Not My Lover: Gibson's Gift
Deslea R. Judd
Copyright 2001
DISCLAIMER: Characters not mine. Interpretation mine.
ARCHIVE: No. This one is a private one for friends. I
haven't decided whether it will be incorporated into any
"official" version of Not My Lover.
RATING: R for adult concepts and some possibly disturbing
sexual imagery.
SPOILERS: To Season 7. Spoilers for Not My Lover universe.
TIMEFRAME: This missing scene from Not My Lover takes place
during Marita's confinement at Fort Marlene.
CATEGORY/KEYWORDS: Angst, Krycek/Marita, CSM, Gibson
MORE FIC: http://fiction.deslea.com
FEEDBACK: Love the stuff. deslea@deslea.com
My son.
When Alex first brought him to me, when I was
recovering from the pathogen in our labs, I had known
perfectly well what he was doing. We had lost one child; and
so when he found another, he had brought him to me. I loved
him for wanting to heal me; I hated him for thinking he
could. But I hadn't had the heart to send the boy away; and
somewhere along the line, he had become my son after all.
That was no lie. Probably the only thing I'd said to Spender
that day that wasn't.
Funny how things turn out. If Alex hadn't tried so
damn hard to put our family back together, at least Gibson,
if not I, would still have been alive. Because make no
mistake, we weren't. Not to anyone beyond the secure walls
of Purity Control. But then again, if Gibson hadn't been
taken with me, I couldn't have achieved what I needed to
achieve in order to survive. Think about that one too long
and you'll go mad, I chastised myself. And by the way,
Marita - think about it in front of him, and you'll drive him
mad with you; so how about turning off your brain?
I wondered how much he knew. Gibson, with his strange
gift, could seek me out, could find the truth, if he so
desired. I had blocked much of it from him, building mental
barriers to keep him from the worst of my suffering, with
little idea of whether they worked. It could also be that he
had quite deliberately not sought me out at all, so that he
wouldn't have to know whether or not they'd killed me. But I
didn't think he had enough control to do that. For Gibson,
exercising his telepathy was as natural as breathing. And
like breathing, it wasn't something he could hold in for very
long. Watching him now through the glass, huddled on his
bunk in that white, airless little room, I wondered with a
pang what else he would do, deprived of any kind of humanity
for five long months. Wouldn't he seek comfort in whatever
he could? Bowing my head, I grieved silently for the little
boy lost. For everything lost.
I opened my eyes. They were wet, and I blinked them,
breathing out shakily. God, my thighs were wet, too - please
let that be sweat; please don't let that be him - and I
pressed my legs together tightly, compulsively reclaiming
that space within me as mine. Control, Marita, control. He
can't see you like this. He might be a telepath, but he is
also a frightened little boy, and you're the only mother he
has left.
I went to the doorway before me, then turned back to
the door behind me. Still no guard; he was waiting outside,
as he'd been instructed. Will wonders never cease, I
marvelled; Spender had kept his word. I rounded the corner
into Gibson's room.
"Gibson?"
He turned to face me, his eyes wide. They'd been
afraid to test him, I knew that from Spender - God forbid
they toy with his unknown biochemical balance - but Alex had
given him the vaccine after the discovery of the pathogen in
Dallas, just before our capture. He'd be in Recovery Stage
1-D, I'd calculated; and I'd prepared myself for how he must
look; but even so, I couldn't quite conceal what seeing him
did to me. Didn't bargain on this when you adopted us, did
you, sweetheart? Still want to be our son? Because this is
our world - pathogen and vaccines that are almost as bad;
death and evil and if you're really lucky you might score a
few minutes or a few hours of love in between. By what right
had we let him in for this?
I watched him, looking for recrimination in his
expression; but there was none. His white, drawn features
were etched with a blend of disbelief, grief, and something
less tangible - something adult, maybe even something aged.
If he looked bad, I looked far worse - I knew that. He sat
up in his bunk, staring at me intently, searching my thoughts
for knowledge - probably unaware that he was doing it. So I
sent him images - fragments; the least distressing ones I
could summon. Those that would explain without bringing him
harm.
Well, everything's relative, I suppose.
I made my way over to him; oh, so carefully. Walking
was a challenge of late, but I put on a good show for him.
Each step pounded in my brain, and I was grateful for that;
because that put one more barrier between Gibson's gift and
what I had done. And when I reached him and sat down heavily
at his side, he fell against me, fitting himself into the
crook of my arm. I stroked his hair, reflecting with
something like self-hatred how skeletal my fingers had
become.
"He thinks we're dead," he said in a voice that was so
low, so raw, that it sounded like steel wool on glass.
That didn't surprise me, but I felt my heart plummet -
and, side-by-side with that, a guilty kind of relief. If
Alex wasn't searching, then maybe what I had done was
justified. Maybe there really was no other way. "They told
you that?"
"I saw it in his mind. That man who smokes."
I shuddered against my will at that, the barriers in my
mind spreading open for an instant, one quick flash of him
labouring over me. Then I clamped them shut again, but
Gibson had drawn back from me. "Marita?" he said, his eyes
wide and brown, and, for an instant, so like Alexi's that I
could have sworn he was really our child.
I smoothed back his hair. "What is it?" Except I knew
what it was, and I should never have come here. I should
never have inflicted this on him. Thought after self-
reproaching thought flew through my mind, each one
incriminating me more than the last, and all of them on
display for him. All but the thought under the thought that
must at all costs be concealed.
He was watching me, inquisitive eyes suddenly alive
with urgency. "I saw something. Something real fast.
Something you're trying to stop me from seeing."
"No, Gibson, honestly," I said with breathless haste,
"there's nothing." He looked at me in frank disbelief, and I
conceded, "Nothing you want to know, anyway."
"Why did they let you come to me?" he demanded.
"Because - because I'm co-operating with the tests," I
said quickly, then cursed myself. He couldn't quite see the
truth; but he could see a lie.
"Why did they let you come to me?" he insisted. He was
staring at me, eyes piercing and disturbingly adult, flashing
with barely restrained power. He was so damn strong and I
was so damn weak, and I shrank back from him, just a little.
He felt it, felt my weakness betrayed, and he used that one
moment, that one little window to see. And what he saw made
him draw his breath in, gasping in a child's voice as his
mind was thrust rudely over the cusp of adulthood. Watching
him, I saw in my mind's eye what he saw; and seeing it
through his eyes, I mourned in a way I couldn't mourn through
my own.
From that strange, twin perspective, within myself and
without, I saw Spender push me against the tiled wall of my
room. I saw him drag the paper gown off my shoulders,
sliding it down my body, rubbing his body against mine,
stinking of cigarettes and something more basic, something
filthy and rotten that seemed to come from deep within him.
Arching my neck to look at the ceiling, so goddamn white, and
thinking of snow. Snow in Ateni. Alex taking me on our
wedding night. God, we'd been so in love. Like teenagers.
He'd made love to me a thousand times, and this could be one
time more, if only I imagined hard enough. Those unfamiliar
hands, larger and coarser and less sure of their ground -
they could be his, if only I could believe it, if only I
didn't look.
Except Alex had never had to part my thighs, because
drawing him into me was something I'd done as instinctively
as breathing. And if I thought about why I didn't now, about
why he had to push them until I clenched my teeth and parted
them through sheer strength of will, I might remember it was
the man who had killed my mother and my child. And if I
remembered that, I might have to scream.
Gibson was weeping.
He was staring at me in horror, his breath coming in
fast, hitching sobs. I was filled with remorse. Why on
earth had I come to him? Why had I made him my excuse?
"You did that...to see me?" he managed, at last. "For
ME? How COULD you! How COULD YOU!" he screamed. He got off
the bed, and backed away, shouting, "I don't want you to do
that for me!" He took a few, lurching steps, and slumped
down on the floor in the corner, his shoulders hunched.
I went to him. I was weeping too, on the point of
hysteria. "Gibson, no, this isn't your fault," I said
urgently, kneeling before him. "I wanted to see you, and I
told him I'd do...that...if I could see you; but that's not
why. It was something else." He stared up at me, gaze
darting back and forth over my face, searching for signs of
falsehood. He was shaking. "It isn't your fault. It isn't
your fault."
Hesitantly, he put a hand up to my neck, touching my
jaw where *he'd* touched it, a childlike hand, an adult
gesture. I recognised it for what it was, a confused attempt
to replace one memory with another, and I loved him for it
even as a little part of me wanted to shrink away. "What,
then?" he whispered finally.
I stroked back his hair a little. "They're going to
kill me, Gibson." His face crumpled a little, and the blood
rushed to his cheeks. "I'm not useful anymore. The
decision's already been made." Tears began to slip down his
cheeks at the same moment as I felt mine, and for a surreal
moment it was as though we occupied the same space,
juxtaposed over one another like two parts of the same whole.
I said urgently, "The only way they won't kill me is if I get
pregnant. They'll want to know, Gibson. They'll want to
know what the vaccine does to the baby."
"You want to make a baby? With HIM?"
I bowed my head. "There's no-one else. Look at me," I
said softly. I didn't have to show him the hollows of my
hips or the wasting at my breasts, though I had a horrible
feeling he knew they were there. These days, my ordeal was
in every line of my face, every contour of my body. "No-one
else would." And then I realised with bitter irony that had
Gibson been two or three years older, there might have been
another choice after all. Good work, Marita, I chastised
myself; you just managed to think of something even more
destructive than this after all. But it was a shadow of a
thought, thankfully transitory, and it was gone, blown away
(chased away?) before he could perceive it.
"What about the baby?" he was saying.
"I'll have the baby," I said. "I'll love the baby." I
cradled the boy's face with my palms, then drew one of his
hands to my belly where, God willing, our salvation was
forming even as we spoke. "This baby is going to bring us
home."
"But what if Alex doesn't want us anymore?"
I drew him close; said with more conviction than I felt, "He
will."
But deep down, I wasn't so sure.
Author's note: If you read this without knowledge of the Not
My Lover universe, you're probably pretty confused right
about now. Fortunately, there's a cure: Not My Lover is
complete, and available at http://fiction.deslea.com.