Waiting?

He should have expected this from the first but he hadn’t. Maybe because it wasn’t that often that a guy you love turns out to be an alien, people didn’t tend to be from outer space, at least not round here. All these years and he hadn’t known that Tobias wasn’t human. Nathan probably would have figured it out, but Nathan had always been smarter than him, not that Scott ever would have told him that.

He ought to have known that there was something different about Tobias, but he hadn’t noticed because he’d been told to expect him to be different. Admittedly, the powers that be couldn’t have known quite how different but they’d told Scott that he would be, so Scott didn't investigate when Tobias did things that were odd, things that he theoretically shouldn't have been able to do.

Plus when you’re a 25-year-old Navy guy working for NASA doing the only thing you ever wanted to do, you don’t rock the boat, and so what if he had acted a little oddly, they’d told you he would, so ignore it.

That had been why he’d been chosen to watch over Tobias LeCont. That was another funny thing; he was always Tobias, never Toby, Tobe or any other nickname. No matter how young he had been, or who he was talking to, it had always been Tobias.

It was a strange brief to be assigned to, but he could understand his commanding officer’s decision. The Colonel needed someone intelligent, so that Tobias could talk to them, and as Scott had had training in both aquatic and space sciences, he could bluff his way through a conversation if necessary. And Scott was staunchly military so if that time ever came and Tobias needed to be ‘removed’ he could do that to. He was adaptable, as shown by his switch to the space programme, and he was pretty much people-friendly, but that was only because he hadn’t had the time or the power to make proper enemies yet.

So this officer scientist was told to watch over the latest young scientific genius. These were worse than your ordinary geniuses, because not only did you have to cope with the ego problems, the neuroses and the quirks, they had an extra layer of teenage angst on top. And spots.

It was always the same story, these young kids would be worked to the limits of their spectacular capacity, come up with one earth-changing idea, be squeezed dry of everything else and then be left to rot in an asylum when they went crazy as they inevitably did.

From the first however, Tobias was different. For one, he wasn’t spotty. And he had a personality. He was arrogant yes, but smart and funny too. He seemed to be far older than his birth certificate indicated.

Of course, Scott fell headlong in love.

This was a problem. Don’t ask; don’t tell actually translated to don’t even think about it soldier or else we’ll bust you down to Civvie Street faster than you can say Jack Robinson. And from his experiences before he joined the military, Scott knew he wasn’t cut out for civilian life.

He had thought he’d saluted lust out of himself, five hundred sit-ups at a time to release tension. And it had worked, up until then.

Trying not to think of Tobias and the way he affected him got to be like trying to ignore a herd of pink elephants.

They worked together all the time, and when they weren’t working, they socialised together. Scott was really the only person Tobias could socialise with, everyone else was either too old or were too busy trying to get fit for the next mission. There were a couple of others, ground crew mainly, who joined them sometimes, depending on the duty roster, but most of the time it was just the two of them.

Tobias used to tell the most wonderful tales about life on the African planes, about lions, gazelles and crocodiles. Scott’s favourite stories were about the zebras, how they cooperated and how they swum, best of all, how they could blend into the background.

Scott learnt that trick, and was being moved steadily up the ranks. But he still couldn’t get on the Mars mission and all his ideas about interplanetary travel never got off the ground. He felt certain that they would work if only someone would give him and them a chance.

He was working on them one night, when he really ought to have been sleeping but this was his dream, so he felt no need for sleep. There was a knock on the door, and when Scott opened it Tobias was standing there. Which was unusual, he should have been tucked away, asleep in bed, not roaming round the corridors, not least of all in a sector that was all military. All that meant was that the rooms weren’t as comfortable and there wasn’t as much furniture as in the science quarters. It was liveable so it didn’t matter to Scott.

Tobias made some feeble excuse about being unable to sleep and being able to see Scott’s light on and thinking he had the same problem. Scott knew it was a lie because Tobias’s room looked out onto the lake not back into the complex but Scott let him in anyway. Company was company and he needed it because he’d been stuck on the same technical detail for the past two nights and needed a break. Tobias asked what he was working on, so Scott explained, and immediately Tobias started pointing out what was wrong with the plan. Scott knew he should have been angry, this was his baby and now some upstart was telling him that he was basically all wrong. But he couldn’t be angry; Tobias was just trying to help. And he was making sense, explaining why it couldn’t work, not in the theoretical realm but using reasonable concrete examples. It wasn’t that Scott couldn’t understand the pure theory, but sometimes he would disregard it because it was mostly unproven.

So they spent the rest of the night discussing the physics of his design. Paper was scribbled on, notes were made, and strange diagrams inexplicable in the morning were drawn. It was great fun and good science. Despite this, the General was not impressed when he found them still deep in discussion the next morning. Scott was lucky to get away with a warning. Tobias, still being the prize asset at that time, was let off without one.

That became another part of their routine, spending Friday night discussing Scott’s latest crackpot theory on interstellar travel, or refining one of them. Fridays were good for this because it meant they could sleep in on Saturday morning once they’d finally got to sleep.

It was nice. Scott even forgot the bitterness he felt over not being allowed to go on the Mars mission. But it couldn’t last, nothing good ever did.

Tobias was only partly to blame, it was mainly their superiors that were at fault, but he did egg them on. The chief scientist of the Mars mission base back on Earth was a grey little man. He was clever, no doubt, but very set in his ways. If Newton, Einstein or Hawking didn’t say so, then it could not be. Tobias’s main interest lay in density and whether it would be possible to achieve infinite density of the sort required for a black hole to form and whether this was controllable and could be harnessed for inter-stellar travel.

According to Einstein, no, but Tobias was determined to find out. Okay with what Scott knew now, it was obvious that Tobias already knew that it was possible because this wonderful tech he had worked on it, but at the time, Tobias must have been trying to point humanity in the right direction. Back then though it wasn’t obvious. The grey little man said he was acting like a child, and refused to fund him further. Anyone with any sense would have let it lie until the old man retired, his successor might be more willing to fund the research. But Tobias never had any common sense. He kept pushing and pushing until the committee had had enough. Either he would work without complaint on the task they had set him or he would be thrown out.

So Tobias complained and was given two weeks notice.

He was twenty-one by now while Scott was twenty-nine and a Major. Officially he had to side with the committee, unofficially he thought, all bias excluded, that Tobias’s idea might be crackpot and probably wouldn’t work but it was at least trying to extend the bounds of human knowledge which was what Scott thought science was supposed to be about.

They were working in Tobias’s research lab when it happened. It was Tobias’s last day, but there was none of the usual pomp and circumstance. He wasn't a very popular person with the science staff because of his brilliance, his youth and, Scott unwillingly admitted, his arrogance. Scott had managed to get a party together with all the usual guys, ground crew and flight crew, the good guys, but it would be in town in a couple of weeks time because that was the earliest that they all had time off, lousy timing, but the best he could do.

Tobias was working on the furthest panel of the computer that was interpreting the results from the latest experiment. He pressed his watch and it said in its calm, monotone way that it was 'two forty five pm'. Scott's life change completely at two forty five p.m. on Friday the nineteenth of September.

Not that Scott knew that it would when Tobias called him over to check something. How Tobias manoeuvred them into position he didn't know but he managed it.

"Scott, there's something I've always wanted to tell you." Tobias reached across, took Scott's head in his hands, felt his way along Scott’s face and kissed him.

"I love you and have for years. And I will always wait for you." Tobias sprang away from him just as the head of Security ran through the door.

"Stop, this is a security alert!"

"What's happened?"

"All the cameras are out in this sector, ‘have been for the last minute. Just checking that it's a simple mechanical malfunction and nothing more." Scott was pretty certain that the camera outage was nothing more sinister than a paranoid science geek making sure that they weren't seen, but he couldn't fault Security on his thoroughness. It might have annoyed Scott in the here and now but the security guard would definitely be getting a bonus this month.

The next few weeks passed in a blur, even the party, which was a multicoloured blur. Tobias left, a new chief scientist was put in charge of the section, Scott got moved on to the Mars team, it was all systems go. He had meant to take Tobias up on his offer, there just hadn't been time and now he was in Australia while Tobias was in Hawaii, not that it was that much distance but enough.

However, he really was expecting Tobias to wait for him, to stick to his word. But Tobias didn't, or so it had seemed at the time, it was only a few months before the scientific community was all a-buzz with gossip about Le Conte and his women, plural. So Scott threw himself into his work. Sure he still saw Tobias, but it was as more as distant colleagues who became even more distant when Tobias left US service completely and went to work in academia.

He moved round, went to Mars, which was great and brilliant, but then he wanted to go to Jupiter's moons. However, he'd gotten older and knew it was time to let other people have a go. He became a trainer, worked on how to get people further into space and back safely, and worked in mission control. He was, in short, busy. And sure he thought about Tobias sometimes, it was difficult not to, when half the major advances came from theories from his students, and Tobias would be on TV all the time trying to explain them. He was an awfully popular face of science. Not that Scott recorded all his appearances or anything, and they didn’t take up an alphabetically ordered wall in his den at the house he bought when he settled down at mission control.

When he was working, or rather during the pauses between work, some of the younger nerds, the ones that hadn’t been trained by Tobias, were seriously impressed that Scott had known him and worked with him. They said it meant there was hope for him yet; he wasn’t just a military meathead. That normally got them a light smack upside the head.

They started talking again, talking properly on a regular basis, about ten years later, by which time Scott was mostly over Tobias, well, over the way that Tobias blatantly hadn’t meant what he’d said about waiting. Well, that was what Scott had thought at the time. He now realised he was very, very wrong.

Waiting wasn’t about sex and their relationship, it was about waiting for Scott to come and find him before going off-planet. It might have worked better if he’d bothered explaining that to Scott. But, as Scott had said many times before, Tobias had about zero common sense.

Of course, Scott had also found out in the worst possible way, thanks to this alien attack, and yes, it might only have been one alien, but he, it, whatever the hell gender they were, had killed three officers of the fleet and endangered many others, all on Nathan’s boat. But to be able to see all those things he’d dreamt of and talked about so many times with Tobias. There was really no way he could say no, not with all that waiting out there for him.

He said much the same thing to Nathan, “This is what I've dreamed of my whole life. Only my family and my good friends could ever tolerate my long absences, I hope you'll understand this one too. You know, Lucas, I never realized this until now, how similar you are too Tobias. You sure you're not from outer space. Hey, you guys take care of each other.”

And then, he beamed up into the unknown.

~~~~

If the situation had been different, Scott didn’t think he could have contained his happiness, because Tobias was alive and well. Well might have been stretching the point. About as well as could have been expected given that he’d likely been tortured. Alive was more than Scott had honestly expected. Given what he now knew of the enemy, who were many times worse than what he expected from fighting the one on Earth, and he’d been bad enough. For Tobias to have been missing for so long and still to be alive, even if he couldn’t quite stand, it was fantastic. Alive was good.

However long that lasted. Scott had been in some awkward situations, half way back from Mars and the oxygen running out. Halfway to Mars, with the water recycling pack playing up. A couple of car crashes and he’d been in small aircraft struck by lightening, which caused the engines to seize up. So, yeah, he knew tight corners and this was the tightest he’d ever been in.

Even so, he wished that Nathan and his crew, especially Lucas, weren’t here. This wasn’t their war. Scott had volunteered for this. When he took Tobias by the elbow, he was accepting that he probably wouldn’t come back, but Nathan didn’t sign up for this and they had far better things to do.

“How do we get out of this?”

“I don’t know.” Tobias not knowing something was terrifying after twenty-odd years of him being the authority on most subjects. It wasn’t that Scott didn’t have brains of his own, and even out here, he’d been of some use, leading the rebellion in the absence of Tobias, but he still knew jack about a lot of the alien tech. Beyond the good reasons, the main reason he wanted peace was so he’d have the time to take some of this stuff apart so he could figure out what made it tick.

If he wasn’t going to get that, and the Seaquest and it’s crew were stuck in this with him, then he was going to some of the Stormers down with him. He pushed Tobias further up his arm, until he was up to his shoulder and then took a second gun from the hands of a dead Stormer. Hopefully he wasn’t going to run out of ammo before they all got shot to death.

~~~~

While it wasn't what Scott had expected the rest of the universe to be like, he couldn't say that they hadn't discovered anything. They'd found a new universal constant, no man, or as it turns out alien, could sleep well on jury-rigged bunk beds.

But they made do with what they had. While they had just about survived the last battle, and taken a lot of the Hyperion stormers down with them, it was still touch and go, especially given the energy and effort they'd had to use to send the Seaquest back to Earth. They'd done their best to round up the survivors, and to bury the dead. They thought it best to bury them here because they couldn't swear when or where they rest of the Seaquest's crew would end up. It was one of the few times that Scott had ever seen Tobias unsure about, well, anything really. Tobias had always been one of those people who threw himself into things, certain that he was right and that, therefore, everything would be okay. But this time he really wasn't sure. It was a mixture of the size of the Seaquest, and the bits and bolts nature of the equipment.

Tobias had offered him the choice to go back with the Seaquest.

“The way things are here, now, this is going to be the only planet you will be seeing. I promised you more planets, but I don't think I'll be able to deliver on that promise. If you want to go back, I completely understand.”

“I knew I was signing on for trouble when I came. We'll kick out the bad guys and you can teach me the physics behind the transporter as we go.”

“I mean it. There might never be any way of getting back.”

“I know.”

It was different when not going back to Earth was forced on him, compared to when he'd chosen it, but he had already chosen it and he wasn't going to go back on that. He was still glad that they'd managed to find Lucas and Dagwood before they sent the ship back, he didn't want either of them involved in what would probably be a long war of attrition. Returning them had been a close run thing, they'd only found them the day before the Seaquest was returned. Ortiz had been less lucky. They'd only been able to check the island he'd washed ashore on a week after the Seaquest got sent back. It had been bad enough that it had taken them that long, he'd been making do with fish and not-quite coconuts, but to have to tell him that home was now out of reach, for the foreseeable future, that was worse.

Ortiz had dealt the news incredibly well. He'd taken to the people of Hyperion and was probably teaching them poker right now.

It had been organised so that Scott and Tobias has a room to themselves. It was still only a set of bunk beds and a washbasin but it was slightly grander than the dorms everyone else was staying in. Scott liked to look at it as a perk of command rather than just because no one ever wanted to be in the same room as their commanding officer.

Tobias had the bottom bunk as a concession to his blindness, and as often as not, they'd spend their free time sitting on it, talking and catching up on the time they'd missed out on. Despite Scott knowing now, and them having spent seven months here already, he'd never seen Tobias as anything but himself, even at his weakest points, he'd always kept up the illusion. Not that Scott wasn't grateful, a Hyperion stormer was the last thing he wanted to see in the morning, but he couldn't help but think that it must have been a drain on Tobias's energy, when he really needed it all to recover, which he still hadn't fully. And they needed Tobias on tip-top form, and Scott wanted to see him well.

Not that Tobias was letting on that he wasn't fully recovered, but Scott had learnt to be near Tobias at the end of the day, and any other time when anything strenuous was being undertaken. Tobias had kept himself upright using Scott's arm twice today, and his grip was like a vice.

“You could change back, you know, here, I wouldn't mind.” They were lying on Scott's bunk, and Scott was stroking Tobias's hair. He did wonder if he could do the same if it were Stormer tentacles, would he even want to? But if it made Tobias healthy, then he thought he could try.

“I'd much rather not.” Scott twisted around so he could look Tobias in the face, while his hand stayed where it was. “If any of them saw me, it would be … what's only weird to you is twenty generations of slavery to them. Plus, it's been years since I didn't look like this for more than a few moments.”

“What, never, not even when you left the programme?”

“No. I always assumed that there were cameras.”

“Oh there were, but only for the first five years.”

“Only?”

“After that we realised that you preferred sleeping with your grad students to selling our secrets to the enemy.”

“Oh.” Tobias looked uncomfortable.

“Don't worry, they didn't make me watch. I only ever heard things second hand.” Tobias didn't look any less embarrassed. “You know that I don't mind. Not now, anyway.” He carried on brushing Tobias's hair, oddly thankful, for the only time he could remember, that Tobias was blind and so he couldn't see anything on Scott's face that might not agree entirely with what he'd just said.

“I'm sorry that you ever did mind, but I never intended to be a monk while I waited.”

“I know that now. It was just at the time you didn't make it clear.

“Was there anyway I could have explained?”

“Yes.” Even Scott had to admit he was being stubborn. “Okay, no, but there should have been.”

“And what would you have done if I had told you I was an alien, I'm mean, after you tried to get me to see a psychiatrist and then forced me to. Would you have handed me over to the military?”

“No.” Scott probably wouldn't have. He stretched out, as much as he could on this bed, decidedly uncomfortable.

“Anyway,” from the tone there was no way that Tobias believed him, “you'd never have forgiven me if someone else got to be the first man on Mars.” That much was true. If he'd never gone to Mars, he'd just be another missing person. Now, well, he was probably keeping the conspiracy nuts busy at home, but he'd left his mark, and could vanish with no work left undone. He'd trained the man they should have brought in as his replacement well, and he could handle everything without Scott.

“So it's not like we wasted the time. I can't be unhappy with how my career has gone. I do wonder though, how much tech did you hold back? I mean, there was the beam and your ship, but how much further did you push us than we would have gone on our own?”

“Not that far. Not out of any misguided sense of it being right or wrong, it's just not as much fun if you don't do the hard work yourself. I'm not going to say I did nothing, Earth's probably fifty years ahead of where it ought to be, but mostly I just stopped people going down blind alleys, wasting time on things that would never work.”

“That isn't what you were like at NASA.”

“I was younger then.”

“Weren't we all.” This wasn't what he'd imagined, none of it, Tobias, the aliens, being on another planet, the fighting, but it wasn't any worse than what he had expected his retirement to be like, and with Tobias, it might even be better.

~~~~