincts. So he'd never even considered asking.
"I'm going to make an announcement tomorrow," she whispered now. Toe to temple, he clenched. "Six weeks from now, I think. On the Feast of Artemis."
His jaw was frozen. "That'll make Conoy happy."
"Lee-"
"Gives you some time to work out a farewell speech. Do I get a note this time? Or just another 'catch ya on the other side' and you'll go on your merry way?"
"Damn it, Lee. You seriously think that I can fight this and I just, what, ignore all the signs and the calls and the feeling? Are you insane? Don't you think, if I thought I could fight it and win-that we could…" She trailed off.
"You can't even say what you'd win, Kara, let alone fight for it." He crossed to the table and grabbed her shoulders. "Right now, tonight. You and I stock up provisions, fill up a Raptor, and we fly away from here. See this world. Settle on some island somewhere. No politics, no Cylons, no destinies. Just us for us." He held her dark eyes in his light ones.
She bent her head so it was almost touching his chin. "What would you even do if I said yes?" she whispered. "Even if it worked, you'd never forgive me."
"Is that what you tell yourself?"
"And it wouldn't work. You can't outrun destiny."
"Yeah, well, especially not if you run toward it with open arms."
"But I have a… proposition." Kara bit her lip, and Lee could see she was afraid. He could feel the race of blood starting in his wrists. "Spend the last six weeks with me, Lee?"
He let that sink in a minute, then swung away from her so he wouldn't have to look at her and refuse her at the same time.
"Are you asking to move in together? 'Cause I'm not sure I'm ready to move all my stuff the full four feet to your side of the-"
"Stop it. I'm serious." She drew in a deep breath. "Gods, Lee, you know I'm not good at this. I'm trying to say… I'm trying to say…"
"I know what you're trying to say." He put his hand on his stomach as if he were going to be sick. "You want me to visit my dad with you in the mornings. And visit you on-site at the temple in the middle of the day, just to say that I missed you. And you-very badly-want me to sleep with you at night."
"I don't just frak at night."
"That's all you want, for your last six weeks. You want me to pretend I'm basically your husband, that this whole thing between us hasn't been just a long frakked-up series of mistakes, just keep pretending so we can forget sometimes that none of it's real. And so itkills me when you-" He stopped himself. "That's literally all you want. A six-week-long fantasy before it's all over forever."
She sounded like she had when he'd found her in the brig, the day of his old man's retirement ceremony, a thousand years ago. Insolent, angry. Underneath it, bottomlessly sad. "It's all I get, Lee."
Lee began systematically cursing every human who had brought him to this irreducible moment, when-finally-there was no choice to be made that wouldn't destroy both of them. He didn't believe in all the Elementary Psych bullshit that they'd spoon-fed him at War College, but there was a hard fact at the center of this crossroads, and that was that her father hadn't been willing to engage in any kind of pretense that would have allowed him to stay, for her. What he knew of Kara's mother made his blood run cold, but her father… if Lee ever met the man in Elysium, he guaranteed he wouldn't be able to stop himself from decking him. Kara had been desperately pretending since the day he'd left and her gods had fallen out of the sky.
No one had ever protected him, either. No one had dressed up either of their childhoods with any illusions at all.
And that realization was enough of an answer. He was conscious of it as an instinct, but trusted it anyway. So he enclosed his arms around her now, squeezing her tight up against his whole body, and if he hadn't done it, he wouldn't have felt her heart racing, felt the very faint convulsion that shook through her. Her teeth sink into his shoulder, gently, and stayed there.
And he smiled.
"Then we'll pretend." They all but melted into each other, at that. And it was suddenly easy, all of it. He lowered his mouth to touch hers for the first time in-gods, how long, and how had he done so long without it? Both electric and comforting, to feel her lips against his and her hands kneading his shoulders and drifting down his back.
Who had he been kidding? What walls were there between them that had ever been real? Hadn't the distance been the pretense?
"You mean it?" she asked, and her voice was husky but her eyes had a hard demand in them. In or out, Apollo. Don't frak with me this time.
"I'm in."
They raced, hands clutching at each other, to the bed, ignoring the papers spread out on the foot of it in their hurry, ignoring the few inches of sunlight sneaking through the barely-open tent doorway, ignoring, as they stripped down, the faint chill in the air that signaled that winter was coming. They were in a holy place, now. Skin like magnets, drawing long fingers to long muscles, soft mouths to soft knees, teeth to bone, old longing to sacred centers.
He wanted her, wanted her, wanted her-as she said more and meant faster, as he rushed inside her, as they consumed each other. She was surer and sweeter and he was kinder and saner than either of them had ever been while naked and together. On New Caprica, their lack of control had been sudden and mad, and on the algae planet, it had been slow and shameful, but the control behind the wildness, now, was righteous and vital and in keeping with the regular, even pace of real time.
When their hips stilled and their hearts slowed, and they were sprawled together stroking slow, shaky hands all along the length of each other, the whole crashing lie of the next six weeks that Lee had agreed to felt to him like the end of a long disaster.
She took a breath against his neck, and his body was still so sensitive that he had to fight to control his shudder. "Lee. If… this is the rest of my life-then this is-you are-"
He squeezed her shoulder, and his own eyes shut. "I know."
There was a question she was answering that he kept locked up in a vault. I mean what if this… this… is the rest of your life, Kara? Is this how you want to spend it? Who you want to spend it with? She'd said she loved him that night on New Caprica like someone yelling to a hostage taker to shoot her instead of a child. And it didn't escape his attention that she couldn't make it through her point any better, now.
This is all I get, too.
He buried his mouth and nose in her hair and stayed there.
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