Signed in Blood
TITLE: Signed in Blood
AUTHOR: Viridian5
RATING: PG-13
SPOILERS: "It Makes a Lovely Light."
SUMMARY: "I thought I knew you...."
ARCHIVAL/DISTRIBUTION: Anywhere, as long as you ask me first.
FEEDBACK: can be sent to Viridian5@aol.com.
DISCLAIMERS: All things Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda belong to Gene Roddenberry’s estate, Majel Roddenberry, and Tribune Entertainment Company. No infringement intended.
NOTES: Written partly because Kass asked for it.
When Dylan walked in on Harper welding... something, he didn’t interrupt or announce himself at first, just watched. Welding, creation and destruction all at once, seemed so appropriate for his new crew and the chaos they brought with them.
They’d managed to keep those overrides and bypasses in even as Rommie supervised them taking a few out. (Where the hell did Beka find Harper that he could do that for her?) His new crew was made up of brilliant, dangerous people whom he’d come to trust, only to discover that maybe he shouldn’t, especially since they obviously hadn’t trusted him. But they’d been raised under moral conditions different from his own, and they focused completely on their own survival. Harper seemed to believe himself when he said that the overrides were exactly like Dylan’s Plan Bs, no more.
"Harper. Am I interrupting something?"
Harper jumped, scaring the hell out of Dylan since he still had the burning welder in his hand. Then Harper took a breath and turned it off. "Nah, not really. Just welding to be welding. Pretty flame, y’know?" When Harper pushed his goggles up to his forehead, revealing his eyes, he looked tired and somehow fragile on the inside. Light bruises about the size of Beka’s hands ringed his neck. "This time I really did take out all of the overrides. Honest."
"That’s not why I’m here."
"Yeah?"
"Why didn’t you tell me she was using? I know that you faced conflicting loyalties, but you knew that her judgment was compromised and she could get us all killed. She nearly did."
"Look, I didn’t know for too long before Tyr blew her cover. She turned out to be one of the meaner Flash addicts I’ve run into, but she’s not the first. Do you think I liked seeing her like that? Liked watching her overdose? Liked... watching her break down and start bleeding from her eyes?"
Dylan remembered sitting there watching them after he’d slipstreamed the ship away. Remembered Beka lying there, a limp, overdosing, crumpled wreck with Harper wrapped around and cradling her. "So?"
The sadness in his eyes deepened. "She told me not to tell."
"That simple."
"She’s my captain. She’s my boss and my friend. We’ve been through a lot together. I owe her." Harper ran his hand through his hair. "I love her. Not like that."
"I didn’t think so."
"I couldn’t betray her. Loyalty makes me do stupid things, but you get that, don’t you?"
Something nagged at Dylan. "What did she say to you? You just said that she was one of the meaner Flash addicts you’ve run into."
Harper shrugged, but the gesture didn’t have the carelessness it tried for. "When I found her and begged her not to do that crap, she told me I better not tell. That’s all."
No, it wasn’t. More secrets. Dylan wanted to pry but didn’t know if it would be appropriate. Every time he worked up a good fit of anger over all the secrets, he remembered Beka’s desperation to keep her promises and Harper’s obvious pain over everything that had happened.
When she’d started taking Flash to be good enough and strong enough to pilot them to Tarn-Vedra, "keeping her word" to get Dylan to the lost capitol of the Commonwealth, his home, she’d put Harper between his two captains. Dylan had known that Harper’s first loyalty rested with Beka, so why did this hurt so badly?
And Harper had risked his life to stop Beka in the end. Beka had been strangling him in retaliation.
But that still could have been him looking out firstly for "his" captain, since her drug use had risked her health.
Dylan waited to see if Harper had anything else to say, but Harper remained quiet, retaining that hurt and worried look. Subdued, as he’d been for a while, even before Tyr had revealed to the bridge that Beka was on Flash. She must have said something....
"If you suddenly recall any details you’d like to share, you know where I am." But Dylan put his hand on Harper’s shoulder and squeezed a bit to lessen the sting of his words. He had the feeling that Harper was punishing himself far worse than he ever could.
"Yeah, I do. Thanks."
-------
Harper went back to welding as soon as Dylan left. Keeping busy was key. He’d repaired Andromeda, removed all the overrides for real this time, and visited Trance to see how she felt. Not that he’d stayed with Trance for long, since she kept asking questions he didn’t want to answer. Now he just needed another thing to do, something that would blot out the memory of Beka bleeding from her eyes....
Beka. On Flash. When he thought one of the few things that he could depend on was that she would use that iron will of hers to stay clean.
Useful. He would be useful, no matter how much he wanted to take his welder and destroy something, anything. Rip through the wall or something, just because he could. But he didn’t do that; he made things, even if he had to destroy something first to put something new together.
This time he heard the door open. Although the hesitant steps had none of their usual confidence or take-charge momentum, he knew whom they belonged to. "Harper?" Beka asked, her voice not quite steady. "Seamus?"
"You only call me ‘Seamus’ when I’m doing something wrong," his mouth said, instinctively going for flippancy. The rest of him pushed his goggles up again and turned to face her.
She looked awful. Raw. Worn out. Only Andromeda’s technology had saved her life.
Harper realized that he still had his welder on, glowing and sparking. He turned it off, set it aside, and tried to think of a thing to say. Anything. For once, nothing came to mind.
Her eyes went to the bruises he knew ringed his neck. "I’m...." She shook her head. "I’m sorry, Harper. I want to say that I wasn’t in my right mind, and I wasn’t, but I don’t want to duck responsibility either."
The way her junkie father had. "I know."
She walked closer to him, and he let her. "But if I know you, and I think I do, I know that the near-strangulation isn’t the thing that hurt you the most."
"I thought I knew you."
Beka flinched, seeming to hear all the things he’d left unsaid. "I deserve that. Harper, finding you was one of the luckiest strikes of my life. I would never--"
"--drop me back on the trash heap where you found me?" Harper said, quoting her words back at her, swallowing the pain. "You saved my life then, and you used it now to tell me to stand aside. While it turned out you were slowly killing yourself. Out of respect for you, I kept your dirty secret this time, but never again, do you get me? If I think you’re doing something to hurt yourself, I swear to you that I’ll do whatever I have to to stop you." He grabbed and hugged her, trying to burn into his mind that certainty that they’d saved her after all. She’d felt so broken in his arms before.
Beka hugged back, fiercely. "If I’d killed you...."
"You didn’t."
"If I did--"
"I would have followed you to hell and haunted you for the rest of your afterlife. Considering that you were a few minutes from dying yourself and all. It’d be worse for you than damnation."
Beka nodded. "And I would have deserved it," she said softly. "I’m told it’s going to be a day to day thing now. Wanting it. I’m just like my father after all."
"No, you’re not."
"So people keep telling me."
"They’re right."
"And my father didn’t have you on his ass." She was straining to be flippant, trying to regain their usual balance.
He could at least meet her halfway. "Is that a proposition?"
She softly cuffed the back of his head. "That would be a ‘no.’"
"Promise me you won’t do this to yourself again, Beka." He felt a small shudder run through her body.
But her voice sounded strong. "I promise. No more Flash."
And Beka would just about kill herself to keep her word.
Harper hoped that he still knew her well enough to call that one right.
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