S'COOL, WE CAN STILL BE FRIENDS
/Yeah, you still kiss me, but it's just on the cheek
Yeah, you still kiss me, but it's just on the cheek
Yeah, you still kiss me sometimes, but it's just on the
cheek
You pull away so easily/
There are few people who could really understand the loneliness. The biting isolation and terrible feeling of being truly and utterly alone.
Harper was surrounded, constantly, watched, but he was never in company. When he was on the bridge there would be sympathetic glances-ones that he wanted to punch- and quiet murmurs behind him. Forced laughter at some joke Beka or Dylan had made, forced trivial conversation about some meaningless diplomatic bullshit. At the center of it Harper would sit, towards the front of the bridge, far away from any useful work, it seemed to him, monitoring the systems and fixing bugs. Busy work.
Busy work to keep him going until his body was ripped open and all his comrades devoured by that which he birthed. They tried, the Divine bless them, they did. But they didn't understand. Not even Trance.
Well, maybe Trance, but Harper couldn't see past his own depression to acknowledge that.
He didn't let on, he tried not to let on. He fell a little too deeply into his protective brattiness, the shield of sarcasm and coolness that was impenetrable to any love his crewmembers would care to show him.
And the standoff continued, they too nervous or scared to comfort him, and he too scared and proud to ask for it. He was alone, on a ship crewed by a family of outcasts like himself, he was alone.
Surrounded by steel and iron that breathed with a life, character and soul that he himself, Seamus Zelazny Harper had breathed into it- alone.
This is why he had the arrangement that he did with Tyr Anasazi, the one he was least likely to trust, or like, or share the time of day with. The one he was most likely to loathe, to despise, to be repulsed by. Since their shared time on the Magog World Ship, Harper and Tyr had an unspoken agreement, and both figured that the other didn't think about it so often.
But Harper thought about it constantly. He thought, and pined, and felt the ticking rage of the suicidal depression lurking in him. He had gone to see Tyr that night, and that night he had finally gotten what he wanted. What no one else could give him, what he was too afraid to ask for from any of them. His current childhood nightmare was erased by his other childhood nightmare- if only temporarily.
/And I still call you, but I get your machine
And I still call you, but I get your machine
And if I'm lucky, I guess, it's your roommate answering
But you're at the bar, or at Gene's/
It had been just as beautiful as it had been in Harper's dreams, his good dreams anyway. It had the potential to be just as ugly as Harper's worst dreams, but the Divine was smiling on the blond boy from Boston that night, and he was happy for the first time months. He had closed his cloudy blue eyes to the firm touch that trailed down his face, leaning into the semi-human contact, the one he so sorely needed but had been pushing away.
Harper's still damp hair swirled on his pillow curvaceously as his stunted, wiry, infested frame stretched beside Tyr. If he had kept his eyes open he would have seen the pain in Tyr's, the warring emotions of protectiveness and self-loathing, the confusion.
But Harper was too wrapped up in Harper at the moment, and he cuddled up to Tyr, saying softly "I love you,".
/And we go to dinner, but you won't hold my hand
We sit at the same table, but we don't play with our
feet
Yeah, we still go to dinner sometimes,
But we don't sneak a kiss when the waitress turns around/
Tyr had tensed up, and said nothing.
I knew it, Harper thought. Well, Seamus Z, that's what you get for giving away your heart.
He had fallen asleep after that, a stone dead, clean sheet smelling sleep that lasted clear on until dawn. He awoke to a cool, abandoned bed.
Alone. Surrounded by living, thinking, breathing tones of steel and iron. Alone.
Harper sat up slowly in Tyr's quarters, trying very hard to keep his breathing under control. He understood, but he didn't. He forgave Tyr, but he couldn't.
He wondered what was so unappealing about himself, other than the fact that he was going to die.
/And we still watch movies, but we don't share the couch
And we still rent movies but we don't share the couch
Yeah, we still watch movies sometimes, but I don't lay
in your lap
The plot is slow, take a nap. /
Andromeda's central AI materialized as he was dressing, dejectedly, at the foot of Tyr's bed. She had known about all the lonely nights spent sleeping next to Anasazi as the bigger man read, the friendless trysts and companionable solidarity the two spent with each other, not saying much, and had grown worried. Last night had been the only time the two were physical in any way, and the ship had watched through privacy mode with an awkward caution. She hadn't told her avatar yet, and had no intention of it until she knew Harper was in danger. She had heard Tyr reciprocate his feelings after Harper had fallen asleep, but being a warship, didn't understand the compulsion to hide such a feeling. She decided she would wait until things played themselves out, and in the meantime would simply keep an eye on Harper.
Harper looked at her holographic face for a long time, his head cocked slightly to the side, his bed head hair, for once not constructed, sticking out in all directions. Then he gave his best, confident, charming, lopsided grin, and she missed the masked pain in his eyes. "I'm fine, Rom Doll."
/You even stay over, but we stay in our clothes
Yeah, you'll even stay over, but now we stay in our clothes
Yeah, you even sleep over sometimes, but we stay in our
clothes,
You're only there so I'm not alone./
After he had been to his own room and washed the memories off his infested body, clutching grotesquely at the wrongness in his belly, he went to one of his more neglected machine shops to busy himself there.
He had been there for a good two hours, not having accomplished much. He spent the morning staring at the tools in his hand and the project at his feet, and wondered who had built such a beautiful machine, because it couldn't have been him. No, he was a mistake, a shell for death, unlovable, meant to die on that rock of a planet. The Divine had forgotten about him when he lived past the age of eight, it was have been merciful to let him catch the plagues that wiped most of the rest of his family out. Harper's stomach contracted painfully with the movement of demise, making up for lost years.
"Harper?" The familiar voice of the ship's young enigma, Trance, startled Harper out of his unhappy mental journey. He looked up and it took him a second to remember where he was.
"Oh, hey Trance," He said jovially. "How is her purpleness today?"
Trance brightened visibly at his flirting and entered the room. "I'm good. One of my plants has a cold, but he'll be fine," She smiled brightly. "You didn't come to the mess this morning. I thought you might be hungry after working so hard."
Harper blinked momentarily. "Uh, yeah, thanks. I'm cool, though. You can...you can just put it down there," He nodded at an almost bare counter, and she placed the ration-laden tray down on it.
"You're doing all right, Harper?" It was more of a well-wish than a question.
"Yeah. Yeah, I'm cool," He smiled at her when he saw the hesitation on her cute purple face. "I'm fine, Trance! You guys don't have to hover over me like this all the time."
Trance smiled again, and this time it was more humouring than genuine. She reached out a hand like she was going to touch him, and then thought better of it. She smiled more broadly and, without another word, left.
Which was just as well, because Harper was getting tired of pretending.
/And you say that I hurt you, in a voice like a prayer
Yeah, you say that I hurt you, and your voice is like
a prayer
Yeah, well maybe I hurt you sometimes, let's contrast
and compare
Lift up your shirt, the wound isn't there!/
"You...you slept all right?" Tyr's voice indicated that he had meant to start another question but quickly changed his mind.
Harper looked up at him, managing to shield the shock and confusion that trembled through his already spent body, and shrugged. "Yeah. Fine. Thanks."
"I...I wanted to..." The Nietzschean wasn't one to usually stutter. He flexed a little and looked away, and was grateful that Harper didn't point out his nervousness. "You don't know how hard this is for me," He said in a whisper, one that wouldn't betray to the other crewmembers his shocking un-Nietzscheanity.
"How hard this is for you!" Harper injected the words with more harshness and sarcasm than was really called for. He looked up at Tyr, still not rising from where he was sitting on his feet on the floor of the bridge, repairing some minor glitch in one of the boards. "What, y'had ta stoop to some lower level of being? Are y'worried that you're no longer Alpha material? How fucking hard do you think this is for me?!" The boy's voice broke painfully and he angrily looked away, throwing himself back in his work.
"I...I'm sorry," It was almost soft enough that Harper's genetically inferior hearing couldn't pick it up at all.
"It's fine," Harper hissed miserably, his being threatening to implode under all the stress he was putting on himself. "It's...it's not your fault," My fucking fault for being so damned...me.
"You will....we're not..." Again, Tyr glanced over his shoulder so he could protect his threatening image from this astonishing frailty.
Harper looked up again, forcing a smile. "No," He said, with the forced, brash happiness that had followed him around since the beginning of his latest ordeal. "S'fine. S'cool. We can still be friends."
The most bitter, hateful, heartbreaking thing Harper could ever have hoped to hear from a girl. He smiled grimly when Tyr didn't quite get it.
The Nietzschean nodded, still troubled, and left Harper to his work. Harper leaned back down to the board and tried very hard to not be sick all over the bridge floor.
/I guess that your truth, is just the ghost of your lies
I guess your kind of truth is just the ghost of your
lies
Your kind of truth, darling, is just the ghost of your
lies,
I see though them all the time/
On his way back to his quarters, Harper passed Beka, who smiled broadly at him.
"Hey, sport! How you doin'?"
"I...I'm fine," Harper smiled disarmingly at her, crossing his arms and supporting his weight on one leg, his pose radiating hipness and confidence.
"Hey, I'm going to meet some old friends at this club on the drift tonight, after we dock. You wanna come with?"
Harper's face blanched for a moment. "Um...I dunno. I'm sorta wiped out. I'm gonna go lay down for a little."
Beka's face softened and she drew him in for a quick, sisterly hug. "Okay. You take care of yourself. If you change your mind, just give me a shout." She smiled broadly and Harper went on his way. "Hey, Harper," Beka called after him when he was almost around the corner.
"Yeah?" He didn't turn around.
"You know you can talk to me whenever you want, right?"
Harper turned and smiled genuinely at her, a little sadly. "I know. I'm cool. Thanks." Beka grinned again and turned to go.
/So I'm pouring some whiskey, I'm going to get drunk
Yeah, I'm pouring myself some whiskey, I'm going to get
real fucking drunk
I'm pouring some whiskey right now, I'm going to get
so so drunk,
Pass out, forget your face, by the time I wake up. /
Andromeda's main AI found Harper later that night in one of the access tubes, a bigger, special-occasions-only bottle of hard liquor in his hand.
Harper often got drunk or stoned in the access tubes, on and off, for various reasons. The ship had yet to be worried of it. She had even seen Harper tell Tyr they would still be friends. She scanned his life signs quickly to make sure he was okay, and set a tertiary monitor on him as the bulk of her CPU went onto other things.
If Rommie the avatar knew he was there, she might have reacted differently. If the avatar knew of the late night meetings between the weapons office and the engineer, she definitely would have intervened long ago. If Rommie had heard Harper tell Tyr they would still be friends, she probably would be sitting with Harper right now, letting him cry on her shoulder. But Rommie didn't know.
Andromeda's main AI, not having the experience or understanding of humanity that Rommie did, did not see the need to inform her little sister yet. So nobody knew that Harper was drinking not to loosen up, or to chill out, or to sleep easier. He was drinking to get drunk, he was drinking to get stone drunk, he was drinking to get dead drunk.
He choked down the last of the burning, clear liquid and lay down, on his back, closing his bleary, double-visioned eyes. He felt the parasites writhing inside him, he writhed himself, but he was happy.
Not as happy as he had been the night before, but in a few minutes, the whole ordeal wouldn't matter anymore.
He would be happy then.