Happy New Year's Eve Day! And, aww, thank you again! I can't tell you all how thrilled I am that you're enjoying this story and the characters so much, and so many of these great reviews are coming from some of my favorite Atlantis writers, too! Totally chuffed.
And the plot thickens further – hopefully in a good way, so deep breath and here we go:
Antal had always bemoaned the fact that his life, thus far, had been remarkably uneventful. He didn't even remember when his father had died. He had been too little to understand why one moment his father had always been around, then one day he wasn't, and so he hadn't missed him. Not really. He missed what it meant to have a father, but not the man himself. Tosia and Lasca were the constants in his existence, and not much had disrupted their lives since. Until now.
John had stumbled back to his usual place by the warm hearth as soon as they had finished bandaging his hands and had helped him change from his wet clothing. He sat motionless, his back against the wall, his legs drawn up and bandaged hands lightly covering his ears.
Tosia had finally returned home a long time later. Even though the old woman entered quietly, Antal still jumped at the sound of the door, and his heart began to pound when he saw the anger that reappeared on his mother's face. Lasca stood glaring at the old woman, waiting for an explanation, but Tosia, in typical fashion, stepped past her without a word, and merely went to her bedroom, banging the door shut, sparing neither Antal nor John even a fleeting glance.
Lasca had muttered something about old fools, which Antal didn't understand, and he watched with growing discomfort as his mother began preparing their evening meal, banging the pots a little louder than usual.
When he grew too distressed by his mother's uncharacteristic display of temper, Antal distracted himself by checking on John. Crouching down close in front of the other man, Antal realized that John was humming very softly under his breath – a continuous, droning solitary note. Antal wondered if maybe John's hands were bothering him something fierce, but it didn't look like he was hurting – his expression was calm, and while some blood had seeped through the coarse material of the bandages, the worst of the bleeding had finally stopped.
Even still, that constant, low keen didn't sound happy, so Antal patted the older man on the shoulder in an attempt at consolation. John's brows pulled together very slightly in acknowledgement of the contact, but that was all. His gaze went clear through Antal, and he went on making that noise, a steady hypnotic monotone on each exhaled breath.
Their evening meal passed without much in the way of conversation. Tosia refused to come to the table, and Lasca's anger faded to mostly silent brooding. John managed a few bites with Antal sitting beside him on the floor and holding his spoon for him; the man's battered hands were too heavily bandaged for him to properly hold anything for a while.
Antal's mother was still quiet when he helped her clean up the few dishes, and he found himself bewildered by the strange tension that had overtaken his previously harmonious home, dividing the two most important people in his life. The unsettling feeling of not knowing how one or the other would react at any given moment was altogether unfamiliar, and Antal didn't like it at all.
Much as he had come to think of John as a friend, and even a member of his small family, Antal was surprised to find himself longing for the placid, consistent routine of his life before John had come so unexpectedly into their lives.
---A---
As had become the norm, Tosia found herself wide-awake in the middle of the night, her thoughts churning. It was on nights like these that she longed for familiar books to read, for music to listen to, anything to shut out her own self-recriminations.
With a sigh, she pulled her aching body from the warmth of bed and shuffled into the common room. The embers from the fire were still glowing, and she saw John's silhouetted form huddled in front of the hearth.
Moving slowly, uncertain how he would respond to her, Tosia stepped beside him and threw some more kindling on the embers, stirring them until the sparks licked the wood, then caught fire, quickly illuminating the room in a warm, orange-tinged glow.
Tosia could see that John was shivering, even though perspiration beaded his brow, and his cheekbones were tinged with pink. She took the blanket from his bed and draped it over his shoulders. He tensed at her touch. When she raised her hand to his forehead, only wanting to check for fever, he ducked his head and batted her hand away.
"You're not the easily forgiving type, are you, John?" Tosia said with a wry smile. But she understood – she would do the same in his place.
Easing into the low chair beside him, she draped the rough wool blanket from the armrest over her lap, and watched John's profile for a moment. The firelight cast his features in amber and lit his dark hair with mahogany highlights. Tosia thought it a shame for a man this virile to be trapped within a mind so shattered. John shifted a little closer to the warmth of the fire, resting his elbows on his bent knees. His hands were so heavily bandaged it looked as though he were wearing thick mittens, and Tosia felt another pang of guilt over her earlier cruelty with him.
"I owe you both an apology and an explanation, do I not?" she began in a soft voice, not wishing to wake the others. What she had to say was for John's ears only, whether he comprehended her words, or not. "Someone once said that we become what we fear, and today I realized that I have done just that. I have become an ignorant, intolerant old coward. I just wanted to live out the remainder of my days hidden in the safety of this small hut with naught but my family by my side. What you found yesterday may have changed all that. You dug up the past, and the past is something I thought I'd successfully put behind me and forgotten. You brought it to light, in all its ugly truth, and that is why I was angry with you. I had no right to that anger, and I am truly sorry for how harshly I treated you, John."
She paused and stared back into the fire. John had begun rocking slightly; his own gaze on the flames, but he seemed alert, almost as though he were listening, and so Tosia continued. "For years, I cursed this planet and cursed my fate even more. Forty-six years ago, give or take, when I was sent here, to the very civilization I had helped create, I thought that I couldn't possibly withstand a world as primitive and harsh as this one. How could I live among people who were no better than the savages my colleagues and I first sent here, such a long time ago? These people were merely an abandoned experiment, docile laboratory rats released and gone wild. That is what I thought of them back then." She smiled sadly and remorsefully at that. "My peers had chosen their place of punishment well. It is what I deserved, I suppose."
Tosia glanced at John who had tipped his head slightly in her direction, but he still wouldn't fully look at her.
Is this what you deserved, too, John? she thought. What reason had they for casting you aside here?
She thought back to her own early days on this land, days that seemed more like a hazy dream than a part of her own past. After so many years, it was becoming difficult to see it all clearly. No one should live as long as she had. It took a moment until she could continue, and she kept her voice barely above a whisper for fear that it would otherwise tremble with regret, with shameful weakness. "For the first few days, I stayed close to the cliffs, the very place of my rebirth, so to speak, and where I found the others and then you, John. I hid in a small cave I found nearby, and inside, there was a small bundle of clothing so that I could at least cover myself. The cave was just large enough to allow me to take shelter, and I stayed there, hiding like a pathetic, frightened animal and hoping for a reprieve from my sentence. I'd hoped that perhaps the others had only sent me here to frighten me into submission. Perhaps they would come when they felt I had learned my lesson. That pardon never came… but those with whom I had sworn allegiance did, in the same manner as myself. Over the course of a few days, all five of them were here. Gaereth was the last.
Then one day, one of them, the others, came to tell us of our fate, our final sentence. The planet would be hidden, cloaked from all sensors, cut off from any outside contact. It was both for our protection, and to make us disappear, as though we no longer existed. Our punishment, for our interference and disobedience, was to live out the remainder of our days on this planet, back in our previous, weak human forms, as helpless and as powerless as though we had never even heard of Ascension. They told you something similar, I assume, John? Before they sent you here?"
Tosia watched his profile again for a long time, but it was someone else's features she saw. "Gaereth was the one who told us to stop pining for what we had lost, and to start dealing with what was before us. He was always very pragmatic that way," she said, smiling, remembering so clearly the stark determination on his handsome face. "And so we found what was left of the original village. It was abandoned, save for a few scattered people, wild as the animals they preyed upon for their food. We took what shelter we could in the remains of the houses, and we used what tools we could find, or make, to work the land and gradually rebuild the village.
It was so very hard, John. It was so different from what we had known before. Sometimes, I felt as though we should just… stop. That we were fooling ourselves. But Gaereth kept me going. Kept all of us going. He was so determined to survive…" A pang of old grief swept over her and a sharp pain stabbed in her chest, but she was determined to follow this through to the end. She owed John as much.
"Gradually, people began to drift to us. They would just turn up at the village, small families, larger groups. Word must have been spreading … They were fearful of us, so brutally traumatized by the Wraith cullings… poor creatures. I often wondered why they gathered to us the way they did. Perhaps with our finer manner of speaking and our seemingly innate, superior knowledge, they must have come to see us as their salvation. And I suppose in a way we were, because once our sentence was finalized, and the planet was cut off, there has not been a Wraith culling in over forty-six years."
Tosia paused to throw another few sticks on the fire. She was starting to shiver, and whether it was from the cold or the echoes of the ghosts of those long dead, she wasn't certain. "Even still, we were not meant to endure, I suspect," she continued in a soft, pensive voice, "those of us sent here. The others likely expected us to be far too weak-minded and too out of touch with the harsh demands of our renewed physical forms to cope with such harsh circumstances. And how surprised we were by forgotten things like gnawing hunger, terrible relentless cold, and illnesses we had no means to cure. But somehow, we continued on. We did what our kind invariably does – we scratched out an existence, and some of us did survive. Humans are very much like vermin in that regard, are they not, John? Worse than cockroaches, even." She chuckled at the thought.
"We came to accept our fate, for what other choice did we have? We reminded ourselves that even a race as advanced as ours had once began as savages scratching in the dirt, wearing rags and skins, and hunting beasts for meat. In time, we decided that our new existence was more honest and purposeful that what ours used to be. We were no longer bound by laws that dictated us to do nothing but watch while others suffered. We were not punished for caring, for taking action, and we survived on our own terms.
Even more people, the ancestors of my lab rats, became curious enough to venture from scattered parts of this small land and settled in this very village. Those people taught us to hunt and to cope with the elements, and we taught them to live in a more civilized, compassionate manner. Somehow, we learned how to farm, how to seed crops and vegetables – at least my old research was good for something practical, hmm? The foundations for an organized society were still here, even after so many years – all that was lacking was the structure itself."
She smiled at the cautious optimism she'd possessed back then. "Unfortunately, this land was never intended to support such a growing population, and I fear, in time, my people will die out. Who is to blame when that happens, do you suppose, John? Those that first placed these people here? Or those who watch and do nothing while innocent people wither away and die?" Tosia stared into the flames, and decided that the answer to her own question didn't matter. The end result would be just the same.
"But back then, of course, we did not know this future that lay before us," she continued. "Back then, we were all working together side by side to make this village work, growing our own food, hunting for our meat. I began to feel a sense of righteous purpose in recreating this society. It was as though instead of merely observing the subjects of my experiment, I was gaining first-hand knowledge. Shaping their very existences. How better to finally see a part of my work to its fruition?"
She noticed that John was now watching her with that intense gaze he sometimes fixed upon whomever was speaking to him. She wondered what he was thinking. Was he hearing her? Was he condemning her for her arrogance? She gave him a faint smile and decided that she deserved whatever judgement he imposed.
"Gaereth thought I was mad, but then, in his mind, madness was a prerequisite for all scientists," she said with a slight, bemused shake of her head. "In these people, I had found my purpose, but it was Gaereth who always gave me hope, who gave me strength. For a time, I thought we would be all right. That it did not matter how we lived, so long as we had one another we could cope with anything. Even a lifestyle as harsh as this one."
Tosia saw no point in mentioning the child she had borne and lost within the space of a few years. That was a private grief she and Gaereth had shared and survived. The old woman was silent for a long time, thinking of how, just when it seemed that life had thrown everything it could at you without physically killing you, suddenly it presented another obstacle, another test of faith and endurance.
"How strange that it all began and ended in the place where the ruins now lie," she said, even as the realization struck her. "Gaereth, unlike the rest of us, did not so easily accept his fate. He always needed to be doing something more, railing against any limitations imposed upon him. When he pinned down the location of my old laboratory, his pragmatic nature came into full force. If there was a possible means to a way out of here, or to merely better our existences, then he would stop at nothing to find it. I suppose that hope sustained him, the way his very presence sustained me.
Even though I knew better, and even though there seemed to be nothing left of the lab, I still joined him in his search. His enthusiasm and determination were so infectious that some of the others also helped. We dug through the blasted ground for days and days, and we found nothing but debris and an amazingly intact detector that refused to work for any of us, but we did not give up.
Then came the day when Gaereth and two of the other men dug a little too deep. The last of the fail-safes that I myself had set so long ago, finally went off. I felt the rumble in the ground beneath my feet. I heard the explosive go off, and when I realized what was happening, I shouted a warning to them, but it was too late. They were killed instantly, and I am responsible for their deaths."
Tosia lightly ran her fingers over the deep scar on her face. She knew Gaereth's body had shielded her from more serious injury, or even death, and that knowledge made the burden of guilt even more difficult to bear. "I suppose it was only fitting that my face became as ugly as my spirit when Gaereth died. He took my hope with him, and all I had left was anger and bitterness so cutting, it was all I could taste for a long time. There were days when I would have willingly followed him to his grave. But I didn't. Like a cockroach, like the human that I had been forced to become, I survived and I went on. I accepted my fate, became as one with these people, and I tried to forget my past. For a while, I almost succeeded."
When something tickled her face, Tosia swiped her hand over her cheeks to find them wet. She cursed under her breath – she hadn't cried in years, and the sensation was almost foreign to her. With disgust, she realized that she was becoming even more of a weakened, old crone than she'd ever suspected possible.
"These people are better off than we were," she stated after a moment, vocalizing what she'd always told herself in consolation of all that she had lost. Sometimes she even believed it. "We never told them of our origins. It would have been too cruel to tell them that their lives could have been so much better had we not played God with their ancestors. That there was so much better out there, so much that they would never get to see or experience. What would have been the purpose in telling them any of that? Their life is harsh, and only the strong survive the winters, but they do not know any differently, and that which they do not know will never hurt them."
Taking a deep breath, Tosia felt some of the tightness that always seemed to be gripping her chest loosening a little. Telling this story for the first time in forty-six years was oddly liberating, she found, though she knew she was far too embittered to allow herself any forgiveness. And maybe it was a story she could only tell to one who wouldn't even comprehend her words.
"The ones banished along with me are all gone – the last one died many years ago now. I never expected to be the last of them. It felt so odd… the loneliness of it... and that is when I started returning to the cliff side, every once in a while. Just in case, I'd told myself. So much for forgetting my past, hmm? I suppose a tiger cannot change its stripes, after all."
Glancing at John again, she frowned and a cold shiver went down her spine as a startling thought came to mind. "Is that why you were sent here, John? Did my wish for a kindred spirit somehow condemn you this fate? I would hope that the others would not be so cruel. Surely they have other methods of punishment for disobedience?" As she watched him, John's gaze began to drift, losing its sharp focus. "Although, the worst punishment is not to die, but to endure and bear witness, is it not? I suppose I have not come very far from what I fought against."
She leaned forward to prop her feet on the hearth, allowing the heat to ease the chill that never seemed to leave her anymore. "Perhaps it is now time to stop witnessing and start taking action again. Tomorrow, or maybe the day after, if you are feeling up to it, shall we go take a look at what you worked so hard to find, hmm, John?"
She looked at him again, but he was no longer watching her. His gaze was once more on the flames, and he rocked very slowly, back and forth, his motions almost hypnotic in their measured repetitiveness. Again, Tosia found herself wondering just how much of what she'd told him had registered. She was surprised to find herself hoping that he had, in fact, heard her story. Everyone wanted to leave behind some sort of legacy, and Tosia was no different.
"Perhaps it is time for an adventure," she mused, nodding to herself, liking the idea more and more. "Shall we open that window and take a look at what is left inside, John? It is unlikely that the ruins pose any further danger. If they did, then I suppose you and I would have been blown to bits yesterday, decorating the landscape and Gaereth's grave."
Nodding, she thought of the fail-safe, self-destruct devices she had set. There had been two of them, and two of them had gone off. They would be safe, she told herself, and she forced herself to believe it.
At some point, John's blanket had slipped unnoticed to the floor. Tosia retrieved it and wrapped it snugly around him, even as he drew up his shoulders and muttered sounds of protest. She quickly pressed her fingers to his cheek and felt that his sweat-dampened skin was warm from more than just the heat of the fire. He turned his face away from her, tucked down his head and rested his chin on his upraised knees.
Tosia chuckled again and let him be. "That's right – you play hard to get, John. A man with your looks can afford to do so, and I am a patient woman." She smiled at her own joke. "I shall ask you again in the morning."
With that, she leaned back in her chair and waited for sleep, or for the sun to rise. Whichever came first.
--- tbc ---
Just a quick note now that you've read this chapter: Any minor similarities to a certain, recent late-ish season 3 episode (which shall remain unnamed so that I don't inadvertently spoil anyone) are purely coincidental, since I wrote the bulk of this story in the late summer. For those of you who haven't seen this mysterious, unnamed ep, don't worry – this story absolutely does not spoil a thing. :-)
Happy 2007 everyone! Seize the year!