Too Far From Home
By SabaceanBabe
Rating: PG
Characters: Helo, with a little side order of Boomer
Disclaimer: BSG belongs to others who are not me. If it were mine? Helo would be wearing a lot less.
Author's notes: This is a response to the first official Hidden Elysium fanfic challenge. I chose option #2: Write Helo's off-screen thoughts about the pregnancy or interaction with Boomer. The result is actually a prequel (by at least a few minutes…) to Nature of the Machine and Nature of the Man. And a big thank you (and a cookie, too, if she'd like) to Shadow Serenity for betaing this for me.
I feel the night is on your side / And I don't recognize this road
We sleep all day and walk all night / You're leading me too far from home
– Tom McRae, One More Mile
Helo, I think there's something else that you should know. I'm pregnant.
I'm pregnant.
…pregnant… pregnant… pregnant…
Helo stared into the fire; Sharon's words circled round and round in his head. The world had ended, and he was going to be a father. He didn't want kids, had never thought about kids until now. And he damn sure didn't want a kid that wasn't human. He couldn't even be sure that what she had said was true. How could she be pregnant? She was a Cylon and Cylons were nothing but machines.
The Cylon had been right about one thing, though. Helo had never liked history. Nor had he liked biology, but he was pretty sure that a machine and a man couldn't produce a child. Even so, she claimed she was pregnant and, when he looked back at their time here on Caprica, at her sudden ravenous appetite and the bouts of nausea a few weeks after they had… Maybe, somehow, she was pregnant.
Standing, he leaned back against a tree, propped the sole of his right boot against the rough bark to take some of the strain from the tightened scar on his thigh. A soft breeze blew through the clearing and he crossed his arms over his chest. He felt chilled to his soul.
How the hell had this happened? By all the Lords of Kobol, how had they come to this? What had humanity done to deserve what was happening to them now? The destruction of everything? And why the frak was it that the only damn thing he cared about was that the woman – the thing – he had thought was Sharon was carrying his child?
You're only alive because I've kept you alive. If it wasn't for me, you'd be dead by now.
Helo had to wonder how many times she had prevented the other Cylons from killing him. For that matter, how many other Cylons were there? And did they all look like Sharon and that blonde? The human-form ones? He was already more familiar than he wanted to be with the chrome "toasters."
But I am Sharon, and that's part of what you need to understand.
His gaze was drawn to her, caught by a flash of movement beyond the flames. The Cylon with the liquid-dark eyes watched him. Those beautiful, treacherous eyes. Her soft hair – hair that slid through his fingers like the finest silk – had come loose, caressed her long throat. Gods help him, he envied that hair, wanted to brush the silky strands away from her skin, replace their touch with his lips, his tongue.
He wanted to put his hands around her slender neck and squeeze until he could no longer see his own pain reflected in those liquid-dark eyes. And yet, he couldn't kill her. He'd already proven that. Helo closed his eyes for a moment, admitted, if only to himself, that he didn't want her dead. The thought of Sharon dead, Cylon or not, shattered something inside him into a million glittering shards.
…take that tough-guy attitude of yours and shove it up your ass.
She sounded like Sharon – the Sharon he had come to know over the past few months, training with her, becoming a team as well as friends. And yet, she couldn't be the same person. No way. It was impossible. Because if she was the same person, then that meant— He shied away from the possibilities, clamped down on the thoughts before he had to admit to himself that other things she had said could be true.
I just want you to know that I genuinely feel something for you.
She looked human. Felt, tasted, smelled human. For weeks he had believed she was human. There had been no reason to suspect otherwise, in spite of the clues he had been blind to, clues that told him she wasn't human and never had been. He had honestly believed that she was Sharon Valerii and that she had come back to Caprica for him. That she needed him, somehow; that she couldn't leave him to die. Him. Not some stranger culled from the crowd, but Karl Agathon.
Gods, how much of a fool could one man be? The Sharon Valerii he had known on Galactica had eyes only for the Chief. It had been that way since she had first arrived. It had only taken a few days for Sharon and Tyrol to become lovers, flouting regulations to be together. She had even enlisted Helo's aid, asking him to cover for her for a few minutes here, an hour there.
And he had. He had been a little jealous of Tyrol, more jealous as time went by, but Sharon was Helo's friend and no one else had really cared if she and the Chief were together. The old war bird was only a short time from being decommissioned and her crew scattered throughout the rest of the Fleet, so what would it hurt?
…what we had between us was important.
"I don't care," he whispered. "I don't love you." He felt her eyes on him still. "I don't love you," he repeated, louder. Their eyes met across the chasm of the campfire. And then he was shouting; he didn't care that Starbuck stared at him as though he was a lunatic. Maybe he was. "Do you hear me? I don't love you!"
He only wished he believed that himself.