233 - Surprise! Your... is at the door -- and at a most inopportune moment! Now what?!
"Where's Tory? Or Tyrol?"
"Frak if I know. Look, son, you've got to hold it together. I don't care if you caused another person's leg to be chopped off or not. I'm your CO now, and these little meetings of ours have got to stop."
"But-"
"No buts. End of discussion." Colonel Tigh… no, make that Commanding Officer Tigh opened the hatch door and walked out, leaving Sam alone. He sunk to one of the chairs, his head falling into his hands. He didn't hear the hatch door opening, but as soon as the song, started, Sam jumped up, eyes wide, as he stared into the face of Felix Gaeta.
"You're standing. How can you be…?"
"Alone she sleeps in the shirt of man, with my three wishes clutched in her hand…"
Sam shook his head and pointed at him. "You're not real. This is… stop it, you're not frakking real."
"The first that she be spared the pain that comes from a dark and laughing rain…"
He held his hands on either side of his head, as if it would block out the song. The one that was trapped now in his head, ever since he visited Gaeta in sick bay. And saw. He saw what he had done, really done, to destroy a man and it was much worse than knowing you were a Cylon.
Unless, of course, this was some frakked-up programming and he was supposed to have shot him…
"When she finds love, may it always stay true. This I wish for the second wish I made, too…"
Was he singing about Kara? Maybe that was it. Kara and how she'd come back from death and Sam had been there for her, but what had she said? Said she'd shoot him if he was a Cylon. Frakked him in her quarters on the Demetrius and tossed him aside, and he did everything for her. Despite what he was. Glowing red eye, Heavy Raider, flashing, make eye contact and stop the battle. Cylons holding hands, was he like them? Bits and pieces of fake memories of him killing his own kind, only that wasn't what Tigh had said. Be your own man. It doesn't change who you are, only Kara had changed and she wasn't even a Cylon.
Right?
"But wish no more, my life you can take, to have her please, just one day wake…"
Sam woke up in a sweat in his rack, alone. No wife, no Kara, no Gaeta standing on one leg, but the song wouldn't go away.
"To have her please, just one day wake…"
Was he awake now? Gods, it would be better if this was all a frakking dream.
Wouldn't it?
Muse: Samuel T. Anders
Fandom: Misc. TV/"Battlestar Galactica"
Word Count: 452 (not including lyrics to "Gaeta's Lament", written by Michael Angeli)