What did Young mean by it, bringing that up now? Was he beginning to gain access to Rush's memories, hardwired as they were somewhere in the neuron webwork of Rush's brain? Well wasn't that fantastic? Would Young pick up the kino surveillance again now too? Kinos following Rush's every step and no privacy even inside his own mind?

Rush curled a little tighter around his pains - you'd have thought Young might have some mercy on his own balls but you'd have been wrong. Now this body felt like one solid ache from the knees to the shoulder blades. But the curious part, the worst part, was the hole that seemed to have opened just under his breastbone that funneled straight down into the abyss. Rush's mind circled it like a penny on a slope, drawn in tighter, more hopeless spirals into the darkness and
pressure and despair that could only be the frozen centre of the ninth level of hell.

This was the subterranean vault from which the anger rose up like a geyser, was it? The hollowness on the other side of that glorious rage. No wonder Young tried to be calm when he could, because his extremes were horrifying.

Well, no. Now they were Rush's extremes to manage. He wondered if he too would start casting his mind back and coming up with Young's memories. Some corn-fed childhood of playing football in a clapboard little mid American town, no doubt, where everyone watched John Wayne movies and checked under the bed for communists at night. Wouldn't that be wonderful.

It took far too much effort to straighten up and get himself to his feet, but he couldn't just sit here looking pathetic until someone found him, so he managed it anyway, eventually. His throat felt bruised - swallowing was painful. His jaw twinged at the hinge when he moved it, and all his teeth rattled. Having the headache back was almost a relief, he hardly knew himself without it, but the deep, offended throb of his balls and his stomach and his lower back? He could walk through it, slowly, and he wasn't going to spare it any more mind than that.

The inhabited areas of Destiny felt hostile, so he got himself a screwdriver and a torch and went to ground in one of the off-limits sections where they had found a number of Ancient crates, which Young had not as yet found the man-power to open and examine. Ancient tech was notoriously volatile and dangerous, but not, to his mind, as volatile and dangerous as human beings. He breathed easier in the silence, where the scent of the air was metal and grease and chalk from the filters rather than the stench of other people's disappointments.

Each crate here was about the size of a skip. Each had a bolted door on the inner wall, facing the back of the room. He jimmied one with the screwdriver, went inside, was hit in the face with a line of blue light that scanned him from head to toe. He froze. Shit. And it blinked out.

"Nicholas." It was Gloria. The blue light lay in her hand like a model of the Earth, its cloud formations swirling. It lit a room full of shelves, the shelves stocked with parts he didn't recognize. Something about them itched at his thoughts, but his mind was sluggish as usual so he waited for it to catch up, turned to the ship's projection, tried not to let it show that he didn't like her using that form, especially not when he looked like this.

"Nice to know I brought my hallucinations with me into this body."

"Nicholas, what have you done?" A million year old sun shone on her face and her hair. She looked, as always, part amused and part reproachful. And if she was Destiny then he thought she was amazing. He was prepared to spend the rest of his life studying her, but that didn't mean she was allowed to do the same thing to him. His inward workings were his own damn business.

"What I had to."

Clearly this amused her. She smiled the closed lipped smile that made her look like Botticelli's Venus. "You know, I wasn't a genius either, but you trusted me."

He suppressed the internal wince. She was a starship, programmed to work with a crew - of course her operating parameters would require that her crew be encouraged to work well together. If he thought of it that way, it was fine. Then he didn't have to think of her as a person whom he had to forgive for forcing him to make the grand poetic gesture that confirmed to everyone on board that she had chosen Young. If she was a machine then she was operating admirably. If she was a person then she had some fucking nerve expecting him to be alright with that.

"Strangely enough, I trusted Gloria because she did not have a history of repeatedly abandoning and killing me. The same can't be said of Young."

Her smile widened to show dimples. "Yet he always brings you back."

"Oh, and I suppose that makes it all right then, does it?" He cast his eyes up to the far corner of the crate because such stupidity merited nothing less than the full eye roll. When he looked down again, she was gone. "Very helpful. You could at least leave me a console."

She was still listening, clearly - if monitoring his brain waves counted as such. A virtual console blinked to life in the center of the room. He used it to set a search going for this shed and its contents in the database. See if he could get some information on what all this stuff was before he tried using it.

With that in place, he lowered himself to the floor, permitted his aching body to slump over to one side, lie down, cheek against the cool metal. The hole to hell had closed over by now, but he was conscious of it nevertheless, as though its surface was ice, barely thin enough to hold his weight. He wanted to sleep and wake up when things had fixed themselves without him. Or to sleep and not to wake up at all.

God, he hated it when one of his paradigms turned out to be shaky. If you couldn't believe in the foundations of your thought, where did that leave you?

He'd been so sure Young would kill him this time. He'd been so sure Young would kill him on the alien ship, after Eli and co had found the bridge. And he'd been wrong, twice. He'd been sure Young would kill his other self after the doppelganger had done for Telford - so sure that he had assisted with the man's suicide. What if he had been wrong then too? What a waste of intellectual resources.

He remembered dying in Kiva's custody - finding out later that it happened because Young had suffocated Telford in order to free him from brainwashing. Rush's life had been merely incidental to that little drama. The conclusion had seemed inescapable - Telford mattered to Young, Rush did not.

Yet he always brings you back.

Even that first time. It had been Young's (borrowed) hand that freed him from the aliens, gave him the chance to find his own way home. Why would Young do that, if he had wanted rid of Rush? All he had to do was walk away and no one, not even Rush himself, would ever have known.

The wheels of his mind had been allowed to go rusty. Pushing them down this track was exhausting, and they met a resistance there, something that tasted just like anguish. But this conclusion was also inescapable: Young had brought Rush back because he wanted to.

Rush groaned, rolled over, covering his face in case something in the empty room might be watching. Tentatively, he allowed himself to approach another, related idea, this one even more dangerous. "He did it to save you," Volker had said. Young had failed to vent the gate room, failed to kill the Lucian Alliance with one blow, put the entire ship in danger in the process, because he was trying to save Rush.

No, no, no, no, that was laughable. Young must have known that gate travel would sever the
link. He would have put their lives on the line to save Telford, to save Telford, who was his friend, unworthy though fucking Telford was of one millionth tiny part of such loyalty.

Yet no one other than Rush seemed aware that the link could be disrupted that way. Not even the science team had known it. Could he really believe that Young did?

If he couldn't, then the truth must be that Young had done that for him. Young had chosen to risk the ship, the crew, the mission, to risk and lose his unborn child, rather than sacrifice Rush.

That thought sat in the middle of the room like an adder. He scrambled up and away from it, putting his back to the wall as though an unwary move might cause it to pounce.
No. No, no. Absolutely not. If he let that thought in it would fucking break him. So he was not going to entertain it. He was going to...

The hand he raised to push through his hair was black with the gunk of the floor, and the side of his face felt sticky from where he had rested it against the deck plating.

No more thinking for tonight. He was going to have a shower and go to bed. Tomorrow it would become clear that he had not fundamentally misconstrued everything. He had not... actually been in a situation where he was safe and valued, only to completely undermine and destroy it by his own mistrust.

That didn't sound at all like something he would do.

As it turned out, he had somewhat misconstrued the shower too, though this only struck him when he had thrown jacket, shirt and undershirt onto the bench and caught sight of his own shoulder and chest - stocky, broad, solid as they were. He closed his eyes. Crap.

Not showering was not tenable, however. He told himself he was fifty two years old and had never been a prude, managed to strip to the skin and get himself inside the cubicle that way. But he shut his eyes again in the warm mist, scarcely dared scrub at his dirty face, conscious of the heavy bones beneath his unfamiliar fingertips. He felt shy, unaccountably shy and jumpy around himself, as if he was trespassing, and that was ridiculous since this body was now essentially his own.

He still cut the shower short and went to bed having done little more than soak. As he hugged himself in the warm darkness (his arms too bulky, his ribs too wide for comfort) a sense of loss came flowering out of all the angles of the room, choking the inside of his chest, filling his throat with fleshy petals, making it hard to breathe.

The truth was, he liked this body. He'd always envied its power. He found its black-lashed golden eyes strikingly beautiful. There had been occasions when he had wanted to pull on the increasingly untidy curly mess of its hair just to feel the texture. But... He examined its nicely shaped hands, slid one up the opposite forearm and sighed.

But honestly? He liked it on Young. He liked the incongruous combination of this rather brutal
form with Young's new gentleness. The way Young walked in it - normally so unassuming, so undemonstrative, and yet sometimes there'd be this hitch of the hip and it would all become casually, confidently magnificent. Rush liked that maybe better than he should.

Now it was gone, and he missed it. He missed seeing Young padding about the ship like a weary lion. The fact that he could do it himself was no compensation at all.

He sighed again. The stones were still inoperative - he could not be replaced. He had not been killed for that, and even his punishment was over. He had achieved everything he set out to do and lost nothing of any moment. So why did he feel so bad?

After another two hours of lying in the dark, fruitlessly waiting for sleep to arrive, he gave up, sloped off to the mess for a cup of tea, reasonably confident that no one would be there at this ungodly hour. But he was wrong about that too.

"Dr. Rush?" said Chloe tentatively as he picked up a mug from the tray by the door. He added a pinch of the mixed leaves Becker had left in a serving bowl nearby and filled it at the spigot before edging over. She had not yet flown at him in a whirlwind of slapping and kicks, so it seemed safe enough. "Is it really you?"

"You know, I'm not sure I know the answer to that anymore," he replied, levering himself gingerly into a chair at her table. "When the stones are active, a person's consciousness still arises from their own body. It's simply transferred to a new... drone, so to speak... for the duration of the proceedings. That's why they retain all their memories, their personality and so forth. This is something quite different. Both of us are trying to be ourselves with brains that are simply not set up to do that. I don't know what will happen in the long run - whether you will lose us both, and some new combination will arise in our absence. I..."

He smiled at her pinched look, while the FTL lights blued her face, and he knew she knew everything there was to know about losing yourself. Though maybe not the grief of watching it happen to someone else.

"You can't have wanted this."

"No," he agreed, warmed as always by the undeserved trust she still placed in him. "No, I didn't."

"So you're going to work out a way of fixing the stones and putting it right, right?"

He supposed she had a mother for whom she wanted to go back. He'd forgotten about that. "Honestly, Chloe," he said, breathing in not-exactly-aniseed flavored steam, "I don't know. I can't see a way and I'm so tired. I'd set it right if I could, of course." He wasn't even completely sure that was a lie any more, but it made no difference, did it? The stones were broken beyond even his own ability to repair. He'd made sure of that. "But unfortunately I don't think I can."