Do Unto Others

[Suji]

Author's Note: This is backstory for Helena, which took place sometime after her family went on the run, and before she joined the Vancouver faction. It's a bit of a lead-up to how she found the resistance, let alone got from the mid-US to western Canada. You can find bits of backstory leading up to the following story in this post.

As a note, there are going to be some violence. The story isn't centered around gratuitous violence or anything, but I figured a moderate warning was applicable. =)

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I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.

– To Kill a Mocking Bird

Property is surely a right of mankind as real as liberty.

– John Adams

[Suji]

Mal was waking up, groggily. Helena sat on the roof of the cab, looking down at his exposed back. Without short reach was her backpack, and in there was the handgun she’d ran away with. She didn’t want to take it out (didn’t want to have to think about what that implied), but she was too smart to completely toss away the saying ‘better safe than sorry.’ Really, she shouldn’t have to worry. After figuring out how to fasten those cuffs around his wrists, she didn’t think he was going anywhere. That was the point of the things, wasn’t it?

“Ugh,” he tried to shake he head, but there was a neck break keeping it positioned with his ear turned to the side. She assumed that was so the slug could get out and back in easily. Helena tossed down a bottle that was still half-full of its contents.

“Rohypnol right?” The container bounced in the truck bed and then rolled around a bit before lying on its side.

“Helena? What is this?”

“I mean, that’s what I figure. Beats me why you had the stuff, though I’m sure you’ll tell me eventually. I think you’ll tell me a lot of things.” She wasn’t angry, and there was no righteousness in her voice—just level-headed honesty.

“Helena, I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but let me out of whatever this is!”

“It must have been convenient though. You probably drugged me the second or so night, or maybe I was still so far gone you didn’t have to, while you used your little pool there.”

“Helena! What are you talking about-”

“Then sometime again after that. Maybe you waited just two days, didn’t want to cut it close—or maybe you waited the full three. I mean, why not? I’m just a lonely runaway. Not a threat.”

“Listen, if you let me out of this, I can explain-”

“I highly doubt that. That’s a… a Kandrona, that’s the word right? A Kandrona pool.”

“What?”

“C’mon. I was running away to join a resistance. And the people you all are invading aren’t completely clueless about how you operate. Overt warfare tends to throw secrecy out the window.”

“Helena, I’m not a Controller! Let me out, I’ll explain!”

“What really gets me though,” Helena wasn’t talking to him now though—the dialogue was more thinking aloud. “What really gets me, is that it never crossed my mind. I thought, hey, he’s alone, and far away from any major cities. I hadn’t seen anything but waste land for a few days before I collapsed—just a bunch of abandoned nothingness. So I didn’t see how one of you could travel that far, cross –country like we have, without hitting anywhere where they’d put one of their pools. That, and you just seemed so… normal.”

At this, Helena winced. She looked thoroughly disappointed in herself.

“I AM normal! Helena, Jesus, I’ll prove it!”

“And then, then I found this bugger. Didn’t exactly give me the warm fuzzies. If you guys have these things circling around, there really isn’t going to be much hope for us in the future, is there? You really will be able to go anywhere.”

“JUST LET ME OUT OF THIS!”

His back and neck were still exposed to her, and he struggled at the wrist holds and neck brace. She made a face, and sucked on her teeth for a moment before sliding off of the cab to the bed of the truck. It shook back and forth where she landed. Mal tensed and went silent, holding his breath, waiting to see if she actually would release him.

She stepped towards the end of the truck-bed, and hunkered down so that they where eye-to-eye. Helena could sense concern there, and fear, but there was also hope. Hope, she realized, that was not all coming from the same source. The yeerk was hoping she’d set him free. And so is the man.Helena’s gaze was impassive, steeled.

“You’re free to leave any time you’d like.”

Confusion spread over Mal’s features. Helena held his eyes for a beat, and then looked down, into the pool. The sludgy water was churning, while the generator inside continued to hum. Her eye’s flicked back up to his, and as comprehension dawned on him, she saw the reaction of fear once again take hold of his body. Only it’s not his. It’s just acting out that thing’s fear. Mal’s pupils dilated, and the muscles of his jaw went slack.

Helena did not smile—in fact, she did not express any emotion at all. She simply stood back up on her young, strong legs, took a few steps, and hopped out onto the ground. His screaming pleas followed her all the way inside the store, only becoming slightly muffled as the door shut behind her. The little bells attached to the doorway chimed.

---

Helena was watching Mal from inside the store: after a bit of fiddling with the wires underneath the counter, she had gotten the surveillance camera outside to work. Only one of the plugs on the board worked, so that meant she could only fire up one monitor at a time, but it wasn’t like she needed to keep an eye on the precarious, nonexistent shoplifters inside the store. She thanked the powers that be that the tiny gas station had its own generator; she guessed there were some perks to travelling in the middle of nowhere. People tended to cater to practical needs rather than just comfort.

From the way his head was angled, he was looking out over the bed of the truck, staring across Midwestern United States, and couldn’t see into the store. She doubted that he could even twist his neck enough to see the camera she was using the watch him. Her eyes were fixated on the point just below his ear—waiting to see a slug slither out. The water in the pool was murky, but it was also shallow enough that she’d probably see it in there, too.

Helena had left the generator in the portable pool on for the simple reason that she had no idea how to turn it off. Now she hopped it would act as temptation on the creature inside of this man (she guessed he was actually more of a stranger than the person she’d spent the last few days with) drew near to starvation. Sooner or later, the hunger would become too great. It would have to leave. She knew because it made simple sense: in the same way that if a person was starving, they’d eat whatever even resembled food.

She munched on a granola bar as she waited, but the chewing was mechanical, barely a conscious action: her eyes didn’t move from the screen, and she barely blinked. Helena was not the kind of person given to daydreams: her attention was complete and absolute when she set her mind to it (and she did set her mind to things often, and therefore had a lot of practice under her belt). So she watched.

Six hours later she reached beside her, still mostly watching the screen, and opened the first energy drink. It wasn’t cold—there had been a crate in the back that she’d dragged up to the counter—and it tasted awful, but she drank it anyway. And continued to watch.

By the fourth drink or so, it was mid-morning of the next day. Mal was slumped completely against the bearing on the pool, and Helena went to see him for the first time since she’d left him screaming after her. She was holding a bottle of water, and after climbing onto the bed of the truck, she dribbled some of it over his lips.

As his eyes opened, she could see a craze already settling in them: he was much worse off than she had left him—or at least, the monster inside of him was. Still, he drank. Not for long, but long enough to soothe his hoarse throat… so that he could start pleading with her again.

“Let me out of this, Helena. Please. Just let me out.”

“I told you, you can leave any time you want-”

“And then what?” Yes, there was a wildness in his eyes that hadn’t been there before—she realized that he was probably already nearing the panic point: the slug hadn’t fed in a while, had probably meant to before he got sick, then got caught with a puking host inside for a time. “Then you reach in and pull me out of the pool anyway? Squish me in your hand? Stamp on me? Maybe even leave me to die on the barren, dusty ground?” His voice was full of hateful bitterness, and tears were forming in his eyes.

Only they weren’t the slug’s tears, were they? They were being formed by this stranger’s tear ducts. They were stolen.

---

Helena merely stared at him. She was not given to sympathy, and wasted no mental ability on imaging what it would be like to be in her captive’s metaphorical shoes. She didn’t care.

“Please, just let me go. Please. I won’t tell anyone about you. Please. Please. Have mercy!”

She was unmoved.

“I saved you! I-I-I took you in! Brought you back to health! You would have been dead in a day if I hadn’t saved you!”

At this, Helena did pause. It was the truth. He did save her. And for someone as straight-forward as she was, one good turn did deserve another. Or at least: she believed in fairness. Maybe even in some way Helena believed in honor—or at least wanted to. But it was hard to find anything worth respecting enough to honor in a creature that had set about destroying her civilization and hijacking the bodies of her kind.

“Why did you save me?”

At this, Mal whimpered, licked his lips with a tongue that was still mostly dry. “I don’t like seeing creatures suffer.”

She quietly regarded this.

“He didn’t want to save you, you know.” The hunger in Mal’s eyes flashed. “He said that I should leave you! That you would be better off dead-”

“-than being a slave, which is what you were eventually planning on, weren’t you? I’m sure you weren’t going to take me to the end of the line and wish me a happy farewell, to wander off as one of the remaining free humans.”

“Don’t be foolish!” His voice cracked, and reflexively, Helena held the tip of the water bottle up for him to drink some more. It wasn’t out of kindness necessarily, but there was no reason for her to let this man’s body suffer. After drinking a few gulps, Mal coughed and spurted. “Don’t be… how could you choose death over… over… occupation!” He was sincerely flummoxed.

Helena let out a brutish, short laugh. “You guys aren’t exactly trapezing across the border of the Rhineland here.”

At this something unexpected happened: the expression on Mal’s face changed, spasmed was probably a good word, and he laughed. It was abrupt and harsh sounding—as if it had gone unused for a long time. Mal’s face contorted again, and he blinked, and shook his head.

“I’ll let you go. I swear it. Please.”

“You know that’s not enough.”

“Then what is!” His voice was high, exasperated—not desperate yet, but not far from it.

“You’re not leaving here in that body.”

“But I need it-”

“Yeah. I was thinking about that, actually.” Helena stood from her crouching position, paced a few steps. “Why are you out here all alone? I hadn’t heard of any ‘portable’ pools before, so either they’re a well-kept secret, they’re rare, or they’re new. Maybe a combination thereof. How’d you come by one? What made you so deserving?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

Helena arched her eyebrows.

“Do you think you scare me?!” There was an edge of panic in his voice, but there was also anger. “YOU DON’T!” This was a bellow, and she controlled the desire to wince a little. “Do you know what they’ll do to me? They can make the starvation last for weeks if they want to, little girl. You’re an amateur!” The last word was little more than a hiss.

“Sticks and stones,” Helena responded under her breath. “I’ll be back when the starvation you’re facing now begins to frighten you more than the fear of starvation in the future.” And again, she returned to the store to watch him from the small terminal she had set up. She kept her back straight until she was inside, but once there she sighed, exhausted. It’d been a while since she’d slept, and she was glad that she didn’t think he had that much longer in him. If he was running on a full three days worth of juice, she might not have been able to keep herself awake to watch him.

Helena popped open another energy drink, and then resettled in front of the small surveillance screen.