Chapter Thirteen: Reassignment
You are not going back.
The words hit Daria like a physical blow to the stomach. For a moment all she could manage was to breathe as she sat there in shock, her hands clutching the arms of her chair in a death grip.
There was dead silence in the chamber.
Then…
"Whadd'ya mean she's not going back?" Sawyer exploded, jumping to his feet. "Of course she is! We ain't leaving without her!"
The others began voicing their protests in loud, furious voices.
Ambassador Helmin stood. "Silence!" he roared over the cacophony. The humans fell quiet, quelled by the powerfully built Tau'ka leader. All except Sawyer. He was still on his feet, looking belligerent.
"You can't do that!" he said furiously. "Daria's one of us!"
Felis eyed him coldly. "She is a Tau'ka under my command, Tau'ri Sawyer," she said sharply. "Who are you to say what we can and cannot do?"
She's more useful with us! Hyde growled, speaking 'aloud' for the first time. Jekyll shrank back under the disapproving looks from the nine Council members. We want her with us!
"That is not your decision, Mister Hyde," Master Trainer Toyoc Keni informed him curtly. The ginger-haired head of Education gave Jekyll a piercing look that was not entirely aimed at Hyde. Then his gaze flicked over the faces of his fellow Tau'ka. He almost seemed to be speaking to them- and he was.
Daria came out of her daze a little. "But… why?" she asked.
"You were sent to Earth to stop the Black Hawks and their interests there," Felis explained. "You successfully completed your mission and now you are being reassigned. Agent Dorou will go to Earth to work with the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in your place."
Under the table, Daria felt a hand reach for hers, squeezing it in a combination of reassurance and poorly concealed desperation. She squeezed back, thanking Jekyll for his support. But what was she going to do now? She couldn't just leave the League and take whatever new assignment Felis had in store for her- even if the Master Agent did intend to train her as an eventual replacement. The League had become a family to her.
She couldn't leave Jekyll again, not when she'd just gotten him back.
A moment later, Halcon had curtly adjourned the meeting. The humans and nine of the Tau'ka left, shooting dark looks at one another, but Daria lagged behind at Felis's silent order for her to wait.
"Agent Noclaf, I am disappointed in you," she said. "I did not wish to bring this up in front of the full Council, but you have broken one of the codes of our field."
Daria tensed a little under her superior's gaze. Her emotions were still in an uproar over the Council's order, and she didn't trust herself to speak just yet.
"You have feelings for that human, don't you?" Felis asked. There was a note of something in her voice. Daria glanced up from looking at her boots- was that sympathy? Certainly, the Master Agent was smiling at her in a disturbingly condescending manner. "It is entirely understandable, Daria, that you think he could entertain such emotions for you. You are young, attractive, and female, after all. But you cannot allow this relationship to continue. You are a Tau'ka, a pure-blood. A dalliance with a mere human is quite beneath you, my dear."
Daria gritted her teeth at the injustice of the whole scenario. Of course, that was the reasoning behind her reassignment. The Council disapproved of her and Jekyll being together, seeing him only as a lesser being not worthy of a Tau'ka. But Henry Jekyll was no mere human. He was extraordinary, after all, and she had no plans for a 'dalliance' with him. She clamped down on her temper, which was coming dangerously close to the boiling point.
I will not yell at my commander I will not yell at my commander I will not yell at my commander…
Felis patted her on the shoulder in what was obviously intended to be a reassuring manner. "Do not worry, Agent Noclaf. Your feelings for him will pass in time, and eventually you will find someone more… suitable to one of your status."
I will not lose my temper…
Daria bowed stiffly. "I understand, Master Agent," she said in a tight voice. "If I may be excused? I need to find Agent Dorou."
Felis nodded. "Of course."
The younger Tau'ka strode out of the room. She had no intention of tracking down Dorou just yet.
OSCOSCOSCOSCOSCOSCOSC
"What do they think they're playing at?" Sawyer snarled as he paced around the room. "They can't just reassign her like that!"
"But they did," Mina pointed out. The six of them- Sawyer, Mina, Nemo, Skinner, Jekyll, and Vader, were gathered in Daria's quarters waiting for her to come back. "She has to follow their orders."
Mina was as unhappy as the rest of them at the decision. She liked Daria and appreciated having another female in the group to talk to. The vampiress glanced over at Vader out of the corner of her eye. He stood off to one side, his scarred features impossible to read. Despite his stoicism, Mina got the distinct impression he wanted to do something rather painful- and permanent- to several Tau'ka leaders. She had no doubts that he would do it too- Vader Skywalker had the air of one used to seeing people in pain that he'd caused.
"I would like to know what prompted the Council to issue those orders," the tall man growled, startling the League members. He suddenly glanced up at the door, the dark expression on his face lightening for a moment. Mina heard footsteps outside.
A moment later Daria stormed in. Without saying anything, she crossed to the end of the bed where Jekyll sat due to a lack of proper seating and plopped down next to him. The doctor put his arms around her.
"Those arrogant, shortsighted, bloody…" Daria snarled, relaxing only slightly in the embrace. She sounded on the verge of tears- a very odd state for her. "Replacing me with a damn rookie on his first mission! Of all the idiotic…"
"What did Felis want?" Vader demanded.
She stopped in her rant and smiled grimly. "Condolences," she said bitterly as she adopted a mocking imitation of Felis's voice. " 'You'll get over him'."
Vader's jaw dropped. "They're reassigning you because of Dr. Jekyll?" he asked.
"The Council disapproves of my little 'dalliance', as Felis so blithely put it," Daria said. She was furious. How dare the Council interfere in her personal life like that? More than half of them had a human in a direct line of ancestry in the past three generations. The only pure-blood was Commander Halcon- Daria knew this because he was a relative of hers. Her father's brother, to be precise.
"Let me get this straight," Skinner said. "You fall in love with the Doc, the Council doesn't like it, so they replace you wi' someone else?"
"Exactly," Vader said. "It fits with how they think. We humans are 'inferior', after all." His tone was dryly ironic, verging on actual anger. Daria stood up and began to pace like a caged tiger, frustration emanating from her with almost physical force.
"This isn't fair!" she growled heatedly, her voice hotter than the temperature she kept her room at. "I do my job well and effectively and this is what I get! And to top it all off, they seem to think they're rewarding me! Me as head of Intel? It's laughable!" And there was no way out of this that she could see. Daria couldn't disobey direct orders like that if there were not lives immediately at stake. She was well and truly bound by the Council's edicts. They were the governing body of the base, and while she only reported to Halcon and Felis directly, their word was, essentially, law. There was nothing she could do. The League would leave, accompanied by that puppy Dorou, and she would stay here and be trained as Felis's eventual successor.
Curse them all.
Vader suddenly became aware of a faint rattling vibration from above. "Dhar'ya…" he began in a warning voice. His eyes fixed on the Tau'ka, who was actually trembling with suppressed anger.
The warning came too late. One of the glass panels protecting the light fixture shattered, scattering shrapnel with an oddly anticlimactic tinkling noise. Nemo scrambled out of the way of the dangerous rain as the others jumped in surprise.
Daria winced. "Sorry," she said.
Jekyll stared at the mess. "What just happened?" he asked. Vader sighed.
"She's telekinetic," he explained. "And isn't always in control of it. When she gets mad, anything crystalline tends to resonate and shatter because of the way her power works."
Nemo looked up from dusting off his uniform. "Daria," he said, a concerned frown crossing his features. "Could you do that to the glass in the Nautilus?"
The Tau'ka shook her head. "No," she said bitterly. "The glass in the portholes is far too thick for me to affect it. I'm not that strong a 'kinetic. And not that it matters anymore, since I'm not going back."
Vader gestured, causing the glass shards to fly off the floor and into a nearby refuse container.
"So what do we do?" Sawyer asked, only momentarily distracted by the ex-Sith and his display of power. "We ain't leaving without you, Daria."
"You have to," she replied. "Don't you understand, Sawyer? There is nothing we can do. The Council has given me direct orders- I can't go against them."
"You can always stow away," Skinner suggested. Nemo shook his head.
"The first place they would look for her is on Earth," he said. "And we would lose any support we have managed to obtain."
"Why do we even need the Tau'ka's support anyway?" Sawyer demanded. "We've managed fine so far!"
"K'Wah and Koor would not have hesitated to wipe you all out if I hadn't been there," Daria pointed out. "They have the technology to destroy any of your cities from space if they wanted. It was only because I was there that they held their hands as long as they did."
"Because you are their sister," Jekyll said quietly.
Sawyer, Skinner, and Mina looked at him in surprise. "I think you failed to mention tha' bit, Doc," Skinner said. "The 'awks are 'er brothers? When did you find tha' out?"
"In Mongolia," Jekyll explained sheepishly. "K'Wah challenged her to a duel."
"And the sniveling little rat promptly ran away," Daria muttered. "Him and Koor."
Mina looked shocked. "Your brothers?" she asked. "They were the ones helping the Fantom? And tried to kill all of us?" She had thought that the Tau'ka were loyal to their families- hadn't Daria told them as much?
The agent nodded grimly. "We don't exactly have a warm and fuzzy relationship," she said dryly. "Between them trying to kill me on a regular basis and succeeding with my parents, I don't claim them as family."
The humans fell silent for a moment. While none of them were inexperienced when it came to politics and battle, none of them could really contemplate having a sibling who would callously murder their family members to further their own ends.
"It's because of people like K'Wah and Koor that you need a Tau'ka," Daria said. "There's no way of knowing if there's anyone else in the galaxy with advanced technology and a vendetta against the Tau'ri. There's not even a way of knowing if all of the Goa'uld left when they were driven from Earth. You need someone who knows how things work out here to help- remember, there's still about a hundred years left before humans have to be advanced enough to fight the Goa'uld directly." Looking defeated, she sat back down on the bed, head in her hands. "I just wish it could have been me."
Jekyll glanced at Vader, a pleading expression in his pale blue eyes. The scarred man read the look, glanced at Daria, and nodded.
"All right, you four," the ex-Sith said to Mina, Nemo, Skinner, and Sawyer. "I know there were things you wanted to do before you left." With several not-so-subtle glares and a muttered, "He wants to talk to her alone, you invisible idiot," Vader ushered the four League members out of Daria's rooms.
The tall English doctor sat on the bed next to Daria, again putting his arms around her in a gesture of comfort. She responded, shifting a little so she could hold Jekyll more closely.
"I want you to come back with us," Jekyll said. "I don't want to lose you again."
Hyde was silent, for once mirroring Jekyll's own emotions. He didn't want to lose Daria either. Jekyll liked her after all, and since Hyde's normal pleasures had been flatly denied by his jailer, he was going to have to take what he could get, how he could get it.
Besides, it was very rare to find a female who could look Edward Hyde in the eye without flinching and then proceed to out-curse him. She was spirited- he liked that a lot.
"You shouldn't have to," Daria said. "When I went to bring the League here, they had indicated that I'd be able to keep working with you. It wasn't until you got here that they changed their minds."
"Are they really that prejudiced against humans?" he asked. He knew there were similar interracial tensions still on Earth- the United States was still recovering from a conflict where such issues were a very real constituent, just to mention a single example. Now that he thought about it, a human and a Tau'ka were, strictly speaking, much further apart than two humans with different skin tones. Is that how they see us? Like the slaves were viewed in America?
I wouldn't be surprised, Hyde muttered. They're certainly trying to get rid of us fast enough.
"Not all of us," Daria said. "Mostly the ones in charge. She looked up at him sharply. "I hope you don't think I see you that way."
"What? N-no, of course not." Jekyll shook his head. In all the time he'd known her, he'd never known Daria to treat a human as being inferior simply because they were human. To act that way just wouldn't be like her.
She smiled, apparently satisfied. Then she glanced at a small storage unit and gestured. The door opened by itself and a small object flew out of it and into her hand. It was a small silver sphere set on top of a square base with little buttons on it. She handed it to Jekyll. "This is a long-range communication device," she said. "So you can get in touch with me if you need to. It's not terribly secure, I'm afraid, so don't use it unless there's an emergency." She quickly explained how to operate it.
Admiring her resourcefulness, Jekyll accepted the device. "Daria," he said, stroking her auburn hair with his free hand simply because it felt like the right thing to do, "Is there any chance of us being able to be together? Since the Council is giving you other orders? We- the League- needs you. I need you, Daria."
The Tau'ka swallowed hard. "I don't know, Henry," she said, burying her face in her beloved's shoulder. "I don't know."