A/N: I wish I summarized as well as I wrote. Ah, if wishes were horses! Horses...would also not come true. This takes place right after (+ during) the season 2 finale, except I may have changed a couple things. Drama, angst ensue. You might even laugh a few times. It's a one-shot to help me work through all my feelings about the finale. I can't promise more, but I never say never.

Spoilers: "Mother's Day" and all that precedes it.

Pairing(s): I consider this an Erica/Hobbes fic. Lisa gets a big role too.

Rated T for language, talk of sex and bad romance. It's for grown ups but I can't bring myself to rate it M.

Star Sapphire

What happens in the Fifth Column lair stays in the Fifth Column lair.

Until Hobbes clears it out.

Erica stared at the bare, empty bed in what was formerly the 5th Column's headquarters. It wasn't just their headquarters, though. It had also been Hobbes' living quarters, and she felt his absence more than any of the missing equipment or city maps. She felt his absence, but she did not mourn it, for unlike Jack and Chad, Erica knew exactly what had happened. She didn't know where he was, or when he would turn up, but she knew Hobbes hadn't abandoned them.

Not for too long, anyway.

hey tasty cakes,

I cleared out the lair, just like you asked. Left the mattress, in case Jackie decided to give into his urges and actually comfort you for once - they way you actually like to be comforted. And don't worry about Dekker. He's in the news - he likes to watch.

But back to more important things. As we discussed, I'm gonna be gone for a little while. For the safety of the team, for clarity's sake...because you can't keep your hands off me? Nah, I know that's just my wishful thinking. And maybe you worrying about me is wishful thinking too, but just in case - don't spend a single second thinking about me while I'm away. You've got enough to worry about, saving the world and all that.

You'll see me sooner than you think. In the mean time, keep your head up. You can do this.

He'd left the note unsigned. It was the greeting, the nickname, that gave it away, while at the same time protecting her identity from anyone else that might read it. In the privacy of her bedroom, alone and on the verge of a nervous breakdown - hours before seeing physical evidence of his departure - Erica laughed. She noticed he hadn't omitted the other names. From Hobbes, there was only so much she could ask.

Lisa, still stuck in her grandmother's dungeon, sat crying in one dank corner. Her knees were drawn up to her chest. She was hugging her legs, staring at the floor and wishing she could have her memory erased. She heard the door to the cave swish open, and she looked up to see Joshua standing in the opening.

"I can save him." he said simply, no other explanation needed. "Come with me."

It took her a moment to process what he said. She was afflicted with a debilitating human emotion - shock. Joshua recognized this but he did not have time to give comfort. He was still a Visitor in every sense. It was not his human skin that made him sympathetic to the planet and its dominant species. He simply believed that the human race deserved a real chance.

After her moment, Lisa seemed to realize what was needed of her. With sudden clarity she wiped the odd wetness from her cheeks and hurried to her feet.

"How?" she asked warily, still lingering in the corner.

"Please." said Joshua, calm but urgent. "We must go now."

"That monster ripped out his throat." said Lisa, petulant in her weakened state. "He's dead."

"I can save him." Joshua insisted.

Thanks to the magic of their technology, Humpty Dumpty was put back together again. Tyler, the most easily broken of all mankind, received a pardon from death thanks to Joshua, his sympathies, and his knowledge of Visitor medicine and its helpful effects on the human body.

"I hate her." said Lisa, words uttered quietly as she watched Tyler's sleeping form. Lisa spoke of her mother, but her look of hate rested on the boy. She felt anger toward him as well. Joshua, also waiting for Tyler to wake, turned to look at Lisa, shocked himself to see so much human emotion in the eyes of the young princess. He found himself longing for the chemical reaction that would cause such emotion within his own body. Within the soul, if any of them really had any.

They hid in a locked medical bay while Tyler recovered from his accelerated surgery. The moment he became mobile, they would escape.

Erica felt frozen until she got the call from Tyler. She would swear her heart had stopped beating, her pulse suspended, life on pause the entire time her child's whereabouts and well being went unaccounted for. Her phone rang, the caller ID said Tyler, and she allowed herself to hope.

"Ty?" she said into the phone, her voice a pathetic warble.

"Mom." he answered back. He sounded confused, as he often did, but she didn't notice because she was falling apart.

"Ty." she sobbed, falling into a crouch in the middle of the empty bunker. Chad and Jack looked on, silent and patient, their stoic support all they could offer while she was still on the phone.

"Mom, something happened." Tyler said slowly, not just confused but disoriented as well. His mother was crying her eyes out and he wasn't sure why or where he'd been for the last few hours. They'd told him to call his mother and he'd followed their instruction.

"Ty," she sobbed, clutching at her own hair. "Where are you?"

"I'm with Joshua, and...and Lisa."

Hearing the names of her allies sent another wave of relief crashing through Erica's body. She wanted to hug him, hold him, squeeze him, shake him and slap him all at the same time. He had a death wish brought on by ignorance, by sheer stupidity, and she had allies that cared enough to save his life. He would never get it. He would never know how lucky he was.

"God," Tyler rasped. "My throat hurts."

From her crouch, Erica fell backward, sitting hard on the floor with her knees spread apart. She pressed the phone to her ear so hard it hurt, and she just kept sobbing. It was the last time, she told herself, the last time she would let Tyler away from her care. In her heart she knew she couldn't control him. She'd never been able to control him. But it was the last time she'd let him go so easily.

Chad's throat hurt too. He'd never seen Erica so out of control. He'd never seen anyone lose it like that. He'd been in the world of fake smiles and phony brow-furrowed sympathy for so long, he didn't remember what a good old fashioned breakdown looked like. It was frightening to see such emotion being choked out of his once fearless leader. He'd felt a lot safer when she seemed to have lost her soul.

Erica sat on the floor, covering her face with one hand, holding her phone with the other, rocking back and forth and sobbing with relief. Jack and Chad could both hear Tyler's voice through the phone.

"Mom," Tyler said, finally getting upset. "I'm fine." he tried to comfort her, without even knowing why he was doing it. "What's wrong?"

While Chad spent excruciating moments lamenting the awkward silence, Jack used the time to thank his creator and savior, over and over again, for showing this last minute mercy to the Evans family. Jack thanked Him, and he prayed, hard, begging God to give Tyler the wisdom to see the absolute treasure that had given birth to him and cared for nothing but his safety since.

If you have just one favor left for me, Jack prayed. For Erica, for this cause - show Tyler the way. Erica deserves that peace. She needs it, to save the rest of us.

Thanks to Joshua and her late grandmother's secret escape pod, Lisa was free from the mothership. Now she was trapped on Earth, and trapped in a car with Tyler as one of Erica's men, formerly one of Eli Cohn's men, drove them to a safe house in the city. She couldn't even bear to look at Tyler, much less talk to him, and the silence grew more awkward with every passing minute.

She'd had hours in that dungeon to think. It all sank in when she curled up on the floor and cried. His mother told him everything, and like a fool he still went to see his girlfriend. Lisa was not convinced that Anna's bliss had stolen any reasoning from his brain. He'd already been a rebellious idiot to begin with. Lisa had found it so endearing at first, flattered by the attention and pleased that her plan to woo him was working so well, but when she weighed her reasons for betraying her mother - she'd come close to matricide that very day - against Tyler's reasons for disobeying Erica, she found Tyler coming up far too short in the competition.

It was not watching him die that had so traumatized Lisa. He betrayed his own kind, betrayed his own mother, and with barely a thought to all that his mother told him, ran to the one place she asked him not to go.

That, and he'd fucked Lisa's clone sister without noticing the difference.

"Lisa." Tyler said quietly, his eyes darting to the silent driver and back again. He didn't know Eli's man, and he didn't understand why they hadn't just taken a shuttle down to Earth. He saw clearly how uncomfortable Lisa was, how upset she was and how distant she was trying to be. "Lisa, why won't you talk to me?"

"When your mother was covered in blood and bruises, all you felt was anger." she began. She turned to look at Tyler, so she could look into his eyes and see if he was understanding any of it yet. He still looked confused. "Do you care about her at all?"

He still looked confused, but he could tell he was being scolded. He knew that much.

"All she's trying to do is save your people." said Lisa, shaking her head in disbelief. "She's trying to save you, and you don't even care. She tells you your world is going to be destroyed and you run back to the mother ship to have sex with me. And then you couldn't even tell it wasn't me, when you looked into her eyes."

Lisa paused for a moment. She could feel hot tears in her eyes again. Everything about her human skin - the tears, the blood, the jealousy and anger - made her feverishly hot and uncomfortable. She had to look away to finish what she wanted to say to him.

"When you were inside of her."

The man driving them to the safe house had been able to ignore their conversation until that statement. He peeked in the rearview mirror, first at the blonde princess, and then at her cheating lover. The boy was eighteen years old, and still a child. Princess Lisa was too good for him.

Lisa's desire for monogamy, caring at all whose eggs her supposed mate tried to fertilize - it wasn't just a possessive, royal nature that made her feel so broken hearted. She was replaceable. After learning what it was to be human, to be an individual, it hurt so much to know she was replaceable.

"You're disgusting." Lisa muttered deep in her throat, revulsion making her voice shake.

At the other end of the back seat, Tyler shrank to the size of a single strand of stolen DNA and wished he could disappear.

He was beginning to understand.

Weeks later, Hobbes called, and Erica wasn't sure how she felt about that. She'd been surviving without him, but hearing his voice again, his accent, she began to wonder about the strength of her own denial.

"Did you miss me?" he asked, coating the words in sarcasm as a defense mechanism. He wanted her to say no, needed her to think yes.

"Are you in town?" she answered with a question, her tone flat. She wanted to be near him, on top of him, and she needed him to give his approval of all the decisions she'd made in his absence. She knew he manipulated her. She didn't actually like being in charge.

"I am." he said, matter-of-fact. "You wanna meet up?"

"Are you there?" she asked. They'd discussed the location of there before he'd left.

"I'll see you soon." he said preemptively, and then he hung up. On a street corner, Hobbes dropped the disposable, prepaid phone to the ground and smashed it under his boot.

The first thing they did when they got to the motel room was fuck. After two weeks of separation they both needed that release. They went on pretending it was only physical. They didn't want to ruin the physical by admitting the truth. They took turns being on top, slamming their bodies together, hurting and pleasing until they both came with a moan and a shout.

When they were done, they laid in bed together, quiet but for the sounds of temporary contentment that issued from their throat when one touched the other. They took an hour out of their busy saving-the-world schedule to relax and feel another warm, human body next to their own. Kyle stared at the ceiling, one arm folded beneath his head. Erica was on her stomach, arms folded under her pillow, her head turned away from Kyle as she breathed in and out. His hand was on her back, heavy and comforting, and once in a while his fingertips moved to graze her skin. An hour of quiet before returning to the reality of a doomed world.

"Tell the truth." he said. "You missed me."

He felt her body move when she chuckled.

"Yeah, Kyle." Erica murmured dryly into the pillow, giving him the sarcastic answer he'd been hoping for. "I missed you."

He smirked to himself, at himself for trying. He'd missed the hell out of her.

"Wanna know where I've been?" he asked.

His hand felt so good, but she was tired of laying on her stomach. After a few seconds, contemplating his question, Erica lifted her head, pulled her arms apart and rested the weight of her upper body on her elbows. She turned to look at him. As she stirred, his hand left her back. He twisted his body, reaching for the jeans he'd left on the floor. He didn't move to get up. He just needed something from the front left pocket.

"You go anywhere you want, don't you?" she asked him.

"Pretty much." he said, with strained voice.

It wasn't the first time he'd taken a vacation. For years the FBI had been looking for him, Erica's team had been looking for him, and he evaded them because he could go wherever he damn well pleased. He wrested a small black pouch from his pants pocket, the kind that tied at the top. The kind that held small jewels. He laid back on the bed, carefully opening the top while Erica looked on.

"And you just stroll in?" she said, still stuck on his ability to not give a rat's ass about the rules. "Take whatever you like?"

His eyes immediately went to hers. His head turned slightly toward her, and his gaze took a trip south. His mouth moved a bit as he took in the sight of her bare breasts, on display there before him. A smirk formed, and he glanced back up at her face before returning to the pouch.

"I think you know the answer to that." he teased.

Erica did not reply. She didn't have to. Her silence, his little smirk, her little smirk. Everything on that subject was already said. But the thing in the pouch, that needed some explaining. He pulled out a single loose gem, holding it up between his thumb and forefinger for her to see. It was ovoid, pale blue, and she stared at it with curious expression. When he didn't give an explanation, she looked back to his face and gave him another wry remark.

"Looks rare and expensive. Which royal museum did you steal that from?"

"So many questions." said Hobbes, in a playfully scolding tone. He moved his hand closer to her, asking her to take it from him. Reluctantly, she held out her hand, and he placed the stone gently in her palm. Now that she had a closer look, she could see a six-ray star hovering within and over its surface. A star sapphire. Erica looked over at him, trying to read his eyes. She didn't find an answer there, so she looked back down to the gem in her hand.

They'd already fucked. He wasn't bribing her.

Then, just as she began to wonder, he said -

"Stop analyzing, Evans. It's just a souvenir."

"Completely meaningless, then?" she asked, holding it up closer to the light so she could see the star again. If he'd meant it as more than a valentine, he would have at least found a setting.

He experienced a moment's hesitation.

Meaningless?

"No," he said. "Not completely."

It rested in her palm. With fingers from her opposite hand, she moved the sapphire around, feeling the smooth surface. There was a memory sneaking up on her. She tried to ignore it, but the stone in her hand was almost identical to the pair of earrings Joe had given her on their fifth anniversary. The feeling she had when she received them was inside her now, seeping, filling out the shell she'd become with a very sweet form of pain.

Hobbes could see something was going on under the surface, but the unspoken terms of their arrangement prevented him from addressing those things.

"There's a Persian myth that says the Earth rested on a giant sapphire." he said, unaware that Erica had already heard the story. He was trying to distract her as always. "They thought that sapphire was what made the sky blue."

"Your eyes." said Joe -

"When I saw that one," said Kyle. "I recalled the myth. And I thought of you."

Erica turned, away from Hobbes, laying down on her side, resting her head on the pillow. She didn't say anything in response. The sapphire was clutched in her left hand. She couldn't look anymore, but she could still feel it resting there.

Hobbes still thought the world rested on her shoulders.

Erica hadn't told him about Project Ares.

She wasn't sure she wanted to.