Come Clean

Chapter Six:

With Tyr was released from Med deck for the second time that day, the idea of returning to his quarters inspired dread rather than any usual anticipation of solitude or refuge. Nonetheless he knew had to brave them. If nothing else, he wanted a change of clothes. More abstractly, if there were any clues to be found regarding this strange life he'd abruptly found himself in, ones that didn't involve asking others, his quarters were where they'd be. He still stopped in the officer's mess for the second time that day, justifying the delay to himself as needing to eat and not knowing if this new Tyr would keep the same supplies for meals. He could only take so long, however, sure the others would be coming in for their own dinners and not wanting to meet them yet, and so he found himself in front of his own door. The motion toward the keypad was automatic, a reflex even in his own memory.

This morning he hadn't taken in any of his own surroundings beyond the immediate. Now as he stepped inside he studied the room carefully. Some of it was familiar, as he remembered it being only a day ago: the smells of leather and gun oil, the shelf of paper books, a few pieces of weaponry and tools on wall racks. Near the kitchenette the scent of familiar spices, ones he used regularly, clung to the air. The painting over the bed was one he might have done. But there was food in the kitchenette that he would not have bought for himself, a bathrobe that wasn't his own hanging by the bathroom door, children's toys in a net tacked low to one wall. He caught Beka's scent everywhere, pooling in ways that suggested more than a casual touch; he could tell which side of the bed she slept on. There was a new bin of flexis and holonovels that proved to be, when he investigated, fiction of multiple genres. There were historicals and romance, detective and horror, all lurid and nothing he would read. The clothes in the drawers were not all his, some very definitely female, and the bathroom yielded unfamiliar toiletries beside his own and a hairbrush with blonde hairs trapped in the bristles.

The most impressive difference was the new door cut into one wall. It went through into a space that he remembered as general storage with no connection to his quarters. Now it was brightly painted, with a child's bed and more toys and books than were in the main room. He stood in the doorway a long time before retreating to his bed.

Nowhere in the room was safe, but he still needed answers. He checked the nightstand, at the side of the bed he'd woken up on that morning. There was little new or illuminating in it, shy of a small metal box he didn't recognize. He opened it carefully, cautiously, to find a cloud of dark hair. At first he assumed it was Catherine's, but the loose curls didn't match the tight coils of the girl who had been around him during the day. His lost son's, then. With reverent motions he closed the box and returned it to its place, frustration overwhelming him at the idea that he hadn't even known which of his two— his only two— children the hair had belonged to.

With only one item left, his eyes were drawn to the shelf he'd set the helix on that morning. It looked like a regular helix, though not the same as the one Freya had given him, that one tucked in the nightstand where he had expected it. There were always small differences between helixes: different emblems and symbols, enamel in different colors filling in the spaces between bars on some, sometimes studded with gemstones, but what stood out with the one he'd woken with was not at all cosmetic differences: this one was well-worn. The gold was no longer a perfect circle, having been warmed and compressed by use to the shape of his arm. Some of the dark enamel was discolored and rippled, as if it had been melted with exposure to heat or energy— weapons fire, perhaps? One of the outer strands also had a dent, as if something hard had crashed into it, or vice versa. It did not look like something recently manufactured, but precisely like he would expect it to after two years of constant hard wear. Still he studied it, searching for some hint of familiarity, some memory or emotion associated with it, and finding none.

The frustration rose again, and it was a fight to set the helix down rather than throw it. If the invading nanos had in fact been neutralized as Harper assured him they had, he was impatient for his memory to return. At least when his memory had been blocked before he had had some illuminating flashes of his life and who he was. This time he was adrift by three years with only others' words to guide him.

He returned to the edge of the bed, at a loss again, and picked up the AI's timeline again to at least try to fill in the gaps. The next entry of any note was of a dimensional tunnel, presumably the one Trance had mentioned, opening during the ratification of the Commonwealth charter and wreaking havoc. The aliens had only been defeated by Dylan and Rommie taking the Maru to deliver an extremely powerful bomb of Harper's, presumably a relative of the ones he had mentioned using against the worldship in their second encounter. He was not surprised at the note that Beka had volunteered but been overruled.

While he was still scrolling through the next several days' entries, most of them of repairs and diplomatic repercussions, the door to his quarters opened. He set the flexi down to see, unsurprisingly, Beka trailing Catherine. "Hey," she said when she saw him, "sorry to interrupt, but bedtime."

"Of course."

The brief exchange was enough to alert Catherine to his presence, and she made a cry of discovery and turned toward him. Beka caught her before she got far this time. "C'mon. Bathtime. Bedtime as usual?" It was only the inflection of the last word that turned it into a question, as if she had remembered the circumstances partway through. She didn't wait for a response, ushering Catherine into the bathroom instead.

He didn't go back to his reading, instead listening to the sounds of running water and splashing, interspersed with Catherine's laughter and Beka's voice, the words hard to make out over the other noises. This should be familiar but was one more thing that wasn't, that didn't even trigger any sort of recognition from his reluctant mind. He stood to leave, to go to the gym or find a quiet deck to run on, to give his mind time to work, but then he hesitated. He didn't know what if any routine existed for Catherine, and if she was used to him being a part of it as Beka's last comment had implied then leaving now might be a problem, especially as she'd already seen him.

The decision was made for him. Beka emerged holding a wriggling, towel-wrapped bundle. She stopped halfway between the bathroom and the door to the child's room and looked at him almost expectantly. "A lot of nights," she said, "if you're not away or something, you'll talk to her before bed."

"Talk to her?"

"Yeah. It's… You said it's something your father always did. I— It might not be a bad idea. If you want to." She shrugged.

And while he couldn't remember doing it for Catherine, he could remember his own father doing it for him. He suspected he knew what he would say regardless of his own memory right now. "Of course," he answered.

Beka nodded slowly. Perhaps she'd guessed he would anyway. "I'll get her ready, then."

Tyr watched her go into the new room, thinking once again that if he had gambled wrongly, if this wasn't real, then whatever it was had entangled itself so deeply that there was no way to distinguish the difference. He took a moment to collect himself before following them through the door, watching as Beka finished fastening the sleepwear. On his daughter, if today was to be believed, something that he wasn't quite sure he was ready to do entirely. Still, she hugged the girl, told her good night, and then mutely and awkwardly passed her to Tyr before retreating, dimming the lights as she did. He could hear her stop outside the door, hear her breathing quietly as if she were listening to ensure that both of them would be well.

And then he sat, Catherine leaning against his chest and clinging to his braids sleepily, and fell into the cadence of the words he last remembered hearing in his own father's arms.

Beka stood outside Cath's door in case of a problem, but otherwise didn't intrude. This was theirs, Tyr's and Cath's; it had started soon after she was born and didn't falter if he wasn't elsewhere. Presumably when— if?— they had another child it would be theirs, too. So she listened to the rise and fall of his voice and waited through the ritual.

Finally she heard movement and a small protest, and then a few more murmured words from Tyr. She leaned into the doorway just enough to see Tyr leaning over Cath, laying a blanket over her, and reassured she moved away from the door as he straightened and turned to come back out. Once he had she closed the door behind him and pressed the button for the comm: one-way, so they could hear Cath but their own noises wouldn't disturb her. Beka was relieved to hear only quiet babbling and rustling noises as she settled for the night, as bedtime didn't always go so smoothly. And then she looked over at Tyr.

He seemed… lost. Unmoored in a way she'd almost never seen him. Quietly she asked, "Are you okay?" and then added hastily, "Besides the obvious."

"I…" He closed his mouth again, uncertainly, before saying, "I don't know what to do."

"Yeah, neither do the rest of us." She tempered her tone, not wanting to be as flip as the words themselves would suggest. When he glanced at her, she continued, "You can't do much until your memory's back or we know it's not, right? So do what little stuff you want to do. A night like tonight, where we're both here, you'll go for a run or to the gym if you haven't already or stay here and you can do your own thing, if we're not doing something together."

"'Do my own thing'?"

"Yeah. Read, work on something. Once in a while you paint."

"And what do you do?"

"Gym or work on the Maru. Read, watch something, go see one of the others."

He nodded, slowly. At least he seemed to accept it. "And together? What then?"

While it was an obvious next question it still felt more like fishing than the last ones had. "Talk. Sex. Work on things with the ship or the Commonwealth. Extra sleep, if it's been a rough week. Stuff like that. Sometimes you cook?"

"Spending time together."

"Yeah," she said, belatedly recognizing her own phrasing from earlier. "Basically. I mean, we're not glued together, but we do things with each other or in the same room. If nothing else we've got to make sure what we know what we're doing with Cath day to day."

"Of course." Tyr still seemed to be considering her answer and she wondered if he was hearing something she didn't think she was saying. None of it was untrue, but she still wasn't sure if she'd let something slip. "And there are nights we wouldn't be here?"

"Well, yeah, of course. Going out on the Maru for something or one of Harper's projects. Sometimes one or both of us gets roped into the diplomacy thing. And it's not like we don't have some sort of galaxy-ending crisis every couple of weeks that's all hands on deck for a while. There's a reason we brought Mara onboard." She glance over at Cath's door during one louder vocalization, but it fizzled out to nothing. When she looked back at Tyr, he had a surprisingly neutral expression. "Everyone else tries to make sure we get time with her and each other. It's not every night that we're both here, but it is a lot."

He was quiet after she stopped, still neutral. She thought it might be the end of the conversation, that he'd make his excuses to do something elsewhere for the evening, but then he asked, painfully casually, "Does my not being here include any other wives?"

She wondered how long that had been bothering him today. She tried to be gentle, but it wasn't what he'd want to hear and she knew it. "I'm your only wife."

"Whose choice?" And now he had a laser focus on her, probably trying to determine if she was lying.

"Everyone's and no one's?" She tried to decide what to say, settling on, "You're Kodiak. You serve under two Humans and haven't taken the ship out from under them yet. That… tends to discourage a lot of Nietzschean women, or make them discount you before they even know about me and Cath. There have been a couple who were interested anyway, but either their pride betrayed yours or you weren't impressed by them enough to even want to display. One was trying to use you to gain access to the Andromeda and never had any intention of following through. And Charlemagne Bolivar keeps dangling one of his sisters in front of you but they're all mysteriously elsewhere whenever he actually deigns to meet with us. It's never gotten to the point where I have to make a choice."

"I see." Even those two words were angry, though she wasn't sure at whom. Possibly all of them, himself included. "And only one child, as well?"

"We only have Cath." She really didn't want to tell him, but she had to. "Freya had… She'd had a baby. Yours, I mean. But she was killed by the Genites. You'd, um. You'd gone to rescue her and it went… wrong. None of the Orca made it out." She hated telling him about Freya and Tamerlane. It had torn him up when it happened, and she couldn't imagine it didn't hurt hearing about it all over again for the first time. He didn't seem surprised by it, though; had it already come up with one of the others today? There was still pain, though, she could still see him struggling, and if he'd receive it well she'd try to comfort him. He wouldn't receive it, though, she already knew. Not from her, anyway, not today. Instead she looked away to give him space, to let him try to conceal what he'd think of as weakness at his failure that he wouldn't want to show to her. As a result she didn't see when he went from grief to anger again, and was unprepared for his next question.

"So, as my sole wife, are you intending to give me more children, or is all of the genetic legacy of the Kodiak to rest on one child?"

Even knowing it was coming wouldn't have lessened the sting of that. Even without the air of accusation it would have hurt. As it was she only barely managed to contain the flinch. "Yeah," she said quietly. "I'm intending to." And before he could press for more she cleared her throat. "If you want to go for a run tonight, deck 42 is usually pretty empty this time of night. I'm going to turn in early, I think, so I may be asleep when you get back. If you're comfortable sharing the bed we can, but if not I'll take the sofa. I'd go to the Maru, but I don't want to be too far away in case Cath needs something overnight, and I'd rather not kick you out of your quarters." She finally turned her face to him again and he was back to being confused, something she was far more comfortable with in that moment.

It took him a moment to answer, hesitantly, "I believe we can share the bed, yes."

"Good." She headed for the bathroom, leaving him standing there without words. It was only after the door closed behind her that she realized she hadn't brought anything with her to change into, although if Tyr had any sense he would be long gone by the time she came back out. She let out a shuddering breath and swallowed hard against the churning in her stomach before getting undressed.

The shower water was soothing on the tension that had been forming over the day in her neck and shoulders, but it did nothing for her equally tense mind. Rather, with nothing to focus on, she kept going back to his last question. If she'd given him the full answer…

But what good would it do if she had? It would confirm what he was probably already thinking, that the Tyr who had lived through the last three years and made those decisions was insane. He was already skeptical and disbelieving of his own actions. For the Tyr of three years ago, there would be no point in marrying her, let alone having babies with her. It hadn't been that long ago for him that he'd declared crossbreeding pointless and that he'd never be interested in a Human woman. Add in that she was probably costing him real, Nietzschean wives and children by her existence and it was no wonder he didn't believe that they were married, because there was no way he would have. At this point, if he did regain his memories, who was to say that he wouldn't view this as a warning that he'd strayed too far from his self-appointed path, when his own past self didn't agree with his choices? And if he didn't, well, he probably wouldn't put his helix back on anyway. Telling him made no difference then.

She turned her face to the water, ignoring the sting of threatening tears. Whether he remembered or not, if he decided not to stay married, she'd be okay, because she'd have to be, just like she'd told Harper. She'd have to hold it together for Cath if nothing else, because she was not going to repeat all of her father's mistakes, and especially not at her daughter's expense. She'd had bad breakups before, after all, this one she could just see coming. Her stomach was flipping at the thought, but her head knew she'd survive.

She just wished it didn't hurt so damn much.