[Resurrection Hub, Laura's Quarters]

"What's this tale, about this being my last body?" The bearded Tigh copy sat on Laura's couch as if it was his, unflappable as if he owned the Hub and the entire Cylon species with it. He singularly lacked Saul Tigh's need for swagger and bravado to compensate for perceived inadequacies. If he hadn't been the colonel's mirror image, Laura wouldn't have recognized him.

"It's not your last body," Ben said. "There is a Colonel Tigh living amongst the humans."

Tigh grimaced. "One?"

They nodded. Now that she'd lived and died as a Cylon for months, Laura could feel the drawback of having just one reserve body waiting for you. And Tigh didn't even have that, because she'd intervened and used the last of his spare bodies for a download that didn't even resemble the Tigh she remembered.

"The Colonel doesn't know he is a Cylon," she said. "He's second in command of the human Fleet."

"If he's a sleeper agent, he's a deep one." Ben flinched. "He enjoys tormenting Cylons more than any other human we have encountered so far."

Tigh's brows crawled up his scalp, but then he shook his head, leaving it be for the moment.

"What's the baloney about John boxing me?"

Ben looked at Laura, in a silent plea for help as if it was all too new to him. Tigh followed his gaze until his eyes rested on her.

"What is the last thing you do remember?" she asked. Where did this Tigh fit into Cavil's plans, this unique model that Ben called his father? Was Tigh the creator of the Cylons? Impossible.

And yet.

"We'd just created the Eights and were conceptualizing a Nine to replace the Daniels, when John –"

Tigh stiffened and took a deep breath as if a foul memory struck him, but Laura's mind had already screeched to a halt, hooked by his casual admission that he was indeed the Cylon creator. Or one of them, from the sound of it.

" - when John got out of control. Ellen thought it endearing, but in a fully-grown machine, tantrums are ugly, and John's rages escalated. He railed against us for giving his model a human body instead of an advanced machinated one, but there was nothing we could have done. The Centurions insisted on taking their evolution to that next level, not us. It was the price we paid for them to end their war with the humans."

"You ended the First Cylon War?" Laura asked, incredulous, and yet almost convinced he was telling some version of the truth by the calm matter-of-factness of his claim.

"First?" Tigh caught her in a piercing gaze.

"What?" She struggled to get back to the present, to this Tigh, this self-proclaimed savior of humanity. It was just too much. She glanced at Ben, who stood by as if having a religious epiphany, apparently swallowing Tigh's assertions wholesale.

Tigh snapped his fingers.

"First Cylon War?" he said, as if unused to repeating himself, observing her as if she was the feeble brained one, instead of –

No, no, he wasn't like the Colonel at all. He was too clever by far and apparently he'd been boxed for more than a few years, if the notion of more than one Cylon War shocked him.

"Yes, First Cylon War." She had his full attention now. So she told the man who had confessed creating humanity's destructors, in a few sentences what he had wrought.

"Leoben?" There was a raw edge of rage in his voice Laura had never heard from the real - the other - Tigh.

Shrinking under Tigh's gaze, uncharacteristically at a loss for words, Ben nodded almost indiscernibly.

"Leoben?" Tigh bended forward, disbelief in his voice.

"We did."

The color drained off Tigh's face and his hands closed to fists. Laura harbored the sudden hope that, even if he wasn't Bill's friend, this new outraged Tigh could be persuaded to be on their side after all.

The muscles in Tigh's jaw worked under his taut skin. His lips drew back, baring his teeth. He turned to Buster.

"We ended the War," he spat at the centurion. "We ended the cycle of war between man and machine. We paid the price you demanded. The war was over!"

Buster stepped back. His red eye swished uncertainly. He raised his hands in defense.

"Uhm," Ben said. "Centurions don't have speaking abilities anymore. We added telencephalic inhibitors to the new models."

"Is this true?" Tigh asked Buster.

The centurion nodded.

Saul turned to Ben. "Then why was a new war started?"

Ben stepped back. "We needed to avenge the enslavement of the Cylons by humanity," he said, his eyes shifting from Tigh to Laura - a plea in them.

As if she would say anything in defense of the genocide.

"By adding telencephalic inhibitors?!" Tigh in a fluid movement, rose and advanced on Ben until he hovered chest to chest with him, crowding his personal space. He seemed to tower over the Two, even if he was not half an inch taller.

Ben drew back. "We needed to prevent the humans from ever regrouping." He faltered under the scorching glare of his creator, and then he held his tongue, his gaze darting through the room, resting anywhere but on Tigh.

"Have you any idea of the size of the universe?" Tigh heckled him.

"Sure." Ben eyed him, confused.

"You could have gone anywhere, explored the galaxy with your siblings, but no, you had to repeat the mother of all Cylon mistakes, you had to do it a third time!"

He raised his fist, and Laura thought for a second he was about to hit Ben, the father chastising the kid that had turned out to be an adult he despised, but Tigh turned his back on Ben and stood quivering, his hands clenched to fists.

Laura's focus shifted. "Third time?" she asked, wondering if she'd understood correctly.

Her question seemed to pull Tigh out of his capped rage. He caught her in a hard blue stare. After a slow measured inhale, he let his breath escape, unfolded his fists, straightened and seemed to shrug off some of the tension from his shoulders, almost as a deliberate act, as if he'd called forth a subroutine and activated it. And maybe he had.

"The Thirteenth Tribe has had its own machine uprising," he said, calmer now, "two thousand years ago. Five of us escaped and came to warn the Twelve Colonies, but we were too late," he said, "the war had already started."

She didn't hear the ending of his explanation.

Thirteenth Tribe. Did he say Thirteenth Tribe?

It was as if he'd pushed a lever that undid the floor under her feet, opening a chasm. She was swallowed whole, and she plummeted, wind whistling past her ears. The Thirteenth Tribe, Earth, had been the one carrot the Fleet had had, the one hope of a friendly welcome for the remnants of humanity. And the Cylons had beaten them to it.

"So," Tigh summarized, oblivious to the blow he had dealt her, turning to Ben, his voice saturated with sarcasm. "So, you allowed John to box us and to lead you into genocide."

He might as well have hit Ben. "We didn't know. None of us knew you ever existed."

Tigh's forehead creased. "Right," he said, his eyes alive with skepticism.

"Memories have been altered," Laura supplied. "Only the Threes kept looking for the unknown five."

"The Unknown Five!? We, the frak, created them!"

"You'll have some reprogramming to do then." She couldn't feel sorry for the bruised ego of the creative genius behind the genocide.

Tigh lips tightened at her rank indifference to his problem.

She shrugged.

Their eyes locked.

"And who created this Nine, by transforming a human?" he asked, sounding as if he would undo that decision too, undo the whole Roslin line, while he fixed the rest of the problems his offspring had spawned during his absence.

"The Ones and the Fours," Ben said, "though the Fives are in on it too."

"Why?" Tigh asked. "I mean, she is fine enough looking," he eyed her up and down, appreciation apparent in his eyes, "but hardly an original concept. She's just a copy of a naturally occurring genetic coincidence."

Laura tried to suppress her smirk at his offhand disqualification. After Cavil's abuse, Tigh's attitude meant little to her. And his exasperation with natural procreation was laughably out of touch. Procreation would be the one project all humanoid models would group around, despite their differences. Her hand covered her abdomen.

At her soft snort Tigh turned to her. "No offense, lady," he said, "but copying nature hardly counts as Art." She could hear the capital in the last word.

"None taken," she said. "And, please do inform Cavil of your insights. I'm not here of my own free will; I'm here as a tool for the destruction of what's left of humanity. My only wish is to end that."

"Tool, how?

"I was the President, and the partner of the military commander, who is now the sole leader of humanity. He will be tormented beyond measure when copies of his former lover start resurfacing in the Fleet."

"Having his lover back, could restore him," Tigh countered.

"He is supposed to shoot them on sight. "

Something flared in his eyes. "His partner?" he asked incredulously. The drunken Colonel had been fiercely loyal to his unfaithful Ellen, and this one kept asking after her. How long had they been a couple?

"I'm a Cylon," Laura continued, still standing by her order to shoot. "An enemy agent. If he can't stomach killing us," she said, "then a Cylon presence will build up in the Fleet to do whatever Cavil has programmed my copies to do."

Cocking his head to one side, Tigh seemed to contemplate that scenario.

"The Thirteenth Tribe has always felt an allegiance to the twelve others, even after we left them," he muttered, weighing what he'd heard.

"It has?"

"Of course we have, you are our creators."

Oh?

Oh.

centered&&&/centered

[Commander's Quarters]

His quarters smelled of leather, of Bill, of books, and there was a lingering fragrance of Caprica's Dawn. She hovered near the hatch, while Bill made his way to the decanter on the side table, poured two glasses of water and turned back to her. His eyes crinkled with affection as he looked at her. She remembered kissing those eyelids, those too long lashes, and sliding a fingertip down over the hard bridge of his nose, over the softness of his warm lips.

The weight loss had done him good and the additional greying of his hair gave him even more distinction than before. Now that the traces of the sleepless nights and excess booze were fading from his features, he looked much like her old partner.

It would never be the same again.

Then again, maybe it could be easier, without her workload and responsibilities as President, without the cancer threatening to cut short their happiness.

Smiling back at him, she took a step in his direction, pulling the hatch close behind her.

"Bill?" A sleepy female voice drifted from his rack.

He ignored it and walked back to Laura, two glasses in his hands. "Water?" he asked.

She nodded, taking the offered glass, and looking over his shoulder to his bunk.

"Please sit," he said.

The leather couch welcomed her with its familiar creaking puff. She saw movement in his rack and two slender naked legs dropping over the side.

The younger one pushed herself in an upright position and sat there for a moment, drowsy, disheveled, naked but for the bandage around her neck, youthfully magnificent, and by the looks of it, thoroughly frakked, quite recently.

The young woman stared at Laura in much the same way Laura stared at her, objecting to the other's presence and strangely connected at the same time.

Bill, standing in the middle, looked from the uncovered young woman in his rack to the middle-aged one on his couch and shrugged noncommittally, as if saying that this was how it was going to be.

She shook her head. It was not his decision to make.

The younger one climbed out of his rack and covered herself with Bill's dark robe. Laura eyed the woman, recalling the scent and softness of the robe against her naked skin.

The woman walked over and wrapped a long arm around Bill's middle. "Hi again," she greeted Laura, amiably enough.

Laura saw the possessive behavior for what it was and let it slide. She would hold off on her suicide plans a little longer to investigate the younger one's programming. She was too close to Bill for comfort.

"For now, this is the safest place for you to be," Bill said.

Laura looked around. On a practical level it would be possible to live here with three people, but she doubted she wanted to sleep on the couch listening to Bill frakking a younger version of herself in their bunk. "You're kidding," she said.

"Not kidding," Bill said. "We'll make do. I have a plan."

"A plan?" said Laura.

His telephone buzzed. Bill walked toward it and picked it up. "Yes? ... Ah." He listened intently, then nodded. "I'm on my way." He placed the phone back on the hook.

"Another one?" the younger one asked, wrinkling her nose.

Bill grinned. "Not for now." He looked at Laura. "Make yourself at home while I'm gone". And to the young one: "Help her, she's not there yet. We can't have her trying to end it, again."

Laura shuddered, feeling betrayed by how easily he'd read her and how he'd carelessly shared what he knew with a Cylon whose programming he'd no idea of. She withdrew into herself defensively.

With a short nod to the both of them, Bill left his Quarters, closing the hatch behind him.