BSG fic: Nightfall (Helo/Sharon)
Nov. 8th, 2011 08:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardMost belated Halloween fic ever! And also a birthday present for snacky; happy birthday, hon!
In which Helo and Sharon find shelter on Caprica, but it might not be what they're looking for.
When they find the cabin, Sharon’s first instinct is fear.
Before she ran, before she made the decision that no other Cylon has ever made before and took Helo and ran – before she made a decision, because it turns out that if you live among humans long enough you start thinking like one of them, even if (especially if) you don’t know what you are, even if (especially if) you aren’t the one (the Eight) that was there – before she ran, Six and Five had told her they were setting up a cabin for them. This is a cabin. She draws her sidearm as they approach it, the safety off and her finger on the trigger. Helo does the same, looking at the cabin with curiosity as they approach from the side of the road, under the tree cover.
Erosion has tipped the road higher and higher up onto its side, so that it slants at a thirty degree angle against the gentler slope of the mountain. The deep ruts have plants growing in them; nobody’s driven here in a long time. Strung across the road is a heavy chain with rusted links. Helo prods at it with the barrel of his sidearm, then looks at her and shrugs, ducking under it. Sharon follows him, unease building in the back of her skull. She’s a machine and machines aren’t supposed to feel fear, or at least that’s what Cavil says, anyway, but she feels it now.
“I don’t think there are any Cylons here,” Helo says, breaking the silence of the forest.
There are no birds, either. Sharon doesn’t know if that’s because they’ve been disturbed by their passage or because there just aren’t many birds left on Caprica and the ones that survived aren’t up here. Sharon looks around at the trees cautiously, listening for the sound of Centurions moving through the forest. It’s surprising that something so big can be so quiet; she and Helo know that all too well.
“Maybe some old survivalist’s hideout?” she wagers. The cabin is a rundown, beat-up old thing perched precariously on the edge of a cliff that looks like it’s been here since the first Cylon War. The foundations aren’t good; it tilts backwards towards the gully below, the concrete block supporting it exposed where some of the siding protecting the crawlspace beneath has been torn away. The paint on the walls is chipped and peeling, the bottommost step replaced by another concrete block. The windows are so dirty that Sharon can’t see through, but the glass looks sound and there’s a roof. There’s also a padlock on the door.
Helo ascends the steps cautiously. They creak under his weight and Sharon tenses in case they break; the last thing they need is another injury. “Be careful,” she says.
“I’ve got it.” He taps the padlock with the barrel of his sidearm. “I don’t think anybody’s been up here in a long time.”
“Is there a key?” Sharon asks, moving to put her back to the cabin. The top step is about level with her shoulders, so she has to look up even further than usual to see Helo’s face.
He glances around. “I don’t think so. Go check around back? Maybe there’s a busted window or something.”
She nods a little, keeping her sidearm out as she goes round the corner. It’s all more of the same, the back of the cabin leaning heavily towards the cliff. There’s enough space to walk around the back; Sharon glances down at the gully below and swallows, picturing the cabin suddenly tumbling down it so clearly that for a moment she thinks she’s projected it, made it her reality – but no, it’s just her imagination. It’s not a real cliff, anyway, just a steep slope – even if she tripped, her fall would be broken by pine saplings and huckleberry bushes long before she got even a few feet down.
“Sharon?” Helo calls. “Anything?”
“Yeah, there’s a window –”
This one is missing most of the glass in one pane, covered up by a sheet of heavy plastic held up by staples. The lean on the cabin puts it near enough that Sharon can see inside if she stands on her tiptoes – it’s all dust and rodent shit, with a crappy fold up table and some cheap plastic furniture. There’s a fireplace in the corner; she can’t remember seeing a chimney on the outside, but maybe it had been taken down for the winter and never replaced.
“Hey,” Helo says, coming up on her right. “Looks like a nice place to spend the night, huh?”
“Yeah, sure,” Sharon says. “If the rats don’t eat us.”
Helo holsters his sidearm and pulls experimentally at the staples with his fingers before switching to the tip of his knife blade. Sharon does the same, and together they manage to peel back enough of the plastic that Helo can boost her up and she can crawl inside. She draws her sidearm as soon as she does, moving through the cabin. There’s not much to see; except for one small room set off by walls – probably a bedroom, there’s a deflated air mattress folded up in one corner – it’s all one big room. There’s a ladder built into the outside of the bedroom wall; Sharon climbs up it and opens the hatch to the attic, sneezing so violently she nearly falls off the ladder. Nothing up here but rat nests and rat crap.
She says as much to Helo, leaning out the window to help him climb inside. He looks around, his mouth quirking a little. “There’s a kerosene stove here,” he says, unlatching it and propping it open. He taps the canister and smiles. “Hey, you know what this means? We can have hot tinned beans instead of cold tinned beans.”
“Really know how to show a girl a good time, don’t you?” Sharon says. “You’re lucky I’m a cheap date.”
Helo shakes his head, grinning, and goes to poke around in the bedroom. Sharon runs her hands over the plastic shelf against the front wall. Some books, a couple of cans of beef stew and ravioli with long-past expiration dates, a flashlight without any batteries. She drops it at a creaking sound from the bedroom, drawing her sidearm. “Helo?”
“Found the pump for the air mattress,” he says, poking his head out the door. “Sorry – did you find something?”
She holsters her weapon and stoops to pick up the flashlight. “Some sleeping bags down here – probably all chewed up by rats, though. Not sure I really want to find out.”
“Ick,” Helo agrees. “Come here and help me with this?”
Together they get the air mattress inflated, somewhat to Sharon’s surprise, since she’d been expecting it to be ripped or torn or chewed or something. She sits down and bounces experimentally. “It probably has bedbugs, but it’s better than the ground.”
“Definitely,” Helo says, sitting down beside her and unzipping the top of his flight suit. He looks at her hopefully and she leans over to kiss him, long and slow with her eyes closed, because this isn’t something that the other Sharon Valerii ever got to do. This is all hers. The other Sharon Valerii could have loved Helo – had, a little bit; that’s why Six and Five had thought this might work – but she never would have acted on it. They are different. They’re the same – but they’re different. She hopes that Helo will understand that when it comes time for him to find out.
“I love you,” she whispers, and pulls him against her, down onto the dirty mattress.
*
Helo’s still asleep when she gets up to fiddle with the stove, pressing a kiss to his cheek. She manages to get a flame on, thin and blue from the kerosene, and cracks open a tin of beef stew to heat up. She stirs it with the tip of her knife, her mouth watering a little at the smell; anything but another tin of cold beans.
The scent of hot food gets to Helo, too, because he comes drifting in about ten minutes later, flight suit back on but left unzipped to his hips. He slings an arm around her waist and kisses her neck. “Dinner smells good,” he says.
“Don’t get too excited,” Sharon says. “It’s the same crap we’ve been eating for weeks.”
“Smells better heated up. I hope it tastes better, too.”
“Can’t taste worse.” She turns around and slips her arms around his neck, kissing him. “Nice hot dinner, nice soft bed, four walls and a roof – feels a little like we checked into a five-star penthouse suite, huh?”
“The room service could be better,” Helo allows. He kisses her again, then disengages to inspect the cupboards. “Damn. I was hoping for bowls, maybe some flatware.”
“Four-star suite,” Sharon teases, switching the camp stove off. She slides the hot tin gingerly off the burner onto the counter, sucking on her scorched fingers, and uses the knife as a spoon to scoop the stew into her mouth. She and Helo are getting better at this; neither of them cut their lips open on the blades this time.
“I know, I know,” Helo says before she can say anything. “I should have grabbed some silverware from that restaurant.”
“Hey, I was missing, you had other things on your mind, I get it,” Sharon says. She points her knife at him. “Just don’t let it happen again.”
He tosses off a sloppy salute. “Yes, sir.”
They finish off the rest of the stew in silence, sharing a folding cup of water between them. Sharon shakes the water bottle after they’ve emptied the cup, frowning as it sloshes.
“Maybe there’s no radiation in the streams up here,” Helo says, his eyes on the bottle. “We’re going to be out of the bottled stuff in a couple of days.”
“Dehydration will kill us a hell of a lot faster than radiation poisoning,” Sharon says. “I think I saw a stream in that gully down below; we can climb down and check it out tomorrow morning when it’s light out.”
He nods, his expression anxious. “We’re, what, a week from Delphi? Maybe more, if it keeps raining.”
“Less if we stayed on the main roads, but the Cylons will be guarding those,” Sharon says, yawning into her fist. “Gods, I can’t wait to get off this frakking planet.”
“From your lips to the gods’ ears,” Helo says. He stretches, spine cracking. “I’m going out to piss, you?”
“Yeah,” Sharon agrees, zipping her flight suit back up to her neck. They hadn’t had many boundaries on Galactica; they’ve lost all of them now. It’s not safe to be alone, especially now that they don’t have Six’s Centurions looking out for them. She wonders if Helo has noticed that they’re being hunted in earnest now.
He climbs out of the window and reaches up to lift her down, his hands steady and confident on her waist. Sharon presses a quick kiss to his mouth before he puts her down, grinning, and draws her sidearm as soon as he lets go.
They don’t go far from the cabin, ducking into the tree cover. Helo steps behind a tree and unzips his flight suit while Sharon waits, looking into the shadows of the forest and hoping that this isn’t the time when the Centurions finally catch up with them. When he’s done, they switch places. It’s more awkward for Sharon to pee in a flight suit than for Helo; she thinks rather longingly of the FUD that had been issued on Galactica, but which Give hadn’t thought to give her when he and Six had sent her after Helo. She doesn’t know what she’d rather have: a FUD or a roll of toilet paper.
“I can’t wait until we get back to Galactica and I can have a real shower,” she says when she’s done, zipping back up. “Or even just wash my hands.”
“Gods, yes,” Helo says longingly. They start back towards the cabin.
“I think it’s going to rain again,” Sharon muses, glancing up at the sky.
“Frakking Caprica,” he sighs. “At least we’ve got a roof this time.” They come around the side of the cabin and he boosts her up again, climbing up after her. Sharon fixes the plastic closed again as best she can while Helo picks up the radio, flipping between channels. Static, static, more static. Sharon sits down in one of the plastic chairs, pulling her legs up as she watches him.
“Nothing,” Helo says finally, turning it off and tossing it onto the table. “Maybe there’s just no reception up here.”
Sharon shrugs, wondering if there’s a way she can tell him that short of a miracle he won’t be picking up a signal any time soon. The entire Colonial Fleet must be destroyed by now, but maybe – maybe there are some civilian transports that survived. If they can find a way off the planet and join up with some humans, maybe Helo never has to find out what she is. (Unless the Galactica survived, somehow, impossibly. She doesn’t dare think that far ahead.)
The first drops of rain spatter on the metal roof. It’s louder than Sharon remembers it being; Helo’s so tired that he doesn’t twitch, drooping over the table as if the lack of radio signal had been a personal insult. She reaches for his hand.
He musters a smile for her. “Sorry,” he offers. “I just – gods, don’t you ever get tired?”
“I’m tired,” Sharon says. It’s true. She is tired. She just isn’t the bone-deep tired that Helo is – that humans get. “Guess this is why I’m the pilot and you’re the ECO.”
He makes a face at her. “Hey, at least I can trap a landing.”
“Oh, shot in the heart,” Sharon says. “I bet you twenty cubits that when I fly us back to Galactica, my landing is perfect.”
“I’ll take your money,” Helo grins.
“Or you can start working off your debt now,” Sharon says, standing up. She tugs him with her, unzipping her flight suit with her free hand, and leads him back into the bedroom.
*
It’s Helo’s turn to take first watch tonight, but he’s so tired that he falls asleep while they’re still doing a little friendly groping. Sharon cups the back of his skull in her hand, feeling the curve of the bone beneath the thin skin, and holds him against her, feeling his breath warm and steady against her shoulder. He’s warm, real, alive – and human. Back on Galactica she’d thought that he was so strong, but now he seems impossibly fragile. She could snuff out that life in a heartbeat and he would never come back. Karl Agathon’s not a Cylon. He won’t resurrect.
She can’t understand how the other Sharon Valerii could ever have left him behind to die.
There’s a window set in the wall above the bed, with a rusted catch and dirty glass. Sharon checks that her sidearm is in easy reach and stares up at it, listening to the rain spatter down against the roof. Helo is warm against her, as good as any blanket, and she strokes his hair absently. She could project, make the setting less dour – put them in a real bedroom, a real bed, in the five-star penthouse she’d teased earlier, but that won’t change where they are, not really. It won’t change what Helo sees when he wakes up. And she doesn’t want to be somewhere that he can’t be.
“I love you,” she mouths. Words. That’s what Cavil would say, that they’re just words and they don’t mean anything, but Sharon thinks he’s wrong. She’s a machine; that doesn’t mean she can’t feel things. Sharon, the other Sharon, had been in love with Chief; she’d loved Helo, loved Kara, loved Galactica. Sharon had downloaded the memories of her feelings, not the feelings themselves, but they feel real, even though she knows that’s just programming. This, though, this isn’t programming; this is real. She’s sure of it.
She sleeps a little, even though she’d promised herself she wouldn’t. It’s drifting more than real sleep, one hand never far from her sidearm as the rain lulls her. It sounds different when it’s raining on Centurions than it does on the roof, on open ground, on trees. It doesn’t sound like there are Centurions outside, and she lets herself relax, tangling her legs with Helo’s. She closes her eyes, just for a minute.
When she opens them again, who knows how much later, there’s a face in the window. Sharon closes her hand around the grip of her sidearm, her heart pounding in her chest. Another Cylon, it has to be – but if they don’t move, if they don’t say anything, then there’s no way for them to know that she and Helo are in here. She grips his shoulder to wake him up, staring at the window to try and figure out who it is. Please, let it not be another Eight –
Helo’s eyes flicker open, his body tensing against hers. He draws his own sidearm, shifting on the mattress in small incremental motions so that no sudden movement draws attention. Sharon looks up at the window again – but there’s no one there this time. She blinks, bewildered, and sits up, moving gingerly on the air mattress as she peers out the window. It’s so dirty that it’s almost impossible to make anything out, especially in the dark. Whoever it is couldn’t have seen anything.
Helo touches her ankle, then points to show where he’s going. Sharon nods and climbs down, moving to cover him as he steps out into the main room, turning quickly to cover the room with his sidearm. Sharon follows him: empty. He glances out the nearest window, hugging the wall, then shrugs: nothing. Sharon checks the back: nothing.
Cylons don’t go crazy or start hallucinating. If she saw something there, then there was something there.
“Sharon?” Helo says cautiously, lowering his sidearm.
“I know what I saw,” she insists, turning in a slow circle with her sidearm pointed at the floor. “There was someone there.”
“A human?” Helo says. “Not a Centurion? Are you sure?”
“I know what I saw,” Sharon repeats, but hears the beat of hesitation in her voice. There’s something wrong – the windows are too high up for a human, even one as tall as Helo, to look through. A Centurion, maybe, but not a human and not a Cylon.
“We’re both tired,” Helo says, holstering his sidearm. “We’re – gods!”
Sharon whirls, sidearm coming up. The face is back, a dim shadow against the dirty glass of the opposite window, with hands pressed against the glass. It’s not a Cylon. She doesn’t think it’s a human either.
“Hey,” Helo says, “hey, we’re all right, Colonial officers, okay?” He approaches the window with his hands open. “Do you need help?”
“Helo,” Sharon says, “Helo, I don’t think you should –”
The windows explode inwards in a shower of glass. “Frak, Helo, get down!” Sharon yells, but his reflexes are slowed by exhaustion, so Sharon grabs him around the shoulders and throws him bodily to the ground, folding herself around him as she waits for the bullets to come screaming above them.
But there are no bullets. Not the endless shriek of Centurion guns, not the shorter rat-tat-tat of human weapons, not even the blast that she expects from Colonial weapons, if there are any Colonials left on Caprica besides them. Instead the glass dances around them, a miniature cyclone that scratches at exposed skin and embeds itself in the wood floor. Helo drags her down against him, holding her close against his chest as they went for the maelstrom to end. Sharon never knew glass had a sound.
“Toasters?” Helo gasps.
She shakes her head. No. Cylons don’t do this. “Don’t talk. Just pray.” She grips his hand as the shriek of the glass rises – it’s like fine crystal, like wetting the tip of your finger and running it over the rim, only magnified a hundred, a thousand times.
When it finally stops it’s so sudden that the silence seems to ring endless around them, echoing as loud as the sound had. Sharon and Helo both go for their sidearms, crouching back to back as they search for the source.
The thing is there’s nothing to see. No Centurions, no perpetrator, not even any broken glass – the windows are whole and unbroken again, as dirty and smudged as ever. Sharon stares at them in utter bewilderment, not understanding.
“Frak me,” Helo says in eloquent summation. “What the frak was that?”
“I don’t know,” Sharon admits. “But I think we should get the hell out of here.”
Helo nods, glancing worriedly towards the windows as he stuffs the remainder of their gear into the makeshift bag. Sharon covers him with her sidearm as he slides out the window, then holsters it quickly as he helps her down. She draws it again as soon as they’re both clear, letting her gaze sweep from side to side as they hurry towards the tree line.
“Oh gods,” Helo says, glancing over his shoulder. He drags Sharon behind a tree with his free hand, keeping a steady grip on his sidearm with the other. “Do you see that?”
There’s a figure standing behind the dirty windows, pressed up against the glass. It’s too dark for Sharon to make out their features – if they even have any. “What the frak,” she says.
“Is that,” Helo says, and blinks, dubious even before he finishes the sentence, “do you think that’s a ghost?”
“I don’t know,” Sharon says. “Come on, Helo, let’s get out of here.” She folds her fist around his belt and pulls him away. He comes with her, stumbling a little because he keeps looking over his shoulder.
“You believe that, Sharon?” he says when they’re about half a klick away, crouched down in the cover of a pine tree.
“Doesn’t matter what I believe, matters what I was there,” she says.
“Is that a yes?” He puts his arm out for her and she leans against him, sighing.
“Yeah,” she admits. “Do you believe in ghosts?”
She feels him shrug. “I don’t know. I guess I do now. What about you?”
“Yeah,” she says again.
Cylons have ghosts. They don’t die, but they have ghosts. It’s something in the code – One says that they’re just dead-ends that haven’t been erased yet, but some of the others say it’s something else entirely. Cylon models that were abandoned, the voices of the Centurions or the Raiders, the walking forms of the hybrids, maybe even the lost code of those who died outside of resurrection range. Maybe even Cylons who are pure AI, who have no bodies and exist solely in the datastream. Sharon has never seen one, has never met anyone who has, but she believes anyway. Helo would probably find that funny if he ever found out. Ghosts in the machine. Now there’s the real kicker.
“That was really frakked up,” Helo says, pressing a kiss to her hair. “I mean – that was really frakked up. Gods, do you think they’re all over the planet?”
“I don’t know,” Sharon says. “I don’t – Helo, I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay,” he says quickly. “Yeah, I get it, I don’t want to either. Whatever that was, it’s over. Let’s just worry about the Cylons, okay?”
“Great, Cylons,” Sharon agrees. “Hope they stay away till daybreak.”
snacky; happy birthday, hon!In which Helo and Sharon find shelter on Caprica, but it might not be what they're looking for.
When they find the cabin, Sharon’s first instinct is fear.
Before she ran, before she made the decision that no other Cylon has ever made before and took Helo and ran – before she made a decision, because it turns out that if you live among humans long enough you start thinking like one of them, even if (especially if) you don’t know what you are, even if (especially if) you aren’t the one (the Eight) that was there – before she ran, Six and Five had told her they were setting up a cabin for them. This is a cabin. She draws her sidearm as they approach it, the safety off and her finger on the trigger. Helo does the same, looking at the cabin with curiosity as they approach from the side of the road, under the tree cover.
Erosion has tipped the road higher and higher up onto its side, so that it slants at a thirty degree angle against the gentler slope of the mountain. The deep ruts have plants growing in them; nobody’s driven here in a long time. Strung across the road is a heavy chain with rusted links. Helo prods at it with the barrel of his sidearm, then looks at her and shrugs, ducking under it. Sharon follows him, unease building in the back of her skull. She’s a machine and machines aren’t supposed to feel fear, or at least that’s what Cavil says, anyway, but she feels it now.
“I don’t think there are any Cylons here,” Helo says, breaking the silence of the forest.
There are no birds, either. Sharon doesn’t know if that’s because they’ve been disturbed by their passage or because there just aren’t many birds left on Caprica and the ones that survived aren’t up here. Sharon looks around at the trees cautiously, listening for the sound of Centurions moving through the forest. It’s surprising that something so big can be so quiet; she and Helo know that all too well.
“Maybe some old survivalist’s hideout?” she wagers. The cabin is a rundown, beat-up old thing perched precariously on the edge of a cliff that looks like it’s been here since the first Cylon War. The foundations aren’t good; it tilts backwards towards the gully below, the concrete block supporting it exposed where some of the siding protecting the crawlspace beneath has been torn away. The paint on the walls is chipped and peeling, the bottommost step replaced by another concrete block. The windows are so dirty that Sharon can’t see through, but the glass looks sound and there’s a roof. There’s also a padlock on the door.
Helo ascends the steps cautiously. They creak under his weight and Sharon tenses in case they break; the last thing they need is another injury. “Be careful,” she says.
“I’ve got it.” He taps the padlock with the barrel of his sidearm. “I don’t think anybody’s been up here in a long time.”
“Is there a key?” Sharon asks, moving to put her back to the cabin. The top step is about level with her shoulders, so she has to look up even further than usual to see Helo’s face.
He glances around. “I don’t think so. Go check around back? Maybe there’s a busted window or something.”
She nods a little, keeping her sidearm out as she goes round the corner. It’s all more of the same, the back of the cabin leaning heavily towards the cliff. There’s enough space to walk around the back; Sharon glances down at the gully below and swallows, picturing the cabin suddenly tumbling down it so clearly that for a moment she thinks she’s projected it, made it her reality – but no, it’s just her imagination. It’s not a real cliff, anyway, just a steep slope – even if she tripped, her fall would be broken by pine saplings and huckleberry bushes long before she got even a few feet down.
“Sharon?” Helo calls. “Anything?”
“Yeah, there’s a window –”
This one is missing most of the glass in one pane, covered up by a sheet of heavy plastic held up by staples. The lean on the cabin puts it near enough that Sharon can see inside if she stands on her tiptoes – it’s all dust and rodent shit, with a crappy fold up table and some cheap plastic furniture. There’s a fireplace in the corner; she can’t remember seeing a chimney on the outside, but maybe it had been taken down for the winter and never replaced.
“Hey,” Helo says, coming up on her right. “Looks like a nice place to spend the night, huh?”
“Yeah, sure,” Sharon says. “If the rats don’t eat us.”
Helo holsters his sidearm and pulls experimentally at the staples with his fingers before switching to the tip of his knife blade. Sharon does the same, and together they manage to peel back enough of the plastic that Helo can boost her up and she can crawl inside. She draws her sidearm as soon as she does, moving through the cabin. There’s not much to see; except for one small room set off by walls – probably a bedroom, there’s a deflated air mattress folded up in one corner – it’s all one big room. There’s a ladder built into the outside of the bedroom wall; Sharon climbs up it and opens the hatch to the attic, sneezing so violently she nearly falls off the ladder. Nothing up here but rat nests and rat crap.
She says as much to Helo, leaning out the window to help him climb inside. He looks around, his mouth quirking a little. “There’s a kerosene stove here,” he says, unlatching it and propping it open. He taps the canister and smiles. “Hey, you know what this means? We can have hot tinned beans instead of cold tinned beans.”
“Really know how to show a girl a good time, don’t you?” Sharon says. “You’re lucky I’m a cheap date.”
Helo shakes his head, grinning, and goes to poke around in the bedroom. Sharon runs her hands over the plastic shelf against the front wall. Some books, a couple of cans of beef stew and ravioli with long-past expiration dates, a flashlight without any batteries. She drops it at a creaking sound from the bedroom, drawing her sidearm. “Helo?”
“Found the pump for the air mattress,” he says, poking his head out the door. “Sorry – did you find something?”
She holsters her weapon and stoops to pick up the flashlight. “Some sleeping bags down here – probably all chewed up by rats, though. Not sure I really want to find out.”
“Ick,” Helo agrees. “Come here and help me with this?”
Together they get the air mattress inflated, somewhat to Sharon’s surprise, since she’d been expecting it to be ripped or torn or chewed or something. She sits down and bounces experimentally. “It probably has bedbugs, but it’s better than the ground.”
“Definitely,” Helo says, sitting down beside her and unzipping the top of his flight suit. He looks at her hopefully and she leans over to kiss him, long and slow with her eyes closed, because this isn’t something that the other Sharon Valerii ever got to do. This is all hers. The other Sharon Valerii could have loved Helo – had, a little bit; that’s why Six and Five had thought this might work – but she never would have acted on it. They are different. They’re the same – but they’re different. She hopes that Helo will understand that when it comes time for him to find out.
“I love you,” she whispers, and pulls him against her, down onto the dirty mattress.
*
Helo’s still asleep when she gets up to fiddle with the stove, pressing a kiss to his cheek. She manages to get a flame on, thin and blue from the kerosene, and cracks open a tin of beef stew to heat up. She stirs it with the tip of her knife, her mouth watering a little at the smell; anything but another tin of cold beans.
The scent of hot food gets to Helo, too, because he comes drifting in about ten minutes later, flight suit back on but left unzipped to his hips. He slings an arm around her waist and kisses her neck. “Dinner smells good,” he says.
“Don’t get too excited,” Sharon says. “It’s the same crap we’ve been eating for weeks.”
“Smells better heated up. I hope it tastes better, too.”
“Can’t taste worse.” She turns around and slips her arms around his neck, kissing him. “Nice hot dinner, nice soft bed, four walls and a roof – feels a little like we checked into a five-star penthouse suite, huh?”
“The room service could be better,” Helo allows. He kisses her again, then disengages to inspect the cupboards. “Damn. I was hoping for bowls, maybe some flatware.”
“Four-star suite,” Sharon teases, switching the camp stove off. She slides the hot tin gingerly off the burner onto the counter, sucking on her scorched fingers, and uses the knife as a spoon to scoop the stew into her mouth. She and Helo are getting better at this; neither of them cut their lips open on the blades this time.
“I know, I know,” Helo says before she can say anything. “I should have grabbed some silverware from that restaurant.”
“Hey, I was missing, you had other things on your mind, I get it,” Sharon says. She points her knife at him. “Just don’t let it happen again.”
He tosses off a sloppy salute. “Yes, sir.”
They finish off the rest of the stew in silence, sharing a folding cup of water between them. Sharon shakes the water bottle after they’ve emptied the cup, frowning as it sloshes.
“Maybe there’s no radiation in the streams up here,” Helo says, his eyes on the bottle. “We’re going to be out of the bottled stuff in a couple of days.”
“Dehydration will kill us a hell of a lot faster than radiation poisoning,” Sharon says. “I think I saw a stream in that gully down below; we can climb down and check it out tomorrow morning when it’s light out.”
He nods, his expression anxious. “We’re, what, a week from Delphi? Maybe more, if it keeps raining.”
“Less if we stayed on the main roads, but the Cylons will be guarding those,” Sharon says, yawning into her fist. “Gods, I can’t wait to get off this frakking planet.”
“From your lips to the gods’ ears,” Helo says. He stretches, spine cracking. “I’m going out to piss, you?”
“Yeah,” Sharon agrees, zipping her flight suit back up to her neck. They hadn’t had many boundaries on Galactica; they’ve lost all of them now. It’s not safe to be alone, especially now that they don’t have Six’s Centurions looking out for them. She wonders if Helo has noticed that they’re being hunted in earnest now.
He climbs out of the window and reaches up to lift her down, his hands steady and confident on her waist. Sharon presses a quick kiss to his mouth before he puts her down, grinning, and draws her sidearm as soon as he lets go.
They don’t go far from the cabin, ducking into the tree cover. Helo steps behind a tree and unzips his flight suit while Sharon waits, looking into the shadows of the forest and hoping that this isn’t the time when the Centurions finally catch up with them. When he’s done, they switch places. It’s more awkward for Sharon to pee in a flight suit than for Helo; she thinks rather longingly of the FUD that had been issued on Galactica, but which Give hadn’t thought to give her when he and Six had sent her after Helo. She doesn’t know what she’d rather have: a FUD or a roll of toilet paper.
“I can’t wait until we get back to Galactica and I can have a real shower,” she says when she’s done, zipping back up. “Or even just wash my hands.”
“Gods, yes,” Helo says longingly. They start back towards the cabin.
“I think it’s going to rain again,” Sharon muses, glancing up at the sky.
“Frakking Caprica,” he sighs. “At least we’ve got a roof this time.” They come around the side of the cabin and he boosts her up again, climbing up after her. Sharon fixes the plastic closed again as best she can while Helo picks up the radio, flipping between channels. Static, static, more static. Sharon sits down in one of the plastic chairs, pulling her legs up as she watches him.
“Nothing,” Helo says finally, turning it off and tossing it onto the table. “Maybe there’s just no reception up here.”
Sharon shrugs, wondering if there’s a way she can tell him that short of a miracle he won’t be picking up a signal any time soon. The entire Colonial Fleet must be destroyed by now, but maybe – maybe there are some civilian transports that survived. If they can find a way off the planet and join up with some humans, maybe Helo never has to find out what she is. (Unless the Galactica survived, somehow, impossibly. She doesn’t dare think that far ahead.)
The first drops of rain spatter on the metal roof. It’s louder than Sharon remembers it being; Helo’s so tired that he doesn’t twitch, drooping over the table as if the lack of radio signal had been a personal insult. She reaches for his hand.
He musters a smile for her. “Sorry,” he offers. “I just – gods, don’t you ever get tired?”
“I’m tired,” Sharon says. It’s true. She is tired. She just isn’t the bone-deep tired that Helo is – that humans get. “Guess this is why I’m the pilot and you’re the ECO.”
He makes a face at her. “Hey, at least I can trap a landing.”
“Oh, shot in the heart,” Sharon says. “I bet you twenty cubits that when I fly us back to Galactica, my landing is perfect.”
“I’ll take your money,” Helo grins.
“Or you can start working off your debt now,” Sharon says, standing up. She tugs him with her, unzipping her flight suit with her free hand, and leads him back into the bedroom.
*
It’s Helo’s turn to take first watch tonight, but he’s so tired that he falls asleep while they’re still doing a little friendly groping. Sharon cups the back of his skull in her hand, feeling the curve of the bone beneath the thin skin, and holds him against her, feeling his breath warm and steady against her shoulder. He’s warm, real, alive – and human. Back on Galactica she’d thought that he was so strong, but now he seems impossibly fragile. She could snuff out that life in a heartbeat and he would never come back. Karl Agathon’s not a Cylon. He won’t resurrect.
She can’t understand how the other Sharon Valerii could ever have left him behind to die.
There’s a window set in the wall above the bed, with a rusted catch and dirty glass. Sharon checks that her sidearm is in easy reach and stares up at it, listening to the rain spatter down against the roof. Helo is warm against her, as good as any blanket, and she strokes his hair absently. She could project, make the setting less dour – put them in a real bedroom, a real bed, in the five-star penthouse she’d teased earlier, but that won’t change where they are, not really. It won’t change what Helo sees when he wakes up. And she doesn’t want to be somewhere that he can’t be.
“I love you,” she mouths. Words. That’s what Cavil would say, that they’re just words and they don’t mean anything, but Sharon thinks he’s wrong. She’s a machine; that doesn’t mean she can’t feel things. Sharon, the other Sharon, had been in love with Chief; she’d loved Helo, loved Kara, loved Galactica. Sharon had downloaded the memories of her feelings, not the feelings themselves, but they feel real, even though she knows that’s just programming. This, though, this isn’t programming; this is real. She’s sure of it.
She sleeps a little, even though she’d promised herself she wouldn’t. It’s drifting more than real sleep, one hand never far from her sidearm as the rain lulls her. It sounds different when it’s raining on Centurions than it does on the roof, on open ground, on trees. It doesn’t sound like there are Centurions outside, and she lets herself relax, tangling her legs with Helo’s. She closes her eyes, just for a minute.
When she opens them again, who knows how much later, there’s a face in the window. Sharon closes her hand around the grip of her sidearm, her heart pounding in her chest. Another Cylon, it has to be – but if they don’t move, if they don’t say anything, then there’s no way for them to know that she and Helo are in here. She grips his shoulder to wake him up, staring at the window to try and figure out who it is. Please, let it not be another Eight –
Helo’s eyes flicker open, his body tensing against hers. He draws his own sidearm, shifting on the mattress in small incremental motions so that no sudden movement draws attention. Sharon looks up at the window again – but there’s no one there this time. She blinks, bewildered, and sits up, moving gingerly on the air mattress as she peers out the window. It’s so dirty that it’s almost impossible to make anything out, especially in the dark. Whoever it is couldn’t have seen anything.
Helo touches her ankle, then points to show where he’s going. Sharon nods and climbs down, moving to cover him as he steps out into the main room, turning quickly to cover the room with his sidearm. Sharon follows him: empty. He glances out the nearest window, hugging the wall, then shrugs: nothing. Sharon checks the back: nothing.
Cylons don’t go crazy or start hallucinating. If she saw something there, then there was something there.
“Sharon?” Helo says cautiously, lowering his sidearm.
“I know what I saw,” she insists, turning in a slow circle with her sidearm pointed at the floor. “There was someone there.”
“A human?” Helo says. “Not a Centurion? Are you sure?”
“I know what I saw,” Sharon repeats, but hears the beat of hesitation in her voice. There’s something wrong – the windows are too high up for a human, even one as tall as Helo, to look through. A Centurion, maybe, but not a human and not a Cylon.
“We’re both tired,” Helo says, holstering his sidearm. “We’re – gods!”
Sharon whirls, sidearm coming up. The face is back, a dim shadow against the dirty glass of the opposite window, with hands pressed against the glass. It’s not a Cylon. She doesn’t think it’s a human either.
“Hey,” Helo says, “hey, we’re all right, Colonial officers, okay?” He approaches the window with his hands open. “Do you need help?”
“Helo,” Sharon says, “Helo, I don’t think you should –”
The windows explode inwards in a shower of glass. “Frak, Helo, get down!” Sharon yells, but his reflexes are slowed by exhaustion, so Sharon grabs him around the shoulders and throws him bodily to the ground, folding herself around him as she waits for the bullets to come screaming above them.
But there are no bullets. Not the endless shriek of Centurion guns, not the shorter rat-tat-tat of human weapons, not even the blast that she expects from Colonial weapons, if there are any Colonials left on Caprica besides them. Instead the glass dances around them, a miniature cyclone that scratches at exposed skin and embeds itself in the wood floor. Helo drags her down against him, holding her close against his chest as they went for the maelstrom to end. Sharon never knew glass had a sound.
“Toasters?” Helo gasps.
She shakes her head. No. Cylons don’t do this. “Don’t talk. Just pray.” She grips his hand as the shriek of the glass rises – it’s like fine crystal, like wetting the tip of your finger and running it over the rim, only magnified a hundred, a thousand times.
When it finally stops it’s so sudden that the silence seems to ring endless around them, echoing as loud as the sound had. Sharon and Helo both go for their sidearms, crouching back to back as they search for the source.
The thing is there’s nothing to see. No Centurions, no perpetrator, not even any broken glass – the windows are whole and unbroken again, as dirty and smudged as ever. Sharon stares at them in utter bewilderment, not understanding.
“Frak me,” Helo says in eloquent summation. “What the frak was that?”
“I don’t know,” Sharon admits. “But I think we should get the hell out of here.”
Helo nods, glancing worriedly towards the windows as he stuffs the remainder of their gear into the makeshift bag. Sharon covers him with her sidearm as he slides out the window, then holsters it quickly as he helps her down. She draws it again as soon as they’re both clear, letting her gaze sweep from side to side as they hurry towards the tree line.
“Oh gods,” Helo says, glancing over his shoulder. He drags Sharon behind a tree with his free hand, keeping a steady grip on his sidearm with the other. “Do you see that?”
There’s a figure standing behind the dirty windows, pressed up against the glass. It’s too dark for Sharon to make out their features – if they even have any. “What the frak,” she says.
“Is that,” Helo says, and blinks, dubious even before he finishes the sentence, “do you think that’s a ghost?”
“I don’t know,” Sharon says. “Come on, Helo, let’s get out of here.” She folds her fist around his belt and pulls him away. He comes with her, stumbling a little because he keeps looking over his shoulder.
“You believe that, Sharon?” he says when they’re about half a klick away, crouched down in the cover of a pine tree.
“Doesn’t matter what I believe, matters what I was there,” she says.
“Is that a yes?” He puts his arm out for her and she leans against him, sighing.
“Yeah,” she admits. “Do you believe in ghosts?”
She feels him shrug. “I don’t know. I guess I do now. What about you?”
“Yeah,” she says again.
Cylons have ghosts. They don’t die, but they have ghosts. It’s something in the code – One says that they’re just dead-ends that haven’t been erased yet, but some of the others say it’s something else entirely. Cylon models that were abandoned, the voices of the Centurions or the Raiders, the walking forms of the hybrids, maybe even the lost code of those who died outside of resurrection range. Maybe even Cylons who are pure AI, who have no bodies and exist solely in the datastream. Sharon has never seen one, has never met anyone who has, but she believes anyway. Helo would probably find that funny if he ever found out. Ghosts in the machine. Now there’s the real kicker.
“That was really frakked up,” Helo says, pressing a kiss to her hair. “I mean – that was really frakked up. Gods, do you think they’re all over the planet?”
“I don’t know,” Sharon says. “I don’t – Helo, I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay,” he says quickly. “Yeah, I get it, I don’t want to either. Whatever that was, it’s over. Let’s just worry about the Cylons, okay?”
“Great, Cylons,” Sharon agrees. “Hope they stay away till daybreak.”
(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-09 04:04 am (UTC)And eeek! Ghost in the window! I really like how silent and creepy the whole of Caprica seems to Sharon, even more so than the Cylons she knows are after them.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-10 12:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-09 04:11 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-10 12:05 am (UTC)