They find him on the edge of the playground where the ground dips into a shallow trench and shrubs provide cover from prying eyes. For nearly a week it's been his quiet refuge, but he knew he couldn't stay hidden here for long. They always find him eventually. And then come the taunts, the threats, the clumsy hands pawing at his satchel or snatching his books from his grasp. If he gives in he'll never see his books again, and he'll take a beating either way. It's better to fight back, to get hit, to protect what belongs to him.
Tom finds him first. It's always Tom who leads the pack. He's the biggest, and also the stupidest. He wouldn't know maths from the profane scribbles on the walls of the boys' toilets, but he knows how to throw a punch. Three other boys trail behind him, but their names aren't important. They're just the scavengers, waiting for a fresh kill. They'll hang back, wait until he's beaten, and then they'll swoop in and make themselves feel strong by kicking him while he's down.
His pulse quickens and his stomach lurches, but he stares defiantly up at his bigger classmate. He never cowers on principle, and he's learned not to run. Burdened by his heavy bag, with its weakened seams and broken strap, he can't rely on his one advantage - speed - to save him. And he isn't about to leave his books behind. They are all he has. They are who he is. They are more important than a few black eyes and split lips ever could be. So he stands his ground and adopts a scornful expression to mask the fluttering fear inside.
The first blow comes as a surprise, unheralded by the usual barrage of unimaginative insults. He staggers back, cheek smarting, stars bursting before his eyes. Already he can taste the metallic tang of blood on his tongue. The next strike comes before he has time to regroup or counterattack. It slams into his gut, stealing his breath and making him gag. He's going to be sick. He's going to be sick at the feet of this useless, brainless piece of garbage, and he's never going to forget the indignity of this moment.
He bends over, retching, and a well-timed shove sends him sprawling into the dirt. That's when Tom's friends appear, circling like vultures. The ensuing rain of fists and feet is relentless, pummeling him into the ground where he fell. His fingers claw at the earth beneath him as he tries to gain leverage to roll away, to escape. It's never been this brutal before. Never so overwhelming, nor so humiliating. And never before has he felt panic squeeze his throat like this, strangling his vocal cords until he cannot release the cries of rage and pain that echo within his mind.
By the time the boys tire of their pastime and leave him shaking on the ground, he is certain of only one thing. This cannot continue. Whatever it takes, regardless of the cost, he must ensure that he will never be this vulnerable again. Tom and his friends are strong, but he is clever. He can't beat them at their own game, but perhaps he can change the rules.
It's his only option.
He came awake with a wounded cry, hands fisting in the bed sheets and body curling protectively inward. Phantom pain and borrowed fear made him shake uncontrollably, and for a few moments he couldn't figure out where he was or even who he was. All he knew was the dream, and the outrage and helplessness and shame that came with it. Not just a dream: a memory. An old, ugly little episode in the life of one Doctor Nicholas Rush that he would rather tuck away forever in some dark crevice of his psyche and never examine again.
As he grew more aware of his surroundings, his trembling eased and his mind quieted. He was lying on his bed in his quarters on Destiny. He was safe. He was-
"Colonel Young?" Eli's voice crackled from the radio on the bedside table.
He was Colonel Everett Young. Fuck. He was not the little boy who had been beaten up repeatedly in school. He had never been that kid who was too smart to be popular, too smugly superior to be tolerated. And no matter what body he currently occupied, he was definitely not Destiny's resident chief scientist. But for a little while there, he had genuinely been confused on that point.
Greer was right. All of this was fucked up.
"Um, Colonel Young? Come in, please," Eli said a little more insistently.
Young rolled toward the end table and made a grab for the radio without bothering to sit up. He misjudged the distance, sending some unknown object flying off the table. It hit the floor with a resounding clatter. Great. He didn't have the energy to find out what it was and whether it had survived the impact, so he decided that he could probably live without it.
"Go ahead, Eli," Young said after his second attempt to retrieve the radio proved more successful.
"You're needed in the stones room," Eli said. When Young didn't answer immediately, he added, "Um, right now would be good."
Young suppressed a sigh. "I'm on my way," he said.
Oh well. He hadn't been enjoying that nap anyway.
It wasn't that Eli was a suspicious kind of person. In fact his mom was always shaking her head at him, telling him to stop letting people take advantage. For example, she'd say it when he'd spent three days fixing a friend's computer and missed a job interview. But she'd usually have this lurking warmth in the back of her eyes, and more often than not she made him cookies after, which lead him to believe she didn't really mind, she just didn't want him to be hurt by the hardness and ingratitude of the world.
So yeah, it wasn't like he was paranoid or anything. It was just that over the past five hours, while he watched the stones run their self-diagnostics and tried to figure out as much as possible about how they worked from the code, Rush had gotten progressively more and more antsy.
That was weird, because Rush was always telling him to apply himself - always with the little digs when Eli did something for play instead of for work. You'd have thought he'd be pleased that Eli was excited enough by the mind-bending fusion of human consciousness and targeted quantum entanglement to give up the chance of dinner and a nap to work straight through.
Another thing that was weird? Watching Rush be antsy in Young's body. All the striding about and the drumming of fingers and the crumpling up of little notes and throwing them in corners, it all seemed a tad more threatening with the extra power behind it. Watching Young's face in fluid expressiveness - frowning, chewing at his lip, pulling to one side with Rush's half smile? That was… going beyond weird and into just plain wrong, to be honest.
Eli slowed on the way to the mess, as his suspicions pulled at him like spider webs. Rush had said "Eli, you must be starving. Why don't you go and get some food. You can bring me some while you're at it."
He'd gone more or less automatically, because it was Young's voice that said it, and it was a Young kind of thing to say. But now his brain was catching up with his stomach, and his brain was saying "Really? Are you really going to fall for that again after what happened with Franklin? What if he's just trying to get you out of the room? What if he's going to… I don't know… do some horrible kind of self-experimentation that leaves them both stranded in the body of the next passing alien? I mean it's happened before..."
And yes, it wasn't like Eli was a suspicious kind of person, but he wasn't stupid either. Once bitten, twice shy, right? He turned around and hurried back.
A glimmer of blue light where none should be stopped him from simply bursting into the room unannounced. What the..? He eased into the corner of the door jamb to get a better look. One of Destiny's holographic screens hung just above the table on which Eli's own laptop was displaying the firmware of the stones.
Destiny could do that? He felt a spike of curiosity seasoned with glee - because having a virtual console anywhere you wanted would be so useful - but tasting mostly of disappointment. It would have been nice to be told.
But this was Rush, who hoarded information like a dragon hoarded gold. Eli shouldn't be too...
While his conscious mind had been going through this little dance of anger and resignation, his subconscious had been noticing the Ancient numbers and words glowing in the air like frantic fireflies. It red flagged them to him, pulling his attention away from the existence of the screen to notice what was written on it.
He read in silence for what seemed like hours, everything in him growing heavy - his leaden lungs pulling down through his chest to puncture his empty stomach.
He walked in. "Is that a manual?"
Rush jumped, which would have been funny in that body, but... wasn't, right now. "I didn't see you, Eli," he said, covering his black dead heart with his hand. "Yes, I thought there must be one, so I set a search going for it. It returned an answer moments ago."
And yeah, yeah, Eli would have bought that four years ago, before any number of things, but he knew that tone of voice now, that easy, habitual reaching for a plausible excuse. Oh, it made him mad. How many times did Rush think he could do that and not have absolutely everyone catch on?
"That's…" This never got any easier, this standing up against authority thing. Conflict, it just wasn't for him. He had to wind himself up until he was shaking to burst out. "That's not true, is it? How long? How long have you known about this and just not told me? I mean, I was running my mouth at Greer and Young about how nobody knows how these things work and you were right there listening, and you didn't think to say anything? You didn't think that was something we all needed to know?"
"Eli, Eli," Rush backed away, raising his hands defensively, and smiling the lets just keep these secrets between us, shall we smile with which he had confessed to being a homing beacon for Chloe's aliens. "Yes, all right. I knew there must be a manual when Andrew Covel made the connection between himself and Greer unbreakable. As a scientist, he's adequate I suppose, but he could never have come up with a fix like that on his own. You'd have realized it for yourself if you'd only thought about it. And yes, perhaps I was remiss in not sharing that with you at once but-"
Apparently Eli'd been subconsciously thinking about this for the whole aborted walk down to the mess because here came another suspicion, newly minted and shiny. "So if you knew how to fix these things all along, why did you need to get me out of the room?"
He made a lunge for his laptop, but Rush was faster, getting there first, hitting Enter and then shutting down the lid. Trembling with fury and adrenaline Eli snatched it from under the man's hands, powered it on again. It took forever, and when it came back there was nothing, just an empty interface, the command gone, processed. Completed.
"What did you do?"
He couldn't cope with this. Seriously, he couldn't fucking cope with this... No, no. No, calm down. A man who could fly Destiny through a death star could surely manage to deal with Rush for five minutes. And besides, he ran a back up every ten seconds. He could go and damn well see for himself what Rush had done.
"Nothing bad, Eli," Rush laughed the goodness, don't be so paranoid laugh of the falsely accused. "I just ran the detangling program I wrote. The next time we use the stones, Young and I should return to the right bodies."
Eli loaded up his backup and sure enough, there it was - a little program. It took him a while. Two minutes according to the time stamps, but it felt longer, to read and understand the section of the manual that still glowed accusingly between them, to understand that the program replaced phrases in the stones code, at random, with similar-looking but non-functioning junk.
No record existed of what had been done, only that it had been done. That the entirety of the working code of the stones had been corrupted. Wrecked as thoroughly as if they'd been smashed into smithereens with a hammer.
Eli's mind connected the dots long before his heart caught up. There was a pause like that between the flash of lightning and the sound of thunder, in which he registered Rush pressing his back into the far wall, hugging himself with Young's arms, the fingers of Young's hand pressed to his lips.
"Eli," Rush began, tentatively, "It's for the best. Believe me…"
He was meant to be visiting his mom in two days. Eli reached for his radio, called for Colonel Young, his voice strained with the effort of not screaming.
"Don't…" Rush said, turning away with a grimace when he went right ahead, because at this moment he didn't honestly care if Colonel Young dumped Rush out an airlock. His mom was expecting him in two days, and she... she hadn't been doing well over the past three years of not knowing if he was ever coming back, and he couldn't, he couldn't do that to her. She'd think he was dead. Oh God, she'd be sure he was dead and she would... He couldn't...
Running feet in the corridor outside heralded Young's arrival. He padded in, quiet as the eye of a storm. "Eli?"
"Don't…" Rush implored Eli.
"Rush broke the stones."
Rush sighed, and Young went very still beside Eli in a way that - even now that Young was slight and fragile-looking - sent a thrill of fear through him. Shouty Young was never the problem. This one, though, whose zero degree kelvin fury was indistinguishable from calm, this one Eli was glad was not his enemy.
"He did what?"