Just Thinking
By: X
x0832001@yahoo.com
Disclaimer: I own nothing and am getting no money.
Rated: G
A/N: Just Trance rambling, I hope you enjoy
Summary: Trance reflects on what she knows about Harper
Trance looked down at Harper. Sleeping Harper looked so different then awake Harper. He was peaceful. Tyr called Harper "boy", but it was when he was sleeping that Harper's youth was obvious. She herself was a complete mystery and everyone knew it. Harper was a mystery of a completely different kind. They knew bits and pieces about him, how he worked, but they had no idea all that he kept secret. Trance was just as in the dark as the others, but she recognized there was more to Harper than they knew. He wasn't just the silly little engineer. Like all people his life had been shaped by his past, a past no one knew about.
But so what if Harper had secrets, they all did. When he slept you wouldn't know that. He looked like any other guy his age; free of the defenses he had been forced to erect in order to survive. Dylan, with his idealism and warm, supportive upbringing wouldn't last a week on Earth. If you plunked him down there right now, even armed with his High Guard training and knowledge and respect of other peoples, he'd be lying dead in a gutter by Thursday. Wednesday afternoon if he was stupid enough to try and change things. But, Harper had created defenses; ways to protect himself from the horrors, from letting the demons destroy him. They bore the glossy surface of a grin or a chuckle sometimes, but there reason for existing remained, protecting himself. Shielding him from the horrors that had surrounded him, and now keeping people from getting too close.
Of course when Beka had plopped him into her way of life on the Maru he had floundered like a fish out of water just as Dylan would on Earth (Before he wound up dead of course.) or anyone would when they were surrounded by a completely new and different way of life. Culture shock is what they called it. Sometimes, back on the Maru, Beka would share stories about Harper's early days in her employment. Beka couldn't believe how jumpy he was. She had thought it might be the caffeine and had tried to wean him off of the stuff. She then warned Trance to never repeat her mistake and deprive Harper of his colas and coffee because the results wouldn't be pretty.
Trance gently traced the top of his ear with her finger. Why? Even she didn't have an answer for that, his ear was there, a little pinker than the rest of his skin, and she gently traced its line because she just wanted to. That brought her eyes to his port. He'd gotten it to interface with machines, to be useful. Useful people didn't get killed. How he'd gotten it was just another of his secrets. It really didn't matter how it came to be. All they really needed to know was he had one, and he used it to his advantage. He could enter the Andromeda mainframe and fix problems from the inside. The port took his natural affinity for fixing machines to the ultimate level. His consciousness actually left his body, and went to work searching out information and making repairs. Andromeda wouldn't say anything, but Trance thought she liked having her one and only engineer able to be so closely connected to her. Andromeda demanded perfection and Harper delivered.
Trance looked at Harper some more. Just watching his chest rise and fall, slowly and deliberately. The corner of his mouth twitched and his brow furrowed. He was dreaming. His mind was never quiet. Always thinking, plotting, planning. An empty mind wandered, remembered things. So, Harper kept his occupied. Upgrades for Rommie, ways to get rid of the larvae, improvements for the weapons, something always had his genius brain working. It was a miracle he ever learned to read considering what they knew of Earth. Education did not seem to be an important value. But Harper knew science, math, mechanical engineering, and history better than anyone else. He was a little font of knowledge. He really was a genius. It wasn't just something he said as a joke like everybody, even he, himself thought. Trance could see genius in him, in the way when he put 2 and 2 he got the square root of 16. Right answer, just a unique way of expressing it. He really never got the recognition he deserved.
The reason she could watch Harper sleep is because he was doing so on Med Deck. He'd reluctantly dragged himself to Medical a few hours ago because he was having problems breathing. It turned out he had a respiratory infection. It'd been festering for days and the stubborn engineer had refused to come and get medicated. He refused to acknowledge his weakened immune system. 20 years of malnutrition and diseases had left his body barely able to defend itself from the bacteria and other pathogens that were constantly trying to slip by and set up camp in his body. Luckily, Andromeda's Med Deck was more than capable of telling Trance exactly what to do and providing the necessary tools. She'd never considered herself to be a healer in the past, but that was part of her job here. Harper had helped her get quite good at it. He offered a string of aliments and injuries. Luckily they were almost always pretty minor.
Except of course the Maggog larvae, they were not a minor thing. Even halfway through the procedure on Tyr she knew it would kill Harper. As her forceps had touched one of the wriggling larvae it constricted around his liver and held tight with its tiny teeth. The Neitzchien had been engineered to withstand organ trauma, Harper hadn't. She'd been happy to save Tyr, but devastated Harper would have to live out his nightmare.
That had led to Harper's dark time. She didn't like to dwell on that. As he lay here sleeping you wouldn't think this peaceful man had come very close to taking his own life. Trance didn't really pray, but she had thanked the Divine when Harper stopped his wallowing. Harper had decided to find a cure for himself. As he was a genius Trance had great faith that between the two of them, they would. It was defiantly part of that perfect possible future, and she was sure he wanted it badly enough.
Harper muttered I his sleep as his hand flopped off the bed, fingers twitching madly. Trance smiled to herself and repositioned the fallen appendage on his chest. She'd leave him alone to get more rest and let the antibiotics kill his remaining infectious invaders. That's really all she could do. Trance would remain an observer. This reflection on his still form had happened before; it would no doubt happen again.