by J. M. Frey
Basil sat up and waved something triangular in Gwen’s face that was silverish and sprouting wires like feathers. “Got it,” he said triumphantly, trying to win back the easy banter that his admission had quenched. “Now we can go back inside and I can murder your father’s overcompensating excuse for a video player, and get us the bloody hell out of here.”
Gwen’s grin was wide and twinkling and oh-so-much like Gareth’s and at the same time baby Gwennie’s that Evvie’s stomach lurched sideways and she thought maybe she was going to be sick again.
“Look,” Basil added, digging into his breast pocket and coming up with a small metallic disk. Evvie was too far away to be able to tell, but it looked like it was made out of some sort of multicoloured, shining plastic or steel. “They even left us music to work by.” Basil snorted and shoved it in his pocket without looking at it again. “What would I play it in, anyway?”
“Certainly not the Betamax.” Gwen rolled her shoulders. “You know, when we get back, Dad will make you pay for it.”
“With interest. Balls.” Basil scratched the side of his nose, leaving a long smear of rainbow-slick engine fluid along his cheek. “I’ll buy him an HDTV — one of the ‘spensive ones that fold out and go flat against the wall, yeah?”
Gwen pulled a tissue from her pocket and scrubbed at the smear, and though he winced, Basil suffered manfully.
“I can’t wait to see the look on his face when he sees us again,” Gwen said, eyes on his cheek.
“On both their faces,” Basil added happily.
And as quickly as that, the laughter was murdered.
“I can’t do this,” Gwen admitted brokenly, in a rush, and that was when the shaking started. She buried her face into Basil’s neck, her back hitching with visible wrenching, dry gasps that struck Evvie, made her heart hurt and the back of her throat close up.
She was torn.
She wanted to go down, hold Gwen, touch her and soothe, but this woman was not Evvie’s child and Evvie wanted nothing (everything) to do with her and her misery.
She was (Evvie’s) not what she wanted.
Gwen’s eyes were wet, but Evvie saw no tears on her cheeks, and she was blinking furiously, refusing to let them fall as firmly as Evvie had moments earlier. A family trait?
Had Evvie’s mother ever cried in front of her? She couldn’t remember.
“Shhh, shhh,” Basil said, running his fingers through the hair at the back of Gwen’s head, toying with the small curls that were really Evvie’s curls, flipping them across fingernails etched with the guts of electronics and the mechanical oils (blood) of the spaceship. He nudged Gwen’s forehead gently with his nose, murmuring directly into her ear, too soft and intimate for Evvie to hear. He raised his chin, kissed the scar once, kissed each dry eyelid, then Gwen’s mouth, comforting and crooked and so filled with want that Evvie had to look away, at the floor, at the damp rug. She peered over the edge of the tub at Gwennie dozing, snuffling haplessly against the fuzzy towel.
“Right then,” Evvie finally heard Basil murmur. “What can’t you do?”
“I can’t go back in there. I can’t…” and the sucking of breath started again, a bit slower and a bit quieter. “Pretend that this is easy. That this is where I want to be. It’s all too much, on top of…” When Evvie turned back to look again, Gwen’s face was pale, sheeted with cold sweat, but there were still no tears on her cheeks. “I can’t face her.”
“Who, your mother?”
It felt like a punch in the chest.
“Did you see the way she looked at me? Basil…she hates me.”
A tidal surge of guilt and grief passed through Evvie, and she wished that the words would wink out of existence; as much as they hurt, they were true, true, true, and that’s what pained her most of all.
“I didn’t choose this!” Gwen hissed, her shoulders hunched up by her ears, defensive, angry, spitting. “I only translate stuff! No one told me when I signed that confidentiality form that they were going to split apart my world and then hand me the puzzle and tell me to reassemble it with a gun.”
“None of us did, Gwen. Be fair,” Basil said softly.
“I’ll be fair when she’s fair! Fuck.”
Evvie blinked at the cuss, wondered idly which one of her parents Gwen had learned it from, because she couldn’t, didn’t want to see the rage that it translated instead.
“The way she…I didn’t want to be a…a soldier. I didn’t want any of this!” She threw her arms out, gestured at the backyard, the hole in the ground, the place where the corn bordered the grass of the backyard. “I am in the past, my past, where I caused the scar on my own forehead by blowing off the head of an assassin from another planet and my mother hates me, and this is just way too freaking science fiction for my comfort level!”
Didn’t want to?
Evvie saw the half smile try to slide into the corner of Basil’s mouth. “Does that make me the acerbic genius? Or, no, I most definitely am the engineering geek. Ha! We are ‘Stargate.’ I am so Rodney McKay! And that makes you Samantha Carter. ‘Cause, Amanda Tapping? Hot.”
Evvie resisted grabbing the side of her head. What were they talking about now? Were these things she would read about in the news one day? A knot of panic pushed against her sternum and she took a deep breath. Their idioms and similes were making Evvie’s head hurt, making an already baffling situation so viscerally confusing as to be nearly physically painful.
Evvie didn’t understand.
Instead, Evvie focussed on Gwen, perched vulnerable and scared in the arms of the man she obviously loved, just as confused as her mother.
Wasn’t a soldier.
Gwen punched his arm. “Kinda having an existential crisis here!”
Mistake.
“Ow,” Basil muttered morosely. Instead of hitting back, he wrapped his arms around her shoulders, reeling her in, holding her against his chest and kissing the top of her head, the shell of her ear, the line of her neck. “I love you,” he said. “And I’m here with you, and for now, that’s good enough, innit?” he said.
Saved my life.
“I miss…” she whispered into his shoulder.
Saved her own.
Basil’s breath hitched. “I miss him, too. I wish he was here.”
Isn’t a…
“That wasn’t what I was going to say,” Gwen snapped, perhaps a bit too quickly, too vehement in her denial. Basil’s mouth slanted in such a way that said he had noticed it, too. “I don’t. I can’t believe… the least he could have done was admit to it. Let me hate him all the way, instead of playing fucking innocent up until the moment they blew a hole in his — ”
“You don’t mean that, Gwen,” Basil said, his voice high and a little desperate. He pulled her close, buried her face in his neck, rocking her, muffling the rest of her sentence. “Yeah? You don’t mean that.”
Only doing what she has to.
Basil pressed his cheek against her hair, swaying them back and forth, one hand around her head, one arm tight around her neck. His own breath was short and uneven, panicked. “You don’t really mean that, you can’t, you loved him.”
What she has to.
Gwen pushed him away, enough to look up into his face, head craned like a furious, puce-faced Scarlet O’Hara. “Just rig up a damn Flasher. Get me the hell out of here.” She sniffled once, then hiccoughed. It would have been a laugh if it hadn’t been so wet-sounding. “Before we descend into more bad sci-fi clichés.”
Basil snorted out a little puff of laughter, which ruined the Rhett Butler pose, but he still tilted his head so their noses wouldn’t bump, then kissed her long and slow and sad.
“They just shot him,” Basil said against Gwen’s lips, shaking like an addict, pulling back just a fraction to give his mouth just enough mobility to form words. “There was nothing I could do. Aitken panicked and just…just shot him.”
“Kalp sold us out,” Gwen said back, a bitter, chiding reminder.
“He didn’t, you can’t think — ”
“Can’t think what?” Gwen hissed. “They knew that we started training the microsecond after the first assassination. Somebody told them what kind of training we were doing. Somebody was selling them information.”
“That doesn’t mean it was Kalp —”
“Well who else?” Gwen snarled. She pressed her hands against his shoulders like she was trying to push him away, but he wouldn’t let go. He fisted his hands in the fabric of her shirt. “There was the letter. And that…that thing you used in the Flasher to get us here. All that time he was with us — ”
“No.”
“All that time he was in our bed —”
“No, Gwen.”
“All that time he talked about units and ‘it’s the person, not the plumbing.’ He made us look like fools.” Basil kissed her temple, the top of her head, her cheek, silently, with desperation. “The Institute stood up on international fucking television and condemned the protesters for being such racists, such goddamned homophobes, for him, defended what we had for him, and he…he…”
She buried her face in his neck again, and her shuddering grief was palatable in the night air. Evvie imagined she could taste the salt of Gwen’s unshed tears, feel her daughter shaking against her own hands. Basil reached up, brushed the pad of his thumb across Gwen’s forehead, tracing the scar.
“He did that to me. It’s his fault,” Gwen said.
It sounded to Evvie like Gwen was trying to squash whatever affection Basil still clung to.
Enough.
Evvie left the window, gathered Gwennie up and put on a new bandage and some antiseptic cream. The baby protested with a dozy whimper, and Evvie went to put her down in the nursery. Mark was already there, standing beside Gwennie’s open window, staring at the backyard, clutching the teddy bear he had bought Gwennie before he had ever met her.
For a moment they stood together, suspended between the dark of the room and the sudden dawn of understanding.
“I don’t hate her,” Evvie confessed, quietly, as she set Gwennie down in her crib. “It’s not hate, it’s…” How could Evvie hate her when she was suffering just as much (more) as Evvie was? “But I’m scared of her. What she’s brought with her.”
“Reckon she’s scared, too,” Mark replied.
***
Twilight, and Mark went out to the barn to do the last of the day’s milking. Evvie went upstairs to check on Gwennie and wake her for her feeding. She didn’t expect that either she or Mark were going to sleep any time soon, but the little rituals of the world didn’t stop just because two strange people had dropped out of the sky. Evvie found Basil standing in the dark at the foot of Gwennie’s crib, staring, watching silently as the baby slept. It should have made Evvie uncomfortable — instead, she found it strangly endearing, though still mostly creepy.
Evvie shifted from foot to foot in the doorway, then made a decision.
“Do you want to hold her?” she asked.
He raised his head slightly, not surprised by Evvie’s sudden question, and she realized that he had probably known Evvie was there the whole time. He was (scary) special ops trained.
“Don’t want to wake her,” he said.
“She’s going to wake herself in about five minutes.” Evvie padded across the wooden floor to stand beside him and stare down at her child. She held out the bottle. “I’ve discovered that if I do the waking, she’s less cranky than if she does it on her own.”
Basil took the bottle with another small, crooked grin. “That’s truth for the next twenty-nine years, too,” he admitted.
Evvie reached down into the crib, rubbed Gwennie’s tummy gently until she cracked a sleepy, hopeful eye. Food time, Mom?
Basil chuckled. “I know that face. That’s the where’s-my-damn-coffee face.”
Gwennie suffered Evvie scooping her up, offering nothing more than a gummy yawn when she transferred Gwen to Basil’s arms.
“Mind her head,” Evvie said softly, and obviously needlessly; Basil already had a large, gun-calloused palm cradling her expertly.
He lifted the bottle to her mouth, hummed a bit when she took the nipple without protest, and smiled. “She looks like a tennis ball. Just like my sister’s kids,” he said.
“You have a sister?” Evvie asked, seizing on the tidbit of information; wanting desperately to make (it right) conversation.
“Mm,” he said, nodding once, slowly. His eyes never left Gwennie’s face, mesmerized, probably looking for the woman he loved in the baby fat and button nose. Evvie had done the opposite earlier. “Two. Older. Right horrors to grow up with — teased me for years. We got close after they both got married, and I realized how…empty my life is. Was.” He smiled softly, and Evvie knew he was seeing things, people behind his eyes, that she could never know. “Used to be.”
Another question danced around the room, and Evvie ignored it, even as she felt it crawl into her mouth.
“What’s a Kalp?” She asked instead, frantic to keep the sound of voices in the semi-dark, or she might forget that he was human, might forget that they had saved her, might forget that he was hurting, might forget everything but her own irrational fear and that these people were strange. And that she (pitied) loved Gwen anyway.
Had to love her because Evvie couldn’t hate her.
“Who,” Basil corrected glumly. “He…he was killed by, uh…another Specialist. He was…he was smart. He was…” Basil swallowed hard. “He used to mean a lot to Gwen and me. Before…well, before.”
He looked up, eyes finding the silhouette of the corn against the darkening sky, seeing people and shadows and things that made the corner of his crooked mouth pull down. “Kalp lived with us. We were a…an Agl — a team,” he said, correcting himself before he actually made the verbal slip, mindful of his audience. He gave a little huffing chuckle. “We shared a house. Kalp wanted to get chickens, ‘cause the people in the movies always have chickens. British gardens and estates and all that. He devoured movies, liked the way the hum of the electronics felt against his skin. Never mind that we only had a small garden. A fox got at one, and Gwen had to strangle the poor thing with her bare hands. I couldn’t bear to watch, but the sound was enough. Kalp made mushroom sauce and I refused to go into the kitchen until its eyes were gone. Gwen thought it was the funniest thing…”
He frowned again, trailed off, closed his eyes.
Basil seemed disinclined to say anything more.
The other question weighed heavily on Evvie’s tongue, pressing until she would suffocate from it if she didn’t ask: “How can you love her?”
Basil looked up, really looked Evvie in the face for the first time, and stared at her with cold, firm eyes. “Do you think I would still be with Gwen if I didn’t? Especially after Kalp?”
“I didn’t mean — ”
“Yes. You did.”
The loud sucking pop of Gwennie smacking her lips off the nipple startled Evvie, and she bundled her close when Basil passed her back, lifting Gwennie to her shoulder to rub the baby’s back. Evvie wanted to run, out of the room, out of the house, out of this strange “Twilight Zone” episode that was suddenly her life, but Gwennie needed burping, needed tucking in, and Mark would want to wash up, then Evvie had dishes to do, bottles to prepare…Too much.
“I should be working,” Basil said. “We need to get back. Fix this.”
“What about the other people?” Evvie asked. Already Gwennie’s eyes were getting heavy, but Evvie wouldn’t put her down until she had belched. She patted Gwennie’s back encouragingly, perhaps a bit too vigorously.
“What about them?” Basil asked coldly.
“Aren’t you worried that other people are ceasing to exist all over the place?”
Basil sighed, rubbed his eyes with the thick pads of his fingers. “Not to be callous, but the only people I’m worried about right now are me and Gwen. The other people, the babies being murdered? Well, I d
on’t know them. They never grew up, never became Specialists. The world shifted and someone else took their place, and those someone elses are my friends, aren’t they? I never knew them, so if they die I don’t — I won’t care.”
“That is callous,” Evvie said angrily, pulling Gwennie tight against her chest. Gwennie responded with a little urp! in Evvie’s ear. “You may not know them, but they’re still someone’s child.”
Basil looked at the floor. “Look, the machines only have enough power to Flash every few days, which doesn’t really mean a lot when it comes to time travel, but it’s a better hope than anything else. So if we can get back there before they go off again, then we’ll do what we can, okay? I don’t want people dying anymore than you do, but I also have a duty to the Institute. “
Evvie stared at him, tasted her heartbeat on the back of her tongue. “Will they come back here?”
“They probably know that their assassin failed by now. So yeah, might do. Which,” he ploughed on, interrupting her next question, “is why I must go and make shiny, complicated things now. You have tea?”
“Lots — in…in the cupboard next to the fridge. Six kinds.”
“Lovely. Really. Another sleepless night for the amazing Doctor Basil Grey.” The corners of his bright eyes crinkled slightly with a small grin. “I tend to do the not-sleeping thing a lot. Lots of close deadlines. Sort of come to live on the adrenaline rush. Drives Kalp and Gwen mad when I crawl into bed at dawn — ” He made a sour, choking face. “Drove. Bollocks.” He shook his head once, viciously. Then he sighed, low and long, like a tire leaking. “There’s just me, and they literally have time on their side.”
“I don’t hate her,” Evvie blurted, apropos of nothing. “I just don’t understand.”
Basil didn’t even blink. “So go talk to her,” he said. “God knows what she needs is more trust issues right now.”
***
Gwen was sitting at the kitchen table in the dark.
She was leaning back in her chair, the front two feet raised above the linoleum, wavering with each indrawn breath. Her knees were braced against the edge of the wooden table, and in her hand was a mug of milky tea. Her jacket and her heavy vest were piled artlessly on the end of the table, leaving her in a black tee-shirt that revealed well-toned arms.