Fic: Hostile Witness (Gaeta, Romo Lampkin, G)
“I don’t know why you’d want to talk to me,” Gaeta begins - terse, defensive. “I don’t understand why I’m here.”
Romo Lampkin assesses the lieutenant through small sunglasses. They cover his eyes just enough so it’s hard for Gaeta to return the favor. He’s made a point of requesting this appointment for late in the evening, so Lieutenant Felix Gaeta would be safely off-duty. He’s also made sure to request it at the last minute, in the hopes of catching the man off guard, in something other than his military uniform. He considers it a small victory that the looming presences of the President, the Admiral and their entourages are absent, and a minor defeat that the interview is happening in Romo’s own quarters. Which he’s sure are bugged.
But he also finds it telling that the Prosecution is allowing this man to be interviewed unsupervised. In the witness list order, Felix Gaeta is one of the last, suggesting the Prosecution considers his testimony among the strongest.
The way Romo sees his job, it’s to make sure when he’s through with him tonight, this is no longer true.
Lieutenant Gaeta’s military file is a matter of public record. Romo has even tracked down a copy of the documentary about Galactica made by that Cylon masquerading as an investigative journalist. The young lieutenant was featured for only about a minute, but drunk as he obviously was, it was a fairly revealing one.
He’s been able to glean a lot about Lieutenant Gaeta’s personality from all these sources, but in Romo’s mind, the picture doesn’t add up. What he’s done, the choices he made. There are missing pieces.
And if there’s one thing an attorney hates on the witness stand, it’s missing pieces. Unless of course, those pieces are missing because he stole them in the first place.
Romo suddenly wonders what he’ll steal from Gaeta. He loves these moments before the grab, when he’s inspecting a person from behind his dark ovals, sifting through the hardly-considered debris people carry around with them every day, looking for that ounce of symbolic gold, the item that will tell him what he needs to know.
He lets the silence grow between them, encouraging the younger man to fill the space, waiting for his discomfort to reveal more than he intends.
“I don’t have anything to offer you for Doctor Baltar’s defense,” Gaeta says finally. Lampkin notes the vitriol barely hiding in Gaeta’s voice. Gaeta tried to stab Baltar to death, almost succeeded. Yet still the honorific. Why?
“I visited the Cylon woman today,” He imbues his tone with false casualness.
“So?”
Romo notes the nervous tapping of the man’s index finger on the table at mention of the Six. Is he afraid of her? Is he afraid she has secrets on him?
He decides to pull on that thread.
“You were there on New Caprica,” he said. “You saw them together repeatedly. How would you characterize their relationship?”
Gaeta’s jaw sets slightly, pupils become pinpricks. “Frakked up, if you want to know the truth.”
Behind his glasses, Romo’s eyes widen slightly. “Go on.”
“He’s a very selfish man,” he says, as if this explains everything.
Romo decides he can wait, and remains silent.
“They argued a lot,” Gaeta offers eventually.
“About what?”
Head cocks slightly. “I don’t know. It’s not like they ever talked to me.”
Romo notices just a trace of bitterness. He thinks a moment. “She’s disappointed in him,” he announces.
Gaeta says nothing, but his eyes look down, and then up again. Romo senses an opening.
“She’s carrying around a lot of anger, you know,” he intimates.
“Is she?” Gaeta says. The words are meant to be flat and noncommittal, but Romo can see Gaeta feels weak for having even asked.
“Yes. She went to New Caprica believing a lot of things about him which turned out not to be true, and it really disappointed her.”
“That’s interesting.” Gaeta’s tension tries to pass itself off as annoyance. “Are we going to get to my deposition now?”
He smiles. “Yes, of course,” he says, his bright tone full of empty reassurance. “Why don’t we start with the basics? How did you end up with the job of Baltar’s chief of staff?”
“He asked me.”
Romo gives Gaeta an ironic smile. “Naturally. But why?”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
“I have.” The lie comes easily.
Gaeta blinks, his surprise obvious. He can’t resist. “Well, what did he say?” He places his hands carefully on the table, palms flat and stiff, waiting.
Romo pauses as long as he can without being too obviously theatrical about it. “Actually, he refuses to talk about you. In fact, when I brought you up, he told me to leave you alone.”
Gaeta’s hands come down into his lap, just a little too quickly; they rest there, uneasy, as he says nothing. Romo watches his hands and gets an idea.
“Do you remember your first reaction when my client asked you to be his chief of staff?” He catches a flicker of something in the man’s eye. Another piece of the puzzle seems about to emerge. “Do you remember how you felt?”
The shrug overcompensates. “Not really.” Romo is sure he’s getting somewhere when Gaeta adds as an afterthought: “Not anymore.”
“I imagine it must have been a difficult choice to leave your military career to go down to New Caprica.”
“I thought about it carefully,” he acknowledges. Romo sees it is even an admission in Gaeta’s eyes, for the lieutenant’s countenance flares into annoyance, genuine this time.
“Excuse me,” he complains, “but what exactly does this have to do with my testimony?”
Romo flashes him a rakish smile, looks him up and down before responding. “Sorry, I get easily distracted by questions of the human psyche,” he explains. “Both the boon and the curse of being an attorney, I guess.” He pats Gaeta on the shoulder, and the man flushes a bit, flinches away at the contact.
A loner, he thinks. Yet more pieces.
“No, you’re right,” he says. “Let’s get back to the matter at hand.” A path in mind now, his words are quicker, as he casts the illusion of complying with Gaeta’s wishes. “Why did you accept my client’s job offer on New Caprica?”
“Because I wanted to try something different,” Gaeta responds just as quickly. “I wanted to see blue sky again, and…I guess I was honored to be asked to do such an important job.”
The statement has the rehearsed air of testimony. Romo resolves to consider later what this might tell him about the Chief Prosecutor’s plans for this man. “How did you like the job?” he continues.
Gaeta pauses. “At first?”
“At first.” Romo nods.
“At first, it was exciting. We were building a society from the ground up. It was a lot of work, but there were so many creative choices to make.”
“And my client? Was he involved in these…creative choices?”
“Yeah…” Romo hears the edges around Gaeta’s voice turn softer. “In the beginning, he was.”
“When did that change?”
Gaeta thinks about it for a moment. “A few months down the road, we started to run into obstacles; things got difficult, infighting among different groups.” His voice turns hard again. “He lost interest.”
“That must have been frustrating.”
Gaeta says nothing.
“People tell me you were the one who handled fine details. They say if you wanted something done on New Caprica, Felix Gaeta was the one to ask.”
He notices that Gaeta looks slightly embarrassed, but is not denying Romo’s words.
“It must have been quite a burden for you.”
“Excuse me?”
“I mean, having to keep everything going once he became unreliable.”
Gaeta pauses, looks askance at Romo, then purses his lips. “It was difficult at times,” he allows.
“After the Cylons invaded,” he continues, “Why did you keep your job?”
Gaeta bristles, just as Romo was hoping he would.
“I felt it was important to keep my job, so I could help from the inside, feed information.”
“Yes, I heard about that.”
“You did?”
Romo nods. “The word around the Fleet is you provided wireless frequencies used to contact Galactica.”
Gaeta’s frame relaxes. “Yes. I didn’t realize it was common knowledge.”
“Well, loose talk anyway." He pauses. "You haven’t answered my question yet.”
“Which question?”
“Why did you keep your job?”
“I thought I just told you.”
“You just told me why it was important to keep your job, but not why you did so. It was a very dangerous choice to make. What gave you the courage to make it?”
Gaeta looks away. “It wasn’t courage.”
Romo pushes. “You don’t see yourself as a courageous person?”
“No, not really,” Gaeta says, staring at his hands.
“Then if it wasn’t courage, what was it? What made you keep your job?”
Romo hears Gaeta’s voice go distant. “People kept asking me to help them. I realized that if I quit, there’d be no one that would even listen to them. I needed to stay, to try and do something, anything.”
“Is that all?”
The lieutenant’s eyes narrow with suspicion. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, was there anything else that made you stay?”
The expression moves quickly beyond suspicion and straight on to hostile: “Are you suggesting something?” he demands.
The abrupt shift gets Romo thinking. He decides to try a gamble.
“Did you not want to leave him?” He leaves the question as open-ended as possible.
“What?” Gaeta’s tone is shocked, defensive, and a moment later, he’s trying to cover it over with disdain. But it’s too late. Romo has caught it. He owns it now. He chides himself for having let it take him by surprise. For just a second, Gaeta’s carefully restrained demeanor crumbled and allowed Romo an unshielded view: The disillusionment, the bitterness, the pain hiding just under the surface, they finally all add up; they tell the same story for Mister Gaeta and the Cylon woman both.
In that moment, he figures out what he has to do.
“You were friends, weren’t you? You worked together and socialized, from what I understand.”
Hesitation. “We worked together. Yes.”
“On a Cylon detector, correct?”
“Yes.”
“That must have been a supreme irony.”
“What?”
“Well,” Romo shrugs, feigning indifference, “the two of you worked on a Cylon detector; as it turns out, your partner cheated on you with the enemy.”
Gaeta’s gaze flies away, too fast for Romo to tell what is going on: Hurt? Embarrassment? Certainly, he seems unable to manage a reply, as he works to straighten his posture and meet Romo’s gaze again.
“That’s one way of putting it, I suppose,” he mumbles.
Watching him, Romo decides that now’s his time to go for all the cubits.
“Why did you stab him?” He asks the question so abruptly, the man blanches. Then, after a moment: “I’m not sure I’m obligated to talk to you about that.”
Romo smiles. “I’m not sure either. I can wait to ask that question in court and let the judges decide. Shall we do it that way?”
Gaeta’s tongue darts over his lips, a barely perceptible nervous gesture. “I’d rather not.”
The grainy copy of a grainy surveillance tape had popped up around the Fleet not more than two days after the stabbing. It had been copied over several times by the time Romo saw it. Still, the body language in it had been discernible and intriguing, especially the part just after the stabbing: Gaeta hanging onto Baltar’s half-conscious body, keeping the Marines at bay with the deadly pen held high over Baltar’s bleeding neck. He’d seemed to be cradling Baltar, at one point shifting his arm, as if to make his victim more comfortable.
And suddenly, Romo knows what he is going to steal from Felix Gaeta.
“All right then.” Romo lets his shades fall again, his eyes just barely visible. He’s not even sure what message he intends to convey with the sly gesture; he’s merely hoping to throw Gaeta off as much as he can.
“So, let’s have it,” he demands. “Why’d you do it? Why’d you stab him? Because Gaius certainly doesn’t know.” He deliberately uses his client’s given name.
As he’d hoped, Gaeta’s eyes startle for a millisecond then cloud over. “Oh, he knows why. He knows very well.”
“Then what is Gaius not telling me?” Romo presses. “Is he protecting you?”
An angry, disgusted snort is Gaeta’s only reply. Romo blinks at it, nonplussed. The lieutenant doesn’t know it yet, but he may have won. Certainly, Romo knows, this interview is over and the puzzle is complete. He now fully understands what Mister Gaeta might do in that courtroom, is capable of doing, and he’s not sure he can stop it. In fact, there is only one thing he can do.
Romo knows what he’s going to take from him. He hasn’t seen it yet, but it has to be on him somewhere. He’s sure Gaeta carries it everywhere he goes as a reminder, a talisman, to make sure he doesn’t ever forget the need to hate Gaius Baltar.