Truth Is A Double-Edged Sword

(Many thanks to Terri for doing this with me. Thanks, Terri!--Maer)

Saturday, 15 Jun 2520
Mike’s Cabin
Fristonweald Range, Salisbury
Kalidasa (Xuan Wu) system
23:30 hrs, local time

        Mike cleaned up after the others had gone for the night. He had a pump out back and while he got it filling a bucket, I found his soap and razor and watched as he put them to good use. He was leaner, honed to a sharper edge than I’d remembered seeing him and I wondered if it was from the rigors of his rustic lifestyle or from his constant vigilance against assassins and the Feds. I noticed he'd acquired a few new scars and I examined them as I waited for him to finish. They weren’t from bullets or knives but were more like injuries from carving his homestead out of the wilderness. I recalled the one-man saw I’d seen in his cabin and reckoned they were from that. Under the wheeling midnight sky, he scrubbed down head to toe and sluiced off with the bucket, and not for the first time I marveled that he could do that standing buck naked in Salisbury’s cold mountain air.
        He turned for the cabin, shaking the water from his eyes and slicking his long hair back, and without a word I followed him inside.

        I slipped out of bed, hoping not to wake him, but sure enough he came instantly awake.
        "What’s wrong?" he asked, grabbing his rifle.
        "Getting some air." I caressed his face, glad his beard was gone. It was a stark accusation of everything I'd abandoned for eighteen months and the reason I wanted outside. I bent over him and kissed his forehead. "Go back to sleep."
        "Go armed," he said, cradling his rifle, and rolled over to face the door.
        How many nights had he slept like that? I wondered, feeling his eyes on me as I quickly pulled on my usual suspects. Tee and vest, shoulder rig and coveralls. I checked the chamber of my pistol and my conscience stabbed over the Tokarev's loss. If Mike had noticed, he’d made no mention of it and I added it to the list of topics we needed to discuss. But first, some air. I holstered my gun and pulled open the door and stepped out into the cold summer night, the stars blazing blue-white overhead.
        I closed the door and put my back to it, crossed my arms and planted a foot on its hewn surface...and tried not to let the conflict in my head get the better of me. Mike had issued a challenge and I had to answer it. Stay on the Gift and lose him, or leave the Gift and stay. I looked at the stars and recalled another night on Salisbury when I'd suffered the same choice—torn between two opposing forces--and asked:
        God, what am I going to do?

 ***

        She'd stepped off the shuttle just to look around a little. The pasture was dark and full of stars. The opening of the front door was easily heard over the sounds of the night, and Nika came around the shuttle with her rifle in her hands. The shadow she glimpsed just as the door shut couldn't have been Carter -- it was too short. Had it been the man, Nika would have left him to his own devices. But it's Rina. She pads across toward the porch and stops in a patch of moonlight. "You okay?" is all she says into the darkness.

 ***

        "No," I breathed, recognizing Nika's tread. I looked at her and understood to the marrow of my bones how she'd felt saying goodbye to Brian on Decatur. "Not even close."

 ***

        Sometimes the darkness is a blessing. All manner of facial expressions can hide in it, leaving only voice intonation to decipher. It offers a kind of safety for the things you're not brave enough to expose to the light of day. "You're not coming with." Nika's tone has no censure, nor does it actually hold a question. It's not as if she didn't see this coming if they ever chanced across Michael Carter again. "Don't feel guilty."

 ***

        "Walk with me?" I asked.
        Painfully aware of the single layer of wood separating us from Mike's cat-keen ears, I pushed off the door and quit the porch. If Mike was going to eavesdrop, I was going to make him work for it. Assuming, of course, he hadn't already bugged the cabin for an acre square and was getting everything on that notebook of his.
        It's what I'd do.

 ***

        "Sure," is Nika's reply. She doesn't leave her rifle on the porch, slinging over her shoulder and turning on a heel to walk a bit away from the cabin. Not too far -- no point in getting away from the cabin and setting off the alarms. But they can walk a distance first.

 ***

        "Guilt. You know me too well." I gauged the distance from the cabin and turned to parallel it. "There's that, but it's not all of it. I'm pissed off at him, too. For all I know, he'd planned to repair that ship all along, knew of it before we'd left him here, and deliberately hid it from me. Seriously, Nika. If he wanted me to say yes, all he had to do was tell me it was here. It would have been a challenge I couldn't turn my back on and he could have had me. I would have walked away with him without looking back. No questions asked."
        I trod on a mountain pebble and picked it up, threw it bitterly aside.
        "He could have raised his horses, I could have worked on the ship, we could have been together. He could have had me here the entire time, Nika. But instead he slapped me with a proposal guaranteed to make me run, despite knowing what would have made me stay, and he just....let it slide."
        I stopped, arms crossed against the tightness in my chest, and tipped my face to the sky.
        "He didn't want me," I breathed. "And now...? I don't know what he wants anymore. I don't know what I want."

 ***

        Nika is silent for a long time, studying the stars of Salisbury. When she finally does speak, it's in a long, low drawl that peeps out here and there. "Seems to me, darlin’, that you're doing an awful lot of finger-pointing in a situation that's not as black-and-white as you'd like to make out. And you're spouting Christian's mindset, but I'm not entirely sure it's your own. I don't believe a man like that asks you to marry him as a test of whether you love him or your job more. I think he offered you the only thing he thought he had -- himself -- and that he's been mighty damn understandin' about the idea that you'll only go with him on your own terms." She shrugs a bit. "The whole point is figuring out what you want and going for it. Yeah?"

 ***

        When I heard that drawl I knew I was in for it, even before she'd delivered the first word of her rebuke. And there was nothing for it. She had me dead to rights.
        Mike was the only person I'd kill for without pity or remorse...and yet I'd been just as ruthless with his heart by turning him down. There was no sugarcoating it: I'd gutstabbed him and left him when he deserved better. Much better. Even if one allowed our mutual reluctance to bare ourselves to others, and that I had mistaken the truth for subterfuge and had played along accordingly, and that he had refrained from calling me on it, nothing could excuse what I'd done.
        Against all reasonable expectations, Mike had extended the same offer again and knowing what I knew now , I dared not refuse it. If I spent the rest of my life making him happy I'd said yes, it would never satisfy my sense of justice for the wrong I'd dealt him. And fully aware that guilt was a poor foundation on which to build a life together, I knew I had to forgive myself as he'd apparently forgiven me but right now, I didn't have it in me. It was too much-too soon and my love for him wasn't enough to quell the self-recrimination that tore at me.
        There was nothing I could say in my defense or in explanation that wouldn't sound self-serving and lame, so I just nodded and held my peace.

 ***

        Nika glanced toward Rina in the silence and held her own peace for a time. Then she finally leaned against a tree and said quietly, "Life's a bitch, ain't it?" She grinned in the darkness, a flash of teeth in the moonlight. Propping one boot up on the tree, she considered and said quietly, "You're beating yourself up for not taking him at face value the first time out, but... I wonder sometimes if you're just afraid. Afraid that the reality of staying won't quite measure up to the things you have in your head; if he'll just turn out to be a guy like any other instead of this person you have in your head."

 ***

        The problem with changing for the better is that it hurts, I'd said once to Christian. You're in love with the memory of Mike, rather than the reality of him, Christian had once said to me. Both statements were true, but to what extent did they apply? As for being afraid of reality falling short of fantasy? I'd lived long enough with the fear of finding Mike dead and that I would fail to measure up to his standards should he prove to be alive, that I couldn’t entirely trust my grip on either fantasy or reality and see my way clear to make things right.
        But how to say it?
        "Fear certainly figures into it somewhere," I temporized. "And it doesn't help that reality can be so damned subjective."

 ***

        Nika laughed at that. "Yeah, no shit." She leaned her head back against the tree and listened to the night. "It tore my guts out to leave Brian on Decatur instead of somewhere that I could see him more. Shyla and Harry haven't sent me any word on how he's doing. He hasn't sent any word. And I can't help but wonder if it's because he woke up and I wasn't there. If he thinks that I lied. Or abandoned him because he was hurt. Or.... who the hell knows what else." She paused, thunking the back of her head against the trunk. A faint smile creases her face. "If you have to go, Rina, you are still and always my friend. I'll kick anyone's ass who gives you shit for it."

 ***

        "I'd do the same for you," I sighed, and took up position next to her on the tree. My fingers fiddled with the bark and I forced myself to leave it alone. "Life's a bitch, yeah, and it doesn't make it better by being stupid.”
        I stared up at the branches overhead, trying to make out slivers of sky in the canopy, midnight blue against midnight green, and said softly.
        "Why is it we can see everyone else's problems so clearly and suck at steering clear of our own? I mean, look at us. Two women with a man in their lives they can't be with...hip deep in shit...and it could have been avoided with one measly little word. 'Yes'. One word. Just one. Why couldn't we say it? Why couldn't I?” I stopped short, hearing my tone.
        “ Oh, God," I groaned. "I'm whining. Just slap me and tell me to shut up."

 ***

        With a snort, Nika shoves off the tree and looked toward the stars. "If you ever figure out the answer, darlin’, lemme know." She shook her head. "The more we try to escape all this political bullshit, the more we seem to stumble into it." There was a pause, and her tone was quiet as she spoke again. "If the fighting breaks out full force, Rina... I'm going to have to go. I won't fly for the Alliance under the conditions that exist, same as before. And they're going to need all the good pilots they can get."

 ***

        "You'll be the first," I promised. "As for the political bullshit? There's no way I'd let Mike face it alone. Okay, he won't technically be alone--he'll have a buttload of fighters with him on Miranda when he does it. But I'm not letting him face the Feds without me backing him up. If the shit does hit the fan, I say we both jump ship and haul ass to Blue Sun. Just drop me off on Miranda when we do."

 ***

        Nika grunted a reply. "That'll go over well" is her reply. "Get back inside to your man before he decides you're rabbiting and decides to shoot you in the butt to lay you up til you get your head on straight." She pivots and heads back toward the shuttle in the pasture. "I'm sure it'll be a huge discussion tomorrow."

 ***

        "I'm not laying odds on how long it remains a discussion, but it'll be a huge something. And Nika?" I paused in pushing off the tree. "I meant what I said. If this hits the fan, I'm backing you all the way to Blue Sun. Just say the word. I'll be there."
        And I returned to the cabin before I could embarrass us further. Crossing the threshold, I found Mike as I'd left him. He lowered the rifle when he saw it was me and I closed the door with a thump.
        "Took you a while," he said, putting the rifle aside.
        "Ran into Nika."
        "And?" He shifted to make room for me.
        "We talked." I unzipped my coveralls and shrugged out of my armor.
        "About?"
        "Stuff."
        The blankets were warm against my skin where he'd lain waiting and when he reached for me, I resolutely turned off my head and let tomorrow take care of itself.

Rina's lucky to have Nika around to keep her grounded. To see why, check Nika out using the timeline links below.

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