Six of Ned

"There must be some way out of here... said the Fool to the Thief..."

It had been nearly two years since she had been brought to this world. Two years since she had been on the planet Caprica in the Twelve Colonies of Kobol. Two years since she was the key to disabling the Colonies defensive systems, allowing her people, the Cylon's to kill the entire human race.

Thirty billion souls, all dead, and the blood was on her hands.

"There's too much confusion... I can't get no relief..."

In her two years on the Colonies she had fallen in love with a man, Gaius Baltar, a man whom she had to seduce to complete her mission. A man of many contradictions, a genius who was foolish about many things, a coward who was stronger than he looked, handsome on the surface but his selfishness tended to cancel that out once you knew him. And yet...

She had fallen in love with him anyway.

"Merchant men they drink my wine..."

But when the first nuclear bombs had detonated in Caprica's atmosphere, signaling the end of the race of Man, she had tried to save him. The blast wave of one of the nuclear detonations had caused Baltar's home to come crashing down upon them. She had shielded him with her body, her synthetic organic body, the pinnacle of the Cylon's evolution from Machines and into something new...

"Plowmen they dig my earth..."

She closed her eyes and felt the child growing her womb, the child conceived in a miracle of love between herself and the man that had found her when she had been brought to this world after the end of the Colonies.

She had taken a name, the name of the world she had helped to murder.

Caprica.

"None of them along the line... Know what any of it is worth..."

She heard a voice, and then realized that she had been singing.

Caprica looked up to see that Ned had returned to their rooms in Red Keep, even though it was obvious to all that Ned wished to return to the North. However in the aftermath of Tywin's Rebellion there were still plenty of things that needed to be sorted out.

It was either good fortune, or the will of the One True God that had placed her on this world, and put her where a man like Eddard Stark could find her, save her, and most miraculously of all...

Love her.

While Eddard sat down on the edge of the bed, and she spoke to him while he kicked off his boots, her thoughts were only half on giving him advice.

She was still thinking of everything that had transpired, sneaking around and learning to use weapons behind everyone's backs. How she had planted a few suggestions in the minds of men about Winterfell out of boredom, and had seen a few of them take root. Already the North's improved alcohol and 'Northmen Steel' was becoming a popular trade item, netting the Starks a pretty penny.

The death of Ned's wife, from something that would have been easily treated with medicine that Caprica didn't have, had weighed on her. She had to stand there silent and helpless as Catelyn died of an infection from an assassin's blade. That was when she stopped thinking about mere survival, she began to think of how to truly make this primitive world a better place.

Caprica had gotten a place in Ned's household when he traveled to King's Landing, there she slipped into the background, no one noticed servants, which allowed her to learn things that her so-called 'betters' wanted to stay hidden. She had discovered a few secret passageways that Varys had assumed only he knew of, she had encountered Ned's daughter Arya in the tunnels and overheard Varys scheming to bring down the Baratheon dynasty. At that point Caprica decided that she would become Ned's spymaster, and hopefully guide him towards fixing the very real problems that this land, Westeros, had.

What she didn't expect was that Ned had been watching her, just like the first time they had met in the Wolfswood. In retrospect it made sense, with his wife murdered, surrounded by men with false smiles and sharp knives, out of his element compared to the North, he needed something, anything, to keep from drowning in despair.

And so... she had become his mistress, and for the second time in her life... Had fallen in love.

At that point, Westeros was hers.

It was through him that she arranged for the Day of Dupes, it was through him that she began the task of sorting out the Kingdom's finances, it was because of him that she got to travel with Robert's forces as Tywin Lannister tried to rebel in revenge for the execution of his beloved children for the crime of incest.

It was because of him that the miracle was growing inside her, something her people believed that God wanted them to do, but had failed to achieve.

To be fruitful... To have children...

Now with Tywin's Rebellion done with, and Robert wedded to a new Queen who was already pregnant, even with Summer ending on this world's strangely distorted seasons, life was returning to normal.

Even as she listened to Ned talking about the latest meeting with the Iron Bank representatives, and his private meeting with them about setting up his own account and a branch of the bank in King's Landing, Caprica wondered what the future held.

Her dreams had gotten strange... Filled with images of dragons and men made of ice with eyes even bluer than hers, a man embedded in a tree glaring at her with an eye brimming with anger... And the strangest, and yet most exhilarating one of all. A dream of a young man in elaborate white painted armor, with white-blond hair and grey eyes wielding a Valyrian steel blade, behind him a city was rising up on the banks of a river she didn't recognize.

Caprica couldn't help but suspect that the dreams were due to her pregnancy, then again there had never been a pregnant robot before, so she couldn't quite shake the feeling of unease.

As Ned finished talking and she had no advice left to give, he smiled ruefully as he realized that she had gotten him out of most his clothes and was massaging his shoulders.

"Ned?"

"Yes, Caprica?"

"Have you thought of names? For our child."

"Aye."

There was a pause before Caprica spoke up once more.

"Well?"

"Edrick if the child is a boy, Lyra for a girl."

"Edrick was one of the Kings of Winter, yes?"

"Aye."

"And Lyra would be for your sister?"

"Aye."

Caprica found herself kissing him, feeling a single tear drop wet on his face as she did so. As the first kiss gave way to a second, then a third, and then so much more, her worries and fears melted away. However, there was another thought present, a memory, a memory of a song that she could never remember where it came from.

And yet it felt like something from childhood, which was truly bizarre since she didn't have a childhood.

A song that she had been singing to the child growing inside of her.

In this moment in Red Keep there was only Ned within her, and the song...

She had no idea what it meant, but it was beautiful.

Like life, even on this primitive and cruel world.


Note: 'The Song' is All Along the Watchtower by Bob Dylan, which was used in Battlestar Galactica (reimagined), the Bear McCreary version is the one she was hearing.