August 12 | 10:45 PM | The holodeck, open to everyone.

[wise_ass]

It's late, but still a fairly respectable time to be up and about. He passes a few people on his way up to the holodeck but thankfully, when he gets to the door, he finds there's nobody else in sight. He lights up a cigarette and stands in the center of the dimly lit room, a blank page waiting impassively for his command. Bert takes a long, easy breath and sighs; the cigarette smoke is toasty, familiar, divine. The first one he's had in days.

"You wouldn't happen to know Mejis, would you?" he asks. His tone is polite-- it sounds like he's already forgiven the computer for not having the first fucking clue about where Mejis is, but before he can explain himself, the room has already started coming to life.

It flickers a few times through scenes Bert's not sure he recognizes as even from his world, but when it finally settles, he finds himself standing on one of the rolling hills overlooking the little town. The oil derricks, far over the hills to his left, are backlit by a fiercely beautiful sunset. On his right he can see a wide, treeless horizon that tells him he's not far from the Clean Sea.

It must have been a market day. The people below are packing up their stalls and loading up their carts. There's a tense moment where he's terrified he'll see something, someone he'll recognize before he realizes that the computer's brought him to a Mejis about fifty years prior to his ka-tet's infamous visit.

He heads down the hill and wanders a bit, trying to stay out of people's way, but enjoying, as he usually does, the novelty of secret immersion, not even minding when a woman gives him the obligatory small-town stink eye reserved for unfamiliar, unaccompanied young men. In fact, it makes him smile. It doesn't seem to improve her opinion of him any, but he can't help it. He walks through the market with that shit-eating grin, hands stuffed in his pockets, enjoying the alien quaintness of it all with a bizarre brand of contentment he figures can only be enjoyed by holidaymakers in other worlds.

He's in another world even now, though, isn't he? The station? The idea is an uncomfortable but not unwelcome knot at the base of his skull. He's spent nearly all of his time here doing penance, even if he hasn't realized it, but the last month has actually been penance in earnest. Bert had been drinking whiskey when zombi Alain had helpfully suggested he eat a bullet to better cope with his guilt, and mayhap it was a blessing, because the stuff just hadn't tasted the same after that. Or mayhap it was his own self-pity that didn't go down sweet anymore.

Cuthbert wasn't sure what he'd expected to feel, standing in the red dirt of Lower Market, surrounded by the smells and sights and sounds he's spent the last seven or so years trying to smother from memory. And mayhap it'd be different if he'd been dropped in at the right time and seen ole Kimba Rimer or Cordelia Delgado strutting through town. Mayhap.

But right now, the air feels clean, and somewhere a hundred wheels away, Cuthbert Allgood hasn't even been born yet. He closes his eyes and lets the idea sink in.

Behind him, the holodeck door opens, and he smiles-- that wide, idiot grin that says he's actually pleased for company-- and squints to see who it is.

"Hey there," he calls out, his voice warm and animated. "Just mind the cow pies."

Comments

[firstcylon]

There it is. That spark of hope flaring to life, hope Zoe can't squash with all of her pragmatism. She holds Bert's gaze for a few steps, and nods, and adds, "All we have is time."

He's said his name, and he's offered to tell her more. How can she not feel hope? It's a bright star in her chest, and it's dangerous, she knows, but she's always strived for far-off goals. She's always gone for too-big, too-bright, too-dangerous. And if she hadn't, she wouldn't be here today.

[wise_ass]

Bert starts at the very beginning: a story he'd heard second-hand, when Roland's father had presented him with the Mejis job and expressly forbade him to recruit Bert's help.

"...'just don't bring that laughing boy,' he says to Ro'. 'Better to bring a barking dog.' How do you like that?" It's pretty obvious from the way Bert can't say it without laughing that he likes it a lot, it's one of his favorites.

He skims over the ride to Mejis but recounts the welcome they received from the sheriff and his cohorts: all of them genial and grinning, ever-so-polite, slick as weasels and about as trustworthy. He tells her how the three of them played up the roles of foolish big-city boys and endured about all the passive aggressive condescension from the country-folk they could stomach, about the ranch they'd been put up in and how it was as far from town as it could be without being technically outside of the limits. Bert paints a picture of a tense chess game: both sides lying through their smiles, all strategy, keeping their long-game out of view.

Then he tells her about how Roland met Susan Delgado and fell head over heels in love. He spends more time describing Sue than he means to. Then he tells her how Susan was promised to the mayor of Hambry, a man well into his seventies.

"That was when I knew we were as good as hanged."

By now, they've walked beyond the center square, and Bert turns off the street and onto a dirt horse trail winding up a hill, away from town. He knows that even Susan's father probably hasn't been born yet in this Mejis, that the whole thing is as real as a wooden nickel, but it still doesn't feel right to progress with the story within earshot of townspeople.

[firstcylon]

It's a story like in the books, especially the way he tells it. Cuthbert's always had a way with words that made Zoe want to listen, instead of turn back to her computer, or whatever else she might have been doing. It sounds like a story from one of the other Colonies, and from his ominous last words, Zoe can imagine it on Canceron. The Largest Democracy had never been much of a democracy at all.

But she doesn't say anything, when Cuthbert pauses and leads the way out of town. Part of her's afraid of saying the wrong thing and having him clam up again, but most of her really knows that there is nothing she can say. It's a story she's got to listen to, and it's not about her response. It's about him sharing it.

[wise_ass]

"To this day I've never seen anyone that had it worse. He was sick with love for her. Roland had always been the most businesslike of the three of us, practically had no imagination, and it was like he was living in a waking dream. At first it was funny," Bert says with a smirk. "But pretty soon me 'n Al realized we were on our own-- not just in terms of what we'd been sent to do, but even with the menial labor the Hambry folk were keeping us busy with. He'd just ride off and come back later with an idiot grin and long blonde hairs on his shirt."

Bert fixes Zoe with a wry smile. "You can imagine what my sixteen year old self thought of that. Not only had Roland effortlessly romanced the most beautiful girl in town, but probably the single most dangerous one, too. It had to be kept a secret, from Sue's family, from everyone in town. They'd meet in out of the way places and Al and I would hide in the bushes-- far away but not quite far enough-- primed to make a barn owl noise at the first sign of townsfolk."

He sighs through his teeth, but it's obvious his resentment is mostly rote at this point; he's far enough from it that he can find some humor in it now, anyway.

[firstcylon]

Not quite far enough - of course not, and Zoe can't help a small smile. And doesn't want to. It's been too long since Cuthbert's made her smile; they have nothing but time here, and when most of yours is spent figuratively headbutting firewalls, it goes by very slowly.

"How did it end?" she asks, after a beat, because it's clear from the way he's been telling that story that it did end.

[wise_ass]

They've reached a little clearing in the meadow, with tamped-down grass; a deer bed, maybe, or someone's picnic spot. Bert eases onto the ground, sitting tailor-style, and motions for her to come down and sit opposite him. The sun has nearly sunk below the horizon, but from where they're sitting, with tall, dark gold grass swaying all around them, they can't see hardly anything else. He wants to be sitting for this part, and though he doesn't want to, he knows he needs to meet her eyes for at least part of the tale.

He tells her about the day they came back to the ranch to find it destroyed; their carrier-pigeons killed, the blood used to write profanities on their walls, their maps ripped into pieces. He neglects to mention the horror of finding that their beds had actually been pissed on. He tells her some more about Rhea, the witch that served as a kind of mystic consult to the mayor, and assured him that she was pure before meeting Roland, and who saw with her wizard's glass just about everything they'd been up to since.

"Shortly thereafter Hart Thorin was murdered. Roy Depape, the bastard who'd been bullying the slow boy Sheemie at the Traveller's Rest, was the culprit, and he left the Lookout at the crime scene."

The Lookout, as Bert had mentioned earlier, was a rook skull Bert had found en route to Mejis and had taken to wearing around his neck and on his saddle pommel; he'd given it a title and its own voice and personality and had been using it casually to bug Alain and Roland, but everyone in town had seen him with it. If you can believe it, I had a strange sense of humor, he'd admitted.

"The three of us were thrown in jail. Sue dressed up like a cowpoke, in a bulky serape and a low-brimmed sombrero; came in toting Roland's guns and held the sheriff at gunpoint, but ended up shooting the deputy. Shot him-- a boy she'd sat in the schoolhouse with." Bert's voice has begun to dry up a little. "Roland told her to take Sheemie and hide with him in an out-of-the-way hut in the Bad Grass while we cornered Farson's men in the gulch. They outnumbered us by a pretty piece-- forty of them, three of us-- but we had the drop on them, and I was able to take the hangers-back out with my sling without ever having to sound fire. Then we blew up the oil derricks, just to be sure there wouldn't be any further trouble there. But the harriers found Susan, meaning to use her as bait, but once they found out how badly we'd done in the rest of their men, they handed her over to the townsfolk. Which sounds like a piece of mercy, but maybe you don't know how small-town folk treat a beautiful young woman who sleeps with a foreigner. Nevermind one that was promised to and paid for by the mayor."

The wind sounds like whispers over the dry grass. Bert is dissecting a clover stalk while he talks, keeping his hands busy.

"I told you Susan had been chosen as the Reaping Girl; in my part of the world Reaptide is an autumn festival, sort of a harvest celebration, I don't know if you have anything like it. Pumpkins and lanterns, a parade through town with the Reaping Girl and Lad in their Sunday best, a big shindig with a bonfire. Folk burn stuffy-guys, straw men in raggedy clothes, to appease the gods. Sacrifice.

We went to Rhea's and took the glass from her-- Roland's father had heard of it and believed it was legend, but told us to keep an eye out for it nonetheless-- and once Roland put his hands on the thing, he had a vision. It showed him everything: Susan, tied up, her hands smeared with red paint, taken to the reaping fire by wagon while townsfolk screamed profanities at her. He watched her burn. We could've ridden back to town first, forgotten the glass and our father's orders, and saved a girl. A girl we damned in the first place, Zoe."

Bert puts his the heel of his hand over his good eye. It's not just this story, it's all of the guilt he's worked so hard to bury, guilt that he realizes now will never fully go away. But telling it, as bad as it is, is an undeniable release.

"And Susan was just the first. Gods, Zoe." He takes a jagged breath. "I thought we were good men, we were raised to be knights," he seethes, voice cracking. "But all of it's pointless. We died fighting for a kingdom that was going to collapse either way. Maybe that makes me a fucking coward, I don't care. By the time we were at Jericho, we weren't even of sound mind anymore. I shot Al. He'd gone away for a few days, to-- to check on our fathers' regiment, and came back to our campsite at night, spooked us, I guess, I don't... We shot him. Al was my brother. I can't tell you--"

He grabs her hands, as if they'll anchor him there, keep him from dissolving.

"Zoe, I didn't want to live anymore." It's a shitty apology, but maybe she won't think quite so badly of his decision if she knows why he had so little regard for his own life. "I couldn't abide my own thoughts, my memories. I didn't know how. I didn't know who I was anymore. I just knew I needed to leave it behind."

Bert stares at her, his eye red-rimmed, his cheek slick from tears. Waiting for people to say their piece after he's said his own is always agonizing for him. He's terrified of what she thinks of him. He's never been so frank with a woman in his life, certainly never cried in front of one that wasn't his mother. There's a certain freedom in realizing that if she despises him, or even just thinks less of him, at least he can drop the carefree cowboy act.

[firstcylon]

Zoe knows it will end badly, even when there is hope. Even when Sue's dressed up and getting them out; it's clear in the way Bert speaks of the boy she killed. It's clear she paid for that, and they all paid for all of it. But it isn't until he explains Reaptide that there is a vague metallic taste at the back of her mouth (the taste of fear), an echo of what is suffusing her lungs.

It was her, she realizes, and feels locked inside of herself. You should have saved me, and flames were licking up her dress. Her Reaptide dress. Sacrifice.

She used to derez back to her safe place, right after Zoe had created her. She couldn't stand sacrifice, and it wasn't even fire.

But you can't derez out of reality.

She keeps listening, as he tells the story she guessed. She saw the ending, and her face in the flickering flames, sometimes replacing Susan's. She keeps listening, and lets him take her hands. She watches him, and she doesn't know what he sees in her face, she doesn't know there are tear tracks on her cheeks. She doesn't know what she's supposed to see inside herself.

When he quiets down, and he just looks at her, she pulls one of her hands from his, shifts, and reaches out to cup his face, on the side of his good eye, so he sees her coming. "Life makes murderers of us all," she says, but she can't recognize her own voice. There is Apotheosis, there is the last time she saw Ben and the pain of death, her first death, one that wasn't hers, and there is the first boy she kissed, not Original Zoe but her, and the sound his head made when it cracked against the wall.

She hasn't even realized it, but she's changed the landscape around them, to the arena in New Cap City, where she first met Tamara. The stands are empty, but the ground is as filthy as if there had just been an evening's fights. She doesn't know how many times they killed her before her angel saved her. Told her the words she needed to hear.

"Are you gonna lie down and pay for your sins?" she whispers, holding his gaze, her voice a perfect copy of her angel's. But she was perfectly alive. "Or are you gonna own yourself?"

[wise_ass]

Life makes murderers of us all, she says. She moves forward a little when she cups his face and he can see the sheen of tears on her cheeks, too.

He doesn't know what he's touched in her, can't even begin to guess, but for the moment all he can feel is gratitude that she didn't get up and walk away, or sit there with mute, naive pity. Maybe Zoe hasn't been showing most of her hand either, or maybe he simply didn't try enough with her, knowing that if he got to know more about her, she'd ask him for the same in return. Maybe a little of both.

There's a soft blur on the periphery of his vision that resolves itself rapidly-- the scene has changed, and they're no longer in a Hambry field but in what looks to Bert like an vast, empty arena, sitting in bloodied, dirtied sand bathed in a hot, white spectator's light. He begins to form the question where are we? but it dies as he realizes she's about to speak. The intensity of her gaze is almost harder to look at head-on than the spotlights.

"I'm not lying down in here, that's for damn sure," Bert says edgily, trying to break the tension. He's a little worried about Zoe, he's never seen her like this, and he feels responsible for whatever he's brought to the surface. His grip on her hand tightens. "I don't know, Zo'." He looks down, his hair falling into his face. "None of it matters anymore, not really. I can't forget any of it, but I'm not even alive in that world anymore. I couldn't be less relevant, and believe me, that's saying something. The only life I've got is here. I don't want to be anyone's goddamn soldier anymore. And frankly even being the old-fashioned guy is getting a little played out."

He cracks a smile then swallows, trying to reclaim some of the moisture back in his mouth. He's parched, can barely talk.

There's a dozen things he wants to say to her: he wants to ask what she's thinking, he wants to know what she thinks he ought to do with himself, he wants to tell her how much he misses his friends and how he's desperate to be close enough to some of the people here, now, to let them fill the roles that his tet once did. Mayhap some new ones, too. But it's not the right time. They could talk all day but that's not what either of them really need, not right in this moment.

His good eye still running over with tears, he reaches over and scoops her into a hug that's almost painfully tight, holding her head against his shoulder so he can put his face in her hair. It's not romantic, not in the usual sense, but right now he's tired of talking. He just wants to do something that might do for her what she's just done for him. Life makes murderers of us all. It's understanding, not forgiveness. Gods know he doesn't want to be forgiven for what he's done, not by Zoe, anyway. How could anyone forgive him? He doesn't know what she's done to call herself a murderer in stride, and he doesn't care. They're both hurting, and this feels like the only thing that can bridge the painful gap between them, filled by stories they won't tell, can't tell, the gap of completely different worlds and lives.

[firstcylon]

The embrace isn't quite right, but she lets him have it, if he needs it. That is part of being the consoler; being what people need you to be. She embraces him back, less fiercely than he is; warmly, instead. Her tears are not for herself, but for Ben, for Original Zoe, for Tamara, for Philomon, for Lacy, and for him.

She's found her path, even if she's been taken off of it. She knows who she is now, and she knows who she isn't. She still isn't aware that she unconsciously changed the simulation to have them stand in the very place where she had her epiphany, beaten, bloodied and killed, because she has her eyes closed, and she is letting him cling as hard as he needs. There's nothing to say for now, not until he feels that he can loosen his embrace. This is a moment without words; a moment of need.

[wise_ass]

Bert sighs and lets her go after a minute, but not before pausing to touch his forehead to hers.

"So... where the hell are we?" he whispers, side-eyeing the arena for a touch of comedy.

[firstcylon]

Zoe refrains from raising her head to press a kiss to his forehead, at first, and right when she's about to do that, he mentions their surroundings. She knows a split second before she sees it, straightening up in front of him and letting her breath catch in her throat again.

She lets it out in a whisper, "New Cap City. There were fights here." She pushes up to her feet, and holds a hand out to Bert, still looking around. "They liked to see blood."

[wise_ass]

Bert takes her hand and springs to his feet, giving his jeans a cursory dust-off.

"This is---" Not home. "This is where you were from?"

He wasn't sure how he'd pictured Zoe's world, come to think of it... but he hadn't pictured anything like this.

[firstcylon]

"No," Zoe frowns, "and yes." She turns to face Bert; it's about time she tells him. She doesn't want to let go of his hand as she does, but she's completely prepared for him to pull away.

This is so far from the kind of technology he knows; she is.

"There used to be another Zoe," she explains, holding his gaze, her voice unwavering. She is doing this. "She copied her mind to make me, a double, in a virtual reality. This place was one among many, in that reality. This body," she squeezes his hand gently, to emphasize what she means, and knows that this is when he might pull away, "was made by her parents - our parents - so I could exist in the material world. It's cybernetic." She isn't sure whether he knows the word, so she makes it as simple as she can, "A robot."