Sanctuary (Part 2 of 7)

[kappamaki33]

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He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn’t need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear.
-As I Lay Dying

Felix carefully put the tattered magazine aside when he heard a knock on his door.

“Yes?” he said.

“You decent?” Rosie asked. Oddly, it worried Felix that she was still only half-joking.

“Not that it matters, but yes.”

Rosie opened the door but didn’t come in. She leaned on the handle. “I got one for ya.”

Felix sat up and did his best not to pale.

He could tell Rosie saw how hard he was trying. “Seems like a nice enough man. Fragile, maybe. Like I said, those are the ones most likely to go either way-get all weepy or go batshit crazy-but I’m a pretty good judge, and I think this one’s a crier. You can handle that.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Rosie rolled her eyes. “How many times have I told you-my mother was a ‘ma’am,’ and if you see my mother standing behind me, you’d damn well better be warning me that the dead are rising rather than chatting with her.”

Military instincts died hard. “Yes, Rosie.”

“That’s better.” She narrowed her eyes. “What I wouldn’t give to know your story. Wanna tell me what your real name is yet?”

“Honest, my name is Hylas,” Felix answered without missing a beat.

Rosie snorted. “Fine. At least you picked a good trade name, Curly. I’ll send him up.”

Once Rosie pulled the door shut behind her, Felix stood, closed the shutters on his one window which overlooked the street, turned off his reading lamp, and flicked on the far softer overhead light. Then he sat on the bed, facing the door. He looked down at his hands for a moment, grateful that they looked no worse by now than if he chewed his fingernails. He folded his hands in his lap and stared at the door.

Felix knew he was lucky that, of all the establishments he could’ve ended up in, he’d found himself on the doorstep of the Rising Sun. Rosie ran a much tighter ship than most of the madams and pimps on the Prometheus did. Part of it was because she’d been a working girl herself, once. In her day, she had likely been what most men would have considered beautiful: blonde and voluptuous.

She wouldn’t have been to Felix’s tastes. The rare women who caught his eye that way were always dark and slim-athletic bodies that were almost androgynous until the clothes came off, but faces that were feminine and sweet and open.... They had played him just right, Felix thought for the thousandth time. She had played him just right.

But Rosie had seen better days. What had clearly once been perfect curves now sagged in some places and carried too much weight in others. More strikingly, she wore too much bright lipstick and rouge and eye makeup in a vain attempt to stay young, preventing her face from aging with the grace it otherwise would. She usually hid most of her frazzled, over-treated hair in a wrap.

There were a lot of madams who had risen to their positions from the ranks of the common pornai, though. Rosie was different because Rosie wanted to be everyone’s mother as well. “My kids,” she called the nine women and four men who worked and lived in the Rising Sun. Felix thought of the last time someone had included him as one of “my kids.” It was the “he’s a good kid” he’d barely heard as he rushed away from the Admiral to blabber at some drunk cabinet minister on New Caprica. He simultaneously laughed and nearly threw up at the unbidden image of Admiral Adama as a pimp. Felix shook his head to try to bounce that picture out of his brain.

He’d been incredibly lucky that Rosie had a vacant room when he arrived. He’d figured out by now that it had been Portia’s room. From what he could glean, Portia had disappeared about the same time he’d met her in the bar. He told Rosie about the three men he’d seen her with, but Rosie didn’t seem particularly interested in his information, or particularly worried about Portia. Rosie said she’d never pegged Portia to be one to stick around for very long, and she reassured Felix that even if she came back, the room was still his.

All in all, the Rising Sun wasn’t that bad a place to be, at least not yet. In some ways, it was better than Galactica. Rosie’s room and board fees and commission percentage were reasonable. He had a nice, big bed with down pillows-frankly, Felix would’ve understood if people hired him to enjoy his soft mattress rather than his body. Rosie kept the place very clean, laundered the sheets often, and had a nice bath with lots of soaps and oils that was strictly off-limits to clients. Of course, he still had to share the bathroom with a dozen other people, and the exposed plumbing looked like it had been put together with duct tape and chewing gum, but he’d expected that. The Rising Sun was one of the few places on the whole block that had its own bathroom, rather than having to use the communal showers and toilets down the street.

Of course, it wasn’t as though Rosie could run background checks on the clients, but she had a good eye for the crazies, and anyone who went against her rules wasn’t allowed back in. If one of her kids said no to something, especially since that didn’t happen much, that meant no-get over it, try another one, or go elsewhere. No doing anything that could lead to permanent physical damage. No tying up that the worker couldn’t undo on his or her own in less than five seconds. No doing anything that could prevent them calling for help. No drugs, unless it was New Caprica Weed, and then only if you were willing to share.

The girls down the hall had told Felix that Rosie was good about letting her kids rest if they needed to, not kicking them to the curb or letting them starve if they needed some time to get over the nasty things they picked up from clients from time to time. One of the bouncers had been a medic in a former life, too, now adept at treating those nasty things. All three bouncers knew their business well: hands-on with the clients, hands-off with the workers.

Felix had already had the opportunity to see one of the bouncers in action. The day after he’d shown up on the doorstep, Rosie had had Felix sit in what she called the front parlor with some of her veterans as a kind of on-the-job training. He’d mentally taken notes, paying attention to how Daphne and Livia and Rhea and Anthony held their bodies and schooled their expressions when clients arrived.

It was several hours before a man looking to hire another man came in. Anthony caught Felix completely off-guard when he wrapped his arms around him from behind and pulled Felix’s hand back to stroke his thigh, putting on a bit of a show for the new client. The lean and hungry look the client gave Felix only made Felix’s panic more visible.

“I want him,” the client had said, pointing at Felix.

Felix had been facing away from Rosie for this whole show, so she merely lifted her eyebrows in surprise and warned, “Hylas is new here. He’s still learning, but if you’re all right with that....”

The client and Rosie negotiated a price. Felix was glad that was Rosie’s job and not his, both because she knew what she was doing and he didn’t and because he was afraid of what his voice might come out sounding like if he spoke right then. Then Felix led the man whose name he didn’t know up to his room, the door approaching so slowly that Felix felt like he was walking up a down escalator, or trapped in something that wasn’t quite a dream but wasn’t yet a nightmare, either.

He kept repeating over and over again in his mind, It’s just sex. Pretend you’re both drunk and you picked him up in a bar. You’ve done that before. Once. It’s just sex.

Once the door to his room clicked shut behind them, the man was all over him. Felix was more than a little surprised at how intense the client was, biting his neck and then throwing Felix on the bed. He was almost glad that it seemed the man didn’t want him to do anything, just to be passive and let him do what he wanted. Before Felix could think anything more, he was naked and the man was hovering over him, kneeling between his legs. Felix’s heart raced as he thought the man moved to unzip his pants, but then there was a glint of something metal and a scream and the crack of bone and-

“What the frak?” the bouncer, Harris, yelled as he burst into the room to find Felix and the client on the floor. The client was flat on his stomach, and Felix was digging his knees into his back, cranking the man’s arm around behind his back as his other hand flailed for the hunting knife that had landed just out of reach.

Military instincts did, indeed, die hard, thank the gods.

“If you were smart, you’d tell me your story,” Rosie had said to Felix later, after Harris had given the now ex-client a black eye for good measure before tossing him into the street. “Whatever your past is, it probably saved your life, but it just about got you killed, too.”

“I don’t think he would’ve actually done anything to me. It was probably just a...kink of his, or something,” Felix rationalized. Believing that was the only way he was going to be able to sleep that night.

Harris shook his head, and Rosie sighed and looked at him knowingly. “It’d be easier to train up a streetwise virgin than somebody like you, no matter how many people you’ve frakked.” She threw her hands out. “I don’t care if he had that knife so he could carve a notch in your bedpost. You can’t afford to take that chance, Curly. Not ever. Daphne told me she saw why he picked you, that look on your face when Anthony started playing around. That poor, scared, vulnerable schtick turns a lot of guys on, but it attracts the crazies like honey attracts bears, too. Not to mention, the Gods know that the apocalypse already brought out the inner loony toon in a lot of otherwise decent folk.”

She patted Felix’s knee. “You’re not dumb, I can tell. But you gotta operate smarter than you are now, kiddo, or you’re not gonna last in this line of work long. Hell, you’re not gonna last in this world long.” She sighed and sat back with one last, hard pat. “If I didn’t know better, I’d send you to a temple society and have the brothers try and take care of you, like I do when I get underage kids coming in here looking for work. But I can tell you’d run from anyone who tried to help you for nothing in return.”

They’d agreed to take things slower, to not have Felix sit out front at first and to let Rosie pick clients for him. Easy clients. His first few had been what she’d called All Business Men, johns who bought sex the same way they bought lunch. If they got anything but an orgasm out of it, they didn’t show it to Felix.

At first, Felix had thought that kind of coldness would make his job more difficult. Even if they were All Business, they didn’t want him lying there like a dead fish, after all. The reality was their manner made reacting easier. He knew exactly what they wanted, so he knew how to move and moan accordingly, whether he felt anything or not.

Felix had thought his first time would be momentous, or at least memorable. Because of the way the All Business Men operated, though, it didn’t turn out that way. They made it all seem so surreal, like he and they were both running on the inexorable but inexplicable logic of a dream that Felix couldn’t quite wake from. Things had progressed so much faster than he’d ever imagined that nothing since the launch tube felt real. A week after he’d moved into the Rising Sun, Felix realized he couldn’t even remember his first paying client’s face.

“The truth is, you’re not really selling sex most of the time,” Rosie had told him. “You’re selling a fantasy. The guys you’ve had are odd that way, maybe. Or maybe they just hide it better. Anyway, the trick to this job is figuring out what people want from you. It’s usually not something you can actually give, so you have to get good at giving them the illusion.”

In a way, Felix now realized as he stared at the door, this man tonight was going to be his real first. A crier would want something more from him than just appropriately-timed back-arching and oh gods, yeses. What if it was something he was afraid to give?

The door opened.

“Oh!”

Felix’s brain was stuck on the strange and inconsequential detail that this was the first time he’d ever seen Louis Hoshi in civilian clothing.

Louis stood in the doorway, eyes and mouth wide.

Felix found his voice first, but his brain didn’t exactly kick in with it. “If you want someone else, I understand.”

Louis crossed the room in a few swift steps, but he restrained himself from hugging Felix. “Felix! What the hell happened to-how did you end up.... Why are you on the Prometheus?” he finally settled on.

Felix could only shrug. “Everyone has to be somewhere, I suppose.”

Louis sat down beside him on the bed. “Dee and I were sure you’d killed yourself. You have no idea how much Dee’s missed you, how much she’s beaten herself up over how she treated you when you got back.”

That tore open an unhealed wound. “Please don’t tell Dee you found me here.”

Louis shifted awkwardly. “Hell, not like I’m going to tell her I was even here. If we don’t volunteer, she won’t ask. She’ll be so happy to see you, she-”

“I’m not coming back to Galactica with you, Louis.”

Louis’s jaw dropped again. “Of course you are. You’ve been pardoned, do you know that?” Louis pressed. “Chief Tyrol told the Admiral what you did, how you made it possible for the rescue to even happen. Everything’s okay now. You’re a hero, Felix.”

Felix breathed deeply. “I know,” he said quietly. “And I’m not coming back to Galactica with you.”

Louis searched his closed expression for a long time. “Oh. So, is this...I mean, do you...like it here?”

“It’s fine.” Felix said evenly. “I’m fine.”

Louis stared at him, clearly unconvinced on all fronts.

He needed to operate smarter, Felix remembered. He needed to be an All Business Man himself, or even merely sitting next to Louis was going to destroy him.

You’re selling a fantasy. Figure out what people want from you, even though it’s usually something you can’t give.

“Not that it’s any of my business-except that I guess it kind of is-but what are you doing here?”

Felix had hoped that a little of his wry humor might make Louis feel more at ease, but Louis’s shoulders just tightened. “Like you said, everybody has to be somewhere.”

Felix put his hand on Louis’s arm. “You never were any good at lying.” That made Louis smile, just barely. “Come on, you can still talk to me. Pretend we’re on a date, and you’re as plastered as you were that night you came down to New Caprica on the shuttle with Hotdog and we won the Drunk Talent Show.”

Louis balked at the word ‘date,’ but his expression turned when Felix mentioned that particular evening.

“By solving differential equations in between shots of ambrosia.” Louis grinned. “I did get pretty talkative that evening.”

“So.” Felix shifted on the bed so he could pull a bottle of ambrosia and two glasses from the cupboard in his nightstand. He had Louis hold the glasses, and he poured. They knocked back their drinks in one gulp.

“Want to take a shot at a homogenous second order linear differential equation?” Felix asked, leering.

Louis laughed like if he didn’t, he would cry. “I understand why you left Galactica, I really do. And even though I think you should, I can understand you not wanting to come back, too. I just don’t understand why you’re here. I know it’s not illegal, but you’re better than this.”

“So are you,” Felix said. “Why are you here?”

Louis stared at his glass for a long time. “Did you ever wonder why, even though we’d been dating for a while before the Fleet jumped away, I never...we hadn’t had sex yet?”

“I figured you wanted to take things slow,” Felix said, though in truth, he had wondered, a lot. He had known there was plenty of mutual attraction. He’d also known it wasn’t merely shyness, since Louis had evaded his own subtle maneuvers to get him back to his tent.

“Gods, I never thought I’d say this out loud.” Louis turned away and closed his eyes. “I can’t come.”

Any man would understand the humiliation that had to come with an admission like that, but Felix knew Louis well enough to sense that something else was going on as well.

Louis started up again, rushing over the words so he wouldn’t have to think about them. “I know it’s a psychological hang-up, because everything works just fine when I, uh, go it alone, but when I’m with someone, I can’t. On New Caprica, with you-I hadn’t felt that way about anyone since the attacks. Then I thought, maybe if I waited until I was really comfortable, if I tried it with someone I loved-”

Louis put his hand over his mouth, but Felix could tell he knew he couldn’t bring those last words back, no matter how badly he wanted to.

Felix smoothed his hand down Louis’s back. “How long has it been this way?”

Damn. Rosie was right. He was a crier. “You heard about the Cylon on the Pegasus? What...happened to her when we found out about her?”

If this really had been one of their dates on New Caprica, Felix would have pulled away in revulsion, but he willed his arm to wrap tight around Louis’s shoulders. “Yes, I know.”

“I went when nobody else was down there. I knew it was the worst thing I’d ever done the moment I stepped into that cell, and I did it anyway.” Louis stared at him despairingly. “But she was the reason Jeremy was dead. We’d been together for eight years.” His voice cracked. “And Gina knew Jeremy. We’d even all had lunch together a couple months before, when I’d gotten shore leave on Scorpia.”

He paused a moment to get his voice back under control. “Once you disappeared, I decided, frak it, Louis, maybe if you don’t care about your partner-maybe you can just pay someone not to be embarrassed for you and get it the frak over with.”

Felix knew that if Louis left like this, he’d tell Dee, and they’d come looking for him. Even if they didn’t find him right away, Dee wouldn’t give up. Everything would be ruined.

He’d figured out what Louis wanted from this. Now, he just had to sum up the guts to give it to him.

He lifted Louis’s chin and kissed him hard, tears still wet on his lips. He pressed his cheek to Louis’s and whispered in his ear, “I can’t come back because I’m not a hero. On New Caprica, a Cylon tricked me into thinking she was my friend. That she loved me. If people knew the things I did-”

Before that night, Felix had thought he’d made love as opposed to frakked before. But the way Louis touched him, the way he locked his gaze on him almost the entire time, made Felix wonder. Louis was incredibly attentive, and Felix came easily and honestly.

Louis struggled. Felix did everything he could think of to help, and finally, after what at least seemed like a very long time, Louis shuddered and gasped in relief against Felix’s neck. After, Louis drowned him with kisses and babbled about love and forgiveness and home.

“I won’t take your money,” Felix said coolly, when he’d let Louis give all the affection he could stand. “But don’t tell anyone you’ve found me, and don’t ever come back.”

Louis pulled him even tighter into the circle of his arms. “But Felix, you can’t mean that-not now.” From the words alone, it sounded like Louis naively believed in magical healing sex, but his expression told a different story. “I understand now. It’s okay. I promise I won’t tell about the Cylon.”

“But I will tell them about yours,” Felix said. So that’s what a heart breaking looks like, Felix thought detachedly, as if he were looking down at the two of them in bed from high above. “I don’t think you’re evil, or that you deserve to be shoved out an airlock for what you’ve done, but it doesn’t change the fact that you did it. And while others may forgive you,” he gave in to sentimentality for a moment, stroking Louis’s cheek, “you can’t forgive yourself. I’m glad that you get it, because now you understand why I want you all to leave me alone.”

Felix held his composure until Louis dressed and stumbled out of his room. As soon as the door shut, he buried his face in his pillow and sobbed.

~~**~~**~~

“Please don’t cry anymore,” Livia said, snuggling up against him.

Felix lay fully clothed in Rhea’s bed, propped up on some of her collection of colorful throw pillows. Rhea and Livia lay on either side of him, patting his shoulders and handing him handkerchiefs.

“Aw, come on, babe, you can tell us what’s wrong. We won’t laugh,” Rhea said.

Louis had called him ‘baby.’ He sobbed even harder, too broken to even be embarrassed. “I don’t know what’s wrong. Honest. I never cry.”

“It’s just all settling in, that this is real, isn’t it?” Livia said. “Everybody thinks the big emotional crying fit’s gonna come after the first john, but it took a while for it to sink in with me, too.”

Rhea hitched up the shoulder of her oversized silk robe. “I know it doesn’t help to hear it right now, but it’s just a job. As soon as you realize that it’s just like any other job, it’s so much easier.”

Livia narrowed her eyes at Rhea. “But it’s not like any other job. Sex is a hell of a lot different from shoveling tylium.”

“Only if you think of it that way,” Rhea said. She turned back to Felix. “You’re from one of the more conservative colonies, aren’t you? You don’t strike me as a Sagittaron, but-Virgon? Picon?”

Felix nodded.

“No, back up a sec,” Livia said. “It’s not ‘only if you think of it that way.’ It is different.”

“Spoken like a true Sagittaron,” Rhea argued. “Case-in-point: on Leonis, being a sacred temple prostitute is about as high and honorable of a profession as you can get. A man or woman revered on Leonis as Aphrodite’s best beloved would be nothing more than a filthy whore on Sagittaron.”

“That proves my point. On Leonis, sex is still special. Sacred. Not like this.”

Felix looked at the women on either side of him: Livia, wearing duck-shaped bedroom slippers, her blonde hair up in curlers; Rhea, coal black hair pulled back from her face so it wouldn’t end up in the cream smeared on her nose and cheeks and below her wide-set green eyes. It was like he’d invaded one of his big sister’s slumber parties, complete with deep and strange philosophical ponderings. If it weren’t so serious, it would almost be funny. A choked giggle bubbled up inside him.

“What?” Livia asked, smiling.

Felix couldn’t explain, so he tried to change the subject. “What did you do before the attacks? Were you always....”

“No,” Livia answered. “I worked on a dairy farm, then I was a roofer for a while, but mostly, I was a waitress in a lot of different places. I kind of drifted a lot.”

They both turned to Rhea. “I was a poet.”

“Really?” Livia said, beating Felix to it. “Were you any good?”

“Some people thought so. But even great poets can rarely pay the bills on sonnets alone.”

“So what else did you do? Write bad romance novels?” Livia pressed, teasing a little.

Rhea scowled. “I was no corporate shill. I’d rather have starved.”

Livia hit her fist on the mattress. “See? Now how is that any different from selling sex?”

Felix was starting to feel like he was intruding, even though Livia and Rhea had been the ones who’d dragged him in here when they’d brought him supper in his room and found him a sobbing, snot-nosed mess.

Rhea said, “Because we sell our bodies all the time! Like shoveling tylium, or milking cows, or putting shingles on roofs. But writing is something that comes from my soul, and I won’t sell out that.”

“But the Sacred Scrolls say you can’t draw a line between your body and your soul like that.”

Felix asked, “What about the heart?”

The women stared at him silently, with a look of oh dear gods, what have we stepped in?

“Hylas, honey, don’t tell us you’ve fallen in love with a client,” Rhea said. “It’s not something that happens very often, but it’s always a very, very bad idea.”

Felix shook his head, not trusting his voice.

Livia studied his face for a moment, then softened and said, “Oh, I know. You were in love with somebody before you came here, and he broke things off because he wasn’t okay with...this.”

Felix nodded, even though that wasn’t really right. He wasn’t in love with Louis, but he thought he could have been, someday. And the way he’d treated Louis, to get him to go away and stay silent....

“No wonder you’re a wreck,” Rhea said. She sighed and rubbed his arm, but her eyes seemed very far away. “Love tends to be something we can’t afford.”

CONTINUE TO CHAPTER 3