Lost
Created on 7/26/13, 11:35AM
Leoben didn't know what to do.
For the first time in his life, he honestly didn't know what to do.
No whispers from God entered his mind, no ethereal hands moved to guide his motions, no sudden insight sparked a fire in his mind. He was completely and devastatingly alone.
Leaning back against the metal the chair he was sitting in at the dining table, he let his elbows rest on the cold glass surface next to the plate he'd filled with food for himself, and stared with dull eyes at the empty chair across from him.
Humans were creatures of habit, he mused to himself. He'd brought in two chairs for them to use, never even thinking to consider the idea that one of them was somehow different from the other.
The first day they hadn't even used the table. He'd prepared two plates of food for them, but one of them had gone untouched and forgotten. She'd wanted nothing to do with him, that day, and had made it a point to be as far away from him as possible at any given moment. When he'd told her that dinner was ready, the look on her face had made him wonder what exactly it was she'd thought would happen to her.
She hadn't expected to be fed, that much was obvious. He remembered frowning, confused. He'd already told her why she was there, he'd already told her that he wanted to help her, that he wanted to help her and prepare her for her destiny, so what could have made her think that food would have been withheld from her?
He'd seen the moment when she realized that it wasn't a trick, that he really was going to let her eat, the surprise that had flashed across her face for an instant before she hid it again with closed off features had confirmed that. But then her eyes had narrowed, and something even darker had flashed through her eyes, and she'd taken a step backwards until her back was to the wall, folded her arms across her chest, and glared at him.
She hadn't spoken a word since the Centurions had escorted her through the halls that had rang with her shouts for them to let her go, and the rest of that night had been spent in silence. She refusing to talk, and he unwilling to break the silence for fear that she would see it somehow as a threat.
Even then, on that first night, he'd known that the path they were on would not be an easy one.
The next day, under the watchful gaze of her tired eyes—because she'd refused to sleep, and had remained standing against the wall the entire night—he'd set out food for her, making sure that when he opened the cupboards, she could see that they were filled with all sorts of things that humans enjoyed eating, and made sure to be very obvious about the fact that they were not locked. He'd even told her that she was free to do whatever she chose, so long as she didn't break anything or try to leave.
He'd explained that their new home was set up exactly the same as her apartment on Caprica had been, so that she would know where everything was without the need of a tour. The Centurions had finished installing pipes for running water a few days earlier, so the shower was running, but the water couldn't yet be heated above room temperature.
That would of course be fixed in another few days, but until then, she was still free to use the bathroom, as long as she didn't mind the cold shower. During his time on Caprica and the other colonial planets, he'd slowly amassed a collection of shampoos, conditioners, body washes, and all the other multitude of things humans used to bathe themselves—the sheer number of them had amazed him at first, why were so many necessary? On the baseships, their shower water was already treated so that they needed nothing else to wash their hair or body, it worked as a soap in and of itself—and she was free to use whichever of them she liked.
Knowing how the humans liked their privacy, he had made sure to assure Kara that he would be using a separate bathroom elsewhere in the facility, even managing to throw in a joke about how she wouldn't have to worry about him wasting the hot water once it was installed.
Her response to his attempt at humor was a flat and emotionless stare, still holding her spot against the wall, and, faced with her silence, he'd made his way up the stairs and out of the apartment, hoping that without him there she would feel less threatened, and would hopefully take the time to sleep. He'd seen the way her limbs trembled from the effort of staying upright. He knew that that hadn't been the first night she'd not slept. He knew that, for almost a week, she'd been trying to evade capture.
Ever since he'd found the tent she and her husband were staying in, ever since he'd made the stupid mistake of asking the man—the sick man, who was practically dying—where she was. He'd been stupid to think that Samuel would actually tell him. Stupid to think that the humans would simply believe him when he said that he meant Kara no harm. He'd left, after making sure that the man—who had passed out after a foolish attempt to attack him in his weakened state—was safely in bed and would come to no further harm—because he knew Kara would never forgive him if he let something happen to her husband—and had made his way back to the baseship where a meeting was scheduled to be held, just assuming, in the naivety that had filled him then that once Kara knew he wanted to see her, she would come to him of her own accord.
Oh, how wrong he had been.
It had been only after hours had passed since the meeting and darkness had fallen over the planet—New Caprica, the humans called it—that he realized that Kara would not be coming to find him.
He'd slipped away from his brothers, who were discussing things that he hadn't been able to focus on and couldn't quite recall now, and had made his way through the dark back down the endless aisles created by the tents the humans had used to raise their city from the ground. He didn't need to stop or pause for directions, he'd memorized the way the first time, and it only seemed like minutes later that he found himself standing outside the tent that Kara and her husband called theirs.
Even then, the concept had seemed strange to him.
He'd stood there for a moment, not even bothering to go in, somehow just knowing that if he went in, he would find it empty. He still wasn't sure how he knew that they had left, there were no signs to show that they had made a hurried departure, no tears or holes in the otherwise patched tent to show where one of them had stumbled as they rushed to leave. They were just gone.
He'd stood there, in the night, surrounded by darkness held at bay only by the weak glow of the stars so far above and a few lamps here and there that the humans had set out to illuminate the walkways, and the wind had brushed past him, chilling him to the bone even through his long sleeved shirt.
And that was when he'd realized that Kara would not come with him without a fight. He'd looked around at the tents the humans slept in, and knew that she would never risk anyone else to keep herself safe. From how sick he'd seen that her husband was, he knew that she would have left him somewhere safe—perhaps with that doctor?—but she would have run somewhere far, far away from them.
She would be outside the city. Where there was no shelter from the biting cold or the shadows that lurked in the darkness. He knew full well that she could take care of herself, but a single human, out there and alone, stood no chance.
He had to find her.
The next five days had passed agonizingly slow as he and a team of Centurions he'd managed to appropriate from the labor force scoured the area surrounding the city of tents. Each day they went without finding her seemed to stab another knife through his heart, as he imagined all the horrible things that could happen to her outside the city's boundaries.
As it turned out, he needn't have bothered, because on the fifth day, another alien concept was introduced to him.
Because when one of the Centurions finally found Kara, it was completely by accident, in a place he would never have expected.
Because they found her underground.
He hadn't been there to witness the incident himself, but he'd watched the Centurion's memory file, and had seen as the ground suddenly opened up beneath its feet, and the Centurion was plunged into darkness as it fell.
He'd been on the opposite side of the city when he finally sensed the distress signal it was sending out, and then only because he had stumbled and had to grab onto the arm of the Centurion he was with to steady himself. The contact had sparked the connection necessary for him to hear the signal, sounding deafeningly loud in his head in the relative silence of the forest they'd been searching.
For a moment he'd been too shocked to react, even as the single tone continued to ring through his head, scattering his thoughts every which way as an all-consuming sense of fear filled him.
Then he had taken off running, his heart racing and adrenaline tearing through his veins. The sound was as terrifying and shocking as a scream of pain from any of his siblings would have been, and he couldn't understand why none of the other Centurions had reacted to it. Because he somehow knew that the signal had been going on for more than a few minutes, and yet they'd not even acknowledged it, and even then, as he ran toward the source of the signal, they simply followed without question, matching his speed but not exceeding it, as if this were something that happened every day, as if they simply didn't care that one of them was hurt.
The signal-scream getting louder in his head with every step he took, by the time he got to the wound that had been torn open in the ground, the Centurions that followed him seemed almost sinister in their indifference to their sibling's scream. Unable to help it, he caught himself almost flinching away when he knelt down at the edge of the hole and one of them moved to stand next to him.
How could it be so uncaring when one of its own was screaming below them?
Ordering the three with him to wait there, he spun around, prepared to run back to the baseship to get help—filled with such anxiety over the screaming he heard in his head that he couldn't think straight enough to realize that one of the Centurions would be able to make it there and back twice as fast as he—and promptly stepped into thin air.
Before he even had time to recognize the fact that he was falling—that the dirt had given way beneath him just as it had the Centurion before him—the ground slammed into him, and his conscious thoughts faded to darkness and pain.
But before he disappeared into the eternal moment before download, out of the corner of his eye, he saw her.
Less than twenty minutes after that, they—he and some of his brothers, along with a Four and two Sixes—had rescued the wounded Centurion and retrieved his body for proper disposal.
But most importantly, they had found Kara Thrace.
She appeared unharmed, leaving him at a loss to explain how she had gotten down there. If she had fallen—thank God she hadn't—like he and the Centurion had, she would have died. But if she hadn't fallen, then how had she gotten down there?
The idea that there were hallways—tunnels, the humans called them—running beneath the city had astounded him when the Six named Caprica, who had more experience with the humans than most, explained it to him later that day. Almost his entire life had been spent on a spaceship, with only a few trips to the human colonies every now and then to gather supplies. He had gone into a few houses, but he'd never seen a basement, a room that Caprica explained to him was built under the house, underground, and usually used for storage.
The idea of having that much weight above you, with only the walls and ceiling to keep it from falling in and burying you where no one would find you, made him feel anxious in a way he'd never felt before, and he couldn't shake the fear no matter how many times Caprica assured him that it was perfectly safe.
Marcurio, one of his older brothers that had accompanied them—for which he was secretly glad, because the fact that they were now all underground had made him slightly nervous—was the one who finally found Kara again, because when they had all lowered themselves down, she'd seemed to have disappeared again. Hiding from them, he had no doubt.
Marcurio—ever looking for new things to discover—had wandered down one of the tunnels that branched off from the small room they were in to explore, and his shout of surprise and pain had sent the rest of them running to his aid. When they finally reached him, he was clutching at his side, obviously in pain, and Kara had her back pressed against the wall infront of him, snarling like a wild animal.
Marcurio had tried to calm her down, reassuring her that they just wanted to help, that they weren't going to hurt her that they meant no harm, but all that had gotten him was a rock aimed toward his head. He managed to dodge it, but that put him off balance, and she seized the opportunity to grab him, holding the sharp edge of a rock to his neck and threatening to kill him if they didn't get the frak out of her way.
Leoben had felt his heart freeze in his chest, struggling against the agonizing decision that had been presented to him. Lose Kara, or have her kill his brother. And not just any brother, Marcurio.
An impossible choice.
But, in the end, it was Marcurio who solved it for him.
He'd never seen anyone move so fast. One moment, Kara had the shard of rock pressed against Marcurio's neck, and the next, the rock had clattered to the ground, and Kara's arms were pinned and useless behind her back, his brother's firm hold keeping her from fighting back even as she raged against him, spitting curses and shouting for him to let go of her.
Leoben remembered Marcurio asking her if she would try to hit him again if he did, and the way she'd head-butted him with the back of her head in answer.
After that, they'd assigned two of the Centurions to hold her still, and Daimon, the Four that had volunteered to accompany them, injected her with a strong tranquilizer that would calm her down and keep her from trying to attack them. At least, until it wore off, that was. It usually lasted about a half an hour though, so they had plenty of time to get her back to the facility.
The effects set in almost immediately, and Kara drooped in the Centurions' hold, swaying as though she weren't able to stand on her own two feet. She was able to walk though, and their small entourage managed to lead her—still mumbling curses and sending dazed glares at them every now and then—back to the room they'd entered from, and used the walkway the other Centurions had set up while they were gone to ascend out of the cave and back into the world above.
By the time they had gotten back within sight of the humans' city of tents, the sedative had started to wear off, and by the time they entered the facility the Centurion labor force had been constructing non-stop for the past week, it had faded almost entirely.
And she looked around, realized that she was in a building and that two Centurions were leading her by the arm, and finally began to struggle, shouting for the frakking toasters to let go of her.
Natalie, the other Six who had accompanied them, moved forward so that she was in Kara's line of sight, and tried to reassure her that she was safe, but at the sight of the tall blonde, Kara's self-control seemed to crumble, and her voice full of horror, she screamed.
He'd never heard a sound more shocking in its terror than what had clawed its way up her throat and into the air. He'd never even known such a sound was possible until that moment. It seemed unreal that something so terrible could come from someone so pure. The sound was going to haunt him for the rest of his life.
He remembered that the click of the door shutting behind him as he left the apartment had brought him back to the present, even as her screams from the days before had continued to ring through his mind.
He remembered going back to the baseship, and to the room where the Centurion shells were held before their programming was downloaded and they were 'born'.
He'd pulled out the memory file he'd retrieved from the Centurion that had fallen. It had been too badly damaged to be repaired, and by the time they were ready to lift it out of the ground, its consciousness had already faded. But the memory disk was intact, which meant that the Centurion could be re-downloaded into a new body.
Never having done it before himself, but having watched a few others do it and confidant that he could as well, Leoben opened one of the empty Centurion's front panel, and, after removing the empty memory disk inside, and inserting the one he'd brought with him, he made sure that everything was connected as it should be, and closed the small panel again, watching as it slid back to meld seamlessly with the rest of the robotic Cylon's chrome-plated chest.
It had taken a few minutes for the consciousness to connect to the new body—he saw its fingers twitch a few times as it readjusted to the systems—but after that, it appeared just like any other Centurion, with no signs to show that it had died the day before, or that it had singlehandedly—albeit accidentally—discovered a network of tunnels that ran beneath the city.
But…Leoben knew, even then, that there was something special about that Centurion. He felt a connection to it like he had never felt before. It was…protectiveness. He had been the only one to hear its distress signal, its cries for help that had gone ignored by its brothers, and somehow that made him feel responsible for it.
He had saved its life—because he had no doubt that if he'd not heard the signal they never would have found it or Kara, and it was possible that neither of them would be alive today if not for that fact—and now he wanted to protect it, to make sure that nothing like that ever happened again.
He'd asked it to follow him, and then led it all the way back to the apartment, explaining the situation to it as best he could in the short amount of time it took to reach the somehow already familiar hallway lined with doors.
It would become Kara's personal guard, he explained, as reward for being the only one to find her. He didn't mention how it would be safer this way, how if it stayed inside the building and inside the apartment if he weren't there, how there would be less chance of it being attacked, either by the humans or by the shadows that lurked outside the city boundaries, how this was his way of showing it that it wasn't alone.
Because he didn't know how Centurions thought, but he knew that if he had cried out for his brothers or sisters to help him, but they had ignored him, he would have felt horrible. As though he somehow didn't even deserve to live.
So explained to it what its new duties would be.
Under no circumstances was it to allow anyone to hurt Kara. If someone somehow got into the apartment and tried to hurt her, it was to stop them with whatever force it thought necessary, though it should try to restrain rather than kill. But if it had no choice, it had his permission to kill anyone who tried to hurt her. Even if it was another Cylon. Even if it was him.
Because he knew that the Centurions couldn't tell the difference between him and any one of the rest of his line, and though he highly doubted it would happen, he didn't want to take any chances if another Two—for whatever reason—tried to sneak into the apartment.
He'd then led the Centurion down into the apartment, and walked into a disaster area.
The wooden dining chairs he'd found for them on Geminon had been smashed to pieces, splinters scattered out across the grey carpet, and the matching table and been tipped onto its side, a crack running all down its middle from where it had hit the carpet-covered concrete, completely destroyed and beyond repair.
The sofa cushions had been thrown across the room, and the glass top of the coffee table he'd been brought in had been shattered—apparently using one of the legs from the chairs, since one of them was lying amidst the shards—and a small trail of blood lead to the far corner of the room, where the two sofas—now stripped bare of their cushions and pillows—met to form a small square of space between their sides and the wall.
The sight of the blood on the carpet wiping everything from his mind but concern for Kara, he'd rushed toward the small space, uncaring of the crunch of glass beneath his shoes, or the hissing of hydraulics as the Centurion followed him.
He wasn't exactly sure what he expected to find when he leaned over the arm of the sofa, but he definitely hadn't been expecting to see Kara curled up on the floor, deeply asleep, with only a small cut on the back of her hand to show where the blood had come from. She had probably cut it on the glass, he realized with part relief and part concern.
He'd been half tempted to wake her, to insist that she let him clean the wound, but one look at her face, at the dark circles under her eyes and the way her body seemed to have lost the tense aura of fear he'd seen earlier, he realized that she needed her sleep a lot more than she needed a bandaid.
So he'd gestured for the Centurion to wait for him at the bottom of the stairs, put the dinner he'd prepared earlier—it was still morning, but he got the feeling that Kara would sleep the entire day—in the oven to heat, and got started on cleaning up the room.
As it turned out, she had slept the entire day away, and woke just a few minutes before the timer on the oven informed him that their food was ready. Unlike the night before, when she'd simply stared at him from the wall, this time, she ignored him completely, choosing instead to slowly but surely undue the attempts at cleaning he had started earlier.
She didn't say a word as she once more tore the cushions from the sofas and tossed them across the room, and he let her, knowing that she needed a way to release her anger and fear, but when she went for the mirror that hung from the wall, he gestured for the Centurion, which had been standing silently in the shadows on the other side of the stairs, to make its presence known.
He saw the instant the familiar hissing sound of its steps forward registered with Kara, because she immediately froze, the hand she'd had reaching out for the mirror held immobile in mid-air, as she slowly turned her head to look at the Centurion, her eyes wide.
It was obvious that she hadn't even noticed it there before that moment.
She'd gotten the message, though, because she withdrew her hand away from the mirror, and, keeping her eyes locked warily on the Centurion, she'd retreated across the room until her back was pressed to the wall, and slid down until she was sitting against it.
Standing from the chair he'd been sitting in at the table—both new, lightweight metal replacements for the wooden ones she had destroyed—he lifted both plates in his hands, and moved to join her at the wall, setting her plate and utensils down infront of her, and urging her to eat, since she hadn't had anything earlier.
Frak you, were the first words she'd actually spoken to him, as she's shoved the plate back toward him and sending the fork and spoon tumbling off it and onto the carpet. And if not for the fact that she was refusing to eat for the second day in a row, he would have found it heartening, the obvious return of her fiery personality.
But, as she shot the most scathing glare he had ever seen at him, a clear dismissal of his presence, he'd felt only worry.
Two days after that, the fourth night she'd been there, had been the first time that she actually sat down at the table with him. She chose the chair closer to the stairs, and he took the one across from her, and happily filled both of their plates with food, thinking that she had finally relented and given up on the hunger strike she seemed determined to go on.
But still, she refused to eat. 2:00am Even with the plate infront of her piled with food, she simply sat, her arms crossed, a cold sneer on her face to greet him every time he dared to look up at her from his own food. Something he did rarely, that night, hoping that she would eat if he wasn't looking.
That night had been the first time she'd killed him.
But he'd come back from the resurrection room to find that she'd smashed both of the plates on the floor, tipped the table over and trashed the room again, but the food that had been on her plate was gone, and when he checked to make sure she hadn't just thrown it away or tried flushing it down the toilet or dumping it in the sink—she hadn't tried anything like that yet, but he didn't want to take any chances—but she hadn't. She'd actually eaten the food.
And though it had cost him a life, he counted that night as a victory.
Because that was the last time she refused to eat.
And every day after that, during the breakfasts he made in the morning, the lunches he made in the afternoon, and the dinners they shared every night, he always gave her the courtesy of sitting first, so that she could pick which chair she wanted.
And each time, to his confusion, she chose the chair closer to the stairs.
He knew that she felt confined in the room, trapped, so it confused him that she didn't take the chair that would let her have the entirety of the room at her back every once in a while, instead of the wall. But every day, without fail, she chose the chair by the wall.
He wondered if maybe it helped her feel safer, with the back at her wall, so that she could see the whole room, or if she wanted to be closer to the stairs incase an opportunity to escape arose, or if she didn't like the way the sunlight came in through the wall-length window in the morning, heating the metal of the chair and getting in his eyes. Maybe she liked the shade that the curtains—always pulled to the side so that she wouldn't feel like she wasn't allowed to look outside, but still blocking out some of the sunlight that filtered through—offered.
He didn't know why she preferred it, but now, staring across the table to that empty chair, Leoben felt a wave of loss rise up in him.
Because Cylons had no concept of ownership. They didn't cling to familiarity the way the humans did. There were bedrooms on the baseships, but they were free for anyone to use who so wished. If you were tired, you would simply find the closest one and go to sleep. For him, the idea that something could be yours seemed strange and confusion and selfish. For one person to have sole access to something, not letting others use it at all, seemed absurd, and he had rejected the very notion of it the first time he'd wandered the streets to find humans fighting over things they thought were 'theirs'.
A blanket, a stack of logs for a fire, a bottle of fresh water, things that, by all rights of common decency, they should have been sharing among them.
The trees and fire belonged to no one, and he hadn't been sure whether to be amused or horrified by the way the two men had almost become violent over the idiotic concept that they had more right to the objects than anyone else.
There were many human traits that the Cylons were better off not emulating, and the human's possessiveness was one of them. It was something to be despised and pitied in the humans.
He was glad to say that he had never fallen under the idea's thrall.
Staring blankly across the table, completely ignoring the plate of food he hadn't touched, he wondered when he had stopped thinking like that.
When had he started to think of it as her chair…?
Hearing the Centurion move behind him, he tensed, his fingers curling his hands into fists as remembered pain tore through his chest, and for a moment, he felt like he was drowning once more.
Then he shook the feeling off, and bowed his head as he heard the Centurion hum softly from the far side of the room.
No, he corrected himself, from Kara's side of the room.
He didn't dare to trespass over the invisible line the Centurion had drawn. If not for the fact that he had expressly forbid it, he knew that the Centurion would have taken her out of the apartment days ago.
But he knew that he had to keep Kara there.
He was the only one who could show her the path to her destiny.
Without him, she had no hope of succeeding in the plan God had chosen for her.
Without him to protect her, there would have been a vote on the first day of the occupation.
They would have voted to have her killed.
Or worse, the part of his mind that hated himself reminded him, taunting him with the sound of her screams when she thought she was being taken back to a Farm.
His hands shook on the table, and he quickly folded them in his lap, fingers clasped about his wrists in an effort to keep his inner turmoil from affecting his outer being.
He could almost hear the sound of the Centurion's eye swinging back and forth as seemed to burn into the back of his head. He knew it was watching him.
"I'm sorry." He whispered, his head bowed over the now cold plate of food.
Soft humming and whirring from the Centurion.
It almost sounded like a lullaby.
The barest whisper of her broken voice.
Filled with pain.
Grief so absolute it almost made his heart stop.
Silence but for the sound of the Centurion's eye.
Leoben clenched his hands into fists.
"I'm so sorry."
Finished on 7/30/13, 1:50AM