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chiron_survivor((Caspar's companion piece.))
Winter on Atlantis is mild, but it still gets cold in the evenings, and tonight is no exception. Adia curls up under the bedclothes while Caspar tends to the fire that keeps their cabin warm and toasty.
He spends a lot of nights tending to the fire, poking and prodding at it long after she has fallen asleep. She didn’t think much of it at first, but after over a month of this routine, she’s starting to get the impression that he’s avoiding sleep.
And possibly avoiding her.
He hasn’t been leaving her alone or ignoring her or anything like that. But lately it feels as if he’s miles away, even when he’s sitting right next to her. It reminds her of her brief encounters with other Fives during the Occupation on New Caprica, and it worries her. Isn’t he happy on Atlantis? He had seemed to be adjusting pretty well, especially these last few months. Even at his most sour, he was never this detached.
What changed?
She took Amelia’s advice and asked him if something was bothering him, that she’d listen to any of his troubles. He always had a simple, inconsequential answer at the ready. His scar was acting up. His research wasn’t going anywhere. Princess accidentally set fire to his shoelaces.
One day he admitted that he missed the Nexus. This felt closer to the truth than his other answers. Neither of them had been able to visit or contact their friends since the winter storm began in earnest. For all his complaining, she knows that he enjoys being somewhere that doesn’t judge him for what he is.
Maybe it’s easier for him not to judge himself there, either.
There are times when the smell of the ocean clings to him so strongly that she wonders if he’s been visiting the beach without her. Other moments, it feels as though something is dragging him from her, like an ocean’s undertow.
“Caspar?” she says, because she can feel that dark current now, even though he’s right there by the fire. It makes her shiver in her cocoon of blankets. “I think the fire will be fine… please come to bed.”
He obliges without a word, nestling up against her under the sheets. As his breath quiets, she thinks about reminding him again that she’ll listen to anything he’s willing to tell her. That she won’t think less of him for having problems, or needing help. But she’s tired, and she’s not interested in hearing him make another excuse for his mood, so with a soft sigh, she shuts her eyes and goes to sleep.
~*~
A loud, repetitive banging on the cabin’s door startles her awake.
She fumbles around in the dark — the fire has gone out — before finding her camping lantern and flicking it on. She opens the door to the sight of Zelus standing on the other side.
“Brrrve,” he rumbles through his closed beak.
Adia yawns and rubs the sleep out of her eyes. “Zelus, why are you knocking on my door at —“ She does a quick check of the time on her PINpoint. “Two in the morning?”
Zelus rumbles again and Adia realizes why he’s keeping his beak closed. There’s a piece of fabric caught there, a bit of a torn undershirt.
It belongs to Caspar.
She spins around to face her cabin, but their bed is empty. There’s no sign of Caspar anywhere.
Gently, she plucks the fabric from the pokémon’s beak. “Where did you find this?” she asks. She tries to keep the panic out of her voice, but she can’t fight off the cold pit of fear settling in her stomach. This isn’t like Caspar at all. Where is he?
Zelus lifts a wing and points in the direction of the beach. “Airy,” he explains, pantomiming his nightly patrol of the island.
The beach. She should have guessed. How long has he been gone? She looks inside the cabin again; his winter coat is hanging neatly on a hook by the door, his winter shoes lined up below.
His PINpoint is on the nightstand. Silent. She checks hers. No messages.
“Did you see him?” she asks breathlessly. “Is he okay?”
Zelus nods quickly to the first question. The second nod is slower. Less certain. He chirps and tugs lightly at the sleeve of her pajama top. She should go to him. He needs her.
“Okay… hold on…” She steps back inside and puts on her winter coat and a hat. She slips her feet into a pair of warm boots, and then she gathers up Caspar’s outerwear. She grabs her messenger bag to shove it all in, along with a first aid kit.
Just in case, she tells herself, but she trembles at the possibility of needing it.
It’s only then when she steps outside into the cool air that she remembers how long it will take to get there. She scrolls through the coordinates on her PINpoint and finds the ones for the beach. But when she presses the button, all she gets is an error message:
Teleportation services currently offline. Please try again later.
She shoves her PINpoint into her pocket and swallows down her dread. If she leaves now, she’ll be there in an hour. Maybe sooner if she can —
Zelus interrupts her thoughts with another light tug of her sleeve. “Brave,” he says, and crouches down, one wing extended.
“…you want to fly me there?” Her pokémon chirps an affirmative, but it takes her a few seconds to consider the offer. It is certainly possible to ride a Braviary, although she’s never tried with Zelus. It’d be a new experience for them both. Not to mention how outlandish that would look on Atlantis. Loki’s enchanted ribbon has helped Zelus stand up to all sorts of scrutiny, but will it hold up to a full-grown woman riding his back?
She thinks of Caspar and casts her doubts aside. It’s worth the risk if she can get to him sooner. Besides, she rode a gryphon on Azeroth; this can’t be too different.
Adjusting the strap of her messenger bag, she takes a deep breath, then climbs onto her pokémon’s back. “Go on, Zelus. Find him.”
~*~
The full moon casts its pale light over everything, which thankfully makes it easy to spot Caspar once they fly over the beach. He’s a dark shape sitting in the sand, and as they glide closer, she spots Anastasia curled up in his lap. That eases the tight knot in her throat long enough that she’s able to call out his name as soon as they land a few yards away.
He doesn’t respond.
Sliding off Zelus’s back, she stumbles on the soft sand, needing a moment to regain her footing. “Caspar,” she says again, as she hurries her approach. He doesn’t look injured, but his shirt his torn and his pants are covered in the detritus of a careless ramble through the wilds of Atlantis.
And he’s pale. That might be the moonlight, but his skin is far too pale for her liking.
She crouches in front of him, blocking his unblinking stare into the ocean. “Caspar,” she says a third time, her voice breaking, and suddenly —
She’s on Galactica.
The sounds and smells of the Battle for Hera surround them. Gunfire in the distance. Explosions. The stench of burning metal. There’s a row of barrels that block her line of sight, but the air has an eery red glow to it from the emergency lights above.
Finally, Caspar focuses on her. His pupils are so wide that his eyes look black. “Adia?” His brow creases slightly in confusion. “What are you doing here?”
The ground beneath them lurches, but Adia ignores it. This isn’t real, she tells herself. It’s a projection. Caspar’s projection. She reaches out and grabs his bare arms. He’s so cold. “Caspar, you’re on the beach,” she tells him, desperate for him to listen. “You might be hypothermic. We need to get you home.”
Caspar shakes his head, his jaw trembling. Anastasia meows, and he absently lowers a hand to pet her. “I’m trying to find the beach,” he explains, his voice tight. “I’ve been looking for hours. I can’t find it.”
Another lurch, and the entire ship begins to tilt. It’s the black hole, dragging the Cylon colony into a event horizon and taking Galactica with it.
“I can’t find it,” he insists frantically. “Adia.” His voice breaks on her name. “I’ve been trying so hard. I don’t want to be here.”
He came here as a foot soldier, no better than a Centurion. He didn’t have to plan or strategize. He didn’t have to think about all the lies that The Plan was built upon. That his life was built upon.
The bullet caught him in the side. He didn’t bother to defend himself. The human soldier moved on while he bled out behind a stack of barrels. This was it for him. No resurrection. Just a slow death on a a forgotten corner of an empty ship.
All he felt was relief.
“I don’t want to be here, but I deserve it,” he continues, while Galactica continues to shake. His gaze drops, expression painfully blank. “If… if it weren’t for you…”
The chill of Caspar’s skin seeps into her blood and freezes her heart. “No,” she snaps. She grabs his arms so tightly that he winces, and stares into his eyes. “You deserve to be on Atlantis. You deserve to be alive. No matter what happens to me.”
She thinks of the sand beneath her. The very real, very cold sand. The crash of the surf behind her. The moon and the stars above.
Galactica disappears.
“You promise me that you’re never going to do something like this again,” she insists. “You promise me.”
Caspar blinks. Slowly, he comes back to himself, looking around as if seeing the beach for the first time. “I…” He lets out a breath, shoulders dropping, sinking into her steady grip. “Of course. I promise. God, Adia… I’m so sorry…”
She exhales. Tries to focus past the rush of adrenaline making her sweat through her pajamas. “Let’s get you someplace warm,” she says gently. She pulls out his winter coat from her messenger bag and drapes it over his shoulders. “Let’s get you home.”
~*~
Between the fire, the blanket, and being in the middle of a cuddle pile, Caspar warms up soon enough.
A little too warm, maybe, but he doesn’t dare say so. Especially not to Princess, who was furious with him upon their return. She is an angry ball pressed right up against his legs, and woe to him if he even scoots a millimeter away from her. Adia is on his other side and Anastasia is lounging in his lap.
Adia breaks the silence first. “Are you ready to tell me what’s going on?” she asks quietly.
Caspar sighs and shuts his eyes. “Ellen Tigh,” he says finally. “She came by our property New Year’s Eve.”
All his strange behavior for the last month and a half suddenly makes perfect sense. “Oh, Cas…” She hugs him, careful not to dislodge Ana. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
There’s another long pause, and she pulls back enough to look at him. He’s got his lips pursed; she can tell that he’s holding onto another secret, but the shame in his eyes keeps her from calling him out. One thing at a time.
“I thought I could handle it.” He pauses, then lets out a wry huff. “No, I thought I could ignore it. But seeing her triggered something inside me. I couldn’t stop thinking about the past…”
He trails off. The look he gives her is weary. “You’re the only part of me that makes sense. I didn’t want to… to taint that, with all the bullshit I was dealing with.”
“You aren’t going to ruin what we have by sharing your problems with me, Cas.”
“You don’t know that,” he replies, and she wilts a little. “Crap. Adia, I don’t mean it that way. I know you’ll listen to me, that’s not the point. What if…” He sighs in frustration, clenching and unclenching his hands. “I don’t know who I am anymore. I thought I did, but then Ellen came along and knocked it over like a frakkin’ house of cards. What if the real me is someone you… you can’t…”
She hugs him again. He’s warm under the blanket, but he’s shaking a little. “Cas, if you were someone I couldn’t love, I would have figured that out a while ago.”
He makes a non-committal sound against her shoulder and she squeezes him tighter. “Ellen would have shaken any Cylon’s sense of self. I mean, Gaius Baltar telling me that the thirteenth colony was all Cylons was enough to throw me for a loop. I can’t imagine how much more disorienting it is for you. Humans get decades to figure out who they are. You’ve had so little time.”
She pulls back to look at him, to see if her words are having an impact. He watches her silently for several seconds before asking quietly, “And you’re okay with that? Me needing time to figure that out?”
“You’d do the same for me,” she responds easily. “You already do, all the time.”
He blinks at her, as if remembering something. “You entered my projection,” he says, a bit of awe in his voice. “You pulled me out of it. How’d you…?”
“I don’t know,” she admits. “My moon rune, maybe? It’s not like I could do it before.”
Anastasia begins to purr, rolling over in Caspar’s lap. He looks down at her and smirks. “I think you might have had a little help.”
“Well…” He smiles at her and she blushes. “That’s, um. That’s neat.”
“Neat? You can project, Adia. That’s amazing.”
“I can’t — I don’t know how I did that yet. And don’t change the subject.” She sighs and forces the smile off of her face. “If you don’t want to talk to me about Ellen, can you at least talk to one of your siblings? Please? You really scared me back there.”
He looks down in chagrin. She hates making him feel guilty all over again, but she knows that she can’t let this go. He needs help. If not from her, then from someone who understands.
“Okay,” he says. He rubs his eyes. “Can we go to bed now?”
Adia hesitates. She’s exhausted, but the thought of closing her eyes and somehow losing Caspar again has her anxious. He catches her expression and leans in to kiss her. “I’ve got a very angry pig who threatened to set my entire wardrobe on fire if I run off on her again. I’m not going anywhere.”
Princess oinks in agreement.
Winter on Atlantis is mild, but it still gets cold in the evenings, and tonight is no exception. Adia curls up under the bedclothes while Caspar tends to the fire that keeps their cabin warm and toasty.
He spends a lot of nights tending to the fire, poking and prodding at it long after she has fallen asleep. She didn’t think much of it at first, but after over a month of this routine, she’s starting to get the impression that he’s avoiding sleep.
And possibly avoiding her.
He hasn’t been leaving her alone or ignoring her or anything like that. But lately it feels as if he’s miles away, even when he’s sitting right next to her. It reminds her of her brief encounters with other Fives during the Occupation on New Caprica, and it worries her. Isn’t he happy on Atlantis? He had seemed to be adjusting pretty well, especially these last few months. Even at his most sour, he was never this detached.
What changed?
She took Amelia’s advice and asked him if something was bothering him, that she’d listen to any of his troubles. He always had a simple, inconsequential answer at the ready. His scar was acting up. His research wasn’t going anywhere. Princess accidentally set fire to his shoelaces.
One day he admitted that he missed the Nexus. This felt closer to the truth than his other answers. Neither of them had been able to visit or contact their friends since the winter storm began in earnest. For all his complaining, she knows that he enjoys being somewhere that doesn’t judge him for what he is.
Maybe it’s easier for him not to judge himself there, either.
There are times when the smell of the ocean clings to him so strongly that she wonders if he’s been visiting the beach without her. Other moments, it feels as though something is dragging him from her, like an ocean’s undertow.
“Caspar?” she says, because she can feel that dark current now, even though he’s right there by the fire. It makes her shiver in her cocoon of blankets. “I think the fire will be fine… please come to bed.”
He obliges without a word, nestling up against her under the sheets. As his breath quiets, she thinks about reminding him again that she’ll listen to anything he’s willing to tell her. That she won’t think less of him for having problems, or needing help. But she’s tired, and she’s not interested in hearing him make another excuse for his mood, so with a soft sigh, she shuts her eyes and goes to sleep.
~*~
A loud, repetitive banging on the cabin’s door startles her awake.
She fumbles around in the dark — the fire has gone out — before finding her camping lantern and flicking it on. She opens the door to the sight of Zelus standing on the other side.
“Brrrve,” he rumbles through his closed beak.
Adia yawns and rubs the sleep out of her eyes. “Zelus, why are you knocking on my door at —“ She does a quick check of the time on her PINpoint. “Two in the morning?”
Zelus rumbles again and Adia realizes why he’s keeping his beak closed. There’s a piece of fabric caught there, a bit of a torn undershirt.
It belongs to Caspar.
She spins around to face her cabin, but their bed is empty. There’s no sign of Caspar anywhere.
Gently, she plucks the fabric from the pokémon’s beak. “Where did you find this?” she asks. She tries to keep the panic out of her voice, but she can’t fight off the cold pit of fear settling in her stomach. This isn’t like Caspar at all. Where is he?
Zelus lifts a wing and points in the direction of the beach. “Airy,” he explains, pantomiming his nightly patrol of the island.
The beach. She should have guessed. How long has he been gone? She looks inside the cabin again; his winter coat is hanging neatly on a hook by the door, his winter shoes lined up below.
His PINpoint is on the nightstand. Silent. She checks hers. No messages.
“Did you see him?” she asks breathlessly. “Is he okay?”
Zelus nods quickly to the first question. The second nod is slower. Less certain. He chirps and tugs lightly at the sleeve of her pajama top. She should go to him. He needs her.
“Okay… hold on…” She steps back inside and puts on her winter coat and a hat. She slips her feet into a pair of warm boots, and then she gathers up Caspar’s outerwear. She grabs her messenger bag to shove it all in, along with a first aid kit.
Just in case, she tells herself, but she trembles at the possibility of needing it.
It’s only then when she steps outside into the cool air that she remembers how long it will take to get there. She scrolls through the coordinates on her PINpoint and finds the ones for the beach. But when she presses the button, all she gets is an error message:
Teleportation services currently offline. Please try again later.
She shoves her PINpoint into her pocket and swallows down her dread. If she leaves now, she’ll be there in an hour. Maybe sooner if she can —
Zelus interrupts her thoughts with another light tug of her sleeve. “Brave,” he says, and crouches down, one wing extended.
“…you want to fly me there?” Her pokémon chirps an affirmative, but it takes her a few seconds to consider the offer. It is certainly possible to ride a Braviary, although she’s never tried with Zelus. It’d be a new experience for them both. Not to mention how outlandish that would look on Atlantis. Loki’s enchanted ribbon has helped Zelus stand up to all sorts of scrutiny, but will it hold up to a full-grown woman riding his back?
She thinks of Caspar and casts her doubts aside. It’s worth the risk if she can get to him sooner. Besides, she rode a gryphon on Azeroth; this can’t be too different.
Adjusting the strap of her messenger bag, she takes a deep breath, then climbs onto her pokémon’s back. “Go on, Zelus. Find him.”
~*~
The full moon casts its pale light over everything, which thankfully makes it easy to spot Caspar once they fly over the beach. He’s a dark shape sitting in the sand, and as they glide closer, she spots Anastasia curled up in his lap. That eases the tight knot in her throat long enough that she’s able to call out his name as soon as they land a few yards away.
He doesn’t respond.
Sliding off Zelus’s back, she stumbles on the soft sand, needing a moment to regain her footing. “Caspar,” she says again, as she hurries her approach. He doesn’t look injured, but his shirt his torn and his pants are covered in the detritus of a careless ramble through the wilds of Atlantis.
And he’s pale. That might be the moonlight, but his skin is far too pale for her liking.
She crouches in front of him, blocking his unblinking stare into the ocean. “Caspar,” she says a third time, her voice breaking, and suddenly —
She’s on Galactica.
The sounds and smells of the Battle for Hera surround them. Gunfire in the distance. Explosions. The stench of burning metal. There’s a row of barrels that block her line of sight, but the air has an eery red glow to it from the emergency lights above.
Finally, Caspar focuses on her. His pupils are so wide that his eyes look black. “Adia?” His brow creases slightly in confusion. “What are you doing here?”
The ground beneath them lurches, but Adia ignores it. This isn’t real, she tells herself. It’s a projection. Caspar’s projection. She reaches out and grabs his bare arms. He’s so cold. “Caspar, you’re on the beach,” she tells him, desperate for him to listen. “You might be hypothermic. We need to get you home.”
Caspar shakes his head, his jaw trembling. Anastasia meows, and he absently lowers a hand to pet her. “I’m trying to find the beach,” he explains, his voice tight. “I’ve been looking for hours. I can’t find it.”
Another lurch, and the entire ship begins to tilt. It’s the black hole, dragging the Cylon colony into a event horizon and taking Galactica with it.
“I can’t find it,” he insists frantically. “Adia.” His voice breaks on her name. “I’ve been trying so hard. I don’t want to be here.”
He came here as a foot soldier, no better than a Centurion. He didn’t have to plan or strategize. He didn’t have to think about all the lies that The Plan was built upon. That his life was built upon.
The bullet caught him in the side. He didn’t bother to defend himself. The human soldier moved on while he bled out behind a stack of barrels. This was it for him. No resurrection. Just a slow death on a a forgotten corner of an empty ship.
All he felt was relief.
“I don’t want to be here, but I deserve it,” he continues, while Galactica continues to shake. His gaze drops, expression painfully blank. “If… if it weren’t for you…”
The chill of Caspar’s skin seeps into her blood and freezes her heart. “No,” she snaps. She grabs his arms so tightly that he winces, and stares into his eyes. “You deserve to be on Atlantis. You deserve to be alive. No matter what happens to me.”
She thinks of the sand beneath her. The very real, very cold sand. The crash of the surf behind her. The moon and the stars above.
Galactica disappears.
“You promise me that you’re never going to do something like this again,” she insists. “You promise me.”
Caspar blinks. Slowly, he comes back to himself, looking around as if seeing the beach for the first time. “I…” He lets out a breath, shoulders dropping, sinking into her steady grip. “Of course. I promise. God, Adia… I’m so sorry…”
She exhales. Tries to focus past the rush of adrenaline making her sweat through her pajamas. “Let’s get you someplace warm,” she says gently. She pulls out his winter coat from her messenger bag and drapes it over his shoulders. “Let’s get you home.”
~*~
Between the fire, the blanket, and being in the middle of a cuddle pile, Caspar warms up soon enough.
A little too warm, maybe, but he doesn’t dare say so. Especially not to Princess, who was furious with him upon their return. She is an angry ball pressed right up against his legs, and woe to him if he even scoots a millimeter away from her. Adia is on his other side and Anastasia is lounging in his lap.
Adia breaks the silence first. “Are you ready to tell me what’s going on?” she asks quietly.
Caspar sighs and shuts his eyes. “Ellen Tigh,” he says finally. “She came by our property New Year’s Eve.”
All his strange behavior for the last month and a half suddenly makes perfect sense. “Oh, Cas…” She hugs him, careful not to dislodge Ana. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
There’s another long pause, and she pulls back enough to look at him. He’s got his lips pursed; she can tell that he’s holding onto another secret, but the shame in his eyes keeps her from calling him out. One thing at a time.
“I thought I could handle it.” He pauses, then lets out a wry huff. “No, I thought I could ignore it. But seeing her triggered something inside me. I couldn’t stop thinking about the past…”
He trails off. The look he gives her is weary. “You’re the only part of me that makes sense. I didn’t want to… to taint that, with all the bullshit I was dealing with.”
“You aren’t going to ruin what we have by sharing your problems with me, Cas.”
“You don’t know that,” he replies, and she wilts a little. “Crap. Adia, I don’t mean it that way. I know you’ll listen to me, that’s not the point. What if…” He sighs in frustration, clenching and unclenching his hands. “I don’t know who I am anymore. I thought I did, but then Ellen came along and knocked it over like a frakkin’ house of cards. What if the real me is someone you… you can’t…”
She hugs him again. He’s warm under the blanket, but he’s shaking a little. “Cas, if you were someone I couldn’t love, I would have figured that out a while ago.”
He makes a non-committal sound against her shoulder and she squeezes him tighter. “Ellen would have shaken any Cylon’s sense of self. I mean, Gaius Baltar telling me that the thirteenth colony was all Cylons was enough to throw me for a loop. I can’t imagine how much more disorienting it is for you. Humans get decades to figure out who they are. You’ve had so little time.”
She pulls back to look at him, to see if her words are having an impact. He watches her silently for several seconds before asking quietly, “And you’re okay with that? Me needing time to figure that out?”
“You’d do the same for me,” she responds easily. “You already do, all the time.”
He blinks at her, as if remembering something. “You entered my projection,” he says, a bit of awe in his voice. “You pulled me out of it. How’d you…?”
“I don’t know,” she admits. “My moon rune, maybe? It’s not like I could do it before.”
Anastasia begins to purr, rolling over in Caspar’s lap. He looks down at her and smirks. “I think you might have had a little help.”
“Well…” He smiles at her and she blushes. “That’s, um. That’s neat.”
“Neat? You can project, Adia. That’s amazing.”
“I can’t — I don’t know how I did that yet. And don’t change the subject.” She sighs and forces the smile off of her face. “If you don’t want to talk to me about Ellen, can you at least talk to one of your siblings? Please? You really scared me back there.”
He looks down in chagrin. She hates making him feel guilty all over again, but she knows that she can’t let this go. He needs help. If not from her, then from someone who understands.
“Okay,” he says. He rubs his eyes. “Can we go to bed now?”
Adia hesitates. She’s exhausted, but the thought of closing her eyes and somehow losing Caspar again has her anxious. He catches her expression and leans in to kiss her. “I’ve got a very angry pig who threatened to set my entire wardrobe on fire if I run off on her again. I’m not going anywhere.”
Princess oinks in agreement.
