crack_van | Not by Zelda (18+)

Fandom: BLAKES 7
Pairing: Cally/Travis
Author on LJ:

archbishopm
Author Website: Penny Dreadful's Fan-Fiction
Why this must be read:

In one of the greatest indignities foisted on an alien guerrilla fighter with a self-destructive streak a mile wide, Cally was often reduced to caring for the crew with gentle platitudes and fetched drinks or being mentally taken over by aliens who played off of the loneliness of an isolated telepath, while her rifle gathered dust on some forgotten shelf (forgotten, at least, to the script-writers). "Not" doesn't ignore that, but uses it and twists it, until we see what happened to make her that way and how far she still has to fall.

Written by the sekrit identity of one of the best B7 writers around, and full of trademarked grim postmodern goodness, this AU branches off when, during the events of "Hostage", Cally tells the crew that Avon has contacted Servalan instead of keeping quiet. With this knowledge, Blake makes a deal with Travis, and his former pursuer becomes a fixture on the Liberator.

This is a dark, bleak story, of a fighter who has lost her will to fight, of a telepath who has lost the contact she needs to remain mentally balanced. When Travis, who as a Federation officer once tortured Cally, comes on board, she is an outsider among strangers, and losing her ability to seperate her thoughts from her words and the thoughts of others from her own. She is losing and growing accustomed to it. With Travis playing mindgames among the crew, she loses more and more, sacrificing her dignity, her body, her ethics almost willingly, for that small bit of focus it grants her, that chance to reclaim small parts of herself from the oblivion she is facing. The prose is harsh and claustrophobic, with a stillness and inevitability that draws in the reader as surely as Cally as is drawn in.

He turned around and looked at me. "You've lost
your edge," he said.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Then, when we took you on Centero. You were a soldier, of sorts.
You're not, you're nothing at all like a soldier now."

I folded my arms across my chest. "I suppose I grew out of it," I
said. That, then, that was a long time ago.

He looked at me. I thought of all the truths I must have told them.
Told him. I could vaguely remember more than enough of it. "Too bad I
was on the wrong side," I said. Attempting humour.

He turned back to the console. Humour attempt unsuccessful. "Better to be a soldier on the wrong side than a civilian on the right."

I smiled. "Is that how you see yourself now? As a soldier on the wrong side?"

"Is that how you see yourself now?" he mocked, with his back still
turned. "As a fucking therapist? There is no wrong side? Everything's
relative?"

The anger in him. The ghost woman had said, lovingly. One of the
nightmare women on that nightmare planet. That too was so long ago
now, and nobody speaks of it--perhaps it was a dream. Of mine, about
him. I did not like to think that it was. The anger, the violence
inside. If I reach out one finger now and touch him, I thought, touch
him anywhere, his hand resting on the console, the back of his neck,
any place on his bare burning skin, his hatred will arc, a psychic
spark, and ground itself in me.

I kept my hands at my side.

Not