Thank you for all the reviews. I figured everyone would lose interest with the delay. Enjoy!
The Reeducation of Nya Reece – Part 2
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"You can see them." Shouts Bravo Four across the comm. "Look at them, there's thousands of them in there!"
"Bravo team mark!"
The VIPERs swoop down on the Resurrection Ship.
-----
"Forgive me." She whispers.
"What did you say?" Heaverly bends over her. An open flame cradled between his hands and Nya's personal bag behind him on the floor.
"Nothing." She looks up at him slowly. She cannot reveal what is hidden inside the fabric lining of the bag, but neither can she let them go without a fight. She slams her shoulder into his abdomen, flames lick against her cheek as they go down in a crumpled mass of flesh. Pegasus' officers are dragging her away from him as she rolls across the flame and extinguishes it.
"Hold her down!" Drake shouts.
Something strikes the back of Nya's head and she whimpers as the darkness swings in deeply around her. As her eyes start to close she sees Baltar in the corridor but there is not enough time to do anything but glare as the pain begins again.
Gauis Baltar is bringing the tray of food down from the galley himself, not trusting the Pegasus crew to give untainted food to the cylon model that calls herself Gina. He glances toward the side room as he hears the shouting. The woman on the floor looks familiar as her attackers ready themselves to vent their real anger on her prone body.
"Lt. Reece?" He asks himself softly.
"Savages." Six's voice is so mundane as they watch the beating.
"Should I stop this?"
"And lose your credibility with Cain?" Her tone of voice tells him exactly what she thinks of that idea. "You have a job to do. God chose you to do certain things that have been foretold. This thing, is not your problem. You must save Her."
"And Reece?"
"She should have died with Leoben."
"They're torturing her." Some brief remnant of a moral conscience rears back its head.
Six shrugs nonchalantly and turns his face with one manicured hand. He glances up at her in adoration and she smiles carefully into that gaze. "She's only human."
"Ah yes." He answers to the thin air that is all around him. "You can justify whatever you want as long as it's done to a human." Without waiting for her response he heads back into the brig that contains another battered and bruised woman.
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"Are you sure this is the place?"
"Yes."
Leoben stares around in awe. He hadn't really expected to be allowed to come here. It is Athena's shrine on Kobol, the ground still marked with faded footsteps and the blood of the fallen.
"They took the arrow of Athena with them."
"That's okay." He steps inside and stares in awe at the statues all around him. The sense of history weighs deeply upon him and he feels, not for the first time, that his new faith is grounded in truth. Blue follows him but stares about with the unseeing eyes of a tourist who has forgotten his history.
"What do you think you can learn here?" Blue asks. "Moldy statues and dust."
"There is something more." Leoben closes his eyes. Deep within his jacket pocket is the unique prophecy that he found on Caprica,that isnearly as important as the scrolls of Pythia, at least to him. They have told him to come here to this spot and to believe.
"I don't get it. We know where they are."
"But we don't really know them."
"Sure we do." Blue says as he sits on the broken altar of a god, ignoring the debris that falls from his presence and scatters even further on the floor. "We know how to use them, to manipulate them, to kill them. What more do we need?"
"For a Three you have such limited vision." Leoben inhales the rank smell of old dust and detects something faintly beneath it, something that rings with the promise of things still unseen and waiting. "We may be superior in all those aspects, but we don't know how they love."
"Love is irrelevant."
"No, there are things we lack. Things we cannot gain on our own."
"The Cylon race is pure and just. We do none of the things that humanity is plagued with. No greed, no hatred, no suffering."
"Exactly." Leoben pulls the small black box from beneath his jacket from where it nestled close to the scroll. There are no complicated steps he needs to take, just a single button to push. He reaches for Blue and slides the box against his copy's skin. Blue's eyes widen and the two men struggle for a moment but it is too late.
The life drains from his eyes.
Leoben lets his body hit the floor even as the box warms in his palm before it cools. "Without injustices, justice means nothing. Without suffering, there would be no value in love. They are the ones who are complete. We are just copies."
He crushes the box underneath his feet and turns again to the gods around him. "Purity of intention is worth as much as a key. Search my soul, Orai guardians of heaven, if I am found wanting then hide the path from me – but if my love is true, show me the way to salvation. Show me how to become human."
The tomb flickers and gives way to grass and a starless sky.
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"May sorrow show me the way to compassion. May I realize grace in the midst of suffering..."
"What the frak is she mumbling about?"
"...may I love, knowing that I cannot change death." Nya gazes up with eyes black with despair and her voice grows in volume so that they can hear it. "I'll fly your frakking VIPER. I'll fly her, and I'll kill Cylons with her. That is what you want. Isn't it?"
"About frakking time." Heaverly gripes and pushes the small burning bag away from him. "Thought we were going to have to beat youall night."
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"Nya?" Captain Adama knocks on the door to the showers before he enters.
She is curled underneath the water, a mass of pain despite the lack of physical scarring. Their techniques were not as flawless as Lt. Thorn would have others believe. Blood streaks her nose and cheek from internal bruising.
She responds groggily as he wraps a towel around her shaking frame and helps her out of the showers.
"Who did this?" He demands angrily.
She only shakes her head. "You didn't include all of my history."
"What?" Her answer confuses him.
"Moral objections." Her voice trails away. "Not the truth. Just that I had a moral objection."
"That was all that mattered." Apollo examines her and the anger in his eyes grows as he sees the tenderness of her flesh. "Who did this, Archer?"
"I'm to fly your VIPER." Her grey eyes are deeper than charcoal with sadness. "Against the Resurrection ship." He starts to ask again who had ordered the beating when she grabs his hand fiercely, intently. "It would have been worse if they'd known the truth."
"About Leoben."
She nods, it was never a question.
"Maybe we can contact my father. Get you transferred back to Galactica."
"No."
"This is not the way the military works. We're not brutes who punish people like this. This is not the law that I've served under for the last seven years. You have to believe that."
She shrugs and winces suddenly with the pain of it. "I don't care."
"You have to care. You know Galactica, this is not how we operate."
"We're part of a bigger Fleet now."
Lee almost reaches out for her. He's never dealt well with his female pilots, and now that he'd been officially stripped of CAG status, he doesn't have the real authority to change anything either. He can only be here as a friend, as even his status as his father's son has lost any weight it might have had. Here he is a hostage against his father's good will.
But also this war has changed the man that Lee Adama was. Aged him, altered his viewpoint, and saddened him. Especially this, another beaten pilot in front of him while two of his closest friends sat in the brig accused of murder. After Lt. Thorn had finished with Nya he'd gone after Sharon, his need for torture unfulfilled. They were tearing themselves apart even as the Cylons got closer and closer.
"Let's get you to the Doc."
She doesn't argue as he helps her dress and half-carries her through the hall to the medbay. Something has broken inside of her that Lee doesn't understand or really know how to fix.
Baltar sees their slow progress through the halls but doesn't offer to help. He is startled as Nya looks up at him with pure hatred in her eyes. But Lee doesn't stop and they pass by the Vice President.
"Hang on, Nya. Just hang on." He tells her but her eyes are blank and glassy with the memory of what Leoben told her before he died. About the serpent.
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"You've come to my favorite part of the tour." Says the tour guide as she steps up onto the final stair and gestures to the omphalos, the naval stone of the temple. "From what the scientists can tell, this is one of the oldest temple stones in the Colonies. We believe that it was brought here from Kobol, and perhaps from someplace older than that. It is made of a stone we cannot identify. Perhaps it was given to our ancestors by the Gods themselves."
"Come on." Leoben pulls at Nya's arm. "Enough of this. Let's explore ourselves."
They break away from the group and scramble across the weathered temple stones that lead in two directions from the temple. Here on a low plateau Nya halts as she sees the heavy pillar statue with a snake curling up around the base of a cracked and fragmented stone leg.
"Ophicus." She says in awe. "I've never been here before."
"The serpent bearer." Leoben looks up as well. "And the healer."
"Oh!" She laughs in glee as they climb over broken statue pieces to the other side of the statue. Here and there, creeping vines have climbed skyward like tiny flowering serpents reaching forever upward. "He does know some history."
"History. Mythology." He chides as she trips and falls into his waiting arms. "I've always known it, I just don't understand why you believed."
"Faith is what some answer but not me."
"What do you answer then? What do you see when you look at the decrepit old bones that our ancestors worshipped? Is there real life in them, or are they are empty as the stone they're made of?"
Nya runs one hand along a ridge of serpent coil. Even where Opichus has lost much definition to the test of time, here she can feel the tiny ripples of scales where they were etched by an ancient stonemason. A thrill runs down her spine at the age of this statue and what he means on the oldest of the Colonies.
"I see hope."
"Hope?" Leoben asks. "They entail the past not the future."
"Like my mother taught me, you always honor your elders for they are the basis of your exsistence. And because I do see the future in the Gods. Someday we will look for their aid and those who've lost faith will be found wanting. I think believing in them gives us hope. And hope leads us toward the truth."
"I hope something different." He grins as he wraps his arms around her waist and draws her toward him even as the sun begins to set and darken. "Isn't there a fertility shrine around here somewhere?"
"And why would we need that?"
"I just thought they might have some interesting ideas."
She shoves him away laughing as they chase each other through the stones and back toward the tour group. The broken statue behind them watching with empty eyes as the snake coils tightly around his feet and up around his staff, its eyes full of truths and mysteries.
Whew! Part II is done and Part III will be up ASAP. I hope everybody can bear with me as I try to bring together the mythology with what is going on and some revelations about Zarek.
And keep you all wondering what exactly Leoben is doing. :)
Leoben's talk about "Injustice/justice" is taken from Heraclitus but similar things have been said by Asian philosophers as well as others. Nya's prayer is a modification of a Buddhist prayer. Ophicus is also known as Asclepius, the healer.
P.S. I couldn't remember if Leoben's number was revealed so I took liberty there.