Disclaimer: I do not own "Helix" or its characters.

ooooOOOOoooo

"'Ten little, nine little, eight little Indians,'" Dr. Adrian sang airily when he spotted Daniel in the hallway outside the cryo lab. Daniel never laughed when the scientist made this joke (which he did more and more frequently of late), but he appreciated the humor all the same.

"'Seven little, six little, five little Indians.'"

Daniel ignored the older man and focused on winding the cord around the enormous buffer with which he had just finished waxing the floor.

"'Four little, three little, two little Indians.'" Adrian had disappeared around the corner, but he rocked back on his heel to cock a cheeky grin at Daniel before continuing into the next hallway. "'One little Indian boyyyyy'..."

Last redskin on base, Daniel thought heavily. The joke wasn't strictly true, because Dr. Lemieux in Oncology was half Tlingit, but Daniel was the last (and oldest) of the First Nations children still living on the Arctic Biosystems base.

It was good to be Dr. Hitake's son.

But it was hard to be alone.

Daniel trundled the buffer toward its home in a nearby utility closet and washed up in the sink. He dried his hands, then rolled down the sleeves on his workshirt and buttoned the cuffs. 11 p.m. It was time to go to his second job. His real job. He smiled to himself and unwound his earbuds from his pocket. The mp3 player was purple, two generations old, and had ridiculous fake crystals stuck all over it, but Daniel wasn't picky. One of the female scientists had left the device to Lexie upon her departure, saying that she would get a new one at Christmas. Lexie had then passed it on to Daniel the day that she left to meet her new family.

"I think our people do something like this. Give gifts when you're leaving, I mean," she had said.

"If you say so," he had muttered into her neck, his hand up her shirt for the last time. Although skinny little Rebecca had let him look at her breasts (she giggling, he so overwhelmed by the sight of actual tits that he could scarcely relish the moment), it was Lexie who had granted him two of the five senses: to look and to touch. The Inuit girl was full and fleshy; her breasts were no different.

After she left, Daniel tried to pick the crystals off the mp3 player, but each sticker left behind a tacky residue that picked up lint and dirt from his pockets. He eventually gave up on trying to rehabilitate the thing. There were no other kids left to make fun of him anyway. The player had been full of Pussycat Dolls and Spice Girls and Britney, but Daniel had replaced all that pop crap with some of his favorite rock and country tunes. He clicked around to his favorite track, a single by Audioslave from which he had derived great sustenance lately, if only for the thrumming bassline that opened it.

And in the aching night
under satellites,
I was not received.
Built with stolen parts...

The song helped him through the hours-a-day of custodial work, labor that Dr. Hitake had called "devotional service".

"You want to work security, Daniel. I want you to work security." Hitake had tilted his head earnestly at the teenager in that way that made Daniel willing to lay down his life for the scientist.

The teen had grimaced. "I know this base better than anyone except you. I've been crawling all over it since I was a kid."

"Do you know it well enough to be my head of security?"

As he had so many times before, Daniel bore down on that moment, pulling strength from it. He had faithfully worked custodial for years, cleaning floors and toilets. Watching. Learning. His eighteenth birthday present from Hitake had been employment paperwork to join ABS Security as a Tech 1.

And in the afterbirth
on the quiet earth
let the the stains remind you.
You thought you made a man.
You better think again.

Chris Cornell's powerful wail, slipping up and down the octaves just south of a caterwaul, reminded Daniel of a dream he had sometimes.

A dream?

A memory.

Something, an auditory image, that wove through his consciousness when he was in that liminal space between waking and sleeping. A snatch of song, eerie but moving, a ululating cry almost too wild to be human, a drum cutting like thunder through the paean.

Daniel knew two things about this song; he could not explain how he knew these two facts, any more than he could say where he had heard it. First, he knew that the song spoke of grief and loss, in a language that could only be Inuit. Second, he knew that his grandfather singing it.

Nail in my head
from my creator.
You gave me life,
now show me how to live.

ooooOOOOOoooooo

A/N: "Show Me How to Live" is by Audioslave. Hope y'all want to hear more, although I've broken my cardinal rule in this first chap (too much tell, not enough show).