Disclaimer: Andromeda and characters are not mine (bet that comes as a shock to you!). Infringement of Tribune's copyright is not intended. I write because I enjoy it and hopefully because people enjoy reading.
Rating: PG-13 for violence and sexual content. Nothing graphic.
Notes: I've only seen 4 episodes at the time of writing so go easy on the characterisation. This is my idea of what Harper's life was like on Earth and will probably be contradicted pretty quickly on screen. At least I hope it will. I'm looking forward to that episode already.
Cold and Bitter Slumbers
© 2000, NorthernStar
". . .and of those born on Earth, they are the vermin of our NewOrder,
they will live as vermin. . ." -- Garra Tell, Nietzschean High Commander.
***1***
Seamus Harper winced as he tried to swallow away the discomfort. His throat was sore; it felt like he had a wad of sandpaper stuffed down there.
Great, just great. He was going to get sick again.
Not that he wasn't used to illnesses. Coughs, colds, flus, measles, mumps. . .if it was out there to catch, Harper had had it at some point or other. Barely a month passed without him contracting something.
It was an annoyance, but one he'd learned to live with.
The rest of the Maru crew were as resigned to it as he. Beka would limit his duties without a second thought and Trance would appear sometime later with a bowl of hot soup and a hypo of antibiotics. Neither of them would actually mention he was ill, or ask how he was feeling. They knew better, He'd chewed them out over that too many times.
He hated being reminded he was sick.
Hated the peculiar sense of shame and guilt it brought on. Embarrassment at being weak and sickly.
Harper closed his eyes. God, he was starting to feel like shit. Was it hot in here? He felt hot inside and he was sweating.
But no, it was cold. Had to be cold. He was shivering, so it had to be cold, right?
"Oh crap," he muttered to himself.
Beka glanced across from her station. She'd been watching Harper since he'd come in. Knew that Rev was too. They recognised the signs.
Harper was sick again.
She walked up to him and touched his shoulder, surprised at the heat coming from his body. The kid was burning up.
"Take a break," she said casually. "You look like you could do with a coffee."
Dylan Hunt turned around in the Helm.
"Sorry, Harper, but I need those sensors back up first."
Beka straightened up. "Didn't your mother ever tell you it was rude to listen in to other peoples conversations?"
"We need those sensors." He repeated, "the next batch of asteroids we come across might knock out something more serious, especially if we can't see them coming."
"Well, Harper is a member of my crew, and I-"
"Our crew."
Harper leaned against the engineering panel and his mind drowned out the argument in front of him. Then he found he was sitting on the floor, his legs having decided without his permission he wanted to sit down. Both Beka and Dylan were immediately there kneeling at his side.
He attempted a smile. "Wipe-out."
"He's sick." Announced Dylan and Beka opened her mouth to retort that all those years of High Guard training hadn't gone to waste when it came to stating the obvious, but Hunt was already half way across the room to fetch a med.-pack.
Beka turned her attention to the young man beside her struggling to hide the tremors in his body. It looked really bad this time. His body had barely had time to recover from the radiation they'd been exposed to a couple of weeks ago. It had left him even more vulnerable to infections.
She brushed his blonde hair from his eyes. "I knew this would happen if you went on that station."
She'd argued that to Dylan, but the captain hadn't seen Harper ill enough times to really worry about him.
"We needed those supplies, Beka." Harper pointed out.
"He should've sent someone else."
"There was no one else." Hunt said as he knelt back at Harper's side. "Harper was the only one who knew what we needed." He took out a hypo and quickly injected the young man with a mix of painkillers and antibiotics. Harper flinched at the discomfort.
"C'mon," Dylan said helping him to his feet, "let's get you to the medical deck."
******
Trance ran the scanner over Harper with the ease of long practice. She'd told him the names of almost all the nasty bugs he caught since joining the Maru.
It was a hellva long list.
Beka stood over him, glaring occasionally at Hunt who stood on the other side of the diagnostic bed, watching Harper with a kind of quiet shock. The kind he'd seen on all his friends' faces at one time or another. The sudden realisation of what being an Earth Res. had done to him.
Harper hated that look.
It was worse for Dylan. He was seeing with his own eyes for the first time the devastation the fall of the Commonwealth had had on his people.
And realising growing up on Earth in a filthy refugee camp with little food and no clean water was nothing to be proud of.
"You've got Ynah Fever." Trance said, "it's not that serious. I'll give you something to ease the symptoms and put you on a course of Immno-boosts."
Harper groaned, "IB's always make me wanna hurl."
The purple skinned alien gave him one of her smiles as she injected him with the IB. "You should get some sleep."
"Yeah, gotta finish the sensors first."
"The nano-bots can handle that. You get some rest." Hunt ordered.
"I'm not tired." He objected, "c'mon, Boss, the nano-bots are fast, but I'm faster."
"Rest. That's an order."
******
Beka caught up with Hunt in the corridor, her arms rigid at her sides. "I warned you this could happen."
"I'm sorry about Harper but we needed those supplies." Hunt replied. "Besides, Ynah Fever isn't serious. He'll be fine."
"Isn't serious for most people. Harper doesn't have the immune system of most people."
"He made the choice, Beka. He understood the risks and volunteered for the assignment."
"Because you asked him!" she argued. "He's barely recovered from the radiation poisoning. He wasn't ready to be exposed to the kind of atmosphere aboard a station. You shouldn't have allowed him to put himself at risk."
"He's a member of this crew. And that means you are occasionally put at risk."
"From Nietzschean ships. From the Magog. Not germs he shouldn't have been exposed to in the first place."
"Beka," Dylan sighed, "I know you're worried about Harper-"
"Don't patronise me!" She snapped, "I know my crew. I know their strengths and their weaknesses. And until you know them as well as I do, you should trust my judgement."
"I do trust your judgement." Hunt relaxed the tense stance his body always adopted when he argued. "And. . .maybe you're right, maybe I shouldn't have sent Harper in there so soon after the radiation poisoning. But he is going to be fine."
Beka wasn't ready to let her anger drop. "He'd better be!" she snapped.
******
His body ached. Harper lay curled on his side; the thick quilt pulled up to his jaw to keep out the cold only he could feel. At least the beds on the Andromeda were comfortable, it was small things like that that made being ill so much easier to bear.
A faint spicy aroma rose from the bowl of broth Trance had quietly placed at his bedside. A smell he usually found enticing was having little affect on his appetite. He just didn't want to eat.
Sleep beckoned and mussed his thinking. Trance had told him his temperature was rising; her words came as a jumble as his consciousness drifted like an unanchored boat on the tide.
Was he still on the medical deck? Or was this his quarters?
His quarters. . .his quarters where?
On the Andromeda? The Maru?
Home?
Funny how he still thought of the Refugee camp as home. Funny? Oh yeah, a laugh a minute that place. . .
"Shay, c'mon, we were gonna go ragging, remember?"
Harper opened his eyes and sat up. An elfin-like girl was standing over his bed, more a pile of rags really. Her hair was matted into rat's tails, hanging limply around a thin sallow face.
"Siobhan?"
***2***
Trance looked up when Beka entered the room, heading towards Harper's bed. She smiled slightly, wringing out a cloth before laying it on Harper's forehead. The young man reacted to the touch with a mumble. His lips moving soundlessly.
"He's delirious." Trance said, her voice tight with worry.
Beka frowned, "he's not usually this bad."
The alien nodded, wiping the beats of sweat from Harper's brow. "I know."
******
Six-year-old Seamus Harper followed his cousin out of the small shanty hut his family called home. It had been built from scavenged wood and metal. The cracks were filled with mud to keep out the cold and rain and thick weave cloths hung from the roof to serve as doors and partitions. It wasn't much to look at but it was warm and dry.
And more than that, it was home.
The moment they stepped outside the smell of the camps hit them. The stench came from the lack of sanitation, the pools of stagnant water and mud all around and the filth that floated in the river.
Declan was waiting for them at the riverbank, skimming stones across the stinking water. Something he could do and Seamus couldn't, no matter how hard he tried. Declan was half a head taller than him, with dark curly hair. His dirty rags hung on his skinny frame. He was little more than a walking skeleton, they all were. So malnourished it was amazing they grew at all. The twins were nearly five months older than Harper and Siobhan was a full 30 minutes older than her brother. A fact she often reminded Declan of because she knew it annoyed him.
"Didya see that?" Dec asked, "five skips that time!"
"That's nothing," snorted Siobhan, "Podraig can do 6 almost every time!"
Mention of the twin's uncle annoyed Declan. "It's still better than you!"
"I don't care. Who wants to skip stones anyway? It's silly."
Harper sighed. They always argued like this. "Are we gonna go ragging or not?"
******
Harper hated the flies even more than the putrid smell. He'd gotten used to the stench of death, growing up in the camps, but he would never get used to the flies. . .
They swarmed around the morgue, crawled over his flesh. He could feel their little feet trickle across his skin. Feet that moments ago walked over the flesh of the corpses, laying their eggs in the dead. Eggs that would hatch into maggots and feed off the rotting meat.
God, it was too much the Magogs. . .
Harper swallowed back the wave of nausea that rose in his stomach at the thought. He hated this. Hated himself almost as much for not being able to stand up to Declan and say he wasn't going to do it. Hated the need for food that drove them all to doing such acts.
Robbing the dead.
"Hurry up!"
Harper jumped at the hissed words and glanced back to see Dec waving frantically to speed his cousin up. He ignored him. The orderlies had caught Harper on several occasions and the whipping he'd received had been painful. He wasn't about to be rushed into making too much noise and be caught again.
There were six corpses on the tables, laid out for burial. One was a child no older than he was. None of them were very old. People didn't live long in the camps.I'm going to get out of here one day. He thought for the millionth time. Not gonna die here.
At the feet of each body was a pile of clothing. The clothing they'd been wearing when they. . .
Don't think about that. Harper shuddered and scooped up the piles. Then he hurried as quietly as he could back to the gap in the wall that he and Declan had made to get into the morgue. Dec's body was poking halfway into the room to watch his cousin's back. He grabbed the clothes from Harper before disappearing back through the hole. Seamus followed him and as soon as he was out the pair began running like the devil himself was after them.
Siobhan was waiting for them at the riverbank. She took the clothes from her brother and the two boys flopped down in the mud, lungs heaving for breath.
"There's some OK stuff here." She said, holding the clothes out to look at them, "should sell easily. You and Shay better stay here, though, someone might've seen you."
******
It was dusk when the girl returned. She walked quickly, clutching a bag to her chest, constantly looking over her shoulder to see if she was being followed.
Declan saw her first, a small figure in the distance. "That-that. . . chitter!" He swore, "I've told her not to look like she's scared. Anyone can see she's hiding something walking like that."
Harper didn't like hearing Dec call his sister that, but he was right. Seamus watched the girl coming closer, his mouth aching at the thought of the food she carried. His stomach had been so empty, for so long. . .
And the food was getting closer, closer. . .
He heard Dec's gasp a second before he saw them himself. The gang of youths, the Blades by their bandannas, seemed to appear from nowhere, surrounding Siobhan, whopping and catcalling. He and Dec broke into a run, covering the distance between them, spurred on by Siobhan's frightened screams.
Dec reached them first. He grabbed one of the youths, pulling him off his sister. The youth shook him off with ease, sending the boy sprawling in the mud. Harper watched in horror as his cousin disappeared from sight and he forced his legs to go faster. He reached the knot of youths and forced his way in, his small fists hurting with the force of the blows he threw. He caught sight of Siobhan, her face covered in her own blood, being punched and slapped in an effort to get her to surrender the food. Harper managed to get hold of Siobhan arm and yank her out of the grip of the youth hitting her. Siobhan fell back against him and the pair tumbled down. The youth immediately took advantage of the situation and began kicking them. Harper twisted to avoid the kicks and tried his best to cover Siobhan's body with his own. Another youth bent over them and grabbed the food bag from Siobhan. The girl clung desperately to it but a firm kick to her ribs made her lose her grip. The youth howled in triumph as he held up the bag.
The other youths cheered and ran off, laughing and joking.
"Dec!" screamed Siobhan. "Where's Dec?"
Harper scanned the darkness and saw his cousin sit up in the mud. "Here." Dec said bitterly, "I'm OK, you alright?"
"Yeah," Harper replied.
Siobhan began to sob. "I'm sorry. I lost our food."
Harper put his arms around her. "It doesn't matter." He told her, trying to ignore the hunger gnawing at his insides.
"It does!" Snapped Declan, "I told you to be cool carrying the stuff. If you'd've listened to me. . ."
The girl buried her face in Harper's shoulder. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. . ."
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