The boy was such a toady. You'd have thought such a plump, bright boy would know better about whose side nature had designed him to be on. Rush tried to gather himself, wished he had not retreated to the far wall, from which it was an awkward dash, avoiding chairs, to get to the door.

All right. All right then. So the secret was out. Now he had to... But he couldn't think what to do. Trying to think with this fucking brain was like trying to run in quicksand. He had to fight for every fucking foot fall and he was so…

He wasn't scared, all right? Well, if he was, who could blame him? He could taste dust at the back of his throat, and behind his eyes he could see again the desolate beauty of a world on which he was the only living thing. Young had left him there. Young had had them sedate him and prod about with hooks by his beating heart. Young had suffocated him to death while Camile and Scott looked on, and no one, not one fucking person on this whole fucking ship had intervened. The conclusion was inescapable - Rush was disposable. Young could kill him whenever he liked, and no one would do a thing to stop it.

"Eli," Young said, his face angled slightly towards the boy but his eyes fixed on Rush's. "Calm down. This can still be fixed."

"I'm telling you, it can't!" Eli looked like he was going to cry, hyperventilating like a child. "I mean do you have any idea of the size of this program? If I... if I was to go through every single line trying to work out which bits were good and which bits were convincing looking nonsense, it would take me years. Like ten years at least. And I wouldn't be able to catch all of them in the first pass. No one would." He grimaced, its comic effect dashed by the desperation in his eyes. "Which would mean another pass of another ten years. And she's going to be dead by then, my mom. In twenty years time we're not going to have anything left to reconnect for."

"Okay," Young said, in the flat voice of a man who was done.

Rush eyed the exits again, caught sight of his own hands as he did so - square, strong hands. Oh. Oh, but that put rather a different complexion on things. Fear transmuted habitually into anger in this body, so he let it come - a clear, righteous possession of anger he could taste between his teeth like the blood of a rare steak. He was afraid, and the thing that was frightening him? He was going to tear that thing apart and beat it into the fucking dirt.

Young gathered up the stones and their base, put them back in the box, his movements very precise. He pushed the box into Eli's chest, the boy grabbing it with the hand that wasn't cradling his laptop. "No one's asking you to do this alone, Eli. Take the stones, find the science team, figure out a way of putting it right. If he can break it, you can put it back together. You got this, Eli. Okay?"

Eli clutched the case to him like a comforter, his head bent as he sucked in air, trying to calm down. Then he squeezed his eyes shut and nodded. "Okay." He shuffled to the door, turned, biting his lip as though he was reluctant to let the words out. "What about you guys?"

Rush wondered whether - lily livered as it was - that was an intervention, whether he needed to feel sorry for the lad, or grateful to him, or more likely annoyed that he thought it was necessary at all. Did none of them remember Simeon? Rush was perfectly capable of looking after himself. All the more so now he had Young's power at his disposal.

Sometimes, for all the man's obvious inadequacies, it felt like Young was the only one on board who knew what he was capable of, the only one who respected him at all.

"We're just gonna have a talk."

"I can see that," Eli smiled nervously. "Just... don't get carried away. You know how you are. Don't forget you're Rush now, okay?"

Oh, the boy was worried about Young? Rush had to grin. How very delightful, how good it felt on this side of the bargain - to be feared instead of pitied.

Eli left the door open behind him, but Young closed it, stood there very still - parade rest, hands clasped behind his back, looking at Rush with cold eyes. There wasn't a trace of fear or cowering in him, and Rush was glad. He wouldn't have liked to see his own body do that, and maybe - if he was being honest with himself - he wouldn't have liked to see Young cringe either.

"You want to tell me what the hell you were thinking?"

No. No, he didn't. He didn't want to have to appeal to Young's sympathy, to explain what it was like to know, down to the copper taste of the blood at the back of your throat, what it was to be prey. To know that if you didn't help yourself, they would take every last thing from you and leave you puking up your guts in the dirt. Not because they even valued that thing, but just to show that they could.

It wasn't as though this brain didn't get there eventually, it just took its own sweet time. "The moment the stones were working again, they would have replaced you with Telford," he offered, pushing the chairs under the table, clearing the path. "And Telford has almost killed everyone on board this ship twice now. How long do you think the crew would last with him in charge and no one to hold him back? He'd blow up the ship and everyone on it within weeks of arriving. I couldn't risk..."

That was true, oddly enough. Sometimes Rush didn't know himself what drove him. Maybe part of his abhorrence for the thought of Telford and McKay in place of himself and Young really had been altruism. He was capable of it. Maybe he really had...?

"Right. Yeah. You did it for all of us. Selfless of you, Rush."

Rush passed the table, came out into the empty space between it and the door. Young had not moved away from the wall. He was watching Rush's progress with the thin, cold smile Rush remembered from being murdered the first time. They were going to fight. He could feel it like a charge through his blood and he wanted it, he just didn't quite know how to make it start.

"Well, yes I suppose I've something of a stake in our survival but-"

"What happened to 'no more lies?'"

Oh, oh of course it was personal for Young - it was the personal betrayal that bothered him most. Everything had to be personal for him.

Mysteriously, people seemed to respond to that - Young had Scott and Greer, James and TJ, Eli, lately even Varro orbiting him. Held there because they wanted his approval, wanted his love, and, when he had it, he took it for granted. That was not, not ever, going to happen to Rush. Rush was the only fully rational creature on this ship and he did not give in to anything as fucking crude, as laughably animal as pack dynamics. Love and trust and all that shite. It was all fucking hormones and he would have no truck with it.

Young closed the distance between them, poked Rush in the chest with a spindly finger, leaving a jabbing little bruise. "You gave me your word, Rush."

He'd been waiting for the trigger to be pulled and there it was. The words slammed into him like bullets, shocking him, filling him with outrage. Bullseye. Young shouldn't have gone for that, where it was already tender. That had bloody well hurt. Fuck him anyway and his fucking self-righteousness. He deserved whatever he got.

Rush balled his fist, swung hard, his knuckles connecting solidly with Young's jaw, snapping the man's head back, lifting him off his feet and hurling him backwards to stagger against the wall. Wow. That was a trip and a half. That felt good. He'd maybe wanted to do that for a very, very long time.

Young hauled himself upright again, hands flat against Destiny's slick metal, his lips outlined in crimson. He turned his head slightly to spit blood on the deck but did not look away from Rush's face. It occurred to Rush that perhaps he should have pressed his advantage, he just wasn't used to being the attacker, he didn't know how it was supposed to go.

Something shifted in Young's expression and his stance, as though he was recalibrating. The emotion drained from behind his eyes. They'd been fighting like old enemies, like people who cared about each other's opinions, like people who got angry with each other because they mattered. Now that was gone and Young was looking at him like he was a target.

This was what it felt like, was it, when Young stopped being personal? Rush... Rush didn't actually like it very much.

He moved in, instinctively wanting to smack that expression off Young's face, to jolt the man into acknowledging him again, into caring like he damn well should.

The punch had worked like a charm, so he threw another, going for the nose this time. Before it connected Young ducked under the blow. While Rush was still struggling to pull the punch back before he broke his hand against the wall, Young grabbed him by the uniformed shoulders, and - tucking himself into a half crouch - unbalanced Rush, rolled him over his bent back and threw him to the floor.

Rush had the sense to hold his head up, so it was his shoulders and his spine that took the impact of the fall, both of which were a great deal more padded in this body than they were in his own. Only his pride was really hurt, his sense of justice. This was not fair! What about his chance to get his own back? Wasn't he at least owed that?

Part of him, an analytical part he was glad could not be shut up even at times like this, noted that Young was now fighting like James, compensating for the loss of his strength with better technique, and it hadn't really occurred to Rush until now that this wasn't just the graceless brawling of streetcorner thugs. It was a skill, and Young had studied it.

He rolled to his side, had only managed to get up on hands and knees when Young was on him again - a kick to the side of the head and another to the belly. His ear burning and shrieking, scuff marks of his own bloody boot on his cheek, he managed to catch Young's ankle on the second kick, twist it clockwise. Young had no choice but to go with it.

Young fell, but as he did he kicked out again, forcing Rush's awkwardly angled arm to bend backwards at the elbow. The pain was excruciating. Rush let go immediately, scrambled to his feet, trying to back off, holding his arm protectively against his chest with the other hand cradling the joint.

"All right, all right," he gasped, fucking afraid again, and that just wasn't fair. He was going to be killed and he would lose his work that way, just because he'd tried to keep it. If those bastards at Homeworld Command hadn't tried to take it from him in the first place he would never have had to resort to any of this. If they'd just let him alone... "You've made your point. Let's... talk about this."

"Oh now you wanna talk?" Young grabbed him by the biceps, kneed him in the groin and, as he doubled over at the sickening pain, Young drove the top of his head up under Rush's jaw, clacking his teeth together, snapping his head back, stopping his breath. He tumbled into darkness knowing he would never find his answers, never claw his way back. So much for the quest for immortality. Step Three had not gone well at all.