Fic: Aftermath (Hoshi, R) Part 2 of 2
Title: Aftermath (Part 2 of 2)
Author: millari
Characters: Hoshi, Gaeta, Seelix, Caprica Six, Tigh, Lee, Adama, Baltar
Genre: Slash
Pairing: Hoshi/Gaeta
Wordcount: 4,085
Rating: R (for sexual situations)
SPOILERS: Through Season 4's "No Exit"
Warnings: None
Summary: Louis Hoshi has lost the man he loves. Now he has to figure out what that really means.
Beta: I had a lot of help with this one. Thanks to usakeh, daybreak777, qumabh for all their cheerleading and on the fly feedback. Thanks to wyrdwritere for the final beta and for unwittingly inspiring this fic with his excellent ficlet, "Repairing the Damage".
Author's Note: This was written for Round 12 at ficfinishing. Huge thanks and love go to all the folks there for their highly recommended encouragement and useful techniques.
Link to part 1
Part 2
Once in the hallway, Louis does start running, weaving from side to side in his drunkenness. It helps that the halls are mostly empty. It only takes a few hallways before he has to stop in his tracks to calm his roiling stomach. Bleary-eyed and panting, his throat so dry it’ll close on him any minute, he slides down a wall he’s been leaning against until he’s on the floor, his knees pulled in towards him.
“Are you all right?” a husky, female voice asks him. He looks up into a blurry mess of blonde hair.
He laughs in the back of his throat. She is the second person to ask him this question tonight, and he feels no more ready to lie about the answer than before.
“No, I’m not,” he says again, too tired this time to keep the tone of it neutral. “I’m not all right,” he repeats angrily. “How could I be?”
He realizes too late that he doesn’t know this woman and she doesn’t know him, and it’s not fair to unleash his anger on her.
“I’m sorry,” he apologizes lamely. “Probably shouldn’t have had all those ambrosias on an empty stomach.” His head falls into his hands, as if to support itself.
The woman says nothing at first. “Is there someone close to you up here?” she eventually asks.
He tries to focus in on her face. It’s surrounded by dozens and dozens of faces in miniature.
Somehow his mind has betrayed him and brought him to the Memorial Wall, the last place he wants to be right now.
“Gods, I’m sorry,” he apologizes, self-consciously aware that his words are slurring. “I really didn’t mean to intrude upon your grief.”
He tries to pull himself up and fails, sinking back down into a sitting position, his long legs stretched out into almost the middle of the narrow hallway. The cooling presence of her hand lightly touching his forehead, surprises him, then turns out to be the most wonderful feeling in the world. She squats down and stares into his eyes. Closer like this, her features are easier to discern. He realizes what she is.
“You’re a Cylon,” he says, stiffening. “You’re a Six. What are you doing here?”
You killed Admiral Cain, he thinks. One of your kind did, anyway. Louis wonders if she remembers shooting Admiral Cain. And sleeping with her too.
He thinks he sees her brow furrow a moment, but with all the alcohol, he already can’t remember if she did or he just imagined it.
“I don’t need any trouble,” she says slowly, her hand withdrawing from his forehead. Louis feels like a child losing its favorite blanket. “I just came here to keep the memory of someone precious to me.”
“You’re mourning someone?” He has trouble believing a Cylon can feel such an emotion. The only Cylon he’s had any close contact with at all is Athena, in the rec room. He’s never sure what to make of her. Underneath the bantering mask she adopts like all the other pilots, there is something ruthless in her expression that every once in a while gives Louis the chills.
She reaches her hand out again, this time to help him up. After a moment’s hesitation, he grabs her hand and lets her do so.
“You sound so surprised, Lieutenant.” Her voice is clipped as she briefly examines his rank pin, then turns to gaze at the wall, slowly tracing her finger around the outer edge of a strange grey and white photo. He squints to focus on it.
It’s not a photo at all. It’s one of those pictures they take of babies in the womb, he knows, but he’s too drunk to retrieve the correct word for it.
Cylons can’t have babies, he thinks. It takes him a moment to realize who she is.
She’s the Six Tigh got pregnant in the brig. He remembers Felix ranting about her, saying that he remembered back on New Caprica, when Tigh would have blown up this woman if he’d had half a chance.
“You were Baltar’s girlfriend,” he blurts out. “On New Caprica.”
A flicker of pain crosses her face. “I was in a relationship with Gaius Baltar, yes.” There is no embarrassment there, no sense of shame in her eyes at the mention of his name, the way Felix always had. All Louis can see is a still-fresh sense of sadness in her.
“You were with Felix then,” he connects the dots for her, “on New Caprica.”
She stops and thinks, her face taut with surprise. “Felix Gaeta?” replies, her expression closing off a bit. “Who led the mutiny?”
Louis looks away. Did she lose her baby in the mutiny, he suddenly wonders? He’s not been paying close enough attention to events lately, and he’s missed a lot of finer details.
“I saw Felix Gaeta just about every day on New Caprica” she confirms. Her hand settles on his shoulder, and it startles him into looking up at her. “Is he why you came here?”
The lump in his throat hardens and he blinks far too many times in a row.
She stares into his eyes, as if inspecting them for something. “You love him,” she pronounces.
“I did.” His voice trails off a moment with doubt and chagrin. “I’m not sure I still do.”
“You do.” She pulls the truth out from him with seemingly no effort. When he doesn’t reply, she looks him up and down. She reaches out a hand to brush his collar again, and her fingers linger over his rank pin.
“You took different sides in the mutiny, didn’t you?”
He’d like to puke right about now, but the nearest head feels a universe away, so he has to swallow down his nausea.
“He didn’t give me a chance to take a side,” he says bluntly. “He just put me in the brig with all the senior staff.”
How frakked-up has Louis’ world become that a Cylon has become his confidante? Felix would be so angry that he was even speaking to this woman, this being, whatever she was.
“What was Felix like on New Caprica?” The words come out far more desperately than he’d planned. She crosses her arms in front of her chest, as if suspicious of a trap.
“He never wanted to talk about that period of his life with me,” Louis adds an explanation in an attempt to reassure her.
She runs a hand through her hair.
“Sad, I guess,” is her first thought. “And angry, I’m pretty sure. But it was often hard to tell. He always wore this neutral mask of cooperation, you know?”
Louis nods. He knows that mask very well. Felix wore it in the CIC whenever he had to deal with Tigh.
“What happened to him on that planet?”
“I’m not sure how much I can tell you about him,” she says flatly. “I remember he worked very hard to make things there succeed." She searches her memories fruitlessly. "Honestly, he never really talked to me, even though I did try to make peace with him.”
“Peace?”
She is lost in thought so long, Louis begins to wonder if he has spaced out and missed something.
“Neither of them ever admitted it to me,” she sighs, “but it was obvious to me what had happened before I arrived. The two of them - Gaeta and Gaius - they had a relationship at some point and it ended badly. I would hear them snipe at each other sometimes, when they thought I wasn’t in the room.”
She pauses in realization. “I’m sorry. Is this painful for you to hear?”
“No,” he lies, his voice hoarse. “Go on.”
Her mouth twists with doubt, but she continues. “Well, frankly, the whole time we were on that planet, I don’t think Gaeta ever got over whatever he and Gaius had had together. The way he acted…I mean, he had plenty of other things to be upset at Gaius about down there I’m sure, but there was something broken about the way he acted with Gaius the last time I saw him on New Caprica. His words were all about Gaius’ failings as a president, but if you could have seen his face…”
She stops abruptly, looking pained. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
The liquor makes it impossible for him to hide the shock on his face. Not that he hasn’t already figured out the basics of this story she was re-telling, but to hear it described in such intimate detail makes his heart clench.
“Nothing,” he replies, than realizes his response isn’t even grammatically appropriate. “I mean, I’m fine.”
“You don’t seem fine,” she observes.
Louis swallows. It disturbs him how well this total stranger can see through his emotions. He’s drunk way too much tonight.
“I’m so sorry about your loss,” he interjects to change the subject, but he is surprised to realize that he means it. “I know how excited the Colonel was about being a father.”
He leaves out the part about how he only knows this because Felix complained about it for twenty minutes straight.
She pulls away. “Yes, he was, wasn’t he?” she says wistfully. “Well, he’s gone now. Back to her. The love of his life.” The words come out evenly, matter-of-fact, with only a slight hitch at the end betraying the pain there. “I really thought the baby meant…” she starts, but cannot finish. Her arms cross over his chest again.
“You know,” she reflects, “down on New Caprica, I remember how smug I used to feel in my pity for Gaeta, thinking that I had won Gaius.” She exhales deeply, as if the memory pains her. “And yet, what do I have now?”
She traces along the edge of the sonogram on the wall. Louis doesn’t know what to say at all.
“Where is he?” she asks. Already her composure has returned, her pain cloaking itself behind a mask of stoicism it’s clear she will not let Louis penetrate.
“His picture,” she explains, when Louis says nothing. “Where did you put Felix’s picture?” She gestures at the Wall.
The question takes him by surprise. “I - I don’t know if I want him up there,” he admits haltingly, “alone in a crowd, like he always was.”
Her fingers are still on the film of the sonogram, as if she can touch her dead child this way. “Well, I prefer to think of Liam as surrounded by a family that never got to know him.”
Louis can’t help it. Something about her answer makes him think of Felix, and the tears roll down his face before he can stop them, blurring his vision. Something in her appearance shifts and morphs, making her look a bit like the Six on Pegasus, and he thinks of Admiral Cain. Suddenly, he feels so weak for crying like this.
“I should go,” he says, embarrassed, turning abruptly, even though the sudden movement sends his head spinning again. His feet start to move, but it’s like his brain isn’t connected to the rest of his body anymore. He stands there before her, helplessly in frozen flight. She smiles at him with confused indulgence, waiting.
“Maybe you shouldn’t,” she says.
He stares at her in confusion. “Shouldn’t what?”
“Run.”
He wipes away his tears, trying to stop. He’s sweating from a combination of stress and too much drink, and he thinks he’s misheard her. “What are you talking about?”
“The pain you’re feeling.” She smiles again wanly. “You need to embrace it.”
He shakes his head. “I can’t,” he snaps. “Why the hell would I want to do that?”
“It’ll teach you.”
He rolls his eyes. “Teach me what? That the universe is random and unfair?” The words come out of him like a spring suddenly uncoiled. “Felix was a good man. He didn’t deserve any of this. What the frak lesson is there in that?”
She stares at him thoughtfully, unflinchingly. “Yes,” she concedes, unfazed. “But he also got you, didn’t he?”
The reply is so unexpected, Louis is caught utterly flat-footed. She looks into his eyes, unflinching.
“I believe God never gives us infinite suffering without also giving us some balance, some form of joy to go with the pain, some source of hope. Otherwise, how would we learn from what we go through? We’d just give up.”
“That’s totally frakked up.” His tone is flat, hostile, frustrated. “Felix was so frakked up after all that happened to him.”
He’s never admitted this to anyone. Louis couldn’t have done that to him, telling people what he’d been seeing of Felix behind closed doors - the drinking, the mood swings, the rages. They might have relieved him of duty, like Adama did with Tigh when he got back from New Caprica, or people would have started being more overt in their pity of him, and Felix would have hated that.
“Gods,” he sighs. “I just wanted to us to be a normal couple, you know?” He stares again at the Wall.
Her hand on his shoulder is comforting.
“I didn’t know Felix Gaeta all that well when it comes right down to it,” she says quietly. “But I can tell you that Gaeta clearly learned from his relationship with Gaius. After all, look at the next person he picked to love.”
He stares at her dumbfounded. Her gaze drifts to the image of her unborn child on the wall, and he feels slightly ashamed of himself. Despite her advice, he can see that she hadn’t been expecting to learn from her pain this way.
Frak, he thinks. The least he can do is be there for her while she looks at all she has left of her dead child.
He reaches out tentatively and takes her hand in his, curling a gentle grip around her fingers. Her reaction is slow at first, but soon, he feels her fingers interlace between his. The two of them just stand there for a long time in silence, thinking about the paths denied them.
When she gently disentangles herself, almost reverently laying his hand against his body, Louis knows it’s time to leave. Felix isn’t here on this wall anyway, and Louis still can’t decide if he should be.
He takes one last look back at her still staring at the sonogram. The way she just squeezed his hand so tightly as the two of them stared at the Wall, the gesture wracked with grief hadn’t seemed one bit different from his own mourning. These thoughts about Cylons feel disloyal to Felix’s memory somehow.
He knows what Felix would say, what Admiral Cain would say, if either of them were here: The Cylons can’t be trusted. They fake emotions to get you off your guard. They mess with your head.
When did Felix become equated with Helena Cain in his mind, he wonders?
But Louis is just not sure how to hate a woman so obviously mourning her lost child. Nor, he decides as he leaves her alone to her grief, does he want to learn.
***
People are still at their card games or eating in the Mess when Louis reaches the officers’ quarters. There is light snoring from the few people burrowed in their racks. Someone has tactfully drawn the curtain to his bunk so he doesn’t have to stare at Felix’s box of effects when he first walks in.
He avoids the bunk for as long as he can - which isn’t very long - pretending to fiddle with the hatch. He’s still drunk enough that he’s clumsy at it, so he gives up quickly.
This is stupid.
He has run out of excuses, and that box isn’t going anywhere. His body tense with indecision, he lurches back around and forces himself towards the drawn curtain.
There is an unopened bottle of wine next to the box that wasn’t there before. He grabs it in surprise and takes off the small piece of paper fastened to it with a rubber band.
The note says in fat, indelible magic marker: Save for Lt. Gaeta. The signature on the note reads Joe, and there is a date underneath.
Louis stops breathing for a moment.
The date marked on the note won’t happen for over a month, but Louis recognizes it immediately - the anniversary of their first date. Louis has always remembered it even though it hadn’t been much of a date: They had eaten together in the Mess, both acting like what they were doing wasn’t a date at all, in case the other person decided afterward that he wasn’t interested.
They had never talked about the fact that they were coming up on an anniversary, because Felix hadn’t mentioned it yet, and Louis had been waiting for a calm moment to remind him, to discuss trying to do something special to commemorate it, just the two of them. But when had there ever been a calm moment in the last few months?
Felix had lost his leg. Then the President disappeared on a basestar and the Cylons held her hostage. Then Tigh and the others were revealed as Cylons. Then Earth turned out to be a wasteland. Then Dee committed suicide.
After all that happened, Louis had stopped hoping for Felix to remember the anniversary of anything. In fact, Louis himself had felt a little guilty for wanting to bring it up. It had seemed so petty and insignificant compared to everything they had to deal with.
He picks up the photo on top of the box and examines it again. He wishes he’d known Felix back when this photo was taken, when Felix wasn’t so messed up. The thought stabs at him with immediate guilt, but for once, he opens himself up to the feeling.
We deserved a better chance than we got, Felix.
He props the photo up on the little shelf above his rack, enjoying it there for a moment before sitting on the mattress next to the box of Felix’s effects. He draws the curtain around him for privacy, then takes out the pocket knife he always carries with him on duty and slowly cuts at the yellow security tape around the box, his expression grim with determination.
***
“Can you still plot a jump, Mister Hoshi?”
Louis almost jumps in his chair at the unexpected sound of Colonel Tigh’s voice next to him.
“Sir?”
“It’s a simple question, Mister Hoshi,” Tigh says impatiently. “Can you plot a jump or not? Gaeta trained you how to execute jumps with our computers before he left his post for New Caprica, didn’t he?”
A memory assaults him unexpectedly, of Felix standing beside him at the navigation plotting table, clearly oblivious to the fact that Louis felt awkward in his attraction to him, oblivious that Louis felt awkward about being trained by a man younger than him with less military experience.
“I know don’t know how to describe it,” Felix said with a confidence that only made him seem more attractive, something Louis really didn’t need to notice just now. He needed to focus on what this man was saying.
“It’s only frustrating until you let it go. Once you do, you can take a second look at it and you’ll see where your blind spots are. Then the numbers and letters start to fall into place, and you see exactly what you need to do to make the equation work. Then you’re home free.”
He shakes away the memory, trying to focus back on the Colonel.
“He gave me a refresher course,” he says. “I’d had a little training, before I knew I was going to focus on communications. But I’ve only done one jump in my career.”
“One?”
“Yes, Sir. I jumped the Pegasus into orbit around New Caprica during the rescue mission.”
Tigh’s eyebrows raise. He has clearly forgotten this detail, or perhaps never knew it. His hand grazes unconsciously at his forehead, then just barely over the eye patch. Louis remembers that the Colonel lost his eye in a Cylon jail. He wonders what it was like finding out he was a Cylon.
“Well,” Tigh says, “that’s a start.”
“Yes, Sir.”
Tigh pauses.
“Look, Chief Tyrol is working on getting us in shape to jump again. When he does, I’m gonna need you to find us a K-class system. Think you can do that?”
The moment is over. Tigh’s voice is already hard again, back to business. Louis bites his lower lip.
“I’ve never plotted a jump that far, Sir.”
“I know that,” Tigh snaps. “Not what I’m asking. Can you do it?”
Louis feels like he’d rather be torn to shreds by Centurions than have to plot a jump anywhere, especially since Tigh doesn’t yet trust his abilities. But he knows what answer Tigh wants to hear.
“I’ll make it happen, Sir.”
Tigh looks pleased. “Good,” is all he replies as he walks away, and Louis can feel his shoulders literally sag with relief, not even caring that he can hear Tigh utter under his breath. “Just don’t jump us into a sun.”
***
His first jump isn’t into a sun, but it is way off his intended calculations. Even though he doesn’t know anything about navigation, Tigh barks at Louis for his sloppy math when they land too close for comfort to an asteroid belt and the entire Fleet has to push into a full-speed retreat to avoid hull damage. The maneuvers need to be made quickly, and so the Admiral puts the comms on speaker to save time, but this means Louis has to listen to indignant and panicky Fleet captains, one after the other, berating Adama for jumping them straight into a hornet’s nest. Louis sits by the DRADIS in shame, as Adama relays instructions to coordinate the Fleet’s movements out of there.
After a few minutes of this, Tigh is next to him.
“So was that beginner’s luck back on New Caprica?”
The gravelly undertone pulls Louis out of his reverie. “Sir?”
“Lieutenant, you think just because you jumped the Fleet into the wrong place, your job is over? We still need to get to our destination, Soldier. Now fix your coordinates and get us where we’re supposed to be.”
Louis blinks in surprise at the gruff words, genuinely grateful that Tigh and the Old Man haven’t given up on him yet. He wonders if this was what it was like when Felix had to make his first jump, back during the Attacks. The photo of Felix that has been sitting above his rack for the last two weeks comes to mind. Every day, it’s the first thing Louis checks when he gets up for the day, and the last image he sees before going to sleep. He keeps telling himself he will place it on the Memorial Wall the next day, maybe next to Dee. Yet each night before he goes to sleep, he realizes that he can’t seem to do it. It’s only a photo, but the image of Felix in that formal military uniform helps somehow. For now, anyway.
Tigh continues to stare at him expectantly. Louis looks around at his colleagues in the CIC now, realizing that there is no one else here who can even remotely take Felix’s place besides him.
“Thank you for giving me a chance to fix this, Colonel.” He rises from the DRADIS console solemnly. “I know I can do better.”
“For all our sakes, I hope so,” Tigh grumbles. “And you can thank me later when we’re done playing asteroid pinball.”
He strides over to the center of the room, where the Admiral is busy calming down ship captains, telling them that coordinates are on their way. Louis heads over to the plotting table and picks up the grease pencil again, examining the transparency on the table with the flawed coordinates, examining the maps of the system. As he goes over his calculations, the errors leap out at him this time. He notices how much calmer he feels about plotting these coordinates now. His mistake has actually taken away the anxiety he was putting onto himself to do this jump perfectly the first time.
I’m not Felix, he tells himself, but I can learn to do this.
Forgetting everyone else in the room, Louis hunches over the table and begins, the light from the table illuminating his focused expression, the grease pencil scratching and swooping over the transparency as he works.
Author: millari
Characters: Hoshi, Gaeta, Seelix, Caprica Six, Tigh, Lee, Adama, Baltar
Genre: Slash
Pairing: Hoshi/Gaeta
Wordcount: 4,085
Rating: R (for sexual situations)
SPOILERS: Through Season 4's "No Exit"
Warnings: None
Summary: Louis Hoshi has lost the man he loves. Now he has to figure out what that really means.
Beta: I had a lot of help with this one. Thanks to usakeh, daybreak777, qumabh for all their cheerleading and on the fly feedback. Thanks to wyrdwritere for the final beta and for unwittingly inspiring this fic with his excellent ficlet, "Repairing the Damage".
Author's Note: This was written for Round 12 at ficfinishing. Huge thanks and love go to all the folks there for their highly recommended encouragement and useful techniques.
Link to part 1
Part 2
Once in the hallway, Louis does start running, weaving from side to side in his drunkenness. It helps that the halls are mostly empty. It only takes a few hallways before he has to stop in his tracks to calm his roiling stomach. Bleary-eyed and panting, his throat so dry it’ll close on him any minute, he slides down a wall he’s been leaning against until he’s on the floor, his knees pulled in towards him.
“Are you all right?” a husky, female voice asks him. He looks up into a blurry mess of blonde hair.
He laughs in the back of his throat. She is the second person to ask him this question tonight, and he feels no more ready to lie about the answer than before.
“No, I’m not,” he says again, too tired this time to keep the tone of it neutral. “I’m not all right,” he repeats angrily. “How could I be?”
He realizes too late that he doesn’t know this woman and she doesn’t know him, and it’s not fair to unleash his anger on her.
“I’m sorry,” he apologizes lamely. “Probably shouldn’t have had all those ambrosias on an empty stomach.” His head falls into his hands, as if to support itself.
The woman says nothing at first. “Is there someone close to you up here?” she eventually asks.
He tries to focus in on her face. It’s surrounded by dozens and dozens of faces in miniature.
Somehow his mind has betrayed him and brought him to the Memorial Wall, the last place he wants to be right now.
“Gods, I’m sorry,” he apologizes, self-consciously aware that his words are slurring. “I really didn’t mean to intrude upon your grief.”
He tries to pull himself up and fails, sinking back down into a sitting position, his long legs stretched out into almost the middle of the narrow hallway. The cooling presence of her hand lightly touching his forehead, surprises him, then turns out to be the most wonderful feeling in the world. She squats down and stares into his eyes. Closer like this, her features are easier to discern. He realizes what she is.
“You’re a Cylon,” he says, stiffening. “You’re a Six. What are you doing here?”
You killed Admiral Cain, he thinks. One of your kind did, anyway. Louis wonders if she remembers shooting Admiral Cain. And sleeping with her too.
He thinks he sees her brow furrow a moment, but with all the alcohol, he already can’t remember if she did or he just imagined it.
“I don’t need any trouble,” she says slowly, her hand withdrawing from his forehead. Louis feels like a child losing its favorite blanket. “I just came here to keep the memory of someone precious to me.”
“You’re mourning someone?” He has trouble believing a Cylon can feel such an emotion. The only Cylon he’s had any close contact with at all is Athena, in the rec room. He’s never sure what to make of her. Underneath the bantering mask she adopts like all the other pilots, there is something ruthless in her expression that every once in a while gives Louis the chills.
She reaches her hand out again, this time to help him up. After a moment’s hesitation, he grabs her hand and lets her do so.
“You sound so surprised, Lieutenant.” Her voice is clipped as she briefly examines his rank pin, then turns to gaze at the wall, slowly tracing her finger around the outer edge of a strange grey and white photo. He squints to focus on it.
It’s not a photo at all. It’s one of those pictures they take of babies in the womb, he knows, but he’s too drunk to retrieve the correct word for it.
Cylons can’t have babies, he thinks. It takes him a moment to realize who she is.
She’s the Six Tigh got pregnant in the brig. He remembers Felix ranting about her, saying that he remembered back on New Caprica, when Tigh would have blown up this woman if he’d had half a chance.
“You were Baltar’s girlfriend,” he blurts out. “On New Caprica.”
A flicker of pain crosses her face. “I was in a relationship with Gaius Baltar, yes.” There is no embarrassment there, no sense of shame in her eyes at the mention of his name, the way Felix always had. All Louis can see is a still-fresh sense of sadness in her.
“You were with Felix then,” he connects the dots for her, “on New Caprica.”
She stops and thinks, her face taut with surprise. “Felix Gaeta?” replies, her expression closing off a bit. “Who led the mutiny?”
Louis looks away. Did she lose her baby in the mutiny, he suddenly wonders? He’s not been paying close enough attention to events lately, and he’s missed a lot of finer details.
“I saw Felix Gaeta just about every day on New Caprica” she confirms. Her hand settles on his shoulder, and it startles him into looking up at her. “Is he why you came here?”
The lump in his throat hardens and he blinks far too many times in a row.
She stares into his eyes, as if inspecting them for something. “You love him,” she pronounces.
“I did.” His voice trails off a moment with doubt and chagrin. “I’m not sure I still do.”
“You do.” She pulls the truth out from him with seemingly no effort. When he doesn’t reply, she looks him up and down. She reaches out a hand to brush his collar again, and her fingers linger over his rank pin.
“You took different sides in the mutiny, didn’t you?”
He’d like to puke right about now, but the nearest head feels a universe away, so he has to swallow down his nausea.
“He didn’t give me a chance to take a side,” he says bluntly. “He just put me in the brig with all the senior staff.”
How frakked-up has Louis’ world become that a Cylon has become his confidante? Felix would be so angry that he was even speaking to this woman, this being, whatever she was.
“What was Felix like on New Caprica?” The words come out far more desperately than he’d planned. She crosses her arms in front of her chest, as if suspicious of a trap.
“He never wanted to talk about that period of his life with me,” Louis adds an explanation in an attempt to reassure her.
She runs a hand through her hair.
“Sad, I guess,” is her first thought. “And angry, I’m pretty sure. But it was often hard to tell. He always wore this neutral mask of cooperation, you know?”
Louis nods. He knows that mask very well. Felix wore it in the CIC whenever he had to deal with Tigh.
“What happened to him on that planet?”
“I’m not sure how much I can tell you about him,” she says flatly. “I remember he worked very hard to make things there succeed." She searches her memories fruitlessly. "Honestly, he never really talked to me, even though I did try to make peace with him.”
“Peace?”
She is lost in thought so long, Louis begins to wonder if he has spaced out and missed something.
“Neither of them ever admitted it to me,” she sighs, “but it was obvious to me what had happened before I arrived. The two of them - Gaeta and Gaius - they had a relationship at some point and it ended badly. I would hear them snipe at each other sometimes, when they thought I wasn’t in the room.”
She pauses in realization. “I’m sorry. Is this painful for you to hear?”
“No,” he lies, his voice hoarse. “Go on.”
Her mouth twists with doubt, but she continues. “Well, frankly, the whole time we were on that planet, I don’t think Gaeta ever got over whatever he and Gaius had had together. The way he acted…I mean, he had plenty of other things to be upset at Gaius about down there I’m sure, but there was something broken about the way he acted with Gaius the last time I saw him on New Caprica. His words were all about Gaius’ failings as a president, but if you could have seen his face…”
She stops abruptly, looking pained. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
The liquor makes it impossible for him to hide the shock on his face. Not that he hasn’t already figured out the basics of this story she was re-telling, but to hear it described in such intimate detail makes his heart clench.
“Nothing,” he replies, than realizes his response isn’t even grammatically appropriate. “I mean, I’m fine.”
“You don’t seem fine,” she observes.
Louis swallows. It disturbs him how well this total stranger can see through his emotions. He’s drunk way too much tonight.
“I’m so sorry about your loss,” he interjects to change the subject, but he is surprised to realize that he means it. “I know how excited the Colonel was about being a father.”
He leaves out the part about how he only knows this because Felix complained about it for twenty minutes straight.
She pulls away. “Yes, he was, wasn’t he?” she says wistfully. “Well, he’s gone now. Back to her. The love of his life.” The words come out evenly, matter-of-fact, with only a slight hitch at the end betraying the pain there. “I really thought the baby meant…” she starts, but cannot finish. Her arms cross over his chest again.
“You know,” she reflects, “down on New Caprica, I remember how smug I used to feel in my pity for Gaeta, thinking that I had won Gaius.” She exhales deeply, as if the memory pains her. “And yet, what do I have now?”
She traces along the edge of the sonogram on the wall. Louis doesn’t know what to say at all.
“Where is he?” she asks. Already her composure has returned, her pain cloaking itself behind a mask of stoicism it’s clear she will not let Louis penetrate.
“His picture,” she explains, when Louis says nothing. “Where did you put Felix’s picture?” She gestures at the Wall.
The question takes him by surprise. “I - I don’t know if I want him up there,” he admits haltingly, “alone in a crowd, like he always was.”
Her fingers are still on the film of the sonogram, as if she can touch her dead child this way. “Well, I prefer to think of Liam as surrounded by a family that never got to know him.”
Louis can’t help it. Something about her answer makes him think of Felix, and the tears roll down his face before he can stop them, blurring his vision. Something in her appearance shifts and morphs, making her look a bit like the Six on Pegasus, and he thinks of Admiral Cain. Suddenly, he feels so weak for crying like this.
“I should go,” he says, embarrassed, turning abruptly, even though the sudden movement sends his head spinning again. His feet start to move, but it’s like his brain isn’t connected to the rest of his body anymore. He stands there before her, helplessly in frozen flight. She smiles at him with confused indulgence, waiting.
“Maybe you shouldn’t,” she says.
He stares at her in confusion. “Shouldn’t what?”
“Run.”
He wipes away his tears, trying to stop. He’s sweating from a combination of stress and too much drink, and he thinks he’s misheard her. “What are you talking about?”
“The pain you’re feeling.” She smiles again wanly. “You need to embrace it.”
He shakes his head. “I can’t,” he snaps. “Why the hell would I want to do that?”
“It’ll teach you.”
He rolls his eyes. “Teach me what? That the universe is random and unfair?” The words come out of him like a spring suddenly uncoiled. “Felix was a good man. He didn’t deserve any of this. What the frak lesson is there in that?”
She stares at him thoughtfully, unflinchingly. “Yes,” she concedes, unfazed. “But he also got you, didn’t he?”
The reply is so unexpected, Louis is caught utterly flat-footed. She looks into his eyes, unflinching.
“I believe God never gives us infinite suffering without also giving us some balance, some form of joy to go with the pain, some source of hope. Otherwise, how would we learn from what we go through? We’d just give up.”
“That’s totally frakked up.” His tone is flat, hostile, frustrated. “Felix was so frakked up after all that happened to him.”
He’s never admitted this to anyone. Louis couldn’t have done that to him, telling people what he’d been seeing of Felix behind closed doors - the drinking, the mood swings, the rages. They might have relieved him of duty, like Adama did with Tigh when he got back from New Caprica, or people would have started being more overt in their pity of him, and Felix would have hated that.
“Gods,” he sighs. “I just wanted to us to be a normal couple, you know?” He stares again at the Wall.
Her hand on his shoulder is comforting.
“I didn’t know Felix Gaeta all that well when it comes right down to it,” she says quietly. “But I can tell you that Gaeta clearly learned from his relationship with Gaius. After all, look at the next person he picked to love.”
He stares at her dumbfounded. Her gaze drifts to the image of her unborn child on the wall, and he feels slightly ashamed of himself. Despite her advice, he can see that she hadn’t been expecting to learn from her pain this way.
Frak, he thinks. The least he can do is be there for her while she looks at all she has left of her dead child.
He reaches out tentatively and takes her hand in his, curling a gentle grip around her fingers. Her reaction is slow at first, but soon, he feels her fingers interlace between his. The two of them just stand there for a long time in silence, thinking about the paths denied them.
When she gently disentangles herself, almost reverently laying his hand against his body, Louis knows it’s time to leave. Felix isn’t here on this wall anyway, and Louis still can’t decide if he should be.
He takes one last look back at her still staring at the sonogram. The way she just squeezed his hand so tightly as the two of them stared at the Wall, the gesture wracked with grief hadn’t seemed one bit different from his own mourning. These thoughts about Cylons feel disloyal to Felix’s memory somehow.
He knows what Felix would say, what Admiral Cain would say, if either of them were here: The Cylons can’t be trusted. They fake emotions to get you off your guard. They mess with your head.
When did Felix become equated with Helena Cain in his mind, he wonders?
But Louis is just not sure how to hate a woman so obviously mourning her lost child. Nor, he decides as he leaves her alone to her grief, does he want to learn.
***
People are still at their card games or eating in the Mess when Louis reaches the officers’ quarters. There is light snoring from the few people burrowed in their racks. Someone has tactfully drawn the curtain to his bunk so he doesn’t have to stare at Felix’s box of effects when he first walks in.
He avoids the bunk for as long as he can - which isn’t very long - pretending to fiddle with the hatch. He’s still drunk enough that he’s clumsy at it, so he gives up quickly.
This is stupid.
He has run out of excuses, and that box isn’t going anywhere. His body tense with indecision, he lurches back around and forces himself towards the drawn curtain.
There is an unopened bottle of wine next to the box that wasn’t there before. He grabs it in surprise and takes off the small piece of paper fastened to it with a rubber band.
The note says in fat, indelible magic marker: Save for Lt. Gaeta. The signature on the note reads Joe, and there is a date underneath.
Louis stops breathing for a moment.
The date marked on the note won’t happen for over a month, but Louis recognizes it immediately - the anniversary of their first date. Louis has always remembered it even though it hadn’t been much of a date: They had eaten together in the Mess, both acting like what they were doing wasn’t a date at all, in case the other person decided afterward that he wasn’t interested.
They had never talked about the fact that they were coming up on an anniversary, because Felix hadn’t mentioned it yet, and Louis had been waiting for a calm moment to remind him, to discuss trying to do something special to commemorate it, just the two of them. But when had there ever been a calm moment in the last few months?
Felix had lost his leg. Then the President disappeared on a basestar and the Cylons held her hostage. Then Tigh and the others were revealed as Cylons. Then Earth turned out to be a wasteland. Then Dee committed suicide.
After all that happened, Louis had stopped hoping for Felix to remember the anniversary of anything. In fact, Louis himself had felt a little guilty for wanting to bring it up. It had seemed so petty and insignificant compared to everything they had to deal with.
He picks up the photo on top of the box and examines it again. He wishes he’d known Felix back when this photo was taken, when Felix wasn’t so messed up. The thought stabs at him with immediate guilt, but for once, he opens himself up to the feeling.
We deserved a better chance than we got, Felix.
He props the photo up on the little shelf above his rack, enjoying it there for a moment before sitting on the mattress next to the box of Felix’s effects. He draws the curtain around him for privacy, then takes out the pocket knife he always carries with him on duty and slowly cuts at the yellow security tape around the box, his expression grim with determination.
***
“Can you still plot a jump, Mister Hoshi?”
Louis almost jumps in his chair at the unexpected sound of Colonel Tigh’s voice next to him.
“Sir?”
“It’s a simple question, Mister Hoshi,” Tigh says impatiently. “Can you plot a jump or not? Gaeta trained you how to execute jumps with our computers before he left his post for New Caprica, didn’t he?”
A memory assaults him unexpectedly, of Felix standing beside him at the navigation plotting table, clearly oblivious to the fact that Louis felt awkward in his attraction to him, oblivious that Louis felt awkward about being trained by a man younger than him with less military experience.
“I know don’t know how to describe it,” Felix said with a confidence that only made him seem more attractive, something Louis really didn’t need to notice just now. He needed to focus on what this man was saying.
“It’s only frustrating until you let it go. Once you do, you can take a second look at it and you’ll see where your blind spots are. Then the numbers and letters start to fall into place, and you see exactly what you need to do to make the equation work. Then you’re home free.”
He shakes away the memory, trying to focus back on the Colonel.
“He gave me a refresher course,” he says. “I’d had a little training, before I knew I was going to focus on communications. But I’ve only done one jump in my career.”
“One?”
“Yes, Sir. I jumped the Pegasus into orbit around New Caprica during the rescue mission.”
Tigh’s eyebrows raise. He has clearly forgotten this detail, or perhaps never knew it. His hand grazes unconsciously at his forehead, then just barely over the eye patch. Louis remembers that the Colonel lost his eye in a Cylon jail. He wonders what it was like finding out he was a Cylon.
“Well,” Tigh says, “that’s a start.”
“Yes, Sir.”
Tigh pauses.
“Look, Chief Tyrol is working on getting us in shape to jump again. When he does, I’m gonna need you to find us a K-class system. Think you can do that?”
The moment is over. Tigh’s voice is already hard again, back to business. Louis bites his lower lip.
“I’ve never plotted a jump that far, Sir.”
“I know that,” Tigh snaps. “Not what I’m asking. Can you do it?”
Louis feels like he’d rather be torn to shreds by Centurions than have to plot a jump anywhere, especially since Tigh doesn’t yet trust his abilities. But he knows what answer Tigh wants to hear.
“I’ll make it happen, Sir.”
Tigh looks pleased. “Good,” is all he replies as he walks away, and Louis can feel his shoulders literally sag with relief, not even caring that he can hear Tigh utter under his breath. “Just don’t jump us into a sun.”
***
His first jump isn’t into a sun, but it is way off his intended calculations. Even though he doesn’t know anything about navigation, Tigh barks at Louis for his sloppy math when they land too close for comfort to an asteroid belt and the entire Fleet has to push into a full-speed retreat to avoid hull damage. The maneuvers need to be made quickly, and so the Admiral puts the comms on speaker to save time, but this means Louis has to listen to indignant and panicky Fleet captains, one after the other, berating Adama for jumping them straight into a hornet’s nest. Louis sits by the DRADIS in shame, as Adama relays instructions to coordinate the Fleet’s movements out of there.
After a few minutes of this, Tigh is next to him.
“So was that beginner’s luck back on New Caprica?”
The gravelly undertone pulls Louis out of his reverie. “Sir?”
“Lieutenant, you think just because you jumped the Fleet into the wrong place, your job is over? We still need to get to our destination, Soldier. Now fix your coordinates and get us where we’re supposed to be.”
Louis blinks in surprise at the gruff words, genuinely grateful that Tigh and the Old Man haven’t given up on him yet. He wonders if this was what it was like when Felix had to make his first jump, back during the Attacks. The photo of Felix that has been sitting above his rack for the last two weeks comes to mind. Every day, it’s the first thing Louis checks when he gets up for the day, and the last image he sees before going to sleep. He keeps telling himself he will place it on the Memorial Wall the next day, maybe next to Dee. Yet each night before he goes to sleep, he realizes that he can’t seem to do it. It’s only a photo, but the image of Felix in that formal military uniform helps somehow. For now, anyway.
Tigh continues to stare at him expectantly. Louis looks around at his colleagues in the CIC now, realizing that there is no one else here who can even remotely take Felix’s place besides him.
“Thank you for giving me a chance to fix this, Colonel.” He rises from the DRADIS console solemnly. “I know I can do better.”
“For all our sakes, I hope so,” Tigh grumbles. “And you can thank me later when we’re done playing asteroid pinball.”
He strides over to the center of the room, where the Admiral is busy calming down ship captains, telling them that coordinates are on their way. Louis heads over to the plotting table and picks up the grease pencil again, examining the transparency on the table with the flawed coordinates, examining the maps of the system. As he goes over his calculations, the errors leap out at him this time. He notices how much calmer he feels about plotting these coordinates now. His mistake has actually taken away the anxiety he was putting onto himself to do this jump perfectly the first time.
I’m not Felix, he tells himself, but I can learn to do this.
Forgetting everyone else in the room, Louis hunches over the table and begins, the light from the table illuminating his focused expression, the grease pencil scratching and swooping over the transparency as he works.