Gaeta-Related Ficlets from First Line Meme
Figured I might as well cross-post these:
"Confession Isn't Always Good For the Soul" (Gaeta/Baltar, angst, PG-13) for geekbynight
“Do you love me, Felix?”
Felix would have preferred panic over the outright amusement and barely-suppressed mockery tingeing Gaius’s voice.
“What? No, I-didn’t…say…” Felix said, trying to sound casual but failing miserably.
Gaius walked in front of a window, the glow from perimeter lights surrounding Colonial One outside making his silhouette visible in the otherwise pitch-black room. He had already put on his bathrobe and was digging for something in its pockets. Felix sat up and hugged his knees to his chest against the cold, regretting that they’d only made it to the sofa and not the bed where he could have at least wrapped himself up in the sheets. He wondered for a desperate moment how quickly he could find his haphazardly discarded clothing in the dark.
“Yes, you did,” Gaius said with cool smugness. “You said, ‘Gaius, I love you.’”
For some reason, the part that hurt the most was that, had Gaius ripped the confession out of him any other way, Gaius really would have panicked instead of gloated; Felix was sure of it.
“No, I meant to say, ‘I love it when you do that,’” Felix stuttered. “But I couldn’t think straight-”
“Well I know that’s true.” Felix could hear Gauis’s smirk and the cigarette clamped in his mouth even if he couldn’t see it.
“But I couldn’t think straight,” Felix pressed on uselessly, “and it came out contracted like that.”
Gaius merely chuckled low in his throat in response. He walked away from the windows, and Felix felt the cushions shift on the sofa as Gaius sat down beside him. A lighter clicked, and the flame lit up Gaius’s wicked grin and the two cigarettes in his mouth. Felix soon felt one pressed to his lips, which he accepted, though he wanted the bathrobe or anything to cover up with far more.
“‘Gaius, I love you,’” Gaius repeated almost to himself as his fingers ran down from Felix’s lips to his throat and then his collarbone. “I wonder what other interesting little secrets could be elicited from the always in-control Mr. Gaeta by applying a bit of…pressure to the right…places.” The fingers trailed down, down, down, hunting out those places and playing Felix’s body as if it were a well-tuned instrument. Felix tipped his head back in pleasure but squeezed his eyes shut in shame.
"Get to the Punch Line Already, Baby" (Gaeta/Hoshi, fluffy fluff, PG-13) for
tin_o_biscuits
"Well, I guess you shouldn't judge people by their looks. So, hey, I'm sorry,” Felix said in a joking tone that Louis knew meant was lining up some sort of punch line for later. He also knew Felix was fishing for either confusion or mock indignation from him, but he decided not to play along and make things too easy for Felix.
“Hey, your loss,” said Louis as he pulled the bunk’s privacy curtain shut. He shrugged and grinned. “By not noticing me sooner, you shorted yourself months of-and I don’t think I’m bragging or over-exaggerating when I say this-of really good sex.”
Felix rolled with the unexpected response pretty well. “And then you do that, and you make me feel like even more of an idiot for not noticing you sooner.”
“Do what?”
“That expression. You smile, and from the nose downward, your face is all sweetness and warmth, but from the nose up-you’re frakking me with your eyes.”
“Well, I’d like to be frakking you with my-”
“Oh, no,” Felix said playfully, taking Louis by the shoulders and gently rolling him back to his side of the rack. “I’m not done apologizing yet.”
“Well, hurry up then!” Louis growled, though his eyes were crinkling with laughter.
“So, I sincerely apologize for being so distracted by the silliest, dorkiest, most horrendous haircut in Colonial history to notice just how much I like the rest of you.” Felix winked and traced a line across Louis’s forehead where his short, stick-straight bangs had been, then ran his fingers through the new haircut, which, while not great, was certainly a substantial improvement.
Louis sighed. “You’re never going to let me live that down, are you?”
“Nope.” Felix paused. “Although, perhaps there are certain ways I might be convinced to…temporarily forget about it…”
Louis flipped Felix onto his back and rolled on top of him in one swift movement. “Like by frakking you senseless?”
Felix’s body shivered underneath his as Felix let out a strangled but very blissful little whimper.
“What, no more jokes?” Louis allowed himself to gloat just a little. “No witty comebacks?”
“Jokes? What jokes? I don’t remember any jokes,” Felix replied mock-innocently, leaning up just far enough to press a kiss to Louis’s lips before settling back down on the rack. Then his eyes softened. “I have a beautiful man hovering over me who’s just offered to frak me through the mattress. That is no laughing matter.”
"The Blue Film" (Gaeta/Hotdog, "How to Live and Love" 'verse, PG-13/light R) for trovia
(Concept unabashedly stolen from the Graham Greene short story of the same name. This story is not entirely unrelated to the original, because it’s set in the same ‘verse, and I changed the tense of the sentence because writing in present-tense for a whole fic drives me batty.)
Brendan had won a porn sample tonight at the card games. Video porn, even, which was quite rare nowadays. Ideally, he would have liked to have enjoyed it in private first-he had nothing against sharing; it was just that watching porn took on a different character when you did it with half the Viper wing and a quarter of the bridge crew-but word of his big win had spread quickly, and the only working videotape player was in the rec room.
“What kind is it?” asked Narcho as he and Thumper maneuvered a sofa through the hatch and dropped it near the viewing screen with a resounding thump. They both hopped over the back and landed hard on the worn cushions.
“Picon porn. It’s from back before the attacks,” said Brendan.
“Do I want to know where you got that from?” Apollo asked as he joined the small crowd, eyeing the sofa like it might bite him.
“No, sir, you don’t,” answered Narcho.
Apollo stood in thought for a moment. “All right, then. Scoot over.” Thumper and Narcho made room for Apollo, who sat down stiffly but looked like he was at least trying to be just one of the guys instead of the CAG.
“And Hotdog, what the frak kind of answer is that? What kind of porn is it?” Narcho looked around the room. “I see that the crowd is predominantly male, but I can’t figure out what kind of porn would attract both Apollo and Gaeta.”
“Since when do you like one kind over the other?” asked Thumper.
Narcho laughed. “True.”
But Brendan had barely been paying attention after Narcho mentioned Felix was there. He was downright shocked to see Felix outside his quarters while not on duty. And here he was, struggling to drag a folding chair across the room while keeping his balance on his crutch and prosthetic at the same time.
Brendan fairly bounded over to Felix and took the chair from him. It said a lot about how much time Brendan had been spending with Felix that nobody even looked at him funny. Not that it would’ve changed how he would’ve acted if they had.
“I didn’t know you were coming,” Hotdog said, wanting to put his hand on the small of Felix’s back but knowing he shouldn’t. “I would’ve invited you, but I didn’t know if this one showed the gay stuff or not.”
Brendan wasn’t happy about lying to Felix, but he was oddly happy he was there. Actually, he hadn’t invited Felix because, one, he never thought he would’ve actually come, and two, considering the kind of thoughts he’d been having about Felix lately, it would’ve made him feel strange and probably even a little guilty. But if Felix came there because he wanted to-well, that was different, or at least that’s what Brendan hoped.
“Okay,” Felix said as he lowered himself onto the chair, wincing.
“You all right?”
“Yeah, fine.”
Brendan pulled up a chair beside Felix. He sat on it backwards, straddling the back of the chair so it sort of hid his crotch from general view. Not that anybody would find it weird for a guy to get a hard-on watching porn, but for some reason, Brendan thought it might be a little weird for Felix to see.
“All right, gentlemen,” Narcho said, hopping to his feet and waving the tape in the air. “Courtesy of Hotdog, resident card shark extraordinaire-”
“Y’know, I think I got a lot better at cards after playing with you all the time in your quarters,” Brendan whispered to Felix.
“-We have tonight, for your viewing pleasure, Mystery Picon Porn!”
The crowd cheered but mostly laughed, and Narcho popped the tape into the player and sat back down.
It turned out it really was a sampler pack, with a bunch of short films cut together on the one tape. The first one was disappointing heterosexual porn; even the guys who were exclusively into women said it was pretty bad. The second was much more interesting: two guys with a girl in the middle, then they switched it up to the two guys and then the girl on the end, but the camera was so shaky that it almost gave Brendan motion sickness watching it. And that was saying something, Brendan being a pilot and being used to twirling and flipping upside down in his Viper, after all.
The third one, though, made Brendan really glad he’d sat in his chair the way he did. The image was really grainy and fuzzy, so it was hard to see their faces much, but frak me. Two guys, one who obviously really knew what he was doing, the other kind of nervous but willing and almost sweet and gods it was hot.
The bad part was, that thing that had been happening for awhile now, how images of Felix always got mixed in any time Brendan thought about sex or kissing or much of anything, was happening really bad right now. It struck him as strange that he kept seeing Felix as the nervous, sweet one instead of the guy who knew what he was doing, because if it ever did happen (which it wouldn’t, don’t even get started down that road, no, it won’t, you can’t, stop it), Brendan would be the one who wouldn’t be really sure how to do things, even though he’d done as much research on it as a person could without actually frakking a guy. But he couldn’t see the nervous one without seeing Felix’s curly hair or the silly tiger tattoo on his chest…
Suddenly, Brendan noticed that the crowd wasn’t hooting or making snide comments like they had been during the other scenes. In fact, they were all dead silent.
Narcho stood up and stepped jerkily toward the screen, jaw hanging open. The camera closed in on the face and chest of the nervous one. Narcho paused the recording and pointed to the image inked onto the man’s pectoral.
“Is that? That’s-no. But-it is. Isn’t it?”
Every pair of eyes in the room slowly turned toward Felix. Felix looked like he was about to throw up.
“In college. I needed the money,” Felix said, staring at the screen with wide eyes.
Well, at least now I know why I couldn’t see Felix as the one who knew what he was doing, Brendan thought to himself
Felix was nearly out the door by the time the cheers and cat-calls started. There weren’t that many of them, and, judging from the few who made them, like Narcho and Thumper, they were made in good fun.
Nobody suggested playing the rest of the tape that night. That was enough excitement for one night. Narcho rewound the tape to play a couple parts of the third scene over again, whether to make sure it really was Felix or for other reasons, Brendan wasn’t sure. All Brendan knew was it was going to be much, much harder to pry Felix out of his quarters ever again, and it was going to be damn near impossible to think about sex at all without very specific pictures of Felix popping up in Brendan’s brain.
"The Best Medicine" (Gaeta/Hoshi, PG-13) for
lls_mutant
The breeze was getting stiffer, ruffling through his hair and tipping the waves with whitecaps. If it hadn’t been for the wind, the beach would have been completely motionless with Felix standing there on the shore, gray as the world around him.
Felix didn’t even turn at the sound of Louis crunching across the sand to stand beside him. “Helo says we need to be back at the Raptor in fifteen minutes.”
Felix didn’t say anything. He kept his gaze fixed on the ruined skyscrapers on the opposite shore.
Both Doc Cottle and Louis had initially insisted Felix stay on Galactica, knowing full well that he really shouldn’t have even been back in CIC yet. But when Louis saw that Cottle and Felix were too drained to trade their usual sarcastic barbs with one another and Cottle throw his hands up in surrender so quickly, Louis had given in, too. He still didn’t understand why Felix wanted to see the burned-out husk of Earth so badly, though.
Sam ambled down the shoreline a few meters off, head hanging and hands shoved deep in his pockets. He looked up at Felix and Louis and briefly picked up his pace as if to come over to them, but Louis shook his head and smiled weakly. Sam’s shoulders drooped, but he took the hint and wandered back in the direction he’d come from.
Louis knew he should still be furious with Sam, but it was so hard to sum up the energy to rage at someone who looked so sad and guilty. In fact, he felt too worn out to be angry at anyone, even Starbuck. Even Dee.
“Wind’s picking up,” Louis said, shuffling a step closer to Felix so their jacket sleeves brushed against each other. He looked at Felix out of the corner of his eye. His expression was as cold and unmoving as if his face had been chiseled out of stone.
“Baltar said that before the disaster, this place had a tropical climate. Sun and blue skies and warm ocean breezes,” Felix said flatly.
Louis could feel his blood pressure rising. That was one person he always had enough energy to hate. “That son of a bitch-I told him I’d frakking kill him if he or any of his crazy disciples came anywhere near you again-”
“Don’t kill him,” Felix said, his expression, though still not happy or even relaxed, softening a little. “He’s still very clear on what you said to him after the trial. I approached him, and nothing happened.”
“Okay,” Louis said in a tone that expressed anything but him actually being okay with Baltar.
They stood together in silence, watching the slate gray waves lap up onto the ash gray beach, until Felix mumbled, “This has all happened before, and this will all happen again.”
Louis groaned.
“What?”
“You’re quoting scripture,” said Louis. He sighed. “That’s never a good sign.”
Felix shrugged and shook his head. “If this is going to be how it ends, again, why do we even want to start again? Even if destiny is just another word for human nature…maybe the Cylons were right. Maybe the universe would be better off without us, since all we seem to be good at is wreaking apocalypses on it.”
He was losing Felix. He’d felt it most acutely since Dee died, that Felix was slipping away into some dark place where Louis couldn’t follow. He wanted nothing more than to pull Felix back from the brink and hang on to him for dear life, but he had no idea how.
“No. You’re wrong. Scripture’s wrong.” Felix turned, brow furrowed. Louis was certain this was the first time Felix had ever heard him even question the Sacred Scrolls.
Louis locked eyes with him and pressed on. “People can be better than this. People have been better than this. I don’t give a frak what scripture says about a ‘caravan through the stars.’ Even if this has happened before,” he said, holding one hand out to indicate the horizon, “Galactica is different. Galactica doesn’t happen every time.” He knew what he had to say next, and how dearly it would cost him, but Felix was worth the price. He couldn’t face Felix when he said it, though. “Pegasus was proof of that.”
Louis realized he’d squeezed his eyes shut when he felt Felix’s fingers caressing his cheek before he saw them. He opened his eyes, and Felix gently turned his face. He could see Felix understood the weight of what he’d just said but that Felix was at a loss for what to do next. Felix’s hand hesitated, and he leaned in but stopped short of being close enough to kiss him.
Finally, Felix reached up and flicked the brim of Louis’s hat, which was the same style as the one the Admiral had worn when he went down to the planet. “You look ridiculous,” he croaked, mouth twisting into something that started out with the intention of being a grin but ended up looking like a desperate attempt to hold back tears.
“I do not,” Louis said with a matching expression. “It’s military issue. Can’t look ridiculous.”
Felix grimaced and snorted. “What the hell kind of comeback is that?”
He made a noise somewhere between a choke and a chuckle, then another. Louis felt his chest constrict as he bit back a snicker, though he knew it wasn’t even all that funny. Felix was the one who gave up first and started full-out laughing, but soon, both of them were in hysterics, leaning on each other as tears streamed down both their faces.
“Gods, I needed that,” Felix said when their laughter finally died down, sniffing and wiping his eyes with the heel of his hand.
“Me, too,” Louis said as he stooped to pick up Felix’s crutch, which Felix had dropped at some point during their laughing fit. “Ready?”
“Yeah.”
Then Felix and Louis trudged back to the Raptor, leaving behind no echo on that beach which hadn’t heard laughter for thousands of years and wouldn’t hear it again for thousands to come.
"Confession Isn't Always Good For the Soul" (Gaeta/Baltar, angst, PG-13) for geekbynight
“Do you love me, Felix?”
Felix would have preferred panic over the outright amusement and barely-suppressed mockery tingeing Gaius’s voice.
“What? No, I-didn’t…say…” Felix said, trying to sound casual but failing miserably.
Gaius walked in front of a window, the glow from perimeter lights surrounding Colonial One outside making his silhouette visible in the otherwise pitch-black room. He had already put on his bathrobe and was digging for something in its pockets. Felix sat up and hugged his knees to his chest against the cold, regretting that they’d only made it to the sofa and not the bed where he could have at least wrapped himself up in the sheets. He wondered for a desperate moment how quickly he could find his haphazardly discarded clothing in the dark.
“Yes, you did,” Gaius said with cool smugness. “You said, ‘Gaius, I love you.’”
For some reason, the part that hurt the most was that, had Gaius ripped the confession out of him any other way, Gaius really would have panicked instead of gloated; Felix was sure of it.
“No, I meant to say, ‘I love it when you do that,’” Felix stuttered. “But I couldn’t think straight-”
“Well I know that’s true.” Felix could hear Gauis’s smirk and the cigarette clamped in his mouth even if he couldn’t see it.
“But I couldn’t think straight,” Felix pressed on uselessly, “and it came out contracted like that.”
Gaius merely chuckled low in his throat in response. He walked away from the windows, and Felix felt the cushions shift on the sofa as Gaius sat down beside him. A lighter clicked, and the flame lit up Gaius’s wicked grin and the two cigarettes in his mouth. Felix soon felt one pressed to his lips, which he accepted, though he wanted the bathrobe or anything to cover up with far more.
“‘Gaius, I love you,’” Gaius repeated almost to himself as his fingers ran down from Felix’s lips to his throat and then his collarbone. “I wonder what other interesting little secrets could be elicited from the always in-control Mr. Gaeta by applying a bit of…pressure to the right…places.” The fingers trailed down, down, down, hunting out those places and playing Felix’s body as if it were a well-tuned instrument. Felix tipped his head back in pleasure but squeezed his eyes shut in shame.
"Get to the Punch Line Already, Baby" (Gaeta/Hoshi, fluffy fluff, PG-13) for
tin_o_biscuits
"Well, I guess you shouldn't judge people by their looks. So, hey, I'm sorry,” Felix said in a joking tone that Louis knew meant was lining up some sort of punch line for later. He also knew Felix was fishing for either confusion or mock indignation from him, but he decided not to play along and make things too easy for Felix.
“Hey, your loss,” said Louis as he pulled the bunk’s privacy curtain shut. He shrugged and grinned. “By not noticing me sooner, you shorted yourself months of-and I don’t think I’m bragging or over-exaggerating when I say this-of really good sex.”
Felix rolled with the unexpected response pretty well. “And then you do that, and you make me feel like even more of an idiot for not noticing you sooner.”
“Do what?”
“That expression. You smile, and from the nose downward, your face is all sweetness and warmth, but from the nose up-you’re frakking me with your eyes.”
“Well, I’d like to be frakking you with my-”
“Oh, no,” Felix said playfully, taking Louis by the shoulders and gently rolling him back to his side of the rack. “I’m not done apologizing yet.”
“Well, hurry up then!” Louis growled, though his eyes were crinkling with laughter.
“So, I sincerely apologize for being so distracted by the silliest, dorkiest, most horrendous haircut in Colonial history to notice just how much I like the rest of you.” Felix winked and traced a line across Louis’s forehead where his short, stick-straight bangs had been, then ran his fingers through the new haircut, which, while not great, was certainly a substantial improvement.
Louis sighed. “You’re never going to let me live that down, are you?”
“Nope.” Felix paused. “Although, perhaps there are certain ways I might be convinced to…temporarily forget about it…”
Louis flipped Felix onto his back and rolled on top of him in one swift movement. “Like by frakking you senseless?”
Felix’s body shivered underneath his as Felix let out a strangled but very blissful little whimper.
“What, no more jokes?” Louis allowed himself to gloat just a little. “No witty comebacks?”
“Jokes? What jokes? I don’t remember any jokes,” Felix replied mock-innocently, leaning up just far enough to press a kiss to Louis’s lips before settling back down on the rack. Then his eyes softened. “I have a beautiful man hovering over me who’s just offered to frak me through the mattress. That is no laughing matter.”
"The Blue Film" (Gaeta/Hotdog, "How to Live and Love" 'verse, PG-13/light R) for trovia
(Concept unabashedly stolen from the Graham Greene short story of the same name. This story is not entirely unrelated to the original, because it’s set in the same ‘verse, and I changed the tense of the sentence because writing in present-tense for a whole fic drives me batty.)
Brendan had won a porn sample tonight at the card games. Video porn, even, which was quite rare nowadays. Ideally, he would have liked to have enjoyed it in private first-he had nothing against sharing; it was just that watching porn took on a different character when you did it with half the Viper wing and a quarter of the bridge crew-but word of his big win had spread quickly, and the only working videotape player was in the rec room.
“What kind is it?” asked Narcho as he and Thumper maneuvered a sofa through the hatch and dropped it near the viewing screen with a resounding thump. They both hopped over the back and landed hard on the worn cushions.
“Picon porn. It’s from back before the attacks,” said Brendan.
“Do I want to know where you got that from?” Apollo asked as he joined the small crowd, eyeing the sofa like it might bite him.
“No, sir, you don’t,” answered Narcho.
Apollo stood in thought for a moment. “All right, then. Scoot over.” Thumper and Narcho made room for Apollo, who sat down stiffly but looked like he was at least trying to be just one of the guys instead of the CAG.
“And Hotdog, what the frak kind of answer is that? What kind of porn is it?” Narcho looked around the room. “I see that the crowd is predominantly male, but I can’t figure out what kind of porn would attract both Apollo and Gaeta.”
“Since when do you like one kind over the other?” asked Thumper.
Narcho laughed. “True.”
But Brendan had barely been paying attention after Narcho mentioned Felix was there. He was downright shocked to see Felix outside his quarters while not on duty. And here he was, struggling to drag a folding chair across the room while keeping his balance on his crutch and prosthetic at the same time.
Brendan fairly bounded over to Felix and took the chair from him. It said a lot about how much time Brendan had been spending with Felix that nobody even looked at him funny. Not that it would’ve changed how he would’ve acted if they had.
“I didn’t know you were coming,” Hotdog said, wanting to put his hand on the small of Felix’s back but knowing he shouldn’t. “I would’ve invited you, but I didn’t know if this one showed the gay stuff or not.”
Brendan wasn’t happy about lying to Felix, but he was oddly happy he was there. Actually, he hadn’t invited Felix because, one, he never thought he would’ve actually come, and two, considering the kind of thoughts he’d been having about Felix lately, it would’ve made him feel strange and probably even a little guilty. But if Felix came there because he wanted to-well, that was different, or at least that’s what Brendan hoped.
“Okay,” Felix said as he lowered himself onto the chair, wincing.
“You all right?”
“Yeah, fine.”
Brendan pulled up a chair beside Felix. He sat on it backwards, straddling the back of the chair so it sort of hid his crotch from general view. Not that anybody would find it weird for a guy to get a hard-on watching porn, but for some reason, Brendan thought it might be a little weird for Felix to see.
“All right, gentlemen,” Narcho said, hopping to his feet and waving the tape in the air. “Courtesy of Hotdog, resident card shark extraordinaire-”
“Y’know, I think I got a lot better at cards after playing with you all the time in your quarters,” Brendan whispered to Felix.
“-We have tonight, for your viewing pleasure, Mystery Picon Porn!”
The crowd cheered but mostly laughed, and Narcho popped the tape into the player and sat back down.
It turned out it really was a sampler pack, with a bunch of short films cut together on the one tape. The first one was disappointing heterosexual porn; even the guys who were exclusively into women said it was pretty bad. The second was much more interesting: two guys with a girl in the middle, then they switched it up to the two guys and then the girl on the end, but the camera was so shaky that it almost gave Brendan motion sickness watching it. And that was saying something, Brendan being a pilot and being used to twirling and flipping upside down in his Viper, after all.
The third one, though, made Brendan really glad he’d sat in his chair the way he did. The image was really grainy and fuzzy, so it was hard to see their faces much, but frak me. Two guys, one who obviously really knew what he was doing, the other kind of nervous but willing and almost sweet and gods it was hot.
The bad part was, that thing that had been happening for awhile now, how images of Felix always got mixed in any time Brendan thought about sex or kissing or much of anything, was happening really bad right now. It struck him as strange that he kept seeing Felix as the nervous, sweet one instead of the guy who knew what he was doing, because if it ever did happen (which it wouldn’t, don’t even get started down that road, no, it won’t, you can’t, stop it), Brendan would be the one who wouldn’t be really sure how to do things, even though he’d done as much research on it as a person could without actually frakking a guy. But he couldn’t see the nervous one without seeing Felix’s curly hair or the silly tiger tattoo on his chest…
Suddenly, Brendan noticed that the crowd wasn’t hooting or making snide comments like they had been during the other scenes. In fact, they were all dead silent.
Narcho stood up and stepped jerkily toward the screen, jaw hanging open. The camera closed in on the face and chest of the nervous one. Narcho paused the recording and pointed to the image inked onto the man’s pectoral.
“Is that? That’s-no. But-it is. Isn’t it?”
Every pair of eyes in the room slowly turned toward Felix. Felix looked like he was about to throw up.
“In college. I needed the money,” Felix said, staring at the screen with wide eyes.
Well, at least now I know why I couldn’t see Felix as the one who knew what he was doing, Brendan thought to himself
Felix was nearly out the door by the time the cheers and cat-calls started. There weren’t that many of them, and, judging from the few who made them, like Narcho and Thumper, they were made in good fun.
Nobody suggested playing the rest of the tape that night. That was enough excitement for one night. Narcho rewound the tape to play a couple parts of the third scene over again, whether to make sure it really was Felix or for other reasons, Brendan wasn’t sure. All Brendan knew was it was going to be much, much harder to pry Felix out of his quarters ever again, and it was going to be damn near impossible to think about sex at all without very specific pictures of Felix popping up in Brendan’s brain.
"The Best Medicine" (Gaeta/Hoshi, PG-13) for
lls_mutant
The breeze was getting stiffer, ruffling through his hair and tipping the waves with whitecaps. If it hadn’t been for the wind, the beach would have been completely motionless with Felix standing there on the shore, gray as the world around him.
Felix didn’t even turn at the sound of Louis crunching across the sand to stand beside him. “Helo says we need to be back at the Raptor in fifteen minutes.”
Felix didn’t say anything. He kept his gaze fixed on the ruined skyscrapers on the opposite shore.
Both Doc Cottle and Louis had initially insisted Felix stay on Galactica, knowing full well that he really shouldn’t have even been back in CIC yet. But when Louis saw that Cottle and Felix were too drained to trade their usual sarcastic barbs with one another and Cottle throw his hands up in surrender so quickly, Louis had given in, too. He still didn’t understand why Felix wanted to see the burned-out husk of Earth so badly, though.
Sam ambled down the shoreline a few meters off, head hanging and hands shoved deep in his pockets. He looked up at Felix and Louis and briefly picked up his pace as if to come over to them, but Louis shook his head and smiled weakly. Sam’s shoulders drooped, but he took the hint and wandered back in the direction he’d come from.
Louis knew he should still be furious with Sam, but it was so hard to sum up the energy to rage at someone who looked so sad and guilty. In fact, he felt too worn out to be angry at anyone, even Starbuck. Even Dee.
“Wind’s picking up,” Louis said, shuffling a step closer to Felix so their jacket sleeves brushed against each other. He looked at Felix out of the corner of his eye. His expression was as cold and unmoving as if his face had been chiseled out of stone.
“Baltar said that before the disaster, this place had a tropical climate. Sun and blue skies and warm ocean breezes,” Felix said flatly.
Louis could feel his blood pressure rising. That was one person he always had enough energy to hate. “That son of a bitch-I told him I’d frakking kill him if he or any of his crazy disciples came anywhere near you again-”
“Don’t kill him,” Felix said, his expression, though still not happy or even relaxed, softening a little. “He’s still very clear on what you said to him after the trial. I approached him, and nothing happened.”
“Okay,” Louis said in a tone that expressed anything but him actually being okay with Baltar.
They stood together in silence, watching the slate gray waves lap up onto the ash gray beach, until Felix mumbled, “This has all happened before, and this will all happen again.”
Louis groaned.
“What?”
“You’re quoting scripture,” said Louis. He sighed. “That’s never a good sign.”
Felix shrugged and shook his head. “If this is going to be how it ends, again, why do we even want to start again? Even if destiny is just another word for human nature…maybe the Cylons were right. Maybe the universe would be better off without us, since all we seem to be good at is wreaking apocalypses on it.”
He was losing Felix. He’d felt it most acutely since Dee died, that Felix was slipping away into some dark place where Louis couldn’t follow. He wanted nothing more than to pull Felix back from the brink and hang on to him for dear life, but he had no idea how.
“No. You’re wrong. Scripture’s wrong.” Felix turned, brow furrowed. Louis was certain this was the first time Felix had ever heard him even question the Sacred Scrolls.
Louis locked eyes with him and pressed on. “People can be better than this. People have been better than this. I don’t give a frak what scripture says about a ‘caravan through the stars.’ Even if this has happened before,” he said, holding one hand out to indicate the horizon, “Galactica is different. Galactica doesn’t happen every time.” He knew what he had to say next, and how dearly it would cost him, but Felix was worth the price. He couldn’t face Felix when he said it, though. “Pegasus was proof of that.”
Louis realized he’d squeezed his eyes shut when he felt Felix’s fingers caressing his cheek before he saw them. He opened his eyes, and Felix gently turned his face. He could see Felix understood the weight of what he’d just said but that Felix was at a loss for what to do next. Felix’s hand hesitated, and he leaned in but stopped short of being close enough to kiss him.
Finally, Felix reached up and flicked the brim of Louis’s hat, which was the same style as the one the Admiral had worn when he went down to the planet. “You look ridiculous,” he croaked, mouth twisting into something that started out with the intention of being a grin but ended up looking like a desperate attempt to hold back tears.
“I do not,” Louis said with a matching expression. “It’s military issue. Can’t look ridiculous.”
Felix grimaced and snorted. “What the hell kind of comeback is that?”
He made a noise somewhere between a choke and a chuckle, then another. Louis felt his chest constrict as he bit back a snicker, though he knew it wasn’t even all that funny. Felix was the one who gave up first and started full-out laughing, but soon, both of them were in hysterics, leaning on each other as tears streamed down both their faces.
“Gods, I needed that,” Felix said when their laughter finally died down, sniffing and wiping his eyes with the heel of his hand.
“Me, too,” Louis said as he stooped to pick up Felix’s crutch, which Felix had dropped at some point during their laughing fit. “Ready?”
“Yeah.”
Then Felix and Louis trudged back to the Raptor, leaving behind no echo on that beach which hadn’t heard laughter for thousands of years and wouldn’t hear it again for thousands to come.