Fic: Love Turns Forty (Battlestar Galactica)
At twelve years old, Felix Gaeta isn’t fond of math.
It’s the sixth time this week he’s slipped out of the window, to the roof (bare feet, shoes make just enough noise to alert anyone in the room below), to the tree branch overhanging the far end of the house. That’s the riskiest part of the climb - he’s in plain view of the lawn, where his father works almost every day. He’s quick now, though, and he’s learned how to move, how to climb and slide and run so that he doesn’t get caught.
The forest is long and wide around his house. Endless and open, not like math - the numbers, letters, proofs and concepts and symbols are enough to make Felix’s mind shut down completely.
The house is constricting. It’s only gotten stuffier, more orderly, more stifling - ever since…
Felix slips his shoes off again, now, his toes slipping on algae-covered rocks. The stream is shallower than usual; hasn’t been much rainfall, lately. News reports say they’re in a drought, that it might take ten years or more to recover the typical average rainfall. Felix doesn’t believe them. He doesn’t believe much that people say, these days.
~
Felix is six years old, and he never ventures out of the house. He likes it in here - cool and comfortable in the summer, warm and cozy in the winter.
Besides, out there he can’t spread out puzzle pieces like he can in here - flat tables give him all kinds of room, even if he can’t reach all the time, and grass just messes up the puzzle. Felix loves puzzles, and he doesn’t understand the charm of grass and mud and bee stings.
He’s almost done with this one - it’s easy. The pieces are big and the picture is simple. It was his father who bought it. His mother always gets him the hard ones.
The front door slams; Felix looks up, his hand poised in midair.
“Hey there, genius.” Felix mother smiles, brilliantly and smoothly. “You done with another one?”
Felix shrugs. “It’s easy.”
She hugs him, from behind. “Where’s your dad?”
“Outside.” Felix shrugs free of the hug, and he presses the piece into the right spot.
“Oh.” And his mother sighs, irritated, long-suffering. Felix doesn’t think about it, later.
~
Felix is ten years old, and he’s alone.
He doesn’t want to move. He doesn’t even know how long he’s been like this - whether it’s been hours and hours or just a few minutes. Maybe, eventually, his father will call him down for dinner, but he can’t bring himself to think about that.
The bedsheets are soft under his fingers. Just washed. But -
There, just there. A glint of light on the bedspread.
Felix reaches out, picks it up from the bedspread, carefully. A strand of hair - long, brown hair.
For the first time, Felix starts to cry.
~
Felix is fifteen years old, and he gets 110% on his first trigonometry test.
For a second, he stares at it, his heart skipping a beat. He barely even studied, he thought it must have failed it, even though he worked out every problem -
“Felix,” says his math teacher, pulling him aside after class, “have you ever considered going the accelerated math route?”
Felix mumbles something unintelligible. When he leaves the classroom, the paper is crumpled, torn at the bottom of the trash can.
~
There are three different bathrooms in their house.
Felix thinks this is very convenient. Three different bathrooms for three different people. When he brings it up, his mother smiles wanly and tells him not to be wasteful; his father grins - “Yep, pretty nice, isn’t it?”
Felix understands his father.
When Felix is nine, his showerhead breaks, and he takes a shower, instead, in his mother’s bathroom.
The knobs are different, and it takes Felix a little while to figure out what controls what. Even so, he still can’t seem to adjust the temperature properly - either it’s so freezing cold he’s shivering, or hot enough that he’s almost sweating, even under the water’s flow. Felix doesn’t like the cold; he chooses a hotter shower.
When he steps out, the mirror is completely fogged up. He grins, in delight - his showers in his own bathroom never completely fog up the mirror. There are always lighter patches.
Then Felix sees the writing.
The words are barely ghosts, swiped into the mirror with a finger. But not this time the mirror was steamed up - the last time, or maybe the time before that. The letters are faint, nearly fading into one another, but Felix can read them.
Scrawled on the mirror, in his mother’s writing, are two words: Don’t go.
~
“What were you thinking, Felix?”
Felix keeps his eyes straight forward, stubbornly.
“She’s your teacher, she deserves your respect - how could you, Felix? Could you have worse timing? Suspension for five days. Look, I know you’re upset-”
The words rush over Felix just like water in a stream. He doesn’t really hear them. He’s not sorry he did it; he’s glad. She deserved it, in some kind of angry, dull way Felix can’t articulate to himself. He hates pre-algebra, anyway.
“You’re grounded.”
Finally, Felix is alone in his room, the door locked. His father won’t make dinner for them tonight, Felix guesses. He’ll just leave Felix in here, to stew over what he’s done, to start to feel sorry.
You should be sorry, thinks Felix, and he opens the window.
Today is his birthday; he turns eleven.
~
“What do you want to be when you grow up, little man?”
Eight-year-old Felix shrugs, taking a long swig of juice from the neon-green plastic cup in front of him.
Felix’s mother reaches over and ruffles his hair. “He’s gonna be a math genius, just like his mom,” she says.
Felix’s father laughs. “No way,” he says. “He’s gonna be a pilot, just like his dad.”
~
Felix is six, and he’s playing with the family cat, on the floor of his parent’s bedroom. The cat chases a toy into the closet, and Felix clambers after him, slipping in between the doors, climbing onto his mother’s shoe racks.
The closet is cluttered - it’s always cluttered, but it’s a good place to hide, and Felix likes it for that. The shoes are all over the place, and the strong, warm leather scent always lasts on his hands after he leaves.
“Felix,” comes his mother’s voice, “what are you doing?” She pulls the closet open. “Come on. You’re going to be late for school.”
~
“Are you planning on cooking dinner?”
Felix’s father looks up from the puzzle, spread out in front of them on the floor of the living room. “Ah,” he says.
Felix’s mother crosses her arms. “It’s your night to cook, and it’s nearly nine o’clock.”
Felix looks from one to the other, worried.
“I’m sorry,” says Felix’s father, “we must have lost track of time.”
An irritated sigh, hissed between Felix’s mother’s teeth. “Go into town,” she says. “Get something from the market.”
“It might be faster to just cook something -”
The look she gives him cuts off his argument.
“I swear,” she mutters, a little too loudly, “it’s like you’re on strike or something.”
~
Felix is admitted to flight school at the age of sixteen.
When he shows his father the letter, there’s barely a grunt of acknowledgement. Felix spends the evening alone, outside, listening to the brook splash its way through the forest. He comes back home to find a covered plate on the kitchen table, a note in hurried handwriting beside it.
You’ll make me proud.
Felix folds the note and keeps it; he leaves the plate untouched.
~
It’s dark; it’s late. Felix doesn’t know how late, but the moon has nearly set, and the sky is a little gray. False dawn, probably. Maybe just three or four in the morning.
He leans back against the tree. His eyes feel raw, his throat sore.
A luminescent beetle lights on Felix’s hand.
“It’s my fault,” Felix tells the beetle, his vision blurring.
It shines, once, and starts moving towards the crook of his elbow.
~
“Don’t go.”
Felix, ten years old, hears the words and pauses, the bare wood cold against his feet.
“Mom?” he asks, moving to the slightly ajar door.
It opens, quickly, in front of him. His mother has reddened eyes.
Felix bites his lip. “Are you all right?”
She smiles. “I’m fine, Felix. It’s just allergies.”
“Who were you talking to, just then?”
She pauses, uncertain, then, “Just myself. It doesn’t matter, honey. Go to sleep. I’m going to go out to the market, I’ll be back.”
“You promise?” asks Felix.
“I promise.”
She slips past him, and Felix’s one glance inside the room leaves him with a lingering impression that something is wrong.
But, Felix climbs into the bed and listens to their car start up, back out of the driveway. He waits, for a moment, then he sees it.
The closet door. It was closed. She hadn’t closed the closet door in years, not since he could remember. It was always just a little bit open, because of everything that was inside…
Felix dashes out of bed, tears down the hallway to his parent’s room. He can hear the television playing, downstairs, and he pushes open the doorway (it bangs against the wall, but that hardly seems important) and yanks open the closet -
It’s empty. Completely empty. There’s a single shoe rack, pressed into the corner. The rest is gone.
“Mom!” Felix shouts, and he takes the steps two at a time. “Mom!”
~
“You know it was no one’s fault, right?”
Felix glances askance at his father, his diploma case slick against the palm of his hand. He’s a pilot, now. Fully qualified.
“Yeah,” lies Felix.
“Your mother had to leave. Sometimes, it’s like that.”
Felix clenches his jaw.
~
“I’m recommending you for algebra next year,” says Felix’s teacher. “What do you say? It’s a little unusual for kids your age, but I think you can handle it.”
Felix shakes his head. “No.”
The teacher blinks. “I’m sorry?”
“I don’t want to,” says Felix. “No.”
~
Felix is seventeen, and he doesn’t want to be here.
“You think that your mother left because of you,” says the therapist, evenly.
Felix shakes his head. “I don’t.”
“Your father thinks that’s what you believe.”
“He’s wrong.”
The therapist nods, slowly, giving Felix the opportunity to elaborate. Felix doesn’t.
“Well,” says the therapist, “what do you think, then?”
Felix meets the therapist’s eyes. - What does he think? - and he figures it out.
“I think she left because of him.”
~
“Felix!” shouts Felix’s father, “were you here all night? What were you thinking? I was worried sick!”
Felix picks up the beetle from his arm - it still glows, but more feebly, in the daylight. He looks up to his father, his eyes dry.
“I didn’t know you cared when people leave.”
Felix watches his father’s face darken, and he feels a sick stab of satisfaction.
~
The recruiting office is too air-conditioned; it’s frigid when Felix steps through the door, leaving behind the sweltering Caprican sun.
“Can I help you?” asks the woman at the front desk.
“I’d like to sign up for the Colonial Military.”
“Did you have a specialty in mind?”
A standard question. Felix takes a breath. “Yeah,” he says. “Mathematics.”
It’s the sixth time this week he’s slipped out of the window, to the roof (bare feet, shoes make just enough noise to alert anyone in the room below), to the tree branch overhanging the far end of the house. That’s the riskiest part of the climb - he’s in plain view of the lawn, where his father works almost every day. He’s quick now, though, and he’s learned how to move, how to climb and slide and run so that he doesn’t get caught.
The forest is long and wide around his house. Endless and open, not like math - the numbers, letters, proofs and concepts and symbols are enough to make Felix’s mind shut down completely.
The house is constricting. It’s only gotten stuffier, more orderly, more stifling - ever since…
Felix slips his shoes off again, now, his toes slipping on algae-covered rocks. The stream is shallower than usual; hasn’t been much rainfall, lately. News reports say they’re in a drought, that it might take ten years or more to recover the typical average rainfall. Felix doesn’t believe them. He doesn’t believe much that people say, these days.
~
Felix is six years old, and he never ventures out of the house. He likes it in here - cool and comfortable in the summer, warm and cozy in the winter.
Besides, out there he can’t spread out puzzle pieces like he can in here - flat tables give him all kinds of room, even if he can’t reach all the time, and grass just messes up the puzzle. Felix loves puzzles, and he doesn’t understand the charm of grass and mud and bee stings.
He’s almost done with this one - it’s easy. The pieces are big and the picture is simple. It was his father who bought it. His mother always gets him the hard ones.
The front door slams; Felix looks up, his hand poised in midair.
“Hey there, genius.” Felix mother smiles, brilliantly and smoothly. “You done with another one?”
Felix shrugs. “It’s easy.”
She hugs him, from behind. “Where’s your dad?”
“Outside.” Felix shrugs free of the hug, and he presses the piece into the right spot.
“Oh.” And his mother sighs, irritated, long-suffering. Felix doesn’t think about it, later.
~
Felix is ten years old, and he’s alone.
He doesn’t want to move. He doesn’t even know how long he’s been like this - whether it’s been hours and hours or just a few minutes. Maybe, eventually, his father will call him down for dinner, but he can’t bring himself to think about that.
The bedsheets are soft under his fingers. Just washed. But -
There, just there. A glint of light on the bedspread.
Felix reaches out, picks it up from the bedspread, carefully. A strand of hair - long, brown hair.
For the first time, Felix starts to cry.
~
Felix is fifteen years old, and he gets 110% on his first trigonometry test.
For a second, he stares at it, his heart skipping a beat. He barely even studied, he thought it must have failed it, even though he worked out every problem -
“Felix,” says his math teacher, pulling him aside after class, “have you ever considered going the accelerated math route?”
Felix mumbles something unintelligible. When he leaves the classroom, the paper is crumpled, torn at the bottom of the trash can.
~
There are three different bathrooms in their house.
Felix thinks this is very convenient. Three different bathrooms for three different people. When he brings it up, his mother smiles wanly and tells him not to be wasteful; his father grins - “Yep, pretty nice, isn’t it?”
Felix understands his father.
When Felix is nine, his showerhead breaks, and he takes a shower, instead, in his mother’s bathroom.
The knobs are different, and it takes Felix a little while to figure out what controls what. Even so, he still can’t seem to adjust the temperature properly - either it’s so freezing cold he’s shivering, or hot enough that he’s almost sweating, even under the water’s flow. Felix doesn’t like the cold; he chooses a hotter shower.
When he steps out, the mirror is completely fogged up. He grins, in delight - his showers in his own bathroom never completely fog up the mirror. There are always lighter patches.
Then Felix sees the writing.
The words are barely ghosts, swiped into the mirror with a finger. But not this time the mirror was steamed up - the last time, or maybe the time before that. The letters are faint, nearly fading into one another, but Felix can read them.
Scrawled on the mirror, in his mother’s writing, are two words: Don’t go.
~
“What were you thinking, Felix?”
Felix keeps his eyes straight forward, stubbornly.
“She’s your teacher, she deserves your respect - how could you, Felix? Could you have worse timing? Suspension for five days. Look, I know you’re upset-”
The words rush over Felix just like water in a stream. He doesn’t really hear them. He’s not sorry he did it; he’s glad. She deserved it, in some kind of angry, dull way Felix can’t articulate to himself. He hates pre-algebra, anyway.
“You’re grounded.”
Finally, Felix is alone in his room, the door locked. His father won’t make dinner for them tonight, Felix guesses. He’ll just leave Felix in here, to stew over what he’s done, to start to feel sorry.
You should be sorry, thinks Felix, and he opens the window.
Today is his birthday; he turns eleven.
~
“What do you want to be when you grow up, little man?”
Eight-year-old Felix shrugs, taking a long swig of juice from the neon-green plastic cup in front of him.
Felix’s mother reaches over and ruffles his hair. “He’s gonna be a math genius, just like his mom,” she says.
Felix’s father laughs. “No way,” he says. “He’s gonna be a pilot, just like his dad.”
~
Felix is six, and he’s playing with the family cat, on the floor of his parent’s bedroom. The cat chases a toy into the closet, and Felix clambers after him, slipping in between the doors, climbing onto his mother’s shoe racks.
The closet is cluttered - it’s always cluttered, but it’s a good place to hide, and Felix likes it for that. The shoes are all over the place, and the strong, warm leather scent always lasts on his hands after he leaves.
“Felix,” comes his mother’s voice, “what are you doing?” She pulls the closet open. “Come on. You’re going to be late for school.”
~
“Are you planning on cooking dinner?”
Felix’s father looks up from the puzzle, spread out in front of them on the floor of the living room. “Ah,” he says.
Felix’s mother crosses her arms. “It’s your night to cook, and it’s nearly nine o’clock.”
Felix looks from one to the other, worried.
“I’m sorry,” says Felix’s father, “we must have lost track of time.”
An irritated sigh, hissed between Felix’s mother’s teeth. “Go into town,” she says. “Get something from the market.”
“It might be faster to just cook something -”
The look she gives him cuts off his argument.
“I swear,” she mutters, a little too loudly, “it’s like you’re on strike or something.”
~
Felix is admitted to flight school at the age of sixteen.
When he shows his father the letter, there’s barely a grunt of acknowledgement. Felix spends the evening alone, outside, listening to the brook splash its way through the forest. He comes back home to find a covered plate on the kitchen table, a note in hurried handwriting beside it.
You’ll make me proud.
Felix folds the note and keeps it; he leaves the plate untouched.
~
It’s dark; it’s late. Felix doesn’t know how late, but the moon has nearly set, and the sky is a little gray. False dawn, probably. Maybe just three or four in the morning.
He leans back against the tree. His eyes feel raw, his throat sore.
A luminescent beetle lights on Felix’s hand.
“It’s my fault,” Felix tells the beetle, his vision blurring.
It shines, once, and starts moving towards the crook of his elbow.
~
“Don’t go.”
Felix, ten years old, hears the words and pauses, the bare wood cold against his feet.
“Mom?” he asks, moving to the slightly ajar door.
It opens, quickly, in front of him. His mother has reddened eyes.
Felix bites his lip. “Are you all right?”
She smiles. “I’m fine, Felix. It’s just allergies.”
“Who were you talking to, just then?”
She pauses, uncertain, then, “Just myself. It doesn’t matter, honey. Go to sleep. I’m going to go out to the market, I’ll be back.”
“You promise?” asks Felix.
“I promise.”
She slips past him, and Felix’s one glance inside the room leaves him with a lingering impression that something is wrong.
But, Felix climbs into the bed and listens to their car start up, back out of the driveway. He waits, for a moment, then he sees it.
The closet door. It was closed. She hadn’t closed the closet door in years, not since he could remember. It was always just a little bit open, because of everything that was inside…
Felix dashes out of bed, tears down the hallway to his parent’s room. He can hear the television playing, downstairs, and he pushes open the doorway (it bangs against the wall, but that hardly seems important) and yanks open the closet -
It’s empty. Completely empty. There’s a single shoe rack, pressed into the corner. The rest is gone.
“Mom!” Felix shouts, and he takes the steps two at a time. “Mom!”
~
“You know it was no one’s fault, right?”
Felix glances askance at his father, his diploma case slick against the palm of his hand. He’s a pilot, now. Fully qualified.
“Yeah,” lies Felix.
“Your mother had to leave. Sometimes, it’s like that.”
Felix clenches his jaw.
~
“I’m recommending you for algebra next year,” says Felix’s teacher. “What do you say? It’s a little unusual for kids your age, but I think you can handle it.”
Felix shakes his head. “No.”
The teacher blinks. “I’m sorry?”
“I don’t want to,” says Felix. “No.”
~
Felix is seventeen, and he doesn’t want to be here.
“You think that your mother left because of you,” says the therapist, evenly.
Felix shakes his head. “I don’t.”
“Your father thinks that’s what you believe.”
“He’s wrong.”
The therapist nods, slowly, giving Felix the opportunity to elaborate. Felix doesn’t.
“Well,” says the therapist, “what do you think, then?”
Felix meets the therapist’s eyes. - What does he think? - and he figures it out.
“I think she left because of him.”
~
“Felix!” shouts Felix’s father, “were you here all night? What were you thinking? I was worried sick!”
Felix picks up the beetle from his arm - it still glows, but more feebly, in the daylight. He looks up to his father, his eyes dry.
“I didn’t know you cared when people leave.”
Felix watches his father’s face darken, and he feels a sick stab of satisfaction.
~
The recruiting office is too air-conditioned; it’s frigid when Felix steps through the door, leaving behind the sweltering Caprican sun.
“Can I help you?” asks the woman at the front desk.
“I’d like to sign up for the Colonial Military.”
“Did you have a specialty in mind?”
A standard question. Felix takes a breath. “Yeah,” he says. “Mathematics.”