Nature's Coin
It lay in Blake's palm, its leatherette strap coiled around his fingers. Small and circular, tarnished silver, with the figure of an Earth bird - or maybe a mutant donkey, Cally wasn't sure - embossed on one side and the number 7 on the reverse.
She'd seen Blake wearing the medallion - once, maybe twice, since she'd joined the crew. And now he was giving it to her?
"What was it?" Cally asked, genuinely curious. "It looks like... some sort of money."
Blake shrugged. "It is - or was. Pre-Federation currency, that's all I know, we used to look for them in the streets of the discarded settlements at home." He ran a finger lightly over the bird/donkey. "When the Freedom Party began, we chose them as a symbol - reasonably easy to get hold of," with a quick, twisted smile, "and not actually illegal to own, once you'd broken the law to go and find them."
"And you kept it -? I would have thought the authorities would have taken it from you when..." She faltered. They'd never spoken of what had been done to his mind - even more than the others, the mere thought drenched her in fear like ice-water.
"Maybe they didn't care enough to," he said with a twist of a smile, "or maybe it amused them to leave it. I don't know, I still don't recall much of that time. But I want you to have it." He took her hand in his larger one and pressed the medallion into it.
It was still warm from his skin. Warmth - that was the first thing Cally had sensed in him, in his thoughts and emotions as much as his hands and smile and golden-brown eyes. Cold and shaken by the death of the Saurian people, she had moved into his warmth as if to a fire. It was only later that she realised how fierce, how dangerous such fire in a human could be.
But she trusted Blake, as far as she trusted any human, with their closed minds and isolated souls, and she knew him well enough to know what a gift he was giving her; so much of his past, his life, torn away, he was giving away one small part of it. To her. A near stranger still. An alien.
"Why?" She spoke aloud without realising it.
"Why... what?"
"Why do you part with it? You have so little..." she floundered, not sure of the thoughts let alone the words a human would understand.
A strange, dark flame - something cold and dark - flickered across his eyes, and was gone. "I have nothing," he said, almost curtly, then his voice softened and the warmth was back. "The people I knew - the man I was - then, are gone, and so are your friends."
His hand folded over hers, curling her fingers around the metal. "I want you to have it in memory of them all. My friends, yours... and the man you didn't know, Cally. You at least," and the warmth was dulled, the smile wrenched a little with a pain she couldn't understand, "you can remember for both of us."
~oOo~
She sat in her cabin, and held the pendant by its leather strap, watching it turn slowly, gleam dully in the light... and remembered. And if some of those memories were sent, unthinkingly, to the man on the flight deck below her, she could only hope it would help him a little.
- the end -