The first lyric that popped into my head:
Let it be known / there is a fountain / that was not made / by the hands of men
Grateful Dead? I approve. Also, this probably isn't even remotely what you had in mind, but this is what it turned into.
Laura lowers herself onto a crate and leans her head back against the frigid, unyielding bulkhead of the cold storage compartment. She closes her eyes and tries to recalibrate.
She should be strategizing with Lee or hashing out a gameplan with Zarek. Doing something productive. Just frakking sleeping would be more productive than this - endlessly spinning her wheels, not moving forward, not really resting - but even sleep seems elusive lately.
The whirlwind of the last few days has left her feeling more drained than she’d thought possible. The nagging voice in the back of her mind continually reminds her it’s not just the rigors of her schedule, but she pushes the thought aside. She’ll get through this - has to, one way or another.
Inadvertently, she lets out a quiet sigh. A moment later, she feels a warm hand on her shoulder. She looks up.
“Elosha,” she says in recognition, and finding herself with little else to say.
Laura beckons toward the nearest crate.
“You’re holding up alright?” the petite woman asks her.
“I’m fine,” she replies, “just thinking.”
“You look about a million miles away.”
Laura shrugs. “It’s just… It’s been a lot, Elosha. A month ago, I’d have said I wasn’t religious,” she says quietly, her brow tightening in concentration. “Not an atheist, exactly, but if you’d told me any of this,” she says, gesturing vaguely around her and shakes her head, letting her confidant fill in the rest.
The priestess smiles, bemused, “And now?”
Laura looks up at her, then glances briefly around them, making sure that neither Lee nor Zarek is in earshot, then returns her gaze to Elosha. “There are moments,” she begins, her voice hopeful, “ when it seems like that’s the only thing that makes sense,” she says, pointing toward the worn, leather bound volume poking out from Elosha’s coat pocket. “And if that’s real,” she pauses for a moment, collecting her thoughts, then continues, “If it’s true, then whatever’s to come, whatever I need to face, I will.”
“I hear a ‘but’ in there, if I’m not mistaken,” Elosha says, her tone neutral.
Laura gives a half-hearted smile and cocks her head to one side. She meets Elosha’s gaze for a long moment, then nods.
“We all have our doubts, Laura. There is no perfect believer.”
“What if I just want this to mean something?” she asks quietly, sounding small and ashamed as she lays her fingertips to rest below her collarbone. “My mother… When she died, it just seemed so senseless--” she cuts herself back, suddenly blinking back tears. She lets out a steadying breath, then meets the priest’s eyes again. “What if I just want it to mean something?”
“Maybe it wasn’t senseless, Laura,” Elosha says, taking Laura’s hand in both of her own. “All of it, good, bad or indifferent, every single thing that’s happened has lead you to this moment. It all meant something, just maybe not what you wanted it to.”
Laura tilts her head to the other side, considering. “Alright,” she says, when she can’t think of any other response, and she hopes. Hopes Elosha is right, and that this is leading them somewhere. Hopes the threat of her looming mortality is the price to pay for humanity’s salvation. Hopes she hasn’t destroyed the government and sewn dissent in the fleet for her own selfish desire that her death have some meaning.
“Alright,” she repeats, a bit more confidently. “Let’s get back to it. What do we know about the path?”
Elosha smiles as she pulls the book from her coat, letting it fall open to a page marked with a little scrap of thread. “Let it be known,” she reads from the battered copy of the scrolls, “there is a fountain that was not made by the hands of men, and it is a marker on the path...”
