dens_serpentis

Heroes fic: Change the World (1/1)

2008-10-06T22:50:38Z

Title: Change the World
Author: dens_serpentis
Disclaimer: I own nothing to do with Heroes.
Summary: Spoilers for 3x01. My take on the events leading up to the Claire/Peter confrontation at the beginning of the episode. No pairings.

Claire was startled from a fitful sleep by the slamming of a door somewhere on the first level of the farmhouse.

She splashed some water on her face and pulled her brunette hair back into a ponytail, studiously avoiding looking at herself in the mirror. She was twenty years old now and still didn’t look a day over sixteen. Her face was as smooth, free of worry lines or scars.

She felt old. She felt scarred.

She had worn her day clothes to bed, too fatigued even to strip before collapsing into sleep. She smoothed one hand over the tight leather, holstered the gun that she kept under her pillow, tucked away the three knives that lived on her nightstand, and was downstairs less than five minutes after she’d woken.

Hiro Nakamura was in the kitchen cooking eggs. The delightful smell set her stomach to grumbling, and for the first time in a long time she felt a tired smile crease her face.

“Did we rob a grocery store?” she said, taking in the two glasses of milk on the table and the chipped plates.

Hiro smiled, the same innocent smile that he had always had. It was a bit sadder now. “Not a grocery store,” he said in nearly unaccented English. “A farm in Missouri.”

Claire frowned. “You stole eggs and milk from a farm?”

He looked away guiltily. “Not exactly.”

She stared at him a moment longer before her eyes widened in comprehension. With a sigh she walked out of the farmhouse to the dilapidated barn twenty yards away. Shaking her head, she peered inside, unsurprised to find a thin cow and a couple of clucking chickens.

She went back to the kitchen.

“Hiro,” she said, in the tone of voice she used to hear from her mother whenever she’d done something wrong.

“I know,” he sighed. “No settling down.”

He was scooping eggs onto her plate as he said it, though, and she found that she couldn’t stay annoyed at him.

“You know we have to leave here soon,” she said, reaching across the table to touch his hand as he sat to eat. “We’ve been here too long already.”

“We have to wait for Alex and Jenny,” he said stubbornly, nibbling at his eggs. “They’re coming.”

“They were supposed to be here four days ago, Hiro,” Claire said, biting her lip. “You know that they’re—”

“Don’t say it,” he said. “Don’t, Claire. I understand what might have happened. But we have to have hope.”

Hope. Claire tried to remember what that was. Hope was what a sixteen year old cheerleader had felt when she’d met her personal hero, Peter Petrelli. Hope was what her family had felt when they’d moved to Costa Verde, certain that they could stay under the radar this time. Hope was what Matt Parkman had felt when she and Hiro had rescued him from one of the camps. Hope was what she had lost when Nathan Petrelli had been the first “special” person to be executed for what he was, when Peter had become a sad mockery of himself, when Ando had been cut down by his own kind for helping the specials. When she had been captured and taken to a camp and tortured for weeks before Hiro and Peter could rescue her.

“Peter came by while you were sleeping,” Hiro said.

“Peter’s going to get us all killed,” she muttered.

“He means well, you know.”

“You didn’t tell him anything, did you?” she demanded, eyes narrowed. “He’s betrayed us once, Hiro. We can’t trust him.”

“I know,” Hiro said. “It’s just…hard. Peter used to be a hero.”

“And now he’s living in a dream world,” Claire snapped. She shook her head. They’d had this conversation too many times. It never went anywhere new.

They were interrupted by loud pounding at the door. In an instant Claire was on her feet, gun in hand.

“Get Molly,” she told Hiro. “If you hear me give the signal, take her to the new safe house. If you can, come back for me.”

“What’s the signal?”

“Gunshots.”

He nodded briefly before teleporting upstairs. Claire strode smoothly toward the door, every muscle tense, ready.

She reached for the doorknob, weapon aimed forward. She pulled the door open with a jerk.

And sighed.

“You’re late,” she said curtly.

Alex, a middle aged man who could see through any solid object, grimaced. He and his partner, Jenny, a teenager who could phase through objects much like DL had been able to do, had another man slumped over their shoulders. The man was thin and trembling, unconscious or nearly so.

“We ran into some complications,” Alex said tightly. “Claire, I think they’ve tagged him.”

Her nostrils flared as she stepped forward, pulling up the man’s head and searching for the bump on his neck where a tracer would be. It was there, all right.

She swore. “Hiro, get down here!” she shouted. “Bring Molly!”

They appeared almost instantly. Molly looked tense but not as afraid as she should have been. She looked up to Claire as a mother or older sister and believed that she could do no wrong.

“Hiro, take Molly to the safe house and then come back for the rest of us. I’ll stall the feds for as long as I can. Come back for me last.”

He nodded, took Molly’s hand, and blinked out of sight. Claire always finished her orders like that. “Do this, do that, and come back for me at the end.” She’d been left behind once, through no real fault of anyone’s, and she’d paid the price for it in blood and pain and torment. Even though she knew Hiro would never let her down, not if he could help it, she couldn’t help but beg him not to.

“Have Hiro take him last,” she told Jenny and Alex, gesturing to the unconscious man.

“But—” Jenny said.

Claire interrupted. “You’re more valuable to us than he is. Don’t worry. We’ll all get out of here.”

She could hear the squeal of tires now, and, grabbing a sniper rifle and shotgun from beside the door, hurried outside to see the feds zooming toward them in four black vans. She laid the shotgun on the porch and then took careful aim with the sniper rifle. Her breathing was steady. Her hands didn’t shake.

Her finger twitched on the trigger and the head of one of the drivers exploded. His car swerved into the one beside it, crashing them together in a heap of twisted metal and broken glass. The other two kept on coming. Her next shot took out a tire, but the driver got the van under control enough to stop rather than roll over, and the men came pouring out of the van in their thick bullet-proof vests and helmets. She was just taking aim at the last van when she heard the ominous throbbing of a helicopter.

“Hiro, where are you,” she muttered, dropping one of the men from the crippled vehicle with a shot to the neck.

She needed to keep them away from the house, in case the others were still trapped inside. Dropping the sniper rifle and taking up the shotgun, she sprinted forward until she was in the wide, flat stretch of dirt leading up to the house. She pumped the shotgun and took out a fed; pumped again and shot fruitlessly at the helicopter, from which a whole group of feds was descending.

It didn’t take her long to be completely surrounded.

Someone blinked into existence beside her, and she turned in relief only to discover that it was not who she hoped it was.

“Go away, Peter,” she yelled. “This isn’t your fight.”

“The hell it isn’t,” he shouted back, the scar on his face making him seem almost threatening. “I’m here to save you, Claire. That’s what I do, remember? Save the cheerleader, save the world.”

“I’m not a cheerleader any more, and you’re not my hero,” she reminded him. “This world can’t be saved.”

“Lay down your weapons!” one of the feds shouted at them. They were surrounded on all sides, with about twenty guns pointed in their direction.

Peter put his hand on her shoulder. “Just tell me where the safe house is. I’ll take us there,” he said intently, so much like the man she remembered that she yearned to give in, to let her protect her just this once. It had been a long time since she had been the one being taken care of.

Then she remembered what he’d done, the man he’d become in the years since Nathan had exposed them to the world, and she shrugged his hand off her shoulder. “I’ll die before I tell you where the safe house is,” she snarled, turning her glare back on the surrounding feds.

One of the feds, a nervous kid who probably didn’t know what he was doing, got overanxious and fired a shot before the order was given. The bullet smacked into her arm, but even though it hurt lot the pain was fleeting, and within moments her body expelled the bullet and sealed itself back up. She’d only gotten to be more durable as time went on. She wasn’t even sure that a shot to the head would kill her these days.

The feds were just about to give the order to open fire when yet another person popped into being beside her, and this time Claire did sigh in relief to see Hiro.

“Claire, it is time to go,” Hiro said. “Oh, Peter! Are you coming with us?”

“No,” Claire said at the same time as Peter said, “Yes.”

“You know I can find you,” Peter said. “I’ve got Molly’s gift.”

“Yeah, well, we don’t have to make it easy on you,” Claire bit back. “Let’s go, Hiro.”

By the time Peter opened his mouth to protest again, they were gone.

The new safe house was many miles from the old one, and maybe Claire would have told Peter where it was, if she hadn’t known that Micah was there also. She knew that she’d done the right thing when the teenager pounced at her the minute she appeared in the warehouse and pulled her into a tight hug.

“I was afraid Hiro would be too late,” he said.

“I’m okay,” Claire said. “You know you don’t have to worry about me, Micah. I’m indestructible, remember?”

“You heal quickly,” Micah said, too smart for his own good. “That’s not the same thing.”

Claire smiled softly and put her hand on his shoulder. She looked over his shoulder to see Mohinder and Matt.

“Peter was there,” she told them, feeling Micah tense beneath her hand.

“Going on about fixing the past again?” Matt said, the fury in his eyes reminding her that she wasn’t the only one who didn’t trust him any more.

“Today it was just all about wanting to help us,” Claire replied. “He’s going to come looking for us.”

“If he does that, he’ll find us,” Mohinder said. He hesitated. “I still think that we should give him a second chance. With his help we could be much more effective in protecting the others.”

“We can’t trust him!” Micah said, his voice high and frightened. “Have you forgotten what he did to me?”

Mohinder looked down. “Of course I haven’t forgotten,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry, Micah. You’re right.”

“I promise,” Claire said, “I’ll kill him myself before I let him hurt anyone again.”

Matt didn’t look reassured by that promise, and she heard his voice in her head, a whisper against her thoughts. None of us would ask you to do that, Claire. Not even Micah.

She thought back: I know. That’s why I have to be the one to do it.

They got settled into the new safe house quickly before everyone assembled in the living room. There were quite a few of them there. Claire knew all of their names, but for a number of them she wasn’t sure which face went with which name. She was largely responsible for helping to rescue all of them, yet they were all beginning to blur together in her mind.

“I’d like to welcome everyone who is new here,” she began, standing at the head of the table and briefly making eye contact with Matt, Mohinder, Hiro, Molly, and Micah—the only ones left from the early days, when they had first banded together. At least, the only ones left whom she could trust. The rest were all rescuees, the ones that her people have risked life and limb to break out of the detention centers and camps that had sprung up all over the country. “You have two options before you. There’s a place out west, a safe zone, whose location is only known to two people in this room and the people who live there. It’s a small but growing environment where you will be safe—or at least as safe as it is possible for you to be. If you choose to join the colony, Hiro will take you there and I will wish you luck for the future.”

“You have another option,” she continued. “You can stay with us and help us fight. As you know, our organization is able to rescue six or seven mutants a month. I understand that this option won’t be for most of you. We are never safe, always on the run, and we are the number one target for both the feds and the company. You have no obligation to do this. Don’t decide now. Go away and think about it. I’ll need your answers by tomorrow morning.”

They filed out of the room, the veterans to begin planning their next strike and the rescuees to ponder their options. Claire didn’t think any of these would choose to stay and fight. And why would they, when the other alternative was so much better?

Once she was alone, Claire sat, elbows on the table and head in her hands. “You can come out now, Peter,” she muttered. She expected him to appear in front of her and was surprised to feel his strong hands on her shoulders, massaging.

“You look so tired,” he murmured.

For a minute she allowed herself to daydream, to imagine that this was four years ago and he was still her uncle Peter—her hero. The dream couldn’t last long, though. She had spent precious little time with Peter before the world went to hell, and most of her real memories of him involved a mixture of bittersweet sentimentality and bitter anger.

“I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in years,” she replied, shrugging off his touch. She turned to face him and found that he, too, looked tired. Not just tired, but weak. Like a puppy that’s been kicked one too many times.

Peter had spent too much time trying to save the world to remember to save himself. Even that had been okay, once upon a time, until he had forgotten that saving the world meant taking it as it was, rather than always harping on the past. She could have forgiven him just about anything, but leaving Micah unprotected as he went off to chase down a lead on how to fix the past, when he knew the feds were closing in, was too much. It didn’t make her love him any less, but it made him untrustworthy and that was almost work.

“Do you need a place to sleep tonight?” she asked, unable even to summon up a sense of pity any more. She was annoyed by his weakness, but too weak herself to turn him away when he was in this state.

He ran a hand tiredly through his hair, the hair that he had never grown back to its former length after Elle cut it so long ago.

“That would be...kind,” he said.

She sighed, nodded. Stood and let him lean on her as she led him up the stairs to her room. The bed was a double and she helped him to lie on the left side.

She turned to go—they could use her help in the war room—but he said, “Stay with me?” and, like a sap, she did. She sat on the bed beside him, carding her hand through his hair. There was a time, she reflected, when she had had such a crush on him—before she’d known he was her uncle, of course, though her feelings had lingered a bit even after that revelation. What was he to her now? She didn’t know.

“Why, Peter?” she whispered, not sure whether he was even still awake. “Why did you stop being my hero?”

“I am going to fix it,” he whispered back. “I swear, Claire. I will. I just need more time.”

“It’s been four years,” she said, taking her hand away, irritated once more. “You’ve had all the time you could need to go back, but you can’t. We both know you can’t. You can’t kill Nathan. It’s not a failing, Peter. The failing is not living in the present.”

“I should be able to,” Peter said. “Nathan’s dead anyway, isn’t he? What difference is it if I’m the one who does it?” He paused. “Could you do it, Claire? Could you kill Nathan? Could you kill me?”

She didn’t pause to think. She’d figured out the answer in her head enough times already. “Yes.”

His lips curved in a parody of a smile. “You’re stronger than I am.”

She didn’t respond to that. They both knew it was true.

“What would it take, for you to get the strength to go back and actually do what needs doing?” she asked, finding a strange sort of peace in the first real conversation they’d had in months.

“If I ever felt like I lost you completely,” Peter said, turning onto his side and opening his eyes sleepily to take in her youthful face. “If I ever felt like I lost you completely, I’d do anything to change that.”

She didn’t reassure him. She patted him gently on the arm, then went downstairs to join the others in the war room. When she came back upstairs hours later Peter was soundly asleep. She lay on the bed next to him and stared at the ceiling for a long time before sleep claimed her.

When she woke Peter was gone. She went downstairs and all eight of the rescuees asked to be taken to the colony.

Two months later she sent Peter a message, to an e-mail account she knew he checked frequently—because he stupidly still trusted her. She told him that she needed his help, that she would meet him at a group of warehouses they had spent some time in a long time ago, when everything had first gone wrong.

She wouldn’t be doing this, if he had just stayed out of their way. But no. He was too dedicated to finding a way to fix everything that would not involve killing Nathan—to find some solution in which Nathan would live and everything would be perfect. And in his search he had interrupted a rescue op, had gotten Matt caught by the company. God knew what they were doing to him right now. Matt didn’t deserve this. None of them did.

“Ask it to go on a time delay,” she told Micah, holding out the dormant tracker they’d extracted from one of the recent rescuees. The feds and company liked to tag their victims.

He put his hand over the small device, hesitated. “You don’t have to do this, you know,” he said, though the words clearly pained him. “Not for me.” When Peter had left Micah, had allowed the boy to be captured, Micah had been used and abused by the company, forced to commit less moral acts than rigging an election. He had been forced to see the terrible things done to his fellow “specials.” It had taken him years to recover.

“I’m doing what needs to be done,” she said. “Please, Micah…this is hard enough. Do it for me?”

Sighing heavily, he focused on the device for a moment before pulling away. “It’s done. It should go off in three minutes.”

She nodded. “Hiro?”

Looking uncharacteristically grim, Hiro took her by the arm and teleported her to the warehouse complex. “Are you sure that you want to stay here alone?” he said. “I could stay with you.”

She was tempted, but shook her head. “Thank you, Hiro,” she said. “He won’t hurt me. I need to do this alone.”

He bit his lip, teleported away. She gently set the tracker on the ground, then walked away, taking the long path to the nearest open door, her gun a heavy weight at her side.

She walked inside, took out the gun, and settled in to wait. If she’d timed it right, Peter would arrive at the same time as the feds. He wouldn’t teleport away, though; he’d be too sure that she was here somewhere, that she needed saving, and he would come looking for her.

She didn’t have to wait long. Less than an hour later she heard the sound of gun fire, and then silence for a long while, and then the pounding of boots against the pavement as he neared. She pictured his handsome, scarred face, and she brought up the hand that held her gun. Her heart pounded in her ears.

He burst through the door, facing away from her. She cocked the gun.

He stiffened, but she knew that he knew who she was. “Come on Claire, it’s me,” he said softly, turning to face her. “Put down the gun.”

“Can’t,” she said, stepping forward, steely determination in her voice and stride. She couldn’t let him see her tremble, even for an instant. “It ends here.”

“Wait!” he shouted, holding up his hand. “Think about it. Claire, it wouldn’t be like this if they’d never known about us. No camps. No experiments. No hiding underground hunted like this. All these powers—it’s going to destroy everything.”

“I made peace with that a long time ago,” she snarled, furious because he had waited until now to be so like the Peter that she remembered. Furious about what he was forcing her to do. “You never did.”

“What happened to you, Claire? How did you get to this place?”

“I’m different, remember? Special.” She spat the word out like it was something foul.

“I can fix all of this, everything. Please.”

She hesitated, her guilt getting to her for a moment despite the knowledge that this was her only choice. It wasn’t as though she could kill him like this anyway. If she wanted to do that, she’d take two steps closer to him and put the tip of the gun on his forehead. He’d let her, of course he would, and even he couldn’t stop time quickly enough to dodge at that range or regenerate once the bullet pierced his brain. Probably.

Her resolve hardened again, she stared him in the eye. You’ve lost me, you fool. Do what you said you’d do, she thought, but not too loudly—not loudly enough for him to inadvertently hear with his borrowed telepathy. “Sorry, Peter. I always loved you.”

Her finger twitched on the trigger, and suddenly Peter was gone, and her gun with him.

“Good luck,” she whispered, her hand dropping to her side. She sat down, resting against the wall, and waited. Waited for Hiro to come pick her up. Waited for this world to disappear, for this version of herself to be destroyed, in favor of a better one.

Response #2 to Another Century

2008-07-30T04:22:41Z

A little "what if?" set just before the cliff hanger at the end of season 4.

Milo Rambaldi does not like this place called Los Angeles. He does not like it at all.

It is too loud, and too crowded, and it is dirty and smelly in a way he has never experienced. It is just as he knew it would be.

His feet follow an unerring path to her home. He knows that he could take a, what is the word, taxi, and it would be much faster, but he daren’t speak to any but she, lest his accent give him away. It took him a long time to learn English as they speak it in this time, long nights going to that place in his head that allows him to see things that no other can see, and although he can understand all that is said around him he has no comfort with this language.

She finds ways of surrounding herself with beautiful things. The golden beach, steps away from her lovely house. Tasteful furniture. Her friends, who are beautiful inside and out. Even her father, who for all his hard edges is one of the most beautiful because of the force of his love for her. Even the man who would have been her father, who is beautiful for the way he sometimes ceased to be Milo’s devoted follower, and who is also often hideous.

He bypasses her security. She is not home, as he knew she would not be, and so he settles himself on her couch and amuses himself with the electronic picture box. He himself designed something similar, a long time ago.

She comes home late, looking tired and worn and exactly as he once drew her on a piece of parchment. She is returning from visiting the father of the Passenger, and is still confused by her own emotions, baffled to find herself once again united with him against a common enemy: the illness that keeps the Passenger dead to the world.

She has suffered much, his lovely Chosen One, and often in his name. He has known this all along, and yet it hurts to see it in her face.

Perceptive as she is, it still takes her a minute to register his presence in her house. Despite the fact that he does not fit in here, in this futuristic, noisy place, not in any way, he does nevertheless fit into her life. And perhaps she senses something of who he is, perhaps she knows that he is here to help, because though she draws a weapon she does not aim it.

His time in this time will be short, and he will make the most of it. This once, he will offer some of the truths she seeks, truths that take no time at all.

“Sydney,” he sighs, overcome by the unusual beauty of the name. This word he speaks with no accent, he has practiced so much. He rises, feeling the ache in his old bones, and stretches out both hands in welcome, and love. “Sydney.”

Response #1 to Another Century

2008-07-30T00:09:39Z

Marshall’s first thought, once the world had stopped spinning, was, I shouldn’t have pushed that button.

“Mi scusi,” someone said, before rattling off a string of words that he couldn’t understand and only somewhat thought resembled Italian.

He looked up, and found himself staring at an older man wearing a very strange outfit.

“Uh, hello,” Marshall said, pushing himself weakly to his feet and brushing ineffectively at his jeans.

The man in front of him frowned, tilting his head to one side and speaking again in that odd language.

“Um, hablar Inglese?” Marshall tried. “English? You speak?”

He grinned in relief as comprehension dawned in the old man’s eyes. “You are English?” the man said slowly, clumsily.

“American,” Marshall said. When that didn’t seem to ring a bell he said, “You know...the United States? Uh, land of the free, home of the brave?”

The man shook his head. “How you get here?” he said again. “My—home. My house.”

Marshall blinked. Looked around at the ornate foyer in which he had landed. “Oh,” he said. “Oh! I am so sorry! Look, I didn’t break in, I just—well, I’m not exactly sure how I got here, actually.”

The man held up his hand again, rather commandingly. “Who—you?” he demanded.

“Uh,” Marshall said. “Marshall. Marshall Flinkman.”

The man raised an eyebrow. “Milo,” he said. “Milo Rambaldi.”

“Ram—Rambaldi?” Marshall stammered. Oh god, oh god, oh god. This was the guy who had caused Sloane to betray them time and again—though Sloane being evil probably had a lot to do with that, too. The guy who had haunted Sydney for decades of her life, who had led to the deaths of her mother and father and her best friend and sister...

With that thought, the fear left him and his eyes narrowed as he stared into the face of the man who was an all around pain in the ass.

Ever so slowly, Marshall reached down to his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. Hands trembling, he aimed the antenna in the direction of Rambaldi, and held down the pound button.

Electricity shot out and into the older man, sending him into pained convulsions. Even when he cried out Marshall didn’t stop, not till his eyes finally rolled back as he fell unconscious.

A sudden pounding at the door drew his attention, quickly followed by the shouting of words that vaguely sounded like “police.” With a jolt Marshall realized that this must have been the day that Rambaldi was arrested and taken to prison for the rest of his miserable life. He hurried away from Rambaldi’s unconscious body, his heart pounding as he looked for somewhere to hide. Almost by accident he stumbled on a door with stairs that must have led down to a cellar.

He made his way down the slick stone stairs, feeling carefully through the darkness. He came out in a large room, lit by burning torches ensconced on the walls.

At the middle of the room was a table, and on the table were a bunch of things he knew all too well.

A music device, which Sydney would find and sabotage when she worked for SD-6 about, oh, five hundred years from now.

A clock, which Anna Espinosa would one day kill an old man to try to get.

A prototype of the Mueller device, a larger version of which would kill over a hundred thousand innocent people in Sevogda.

To one side, the same device that he had accidentally activated to send himself back in time—which theoretically, hopefully, would send him back to the future.

Rambaldi’s journal, and on top of it—page 47, Sydney’s angelic face staring up at him.

He’d bet good money that it wouldn’t be long before Rambaldi’s followers came to spread these things to the four corners of the earth.

Marshall looked over the many artifacts again, noting at last the quill resting in a pot of ink on the table. His eyes flitted from the quill to page 47 and back again. A slow smile stretched across his face, and he got to work. It only took him a couple of hours to do what he had to do.

“You don’t mess with a friend of the Flinkman,” he proclaimed with a grin, and pushed the button on the time machine again.

Oh, about five hundred years later…

Arvin Sloane, 30 years old and still reeling from the death of his infant daughter Jacquelyn, looked at the ancient page he held in his hands, then glanced up at the monk who had given it to him.

“Rambaldi directed his messengers to conceal this page with the rest of his journal,” the monk explained. “It was said to be his most vital page. The follower who was directed to hide it dared to glance at it, however, and what he discovered was…unusual. He chose instead to bring the page here, where it could be studied. Now I give it to you.”

Sloane looked at the page again. He had been intrigued by the rumors of Rambaldi since he had first heard them, though the ancient prophet’s inventions that had been discovered so far had been almost universal failures. He had still thought, though, that there might be some merit to being a follower of Rambaldi, a visionary who had seen so much.

With a sigh and a shake of his head, he tore his eyes from the ancient cartoon drawing of Daffy Duck—a drawing that almost looked like it had once been a woman’s face—and set the page on the table with less reverence than it was probably due.

“Rambaldi,” he said, disgusted. “What a joke.” He thought of how Jack would laugh if he saw him like this—a man of eminent intelligence and reason almost allowing himself to be drawn into such a ridiculous obsession.

He was on his way back down the mountain before the monk could try to stop him.

Strange Collaborations (1/2)

2008-07-13T21:52:27Z

Title: Strange Collaborations
Disclaimer: I own nothing to do with Alias!
Summary: A "missing two years" AU. What if Julia had had a different partner during her missing two years? Sloane/Sydney two-parter

When Arvin Sloane learned that Sydney Bristow was dead, he killed the messenger.

Then he went to her funeral and watched through a telescopic lens as her ashes were cast out to sea.

And then he planned to approach Jack about coordinating a revenge strike, something to give them both strength and purpose in the wake of the death of the most important person in their life, only to discover—to his jealousy and displeasure—that Jack had already found a wanted fugitive with whom to join forces, and it wasn't Sloane.

So instead he did something he had not planned on. He turned himself in to the CIA and cut a deal, and he began to build himself a new life as Arvin Sloane, Great Philanthropist. It was a lonely existence, and not nearly so gratifying as it had been to be Arvin Sloane, Evil Mastermind, but he found that it became easier and easier to endure as time went by. He could almost forget about Sydney, and Rambaldi (the two were so entwined in his mind as to be almost inseparable), and even Emily, poor Emily, who was the only person who had loved him after finding out what he was. He wondered often where Jack Bristow and Irina Derevko were, whether they were having any more luck than he in hunting down Sydney's killer.

There were times when he was even almost content.

Which was why he was so displeased when the Covenant, an uppity new organization seeking to take the place of the Alliance, and K-Directorate, and FTL, managed to dig up one of his skeletons he thought had been permanently squirreled away. It wasn't as though the CIA or NSA would be surprised to learn that he had been hiding a few things from them, but patriotic government officials tended to be rather prickly, and it was quite possible that his execution, which had been postponed by his promise of good behavior, might be put back on the official roster were this particular skeleton to be revealed.

And so he became a Covenant agent. Not a field agent, of course, at least not usually. No, he was more useful to them as a Rambaldi scholar with ties to other Rambaldi enthusiasts (obsessionists).

The Covenant was smart, but not as smart as it thought it was. If they'd known how much Sloane kept to himself, how many times he'd purposefully destroyed or exchanged the objective for a useless fake, well...Sloane would probably have become a skeleton himself. There was a certain thrill to what he was doing, an excitement that had a little to do with being back in the spy business and a lot to do with the feeling that this was bringing him somehow closer to Sydney—for she had practiced this very deception upon Sloane himself, and done it brilliantly.

And perhaps it was because he was thinking of Sydney, and how she had had to work around Dixon all those years at SD-6 (Sloane still could not think about him without a flash of red filling his vision, the red of Emily's blood on his hands, and sometimes he could not remember whose hands he was thinking of—Dixon's or his own), but it was anticipation and not disappointment that Sloane felt when he was informed, three months after he began to work for the Covenant and ten months after Sydney's death, that he was being given a partner.

"What is his name?" he had asked when he was first told.

His handler, an unpleasant fellow by the name of Karl, grinned and answered, "That would spoil the surprise."

Sloane met his partner a week later, at a warehouse on the outskirts of the city. He was the last to arrive in his sleek sedan. A red convertible and black town car had beaten him there.

Karl was lounging in front of the building, smirking like the cat that tortured the canary before eating it piece by piece. "Arvin," he said cordially.

Sloane smiled pleasantly. "Karl."

"Your partner is inside," Karl said, gesturing to the open door. Sloane did not understand the expression on the other man's face, wouldn't let it distract him.

He stepped to the door, looked inside.

Time froze. His heart stopped. His foot froze mid-air.

Impossible.

From a distance, he heard Karl say, "Arvin Sloane, this is Julia Thorne."

Time resumed. Sloane felt his foot come down, not quite stumbling. And Sydney/Julia Bristow/Thorne/Derevko smiled coolly. Extended one slim arm and waited for him to dumbly take hold of her well-manicured hand. The shape and warmth of her hand were so familiar to him.

"Arvin," she said in an impeccable British accent. "A pleasure to meet you."

Sydney had never called him Arvin.

"Julia," he managed after a pause, and he was proud that his voice was even. "It is very good to meet you." He reluctantly released her hand, as though fearing she would disappear when he lost contact. But she simply raised an eyebrow as she stepped back.

"Karl," he said, not looking away from her face, fighting to keep his own face bland. "May I have a moment outside, please." It was not a request. They stepped out of the warehouse, walked far enough away that she could not hear them. Then in a voice cold as ice and deadly as steel he hissed, "Explain."

Karl did not seem to realize the precariousness of his position. He crossed his arms, leaned against a tree. "Explain what?"

Many people had been deceived by Sloane's age and average stature into believing that he was not a physical threat. Few made that mistake twice.

Quick as a cobra striking Sloane moved in, his forearm darting up to press against Karl's windpipe. "Sydney. Bristow. Is. Dead," he said clearly, articulating each word as if that would somehow make them more true—or less true, for a moment he wasn't sure which he preferred. Because if it was true, if Sydney had been alive all this time, in the Covenant's clutches, then Sloane could feel the immense relief that would come at knowing that Rambaldi had not failed him, had not been a lie; but he would also face the devastating truth that he himself had failed Sydney.

How could he have never doubted the reports of her death?

Karl was remarkably unfazed by Sloane's assault. He stared at the older man, wheezing through the bare space in his windpipe, and croaked, "Yes. She is."

Sloane released him, stepping away as though burnt.

Karl straightened his suit, took a moment to relearn how to breathe. "Sydney Bristow is dead," he said again. "Don't forget it. Julia Thorne is very much our creature."

"What did you do to her?" Sloane demanded, still fighting for composure, aware that his face was twisting into something...frightening.

Karl smirked. "You don't want to know,” he gloated, and Sloane resolved then and there that one day soon he would kill him. “Now, if you'll excuse me, I have responsibilities elsewhere. Julia has been briefed on your next assignment. I suggest you return before she gets bored. She can be rather destructive."

By “destructive,” it turned out, he meant that when left to herself Julia had a habit of carving disturbing pictures onto available surfaces. By the time Sloane returned to the warehouse, she was just finishing a charming rendition of a man biting into the throat of a struggling, live deer. For a moment Sloane almost thought the face resembled Jack Bristow, but then he turned his head and the angle of the light changed and he decided they looked nothing alike.

He tried to remember any artistic ability Sydney had ever shown; he did not think she had had much passion for visual art.

“I hope your complaint was not because I am a woman,” she said, digging the point of her knife a little deeper into the wall to finish the deer’s eye.

Sloane stepped a little closer, unable to maintain his distance. He resisted the urge to reach out and touch her. Likely “Julia” would not welcome such a touch; he knew that Sydney would not. “Not at all,” he said smoothly. “It’s just that you have a rather stunning resemblance to a woman I used to know.”

He looked for any indication, any sign that she knew what he was talking about. His eyes traced the lines of her too-thin face, a profile that he could have drawn from memory; a profile Rambaldi had drawn centuries ago. Her hair was all wrong, though, this pale, blonde color that had none of the richness of her natural brown. Her eyes were as he remembered them, color-wise, but they were so distant, so cool.

She raised an eyebrow, folded her arms across her chest. The knife had disappeared somewhere into her very predatory outfit.

“I have no family,” she said without batting an eye. “It must be a coincidence.”

He nodded. Looked around their surroundings. “I must admit that this would not be my preferred setting for us to get to know one another,” he said. “Would it be inappropriate for me to invite you to dinner?”

She smiled. It was not a gentle smile; there was a gleam in her eyes that would have frightened a lesser man. She named a restaurant in the heart of Zurich.

“A fine choice,” Sloane said. But then, Sydney had always had good taste in everything except men.

“Twenty minutes,” Sydney/Julia said. She was out the door before he could respond. He listened to the squeal of her tires as she peeled away.

For a full five minutes Sloane stood in the warehouse and simply breathed. It took a long moment for him to identify what he was feeling as...euphoria.

Then he went to his car and began to drive.

He did not know what to believe. Part of him, a weak, naïve part, insisted that Sydney had such strength of spirit that she could never be truly conditioned. She was Sydney Bristow, and no torture or drugs or abuse could ever change that. The realistic, world-weary part of him knew the truth. Anyone could break under torture. Anyone. Even Sydney.

Yet he doubted. He remembered Sydney’s time as a double agent at SD-6, the way she had deceived him so effortlessly. It was not a stretch of the imagination to think that she could be deceiving the Covenant in the same way. If that were the case—if she was truly still Sydney, and not Julia, then he must find a way to convince her that she could trust him. For perhaps the first time in her life she was out from under Jack’s constant eye, his protection. Her only ally in this was Sloane. It was a heady thought.

And even the alternative was not so bad as he had originally thought. Because even if she was Julia now, she was still Sydney at her core. She still had Sydney’s vitality, her intelligence, even her talent. And she had none of Sydney’s hatred for him.

Surely a brainwashed Sydney who could bear to be around him was better than a dead Sydney, which was all he thought he’d had only an hour ago.

By the end of the drive he had decided his course of action. He smoothly pulled up outside the restaurant and allowed the valet to take control of his car. It had taken him nineteen minutes to get there.

She was waiting inside, a smirk on her lips and a challenging light in her eyes. She let him pull her chair out for her.

“Julia, my dear,” he said with a pleasant smile, seating himself. He ordered a bottle of wine. “Tell me about yourself.”

“I am the very best,” she said. It was so good to hear her voice, even with the accent. “The Covenant is lucky to have me.”

That kind of arrogance was not like Sydney at all.

“How long have you worked for the Covenant?” he pressed. How long had it been since the Covenant brainwashed her? He had to believe that she would have held out for a very long time.

“Only a month,” she replied, sipping at her glass of wine. “I have been working with Simon Walker in Algeria.”

“Oh?” He was very good at infusing a wealth of meaning into a single word.

Her lips curved. “Oh, yes. Mr. Walker has certain...qualities...that make him an ideal partner,” she said. He couldn’t tell whether the words were meant to be a taunt. “Unfortunately, he lacks long-term vision.”

Sydney had never been much interested in long-term thinking, either.

“And you think I am more interested in the long-term?” he asked, sipping his own wine. It was a fine vintage, and he savored the boutique. Drinking a fine wine in a beautiful restaurant with Sydney Bristow. It was an experience the likes of which he had long ago ruled impossible.

Her shoulders moved in the barest shrug. “I’ve read your file, Arvin,” she said knowingly. “You are a bit of a Rambaldi expert, like myself. One cannot believe in Rambaldi without believing that his works will take a long time—dare I say, a lifetime—to complete.” She said “his” as she might speak of God, as though it were meant to be capitalized.

Sydney had never been obsessed with Rambaldi.

He shifted tangents. “Tell me about our first assignment.”

“We’ll be infiltrating the home of the ambassador from Nicaragua to England,” she said. She looked away as the waiter came to the table. She ordered her steak medium rare. She waited for him to place his own order before continuing. “He has recently come into possession of one of the Rambaldi batons. I believe he will be inviting you to an event at his home in the near future. I will be attending as your...assistant.”

Was it his imagination, or did she place a special emphasis on that last word?

She went on to discuss the details of their assignment. He half-listened, filing away the information for later; it sounded fairly routine, undoubtedly a warm-up exercise to test their partnership. He did not intend to give the Covenant any excuse to separate them. Not ever again.

By the end of the dinner he had catalogued twenty-two things that she had said to make him think she was not Sydney, and none to think that she was. Which made him place a large “1” in the “Sydney” column. Surely only Sydney could do such a perfect job of pretending not to be herself that she would not slip even once.

When they separated at the door, he thought of kissing her on the cheek, but settled for pressing her hand in his. He couldn’t get enough of her touch, it seemed. Her hand was warm and dry in his, her nails just sharp enough to remind him that she did not need a weapon to kill him.

“Good evening, my dear,” he said courteously.

He turned to enter his car and was just stepping inside when she called, “Arvin!” He looked up, half-expecting her to suddenly reveal herself as Sydney. Instead she shot him an anticipatory grin with a manic sparkle that was all Julia. “We’re going to have a lot of fun,” she said.

As he drove away he placed a “1” in the “Julia” column.

Part 2: http://dens-serpentis.livejournal.com/3471.html#cutid1

Strange Collaborations (2/2)

2008-07-13T21:48:49Z

Working with Sydney/Julia—he alternated between the names so smoothly in his head that it was as if they were almost the same—was one of the more delightful things he had done in his life so far. In all their time at SD-6 they had never worked together on missions, the danger of his exposure as head of the cell too great to allow him in the field. He had been relegated to conference rooms, only able to see her work from a distance. Then, in that brief time when he had wandered the earth in search of Rambaldi artifacts and Sydney had sought to stop him, she had always been his beloved enemy.

But now, now that she had come back to him, scarred and changed and as beautiful as ever, for the first time in their lives they could truly work together in the field, and he loved it.

He found that he did not even mind the loss of his authority over her; he half-tried to give Julia an order just once, and the look she shot him promised death if he finished his sentence.

“I’m going in,” she said, in that soft accent that he knew was unnatural and yet that she managed to make sound so very right.

“Copy that,” he said calmly, knowing that the words would be picked up by the microphone in his glasses. It was a pity they didn’t have someone like Marshall working for them, but then there was a certain satisfaction in doing things the old-fashioned way. He eyed the security guards at the exits as he surreptitiously took another champagne glass from a passing waiter. “You’re clear, Hera.” The call sign had been her choice; it was not a name he would have expected Sydney to choose.

It was their fifth mission together in as many weeks. He wasn’t sure what Julia/Sydney did in her time off, or even whether she stayed in Zurich or went elsewhere. They had been successful in every mission so far, though Sloane had had to significantly curtail his efforts to provide false Rambaldi devices to the Covenant. Sydney/Julia was far too perceptive for that; not for the first time he wondered how she had managed to deceive Dixon, who was one of the better agents who had worked for him, for so very long.

His own disguises tended not to be disguises at all; he was too well-known, his face too recognizable. Sydney/Julia, however, was of course a master, and had come along on missions as a dignitary herself, and a server, and several times as his assistant. Today she was breaking into yet another embassy vault.

It frustrated Sloane to no end that they had worked together for so long and yet he felt no closer to knowing whether Sydney—the Sydney he’d known—still existed, or whether “Julia” had overridden her completely.

He had tested. Sometimes subtly, sometimes not. He spoke to her often, on the long plane flights and car rides, of his great love for Sydney, Australia, or how much he enjoyed movies with Sidney Poitier, or even, on occasion, “Sydney, an agent I once knew.” His favorite verb became “bristle.”

She never flinched, of course, and he was never sure whether that convinced him more that she was Sydney or that she was not.

Perhaps the most convincing evidence so far that she was in fact Julia was her complete lack of seething hatred toward himself. Even back at SD-6 Sloane had felt Sydney’s antipathy toward him—understandable, of course, given his role in Danny’s death but still painful. She hadn’t tried to hide it too hard, not really, since that would have been unbelievable, but she had pretended to try to hide it and that was why he had not doubted her much earlier.

But with Julia there was no sense of pretense. When Julia looked at him there was no flash of disgust, no quickly-hidden moment of disdain. No disapproval at all. Just a sense of challenge, as though she saw in him someone with shared passions. Shared talents.

When she looked at him, he felt a surge of answering heat up and down his bones.

There was no alarm, but all of a sudden the guards began to move.

“Hera,” he murmured, placing the still full glass on a table, “you’ve been made.”

“I’m on my way out,” she said, sounding a little breathless, and he wondered how many men she had already dispatched. “Some help would be appreciated.”

It was the first time she had ever made that particular request, and he was instantly on the alert that something might be wrong—something more than the obvious. Perhaps she was hurt?

He quickened his steps toward the entrance she specified, hefting a short metal pole he found blocking off a side hallway. He hurried down the corridor, listening for the sound of battle, and found it not too far away. Sydney/Julia was facing off with three men, and for a moment she was so perfectly Sydney that he could only watch. Her movements were fluid, perfectly coordinated; effortlessly compensating for the fact that she was facing off against three much larger men. Then she caught sight of him and shouted, “Some help would be nice!” and he waded into battle, swinging the pole like a baseball bat.

He took out one man in the time it took Sydney/Julia to take out two. When the men were down Sloane watched as she calmly took a gun from the floor and calmly shot each man in the forehead. Protecting his cover, not hers. He couldn’t afford to be identified. She dropped the gun on the ground beside a body. Then she looked up, and her eyes widened, and she pushed him out of the way.

He saw her stumble back, eyes wide, before he heard the sound of the bullet. He spun to face the guard who had somehow come up behind them, saw the gun being redirected toward him, saw his own death, but before he could move a knife spun through the air past his head, end over end, to embed itself deep in the guard’s eye.

He turned back to Sydney/Julia, whose hand was outstretched from the throw. They stood there for a moment in that frozen tableau before her hand flew to cover her shoulder and the wound that gaped there. Not a fatal wound, he thought, but still quite bad.

He took the barest of moments to admire her ability to sneak knives past every metal detector she encountered.

“Give me your jacket,” she gasped, and he returned to the moment, his heart pounding in his ears and adrenaline surging. Her pupils were dilated from the pain. In an instant he swept off his jacket and placed it around her slim shoulders. “Now put your arm around me,” she ordered, “and don’t let go.”

Even knowing that their lives were at stake—even knowing that Julia/Sydney was hurt—even knowing that were she herself Sydney would have killed him for taking even this much liberty with her body—he felt a deep, secret pleasure at holding her so close to him. They moved through the crowd, the aging philanthropist and his assistant who had clearly had a bit too much to drink, without drawing much attention. As they waited for their car she began to shiver, and he could read the approval in the eyes of the servers and valets as he pulled her more tightly against him, offering further warmth.

“Thank you,” she said quietly to the valet who opened her door as she slid onto her seat. She shot him a tremulous smile.

Sloane climbed into his own seat, waited for both of their doors to close to say, “Stay conscious, Julia.” He glanced at her as he began to drive, noticed her worrisome pallor. The tang of blood was heavy in the air. “I have a safe house nearby. We’ll be there in the hour.”

She increased the pressure on her shoulder, wincing as she did so. “I’ll be all right,” she said tightly. She flashed a smile. “I’m getting blood on your jacket. My apologies.”

He half-smiled himself. “I’ll send you a bill,” he said. They drove in silence for a long time. The Danube Waltz drifted over the speakers of his rental car. “You took a bullet for me,” he said at last. “Why?” True, the wound was non-fatal, but she could not have known that it would be when she pushed him out of the bullet’s path.

She snorted, but the sound came out more pained than she probably meant it to. “I assure you, Arvin,” she said, using his first name as she always did, “I have no intention of going back to work with Simon Walker.”

Which was really no answer at all. He reflected, as he pulled in to park at the safe house, that the ones in the “Julia” column were coming to significantly outnumber those in the “Sydney” column. He could not believe that Sydney, even pretending to be someone else, would be willing to give her life for him. Nor would he ever have wanted her to.

The safe house was one of his old ones, and well stocked with emergency medical supplies. Except for morphine. He himself was allergic, and he had never expected to be in a position where he would take anyone else there. None of the Bristows, he had assumed, would ever put themselves that much in his control, and he would not care for anyone else enough to take risk this much exposure for them.

He took off his belt. “Bite down on this,” he said gently as he held out the fine leather. She looked mulish for a moment—so much like Sydney—and he thought she would refuse, but then she shifted and winced again and used her good arm to take the belt from him and place it between her teeth.

He carefully peeled his jacket away from her shoulder, watching clinically as the wound, which had begun to crust over at the edges, began to bleed profusely once again. He discarded the jacket, making a mental note to burn it later. Julia/Sydney did not need extra spare traces of her blood lying around for others to find.

“I’ll need to extract the bullet,” he said, knowing that of course she knew that but also wanting to offer the explanation before causing her excruciating pain.

“Just do it,” she said around the belt. He realized distantly, as he pulled on a pair of rubber gloves, that her accent had not slipped once.

He gripped her shoulder with his free hand, met her eyes. Then he dug his fingers into the hole in her shoulder, forcing himself to disregard her pain as he felt for the bullet. He found it at last, a small, almost innocuous hunk of metal, and pulled it out with a silent sigh of relief. He dropped it on the metal table. She was gripping the edge of the table, white-knuckled, but her gaze was direct, locked on his face.

“I’m going to disinfect the wound now,” he told her, unwrapping a bottle of cleaning solution from its shrink wrap. He didn’t warn her before spraying the liquid over the bloody hole, not wanting her to tense up. She hissed, eyes fluttering closed.

“A few stitches and we’ll be done,” he said in as soothing a voice as he could manage. He began to thread the needle.

“You’re quite good at this,” Julia/Sydney said. He glanced up, questioning. “Your bedside manner, that is,” she explained.

“My wife, Emily—” and his voice still cracked when he spoke about her “—suffered from lymphoma,” he explained, wondering as he did whether mentioning Emily might cause Sydney to reveal herself. She had always been very close to his wife. It had been another reason why he loved her. “I spent many months by her side when she was ill.”

He began to stitch the edges of the wound together, his hands perfectly steady.

“My parents died when I was a child,” Julia/Sydney said, with such pained reluctance that he was almost certain she really felt the pain her voice expressed. Perhaps she saw the softness in his eyes, because her expression tightened and she warned, “They were the only people I’ve ever loved—so when you’re in a similar position, don’t expect bedside manner from me. I don’t do sympathy. Or gentleness.”

This was, of course, the precise opposite of what he knew was true with Sydney.

His lips twitched in a smile. “I understand,” was all he said as he tied off the stitches.

Then he rested his hand on her other shoulder. “I’ll set up the cot so you can sleep for a few hours before we fly back to Zurich,” he said.

She did not protest. He watched over her while she slept.

She disappeared for a month after that, on Covenant business or her own he did not know. He only knew that the last time he had seen her she had been disappearing into the night in that red convertible of hers, blood still leaking from her stitched shoulder, and a month later she was striding into his office at Omnifam as if she had seen him the day before, wearing a tank top that revealed the healing scar across her shoulder.

“Julia, my dear,” he said, casually closing a document on his computer, unable to help his broad smile as he walked around his desk to approach her. “You’re looking very well.”

She did not touch her shoulder or acknowledge the injury in any way. She simply smiled her signature cool smile, looking beautiful.

“Why Arvin,” she said, hand on her hip—no doubt to show that some or all of the motion of her shoulder had been restored. “Did you miss me?”

And that was that. The next day they flew to Ontario and stole Rambaldi’s diary.

It was a month after that that Sloane became convinced, once and for all, that Sydney truly was gone and Julia had taken her place.

It was another routine mission—the kind that was always the most likely to go wrong—and another agency, it turned out, had beaten them to the punch. As they made their way down an off-limits corridor, the alarm sounded.

Julia/Sydney cursed.

“We need to go,” Sloane said.

It was too late, though; they both tensed at the sound of guards running toward them. A plan was just beginning to form in Sloane’s mind—the obvious option, and yet one that he still hesitated to use with her—when Julia/Sydney pushed him against the wall, framed his face with her hands, and began kissing him with all her might.

Needless to say, after the barest moment of pause he began to kiss her back.

He hardly noticed as the guards hesitated, watching them suspiciously before continuing past to apprehend the spies currently in the vault room. Julia didn’t let go, though, and neither did Sloane, knowing that they could come back any minute—at least, that was the excuse he used. In reality, he was lost, lost in her touch, her taste, her smell. Lost in the feel of her hands on his face, her silken hair twined around his fingers, the fierce press of her body against his. More lost than he had ever been before on a mission. Ever.

She was the first to pull away. “We need to go,” she said, repeating his own words, and the fact that she pretended not to be breathless was very interesting. He did not hide his own breathlessness.

She ran her hand through her hair—the closest he had seen her come to Sydney’s signature move of tucking her hair behind her ear—and waited for a moment as he straightened his suit.

If it had been Sydney—not that Sydney would ever have kissed him, mission or not—she would have pretended it had never happened. Julia, though, waited only until they got in the car to say, “Very nice, by the way.”

Staring straight ahead at his hand on the steering wheel, at the thin white line that encircled his right index finger, he very carefully did not blush. Arvin Sloane never blushed. This was the closest he had come in a long, long while.

Her red, red lips curved in a far too satisfied smile, and he thought: Sydney is gone. He was pleased that he was not so far gone that the thought did not hurt.

After that, everything changed, and nothing did.

Julia’s behavior did not change in the slightest, which made him wonder whether he had been missing signals all along. He felt over-sensitized, attuned to her in ways that he had not been before. The closeness of her, in the car with him. The feel of her arm linked through his as they walked into another ball, another dinner. The fire in her eyes that spoke of some passion he still could not identify.

He felt that they got to know each other—truly know each other—much better, too, now that his suspicions were mostly laid to rest. He stopped looking for traces of Sydney and started to learn Julia as more than an alias. Over the next six months, he learned about her troubled childhood, starting when she was orphaned at an early age and taken in by an abusive uncle, whom she had executed when she was fifteen. He learned about her training by a small organization that had taken her for granted, until the day she turned on them and brought them to their knees. He learned about the various tortures she had endured, the torments and abuses that had honed her into a weapon that preferred knives to guns and killed without remorse. He wondered how many of those tortures the Covenant had inflicted in the process of breaking her, and found that he could not wonder for too long for fear that his fury would overcome him as it had once before, after Emily was shot.

He wondered, sometimes, what she had learned about him. Looking at her, seeing Sydney’s face, he couldn’t help but think at times that she must already know everything important there was to know about Arvin Sloane. Yet there was a certain desperation present when she asked him about his past, when she fell asleep on the plane and let her head loll on his shoulder, or even when he allowed himself to touch her shoulder or face, a desperation that reminded her that this was someone completely new.

He never lied to her in all that time, except to call her “Julia.”

It took those six months before anything like the kiss happened again. It was after another of Julia’s mysterious disappearances. He would have suspected that those disappearances might have had something to do with the theft of several Rambaldi artifacts from DSR custody—or the destruction of a Covenant cell in South Africa—if either of those events had coincided with her absences. But they had not.

He took advantage of those times to further certain of his own endgames. One plan that had been on hold for a while, when he had believed Rambaldi had failed him, only to come back into play with Julia’s appearance. The search for the child he had only just been told existed.

Six months after the kiss, it was the first time she had ever come to his house, and it was the middle of the night. He was awake, for whatever reason, sitting at his long, empty dining table, a half-empty glass of water beside him and a copy of The Iliad in the original Greek lying, unopened, before him.

The doorbell rang.

It was raining outside, cold, torrents of rain. And Julia was standing on his porch, looking the most like Sydney he had ever seen her—vulnerable, and needy, and lost. She wore a trench coat, but even that was plastered to her body by the force of the rain. Her blonde hair was darkened by the rain, almost to its natural color.

“Julia,” he said, stepping back, inviting her wordlessly inside. “Let me get you a towel.”

She tried to smile, didn’t quite manage. By the time he returned she had removed the trench coat; her clothes were dry underneath. She used the towel to dry her face, hands, and hair, evidently unconcerned by the way he watched her.

She was dry by the time she was done, but not composed. It was the first time he had seen Julia’s hands shake. She tucked them under her arms and met his eyes from beneath a curtain of hair.

“Julia,” Sloane said gently, touching her arm. “What’s wrong?”

She shook her head, stepped closer to him. “I can’t—I just.” She stopped, started again. “Would you just—hold—” She shook her head again. He waited patiently, wondering what she was keeping himself from saying. She pressed the heel of her hand hard into her forehead, and the next words that came from her were raw. “God, you’re the only one—” She stopped again. He saw the moment when she made up her mind, when her head came up and her expression focused, and she dropped the towel to the floor.

She stepped in closer, smelling of salt and rainwater and Sydney, and she kissed him.

He kissed her back for a long moment before he found the strength to pull away. This was so wrong, on so many levels. “Julia—what—” but she interrupted again, pressing back in, and this time he was helpless to stop her in the face of her determination and his extreme lack of desire for this to end.

Thunder crashed, and lightning flashed, and the rain had almost stopped by the time they made it to his bedroom.

Three days later, Sloane learned through one of his contacts that Michael Vaughn had gotten married earlier that week. If he suspected that that might have caused Julia’s behavior—and perhaps a part of him did suspect—he was willing enough to believe otherwise.

That night was the most vulnerable he ever saw Julia. It was not, however, the only time they indulged in their mutual attraction.

Perhaps at times he wondered what it was she saw in him—certainly there were other men who would be more of a match for her physically, such as the once-mentioned Simon Walker—but he flattered himself that, just as he had made himself a father figure to Sydney once when she had needed one, so he now occupied some position that Julia needed.

Two years after Sydney Bristow’s death, Sloane and Julia uncovered a Rambaldi document that spelled the beginning of the end.

Per their usual procedure, they did not immediately turn the document over to the Covenant, but brought it back to Zurich to interpret themselves. It was a difficult cipher and took both of them working together 24 hours to crack.

At last, exhausted, triumphant, Julia read, “And the Chosen One shall bring forth a Gift.” She looked up from the page, her brow furrowed. “The Chosen One?” she said.

Sloane poured himself a glass of water. “Hmm,” he said. “Rambaldi speaks in some of his documents of a Chosen One, someone he considered special to his plans. I’m surprised that you’ve never heard of her.” No he wasn’t. The Covenant would not have trusted even their own brainwashing enough to expose Julia to the Chosen One.

“Her?” Julia said, taking the glass from him and sipping at the water before passing it back. He was still unaccustomed to—and perpetually thrilled by—such casual contact.

“Several years ago, the Chosen One was identified to be an agent I used to know,” he said. Dare he say the name? For some reason he was reluctant to do so.

“What happened to her?” Julia asked, perhaps sensing his hesitance.

He met her eyes. “She died,” he said simply. “Murdered, by the Covenant. It was...a terrible blow.”

Her expression was mildly sympathetic. “I’m sorry,” she said.

He leaned over her to see the parchment. “This,” he said, drawing his finger beneath a line of text, “this is a formula.”

“Bring forth a Gift,” Julia repeated. “Normally, I would think Rambaldi was speaking about the production of a child. I don’t see how that could be, if this Chosen One is dead.”

He couldn’t quite stop himself from letting his hand drift around her side to rest against her stomach. He remembered that Sydney had told him once, a long time ago, that Danny wanted to have several children. He had enjoyed thinking of Sydney as a mother at the time.

What would the Covenant do if they got their hands on this document? He knew all too well. Take Julia back into custody, torture her, perhaps rape her, extract her ovaries. All in the name of Rambaldi.

And what could he do with this information? He could not deny that his mind was racing through the possibilities. Julia trusted him, perhaps loved him as much as she was able. And she was as much a Rambaldi follower as he was. If he explained a few things—left a few things out...

He was surprised to find that the idea did not hold the appeal that it once would have.

“Julia,” he said slowly, pulling back, taking up the Rambaldi document. “We have not discussed our respective loyalties much, have we?”

She went still. “No,” she said after a pause. “No, we have not.”

He nodded, looking at the page. “I would like to burn this,” he said, though it pained him to even make the suggestion.

“Burn it.” She sounded as she might if he suggested torturing a child to death; more surprised, perhaps.

“This page presents a threat to someone very dear to me,” he said, reluctant to reveal even that much. How strange, to fear that she might betray herself to the Covenant if her ties to them were as strong as the Covenant believed. “I would sooner see it destroyed than have her come to harm.”

He couldn’t read her expression.

“Even if that meant that all our work was for nothing?” she said. “Even if it meant trying to foil Rambaldi at his own game?”

Once again he was aware of the many ways she could kill him if she chose to do so.

“Yes.”

She stared at him for nearly a minute. “Do it,” she said.

He carried the page to the crackling fire of the safe house. With great regret he tossed it in, and watched as the aged parchment was rapidly consumed.

When he turned back around it was Sydney Bristow who was looking at him.

“I didn’t think you’d actually do it,” she said. She had shed Julia the way a leopard sheds its skin. That cold persona she’d pulled around herself was gone as if it had never been, and her eyes and face were alive in a way that he had fiercely missed. She was stronger and more vulnerable than Julia had ever been.

“Sydney,” he said, extending his hand though he didn’t know what he expected her to do with it.

Her eyes went to the fire. “I would have done it myself, if you hadn’t. But...thank you for that.”

“Sydney,” he said again, other words abandoning him for once.

“I’m going away, Sloane,” she said, calling him by his last name for the first time in two years. “I wasn’t going to reveal myself, but hard though it is for me to believe—you’ve actually been a friend to me, these past months.” She didn’t even look sick, speaking about that time.

“Sydney,” he said one last time, and was not surprised when her fist lashed out and caught him across the temple, dropping him like a sack of potatoes.

When Sydney showed up in his office a month later and slammed into his desk, her expression showed nothing but hatred. He searched her eyes for any memories of the past two years and found...nothing.

It hurt, to think that she had wiped it all away. But then, he did not think he would ever believe that she actually chose to remove her own memories. She was too strong for that. And he had no doubts about her ability to fake amnesia, even with the one person who had truly known her during her missing time. It was what she did, after all.

Spending Eternity 4/?

2008-07-07T13:11:35Z

So sorry for the insanely long delay, everyone. Last semester was pretty awful. Hopefully I'll be more consistent now!

It had been a long time since Sydney had been able to sleep through the night. That night she lay in bed for nearly four hours, staring at the dark ceiling and trying not to disturb the snoring dog beside her.

At three a.m. she got up, went to her office, and booked a flight to Mongolia.

She arrived at the cave—the god awful cave that was the source of more than one of her nightmares—barely more than 24 hours later, after only a brief detour in Prague. She drove up the wide dirt road in a military-style truck, her hair pulled back tight from her thin face. Dark sunglasses covered her eyes and for the first time in a long while she wore tan camouflage garb.

The truck pulled to a stop before the cave, loose rocks crunching beneath its tires. The area was deserted; from what Sydney understood the cave was now considered by the locals to be cursed.

The mouth of the cave was well blocked by a pile of rocks that filled it entirely. It looked just as she remembered from the last time she was there. It was the same day her father had been shot, the same day her mother had fallen through a glass ceiling in a fruitless attempt at immortality. She had been battered and bruised, filled with a soul-deep weariness that threatened to pull her down into some dark place she did not dare to go. And then Vaughn had come with his soulful eyes and furrowed brow and she had recalled who she was, who she had to be. She was the strong one, the one who knew what needed to be done and did it.

“We need to go back to Mongolia,” she said, because she knew, just knew, that her father had not been evacuated by the helicopter they’d sent.

He swallowed and nodded and ran off to make the arrangements, leaving her to stare at the broken form of the woman who had said “for what it’s worth, I really do love you” and then tried to kill her. Sydney shuffled forward, body stiff, and bent to pick up the sphere that lay close to her mother’s outstretched hand. She stared at it for a long moment, running her thumb over its slick surface, and when she heard Vaughn approaching again she swiftly tucked it into her backpack.

By the time they got back to the cave, of course, it was all over. She stared at the wall of rock blocking the entrance to the cave, a lump in her throat as she thought about what it meant.

“We can dig our way in,” Vaughn offered, his hand comforting against the small of her back. “It’s possible that—”

“No,” she interrupted softly. The only one who could have set off the bomb that brought the cave in was Jack Bristow. She had no intention of digging into that rock and unearthing pieces of her father. She didn’t want that, and she knew that he would not have wanted her to. “No, Vaughn, it’s not.”

Staring at the blockage now, she searched for the new hole that must be there, one large enough for an adult male. At last she spotted it, a splotch of darkness against one of the uppermost corners.

With a decisive nod Sydney tucked a small hand-held pick into her belt. She set her foot against one of the lower rocks, feeling carefully for a steady handhold. She clambered up the short rock wall with imperfect grace until she reached the hole. She peered into the darkness and saw nothing.

She pulled a flashlight from her belt and clenched it carefully between her teeth, taking a deep breath as she wormed her way into the hole. The small tunnel was tight but not too tight; it had been made to accommodate a man larger than she was. She grunted as she pushed herself a short distance before she reached the end, letting the sturdy flashlight fall to the ground below to illuminate the small cavern. She heaved herself through the hole, lowering herself uneasily to the ground before picking up the flashlight again.

This was the place where her father died.

She shook away the thought. It wasn’t helpful at the moment, and he would have been the first to chastise her for allowing herself to become distracted by sentimental remembrances.

The beam of light swept around the cavern. Most of it was still buried in rock. One rock in particular drew her attention and her eyes narrowed as she approached it. It was a large boulder, resting fully upon the ground. The dirt beneath and around it was somewhat indented from years of having a human shape pressed hard against it.

Looking closer she grimaced at what she saw. What had looked at first like dark smudges against the gray rock were in fact smears of old blood. A fingernail was buried in one of the boulder’s many crevices, torn off from desperate clawing at the rough surface.

She sat back, rubbing the heel of her hand tiredly against her forehead. She tried to imagine Sloane’s imprisonment here, buried underneath a boulder that was impossible to lift. He must have broken his own ribs to pull himself free. It must have taken him months at least to get out. She wished she understood more about what the sphere had done to him; had he been weakened by the lack of food and water? Had he experienced pain, or simply the discomfort of physical restraint and solitude?

A thin smile spread slowly across her face. “Nice job, dad,” she whispered into the stale air.

She sighed as she stood, glancing around the cavern once more to make sure she hadn’t missed any important details. Then she left the cave as she’d entered it, careful not to dislodge any of the precariously perching stones.

Standing outside the cave again she found herself blinking in the bright sun. She stood unmoving for several long minutes. When she finally moved it was only to bend at the waste, trying to breathe past the blockage in her throat. She tried to will away the tears in her eyes but could not, could not restrain the sobs building in her chest and spilling out of her traitorous mouth.

Emelia Costa did not cry because she had nothing to cry about. It was impossible to be Emelia Costa when standing outside of Jack Bristow’s grave.

It was some time before her harsh breaths gave way to even breathing again. She stayed in the same position, bent over with her hands on her knees, staring at the ground where her tears had darkened the dirt.

Then she pulled a cell phone from her belt, the item that she had retrieved in Prague. She flipped it open with a steady hand, dialing in a quick stream of numbers. It rang once.

“It’s me,” she said. “Yes, that’s right. It’s time for a change in plan.”

************************

Sloane stood in the sun and tried not to cringe. It had been a long time since he’d subjected himself to the harsh Los Angeles sunlight, and though he had missed many things about California, this was not one of them. The sun here seemed brighter, starker somehow than the sun in Italy. It left him feeling peeled back, exposed even as he blended into the endless mass of people in the city.

A young woman hurried rudely past him, not apologizing as she knocked him slightly off balance, and he glared after her through his dark sunglasses.

At least when he’d lived here in the past he’d felt a sense of power despite his seeming physical insignificance. He enjoyed looking at the people around him—the tall man his own age, the mother with her three bawling children, the old woman with the walker—and knowing that with a stroke of his pen he could end their lives. He did not enjoy murder—despite what most of his enemies and all of his friends might think. What he enjoyed was the sense of power implicit in the ability to take the life of another human being.

Even now it would not be too difficult to arrange the death of any of the people he saw on the street today, but the thought did not hold the appeal it used to. Any such action on his behalf if traced back to him would undoubtedly bring Sydney’s wrath down on his head, and though he did intend to have significant contact with her in the future he hoped it would be slightly more amicable than with her simply attempting to kill him.

He walked past Credit Dauphine and kept going, though that had been what he’d come to the city to see. This place more than anywhere else in Los Angeles was a reminder of the time when he had been truly powerful, truly in control of himself and a significant portion of the world around him. He found that he did not miss it.

He flagged a passing taxi and directed the driver to a small park on the outskirts of town. He found himself a bench and settled down to wait. He didn’t have to wait long; not ten minutes later the people he was waiting for arrived: six year old Isabelle and two and a half year old Jack, accompanied by their babysitter, young Robin Dixon.

His breath caught at the startling similarities between Isabelle and Sydney. When Sydney was the same ago she was almost identical to this girl, except for the eyes. Isabelle had her father’s eyes and for that Sloane resented Vaughn all the more. Jack’s resemblance to his mother was more subtle; in fact, if Sloane had to pick he would say that Jack most strongly resembled his namesake. He, like his mother and sister, had inherited the charmingly large Bristow ears. He moved with a kind of cautious gravity, too, that reminded Sloane of Jack although it really might have been a result of his unsteadiness as his little legs moved over the wood shavings which covered the park floor.

Sloane counted three people besides himself who might have been at the park to keep tabs on the children. Two might have been there for another purpose; the way their eyes slid over the children to find other targets suggested that they might be waiting for someone, or something, else. The last watched the children intently, eyes flitting from her John Grisham book to the children and back again. Sloane stared at the young woman, wondering who she worked for and what their intentions were.

The woman looked up and met his eyes. He could tell from her reaction that she worked for Sydney. Her eyes widened, indicating that she recognized him, but she did not look shocked by his presence, as though someone had warned her to look for him. She did not go for a weapon, but lifted her watch and pointed it in his direction, very obviously taking a picture with the camera that must be hidden there.

He arched an eyebrow and nodded courteously in her direction before returning his attention to the children. Let the watcher assure Sydney that he did not approach them or make any threatening gestures. He simply came to see what it was about them that had enabled Sydney, the most loving and selfless person he knew, to leave them in the dubious care of their father.

Isabelle was pushing Jack on the swing set, eyes watchful and protective as the little boy’s face scrunched up with glee.

He watched for nearly an hour—until the sun began to set and Robin collected the children and ushered them home. Sydney’s watcher shot him another glance as she left, following the small party from a careful distance.

Sloane tapped his gloved fingers against his lips as he stared in the direction they had gone. Sydney had not left them for lack of love, that was obvious. Jack had just been a baby at the time, of course, and Isabelle…she was so like Sydney at that age that he could not understand how anyone, especially Sydney herself, could fail to love her.

So it must have been too much love that had driven Sydney away. A threat to the children, probably. Otherwise she could never have left.

He caught a plane back to Italy—with detours to several other cities just in case anyone should be following, of course—later that evening. He resisted the urge to visit his old home or the Vaughn household; either would be too risky. He had seen what he came to see.

*******************************

Sydney sprinted the last hundred feet to the front door of her house before allowing herself to collapse, panting. Sweat dripped down her face and Will, who had fallen behind in the last stretch, pounced upon her with a lolling grin and began to clean her face with his tongue.

One of her arms came up to shield her eyes from the bright sun. She gave herself a moment to recover before she began to stretch; she was not old by any stretch of the imagination, but she had begun to notice a stiffness in her limbs that had not been present before.

Probably the result of countless experiences with electroshock before she turned thirty.

Her cell phone chirped. She exhaled deeply before pulling it from the shallow pocket of her running shorts.

“Yes,” she said, her voice slightly less crisp than usual due to harsh breathing she couldn’t quite control.

The voice on the other end spoke and she groaned as an expression of mixed aggravation and amusement flashed across her face. “None of your business what I’m doing,” she said. “Why are you calling?”

At his words she sat up abruptly, eyes narrowed in fury. “When? He didn’t speak to them, do anything threatening? No. No, I’ll take care of it. Yes, I have it under control. You just stay focused.” She snapped the phone shut as she lay back down on the grass, but she was unable to recapture the peaceful feeling she had been experiencing just minutes before.

After several minutes of trying and failing she let out a sigh and sat up, pulling Will’s head into her lap. She stroked his fur for a few moments.

“Whaddya think, Will?” she asked idly. “Time to go see just how real that immortality is?”

The dog barked, tongue lolling in a grin from the side of his mouth.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” she said, pushing his head away as she pushed herself purposefully to her feet.

The ache in her bones was gone as if it had never been.

*******************************

Sloane regarded the man across his desk with narrowed eyes.

“You did not get the dart,” he said, leaning back in his chair and feeling eerily reminiscent of his old SD-6 days.

Colin Acre, a handsome British national who had spent significant time in Zurich and the United States, blinked once. “No, sir,” he said smoothly, not intimidated by his employer.

Sloane’s lips twisted in a frown. “It took us nearly a month to determine the dart’s location,” he reminded the other man. “What went wrong?”

Colin met his eyes evenly. “I infiltrated the gala at the Argentine embassy, but by the time I reached the safe in which the dart was being held another man had beaten me there. I had not seen him before, but I recognized him from your description.”

Sloane sat up straighter. “Who was it?” he asked intently.

“Julian Sark.”

A sharp breath was Sloane’s instinctive reaction. Sark. He hadn’t thought of the man in years, beyond a passing speculation of what might have become of him.

“You fought?” he asked.

For the first time Colin showed some emotion, a light blush staining his pale cheeks. “I didn’t get the chance,” he confessed. “Someone struck me from behind before I could confront him, knocked me unconscious.”

“I see,” Sloane said, his voice heavy with disappointment. He ran his finger around the rim of a glass of water. “So we are back to square one.”

Colin cracked a smile. “Not quite, sir,” he said. At Sloane’s expression he explained, “I did some digging before I came here. This is not the first Rambaldi artifact which has been stolen recently. In fact, a number have disappeared lately, all over the globe. According to my contacts, Sark was seen at or near almost all of the sites from which the artifacts were taken.”

Sloane nodded. Colin’s competence was always a breath of fresh air; it had been the reason he had carefully cultivated a mentor/mentee relationship with the younger man during his later years at SD-6 and his time at Omnifam.

“Well done,” he said. “I do not believe Sark is working on his own; the last time I saw him he was far from being a mastermind himself.”

“There’s more,” Colin said, an excited gleam in his eye. “This is more rumor than certainty, but I dug a little further and I found something…very interesting. There have been whispers in the international community lately, whispers about a woman some say is pulling Sark’s strings.”

“Do you have a name for this woman?” Sloane demanded.

“Yes,” Colin said. He paused for a moment as if to build the suspense. “They say her name is Anastasia Derevko.”

A beat of silence passed before Sloane said, “Is it possible that this is an alias of Katya Derevko’s?”

The agent’s shoulders began to move in a shrug before he thought better of the motion and forced them still. “I don’t know,” he said regretfully. “No one’s caught sight of her. My guess would be that this is someone else.”

Sloane nodded thoughtfully, leaning back again. “Thank you, Colin,” he said. “Keep looking into the location of the map. If you learn anything else about this new Derevko…inform me immediately.”

“Of course,” Colin said. He nodded respectfully and turned to go. Sloane’s voice stopped him.

“Oh, and if you see Sark again—get rid of him.”

The agent’s smile widened, showing the tips of his white teeth. “My pleasure, sir.”

Sloane waited until the other man was out the door before relaxing.

Anastasia Derevko. The name sent shivers down his spine. He had thought that Katya was the only remaining Derevko. Like Colin he did not believe that Katya had assumed a new first name. Was it possible that Irina had had another child? The thought was simultaneously delicious and terrifying—her offspring seemed to live to influence his life. Elena claimed never to have reproduced—a fact for which Sloane had been supremely grateful—but then the woman lied more often than she spoke the truth. It was also possible that Katya had a child of which he had been unaware, though he had always thought that if that particular Derevko ever found herself pregnant she would abort it immediately.

He tried to decide which option he preferred before he realized that it didn’t matter. Whoever this Derevko was, she was collecting Rambaldi artifacts, and that made her a threat to both Sydney and Sloane himself.

Speaking of Sydney…It had been nearly a month since Sloane had last seen her. It was time to drop in on his favorite ex-agent again.

Two Alias500 responses

2008-07-07T04:08:52Z

Two "What Ifs?"

It wasn’t that she was appalled that Danny had asked permission to marry her. Danny was an old-fashioned guy, even if Sydney was not an old-fashioned gal. No, what drove her crazy was that her father had known Danny was going to propose, had known for weeks, and hadn’t given it away.

She had thought that she knew her father as well as she knew herself. She hadn’t thought that he could deceive her.

It was his ability to look her in the eye and lie that first made her suspicious. She began to watch him for signs of deceit. She examined the deliberate way he chewed his food. She waited for the moments when he put his hand on her shoulder and tried to feel whether there was anything else he might be hiding.

Her father watched her, watching him.

“Sydney,” he said one day. “I want you to know that I trust you more than I trust anyone else. I love you.”

She smiled. Though she never doubted her father’s love, it was rare for him to be demonstrative. So she leaned in as he pressed a kiss to her forehead. And she stopped watching him.

It wasn’t until a month after Danny proposed that her deceit became unbearable. She had thought that she could bear it, lying to him every day. Then she thought of what her father had said—that he trusted her completely—even if that hadn’t been quite what he said—and she knew that she had to be able to trust Danny. They loved each other, after all. How could she keep anything important a secret from him?

The moment she got back from Tai Pei she knew something was wrong. When she looked in the bathtub she felt as though her stomach had been ripped out.

She huddled there, collapsed on the tile with Danny’s bloody body clutched in her hands, for hours. She didn’t know where to go, what to do. She thought of her father. “I love you,” he had said. She threw up.

Her truck screeched to a halt in front of the home of her early childhood. She stared for long, painful moments at the house that had been engrained on her memory. She rang the doorbell.

It took Jack Bristow a moment to recognize her.

“Sydney,” he said.

He looked old. She socked him in the eye and felt his cheekbone give.

She stared down at him. He had Danny’s blood on his face.

“I waited for you,” she said quietly. “I waited for you for six years, before I gave in and started calling him dad. I wanted you, not him. But you never came. You left me for Arvin Sloane to raise. You son of a bitch.”

She left him there and did not look back.

He was the last person to see Sydney Bristow. Her truck was later discovered in the ocean, having been driven off of a bridge. Her body was never found.

She is used to his hand on her shoulder. Even now, three years (counting the two when she was dead) after she last worked for him, the feel of his hand is something familiar.

In a way, it’s even almost comforting. Those two years as a double agent at SD-6 had been hellish, yes, but compared to the years that came after they were almost a blessing.

When his other hand comes to rest on her other shoulder she can’t help her surprised flinch. This is not something she expects. She wonders if this looks to the others the way it feels to her. She, sitting, he, with both hands on her shoulders. It’s a possessive positioning.

She is used to his desire to offer comfort after a particularly traumatic assignment. In her second year as an agent, after she saw her partner murdered in front of her, he had been the one to find her huddled in an obscure corner, and he had put his arm around her shoulders and murmured words of comfort.

Even so, she is surprised when he comes to find her after a difficult assignment for APO—nothing really special about it, except for the fact that for some reason she feels like she’s about to crawl out of her skin. She’s not surprised that he finds her, but she's surprised by what he does next. He crouches beside her, and he pulls her into an embrace. He has never hugged her before, always too careful to observe propriety. This—this parody of affection, this positioning that is so very wrong—is way outside what she should allow in their relationship.

She allows it, and that is the most surprising part of all.

She is used to going to his house. She went often enough when she was at SD-6. It feels strange being there now, without Emily, without pretense, without any real reason to be there at all except that she wants to understand why he invited her. She wonders whether he understands it himself.

He pours her a glass of wine from a bottle that he could never have afforded on an honest government employee’s salary. He leans over her to pour, his hand warm on her shoulder, his chest warm against her back.

They avoid painful topics. Which means that they don’t talk about her father, or his daughter, or her mother, or his wife, or their work, or even the merits of the Lakers, which had been a favorite topic of theirs a long time ago.

When he offers her coffee after dinner she should decline. She accepts. He sits next to her on the couch and like a teenage boy at a movie theater he casually rests his arm on the back of the couch behind her shoulders, then lets his hand drop so that his arm is curled around her. He leans into her, and she is distantly surprised that he smells good.

She allows it, and that is the most surprising part of all.

Is it sick that my response to this prompt is to eagerly go and write first a "Sloane as Sydney's surrogate father" fic and then a "Sydney and Sloane are together" fic? I thought not.

Fic: Seven Days in Libris (1/1)

2008-04-25T00:11:39Z

Title: Seven Days in Lbris
Author:

dens_serpentis
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Kara/Adama
Disclaimer: I don't own them.
Summary: Four years before the mini-series, two lonely souls meet in a bar in Libris.
Note: Reviews are appreciated!

Commander William Adama knocked back another shot of whatever it was that he was drinking, not trying to hold back the satisfied sigh that escaped his throat at the burn. The bartender, a thin, almost shifty-looking fellow, pulled a bottle from behind the counter and topped off the glass with a knowing glance.

Adama nodded his thanks, then looked back at the battered television that occupied the far end of dusty bar, his eyes intent as they followed the graceful rise and fall of the light vipers. Light vipers were ships that had been stripped of guns and artillery, as well as some secondary shielding, leaving them faster and more maneuverable than normal vipers. They existed solely to be used in viper diving, a sport for the young and stupid—too young to be afraid of smashing headlong into an impenetrable object, too stupid to put their skills to use in the Colonial Fleet rather than seeking thrills.

Adama loved to watch the sport.

He nursed this shot—his third—more slowly than the first, savoring the taste and lost in his appreciation for the skill of the pilots; he barely noticed when a young woman came to join him at the bar.

“Ambrosia,” she ordered curtly.

He took no further note of her until nearly ten minutes later. The viper pilot on screen was attempting a Prometheus Twirl—flying to within inches of one of the fixed obstacles before falling away in a spin and coming to land on an obstacle placed opposite the first. The hardest part of the move was that the pilot was not allowed to use the backward thrusters to slow his descent, only the forward thrusters—so the only way to slow was to occasionally flip to fly upwards. It was not the most difficult maneuver, but it was up there.

“Come on,” the woman next to him muttered under her breath as the pilot reached the peak of his ascent, and out of the corner of his eye Adama saw her lean forward in her chair. The viper plummeted quickly and in just those first few moments he knew that the pilot couldn’t pull off the maneuver. “He’s not going to make it,” the woman said, echoing his thoughts.

Sure enough, the pilot couldn’t slow himself enough and only narrowly escaped splattering against the landing platform by jerking wildly and scraping by the side, whirling uncontrolled out into space.

“He frakked up the flip,” the woman said. Adama didn’t know whether she was talking to him or herself. “Held the thrusters too long and got up too much momentum for the fall.”

For the first time he turned to look at her. She was young, about the age of his older son, Lee, with a hideous haircut she had probably done herself and a gleam in her eye that he hadn’t seen in his own reflection in a long, long time. Her jacket was old and worn and splattered with paint. She was not his idea of attractive, but she had been, once.

“You have a good eye,” he acknowledged. The surprise on her face told him that she had not, in fact, been talking to him, but he didn’t let that phase him. He was on vacation in a place where no one would think to look for him at a dive where no one of good repute would bother to go. If she thought him to be a foolish old man, well…he had been called worse, by better people.

She watched him, considering, for a long moment before she flashed a quick smile. “I do, don’t I,” she agreed. Then, she called, “Bartender! Another ambrosia for me, and a shot of whatever he’s been drinking for my friend here.”

Adama raised an eyebrow and quirked a smile and accepted the refill without hesitation.

“Do you come here often?” he asked.

It was perhaps the oldest line in the book, but she took it with good humor. “Nah,” she said. “I’m on vacation. Figured I’d find the seediest place I could and enjoy some viper diving before I go looking for some real action.”

“Triad?” he asked. “Or pool?”

“Yes,” she smirked. Her eyes raked over him, taking in his civilian slacks and shirt with a mixture of curiosity and appreciation that left him feeling very exposed.

It occurred to him that he had yet to contribute anything particularly interesting to their conversation, and so, feeling about twenty years younger and less mature as he tried to show off for the good looking girl, he turned back to the television.

“He’s not going to pull off a Minotaur,” he opined, watching another viper position itself. “Look at the way his forward thruster is trembling—there’s a loose bolt there that’ll make it impossible to do the twists.”

She nodded her agreement. “Should have done his own pre-flight check.”

Adama hesitated. “I’m Bill,” he said, sticking his hand forward.

She didn't hesitate. “Kara,” she said, shaking his hand. Hers was warm and dry, her grip firm and comfortable--stronger than most men's.

The early evening passed swiftly with someone to talk to. Adama found himself strangely at ease discussing the merits of the viper divers, the quality of the alcohol being served to them, and the relative chances of the Caprican Buccaneers securing the Colonial Cup over the Sagittarian Gulls. Kara spoke with a kind of careless ease and had a laugh like the braying of a donkey—loud and free and with the same lack of apology that she exhibited in every other aspect of her behavior.

At some point Kara had moved over to sit on the stool next to him—or had he moved closer to her?

At some point one of them leaned in closer to the other, a clumsy mashing of lips, the fiery taste of alcohol on her breath, his tongue slipping over her teeth, his hand on her cheek and strands of her hair brushing against his hand, and he honestly couldn’t say which of them was to blame.

At some point one of them pulled back and she was staring at him with mild confusion in her eyes and he felt his aging heart race in his chest.

“I thought you were going to look for some more excitement,” he murmured, his hand toying lightly with her smooth honey-colored hair.

Her face split in a grin and she laughed, throwing back her head, her graceful throat moving in a way that made his mouth water. Then she pushed herself off of her stool, tossing a wad of cash onto the bar, and grabbed the lapels of his jacket, tugging him to his feet as well. She was shorter than he realized, shorter than her attitude would suggest, and he had to bend—not uncomfortably—to kiss her again.

“My hotel is ten blocks away,” she said with a challenging smirk, and even as her words brought home to him that they were really going to do this he pulled out some cash of his own and dropped it on the counter.

“Mine’s closer,” he rumbled, pulling her against him and leaning his face into her hair, breathing deeply. She smelled of engine grease and alcohol and some faint, not remotely flowery, shampoo. To him, and this was something that neither of his ex-wives had ever understood, that was the smell of life.

She let him keep his arm around her shoulders as they walked away from the bar, wrapping her own arm casually around his waist, their bodies fitting together as if they had been made that way.

His hotel was nice, but not as nice as someone of his rank could have commanded if he wanted. Still, the room was large enough, with a king-sized bed and a minibar that was sufficiently stocked to satisfy them both.

It had been a long, long time since Adama had had a casual evening with someone he barely knew. It came back to him quickly, though—the press of the wall against his back when she pushed him hard against it and began to kiss him with more passion than finesse—the play of her strong muscles under his hands as he pushed her jacket off of her shoulders—the soft sounds she made as his hands went under her shirt to play along her taut stomach and around her breasts—the flutter of the pulse in her neck against his lips—the exquisite agony of her strong hands on his own chest and moving lower.

They moved together, the two of them, in a dance as old as time. If he wondered at the perfect kinship he felt with this girl less than half his age, and if she wondered at the comfort she felt in his arms…well, both were desperate enough to take the pleasure as it came. Some part of him might even have admitted that nothing, nothing, had ever felt quite so good, so right, as being one with Kara.

He fell asleep with his arms wrapped around her, her back snuggled tight against his chest, and did not expect her to be there in the morning.

She was still there in the morning. He awoke to the sound of the shower running, the sound of someone singing badly. Every muscle in his body ached, but in a delicious way.

When she came out of the bathroom she had a towel wrapped around her body and was drying her hair with a hand towel. When she caught site of him she flashed a cheerful grin, showing about a million teeth. She had a hickey on her neck.

“I didn’t expect you to stick around,” he said, pulling the sheet further up his body as he sat up in bed. He gestured at the bed in front of him and she came to sit, leaning back and letting him take the towel from her hand. He used it to gently massage her head, teasing out errant drops of water. Every so often he let one of his hands drop down to caress her bare shoulder, the shell of her ear.

“I didn’t have anything better to do,” she said with the ballsy tone that was so Kara that he couldn’t help but grin himself.

“I’m—” He stopped himself. This was probably a very bad idea. On the other hand, this was a mandatory leave. He was going to stay on this planet, it was simply a matter of whether or not he did it alone. “I’m here for a week,” he said at last, taking the chance. “No real plans.”

She tensed under his hands; it was her turn to be surprised. “I don’t usually extend one night stands,” she said cautiously. She didn’t pull away.

He suppressed the wave of disappointment, started to withdraw. “I understand.”

She caught his hand before he could pull back very far. When she turned to face him her lips were twitching in a smirk that sent a pleasant tingle through his body.

“What the hell,” she announced. “I’ve got a week of vacation myself, and it’s cheaper for us both to share a hotel room.”

It was a flimsy excuse, but he would take it.

Her smirk widening, she tightened her grip on his hand. Brought it to the corner of the towel that was wrapped around her body.

They didn’t leave the hotel room that day. The room service was excellent.

The next day they fetched Kara’s few belongings from her hotel, then set out to explore Libris. Neither, they had learned, had ever been to that particular planet before, so they lost themselves in exploring. The sea there was less blue but more vibrant than on Caprica. The buildings were shorter than on Picon, with more levels underground.

Their wandering took them eventually to a public arcade. It was designed mostly for teenagers but there were a fair number of adults as well. At first Adama felt awkward entering—he had never been to an arcade even with his children—until Kara, using some impressive sixth sense, led them directly to the flight simulators. They were of fairly old design, nowhere near the accuracy and precision of the models used at flight school, but they were not so different from the machines Adama had first used to learn to fly.

Kara stared at the simulators and her eyes sparkled. “What do you think, old man?” she challenged playfully. “You up for it?”

His eyes narrowed. “I’ll have you know that I was quite good on one of these, once upon a time,” he informed her haughtily.

With one of her trademark smirks and a bow, she gestured for him to take the nearest simulator. Adama was conscious of the group of teenagers that gathered around them, no doubt looking forward to seeing the old man crash and burn. He intended to show them just the opposite.

As the game loaded they chose the most ridiculous call signs for each other that they could think of.

“Dipshit, this is Frakker,” Kara said. “Do you read me, Dipshit?”

“Frakker, Dipshit. Reading you loud and clear.”

“Ready to get your ass blown out of the air?” He could hear the laughter in her voice.

“I just hope you’re ready to eat my dust,” he replied.

Then the game began. Adama’s world darkened until only pinpricks of light were visible. His muscles tensed as he gripped familiar controls. The simulator couldn’t capture the true feeling of being in space, but gods this was good. Not for the first time he regretted ever having been promoted past captain.

He searched for Kara, moving slowly to get a feel for flying. It had been so long since he had done even such a simulation as this.

A shot from behind rocked him. It was a glancing blow to his wing, designed not to damage but to startle.

“You all right there, Dipshit?” she asked. He could see her now, a Mark II viper with its nose pointed practically in his face.

In reply he launched himself toward her, firing as he went. His muscles protested as he forced the viper into twists and spins and turns, watching as Kara’s viper danced in an echo of his movements. Watching her his speculation about her profession was laid to rest—she moved with the ease of a viper jockey. Fleet. He recognized some of her maneuvers from his own time as a pilot, although Kara being Kara they were more dramatic and daring than he remembered.

They toyed with each other for what seemed like hours, not really trying to kill each other as they were meant to in a dogfight but instead getting a feel for how they flew together. It was hard to tell on this machine, but Adama thought that she was probably the best pilot he had ever seen. Better even than he had been in his heyday. Her viper moved as if it were an extension of her own being, without conscious thought. The maneuvers she pulled were playful, insane, stupid, and he had no doubt that she would pull them off in a real viper as daringly as she did here.

He couldn't remember the last time he had such fun. He wished he had done this with Zak and Lee when they were children, even once. Perhaps it would have given them more ground in common.

When they finally stepped out of the simulators, drenched in sweat and grinning like buffoons, a small crowd had gathered around, respect in their eyes.

They returned to their hotel room. Adama was exhausted from the very real simulation, but not too exhausted.

He was awoken shortly after falling asleep by the sound of the hotel door opening and shutting softly as Kara snuck out. For a moment he was concerned that she was going out alone so late; then he remembered that she was Kara and he ought to pity the fool who tried to pull something on her. He was asleep again long before she returned.

It was not the shower that woke him the next morning, but the feel of Kara pressing her lean body flush against his and breathing in his ear.

He groaned.

“How wonderful am I?” she asked, each word sending a breath of warm air to tickle his ear.

“Very?” he tried, opening his eyes slowly to see her cheerful face.

“Look what I got,” she crowed, thrusting something into his line of vision.

He blinked to clear his eyes, then took the tickets from her. He examined the small words, feeling his eyes grow wide.

“Where did you get these?” he demanded.

Her eyes were full of mischief. “I went out and found a triad game last night,” she said triumphantly. “Got enough pocket money to last the week, and those.”

“Those” happened to be two VIP tickets to a viper diving match that very day.

Adama had not been to a viper dive in, gods, it must have been twenty years. Each aspect felt new. Lining up for popcorn. Being jostled by fans wearing jerseys with the names of their favorite pilots. Sitting at the front of the viewing platform and watching through the translucent protective shield as the pilots flew before them. Kara’s loud catcalls as she picked her favorite pilots, which didn’t keep her from shouting insults and advice to all the pilots, favorite and least favorite alike. And soon enough he found himself on his feet, yelling along side her, pressing his hand against the shield as though to push through it and join the pilots in space.

As they walked home that evening after the game, their arms linked, heads tilted back to watch the stars, Adama began to laugh. It felt like he hadn't laughed in years.

“Gods, Kara,” he said, pulling her into a loose embrace, loving it when she didn’t protest. “You make me feel young again.”

The next day, they talked and they played triad. Talked about inconsequential things, at first. And then they talked about consequential things, things they couldn’t tell anyone else but that they could tell each other, two not-quite strangers. And so Bill learned that Kara’s mother was a real piece of work, a woman he would gladly strangle with his bare hands, and Kara learned that Bill was aware of just how crummy a father he’d been, and how much he missed the youth that he seemed to have found again with her.

They mentioned no names, no ranks, no places. If either of them felt concern about their strange relationship, neither voiced it.

They played triad as they talked. Strip triad, of course, which was all well and good in principle except that somehow it resulted in Adama finding himself naked over and over again with Kara still fully dressed, until he informed her that it really should be the other way around, and so for a while every time Kara won she was the naked one because that inevitably drove him mad and ended up in a recess from triad as they made a visit to the bed, and that way they both could win.

He had never met anyone who could bluff as well as Kara. Or anyone with her incredible luck at cards.

That night they went out and found a bar with a lively triad game. Kara spent the evening cleaning out everyone at the table; Adama was no exception, but since he got to be the one she went home with in the end he had no problem with that at all. She was so vibrant and alive at that table, so clearly in her element, that it was impossible not to love her just a little.

The next day Kara got a call from home. She went into the bathroom to take the call and when she came out her cheeks were dry but her eyes were bright. She grabbed her jacket and took off. He hesitated, wondering whether he was meant to follow, and ultimately he did. He followed her in a brisk walk around town and finally to a public gym. Kara did not bother to tape her hands before she began to pummel one of the punching bags, her eyes blazing as she punched and punched and began to bleed.

Later, after he took her back to the hotel room and let her ride him to exhaustion, he held her in his arms and rocked her to sleep.

“I would have sparred with you,” he whispered in her ear.

“I didn’t want to hurt you,” she whispered back.

She would not break. He did not believe she knew how.

In the morning Adama suggested that they go back to the arcade. If she’d thought he was pitying her, he knew, she would have refused—but perhaps she could read the genuine longing in his eyes, the way he itched to get back into a cockpit, even if it was a fake one.

He flew better today than he had his first time in the machine. It all came flooding back to him, the sense of oneness with the viper, the skill that had made him a war hero way back when. He thought by Kara’s exclamations (“Impressive, Dipshit!”) that she had noticed his improvement as well.

That evening—their last—they went back to the bar for old time’s sake. This time they got drunk.

“I don’t have a daddy complex,” Kara informed him seriously, fingering her beer glass and watching him through dilated eyes. “Just in case you were wondering. I usually go for guys my own age. You’re a special case.” She poked him in the chest with one finger to emphasize her point.

“That’s good,” he replied gravely in that gravelly voice of his. “I don’t usually go for women so much younger than me. You’re a special case, too.”

“Kindred spirits,” Kara mumbled later, when they were in their hotel room and clumsily attempting to undress each other.

It was too difficult at the time to simultaneously think and wrestle with Kara’s clothes, but Adama filed the term away for later and, in the years ahead, thought of it often. Kindred spirits.

It was hard to say goodbye.

Adama’s raptor was leaving at 1300 for the Galactica and Kara’s shuttle would depart at 1500 for wherever it was she came from.

They treated themselves to a long breakfast in bed. Then they packed in awkward silence, each piece of clothing tucked away feeling like another nail in the coffin. When the time came for Adama to catch a taxi to the airfield he held her hand and looked down at a face that had come to embody life and vitality for him and wondered what to say.

“Marry me,” he said, half in jest, half serious, because he could not say anything else.

Her gaze shuttered at his words, losing the crystalline openness he had become accustomed to, and he understood that she just wasn't ready--that Kara, for all her awesome strength, was in some ways still a child, still finding her way in the world. She leaned in and kissed him, hard, a kiss that was at once possessive and a farewell. “You’ve got a raptor to catch,” she said roughly, her hands fisting in his jacket, her jaw firmly clenched.

He took the rejection and he took his pride and he gathered them to him as he caressed her face one last time, memorizing her eyes, her nose, her lips, the softness of her cheek. Then he turned and walked away.

Two years later, when his world ended and he was told that Zak had died and that his son had been engaged to his incredibly talented flight instructor, he was surprised but not surprised to recognize Kara Thrace. Adama men, after all, had exceptional taste in women.

Fic: Spending Eternity (3/?)

2008-01-27T05:20:15Z

Title: Spending Eternity (3/?)
Timeline: After the series finale
Pairings: Sydney/Sloane eventually. Past Sydney/Vaughn
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Six years after the series finale, an older man who calls himself Giovanni and a younger woman who goes by the name of Emelia live in separate estates on the coast of Italy. The last time she saw him she put a bullet in his forehead. The last he'd heard she was dead.

Sydney was a little surprised that Sloane wasn’t waiting for her outside the bookstore the next day. Somehow she didn’t believe that he planned to leave her alone, especially after she had had the last word in their conversation yesterday.

She breathed deeply, enjoying the fresh scent of the breeze off of the ocean. She had lived by the ocean her whole life, of course, but it had never smelled the same in Los Angeles as it did here. Here, it meant freedom, and life, and peace. There it had been marred by the smog and the cloying weight of the secrets and lies that surrounded her.

She was still surrounded by secrets and lies in her new life, but now she wore them like a cloak, embraced them.

She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, composing her face. Seeing Sloane yesterday had been…more than unpleasant, and she worried that her expression might show it. Her other hand she kept tucked in her pocket, concealing the loose swathe of bandages she had wrapped around the injured areas. The cuts from the glass had not been deep, but her hand was littered with small scabs.

The bell over the door chimed as she stepped inside. She inhaled deeply; she loved the musty smell of old books. “Good morning, Carlo,” she said cheerfully.

The old man stood up from his desk with a wide smile and open arms. “Bella,” he greeted. “It is so good to see you.”

She gave him a quick hug and a peck on the cheek. “I’m sorry for coming yesterday,” she said. “I know you weren’t expecting me.”

“You know you are welcome any time,” Carlo rebuked gently. “I am just sorry that that man was there.” He glanced at her sidelong glance. “Did you know him? You both left fairly quickly.”

Sydney laughed. “I met him once before on a business trip,” she explained. “We didn’t talk much then, but we remembered each other because it turned out that we had the same surname.”

Carlo raised an eyebrow. “Are you related?” He knew nothing about her family.

“No, nothing like that,” she hastened to say. “Just an amusing coincidence.”

He nodded, taking her words at face value as he returned to his desk. “Well, your books came in the day before yesterday,” he said, bending and retrieving a package wrapped in brown paper. “The Tolstoy was particularly hard to find, but I finally tracked it down to a nice little store in Amsterdam.”

She smiled gratefully as she took the package. “Thank you,” she said. “I really appreciate you going to such lengths for me.”

He waved her thanks away. “Do you have a package for me to send to my friend in Rome?” he asked. “You know he loves your restorations. I still don’t know where you get such rare books.”

“Family secret,” she said with a wink, pulling her wallet from her purse and handing him the pre-counted cash. In the old days she would never have paid so much for books, rare or no, but she was living a new life now. “And no, I don’t have anything to send today, but I’m just finishing a restoration of a copy of War and Peace that he’s going to drool over. I’ll bring it sometime in the next few days.”

“I’ll be here,” he said. “Would you like to look at anything else?”

She tucked the package under her arm. “I’m good, thanks,” she said. “Have a great day, Carlo, and say hello to Lucia for me.”

“I will,” he promised. He eyed her in a fatherly way. “Actually, you should stop in at the bakery before you go home, Emelia,” he said. “You’re too thin.”

“You’re sweet,” she said with another smile. They kissed on the cheek again before she left the store.

She did stop in at the bakery before she left the town, stepping inside to be greeted by a chorus of “Emelia!” from Lucia—Carlo’s wife—and the young woman who helped with the baking. She ordered some cannoli.

She had parked her car—her other Mercedes—at a small parking lot primarily meant for tourists and she headed back there once she was done at the bakery. She unlocked the doors and tossed the package and pastries onto the passenger seat.

The drive to her estate was long and beautiful. The road ran alongside the ocean most of the way, the blue-green vista spreading out into the curved horizon. The car purred beneath her, the V8 engine handling the light inclines easily. She had never been interested in owning nice cars as Sydney Bristow, but since moving to Italy she had come to love them. Opera poured quietly from the speakers, more soothing than she really wanted, but music with the kind of beat she wanted did not really match the Emelia persona. Even if Emelia was who she was now.

At last as the road began to curve inward she veered off onto a narrow dirt road back toward the ocean. It extended only a short way before an iron gate blocked her path. She lowered her window as she pulled up to a small black key pad, pulling a card from her pocket and swiping it through before dialing an eight digit number on the pad—the number was Isabelle’s birth date plus Jack’s, run through a fairly sophisticated encryption program.

She drove through the now-open gate and waited to make sure that it closed behind her, then carefully drove around the large, deep pit in the center of the road that was covered by very thin wooden boards and concealed by a layer of dirt and grass. She drove nearly a mile through the woods before her home came into view. It was not quite a mansion, but if it had been any larger it would have been. The walls were off-white, with the typical baked red tiles of houses in the area. There was a large yard with luscious flowers that spilled out onto the neatly-trimmed grass. As she pulled into the driveway she noticed a small mound in the grass and her lips tightened.

Moles. She hated moles.

Her displeasure lifted immediately as she parked next to the house and climbed out. The sound of eager barking filled her ears as a medium-sized dog charged around the house at full speed, leaping onto her and bathing her face and arms with slobber before dropping to all fours.

Sydney laughed as she ran her hand over the top of his shaggy head. “Good boy, Will,” she cooed, crouching to hold his face in her hands and rub her nose against his. “You’re such a good boy.”

She hadn’t meant to name the dog after her old friend. She’d found him on the drive to her house nearly a year ago, beaten and hungry. She didn’t know what breed he was, probably some mixture of border collie and golden retriever. He had fallen in love with her almost immediately and spent his days following her around the house and yard. She hadn’t known what to name him until the third time he broke into the kitchen after she told him not to, too eager to investigate the exciting things which were surely hidden inside. Then the name had just come to her.

She walked around the car and opened the passenger door, pulling out the packages. She entered the house through the front door, pushing the key into the lock before putting her eye against the peep hole for a retina scan. Then she turned the key in the lock and stepped inside, Will following on her heels with his tongue lolling out of the side of his mouth.

The house was beautiful, inside and out. The kind of place she had never dreamed of owning herself. The foyer led directly to a marble staircase. Continuing past the stairs she walked past the large living room and into the kitchen, where she placed the cannoli and her purse on the counter. The kitchen was large and had an island with a set of six gas burners on the stove.

The walls were shades of green, mostly a rich hue that reminded her of the woods around the house. They were decorated with pictures in simple frames: her father, her sister, Vaughn, Weiss, Dixon and Diane, Marshall with Mitchell and Carrie, Francie, Danny, Will, and of course her children, though the pictures were somewhat outdated. They would have grown much larger in the two years since she’d seen them. She bit down hard on the side of her mouth at the thought, shaking her head in an attempt to clear it.

She walked back to the staircase, ascending the stairs two at a time. The second floor held two furnished spare bedrooms which had never been slept in, an exercise room with the latest in gym equipment, and a small room with a doggie bed which was meant for Will. That room had never been slept in, either; the dog always managed to sneak his way onto her bed sometime in the night and she never had the heart to push him away.

She continued up to the third floor, which housed storage space and her two offices—one for her day to day business and book restoration, the other for her brief forays back into her other life. She dialed the fourteen digit code for the latter office (the phone number of her childhood home and the phone number from the apartment that burned down when she fought Not Francie, run through a different encryption program), said “Derevko” to the voice print analyzer, and breathed into the tube that obligingly emerged from the wall. The thick steel door slid aside, revealing a large room filled with state-of-the-art equipment: a powerful computer with two monitors, an ergonomic keyboard, faxing and copying equipment, and some gadgets that Marshall might have taken credit for with pride if he’d been the one to make them.

This was the one room in the house where Will was not to follow her, which he knew. He sat at the door and watched as she entered, his golden eyes mournful although his tail twitched hopefully when she turned to send him a regretful smile. The motion sensors sensed when she entered and closed the door behind her with a resounding thud.

She sat at the desk, placing the package in her lap. She pushed the power buttons on the computer and one of the monitors, then set to unwrapping the package swiftly, dropping the paper into the wastebasket next to her. The book on top was the Tolstoy Carlo had mentioned, and she caressed its cover lovingly before setting it gently on the desk. The second was a first edition of Through the Looking Glass. She held the book in her lap, turning carefully to page 47. That particular page had not been her choice. She ran her fingers lightly down the page, enjoying the slightly rough texture before her finger caught on a different, smoother texture. She slid her fingernail under the thin film, the size of a stamp, and gently pried it off.

She set the book on the desk and held the film up to the desk light, quickly memorizing the long series of numbers written there. Then she filled a cup of water from the sink against one wall of the office and dropped the film in, watching to make sure it dissolved fully before pouring the water down the drain.

She sat again and stared at the computer. Her fingers flew over the keys, first logging on and then connecting with the secure network. The code she had just memorized and destroyed gave her complete access to the account she wanted.

Her eyes scanned a list of numbers and figures and she typed quickly, depositing money from one of her other accounts into this one. She turned next to the message that was waiting for her in the account.

“All going well.” She felt muscles she hadn’t known were tense begin to relax. “Events are proceeding as planned. More funds required.” She thought the amount she’d just put in would suffice, but decided to add more just in case. “On another note, Isabelle and Jack—” Her finger twitched spasmodically on the mouse, closing the message. Eyes flashing furiously she opened a window to type her response.

“Continue with the plans. Have added more money, which should suffice. Inform me of any new players. Continue to keep tabs on the children. Never mention them again.”

She stared at the message for a long moment, her face tight, before clicking send. She added more money to the account, scanned the reports again, and signed out. She relaxed her mental control to allow herself to forget the numbers she had just memorized—though due to her near-perfect memory they would linger for some time. The numbers were good for one use only and she received a new one once a month.

She turned to her other accounts, sending some e-mails and moving money, then checked upcoming flights, putting together an entire itinerary that would to take her to Mongolia and back in the next few days. She stared at it for a full five minutes, the mouse posed over the button marked “submit.” At last she sighed, closed the window, and logged out.

She stood, picking up the books. She slapped her hand against a button on the wall, waiting as the door slid open.

Will barked, tail wagging. He hadn’t moved since she went in. Emelia grinned. “What?” she asked cheerfully, ruffling his fur. “Is someone hungry? Me too. Let’s get something to eat. Then we can play in the garden.”

********************

Giovanni had decided the night before not to go to the bookstore the next day. Instead he caught an early train back to Monterosso Al Mare. From there he called his driver to come and take him back to his estate.

His house was a mansion about twenty minutes from the town. In many ways it resembled the home he and Emily had chosen during his brief stint as a retiree, though it was larger and had fewer flowers. Normally he found some comfort in the simple pleasure of observing the house as he approached, but today he was too wrapped up in his thoughts.

He did not wait for the driver to open his door but opened it himself, striding swiftly into the house and heading straight for his office computer. There he pulled up the many files he had saved in a folder labeled simply “Sydney.”

The first file he opened was a picture. It had been taken by one of the many bugs Allison Doren had placed in Sydney’s apartment, but he didn’t care to think about how he’d gotten it. Sydney was laughing in the picture, light hearted in a way he could barely remember from her. Her face was flush with happiness, her head thrown back, the wrinkles around her eyes from laughter for once instead of stress. She was beautiful.

Yes. He nodded decisively. He was reassured that he had not been delusional, hallucinating. This was the woman he’d seen, spoken to, yesterday.

The next file was a newspaper article. The headline read, “Local Banker in Coma After Heroic Effort.” It included a picture taken outside a bank, with Sydney—yes, he told himself, that was definitely Sydney—on a gurney being wheeled to an ambulance, police cars and reporters all around. The picture was taken from a bad angle, but it was clear that Sydney was pale. Though the pictures were in black and white he could just make out the bloodstains on her dark suit.

The bank was not Credit Dauphine. If it had been he might have been much more suspicious about the reality of her death, but she had undoubtedly considered that and covered herself well.

The next file was a video clip, depicting a young pregnant woman standing outside of the bank immediately following the robbery.

“I was so scared,” the woman said tearfully. “I had just come in to cash some checks when these men with guns burst in. They screamed for us to get down on the floor, and then they started grabbing money from the registers. One of the security guards, he tried to fight back. He—he had a gun, and he raised it. They were about to shoot him when this woman in a suit—I think they said she worked at the bank—she just jumped right in front of him, and they shot her instead. She saved his life.”

Sloane’s face was stony as he closed the file and opened another. This was another newspaper article. “Hero Banker Taken Off Life Support.” Apparently Michael Vaughn had kept Sydney on life support for nearly a month before getting the courage to take her off. Sloane would not have waited so long; he knew that for someone like Sydney, who was so vivacious and intelligent, the thought of being in a coma from which she could never awaken, of being a vegetable for the rest of her life, was worse than death.

Sloane had attended this funeral as he had her previous funeral: watching through a pair of high-powered binoculars from a short distance down the beach. He’d thought it tacky to spread the same woman’s ashes at sea twice, but Vaughn had looked impressively pained both times and he supposed that was what counted. The second time had been even more painful for Sloane than the first, not least because this time instead of Jack being there it was four year old Isabelle and baby Jack. The older Jack’s absence had been a stark reminder of the losses he had brought upon himself. The children’s presence reminded him of the role he had played long ago when Sydney lost her mother. He remembered how Laura Bristow’s supposed death had destroyed Sydney when she had been a child, the way that it had driven Jack to alcoholism and neglect.

Sloane resolved then that if Vaughn showed any symptoms of heading in the same direction—of being more wrapped up in his own grief than his children’s lives—that he would see the children taken from him and given to a loving family. Even thought dead he had enough influence to manage that. Maybe the Dixons, since Marcus had recently wed Hayden Chase after a long-time affair. Even Marshall and his clan of geeks would be better than leaving the children to be neglected and unloved. Vaughn had not shown any such signs yet, however, and so for now the children remained in his care.

In his thoughts Sloane never thought of Isabelle and Jack as Sydney and Vaughn’s children. They were Sydney’s children; Vaughn’s involvement was not worth mention or consideration.

The final file was a CIA document it had taken a month of hacking and quite a lot of bribery to get. It described the CIA’s investigation into Sydney’s death, which had ultimately classified it as nothing more than what it looked like: a botched robbery.

How had she done it? Sloane pondered the question as he leaned back in his chair, staring at the CIA report. She was an incredibly talented agent, of course, so he wasn’t surprised by her ability to disappear or her apparently large supply of funds. Faking a robbery and death required more people than just her, though. She couldn’t have done it alone. He was convinced that none of Sydney’s close friends or family had been involved. Their grief had been very real.

How had she done it? She had been on life support for a full month before being taken off and left to die peacefully. The switch must have occurred before then, someone else’s body for hers, someone who must have been a Project Helix clone. More than a clone, even—the look-alike would have had to have Sydney’s scars and old broken bones to pass close, long-term inspection.

Clearly she had pulled it off, so really the question he should have been asking was why she had done it. He stared at the pictures on his desk as he brooded. One showed him and Jack on a mission when they were both much younger men. Jack had his arm slung over Sloane’s shoulder as they both held their mugs of beer in a toast. That was the day Jack found out he was going to be a father. Another picture was of Nadia, taken midway through the blessed year when she had worked at APO. She was sitting on his sofa with one of her legs outstretched and her other knee pulled up to her chest with a book balanced on it, reading with a slight furrow in her brow. He could never look at the picture without remembering how she died, the way her apparition had haunted him in the days and months to follow.

The last picture was of Sydney with her children: Isabelle at her side and baby Jack in her arms. Sloane had stolen the picture from their house shortly after Sydney’s death; there had been so many photos that he was sure this one wouldn’t be missed. It had been his favorite of the pictures in their house, not least because Vaughn was not in it.

Sydney did not look unhappy in the picture, though surely by the time it was taken she was already plotting how to fake her own death. Her love for her children was obvious even though she wasn’t looking at either of them. Isabelle was leaning into Sydney’s leg, an adoring expression on her face—so like Sydney’s at that age—as she gazed up at her mother. Jack looked as happy as a baby could be. Sydney’s face was perhaps a little more tense than a young mother should be, a little too thin—but though Sloane wanted to he couldn’t blame Vaughn for not noticing that she was on the verge of abandoning her entire life. Based on this picture he wouldn’t have expected it either.

Sloane heaved a great sigh as he tore his eyes from the picture. He laid his fingers on the computer keyboard, hesitating only a moment before signing onto one of his old accounts. He sent a cryptic e-mail to a contact he knew he could trust not to go blabbing about his reappearance, then began setting up a new account, looking into arranging new contacts.

If Sydney found out—and he was fairly certain she would—she would be furious. She’d probably try to kill him. He doubted she’d give him time to explain that he was doing this to help her, to protect her against the other Rambaldi fanatics in the world. If Rambaldi’s devices were in his hands then he would know that they could not hurt Sydney, because he would never hurt her intentionally.

It was for her own good, really, that he was going to stretch out his feelers and start collecting a few Rambaldi artifacts. It never even occurred to him to doubt himself.

Fic: Spending Eternity (2/?)

2008-01-25T07:42:42Z

Title: Spending Eternity (2/?)
Timeline: After the series finale
Pairings: Sydney/Sloane eventually. Past Sydney/Vaughn
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Six years after the series finale, an older man who calls himself Giovanni and a younger woman who goes by the name of Emelia live in separate estates on the coast of Italy. The last time she saw him she put a bullet in his forehead. The last he'd heard she was dead.

Over dinner and a glass of wine nearly as old as he was Giovanni planned out his next steps in his mind.

Tonight he would do some research. Of course he’d read the documents regarding Sydney’s death, both public newspaper articles and the classified documents from the CIA’s investigation, many times—but apparently he, like everyone else, had missed something. The last he’d seen of Sydney she’d been a devoted mother, a loving wife-to-be. He wanted, no, needed, to know what had changed.

It occurred to him that Sydney was the only person he knew who’d come back from the dead as many times as Irina Derevko.

So tonight he would research, try to understand why Sydney had faked her own death. Tomorrow he would approach her again at the bookstore; she’d told the owner that she would be back, after all. He would remind her of her hatred of him, of her certainty that he was up to no good, and when he was done she’d think that it was her idea to have frequent contact with him in order to monitor his activities.

He thought about his plan until he was satisfied with it and then he finished his wine, savoring the strong boutique. He paid for his meal before strolling sedately to his small but elegant hotel.

The concierge greeted him cordially as he entered the small lobby. Giovanni nodded politely, calling for the elevator and taking it to the eighth floor. He fished the metal key from his pocket, fitted it into the lock. The tumblers turned with a satisfying click and he flicked the light on as he entered the room.

And that was when his carefully-thought-out plan went to hell.

“If you reach for a weapon, I will shoot you,” Sydney said, speaking Arabic this time. He had always been impressed by her gift for languages. She was positioned like a villain from a Bond movie, reclining in an armchair with her legs crossed and her gun resting on her knee, the barrel pointed directly at his forehead.

“If I told you I was unarmed, would you believe me?” he replied more calmly than he felt, shrugging out of his light jacket and draping it on the double bed.

How foolish of him, spending all that time devising his plan. He’d forgotten how talented Sydney was at derailing even the most well-devised schemes. It was one of her best qualities as an agent.

A curl of her lip was her only response. She tapped her forefinger against the gun. “I was halfway home when I realized that I couldn’t just walk away from you,” Sydney said. “Six years ago, I resigned myself to the fact that there were questions, a lot of questions, that I would never know the answers to. I thought that I was okay with that, but I was wrong. Seeing you again…” Her eyes narrowed and she leaned forward. “There are things I need to know, Sloane.”

Ten careful steps took him across the room. He sat in the armchair facing her, leaning back as though unconcerned by the weapons till pointed at his head. He spread his palms. “Ask.”

She blinked once, not so much a sign of surprise as a brief moment of contemplation she allowed herself in response to his willingness to oblige. “I barely know where to begin,” she said. She smiled, the self-conscious smile she was known for using in some of her sweeter aliases; this time the expression was marred only by the predatory gleam in her lovely eyes. “No, I know exactly where to being. Why, Sloane? Tell me that. I think I deserve to know. Why did you do everything that you did? Was it really all about immortality? Was that your ultimate goal?”

He could feel his indignation flit across his face before he could conceal it, knew that she had seen it. “What do you think, Sydney?” he demanded, his voice hard.

She slammed her palm on the small table next to her chair, the sound of the impact shockingly loud in the muted space. “I don’t know what to think!” she snarled, her voice breathless and angry as he remembered it, with a ragged edge that was as close as she would come to crying in his presence. “I knew that you were a—a heartless—a monster, that you were obsessed! But as evil as I knew you were, I never thought—I never thought that you would kill my father just to become immortal. I thought, of all the things you lied about—that caring for my father wasn’t one of them.”

Sloane found her choice of words interesting even as he winced at the reminder of Jack’s death, at the obvious grief in Sydney’s thin face. “’Just to become immortal’?” he echoed. “You don’t find immortality to be a rather admirable feat?”

“Personally, I don’t understand why anyone would want it,” she said bluntly. “Eternal life, watching the people you care about grow old and die—sounds like hell to me.” A pause before she added, cruelly, “Oh, I forgot. You killed everyone you care about.”

Jack, Nadia, even Emily’s death was largely his fault. He rewarded her well-aimed jab with a wince. “Not quite everyone I care about, my dear,” he returned, his piercing stare as he met her eyes leaving no doubt as to his meaning.

The look she sent him in response was withering. “As usual, you’ve successfully sidetracked the conversation,” she said. “You were about to tell me why you did—everything you did. Why you killed my father and my sister.”

Sloane sighed. “I was a fool,” he said, wondering whether she could hear the truth in his voice. “I spent thirty years chasing that man, Sydney—” he saw her grimace at the euphemism they’d given to Rambaldi and acknowledged it with a grimace of his own; they’d spent months calling Irina Derevko “The Man” and he’d hoped they’d moved beyond such code names “—thirty years following a trail of breadcrumbs leading God knew where.” He did not know when he had slipped into English, but he had, and a flicker in Sydney’s eyes told him that she would adapt to the change in language as she always did. “It became…an obsession. You know that.”

His words had not been meant as a barb but she flinched nonetheless. Sloane sighed inwardly—it was typical Sydney, to feel guilty about things outside her control. It was part of what made him love her, but it was also a trait that frustrated the people who cared about her, who wished that they could spare her the pain she so frequently inflicted on herself.

“I should never have encouraged you to go back to that man,” Sydney said, looking away for the first time although the gun remained pointed steadily in his direction. She was referring, of course to the incident with the aptly-named Arvin Clone. She had asked him to return to Rambaldi in an effort to derail the clone’s efforts. Her jaw clenched as she forced herself to meet his gaze again. “It wasn’t all my fault. You’re a grown man; you should have had more self restraint, even if you were a that man junkie.”

He contemplated telling her that his return to Rambaldi was not her fault at all—that it had been fated, beyond her control or even his. Then he realized that that was his Rambaldi junkie side speaking.

“Yes,” he conceded instead, folding his hands in his lap. “I should have known better. But once I was back in, once I was reminded of everything I’d aimed for, I couldn’t stop. The need to discover the truth was insatiable.”

“What was that man’s end game?” Sydney demanded, tired of his prevarications. She had never been the most patient person.

“I don’t know,” he said. At her incredulous expression he said, “I know you don’t believe me, Sydney, but it’s the truth. I don’t know what his end game is, no one does. Was that man trying to save the world, or destroy it? Was he a harbinger of good or evil? I don’t know what his ultimate end game was, but the more I dug the more I began to realize…”

“Realize what?” she pressed.

He sighed. “To realize that while Ram—that man’s—end game would play out during your lifetime, would have to since you are the Chosen One, it might not during mine. And that was simply unacceptable.”

He had meant the emotion behind his words to be ambiguous, but as usual Sydney with her sharp mind and keen suspicion saw right through him, then promptly disbelieved the emotion she so aptly perceived. “Do not pretend that you did this for me!” she hissed.

He gritted his teeth. “I would not have had you go through it—whatever it is—alone.”

“I wasn’t alone,” she retorted. “I had Nadia, my father, Vaughn, Weiss—I had people who loved me. And now I don’t.”

“Yes, let’s talk about that,” Sloane said, though he really would have preferred to have this discussion after he’d had a chance to do some digging. “Abandoning your husband and daughter—that seems more like something that Irina Derevko would do.”

Perhaps hearing the undercurrent of anger in his voice, Sydney smiled, a little viciously. “Given that you sacrificed everything, murdered two people whom you claimed to love, just so you could live long enough to ‘help’ me—my death must have been a real disappointment to you.”

Sloane closed his eyes, recalling the flash of pain he had felt when he heard of her death, the numbness that had spread through a body supposedly immune from physical problems.. “You have no idea,” he whispered.

She rolled her eyes. “Spare me.”

“Sydney…” It was not a plea, or a lead-in to some further explanation. It was just her name, and it fell from his lips as naturally as it had when they had worked together over six years ago.

“Enough,” she said tiredly. “Just tell me one more thing.”

With Sydney it was never just one more thing, but he would oblige her for the moment. “What would you like to know?”

“Do you regret killing Nadia and my father?”

Sloane clenched his fists. The very real doubt in her voice made him furious. “Do you really have to ask?” he demanded.

She didn’t waver, never looked away from his face. “Apparently I do.”

“If I could turn back time, if I could change just one thing I’ve ever done—I would save Nadia’s life,” he said. When that did not seem to be enough to satisfy her, he added, “The memory of what I did to her will haunt me until the day I die.”

“Good,” Sydney said. “I like the thought of you suffering for eternity. What about my father?”

“I honestly believed that by killing Jack I was helping to save your life, Sydney,” Sloane said simply. “If it ever came down to your life or Jack’s, despite my love for Jack, I knew there was only one possible choice for me. Jack certainly would never have had it any other way.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” Sydney said intently. “Do you regret killing my father?” She spoke each word slowly, distinctly, as though she were tasting them in her mouth.

“No.”

Sydney did not quite react as though she had been struck. When Sydney was hit she moved with the punch, letting her opponent’s momentum unbalance him as she came up swinging. At his simple word she rocked, as if stunned, but did not come back with a return blow. Her tongue even moved over her teeth as if tasting blood from a split lip.

The silence between them stretched.

“I appreciate your honesty,” Sydney said at last as though each word pained her. She stood stiffly and Sloane thought again that she wasn’t the girl he had known.

“Sydney…” he said again.

“It’s Emelia now,” she interrupted.

He smiled sadly. “Emily would have liked that.”

She shook her head. “My father is probably turning over in his grave at your choice of alias.”

Sloane’s lips twisted. “Jack was always well aware of my jealousy,” he said, his tone bitter with self-mockery. “And why shouldn’t I have envied him? He had Laura—and you—”

“And all you had was Emily,” Sydney sneered, and he realized that she hadn’t meekly taken his blow, not at all. She was just waiting for the right moment to slip in the knife. “But she wasn’t enough, was she? You wanted my mother—you wanted to have an affair with Laura Bristow. And you wanted me.”

He twitched, and suddenly he couldn’t bear for this conversation to go any further. “It’s getting quite late, Signora Costa,” he said stiffly. “If you don’t mind, I would like to be left alone.” This had not been the plan, not at all. The plan had been to get under her skin. He’d forgotten how good she was at getting under his. He had forgotten that she knew him nearly as well as he knew her.

She raised an eyebrow, the only sign that she knew that she had won this round. “Of course,” she said, rising to her feet, letting the gun drop at last to hang by her side. He followed her example and stood, brushing wrinkles from his shirt and pants. “It should be easy enough to find you again if you persist in living in the Cinque Terre area, Signor Costa.”

“Will you be all right getting to your car alone at this time of night?” he asked courteously.

“I think I’ll manage,” she said.

He walked her to the door because he knew that she would not be willing to turn her back to him. He held the door open for her, breathing in the smell that was so distinctly Sydney as she passed, then closed and locked the door behind her.

Then he walked to the corner of room where a pitcher stood in front of a mirror. Giovanni glared at Arvin Sloane and poured himself a glass of watcher with hands that shook.

********************************************

Sydney made it nearly halfway to her car before she was forced to stumble into a street corner and retch violently, falling to her knees and hugging her stomach, unable to control the tremors that ran through her entire body. She pushed herself back to her feet, weaving the rest of the way to her car, a fairly new Mercedes. She stared at her reflection in the tinted window for a long moment, assessing the woman who looked back.

The woman in the window was not Nadia Santos. They had some physical similarities, especially in their eyes and the stubborn set of their jaws. But this woman was older than Nadia had ever been, and harder too.

The woman was not Irina Derevko, nor indeed any of the three Derevko sisters. She looked uncannily like Irina had at the same age, except for her ears, but when Irina was this age she had been cunning. Lost, yes, like the woman in the window, and lonely too—but also scheming, conniving, planning how to turn the world over on its axis. The woman in the window had no interest in such things.

The woman was not even Sydney Bristow. Sydney was a name belonging to a woman who was young, vivacious. Who had unusually strong empathy and consequently loved and was loved by the people around her. Sydney was also determined, relentless. Even when she was beaten she was not this beaten, and she never let a weak stomach get the better of her. She would never have gone up against Arvin Sloane with an unloaded glock pistol.

Emelia Costa was not a spy. She lived a pleasant existence in which she spent most of the day doing pleasant things and trying not to think about the past that haunted her. She did not like weapons. She carried no knives on her person and the sight of the gun in her own hand, even though it was unloaded, brought back a wealth of unpleasant memories.

Still, Emelia was not entirely against violence in situations which called for it. So she glared at the woman in the window, and then she lifted the gun by the barrel and brought it down as hard as she could against the glass, the blow sending spider-web cracks across the slick surface. She brought it down again and again, knocking in the glass, knocking the gun around the edges of the window frame to dislodge every shard, not caring as her fist and wrist scraped against the jagged edges. When she was done she stared at what she’d done, the hole where the window had been, breathing heavily. She smiled.

Then she opened the door, brushed most of the shards off of the leather seat, and climbed inside.

The glass crunched underneath her back tires as she drove away.

This is me procrastinating

2008-01-23T02:05:37Z

I'm so closed to finishing the Paper That Made Me Hate School (previously known as the Paper From Hell and the Almighty Paper of Doom). I don't know why it's so easy to whip out pages and pages of fanfiction, while a twenty page research paper that I have two months to work on leaves me stumped (and frantically trying to finish on the very last day). Well, okay, I do know why it's easier to write fanfic, but that doesn't make me feel better.

This has been an awful month. I think its only redeeming quality was my renewed obsession with all things Alias. My season four DVDs are in the mail and should arrive any day now, yay!

Fic: Thoughts Only During Surgery (1/1)

2008-01-23T01:55:48Z

Fic: Thoughts Only During Surgery (1/1)
Timeline: During Breaking Point
Summary: A response to the alias500 challenge "separation." Sloane's thoughts as Jack operates on him.

As Arvin Sloane lay on the cold metal operating table in Jack Bristow’s secret storage unit, he did not want to think about the fact that Jack was fiddling around inside him for the bullet that had lodged in his chest. Nor did he want to think about the last time he had been tied down and Jack had come to the rescue—that particular incident had resulted in the temporary loss of a finger to which he had been quite attached. (Clearly the pain was getting to him, if he was thinking puns like that. He supposed he shouldn’t blame himself; it really was quite excruciating.)

Deliberately not thinking about the times Jack had hurt him naturally led to thoughts about the good times with Jack—and there had been many. Introducing him to Laura; playing couples bridge; a million missions that had been terrifying and exhilarating and quite a lot of fun. For thirty years they had worked together, tested each other, trusted each other implicitly.

At least Arvin had trusted Jack. He had always thought that the recent separation between them was mostly physical; since he had helped Jack and Sydney bring down SD-6 he had been far from his old friend, first because he was on the run and later because his work with Omnifam required his presence in Zurich. There had been meetings—altercations—between them within that time, of course, but none of the closeness that only consistent proximity could inspire. Arvin had always been confident that given enough time and a gun pointed at Jack’s head he could convince the other man to his side again, which had been a relief. They’d been apart for two and a half years, which was two and a half years too long.

He’d thought that that was the longest he had been separate from Jack since their first meeting at Langley, but now he wondered.

Had the separation really begun before Arvin’s abrupt departure from California? Had it begun when Jack first joined SD-6, already planning to betray his best friend? These questions had been niggling at the back of his mind since he first learned of Jack’s betrayal, but he had shoved them into the dark corner where he kept his grief for Emily and his mixed hatred of and admiration for Irina Derevko and his sometimes-paternal-sometimes-not love for Sydney.

Squinting through the pain at Jack’s face now, Arvin wondered whether he had underestimated the distance between them so severely. It could still be bridged, he was sure—his actions today had gone a long way toward redeeming him in Jack’s eyes—but only now did he realize how far the distance between them had stretched.

How long ago had the separation between them begun? He pondered the question, turned it over in his mind, examined it from every angle, and the answer came to him just as he slipped into blessed unconsciousness. Long enough that Jack had forgotten that he was allergic to morphine.

Fic: Finding Closure (1/1)

2008-01-20T22:52:23Z

Title: Finding Closure
Characters: Kara Thrace, William Adama, Lee Adama
Spoilers: Maelstrom
Summary: Basically what it sounds like, because I found Maelstrom dissatisfying. Does not take into account later episodes.

William Adama stared at the pieces of wood and twine that used to be his model ship. He didn’t bother to wipe at the tears forming in his eyes; for the first time in his life he had cried before his crew in the CIC today, so why not in the privacy of his own room?

"You shouldn’t have done that,” a voice sad, and he nearly pulled a muscle in his neck jerking his head up to see who was speaking. He gaped. She smiled, not the benevolent-angelic smile he half-expected, but the cocky, arrogant smirk he was so used to and so sure he would never see again.

“Kara?” he rasped, rubbing at his eyes to clear away the tears as though that would make the apparition disappear as well.

“Yeah,” she said simply, sitting on the edge of the table and watching him intently. “Temporarily back from the dead, or wherever it is I went when my viper blew up.”

“What—” He was losing his mind. That was it.

“See, the voice in my head—Leoben, but the nice version—kept saying ‘Kara, you must fulfill your destiny.’ Giving me orders. Well, you know how well I take orders.” The light in her eyes made his chest ache.

She seemed to be waiting for a response. He gave her one. “You don’t," he rasped. "You don’t take orders.”

“Not from the likes of him, anyways,” Kara agreed. “So I told him to shove it, and I hurried my way back here—spiritually, if not physically.”

“Why?” he asked, slumping back in his chair as he stared at her. “To talk to Lee?”

She raised an eyebrow. “To Lee? What’s there to say to Lee? He and I—we know where we stand. We’ve always known where we stand. He’ll put my picture on the wall, and he’ll mourn, and he’ll blame himself for my death, but he’ll move on. He’ll be Apollo. He’ll be the CAG. He’ll manage.”

“Anders, then?” he asked doubtfully. He would never have suspected that their relationship was strong enough to pull Kara back from the grave, but perhaps he was wrong.

She snorted once, her eyes wide with good humor, then erupted into real laughter, holding her sides, bending over, shaking. He felt his brows furrow into a frown.

“Sorry,” she choked, catching sight of his darkening humor. “Sorry. It’s just—for someone who knows me so well—and for so long—you can be rather, well, dense, sir.”

He felt his expression clear. “You’re here to talk to me?”

“Don’t sound so surprised,” she said, sounding a little offended. “If the gods were going to let me come back to talk to anyone, I’d think they’d let me come to talk to the admiral of the fleet!”

“Well, I mean—” it wasn’t like him to stutter, so why was he stuttering? “—I just thought that…spirits…came back because of unfinished business, or something like that.”

“Well, yeah,” she said, watching him expectantly. She pushed a strand of short hair behind her ear.

“We have unfinished business?”

Ah, here was the Kara temper he knew so well. “What kind of question is that?” she demanded. “Of course we have unfinished business! Are you kidding me?”

“You’re talking about the incident in the rec room,” he said with a wince.

“Yes, I’m talking about the incident in the rec room,” she said, pushing herself off the table and walking away, turning away from him as if unable to meet his eyes. “You disowned me. You called me cancerous. You struck me.”

“I’m sorry, Kara—”

“I don’t want your apologies!” she shouted, whirling on him, and she looked so alive that he could have sworn she was really there. “It’s not like that was the first time someone I thought of as a parent did those things to me. My mother did worse. It’s not like I couldn’t handle it. What I couldn’t handle, sir, was what happened afterwards, when you acted as though things had never changed. As though we had gone back two years and the cylons hadn’t yet invaded.”

She was referring, he knew, to the banter that had been so familiar before the worlds ended. Starbuck, whaddya hear? Nothing but the rain. It had been instinct to say it in the hall the other day though he didn't know why, since he had gone so long without saying anything cordial to her at all. He picked up the Aurora figure from his table, watching it rather than her.

“That was an exchange you began before the worlds ended,” she said, twisting her hands, her face as full of emotion as he could ever recall having seen. “Or before New Caprica, even. But not since. Not since my behavior made you decide not to love me any more. And—I didn’t know what to make of it. Still don’t. Because what I don’t get, Admiral, sir, is why you seem so saddened by my death—when you were the one who first said goodbye. I can’t think of any other reason you would have brought up 'nothing but the rain', now, of all times. I mean, seriously, you haven't asked me 'whaddya hear' in months, if not years. Sir.”

“It’s not what you think, Kara,” he said, placing the figurine on the table gently and meeting her eyes. “I wasn’t—wasn’t saying goodbye. I was just—I missed you.” When it looked as though she might speak, he held up his hand to forestall her. “I pushed you away, Kara, I know that, and I shouldn’t have done it. And because I pushed you away, not the other way around, I couldn’t fix it. I couldn’t swallow my pride and go to you. So I had to try to make it up in the small gestures. A hand on your shoulder, here. An encouraging word there. But never anything, never enough, for you to realize that—I have never hated you. I have never thought of you as anything but the daughter of my heart.”

She clenched her jaw, her usually unreadable face twisted by some emotion he couldn’t name. “You have plenty of ‘daughters,’ sir,” she gritted out. “Sharon—excuse me, Athena. Kat, even.”

“You overheard me with Kat?” he asked cautiously.

“Let’s say I did.”

He shook his head. “Kara—I feel guilty about what I said when I was with Kat.”

“What—you lied, and you don’t wish you’d had a daughter?” She wasn’t making this easy for him.

“I didn’t need to wish,” he said gently. “I’d had a daughter for four years, and her name was Kara Thrace. I felt guilty because I was with Kat on her deathbed, and when she asked me that question, the one I was thinking of was you.”

She stared at him. “Really?” He couldn’t remember her voice ever sounding so small in life. Maybe when she told him about her role in Zak’s death.

He stood and walked closer to her, his step slow as if he were approaching a wounded animal. He stopped, and wished he could touch her, as he had once caressed her cheek when he met her on Kobol after her desertion. “Kara, I’ve made so many mistakes with you,” he said roughly, his voice catching in his throat. “I reacted badly when you told me about passing Zak, I wasn’t the father I should have been to you when I asked you to assassinate Cain, and I certainly have not acted towards you as I should have since you came back from New Caprica. But please believe me when I say that I love you, Kara. You are my daughter, my only daughter, and always will be.”

She smiled tremulously. “I love you too, sir,” she whispered, a single tear splashing down her cheek, disappearing as it fell toward the carpet. “And, for what it’s worth—I forgive you. For everything.”

He hadn’t realized how much he needed her to say that.

“Is Zak—is Zak waiting for you?” he asked, sounding broken. “Are you returning to him?”

“No,” she said, and now there was something a little ethereal about her expression, something so at peace that he knew she had never looked that way in life. “Zak isn’t—there. He’s here, right now. By your side. He always has been.”

Adama closed his eyes, and for the first time in a very long time he almost felt that he could feel his son’s presence. “Will you tell him that I love him?” he whispered.

“He knows,” she said. She smiled abruptly, a tearful smile, but there was a hint of Starbuck in it. “You Adamas really are amazing men,” she remarked. “All of you—in your own way—charismatic, strong, loveable. You hold each other up, and you hold up everyone else in the meantime.”

He was crying again, and again he didn’t mind. “You’re mostly right, Kara,” he said. “Except that we don’t hold each other up; we’ve never been able to. You’ve been the one to do that.”

“You’ll get by without me,” she said, a faint blush painting her cheeks at his praise and obvious affection. “You’ll find Earth, and Lee and Dee will settle down and give you lots of grandchildren, and you’ll all tell the new nuggets about Starbuck and her exploits, and sooner or later—it better be later, sir, or you’ll answer to me—you’ll come to be with Zak and me and we’ll fly vipers forever.”

“You’ve seen that?” he asked tremulously, feeling as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders—the weight of age and worry and care that he barely realized he had been carrying.

She shook her head, but there was no regret in her eyes. “No,” she murmured. “I haven't seen the future, or anything mystical like that. But I know it’s true. I’m still watching out for you Adamas, you know, just like I always tried to. I know you’ll succeed.” Her gaze moved past Adama to the broken fragments of his model ship. “I don’t think you can fix that,” she said sadly.

“No,” he agreed.

“But you can build a new one,” she continued. “A better one.” She paused, then grinned wryly. “I’ve gotten as cryptic as an oracle,” she said self-deprecatingly, but then her expression became serious again. “What I’m trying to say is—don’t waste your time mourning me. I’m not saying not to mourn me at all—I think I’d be offended if you didn’t—but don’t kill yourself thinking about might-have-beens. Things will turn out for the best. You’ll see.”

He nodded, but his eyes and soul were still full of doubt.

She took a step towards him, then turned her head and spoke as if someone were standing next to him. “Oh, shut the frak up,” she said crossly. “Frak the rules, Leoben—if you think I’m just going to sit back and let them tell me what to do… So what if they're the gods? Look, if you want me to fulfill my destiny, pal, then you’d better…That’s right.” A self-satisfied smirk crossed her face, and before Adama had time to process what had just happened, she took one more step forward and wrapped her arms around him in an honest-to-gods, real warm and real Kara hug. He stiffened in shock for just an instant, and then his arms came around her, and suddenly they were clinging to each other as if to never let go. “I never did this in life,” Kara whispered into his neck, his chin resting on her hair, “never quite dared, but now that I’m dead I guess I can go ahead and do it.” She took a deep breath, as if to steady herself. “I love you…dad.”

And before he could respond, she was gone forever. His arms closed around empty air, and he felt himself stumbling back, falling into his chair, staring at the place she had just been as he tried to recover from the most realistic hallucination he had ever had.

Something pressed against his leg, and he was about to reach for it when a quiet knock sounded on his door and Lee poked his head in. His son looked as tired and drawn as he had felt before whatever had just happened happened.

“Hey,” Lee said quietly. “I just wanted to say goodnight.” He paused, frowning as he stepped inside. “Are you okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Adama blinked. “I’ll be alright,” he said. “Just—” he rubbed his eyes “—just tired, I think.”

Lee nodded once. “Get some rest,” he said quietly. “And, I know it goes against protocol, but would you mind—would you mind if I stand next to you at the funeral tomorrow?” There was no body to eject, but they had filled a coffin with mementos of the pilot the entire crew had known and loved/hated that would act in its stead.

“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

They would have hugged, but Adama didn’t rise from his seat, for fear that he might lose the sensation of something pressing against his leg.

“Well—goodnight. I love you, dad.” Those were certainly some words that Lee didn't say often.

“I love you too, son.”

The door shut behind the younger man, and Adama sneaked a hand into his pocket, feeling something hard and metallic. He knew what it was before he pulled it out, spreading the chain across his fingers and staring at what he saw there.

Lying on his palm, gleaming and pristine when by all rights they should have been blown to smithereens, were a pair of dog tags and an engagement ring on a standard fleet-issue chain. The dog tags were engraved with three simple words, and he didn’t even need to look to know what they were.

Kara “Starbuck” Thrace.

Fic: Fleet Resurrection (1/1)

2008-01-20T22:34:21Z

Title: Fleet Resurrection
Characters: Kara Thrace, Helena Cain, William Adama, Lee Adama
Timeline: AU from pre-series through Resurrection Ship.
Summary: What if Starbuck joined the crew of the Pegasus before the cylons attacked?

It was the first Tournament the Colonial fleet had held in nearly forty years. Many of the more junior officers did not even know the purpose of a Tournament, and many of the older officers only knew about them in theory.

Tournaments were held when a battlestar retired and its pilots needed to be redistributed. Most pilots were relocated to their new posts with little difficulty, either through recommendations or stellar service records. Those who remained—who either were not remarkable enough to merit immediate placement or, less frequently, who were troublesome enough that no one wanted them—participated in the Tournament. They faced off against the pilots of other battlestars while the various commanders looked on. The commanders in turn placed bids on the pilots who caught their eye.

Forty years ago the Battlestar Torrentia had retired following the end of the Cylon wars. And now, in a month, the Battlestar Galactica was set to retire. The commanders of battlestars throughout the Twelve Colonies had come to come to volunteer their viper pilots to participate in the tournament and to take their pick of the twenty from the Galactica who were up for auction.

Admiral Helena Cain of the Battlestar Pegasus shifted stiffly in her seat next to Admiral Nagala. She and the other commanders sat in order of rank on the small viewing platform that had been erected near the tournament field. Each held in their laps a small display pad digitally portraying the scene playing out in front of them. The purpose of the pads was to associate each ship with a number--the Tournament was done anonymously—so the commanders could keep track of their favorites. Cain hated to sit still for any long periods of time—would have spent her entire life standing, if she could. She also hated these kinds of events. She had a good, well-disciplined crew as it was and saw no need to add any of the Galactica's poor excuses for pilots to her rosters.

The Galactica's older model of vipers faced off against the gleaming flock of vipers from the other battlestars. The newer vipers were in a typical formation, while the Galactica's ships were scattered in a formation that was definitely not standard. Cain stared critically at the formation. There was something about it that struck her as odd, but she couldn't quite place it.

"I've never seen a more ragtag group," Commander Franco, one of the most junior commanders, remarked, just loudly enough that everyone on the platform could hear.

For reasons she could not explain, Cain bristled on the Galactica pilots' behalf. "I don't care how they look, as long as they can fly," she said icily.

She felt the surprised look Nagala shot her way but did not acknowledge it. The Pegasus was the newest battlestar in the fleet, the height of Colonial technology and aesthetics. They thought that she would be as disdainful of the vipers' appearance as they were. She did not like it when people thought she was predictable.

A single piercing blast of a horn signaled the beginning of the Tournament, and in the time it took Cain to blink the Galactica vipers surged forward with more speed than she would have thought possible, taking out a good number of their cocky opponents in the first burst.

"Gods," someone said behind her, and then typing began all around as the commanders began to take note of the different pilots' skills.

Cain did not need to take notes. In that initial surge she had realized what it was that initially caught her eye about the Galactica pilots' formation: although it was scattered and almost haphazard, it was all focused around one central pilot. That pilot, number 20, was at the heart of the fray, taking out opposing pilots with grace and speed while the other Galactica pilots efficiently dispatched pilots from the fringes, working their way inward toward 20.

Cain did not need to take notes, because there was only one pilot she was interested in, and she was going to get that pilot, whatever it took.

20 danced through the air, lethal with every shot. One of his engines had been blown out but he still flew better than any of the others out there, spinning, flipping, diving under and around his opponents and, Cain suspected, directing the rest of his squadron as he flew.

She was not the only one to take note of 20's skill. "Did you see that?" Admiral Lear gasped after a particularly skillful move.

"20 is mine," Cain said so quietly that none but Nagala heard her vow.

The Tournament was over almost as soon as it had begun. Although a number of the Galactica ships had been "destroyed" they had managed to wipe out the entire flock of opposing vipers. The Galactica vipers that were still maneuverable reassembled into formation, this time aligning in a perfect Colonial salute formation facing the commanders in their viewing platform. The front ship, 20 of course, dipped in an unmistakable bow before executing a perfect 180 and flying straight through the formation, which turned more sedately to follow the lead pilot back to the Galactica.

Lear laughed shakily. "I think my pilots need to run a few more practice drills," she said.

"Yours are not the only ones," Cain said darkly. She and her CAG Stinger clearly needed to have a little chat.

"Don't take it too hard," Nagala said, standing to face the others. "I think it's safe to say we saw something pretty special today."

"I'm glad you appreciated it, sir," a gravelly voice spoke from the entranceway, and all the commanders whirled to see Adama leaning against the door frame and smiling that craggy grin of his.

"Commander Adama," Nagala said. Cain, who had known Nagala for most of her life, could tell by the tension in his stance that he was as surprised as the rest of them by Adama's presence. "I…that is, we thought you were on the Galactica commanding your pilots."

Adama's grin widened, if that was possible. Smug bastard. "It was made very clear to me that my presence there was not necessary," he said. "My pilots advised me to sit back and enjoy the show."

"What can you tell us about number 20, Adama?" Franco demanded.

Part of Cain wanted to object at the clear violation of Tournament rules. Nothing was to be known about the pilots other than what could be observed. The rest of Cain wanted to know everything she could about that particular pilot.

"You know I can't tell you anything," Adama said with an air of finality that made it clear he would not budge.

"Sometimes I hate that man," Nagala muttered under his breath. Cain agreed with the sentiment. "All right," he said more loudly. "It's time to place your bids, commanders. You know the drill. Bidding will begin with the least senior commanders. Who would like to bid on pilot number one?"

The bidding went fairly swiftly. Although each pilot did find a new home, it was clear that everyone was waiting for the real gem of the group.

At last it was time to bid on 20. The junior commanders were generous with their bids, each beating the bid of the commander before them, knowing that it was unlikely even then that they could win the pilot. Admiral Lear came before Cain and offered, "Status as lead pilot, with serious consideration for promotion in a year."

All eyes turned to Cain next, who took a deep breath as she stood. Her spine was straight and she stared straight into Adama's eyes as she said, "Immediate promotion to Captain. Position as lead pilot and assistant CAG. If he continues to prove his worth, promotion to CAG within the year. After one year aboard the Pegasus, one year's paid leave to attend War College, with the potential for additional promotion if he does well there."

Silence rang in the small room.

Admiral Nagala, the only officer senior to Cain, raised an eyebrow. "I won't even try to beat that," he said. "Congratulations, Admiral."

"Yes, congratulations," Adama said, walking down the stairs to shake Cain's hand. He stared into her eyes, and she felt incredibly judged by the junior officer. "Starbuck's an incredible pilot, and if you do right by her she'll be a great officer."

Relieved laughter rippled through the room, and Cain felt abruptly as if the joke was on her. "Starbuck?" she repeated the unfamiliar call sign.

Adama smiled, a kind of strained smile. "Lieutenant Thrace has a history of disciplinary problems, but don't let that fool you. She's the best pilot in the fleet." Coming from the war hero, a man who had been a star viper pilot before Cain was even born, that was saying something.

The room held an expectant silence again. Cain frowned. "I'm not retracting my bid," she said, meeting Adama's eyes of her own accord this time.

He nodded once. "I'll send my pilots to your ships to coordinate their transfers," he announced to the room at large. "Thank you for your consideration." He sketched a salute before marching out.

"Did I just dig my own grave?" Cain asked Nagala out of the corner of her mouth. She wondered how she could have missed hearing about the infamous Starbuck's exploits, if the pilot was really so well known.

Nagala patted her arm gently, in a fatherly way she did not permit from anyone but him. "It'll be fine," he said. "Your brig needed some livening up anyway."

After returning to the Pegasus Cain immediately requisitioned Starbuck's file. It was thicker than most, both because of the large number of disciplinary infractions and because her medical file was sizeable. The injuries outlined there, most of them dating back to the pilot's childhood, were particularly disturbing. The thought of anyone hurting a child in such a way was infuriating.

She was interested to see that Commander Adama himself had written the request for Starbuck's transfer to the Galactica from her former position as flight instructor almost two years ago. Much as he had done in person, in his reports he praised Starbuck's talent and loyalty but stressed that she had a quick temper and virtually nonexistent self restraint. Cain read between the lines and understood that Adama was very fond of Starbuck, almost in a fatherly manner. Their relationship in some ways reminded Cain of her own with Admiral Nagala.

A knock sounded on her door nearly an hour later and Cain folded her hands behind her back as she called, "Come in."

The young woman who entered was everything Cain expected. Not too tall, well-muscled. Hair that looked like it had been cut with a lawnmower. A chin that tilted further upward than it had a right to go and eyes that flashed defiance. Cain felt a thrill of excitement run through her at the thought of conquering that defiance, of molding this fiery officer to her own use. Starbuck executed a perfect salute, standing at stiff attention.

"At ease," Cain said, watching as the girl relaxed infinitesimally. "I trust that you have read and understood the details of my bid," she went on, coming to stand directly in front of the shorter woman.

"Yes sir," Starbuck said.

"Do you accept?" Cain knew that she would.

"Permission to speak freely, sir?" Starbuck asked in lieu of a direct reply.

Starbuck's file warned that this might be a dangerous thing to allow. "Go ahead," Cain said.

Starbuck frowned. "Why do you want me, sir?" she asked. "I understand why you want me as a pilot--" there was the expected arrogance
--but I've never taken a leadership position in the field. Why promote me, or offer to send me to War College?"

"I saw you take a leadership position earlier today," Cain said. "Don’t get me wrong, Starbuck, there are a lot of things I don't like about you and I don't even know you yet. You're insubordinate and have no control on your temper. You drink too much and are one arrogant son of a bitch. For some reason, though, I have a lot of faith in you. I'd like to see where you could go with the right kind of training and responsibility."

Starbuck chewed her lip thoughtfully. "When would the transfer take place, sir?"

Cain raised an eyebrow. "Do you have somewhere else you need to be, Lieutenant?" she asked.

A muscle leapt in Starbuck's jaw. "I want to attend the Galactica's decommissioning ceremony," she said.

"And do you always get what you want?" Cain asked.

Starbuck did not stop to think about how to respond, did not seem to care what Cain thought about her. "Most of the time, sir," she said.

Cain smiled a predatory smile. "Good. So do I."

The ceremony was not for another month. Cain did not want to wait that long. She also wanted to sever any ties the young officer might have to that bucket of bolts—and its infuriating commander—as soon as possible.

"The transfer will take effect immediately," she decided. "The Pegasus will be on maneuvers during Galactica's decommissioning; you will not be able to attend."

Starbuck clenched her teeth. "Then thank you for the bid, sir," she gritted out, "but I am unfortunately unable to accept." She turned to go without being dismissed. Cain decided to let that disrespect slide for the moment.

"Do you think Adama would want you to sacrifice this kind of opportunity?" she called out. Starbuck stiffened, stopped. Cain stepped closer to her, almost touching. She could see the fine trembling in the other woman's back. "Turning down my offer would be a poor repayment for all that the Old Man has done for you, wouldn't it?"

Starbuck did not respond, but turned slowly to face her, fury dancing in her eyes. Cain suspected that if she had been anyone else the young pilot would hit her with little hesitation.

Cain opened her fist, held up the captain's pins she had been clenching since before Starbuck entered the room. She took Starbuck's hand and squeezed her wrist to force her palm open, placed the pins onto her palm one by one. Then she closed the other woman's fist with a deceptively gentle push.

"Take these and think it over," she said. "If you still decide to reject my bid, send them back—I won't want to see your cowardly face. Otherwise I expect to see you on board at 8 a.m. sharp in two days with those pins on your lapels."

"Yes sir," Starbuck said. "Permission to be excused, sir?"

"Granted," Cain said, and watched the young officer leave the room.

Starbuck would be back, she knew. Adama would see to that. All she had to do was wait.

And she was right.

One year later

Commander William Adama sighed tiredly and removed his glasses, rubbing fruitlessly at his eyes. He always felt his age now, some days more than others. This was one of those days. The president, Laura Roslin, was not doing well. Doc Cottle gave her a month at the outside to live. Fleet morale was low despite the successful creation of the Chief's new ship, the Blackbird. His son Lee had taken the ship for its first flight, but although he was a good pilot it was too much for him to handle outside of very basic flight maneuvers. The ship's stealth capacity would not do them much good if no one could fly it in combat situations.

Kara Thrace could have flown the ship. Not for the first time Adama tasted bitter regret at having convinced her to transfer to the Pegasus. If he hadn't, if she'd been at the decommissioning ceremony, she would still be alive. And how many other lives would she have saved in the time since then? Would they still have lost half of their civilian fleet in those first days of flight from the cylons? How many pilots could she have trained? As it was, the Galactica had been perilously short on pilots ever since the accident that had killed off thirteen of his best. The two civilian flight instructors in the fleet had done their best to train new pilots, but flying a viper was a tricky business, quite unlike anything a civilian could imagine or handle.

"DRADIS reports contacts," Lt. Gaeta said quickly, interrupting Adama's dark thoughts. "Gods, it looks like a basestar."

Adama stared in dread at the DRADIS screen, watching as the large dot marked UNKNOWN moved closer to the Galactica, smaller dots—cylon raiders—swarming toward them.

There was something familiar about the formation the raiders took.

"Bringing the heavy artillery to bear," Gaeta said in response to an order from Colonel Saul Tigh. "Spooling the FTL drive."

"No, hold," Adama ordered, still studying the formation. He had seen it once before, at the Tournament a year ago.

"Sir?" Gaeta asked, eyes darting in confusion.

"Open a ship to ship line," Adama commanded, listening intently as Dee did so. He picked up the command handset. "This is Commander Adama of the Battlestar Galactica," he announced. "Identify yourself or be fired upon."

There was a short pause before a vaguely familiar voice spoke over the speakers. "Adama? Is that you? This is Admiral Cain, commander of the Pegasus. You have no idea how good it is to hear your voice."

Adama felt a smile split his face for the first time in a very, very long time. "Admiral," he said warmly, "I know exactly how you feel."

An hour later found Adama and most of his crew standing on the deck of the Galactica as a raptor landed. Adama felt the urge to fiddle with his uniform but then Laura Roslin took his hand in hers and that was eminently better.

The raptor door swung ponderously to the ground and an aide stepped out. Then Admiral Helena Cain's face appeared—and who would ever have thought he'd be happy to see that battle axe? She stepped down the stairs quickly. A man with colonel's stripes followed her. And then…Adama felt his heart stutter in his chest. From the corner of his eye he saw Lee stiffen as well.

"Bill?" Laura asked quietly, concerned by his obvious shock.

He didn't respond though, just stared at the apparition that had appeared, her face a little thinner, a little older, her uniform graced with the pins of a major, stared and took an unconscious step forward.

Kara smiled at him, a wide, goofy smile, her eyes suspiciously bright as she stepped down to stand beside the colonel.

Adama coughed, blinked once, turned back to face Cain. "Admiral Cain," he said, not needing to speak loudly to be heard by everyone there. "Welcome aboard the Galactica."

"It's so good to see you, Commander," Cain said, and then everyone was cheering and breaking ranks and shortly after shaking hands with Cain Adama found himself face to face with the young woman who had almost become his daughter.

He pulled her into a tight hug before he could stop himself. "I missed you," he said in her ear.

She laughed, the ungraceful laugh for which she was famous. "I missed you too, Old Man," she said, squeezing him back.

Then he felt himself being pulled away by his son as Lee came to stand next to him to stare at their girl.

"Kara," Lee said, his voice hoarse. He cleared his throat in embarrassment. "It's, uh, it's good to see you."

Kara grinned again. "Lee, you frakker," she said, and her own voice might have been rougher than usual, "I can't believe you're still alive! Haven't you done anything stupid and gotten yourself killed yet?"

Lee grinned, wiped away the tear at the corner of his eye. "Me?" he shot back. "How the hell did Cain manage to keep you alive this long without killing you—sir?" He raised a skeptical eyebrow at her new rank.

Kara punched him in the shoulder and he punched her back and then Adama couldn't tell which of them pulled the other into a hug first, because all of a sudden they were wrapped around each other laughing and crying.

"You were right about her," Cain said from behind him. Adama turned warily to face her. She looked almost fond as she observed his two children tussling. "Headstrong and insubordinate, yes, but if you have just a little faith in her she'll do amazing things for you."

"Thank you for looking out for her," Adama said awkwardly, feeling a warmth at his back as Laura joined him.

Cain's gaze shuttered. "Starbuck doesn't need anyone to look out for her, Commander. She's strong. Even if I had done anything special for her…I wouldn't have done it for you. She's my officer now, not yours. My 3IC. Remember that."

Adama looked back over his shoulder, taking in the ease of Kara's stance, her unforced smile, her crisp uniform and the pins he wished her could have put there, and felt a twisting in his gut. "How could I forget?" he replied.

Kara and Lee linked arms as Lee began to reintroduce her to the pilots, forgetting that she had flown with most of them long before he became Galactica's CAG. Adama was reminded once again of the many pilots they had lost since the worlds ended, among them some of his favorites. Helo, lost on Caprica, having traded his life for that spineless worm Baltar. Crashdown, on Kobol. Sharon, who was really a cylon and who had put two rounds in his chest while he smiled at her with fatherly pride.

Several hours later the crew of the Pegasus was ready to return to their ship. "Admiral, I'd appreciate it if you allowed Major Thrace to stay on Galactica for another few hours," Adama said. He would never admit to anyone how he chafed at having to ask her permission for anything. He had gotten so used to being in command. It would take some time to get used to taking orders again.

Cain stared at him for a long time and he almost thought that she was going to turn him down. Then she smirked, a smirk that said that she had nothing to fear, that he could not take Kara back from her, and said, "You can keep her all night. I'll expect her on duty tomorrow." Then she walked to Kara and put her hand on her shoulder in a manner that was completely proprietary. She whispered something in the pilot's ear, Kara nodding in response, then continued back to the raptor.

Adama walked up to Kara. "Let's go to my office," he said.

"Yes, sir," she said.

Once in his office Adama poured them each a glass of whiskey, the really nice stuff that he only broke out on very special occasions. He watched as she sipped at her drink, savoring the strong flavor.

"I'd like you to tell me about you time on Pegasus," Adama said carefully. "Nothing that you feel would violate Cain's trust, of course. Just, whatever you feel like saying." It was clear that Cain was genuinely fond of Kara and Kara fiercely attached to Cain—much as she had once been attached to Adama. However much he wanted to hear incriminating evidence against Cain, he did not want to destroy the relationship that Kara had built with the admiral by asking her to betray her trust. He cared too much about Kara to do that.

Kara stared into her glass, swirling the liquid inside. "Admiral Cain is…very strict. She's a good commander. She's kept her head as we've jumped from place to place hunting down cylons. Sometimes she makes…hard decisions. Decisions that I, well, haven't agreed with. Very vocally." She glanced up, inadvertently met his eyes, looked away. "Sometimes I think that's why the admiral likes me," she said. "I'm like her, in some ways, and in some ways I'm a complete opposite. I help her to…reign in her more…extreme impulses."

Adama tried to understand what Kara was too uncomfortable to say. "Such as?"

Kara sighed. "You'll have seen that Pegasus has a small civilian fleet attached to it. Admiral Cain…well, she wanted to strip the civilian ships down for parts. Leave them to fend for themselves. I, well, I told her not to."

Adama's mouth went dry. Strip the civilian fleet? Even on his very worst day he had never considered such a possibility. "Admiral Cain does not seem like the type who would do what her subordinate told her to do," he said after a long pause.

"Ah, well," Kara said nervously, "I might have threatened to quit if she did it, sir. And, um, join the civilian ships in fighting off the Pegasus' forces. And, well, take a few of her pilots with me."

Adama blinked. "How did Cain respond?"

Kara shrugged. "We kept the civilian fleet with us."

"There has to be more to it than that," Adama pushed. "Cain wouldn't have just accepted your threat."

"No, but it's not like I'm not used to being disciplined," Kara said with a weak smile.

"I can't imagine that she just sent you to the brig," he said. He'd had to do that to Kara often enough when she'd been under his command.

"Admiral Cain has found it fairly effective to employ corporal punishment since the worlds ended," Kara said after another reluctant pause. "Nothing too severe, just enough to convey her displeasure."

"What you're saying is that you saved hundreds, maybe thousands, of civilians, and Admiral Cain had you beaten for it," Adama said flatly, fury running through him.

To his surprise, his words seemed to irritate her. He had forgotten that Kara had become loyal to Cain. "It's not like that," she argued. "You've said yourself that sometimes we have to roll the hard six. Well, Admiral Cain does that all the time. Sometimes she goes too far and needs me to step in to stop her, and when that happens she does listen to me, but she can't just let me be insubordinate without any kind of punishment, and this is a solution that works for both of us."

The silence rang between them.

"I'm sorry," Adama said, though he bristled at Kara's acceptance of Cain's extreme discipline. "I've become very protective of our little fleet. If something happened to it, it would be a devastating blow to the human race."

Kara hugged her stomach. "I know that," she said. "That's why I protected the Pegasus' fleet. We've all done what we have to do."

Adama drained the last of his whiskey, set it lightly on the table. "I appreciate your honesty, Kara. You probably want to go catch up with the rest of the crew."

Kara set her own glass down. It was still mostly full. "Sir," she said, the note of dread in her voice impossible to miss, "there's something else I should tell you. I've been thinking about this for a long time, regretting not confessing the truth to you." Her voice trailed off.

Adama frowned. "What truth?"

She took a deep breath. "Zak failed basic flight," she said in a monotone.

"What?" he breathed.

"His technique was sloppy and he had no feel for flying. I should have flunked him, but I couldn't," she whispered.

He remembered the first time he met Kara Thrace. She had tried so hard then to pretend that she was unaffected by Zak's death, had tried to conceal their engagement thinking that it could only hurt Adama to know now that Zak was dead.

"Because you were engaged," he said now, feeling an icy hand clench around his heart. "You did it because you were engaged."

She was crying now. "I was so in love with him," she croaked. "I couldn't bear to be the one who broke his heart. I'm so sorry. So sorry."

Adama stared at her bowed head through a haze of red. "Go back to the Pegasus," he said in a voice he did not recognize as his own.

"Okay," she whispered, broken.

"And walk out of this office while you still can," he finished.

Kara did glance at him then, just once, her eyes full of such pain that she almost reached him through the anger that had engulfed him. Almost.

She closed her eyes, turned, and walked out, hands behind her head as if to shield herself from a blow.

When Saul Tigh entered a few minutes later he found Adama staring moodily into Starbuck's now empty glass.

"Starbuck sure looked unhappy," Saul remarked, seating himself across from his friend. "I thought for sure she'd stick around to rub her new rank in everyone's faces."

"Talk to Cain's XO, Saul," Adama said. "I want you to sound him out about their actions, Cain's and Major Thrace's."

Saul blinked. "Of course. I'd have thought that Starbuck would have told you anything you wanted to know."

Adama's lips tightened. "Starbuck's on the Pegasus now," he said firmly. "We need to remember that. She's not one of us."

"Far be it from me to defend Starbuck, but she's always loved you, Bill," Saul said slowly. "I think we can trust her at least to be honest with you."

The irony of the situation, of Saul defending Starbuck against Adama, was not lost on either man.

"I just want to hear everything from another source," Adama said in a heavy voice.

Saul watched him for a long moment. "I'll take care of it," he said.

Adama kept staring into the glass long after Saul had gone. He had never been one to find solace in the bottom of a bottle. Maybe now was the time to start.

The next day Kara came back to the Galactica to try flying the Blackbird. Of course, Kara being Kara, rather than go on the simple test flight that had been planned she took off toward the cylon ship the Pegasus had been stalking, took a series of pictures Cain would have given her right arm for, and returned back before Lee had finished his rant about her irresponsible and foolhardy stunts. As Adama later heard it from Saul Tigh she even had suggestions for how to make the Blackbird more usable for other pilots, although they would take some time to be put into effect.

She left the Galactica later that day without ever having to say a word to Adama.

Kara Thrace had no sooner landed on the deck of the Pegasus than a call was sent over the intercom requesting that she come to Admiral Cain's office. She walked there quickly and told herself that the stiffness in her spine came from good discipline rather than lingering pain from Adama's harsh dismissal. She deserved his response, after all, had even expected it. So why did it hurt so much?

Cain was standing when Kara entered her office. Kara wasn't sure that she could remember ever seeing Cain seated.

"Major Thrace," the admiral greeted curtly.

"Sir." There were few people Kara had ever called "sir" with any real respect. Cain was one. Adama was another.

"I'd like to ask your opinion about something," Cain said. "I believe that it would be a mistake to allow Lee Adama to continue serving under his father's command." Kara opened her mouth to reply but closed it again when Cain held up a finger. "Captain Adama has a history of insubordination—in more serious circumstances than your own—and it's clear that he and his father are very attached. I'm afraid that by allowing them to continue working together I might be endangering this fleet."

Kara waited a moment to make sure Cain was done. "With respect, sir, I don't think it's a problem at all. Lee—Captain Adama—is good at separating his personal life from his work. And the commander, well, he cares about most of his crew almost as if they're family. You can't take them all away. Also, if Lee comes to fly for Pegasus you'd need to find the Galactica a new CAG—I'm assuming you don't intend to trade me for Lee."

"Stinger could do it," Cain said.

Kara shook her head. "I've worked with Stinger, and I've worked with the Galactica pilots. They don't respond well to his kind of leadership." His leadership being heavy-handedness and excessive vitriol.

"So your suggestion is that I allow Lee Adama to continue serving as Galactica's CAG," Cain said.

"He would still be under my authority as well," Kara pointed out, "and I'm under your chain of command, not Commander Adama's. If I felt that he was acting inappropriately, I would step in. Assuming you trust me, of course."

Cain's response to that was a withering glare.

"Actually," Kara said blithely, "this leads into something I want to talk to you about. I've been planning our attack against the resurrection ship, and I would like Captain Adama to lead the strike."

Cain's surprise was obvious. "You always want to be the first into a fray," the admiral said. "What's changed?"

"I've been running possible scenarios," Kara explained. "The best approach is to use the Blackbird to take out the resurrection ship's FTL drive so it can't jump away, then send the vipers to destroy it. Lee's a good pilot, Admiral, but he's too by the book. I don't trust anyone but me to get the Blackbird in close enough without being detected. Stinger's not an option to lead the attack—no one will follow him and he doesn't have the adaptability Lee does in a fight."

Cain stared at her long and hard. "All right," she said at last. At Kara's smile, she warned, "Not because I trust him, but because I trust you."

Kara tried to hide how much that meant to her.

"Finally," Cain said, "I've been reading Commander Adama's logs and I've found something interesting. His president—this Laura Roslin—thinks that she has had visions from the gods. These visions have told her that if the Arrow of Apollo is retrieved from Caprica and taken to Kobol, it will show us the way to Earth."

Kara stood very still. "You don't believe in the gods," she said.

"No," Cain agreed. "But you do. And regardless of whether this arrow will help us find the mythical Thirteenth Colony, there might be people still on Earth. Now that we have Galactica's resources, when this is all over, I'd like you to plan a mission to Caprica to retrieve the arrow and see whether there is anyone there to rescue."

The viper pilot grinned. "That's the best idea I've heard all day, sir."

Cain waited until Kara was at the door to say, "Kara. I know that it hasn't come to this yet. And maybe it never will. But there may come a time when you have to chose between Adama and me." Kara turned slowly to face her, her face tight with dread. "I'm not asking you to choose now," Cain said. "I just want you to know…I know that you'll make the right choice."

Kara winced as if she had been struck. "Yes sir," she murmured before hurrying away.

By the day of the big mission Kara and Adama still had not spoken and tensions between the two ships were running high. The Pegasus pilots were skeptical about flying for Apollo although they trusted Starbuck's word that he would not lead them astray. Baltar had found out about the Pegasus' captive cylon and was screaming throughout the fleet about ill treatment although the cylon had been relatively unmolested (once again due to Kara's judicious intervention into Cain's harsh rule). Although Adama had made it clear that he would yield to Cain's command there were many in the Galactica fleet who felt that he should remain in charge. Even the civilian fleets were not melding well, having developed two dramatically different economies since the worlds ended and finding that their supply lines did not merge seamlessly.

Kara stood at the podium in front of a room filled to overflowing with Galactica and Pegasus pilots all in their flight suits.

"This is going to be a momentous day in fleet history," she announced, concealing her wince at her own words. She'd never been much of a public speaker. "I'm proud that we have two terrific fleets flying together today. We're going to kick cylon ass. I know some of you are nervous about flying with pilots from another ship. Don't be. I've flown with all of you at one point or another and can confidently say that there are no other pilots I'd rather fly with."

Wisely no one pointed out that there were no other pilots left.

"You're all going to be following Lee Adama on this mission," Kara said. "I know you'll listen to him as if he were me." This was said with a stern glare at the Pegasus pilots who were looking somewhat mutinous. She turned over the podium to Lee, striding swiftly down the aisle. She put her hand on the shoulders of several pilots as she walked past.

"Starbuck," Lee called. She turned to face him and the expectant faces of the pilots watching. His eyes were soft. "Good hunting."

"Good hunting," the pilots echoed.

Kara flashed them her pure Starbuck grin. "Back atcha," she said.

She flew herself to the Galactica in one of the spare raptors. The Blackbird was waiting for her when she landed and she performed a quick inspection to make sure everything was in order.

"It's been a while since I've had a pilot who insists on doing her own pre-check," the Chief said. "It's good to have you back with us, sir."

"Good to see you, too Chief," she said. "Let's get me in the air."

Minutes later the Blackbird was flying, headed inexorably toward the resurrection ship. "Starbuck, this is Galactica," Dee said. "Good hunting."

"Roger, Galactica," Kara said, wondering whether Adama had approved the message.

She went radio silent and turned off the lights in the cockpit as she slipped her way into cylon territory. Her own breathing was loud in her ears as she moved slowly through the arches of the resurrection ship, looking for the FTL drive. She tried not to look at the faces of the deactivated cylons lined up row by row in the ship. They weren't alive. If she did her job right and Lee didn't frak up leading the charge then these cylons would never be alive.

She found the FTL drive and took careful aim. A quick press of a button and it exploded in a brief flash of fire. Then cylon raiders were converging on her and she maneuvered as much as she could in the sluggish ship, spinning to meet her opponents. Her muscles burned with the effort and sweat trickled down her spine.

"Galactica, Starbuck! Where the frak are the vipers?" she screamed.

Galactica's reply was lost in the roaring in her ears as she faced off against an endless sea of raiders. She took out the five nearest to her and was almost away when a lucky shot by one of the other raiders took out two of her back engines. "Oh, frak me," Kara said as she felt herself begin to lost control. She pulled off a flip that should have been impossible in that ship, shooting once at the cylon that had got her. Then they were both falling, the viper pilot and the raider, pulled inexorably by the faint gravity of a nearby moon.

She had just enough presence of mind to eject before she lost consciousness.

Adama let out a sigh of relief as Dee pulled off her headset. "Apollo reports that the basestars and resurrection ship have been destroyed," she reported with a wide smile.

A cheer went through CIC.

"Any word on Starbuck?" Adama asked.

Dee spoke into the headset. "One of the Pegasus fighters reports that he saw the Blackbird go down," she said quietly.

"Did he see it explode?" Adama asked, his throat suddenly very dry. He remembered how he felt when he heard that Zak had died. It had felt a lot like he felt now.

"Negative, sir," she said. "He says it looks like she crashed on the moon."

"She could still be alive then," Adama said. "Prepare search and rescue. I want her found, now."

"Finding a pilot on that moon could be like finding a needle in a haystack," Saul murmured. He had been even more open with his disdainful comments since Adama's sudden change in attitude toward Starbuck.

Adama speared him with a glare. "I don't care how long it takes or how hard she is to find. We're going to find our missing pilot and bring her home."

Saul grimaced. "We'll do our best, but she only has about 48 hours of air. After that, it doesn't matter how hard we look."

"Commander, you have a call from Pegasus Actual," Dee said.

Adama took up the handset. "Adama," he said.

"Starbuck is on that moon," Cain said, her voice tense. "I've begun to coordinate search and rescue here—"

"We're coordinating it here too," he interrupted.

A pause.

"Perhaps we should work together," she said reluctantly.

"Agreed."

"Apollo will be in charge of the rescue mission. The full resources of the fleet will be at his disposal. Adama, I want her found."

The echo of his earlier words struck a chord with him. "We'll find her, admiral," he promised.

Only after they both hung up did it occur to him that neither had mentioned the success of the resurrection ship mission even once.

48 hours later the missing pilot had still not been found.

Admiral Cain sipped a cup of coffee as she stood in Galactica's CIC. Adama stood next to her. Their eyes were glued to the red counter that began to tell them just how long ago Starbuck had run out of air.

"She might have had an extra supply," Adama said.

"Of course she did," Cain agreed.

They took occasional breaks to Adama's office when they could not stand to be in CIC anymore. Then they would talk about Starbuck.

"Why do you like her?" Adama asked once.

Cain did not need to ask who he was talking about. "Because no matter how many times you knock her down, she comes up swinging," she said in a rare moment of openness. She hesitated. "Because she's like me, except she's better than I'll ever be."

Another time Adama told her the story of Starbuck's relationship with Zak, Zak's death, and Starbuck's consequent transfer to Galactica. He did not mention that Starbuck had passed Zak when she shouldn't have. He would never tell anyone about that.

The last time they retreated to his office Cain said, "If something happens to me, Starbuck is my replacement."

"What?" Adama asked.

"Starbuck doesn't have formal training, but she's got a mind for strategy and she's a good leader," Cain said. "Ever since she came on board I've been planning to make her into a commander some day. I've been working hard with her since the worlds ended. She'll be ready. If anything happens to me…promote her. Place her in charge of the Pegasus. I'll put it in my will to make it formal, but I wanted to tell you in person."

"She might be dead now," Adama said unwillingly.

"She isn't," Cain replied, gripping her glass so tightly that it cracked.

Twelve hours after Starbuck's air ran out the president had had enough. "Do you know how much fuel we have expended looking for one pilot?" she asked, eyes flashing with anger. "You two are the leaders of the Colonial fleet," she snarled, hands on her hips. "If you're willing to sacrifice everything—the future of the human race—for one pilot, then you're not worthy of your uniforms."

Cain smiled a smile that showed too many teeth. "All due respect, Madam President, but you can frak off," she said.

Adama sighed. He would have liked to respond as Cain had, but he couldn't. "Kara told me that she acted as a mitigating influence on you, Helena," he said.

The admiral stiffened. "Perhaps," she allowed.

"If she were here, she would be the one in our faces telling us not to do this," he said. "You know she would."

Cain glared. "And I'd send her to the brig just like I always do," she said.

Adama raised an eyebrow. "The brig?" The words were all the rebuke that was necessary.

She flushed at being caught in the lie. "Our system works for us, Adama," she said. "Kara's mother hurt her far worse. She can take anything I can dish out—and more."

"Surely you see that that can't continue," Adama said firmly. "I won't allow it."

"Do you think I like hurting her?" Cain demanded. "I hate it! But what can I do? I can't afford to have one of my officers in the brig. This way, at least she can stay on duty. Like I said. She can handle it."

"Although I don't know Major Thrace very well, I am fairly sure that if she were here she'd be right in your face right now, demanding that you call of the search," Roslin said, reminding them both of her presence.

"Two more hours," Cain bargained. "We can wait that long. The cylons won't be coming back here any time soon. If that's not all right with you…then go frak yourself."

Roslin smiled. "That sounds just fine," she said.

Two hours later Kara had not been found. Two hours and five minutes later both battlestars began spooling their FTL drives to make the jump away. Two hours and six minutes later a cylon raider appeared on DRADIS.

"DRADIS contact," Gaeta exclaimed. "The cylon will reach us before we can jump."

"Send the alert fighters," Adama and Cain ordered in unison.

Apollo and several of the Pegasus vipers flew out to meet the lone raider. Despite the good odds the cylon managed to evade the increasingly frustrated colonial pilots for several tense minutes. At last Apollo let out a soft curse as he lost sight of the raider. "Where the frak did it go?" he demanded.

"Uh, Galactica, this is Tophat," a Pegasus pilot said. "The raider is now flying formation above Apollo."

A moment later Apollo's amazed laughter rang out. "It's Starbuck!"

Adama snatched up the handset. "What?" he barked.

"The cylon is marked 'Starbuck' under the wings," Apollo said. "It's her!"

"Bring it in!" Adama shouted above the cheering in CIC. "If it does anything, shoot it!"

"Wilco, Galactica," Apollo said. "It's definitely her, though. This thing is flying with some real attitude. Where should we bring her in to land?"

Cain took the handset from Adama. "Bring her in to Galactica," she ordered. "We're both here." At least Starbuck did not have to choose between the two of them now.

Adama turned to Cain and pulled her into a hug. "We brought her home," he whispered in her ear.

She smiled back at him although the expression looked like it hurt her face.

"Congratulations," Roslin said. Cain shot her a disdainful glare.

A short while later Cain and Adama waited anxiously outside of Starbuck's alcove in the infirmary as Cottle completed his examination. When he stepped outside his face was set in its usual frown.

"Well, she banged up her knee pretty good," he said. "Anyone else, I'd say they'd never fly again. As it is, even with Starbuck it'll be a while before she's up in the air. You can go in and see her if you like, but she's pretty drugged up."

"You first," Adama said to Cain.

She graced him with another small smile before going inside.

"Good to see you awake, Major," Cain said, standing at Starbuck's bedside.

Starbuck smiled weakly. "Thanks for waiting for me," she said. "Sorry I took so long."

Cain shrugged. "I'm used to that kind of disrespect from you."

She took Starbuck's hand, gave her the small round pins she had been carrying for some time now. "Good flying today, Kara," she whispered. "I'm proud of you."

Kara bit her lip to keep from crying. "Thank you, sir."

"Now get some rest," Cain said. "I want my CAG back ASAP."

"Yes, sir," Kara said, pulling her hand back to rest it against her chest.

Cain emerged from the curtains. "She's all yours, Commander," she said. "I think we should wait till she's mobile again, then meet with the president and Major Thrace to arrange for…improved relations between the Pegasus and Galactica. We're all human. We're not the enemy—we should work together against the cylons. We should also begin organizing a mission to send some pilots back to Caprica to retrieve the Arrow of Apollo and see whether there are any people still alive."

Adama stared at her for a long moment. "I'd like that, Admiral," he said, watching as she strode briskly away.

He stepped slowly into Kara's alcove, wincing at the apprehensive expression on her face.

"How are you doing?" he asked.

She shrugged. "The doc, he can fix you up with some really good stuff," she joked, not meeting his eyes.

"Kara," he said. He bent to press a kiss to her forehead. "You did good."

She smiled tremulously, reading the forgiveness in his face, his voice. "Is there anything you need?" he asked gently.

"A stogie would be great," she said.

He laughed softly. "I had a feeling." He had been saving the cigar since the worlds ended. He had planned to smoke it at Zak's wedding. It seemed right to give it now to the young woman who was his daughter in everything but name.

"Get some sleep," he advised, watching as she leaned back in the bed, rolling the cigar between her fingers. "Tomorrow we're going to figure out how to bring peace to this frakked up fleet of ours."

She flashed him a grin. "Yes, sir," she said.

Adama left and closed the curtains behind him.

Kara lay in bed and clutched the stogie. In her other hand she played with the colonel's stripes that Cain had pressed into her hand—not a promotion quite yet, but a promise of one to come. She smiled faintly, and then she rolled over, careful not to bump her injured knee, and fell asleep.

Fic: Spending Eternity (1/?)

2008-01-20T22:09:46Z

Title: Spending Eternity (1/?)
Timeline: After the series finale
Pairings: Sydney/Sloane eventually. Past Sydney/Vaughn
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Six years after the series finale, an older man who calls himself Giovanni and a younger woman who goes by the name of Emelia live in separate estates on the coast of Italy. The last time she saw him she put a bullet in his forehead. The last he'd heard she was dead.

“More coffee for you, signor?”

The elderly gentleman smiled kindly, blue eyes crinkling behind round sunglasses, short salt and pepper hair bent by the light ocean breeze, and nodded once. His waitress, an attractive young woman, blushed as she took up his empty cup and carried it inside.

In the three years he had lived on the Italian coast, Giovanni Costa had never before visited Riomaggiore. The charming town was the furthest south and east of the five towns of Cinque Terre and therefore the furthest from his coastal estate, which was very near the north-most town of Cinque Terre, Monterosso al Mare. The five towns—overrun by tourists more and more these days, though in some ways that suited his purpose—were connected by an efficient train, so it was certainly no hassle to get from his home to Riomaggiore.

These days, however, Giovanni was obsessed with the simple pleasures of life—the wind against his cheek, the sharp smell of the ocean, a good book and a crackling fire, the crunch of leaves and twigs beneath his feet and the feel of the blood pumping steadily, strongly through his veins—and so he refused to take the train. He spent a day planning his trip, choosing the hotel at which he would stay, reading up on restaurants and cafes as though he were visiting another continent rather than a town not even a two hour drive away, and then he packed a bag, put on his expensive hiking garb, and spent the good part of a day hiking to the one town of Cinque Terre he had never visited.

Giovanni was not an old man. Those who saw him in the street might say that he was aging—and that suited him just fine. He had been aging for over a decade now. He had no friends, but in the towns nearer to his home he had plenty of acquaintances. He was known for his taste in fine wine—something for which Riomaggiore was famous, and part of the reason he had finally chosen to make the trek—his impeccable knowledge of Italian literature, both new and ancient, his extreme wealth, which he neither flaunted nor concealed, and, above all, his horses. Yes, everyone agreed, Giovanni Costa had an excellent collection of horses.

Giovanni had called himself Giovanni for four years now. He had been surprised to find that he liked Italy even better as Giovanni Costa than he had as Arvin Sloane.

He drank his second coffee slowly, savoring the rich taste, then paid with his credit card.

The serving girl frowned in concentration as she read the name on the card.

“What is it?” he asked, the Italian rolling off his tongue as smoothly as English ever had. His instinctive caution he concealed behind another paternal smile.

“It’s funny,” she said. “Your surname is Costa—one of our regulars is a Costa as well.”

“That is funny,” he said in a tone that was not censure and that did not invite further conversation. Let her think that he was sensitive about his family name.

She shrugged and took the card away.

He did not think too hard about the coincidence of another Costa living in the region. It was a common enough name—one of the reasons he’d chosen it—and of course there was no danger that the other Costa was a relative of his. He waited patiently for the serving girl to return with his receipt. He signed his name with a flourish—as graceful and looping as Arvin Sloane’s signature had been cramped and reminiscent of a series of stalagmites—nodded at the serving girl, then donned his white fedora and strode out onto the narrow street.

He wandered the sloping paths of the town for some time, unbowed by the hot summer sun, alternately blending in with the tourists and passing as a native, before coming upon a recessed used book store. He thought briefly about passing it by—the hike to the town had been more strenuous than he had anticipated, and there was little chance the store would possess a book he would like to buy that could not be had more easily than by lugging it up the Italian coast. But then he inhaled and the smell of old books swirled through his lungs and without further hesitation he went in, a bell chiming as he pushed open the aged door.

An elderly man sat behind a solid wooden desk near the shop’s entrance. Beyond him were several deep rows of shelves and it was to these that Giovanni was drawn.

Two hours later, Giovanni was two-thirds of the way through his perusal of the books on offer, having stopped often to skim a familiar passage or check a publishing date. A tall pile of books had accumulated on the floor, from which he would have to carefully pick one or two to bring back with him this time. If he had needed incentive to return to Riomaggiore at a later date, this bookstore had provided it.

A chime from the door bell was the first sound to interrupt his examination of the shelves and he shrugged off the irritation with minor effort. His back was to the door and it was only being out of the spy business for four years and a determination to be as unparanoid as possible that kept him from turning around to examine the newcomer.

“Emilia!” It was the first word the proprietor had spoken since Giovanni arrived. “I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow!”

The pleasant laugh that came as a response made Giovanni shiver with something like recognition and something like enchantment. It was not an altogether unpleasant sensation.

“I’m sorry, Carlo,” a woman’s cheerful voice replied. Giovanni stiffened. The voice was so familiar that he knew that it must just be a trick of his imagination. “It was such a beautiful day, I couldn’t resist walking into town a day early.”

“It is always a pleasure to see my favorite customer,” Carlo said gallantly.

She laughed again and then the soft sound of her footsteps made it clear she was approaching the narrow aisle in which Giovanni had ensconced himself.

“Excuse me,” she said politely. “May I squeeze past you?”

Still not looking at her—unwilling to look at her—but also no longer looking at the books in front of him, he nodded once, stepping to the side to allow her to pass. He sneaked a peak at her profile as she slid by him before she turned her back to him to commence her own perusal. He felt his heart seize in a way that it hadn’t since…well, since a time he strove never to think about.

This woman, this Emilia, had long chestnut brown hair that looked like it would be soft to the touch. She was tall with a graceful, slender frame that did not hide the well-defined muscles in her arms and back. It was impossible to guess her age, though she was certainly not past her prime. She wore light colors—a blue tank top and beige capris over suede sandals. Even from behind she was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen.

It did not take her long to feel his gaze on her back. Perhaps she had felt it all along but assumed that he would dismiss her and look away. He could tell the moment she decided to confront him because her posture became even straighter (it had been excellent to begin with), and she let her hand fall from the spine of a book to hang at her side.

She turned to face him.

She stared at him for a long time, her face impassive. Her body was not tense, not exactly, but neither was she relaxed as she had been before.

Giovanni could hear his own heart pounding in his ears, and were he another man he might be afraid that a heart attack was imminent.

“Carlo,” she called out, never once taking her eyes off of him, “I’m sorry, but I just realized I left the oven on at home. You’ll forgive me if I come back tomorrow?”

Carlo laughed. “For you, bella? Of course.”

She pierced Giovanni with her gaze, a thousand meanings flashing through her eyes, and then she tore herself away and strode through the store with a predatory grace he knew too well.

Giovanni waited five minutes. Then he gathered up his pile of books, shuffled through them, and chose a very early edition of the Divine Comedy. He carefully sorted the rest of the books back onto their appropriate places on the shelves. He paid for the book and then left the store. He looked up and down the alley, trying to decide which way she would have gone. Toward the ocean, or inland?

He turned left, toward the ocean, and hadn’t gone thirty feet when she stepped out from a cross street and faced him.

She had changed and yet she was just as he remembered her. Her face was thinner now, with more lines from age and worry. It appeared that she had had the good fortune to age as her mother had: well, like fine wine, the few rough edges burnt away and leaving only a pure diamond. It was a measure of his shock at seeing her that he mixed so very many metaphors together in his head—but she fit them all. She was beautiful and she was mature and he did not begrudge himself the time it took to admire her.

“Emilia Costa, I presume?” he said, more than a little pleased at the thought that she, too, had chosen a name that almost sounded like “Bristow.”

Sydney Bristow would have slammed him into a wall and jabbed him in the neck with the knife that was undoubtedly concealed somewhere in her clothing. Emilia Costa smiled coolly, arms across her chest in a deceptively relaxed pose. Even her eyes, which had always shown her emotions so clearly, were blank, lacking even the hatred he had become so accustomed to finding there. He tried to tell himself that this un-Sydney-like control was for the best, that it would be better for her in the long run, and ignored the sadness in his chest at the thought of those volatile emotions being so effortlessly concealed forever.

“How did you find me?” she asked, in German so that any passing Italians could not understand her but would not link her to an American.

“Emilia, how could I try to find you?” he said in the same language, putting emphasis on the variation of his late wife’s name, knowing that he felt happy in a pure way he hadn’t felt in a long time and that that happiness seeped into his voice. “I thought you were dead. You cannot know how pleased I am to be wrong.”

“I know you were dead,” she said evenly. “I shot you myself. Three times. Once in the forehead. I can only assume that that man had something to do with your survival.”

For a moment Giovanni was confused by her use of a rather ambiguous euphemism. Then he realized that Rambaldi was undoubtedly still a key Echelon word and that she was trying to avoid drawing any international attention.

“Are you here on a deep cover operation?” he asked, ignoring the implicit question in her statement regarding his death. “Did you come to hunt me down?”

He thought he knew the answer to the second question, at least. As good an actress as Sydney was he didn’t think even she could pretend to be so simultaneously surprised and blasé about his miraculous survival.

“The CIA believes that I am dead,” she replied. “As does the world at large.”

If you expose me, I will kill you was the unspoken but implicit threat that followed the revelation.

“It seems we are in similar positions, then,” Giovanni said. Regarding the verbal statement rather than the unspoken threat, of course. It would take much more than the risk of exposure to convince him to kill her. “I have no desire to expose you, Emilia. I do not think it is too much for me to ask you to extend me the same courtesy.”

“You killed my father,” she said, the guttural German tongue lending itself to her fury, and it was no longer refined, controlled Emilia but rather Sydney who spoke now, Sydney whose eyes lit with a familiar fire of hatred that he couldn’t bring himself to regret. “You killed my fiancé. You killed my best friend. You killed my partner’s wife. You killed my sister. Killing you—it wasn’t the best thing I ever did, but it was justice. It would be justice to do it again.”

Sloane smiled. “But you can’t kill me, Emilia,” he said. “I’m immortal.” It wasn’t strictly true, but he was hardly going to explain that to her. “If you try, I will be forced to reveal your presence here. I don’t want to do that.” It was the one weakness he knew with a certainty that she had these days, her need for concealment, though he couldn’t guess why she of all people had chosen to fake her own death and hide herself away. He’d search for other weaknesses once he was safely back home.

She trembled and he knew that she was resisting the urge to hit him.

“If I hear that you are looking for his artifacts,” she said in a slow, deadly tone that was a combination of her mother’s vicious spirit and her father’s cold deliberation. “If I hear that suspicious characters are coming to this part of Italy. If I hear that you’ve been seen with a weapon more deadly than a butter knife. If I hear your name mentioned anywhere outside a celebratory obituary…I won’t care what you do to me. I will hunt you down, and you will wish that you could die. Do you understand me?”

His smile widened and he would have put his hand on her shoulder if he thought he could get away with it. “I really have missed you,” he said, his words like a benediction. “If you want to find me, my name is Giovanni these days. Giovanni Costa.” He knew that she would understand the implication. The name had been the closest he could get to “Jack Bristow” without giving himself away.

Her lip curled in a snarl and her hand came up like a claw as if to rake his face. At the last moment she aborted the gesture and combed her hand through her hair instead. “I don’t care what name you go by now,” she hissed. “I know who you are. You are a monster, and I don’t want to see your face. After today, I will never see you again unless I’ve come to tear you apart. Count on it.”

She spun on her heel and strode away, anger making every step rigid, glorious in her rage. He watched her go, the smile never falling from his face.

“I don’t think I’ll count on that, Emilia,” he murmured. “I don’t think I’ll count on that at all.”

Having gotten his first taste of Sydney Bristow in six years, Arvin Sloane was not about to let her leave his life again.

TBC

Returning to Alias

2008-01-20T19:48:42Z

So it's been a really long time since I've read Alias fanfiction. It was one of my first fandoms, from the time period when I used to save pages from fanfiction.net to read at the back of classrooms that didn't have internet in college. At the time I was all about Sydney and Vaughn, and then Sydney and Sark, and then really just Syndey for Sydney because she kicked ass. Now, four years later, I've come back to Alias, and have found that even though everything's changed, some things don't. (Ah, Vaughn, you were a source of endlessly ridiculous quotes).

Namely, I've added a fascination with the first generation spies--Jack, Irina, Katya, and especially the wonderfully complex Sloane--to my love for Sydney. I'd love to become acquainted with people who have the same interests. I've been reading a lot of fics with these characters online and am being inspired to write some of my own. I've written fics in other fandoms before, but not many Alias fics, and certainly none that would be worth reposting here. I'm a little late getting into the game, but hopefully not too behind to contribute to the wonderful Alias community!

Fic: The Making of a Starbuck (1/1)

2007-02-20T04:35:53Z

Title: The Making of a Starbuck (1/1)

Note: Please review! I’d like to know what people think.

Disclaimer: I don’t own anything to do with Battlestar Galactica.

Commander William “Husker” Adama liked to walk the corridors of his battlestar at night. The feel of the sturdy metal beneath his feet, the reassuring thrum of the ship's engines, the chatter of the night crew as they went about their business--all combined to make him feel at home. He was more comfortable here than he ever had been planetside. The Galactica wasn’t the nicest or most up-to-date ship in the fleet—in fact, it was the most old-fashioned—but it was a well-put-together ship, and one he knew he could rely on in a time of need.

It had been an exhausting day. The Galactica had pulled into orbit around Picon for an annual check-up, and while it had been there the Admiral had cruelly decided to subject Adama and his crew to visits by a few high schools. Apparently the fleet’s recruitment had not been as good the past few years as they would have liked, and allowing children onto a battlestar was a new form of advertising. Adama had put up with it with fairly good humor—he thought—although having rowdy teenagers underfoot all day had not been his idea of a good time. Fortunately the intruders were now gone and the fleet was three FTL jumps away from Picon and he could go back to pretending that the Galactica was a weapon of war and not a museum piece, whatever some of the higher ups might have thought.

He passed by a storage closet and stopped at the sound of strange noises coming from inside. He stared at the doors in trepidation, trying not to imagine the kinds of things a bunch of kids could have left on his ship. A wild arglemyre, from Sagittarius? A fendelplank from Caprica? Worse, a mean cat from Picon? He thought back to his own childhood and shuddered to remember his ingenuity at the time.

He reached out hesitantly and grasped the handle of the closet, turning it and listening to the click of its latch as it swung open. He looked inside. And stared. Two piercing blue-green eyes glared up at him defiantly. The owner of the eyes happened to be a young girl—perhaps fourteen or fifteen years old.

“What the fr—” he cut himself off, mindful of his language. He knelt next to her, pulling a knife from his boot—glad for once that he still insisted on arming himself like a soldier rather than a has-been—and using it to slice apart the rope binding her feet. He moved to do the same thing to the rope tying her wrists together, but paused when he realized that she had nearly gotten herself untied, rubbing the rope against the sharp edge of a shelf until it frayed. Her wrists were speckled with blood from where the rope had chafed her skin. He cut the rope with his knife, then watched as she scrambled back from him, reaching up to untie the sock that had been used to gag her, wincing only slightly as the blood began to flow back into her limbs.

She rubbed her arms as she stared at him, her expression a mixture of fear and anger.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, then could have kicked himself for his stupidity. “What happened to you?” he amended.

“Some kids from my class,” she muttered. “Couldn’t take me one on one, so they waited till today to gang up. Fraking cowards.”

He winced at that kind of language from a young teenager.

“Why would they have done that?”

She blinked at him as though that were a particularly stupid question. “Kids are stupid,” she said. “I guess they thought it’d be funny…” She grinned suddenly, maliciously. “We’ll see how funny they think it is, when none of them can sit for a week!”

He tried not to think about the implications of that statement. “Well, let’s get you out of here and to CIC so we can try to work out a way to get you back home,” he said instead, offering her a hand up as he rose.

She glared at the proffered hand suspiciously, then pushed herself up to her feet, wavering a little unsteadily before becoming stable. “I don’t even know who you are,” she pointed out brashly, hands on her hips. “How do I know I should go anywhere with you?”

He quirked a smile. This girl was a real firecracker—much more interesting than most teenagers he knew, his own sons included. He gestured to the pins on his shoulders. “See these? These show that I’m—”

“A commander,” she interrupted, her expression taking on a keen-eyed look of interest. She stalked toward him in a rather predatory manner considering she was just a young girl, stopping only a few feet away. Now there was an expression he recognized—hero worship. “You’re Commander Adama?”

“I am. And you are?”

She hesitated, as if wondering whether to trust him, even knowing his identity. “Kara Thrace.”

“Well, Kara Thrace, I don’t know about you, but it’s just about my bed time,” he said, making a show of exaggerating how tired he was. She seemed confused as she watched him, and he realized that she was too old to be talked down to. He was reminded how long it’d been since he’d last seen his sons—they were both around her age. “Like I said let’s head over to the CIC so we can call your parents and get this sorted out.”

She paled, so suddenly and dramatically that he wondered what he’d said wrong. “Do you have to call my mom?” she asked, for the first time sounding fragile. “It’s just…I don’t want to bother her.”

Adama frowned. “I certainly do need to call your mother, Kara. We need to arrange to get you back home. We’re in deep space right now, but a couple of jumps can take us back soon enough.”

“Don’t do that!” she exclaimed urgently. “I don’t want anything to get messed up because of me. Just—pretend I’m not here, and drop me off the next time you’re on Picon.”

“A year from now?” he asked dryly, prepared to see surprise on her face. What he was not prepared for was her immediate agreement.

“A year, yes! That sounds great.”

“Kara, the Galactica is not a high school. It’s not a daycare. It’s a battlestar, designed to go into war. I’m afraid there’s just no place for you here.”

“Please.” The urgency in her voice kept him from dismissing her out of hand. It prompted him to look more closely at her—at her thin face and big eyes, at the sleeves that came down to hang over her hands, at her complete lack of laugh lines.

“Do you have…a reason for not wanting to return home?” he asked cautiously. Of all people on the battlestar—except maybe Saul Tigh—he had to be the least qualified for this conversation.

She couldn’t seem to make up her mind whether to nod or to shake her head. She just pleaded with him with those eyes of hers.

He turned over this problem in his mind. On the one hand, he had been quite right in telling her that the Galactica was not equipped to act as a refuge for children. On the other hand, as a father and a decent person he could hardly turn his back on a child in need.

“You can’t stay here for a year, Kara,” he told her softly. “I’m quite sure that wouldn’t be allowed. A few days, though…”

The way her expression lit up almost made the thought of the hassles he had just brought down on himself not so intimidating.

Kara Thrace pinched herself, hard, just to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. The pain radiating out from a bruise on her arm told her that this wasn’t a dream—that somehow something that was far too good to be true had actually happened to her.

She was sitting on a bunk in the viper pilot’s bunkroom. Commander Adama had explained to her that although he would have liked to have put her in a private room the battlestar was very conservative in its use of space, and he had given her the choice of bunking with the viper pilots or deck crew. He had smiled when he heard her decision—a friendly, open smile the likes of which had never been directed at her before. She still didn’t trust him, not really—couldn’t trust an adult, no matter how nice he seemed—but she did like him.

The viper pilots bustled about her, and she stared at them in awe. There were men and women—mostly men—all in various states of undress, all joking and teasing each other as they readied themselves for the day ahead. They had taken the intrusion of a strange girl into their realm very well—had barely noticed her presence—and now acted as if she didn’t exist, which was exactly as she wanted it.

She was just beginning to wonder what she was supposed to do with herself when one of the CIC crew she’d met last night poked her head through the door. “Kara, will you come with me please?”

Kara hopped off of the bunk, holding back a wince as she landed a little badly on her mostly-healed sprained ankle, then hurried over to the woman. “Good morning, Lieutenant,” she said awkwardly. Niceties didn’t come easily to her, but she didn’t want to make anyone on this battlestar unhappy with her.

“Good morning, Kara.” The woman smiled, showing no sign of being annoyed to be forced to spend time with Kara rather than doing more important things. “The Commander asked me to show you to the mess hall, and then to ask whether there’s any particular part of the ship where you’d like to spend your time.”

Kara practically glowed, trotting alongside the woman to the mess, where she devoured the tasteless food quickly, too eager to explore the ship. She knew exactly where she wanted to go, too. “The hangar bay, please.” Being a pilot would be beyond awesome, she knew, and she would seriously have considered trying the join the fleet, but she was going to be a kick-ass professional pyramid player—the star on the C-Bucs, if things worked out as she wanted—so this might be the closest she ever got to vipers.

The lieutenant smiled indulgently and led the way. Kara memorized the corridors as she went, wanting to be able to find her way back to the hangar on her own as many times as possible over the course of the next three weeks.

The hangar was everything she’d ever dreamed it would be. Vipers were everywhere, some of them flying out, some returning, some being repaired, some just sitting around waiting for someone like Kara Thrace to come fly them. The lieutenant left her there under the watch of a young deck crewman, Galen Tyrol, who patiently showed her a viper and let her watch as he tried to fix it up.

“Can I help?” she asked. He paused in his work, gazing up at her from under the viper as he thought.

“You think you can turn these bolts if I give you the tools?” he asked.

She was affronted. “Of course I can.” She wasn’t a sissy, not like the boys and girls at her school. She hopped off of her perch—she had been balanced on a piece of scrap metal—and strutted over to where he was working, taking the wrench he offered and using it to twist a bolt out of place. It was a good deal harder than it looked, but she kept her face bland as she forced it out and handed it to him. He kept his face expressionless, too, but she thought he was impressed. After that, he put her to work, and she threw herself into learning the ins and outs of the wonderful vipers as she worked the rest of the day.

“I see you’ve been keeping our young stowaway busy, Specialist,” a gravelly voice said, and Kara almost hit her head in her haste to drag herself out from under the viper to greet the Commander.

“Sir!” she said, saluting him as she saw Tyrol was doing and as she had seen her mother do in the past.

He laughed. “At ease, Kara. You don’t have to salute me.” She might have blushed or bristled at his words, but the friendly expression on his face really just made her want to smile. She restrained herself, though. “I was just coming to see whether you wanted to join me for dinner.”

She was sure her eyes were as wide as saucers, and she wished she wasn’t acting so childishly. Still—to be invited to dinner with Commander Adama! She leapt to her feet, dropping her screwdriver into the toolkit and following the Commander out of the hangar. She could feel Tyrol watching them go, and turned to stick her tongue out at him as he grinned at her.

Adama’s dining room was nice. Very nice. Much nicer, in fact, than anywhere she’d ever been before. Also joining them for dinner was Colonel Saul Tigh, whom Adama introduced as his right-hand man. She sensed instantly that the man didn’t like her much; she had no difficulty returning the sentiment when she saw how much he drank over the course of dinner. Still, the meal was quite enjoyable; Adama kept the conversation light, asking Kara about her day and giving her the opportunity to rave about how wonderful it had been.

After dinner Adama invited her back to the CIC, and she spent the evening sitting in a corner and watching as the brains of the battlestar functioned. It was wonderful.

And that first day set the tone for most of her stay on the Galactica. She varied her time between the hangar bay and the viper pilots’ briefing room, and occasionally spent a few hours reading piloting manuals that Adama indulgently loaned her, and spent every evening with the Commander, first with dinner and then the CIC. By the end of her first week she knew the schematics to the viper backwards and forwards and Tyrol boasted about her to the other deck crew as if he were a proud uncle. By the end of the second week she’d convinced one of the viper pilots to let her sit in his cockpit and to show her the controls and the four unities of flight: power, pitch, yaw, and roll.

There had been a few highlights that no one would forget. She had been in the mess having lunch with a group of young pilots—holding court over them, really, despite her youth—when one of them had mentioned that Adama had spent more time with her in the past week than he had with his sons in years. Kara had laughed, mostly out of surprise, and exclaimed, “The Commander’s someone’s old man? They don’t know how lucky they are!” The others had laughed as well, but within a day the nickname—Old Man—had spread. When she heard Tigh call Adama that at one of their dinners, and saw the way the Old Man had smiled fondly in response, she’d known that she had achieved something.

Then there was the time she’d beaten Tigh at triad. She’d convinced Tyrol to spot her some cubits so she could play, and she proceeded to wipe the floor with her competitors. There was a bit of cheating involved, of course—that was half the fun—but she felt that if a group of old people couldn’t tell that she was cheating they deserved to lose anyways. Tigh had gotten so upset he’d sworn and drunk and stormed out of the room.

And then there were the quieter moments, the moments that meant more to Kara than anything. Those were the times when she and Adama would sit in his quarters and just talk. She talked about not liking the people at her school; about her dreams of playing pyramid; about how much she was enjoying her time on the Galactica. He spoke of his time as a hotshot viper pilot; of his two sons, Lee and Zak, who were about her age. And once, just once, he mentioned that he regretted not having a daughter, and that he liked to imagine that if he had, she would be something like Kara. Neither of them had been able to cope with the emotion hidden behind that statement, and Kara had quickly changed the subject, but his words had stayed with her. After that talk, she could no longer fool herself—she trusted him implicitly.

By the end of the third week, everyone on the ship—save perhaps Colonel Tigh—wished that Kara would stay on the ship forever.

What had happened was this. One of the viper pilots was very young and very foolish and thought that Kara reminded him of his kid sister. He agreed to let her try to fly his viper. She could tell that he thought it was a bad idea from the outset—hell, she thought it was a bad idea, and she was the one who had suggested it—but she was hardly going to turn down this opportunity to act out one of her greatest desires, no matter the consequences.

It had been ridiculously easy for Kara to borrow an extra flight suit—although she was swamped even by their smallest sizes—and join the CAP. Galactica was always alert and ready for attack, but even the Old Man admitted that the likelihood of attack was almost nonexistent, and the pilots were not as alert as they might have been. Kara sat in the cockpit and screwed the helmet into her flight suit, whispering to herself all the time. “Power, pitch, yaw and roll. Power, pitch, yaw and roll. What the frak are you doing, Kara? You’re going to get yourself killed.” It was too late to talk herself out of it, though—or at least too late to get out of it without admitting what she was about to do and getting punished for it without having had any of the fun—so she focused her mind on the task before her and tried not to imagine getting blown into tiny bits.

Someone’s voice started counting down and then her hands went to the controls and her heart started pounding in her ears and what was she kidding, this was the best idea ever, and then she was off!

In a second, her dreams of pyramid playing went out the window. Why would she ever want to play pyramid when she could do this for the rest of her life? She got control of the viper almost instantly, feeling like she was coming home even though the cockpit was large enough that she had to stretch to reach things. She did a loop just because she could, then fell into line with her leader. Fresco, the pilot whose viper she was flying, had told her that he and his wingman rarely spoke during CAP—they didn’t get along for some reason—so she should be able to make it through the whole thing without being discovered—assuming she didn’t do something stupid like blow herself up.

Most of the CAP went marvelously. She followed Fresco’s instructions to the letter, finding that she didn’t even have to think make the viper move this way, that way. She could do this, she could do that. If she wanted to, she could fly away and never look back—but why would she want to, when it would be to the Galactica that she would return? There was another pair of vipers out flying with them, and those vipers landed before she and Barebones were supposed to. It was as they were coming in to land that something went wrong.

“Galactica, Barebones.” The man’s voice was panicked. “Something’s stuck! I can’t slow down!”

Kara stared in horror as he accelerated towards the hangar, picking up speed as he went. She increased her own speed to keep up.

“Barebones, break off!” someone in CIC shouted urgently.

“Systems nonresponsive! Oh gods!”

There was nothing Barebones could do. There was nothing Galactica could do. Kara took a deep breath, came up with an insane plan, and zoomed ahead full speed, hurrying toward the hangar herself, before pulling into what should have been an impossible flip, flying back the way she had come—back at Barebones.

“Fresco, what the frak are you doing?” It was Adama’s voice that came over the radio waves now, and Kara gulped at the sound. Better not to respond, she thought. Either she’d get this right and she could apologize later, or she’d miss, Barebones would crash full speed into the hangar, the hangar would go up in flames, and Adama would have far bigger problems to deal with.

She focused her attention on Barebones’ viper. All vipers had one vulnerable spot—one place where, if struck properly, their systems would be deactivated completely. That place happened to be on the underbelly of the plane, an incredibly difficult if not impossible target to hit.

She was close to Barebones now, very close, and she could see his face and his shocked expression as he said, “Oh frak, Galactica, that’s not Fresco…” but then she was diving under him, spinning as she did so, and she breathed a prayer as she fired a single shot at a single target, knowing that if she missed she would be killing him and possibly more people aboard the Galactica.

Barebones’ engine cut out. He let out an incredulous cry of relief as his ship stopped accelerating, but that cry was cut short when he realized that he was not slowing down, either.

Kara blinked. “You’ve gotta be frakking kidding me,” she muttered, taking off after the other viper again. “Alright, Kara, what’s behind door number two?” she asked herself. He was coming in hot, too hot. At this speed, he wouldn’t kill anyone else—probably—but he was toast. So she had to find a way to slow him down.

She didn’t give herself time to think. Instead, she pulled in front of him again and began flying backwards, matching his speed and then gradually slowing, letting him pull closer and closer and then allowing him to bump up against her. The contact was more violent than she expected, and she cursed as she rocked back and then forward in the cockpit, refusing to let go of the controls. Her eyes locked with Barebones’ as she continued to slow her own speed, slowing the other viper as well, pushing gradually so as not to cause either or both vipers to blow up.

“I thought you were going to be a C-Buc,” Barebones stammered as he watched her fly them both in, a look of intense concentration on her face. She flashed him a brash, totally-Kara smile.

“I’m a star-Buc today,” she told him. “Stay with me, Barebones. It’s going to be okay. Galactica, we’re coming in hot,” she said. “Clear the hangar.”

“The hangar is clear,” the Old Man’s voice came again. Was there fear in his voice? At least he seemed to sense that now was not a good time for a lecture. “Good luck, Starbuck.”

She grinned at the call sign, then turned her attention back to the task at hand. She had managed to dramatically decrease their speed, but the two vipers were still coming in faster than she’d have liked. She glanced back, toward the fast approaching hangar. “Hand on, Barebones. It’s going to be a rough landing.”

“Roger that, Starbuck,” he replied, and though his face was terrified it was also resolved. “I’m with you.”

She held onto the controls tightly and saw him do the same. Their eyes met. And then they landed.

The landing went off better than they might have feared. The two vipers careened across the hangar in a screech of scorching metal and the clang of tools and things falling and hitting each other, and eventually crashed into the opposite wall, hard enough to batter both pilots about in their cockpits. There was a moment of silence when the crash was over, and then a sudden flurry of shouts and orders as the people in the hangar hurried to get the two pilots out.

They pulled Barebones out first because he was closest, and although he was a bit scraped up he had no serious injuries. He sat on the floor of the hangar, a little dazed, as someone ran off to get him water. They had more difficulty getting Kara out because the latch to her cockpit was shoved against the wall, but they managed to get the hinges on the other side undone. She wasn’t exactly sure what had happened because she wavered in and out of consciousness, watching the action around her as if in a dream.

She woke up, though, when at last the top of the cockpit was pulled off and there was Galen Tyrol, glowering at her as he growled, “Starbuck, what have you done to my viper?”

She grinned weakly. “Give me a break; I’ll fix it later.” And then she was being pulled from the cockpit and she gave a gasp as a sudden, sharp pain radiated up her leg starting at her knee and someone cursed and then she was out cold, long before the Old Man arrived.

Commander Adama stood next to his young charge as the Galactica pulled into orbit around Picon, acutely aware of her crutches and the bruising on her face but refusing to offer her comfort he was sure she didn’t want. “Well,” he said, not quite knowing what to say. “Thank you for saving my ship” seemed melodramatic. “Please don’t leave,” seemed childish, and he knew it wasn’t her choice. He settled for, “I’m going to miss you, Kara. Even if you are the frakking craziest person I’ve ever met.”

He didn’t want to send her back to Picon for another, grimmer reason as well. He had his suspicions about her mother’s treatment of her—Kara had never once mentioned her father—but Kara had been unwilling to say anything about her home life, and he could do nothing without more information to work with.

She grinned, one of her hands coming off the crutches to touch the wings that had been pinned to her shirt. They weren’t official, of course—she would have to go through flight school and all that to make them so—but they were official enough for her. They were a sign that Galactica had accepted her, had welcomed her to the family.

“I’ll miss you—and the Galactica—too, sir. It’s been…educational.”

“I’m sorry about your knee,” he said uncomfortably. Doctor Cottle had said that she would never be able to play Pyramid again, not with the skill she claimed to have had before. Adama hated to think that her time on the Galactica had ruined her dream.

“Don’t be,” she said, surprisingly pleasantly. Her expression turned mischievous. “I’ve talked to the pilots, and they said you only need one really strong leg to fly a viper.”

He couldn’t contain the smile that spread across his craggy face. “You’ve decided to go to flight school? I’ll be happy to write you a recommendation.”

“I can’t imagine doing anything else,” she confessed, looking out the window rather than at him.

“I understand,” he said. He really did. The worst thing about advancing in years and rank had been having to give up his place in a cockpit to younger pilots. Considering the amazing skill she had shown in her one—idiotic—stint in a cockpit, he would have been surprised if she hadn’t fallen in love with it. He had lost ten years during that little fiasco, and then had been so pleased by how things worked out that he hadn’t punished Kara at all and had only thrown Fresco in the brig for a week—a much kinder sentence than he could have given him, based on the infraction. “Well…just so you know…the Galactica isn’t exactly the place most hotshot pilots go, not with ships like the Pegasus and Atlantia flying around, but if you ever want a position here, it’s yours.”

“Thank you, sir,” she said quietly. “You don’t know how much that means to me.”

A voice came over the speakers announcing that her ride back to the surface had arrived.

“What are you going to do to the boys who stranded you here?” the Old Man inquired lightly.

She grinned maliciously. “Nothing too painful. They’ve already suffered a bit, and, well, I’m glad they did it. I just have to make sure they don’t get it into their stupid heads to try it again.”

Adama shuddered at the thought of being on the wrong side of Kara’s revenge. He liked the girl—maybe even cared for her like a niece or daughter—but she could be quite scary, if the stories he had heard were true.

They walked the corridors in silence, side by side. He paused outside the hangar. “I know the deck crew and the pilots have prepared their own goodbye, so let me say goodbye now. It’s been an honor and pleasure having you aboard the Galactica. I’ll place a commendation in your fleet file as soon as you actually get one. And—I’m glad to have met you, Kara Thrace. I hope you’ll invite this old man to your graduation from flight school.”

She grinned again. She had been doing that a lot lately, he’d noticed. “Oh, I will sir. And—it’s been an honor, and a pleasure, for me too.”

He nodded once, then, before he could stop himself, grabbed her shoulders and pressed a kiss to her forehead, a farewell and a greeting all rolled into one. When he pulled back he saw that her eyes were bright with unshed tears.

“I’ll see you in five years, then, Starbuck,” he said roughly.

Her chin was high and her expression typically defiant as she replied, “I don’t plan for it to take that long.”

And then she was gone, into the hangar to return to the life she had had before, out of his life. As he stared at the open door through which she had just gone, he felt a tugging at his heart, and wished she didn’t have to go. Still, they would meet again, he was sure. And he was right.