Odds Are, You'll Find Your Way
Title: Odds Are, You'll Find Your Way, by millari
Summary: What does it mean to be an individual?
Characters: A non-descript Eight (OC), Gaius Baltar, Paulla, various unnamed Twos, Sixes, and Eights, and other minor OCs.
Pairings: Baltar/Non-descript Eight
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None
Title, Author, and URL of original story: The Odds Are There to Beat by nicole_anell
Author's Notes: This is a remix of a ficlet that captivated me immediately with its angsty look at Gaius Baltar on new Earth trying very hard to be a better person, and well, obsessing on it in a Gaius-y sort of way. This story takes an offhand reference in the story and runs with it in an entirely new direction, and from a new point of view, but I hope it supplements the original in an interesting way and addresses the ideas that I loved best about it. Thanks for letting me play in your sandbox, Nicole!
For some reason, the moment Gaius Baltar touches her in the tall grass by the light of the bonfire, Eight remembers mushroom clouds on the Caprican horizon.
These aren't her memories, of course - of a downed Raptor and a soldier telling her stoutly to go back without him - take the scientist, he's our last best hope, Sharon. No, she wasn't even alive when her brothers and sisters implemented that Plan.
The two of them have lingered in the tall grass by the waning bonfire, as one by one, occasionally in twos, the other members of the settlement have all drifted back to the longhouse to celebrate the end of their building season. Twenty three families will have homes this winter, no longer forced to live communally in the longhouse the humans built when they first arrived on Earth.
“You're beautiful, you know that? I've always thought so,” Gaius mumbles at her now, much more clumsily than she'd imagined a few minutes ago when she'd suddenly realized what was on his mind. In her memories of him on Galactica, in the short time she'd spent with his flock, he'd seemed smoother, more confident than he is here. The fierce brew the humans have managed to make may be to blame, she thinks. Or maybe he's just out of practice.
“You've always thought that?” she mildly teases. “You didn't even remember me when I joined this building project.” She tries emulating the flirtatious mockery of the Sixes Gaius was once notorious for bedding. It helps. He rises to the bait, his voice turning just as playful in his reply.
“At first, at first,” he acknowledges, his voice turning over with snake-like charm. “But I promise you, darling, at this point, you've become … unforgettable.”
He sidles his body next to hers as he says this, moving up so close, she could kiss him right now if she wanted. More long-buried memories pop up, images she's never actually witnessed herself - one of him this close to her, his arm around her in a laboratory, his expression animated; in the memory, he's holding too tightly to her shoulder, and she's laughing with nervous relief, but she's not sure exactly why. The Cylons have been almost a year without fresh downloads, and Eight finds her model memories are becoming less visceral and more one-dimensional.
She kisses him, mostly to prevent him from saying something that might kill the mood. It's all he needs to fall into the tall grass with her and start making out. He never asks her if she wants to sleep with him. She never tells him that she wants to either. But she does want to sleep with someone human,. The humans all seem so distinct from each other, and Gaius is particularly distinct from everyone else here.
Eight desperately wants to know what that's like.
**
“How does it feel to share all your memories?”
Eight hears this question with her eyes closed as she lies in the sand of a newfound beach. Gaius, as chief architect of this homebuilding project, has sent Eight, Paulla, and the rest of this small group on this journey to bring back shells from the coastline, so they can pulverize them for lime to make plaster. Paulla is next to her, engaging in some nostalgic facsimile of days spent tanning on the Caprican shoreline.
Eight turns pensive. “Well, I never thought about it much, that is, until I moved onto Galactica. I remember how strange it was at first, to be surrounded by people who thought of themselves as individuals.”
“There's a strangled noise in the back of Paulla's throat. “You know, it was pretty strange for us too, suddenly having hundreds of you running around the Fleet,” she remarks. “What was so strange about us, anyway?”
“Well, suddenly I was doing things, and talking to all these different people, who didn't have access to projection, or the datastream, or anything to link them together. Connecting with anyone was so much work,” she explains. “And every experience I had was unique. I soon realized that the memories of those experiences were unique too, and that the longer I was on Galactica, the more my memories were becoming that way; they were mine and no one else's, nothing like model memories.”
“Model memories?”
“All the memories shared by everyone in my model,” she clarifies. “All the Eights.”
“Oh,” Paulla nods, taking that idea in. “Okay. “What are those like?”
“Pretty flat. Like looking at a photo,” she explains. “They're intriguing. They're emotionally affecting. But you don't feel like you've experienced anything yourself.”
Paulla turns on her side. Eight follows suit and their eyes meet. Paulla clears her throat self-consciously..
“Huh. So you remember the destruction of the Colonies?”
An image of a young boy sitting next to her inside a Raptor that slowly rises higher and higher. The expression on his face is blank as he stares at the ground pulling away from him, at his frantic parents peering upward through the smoke and roar of the engines to get a last look at him forever. As Eight looks over the image in her mind, she sees that he's already learning how to be alone, learning to think of himself as separate from what had only minutes ago seemed the inseparable.
“Yes, I remember,” she says, quietly, pursing her lips. She can't tell if this is a genuine question, or a question coiling itself for attack. Humans on Galactica had sometimes asked questions like these merely as a prelude to a rant, with no intention of actually hearing her answer. “Many of us were on the Twelve Colonies that day.”
There is silence.
“And guilt?” she asks after a moment. “What about that?”
She hesitates. “What about it?”
“Well,” Paulla retorts, her surprise obvious. “Well … I guess I mean, do you feel any?”
It's a question Eight has grappled with before, after she started meeting humans on Galactica, and they began accusing her of killing their families. She had always run from those moments, never sure whether or not her memories of the Plan, of the New Caprica version of the Plan, meant that she was complicit in what her forefathers had done to the humans. But now, here on this beach, lying in the sun with her first true friend, Eight realizes that for the first time, she has a definitive answer.
“No, I don't feel any guilt,” she says, feeling the sun coming out from behind a cloud. “I didn't do any of those things.”
**
Gaius is less clumsy with actual sex than he is with his flirting, but Eight soon discovers another issue - he's suprisingly passive, and fairly mundane in his appraoach. He makes it silently clear that he wants her to be on top, and that he'd like it if she more or less took charge. It takes her a while to catch on, to understand how to read his gestures, his body positions, his grunts to inform her about the preferences he won't tell her. It's especially difficult because Eight has never felt the need to have sex before.
Up until recently, she has been content with the mere communion of touch with other members of her model, which is not mere communion. The simple physical gesture always triggers her IFF mechanism, sending a general stream of positive stimuli flowing into Eight's receptors all vaguely meaning, home, safety, acceptance - the warmth of being part of the undifferentiated collective. But ever since she began working in the Fleet with the humans, Eight has become intrigued with the human's unexpected emphasis on difference.
“Their connections are so analog,” she remembers a Six remarking on the basestar, after a long day of repairing Galactica's hull together. “They're different every day, completely unpredictable.” Her words spoke with obstensible wonder, but Eight could hear how they were tainted with lofty disgust.
It was something Eight definitely noticed too - the constant work of building connections to other beings manually - sifting through the right words, the right gestures to use, the right memories for building neural networks between two people, and even more than two sometimes. It puzzled her how the humans did it their way every day, with seemingly no effort. But unlike her brothers and sister, Eight found it interesting.
She just barely realizes when Gaius is finishing, suddenly shuddering and crying out with climax, barely before she knows it's over. He goes very quiet as soon as it is done, caught up in his own thoughts. The connection between them feels surprisingly one-sided and empty, and to her disappointment, she feels no different. Even though she is wrapped in his arms, she already cannot wait to be gone.
She slips out of his sleeping grasp and walks back to the Cylon longhouse, finding herself thinking about the human need to name.
**
A female voice pipes up from somewhere invisible in the crowd.
“What does she think she's doing here?”
“I came to help,” she insists, silently counting the cleared rows of building plots behind them. “Look, you need to get twenty three homes built before the rainy season, right? There's only about thirty of you. That's practically one of you per home, and some of you are children. You're not going to make it at that rate. I'll work hard. I'm not big, but I'm strong and I've got a lot of stamina, so I won't need breaks. I can do the work of two of your men.” She tries to use her gaze to establish a connection with someone in the crowd, anyone.
“You need help,” she repeats.
A thirty-ish man at the front of the group crosses his arms across his chest. “Last time you 'helped' us, my wife died of typhus in a New Caprican prison.” His thick hands hold a military-issue machete at his sides, his eyes permanently bulging with suspicion. The accusation about New Caprica is not a new experience for her, and she inwardly cringes. Conversations with the humans back on Galactica so very often came back to this topic, or else to the attack on the Colonies. Each time, she's tried a new way of handling it, always failing.
This time, she reaches out a hand to touch the human's shoulder. “Oh, how awful,” she offers, truly chagrined. New Caprica had been a terrible mistake, from all she had heard about it. “You must miss your wife quite a lot. But you see, I actually wasn't alive then yet. I was only brought to life after we left New Caprica ...”
His anger uncoils like a whip. She jumps back in surprise.
“I don't care where the frak you were, you frakking toaster! We didn't want you and your frakking goo on our ships, and we definitely don't want you around now either!”
She sees his hand with the machete rise slowly, and begins to understand that she may be in danger. She no longer can take resurrection for granted.
The others in the crowd remain silent, sullen, and deliberately avoiding her gaze, as if afraid she could hurt them if they drew her attention. Or maybe it's just embarrassment. She's not really sure.She's badly mispredicted how this encounter would go.
The Cylons needed to embrace their own mortality, Natalie had said. Eight wonders if this is what she had in mind.
“Are you really going to turn down an extra pair of hands?” A sardonic female voice emerges from the back of the crowd. “I don't know about you, Mason, but after chopping down trees with nothing but these stupid machetes, I'm sweating like a pig. If the Cylon wants to help, I say we let her.”
They all turn towards the source of the comment, and Eight sends a silent prayer of thanks to God for this intervention. The lean woman with dirty blond hair immediately becomes the focal center of the crowd. Eight's memory brings up a file labelling her as someone she remembers in the inner circle of Baltar's flock.
A man standing next to her starts to speak too, his voice less sardonic and more mellifluous. Although he is wearing drab olive pants instead of the purple robes she remembers, Eight recognizes him right away as Gaius Baltar.
“I agree,” he says. “Is this truly the sort of people we want to be anymore? Have the events of the last few months taught us nothing?”He stands just as straight and tall in these clothes as he did in his holy robes, but he looks much smaller now, Eight thinks.
Baltar points with his machete to various people in the crowd, mostly women, but a few men too. “You, Lilly and you, Marisa and you and you, and even you, Brian,” he admonishes them. “All of you were with me not so long ago. Have you already forgotten how we made a place for our Cylon brothers and sisters in our community?”
To Eight's surprise, his ex-followers to the one are gazing now at the ground, like shamed children caught stealing sweets. Or at least what Eight imagines that would look like.
She wouldn't know.
The man who the woman called Mason stares daggers at Baltar. “I didn't vote toasters into our community,” he accuses. But Baltar continues on, undeterred.
“Is Paulla the only one who remembers?” he adds. “We agreed that God didn't want us to discriminate against any of his creations.” His tone is quiet and paternal, like he's teaching them a life lesson. He reaches out for Eight's hand and holds it up between them for dramatic effect. She is too surprised to react. “Look, she has the same flesh and blood as you do, the same skin.”
He lowers his voice to a disappointed tone. “This woman was part of our flock. Do you not recognize her, Millicent?”
Eight beams a little, delighted at being remembered. She'd only been with his flock for a short time, and she'd never felt part of anything there. She had doubted anyone had noticed when she left.
But Millicent shakes her head. “She's not a woman, she's a machine,” she softly criticizes. “And you're not with us anymore, Gaius.”
“But she has feelings,” he argues. “Selflessness. Look at how she is here offering of herself, seeking to make a connection with us.” He looks into Eight's eyes a moment, and she feels a passing burst of emotion between them, almost as if he were one of her brethren, but it is gone in a moment, and he turns back to his ex-follower. “She's very brave.”
None of their faces look particularly impressed. Other than this woman Paulla, those in the crowd who can bring themselves to look at Baltar glare at him. Then with no explanation, the crowd spontaneously gives in and diffuses back towards their work on the logs. The formerly smug man with the machete is the last to linger, glowering at Eight in a way that prickles her skin. But then he too follows the crowd without a word.
“Well,” Paulla shrugs after another moment, her face breaking out into a wan smile. “That fizzled out pretty quick.” Her eyebrows raise. “Uh, you can get let go of her hand now, Gaius.”
Baltar lets her hand drop, as if very suddenly remembering an appointment he must attend, and flashes an embarrassed smile at her that Eight doesn't understand. Not sure what to make of this, Eight turns to her new partisan with a determined smile.
“Thank you,” she tells her, trying to communicate her gratitude, but all the gestures and movement of facial muscles involved seems altogether inefficient and inadequate to the job somehow. “I thought knowing I didn't participate in those events would make them feel better about me,” she muses aloud, looking over at the crowd getting back to work, slowly drifting back into muttering small talk.
Paulla's eyes dance upward, as if on some level, she can't quite believe what she hears. “Really?” she retorts. “You really don't understand their problem with you?”
Eight shakes her head, heartfelt, but confused. “Do they really just hate all Cylons? Even ones who were born later?” It saddens her to think that her brothers and sisters were right about the humans.
Paulla seems to be trying not to laugh at her, maybe out of politeness? Out of pity? “Anyway,” she announces, “I appreciate you sticking up for me.”
Paulla shrugs. “No big deal. Gaius did most of the talking, anyway.” She turns to him with begrudging respect. “I almost forgot how charming you can be - when you try. Almost makes me wish you'd stuck around with us.”
Eight sees something flash by in Baltar's face, but it passes quickly, and she can't read it anyway. She's finding this constant data interpretation taxing, and is actually grateful when Paulla closes the conversation and slaps a congenial palm on her shoulder.
“If you want to thank us, grab a machete,” she says simply. “There should be a couple left over there.” She points towards a an area with a pile of strewn shirts and a large gourd that someone has found and fashioned into a water pitcher. “We're getting pretty tired and could use a dose of your superpowers right about now.”
She walks off without a glance backward. Eight watches her, thoughtful, until she hears the ungainly sound of Baltar clearing his throat.
“You remember me,” she tries, self-consciously adding a friendly smile.
Baltar inhales deeply as he stares at her, his expression scrambling. “I …” Eight wonders at the way he bites at his lower lip.
“Wait,” she asks, her expression rapidly narrowing with doubt. “Were you just pretending to remember me?” A touch of indignation creeps into her voice.
“I was with your flock. I lived there.” She frowns, pensive. “Come to think of it, you never seemed able to remember me then, either.”
He winces at her use of the word flock. But she's more concerned with the dawning realization that in the last six months, she has utterly failed to make a unique impression on him. She was just one of many Eights in the group. Paulla obviously didn't remember her either. For some reason more emotional than logical, Eight finds this understanding extremely disheartening.
“Oh! Well, I ...” Baltar dithers, backpedaling. She watches him move through a complicated series of discomfited expressions for a while, comparing them to the ones in her memories of him from his first days on Galactica. In some ways, he hasn't changed at all in five years.
But then, just as she's deciding to say something to put him out of his misery, he straightens up and makes a declaration.
“Now look,” he insists. “However I may have acted with you in the past, the fact remains that I did a kind thing for you just now, didn't I, speaking on your behalf? I should think that that's what matters.”
Hearing no objections, he continues.
“I knew my word would carry a lot of weight with many of the people here. And to be quite honest, I knew if I told them that you'd been one of us, they wouldn't be able to tell one Eight from another.”
His last statement shouldn't hurt her feelings, she tells herself, but it does. She didn't come here today expecting Gaius Baltar to remember her. But somehow, the prospect he's now introduced that he might have remembered her, but doesn't, stabs into her.
He notices her expression, and adds hastily, “I'm sorry. I was just trying to help. You did seem so keen to join up with us.”
“Yes,” she acknowledges his good intentions. Her voice hitches with disappointment nonetheless. But she cannot change the past, only focus on the future. “Speaking of which,” she says, “I had beter go over there and start helping.”
Baltar looks surprised at the dismissal, and Eight leaves him there and heads over to the pile of clothes and machetes.
By the time she reaches them, Baltar has regained the power of speech.
“Ah … Eight, is it?” he experiments, unsure.
She looks over without much hope. “Yes?”
He pauses, as if searching for something grand to say, but settles on, “Welcome to our little group.”
There is something so earnest and free of human complication about the moment that it stops her in her tracks, machete in hand.
“Thank you, Gaius,” she says, the hint of a surprised smile on her lips. He nods at her and turns away and pretends to busy himself with really nothing, so she heads towards the group. Everyone but Paulla avoids her gaze, but people's tones are more relaxed now (at least with each other - they don't speak to her) as they focus their restless energy on the strenuous work at hand. Baltar joins them after a minute, and the work is mostly quiet and efficient for most of the day.
As dusk falls, the group takes stock and realizes they have accomplished far more for the day than they'd ever expected.
“We couldn't have done this much without you,” Paulla tells her conversationally around the fire as people reward themselves for their hard work of the day with cooked strips of elk meat. The compliment feels a bit orchestrated, but the effort involved feels like it's coming from a genuine place, and Eight smiles.
“Yeah, you were a really big help today,” a shirtless teenaged boy sitting next to Paulla offers, despite the rebuking glare from his father. “I'd say we got twice as much done today as usual,” he tells her.
“Thank you,” she says, truly pleased.
“So what's your name?”
“Perry!” his father hisses.
Perry dares not speak to her further after that, but he lets her see him roll his eyes at his father, who cannot see his expression at this angle. She represses a laugh at the playfully defiant gesture, not wanting to get him into more trouble.
Back at her longhouse, her brothers and sisters are clearly relieved to see her safe and sound. “Were they nice to you?” a Two asks. “Did they accept you?”
“Sort of,” she says absently, still thinking about Perry's question. “A few of them did. The others just kept quiet.”
“Well, that's a start,” a sister Eight offers support and takes her hand. “Come,” she urges, and pulls her into a corner of the dirt floor where they sit together, their bodies touching, reveling in their own familiarity, their sameness. Eight knows exactly what to expect as she curls into her sister Eight's body, and somehow, after her interactions with Paulla and Gaius and Perry, it feels just a bit less satisfying. This thought troubles her, feeling a little like treason; she is glad the Cylons no longer have the datastream.
“Are you really going to go back tomorrow?” her sister asks.
“Yes. I think I made some friends there today,” she says. Even in this close proximity to her sister, she can no longer experience the other's thoughts uploading into her neural networks. But she can feel the twinges of judgmental concern vibrating off her sister as if they were her own.
“We're worried about you, Eight,” she begins a speech that she has clearly crafted with the other Twos, Sixes and Eights. “Despite everything we've done to earn their trust, they still won't forgive us, won't ever forgive us. I think they hate us.” .
It's true that ever since they all arrived on Earth, the two sides, Cylon and human, have been moving further and further away from each other. The first sign was when they built two temporary longhouses of woven thatch and fallen branches - one for humans and one for Cylons. Then, the more their reserves from the Fleet became scarce, the more hostile the humans became.
“It's not safe to surround yourself with so many of them,” her sister frowns.
“Gaius Baltar is part of their group,” Eight resassures her. “It'll be fine. He won't let me get hurt.”
“I hope so,” her sister says, but her voice is even and neutral, and not at all convinced.
**
Within three weeks of sex with Gaius, she feels an unmistakable quickening. The life within her stirs.
“It's way too early for you to know without a medical test,” Paulla says with a skeptical air of authority. She has been delivering enough babies with Cottle by now that he's about to send her out to another settlement 50 klicks away to be their midwife. She leaves in the next week or two. So she feels she ought to know about these things.
But as it turns out, Cottle, who a year ago told Presidents Adama and/or Lampkin to go frak themselves when they came for his remaining medical equipment, still has some pregnancy tests lefts. Most people don't bother even with contraceptives anymore. And so Eight's intuition is confirmed by medical science.
Her brothers and sisters are thrilled.
“A spark of the Divine,” a Six says with reverence after Eight makes her announcement. She presses her fingers against Eight's not-yet distended belly and sighs, her expression beatifically content. Beside her, a Two looks on, pleased.
“Do you realize what this means, Eight?” he asks. “We are going to be able to survive as a species. Yours is the seed that will recultivate our race.” He pauses in appreciation. “You must feel very blessed.”
Eight wishes she felt blessed, but in truth, she already feels like she is drowning, especially when a sister Eight approaches her one day in the longhouse as she's trying to get some peace and tells her that her pregnancy is a permanent sign of God's favor on their model. It's a well-meant sentiment, and Eight can just barely remember a time when she might have thought the same way, but the idea just feels smothering now.
“I know they're your family,” Paulla comments one day when Eight arrives on her doorstep needing to get away from her brethren's well-meaning hovering. “But they sound like they've kind of gone off the deep end with this baby thing.”
Eight nods, mentally exhausted. “It's like I've stopped being me,” she confides. “To them, I've become nothing but a vessel - to this child, to their hopes for our survival.”
Gaius' reaction is far more direct.
“Y- you can't be serious.”
Eight stands in the plot of land outside his and Caprica's house. He's sweaty and disheveled from harvesting in the noontime sun, and it reminds her of how he looked as he slept after their brief tryst a month ago. Can something as ineffable as the birth of a new human life really have been conceived in such mundane circumstances?
“Of course I'm serious. Why wouldn't I be?” She shakes her head, bewildered. On the basestar, they never harbored secrets or hidden emotions from each other - difficult to imagine when you had the datastream automatically uploading your every thought to your entire model.
“But, but, it was just that one time,” Gaius argues stupidly, no filter on his innermost thoughts. “I barely even remember it! You can't truly be pregnant, can you?” His expression quickly becomes all hard muscles, dilated pupils. “I thought Cylons had a very hard time getting pregnant,” he accuses.
“You can go ask Cottle if you don't believe me,” she retorts, annoyance crossing her eyes. The man in the purple robes who had intrigued her, who had convinced a group of hostile humans to accept her into their fold has been replaced by a abject, distractible bundle of terror waving at Caprica Six, who is standing in the doorway, extremely round with with the new life she has been carrying. She is waving back at the two of them with a smile, but her head is cocked in curiosity, and Eight can see how for a moment, it nearly breaks Gaius.
But it also focuses him on the task at hand. “Does anyone know?” he demands.
“What, that I'm pregnant?” She is thrown off by the question. “Well, I guess just the Cylons,” she replies. “Oh, and Paulla.”
“No,” he cuts her off in his frantic impatience. “I mean, do they know that I'm the father?”
“Oh.” She thinks about it for a moment. “No, I guess not. No one's asked me. My brothers and sisters seem more focused on the baby than on who produced it.”
His eyes drift off as he thinks aloud, calculating. “Paulla probably knows. She saw us talking together that night. The fact that she hasn't asked you about it probably means she's not intending to spread gossip …” She can see his mind moving at a hundred klicks an hour.
“All right, now listen,” he concludes with newfound determination. “Now what we had was very nice, I'm sure. But the fact is that we haven't spoken in a month since it happened, and well, I was very drunk at the time, so ...” He trails off, gazing at her helplessly.
“What do you plan to do about it?” he asks with an undertone of desperation in his voice.
“Do about it?” Her brow furrows.
“Yes, do about it,” Gaius echoes, his words clipped and frustrated. “I keep hearing from Paulla about the work she's doing with Cottle as a midwife. In addition to delivering babies, they apparently have made great strides with finding just the right dose of a local abortafacient herb.”
She blinks in surprise. She hasn't been sure about the prospect of having a baby, certainly not the way her brothers and sisters have been elated about it. But she hadn't even considered the possibility of making the problem go away. But it doesn't feel right, and it annoys her that Gaius seems to have considered it even before her.
“Somehow I don't think the One True God would like you to abort your child, Gaius,” she observes with a sarcasm she realizes she's picked up from hanging around Paulla.
The comment momentarily flusters him, and he backs off the idea, shifting gears back to panic.
“Eight, I beg you. I can not help you with this. I love Caprica, and what I did with you was a mistake. His eyes widen a bit with his own foresworn emphasis. “It's a mistake that I've told myself will never happen again.” His voice drops down to almost a whisper, even though Caprica has gone into the house by now. “I think she would leave me if she knew what we had done.”
To Eight's amazement, there are the beginnings of tears in his eyes. She realizes that he thinks she's here to drag him away from the woman he truly loves. Before she even got here, he had already fit their night together into a neat mental container, with a label on top - Things Caprica must never find out.
“Fine,” she announces, weary of this conversation. Because it isn't a conversation, she realizes. It's a polemic. A pleading one, but a polemic nonetheless. “Don't worry about it, Gaius. I'll be okay.”
He is about to begin babbling pleas again, but her words have cut him off. He freezes.
“Are you sure?” he asks, his voice the equivalent of a child peering in terror around an open door into a pitch black room. “What are you going to do?”
She sighs. “As far as I can tell, you just made that entirely not your business.” She tries not to snap at him, because really, when she thinks about it, she doesn't want him involved. But she thinks she would have liked the opportunity to decline an offer.
He at least has the decency to look abashed at being let off the hook so easily.
“I'm sorry, Eight. Truly, I am,” he adds superfluously.
“It doesn't matter.” She turns on her heel to leave, trying to think of a place she can go that isn't home.
She has never felt that way before, she realizes. With all the changes and upheavals she and her siblings have gone through in the last two years - civil war, alliance with the humans, the end of resurrection - the embrace of her brethren has always been a place that meant comfort.
This understanding hones her decision.
“Have a nice life, Gaius,” she says, and doesn't turn back.
**
She can see the surprise in Paulla's eyes when she greets Eight at the door. “Did I forget we were getting together today?”
The first words out of Eight's mouth are: “When are you leaving for the other settlement? You know, to be their midwife?”
Paulla's eyes widen. “Why?” she teases. “You eager to see me go?”
“I want to go with you. Will you let me?”
**
Predictably, her siblings do not want to let her go. Nor do they understand.
“But why would you want to be alone?” the Eights ask her, their expression incredulous when she tells them first. “How could you possibly want to have our baby alone?”
Their use of pronoun tells her she has made the right decision.
“I won't be alone,” she replies, arms crossed against her chest, a self-protective emotional barrier she puts up between herself and them. “I'll be living in a whole other settlement of people.” She combats their worries by piling up logical facts. “Paulla knows how to help me have the baby.
“And anyway,” she finally remembers to say, “it's not for you to decide. I'm having this baby.”
She puts up a brave front, but in truth, it's a bit frightening to cut herself loose like this, especially as she begins to experience the first pangs of morning sickness and it reminds her of how much more vulnerable she will be once she is no longer here. But already she feels stronger, older too. Her days feel earned in a way they haven't before. And although she feels herself intertwining with the fate of this child, it feels like a choice and not just the result of fate or coincidence.
Still, the days before she leave are awkward. She has announced herself to be an Eight in self-imposed exile - another Boomer, another Athena, and yet she is still around. Her siblings, once they give in to her decision, are just as confused as her about how to handle the transition. They alternately cling harder to her - the Eights insisting that she sleep each night with them, like a pack of wolves in their den - and at othe times, push her away, telling her she's just like Athena or Boomer. She realizes after a while that they don't know what they're doing either, but it's exhausting and disorienting to manage their grief and her own.
Perhaps this is why she is more vulnerable.when Gaius comes looking for her at longhouse the evening before she is supposed to leave, asking if they can talk. They walk through the quickly cooling grass by the light of the setting sun, Gaius unable to come up with anything to say the entire time, until they arrive back outside the longhouse and he screws up his courage.
Perhaps it's the shadows created by the waning light, but there's something that seems gentler, more contrite about him when he finally does speak. It reminds her of when she first met him with his flock.
He opens with, “I was wrong to try and get you to abort your baby. Our baby, I mean.” As he self-corrects, his voice takes on a steely quality, but Eight realizes she can sense something underneath it, something terrified.
“I admit I was in denial when you first came to me with this news,” he tells her. “I even went to C ottle with questions, trying to catch you in a lie. But I have thought long and hard about this and I've come to a decision.
“I told myself when we arrived here that I would become a better person, for Caprica. And I have; I've worked very hard to be a good man, Eight.” He pauses, looking like he's trying not to wince. “What we did that one night was … reflexive.”
She feels bad for him at first, whatever he's doing; it looks very difficult for him. But as the rambling continues without a real point, it starts to confuse her and she finds that when she tries to interrupt for clarification, he's clearly come with something to say, something that is coming out of him no matter what, and he won't let her speak.
“My previous self would have given you money to get rid of the child and never thought about it ever again,” he confesses. “But I've told myself, I must become a better person.” He repeats the key phrase again, like it's a mantra. He looks up at her with eyes strained with worry. “Have I mentioned that I've been praying to God again lately?”
She shakes her head, mystified. He seems to have forgotten that they haven't spoken in a month.
“Gaius, I-” she begins.
“What I'm trying to say here,” he blurts out, like it's something afraid he will never say otherwise, “is that if you want to keep this baby, I will do the right thing. I am going to be a father soon - with Caprica, I mean - and I realized that I'll never be able to look that child in the eye knowing that I left another child out in the wilderness to die.”
His dramatic professions of loyalty and steadfastness and his desire to be a man who meets his debts overwhelm her. She stares him with eyes as round as Caprica's belly, trying to imagine the picture he is painting for her. But all she can envision is his voice, filling every last empty space of her pregnancy like this, drowning her in a sea of endless words and highminded ideals.
“I will help you take care of it,” he carries on, oblivious. “I will even tell Caprica. She loves children,” he offers. “And I'm certain that once she gets used to the idea, she will ...”
“Gaius!” she cuts him off with a sharp cry. It is the only way she knows to grab his attention.
“What is it?” he sputters, like her voice is an unexpected and disruptive variable in his calculations.
“This is irrelevant,” she announces. Her own calcuations are made up of simpler, cleaner lines. “I'm leaving tomorrow morning.”
The way his face falls with utter chagrin touches her for a moment, and she experiences a wave of nostalgia for the person she thought he was, back in the tall grass. Or maybe it's just nostalgia for a more innocent version of herself, who thought being an individual meant being reflected in the eyes of a human.
“Paulla is going to a settlement about 50 klicks from here to be a midwife,” she explains. “I've decided to go there with her-”
She's about to add, “so she can help me deliver the baby,” but Gaius, looking gutted by the news, starts up again.
“But I've already told you I would take care of it,” he says, his words stout and defensive, unable to understand the problem. “You can't leave now.”
She does know him well enough by now to realize that his last declarative sentence is meant with the best possible intentions. But it also fuels her with just enough exasperation to truly cut him loose the way she needs to.
“There is no baby,” she grunts, before thinking about it. “It died two days ago.”
A possibly cruel part of her is gratified at the way it renders him silent, his mouth a perfect round O of shock and remorse.
“Wait, what?” he gasps. “How?”
She still has much to learn about pregnancy, she realizes, for she has no contingency for this question. She has no idea how fetuses die.
“I don't really know,” she stalls a moment, then confabulates. “I don't think Cottle knows either.” She ends up going with the only thing she knows, adding a shrug. “Maybe it died because you didn't love it enough.”
His hand flies to cover his mouth, then pulls it back down determinedly by his side, as if to shut off something inside himself. She realizes too late how terrible a lie it is, but it's already having the desired effect. He's backing away from her.
“That's absurd,” he admonishes, his voice sounding strangled. ”Babies don't die like that. They don't. They just don't.”
Still, she has planted a seed. His habitual, nerves-induced head nodding that she recognizes from her now truly faint Boomer memories has returned, and she knows that he will believe this lie just enough to leave her alone.
“I've got to go pack,” she mutters, wanting to get away before this moment makes her feel any more heartless. “Thank you for everything, Gaius,” she says. It isn't an entirely meaningless statement in her eyes. She is grateful to him, for things she's sure he'd never understand.
He gazes at her with a startled expression, as if finally remembering that she's there. But pulling himself together, he flashes her a wordless nod and does leave, shaken and quiet.
She arrives at Paulla's home at dawn, a pack on her shoulders and the rueful concerns of her siblings still ringing in her ears. Contrary to the way she's made it look to everyone around her, it isn't easy to leave. But the way her brothers and sisters envelop her with their fussing over her departure helps, a multitude of hands lingering one last time over her still invisible fetus. And when she arrives at Paulla's, her friend says little, merely handing her a bag to carry and the compass. That helps too.
“You know,” Paulla finally says after they've walked far enough away to see the settlement becoming a set of large brown dots on the horizon behind them, “you've never told me and I've never asked you. Why do you want this baby anyway?”
A week ago, Eight doesn't think she would have had an answer.
“Because I've never been a child myself,” she replies easily.
Paulla's eyes narrow, then widen. “Huh? Oh, right. I guess I forget you're a Cylon sometimes.”
“Sometimes I think I've been mentally a child for a long time,” Eight reflects. “Maybe all my conscious life. But I think it's time for me to become an adult, my own separate person. I feel able to do that now.”
Paulla seems to be thinking about that.
“Kind of an odd reason to have a child,” she can't help remarking.
“I imagine there are humans who have successfully had babies for worse reasons,” she says.
“True,” Paulla admits. The silence hangs over them again. “Well, at any rate,” she offers, “I guess it doesn't matter what I think. It is your choice to make.”
Eight nods. For better or worse, this and all things to come, are indeed her choice to make.
Summary: What does it mean to be an individual?
Characters: A non-descript Eight (OC), Gaius Baltar, Paulla, various unnamed Twos, Sixes, and Eights, and other minor OCs.
Pairings: Baltar/Non-descript Eight
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None
Title, Author, and URL of original story: The Odds Are There to Beat by nicole_anell
Author's Notes: This is a remix of a ficlet that captivated me immediately with its angsty look at Gaius Baltar on new Earth trying very hard to be a better person, and well, obsessing on it in a Gaius-y sort of way. This story takes an offhand reference in the story and runs with it in an entirely new direction, and from a new point of view, but I hope it supplements the original in an interesting way and addresses the ideas that I loved best about it. Thanks for letting me play in your sandbox, Nicole!
For some reason, the moment Gaius Baltar touches her in the tall grass by the light of the bonfire, Eight remembers mushroom clouds on the Caprican horizon.
These aren't her memories, of course - of a downed Raptor and a soldier telling her stoutly to go back without him - take the scientist, he's our last best hope, Sharon. No, she wasn't even alive when her brothers and sisters implemented that Plan.
The two of them have lingered in the tall grass by the waning bonfire, as one by one, occasionally in twos, the other members of the settlement have all drifted back to the longhouse to celebrate the end of their building season. Twenty three families will have homes this winter, no longer forced to live communally in the longhouse the humans built when they first arrived on Earth.
“You're beautiful, you know that? I've always thought so,” Gaius mumbles at her now, much more clumsily than she'd imagined a few minutes ago when she'd suddenly realized what was on his mind. In her memories of him on Galactica, in the short time she'd spent with his flock, he'd seemed smoother, more confident than he is here. The fierce brew the humans have managed to make may be to blame, she thinks. Or maybe he's just out of practice.
“You've always thought that?” she mildly teases. “You didn't even remember me when I joined this building project.” She tries emulating the flirtatious mockery of the Sixes Gaius was once notorious for bedding. It helps. He rises to the bait, his voice turning just as playful in his reply.
“At first, at first,” he acknowledges, his voice turning over with snake-like charm. “But I promise you, darling, at this point, you've become … unforgettable.”
He sidles his body next to hers as he says this, moving up so close, she could kiss him right now if she wanted. More long-buried memories pop up, images she's never actually witnessed herself - one of him this close to her, his arm around her in a laboratory, his expression animated; in the memory, he's holding too tightly to her shoulder, and she's laughing with nervous relief, but she's not sure exactly why. The Cylons have been almost a year without fresh downloads, and Eight finds her model memories are becoming less visceral and more one-dimensional.
She kisses him, mostly to prevent him from saying something that might kill the mood. It's all he needs to fall into the tall grass with her and start making out. He never asks her if she wants to sleep with him. She never tells him that she wants to either. But she does want to sleep with someone human,. The humans all seem so distinct from each other, and Gaius is particularly distinct from everyone else here.
Eight desperately wants to know what that's like.
**
“How does it feel to share all your memories?”
Eight hears this question with her eyes closed as she lies in the sand of a newfound beach. Gaius, as chief architect of this homebuilding project, has sent Eight, Paulla, and the rest of this small group on this journey to bring back shells from the coastline, so they can pulverize them for lime to make plaster. Paulla is next to her, engaging in some nostalgic facsimile of days spent tanning on the Caprican shoreline.
Eight turns pensive. “Well, I never thought about it much, that is, until I moved onto Galactica. I remember how strange it was at first, to be surrounded by people who thought of themselves as individuals.”
“There's a strangled noise in the back of Paulla's throat. “You know, it was pretty strange for us too, suddenly having hundreds of you running around the Fleet,” she remarks. “What was so strange about us, anyway?”
“Well, suddenly I was doing things, and talking to all these different people, who didn't have access to projection, or the datastream, or anything to link them together. Connecting with anyone was so much work,” she explains. “And every experience I had was unique. I soon realized that the memories of those experiences were unique too, and that the longer I was on Galactica, the more my memories were becoming that way; they were mine and no one else's, nothing like model memories.”
“Model memories?”
“All the memories shared by everyone in my model,” she clarifies. “All the Eights.”
“Oh,” Paulla nods, taking that idea in. “Okay. “What are those like?”
“Pretty flat. Like looking at a photo,” she explains. “They're intriguing. They're emotionally affecting. But you don't feel like you've experienced anything yourself.”
Paulla turns on her side. Eight follows suit and their eyes meet. Paulla clears her throat self-consciously..
“Huh. So you remember the destruction of the Colonies?”
An image of a young boy sitting next to her inside a Raptor that slowly rises higher and higher. The expression on his face is blank as he stares at the ground pulling away from him, at his frantic parents peering upward through the smoke and roar of the engines to get a last look at him forever. As Eight looks over the image in her mind, she sees that he's already learning how to be alone, learning to think of himself as separate from what had only minutes ago seemed the inseparable.
“Yes, I remember,” she says, quietly, pursing her lips. She can't tell if this is a genuine question, or a question coiling itself for attack. Humans on Galactica had sometimes asked questions like these merely as a prelude to a rant, with no intention of actually hearing her answer. “Many of us were on the Twelve Colonies that day.”
There is silence.
“And guilt?” she asks after a moment. “What about that?”
She hesitates. “What about it?”
“Well,” Paulla retorts, her surprise obvious. “Well … I guess I mean, do you feel any?”
It's a question Eight has grappled with before, after she started meeting humans on Galactica, and they began accusing her of killing their families. She had always run from those moments, never sure whether or not her memories of the Plan, of the New Caprica version of the Plan, meant that she was complicit in what her forefathers had done to the humans. But now, here on this beach, lying in the sun with her first true friend, Eight realizes that for the first time, she has a definitive answer.
“No, I don't feel any guilt,” she says, feeling the sun coming out from behind a cloud. “I didn't do any of those things.”
**
Gaius is less clumsy with actual sex than he is with his flirting, but Eight soon discovers another issue - he's suprisingly passive, and fairly mundane in his appraoach. He makes it silently clear that he wants her to be on top, and that he'd like it if she more or less took charge. It takes her a while to catch on, to understand how to read his gestures, his body positions, his grunts to inform her about the preferences he won't tell her. It's especially difficult because Eight has never felt the need to have sex before.
Up until recently, she has been content with the mere communion of touch with other members of her model, which is not mere communion. The simple physical gesture always triggers her IFF mechanism, sending a general stream of positive stimuli flowing into Eight's receptors all vaguely meaning, home, safety, acceptance - the warmth of being part of the undifferentiated collective. But ever since she began working in the Fleet with the humans, Eight has become intrigued with the human's unexpected emphasis on difference.
“Their connections are so analog,” she remembers a Six remarking on the basestar, after a long day of repairing Galactica's hull together. “They're different every day, completely unpredictable.” Her words spoke with obstensible wonder, but Eight could hear how they were tainted with lofty disgust.
It was something Eight definitely noticed too - the constant work of building connections to other beings manually - sifting through the right words, the right gestures to use, the right memories for building neural networks between two people, and even more than two sometimes. It puzzled her how the humans did it their way every day, with seemingly no effort. But unlike her brothers and sister, Eight found it interesting.
She just barely realizes when Gaius is finishing, suddenly shuddering and crying out with climax, barely before she knows it's over. He goes very quiet as soon as it is done, caught up in his own thoughts. The connection between them feels surprisingly one-sided and empty, and to her disappointment, she feels no different. Even though she is wrapped in his arms, she already cannot wait to be gone.
She slips out of his sleeping grasp and walks back to the Cylon longhouse, finding herself thinking about the human need to name.
**
A female voice pipes up from somewhere invisible in the crowd.
“What does she think she's doing here?”
“I came to help,” she insists, silently counting the cleared rows of building plots behind them. “Look, you need to get twenty three homes built before the rainy season, right? There's only about thirty of you. That's practically one of you per home, and some of you are children. You're not going to make it at that rate. I'll work hard. I'm not big, but I'm strong and I've got a lot of stamina, so I won't need breaks. I can do the work of two of your men.” She tries to use her gaze to establish a connection with someone in the crowd, anyone.
“You need help,” she repeats.
A thirty-ish man at the front of the group crosses his arms across his chest. “Last time you 'helped' us, my wife died of typhus in a New Caprican prison.” His thick hands hold a military-issue machete at his sides, his eyes permanently bulging with suspicion. The accusation about New Caprica is not a new experience for her, and she inwardly cringes. Conversations with the humans back on Galactica so very often came back to this topic, or else to the attack on the Colonies. Each time, she's tried a new way of handling it, always failing.
This time, she reaches out a hand to touch the human's shoulder. “Oh, how awful,” she offers, truly chagrined. New Caprica had been a terrible mistake, from all she had heard about it. “You must miss your wife quite a lot. But you see, I actually wasn't alive then yet. I was only brought to life after we left New Caprica ...”
His anger uncoils like a whip. She jumps back in surprise.
“I don't care where the frak you were, you frakking toaster! We didn't want you and your frakking goo on our ships, and we definitely don't want you around now either!”
She sees his hand with the machete rise slowly, and begins to understand that she may be in danger. She no longer can take resurrection for granted.
The others in the crowd remain silent, sullen, and deliberately avoiding her gaze, as if afraid she could hurt them if they drew her attention. Or maybe it's just embarrassment. She's not really sure.She's badly mispredicted how this encounter would go.
The Cylons needed to embrace their own mortality, Natalie had said. Eight wonders if this is what she had in mind.
“Are you really going to turn down an extra pair of hands?” A sardonic female voice emerges from the back of the crowd. “I don't know about you, Mason, but after chopping down trees with nothing but these stupid machetes, I'm sweating like a pig. If the Cylon wants to help, I say we let her.”
They all turn towards the source of the comment, and Eight sends a silent prayer of thanks to God for this intervention. The lean woman with dirty blond hair immediately becomes the focal center of the crowd. Eight's memory brings up a file labelling her as someone she remembers in the inner circle of Baltar's flock.
A man standing next to her starts to speak too, his voice less sardonic and more mellifluous. Although he is wearing drab olive pants instead of the purple robes she remembers, Eight recognizes him right away as Gaius Baltar.
“I agree,” he says. “Is this truly the sort of people we want to be anymore? Have the events of the last few months taught us nothing?”He stands just as straight and tall in these clothes as he did in his holy robes, but he looks much smaller now, Eight thinks.
Baltar points with his machete to various people in the crowd, mostly women, but a few men too. “You, Lilly and you, Marisa and you and you, and even you, Brian,” he admonishes them. “All of you were with me not so long ago. Have you already forgotten how we made a place for our Cylon brothers and sisters in our community?”
To Eight's surprise, his ex-followers to the one are gazing now at the ground, like shamed children caught stealing sweets. Or at least what Eight imagines that would look like.
She wouldn't know.
The man who the woman called Mason stares daggers at Baltar. “I didn't vote toasters into our community,” he accuses. But Baltar continues on, undeterred.
“Is Paulla the only one who remembers?” he adds. “We agreed that God didn't want us to discriminate against any of his creations.” His tone is quiet and paternal, like he's teaching them a life lesson. He reaches out for Eight's hand and holds it up between them for dramatic effect. She is too surprised to react. “Look, she has the same flesh and blood as you do, the same skin.”
He lowers his voice to a disappointed tone. “This woman was part of our flock. Do you not recognize her, Millicent?”
Eight beams a little, delighted at being remembered. She'd only been with his flock for a short time, and she'd never felt part of anything there. She had doubted anyone had noticed when she left.
But Millicent shakes her head. “She's not a woman, she's a machine,” she softly criticizes. “And you're not with us anymore, Gaius.”
“But she has feelings,” he argues. “Selflessness. Look at how she is here offering of herself, seeking to make a connection with us.” He looks into Eight's eyes a moment, and she feels a passing burst of emotion between them, almost as if he were one of her brethren, but it is gone in a moment, and he turns back to his ex-follower. “She's very brave.”
None of their faces look particularly impressed. Other than this woman Paulla, those in the crowd who can bring themselves to look at Baltar glare at him. Then with no explanation, the crowd spontaneously gives in and diffuses back towards their work on the logs. The formerly smug man with the machete is the last to linger, glowering at Eight in a way that prickles her skin. But then he too follows the crowd without a word.
“Well,” Paulla shrugs after another moment, her face breaking out into a wan smile. “That fizzled out pretty quick.” Her eyebrows raise. “Uh, you can get let go of her hand now, Gaius.”
Baltar lets her hand drop, as if very suddenly remembering an appointment he must attend, and flashes an embarrassed smile at her that Eight doesn't understand. Not sure what to make of this, Eight turns to her new partisan with a determined smile.
“Thank you,” she tells her, trying to communicate her gratitude, but all the gestures and movement of facial muscles involved seems altogether inefficient and inadequate to the job somehow. “I thought knowing I didn't participate in those events would make them feel better about me,” she muses aloud, looking over at the crowd getting back to work, slowly drifting back into muttering small talk.
Paulla's eyes dance upward, as if on some level, she can't quite believe what she hears. “Really?” she retorts. “You really don't understand their problem with you?”
Eight shakes her head, heartfelt, but confused. “Do they really just hate all Cylons? Even ones who were born later?” It saddens her to think that her brothers and sisters were right about the humans.
Paulla seems to be trying not to laugh at her, maybe out of politeness? Out of pity? “Anyway,” she announces, “I appreciate you sticking up for me.”
Paulla shrugs. “No big deal. Gaius did most of the talking, anyway.” She turns to him with begrudging respect. “I almost forgot how charming you can be - when you try. Almost makes me wish you'd stuck around with us.”
Eight sees something flash by in Baltar's face, but it passes quickly, and she can't read it anyway. She's finding this constant data interpretation taxing, and is actually grateful when Paulla closes the conversation and slaps a congenial palm on her shoulder.
“If you want to thank us, grab a machete,” she says simply. “There should be a couple left over there.” She points towards a an area with a pile of strewn shirts and a large gourd that someone has found and fashioned into a water pitcher. “We're getting pretty tired and could use a dose of your superpowers right about now.”
She walks off without a glance backward. Eight watches her, thoughtful, until she hears the ungainly sound of Baltar clearing his throat.
“You remember me,” she tries, self-consciously adding a friendly smile.
Baltar inhales deeply as he stares at her, his expression scrambling. “I …” Eight wonders at the way he bites at his lower lip.
“Wait,” she asks, her expression rapidly narrowing with doubt. “Were you just pretending to remember me?” A touch of indignation creeps into her voice.
“I was with your flock. I lived there.” She frowns, pensive. “Come to think of it, you never seemed able to remember me then, either.”
He winces at her use of the word flock. But she's more concerned with the dawning realization that in the last six months, she has utterly failed to make a unique impression on him. She was just one of many Eights in the group. Paulla obviously didn't remember her either. For some reason more emotional than logical, Eight finds this understanding extremely disheartening.
“Oh! Well, I ...” Baltar dithers, backpedaling. She watches him move through a complicated series of discomfited expressions for a while, comparing them to the ones in her memories of him from his first days on Galactica. In some ways, he hasn't changed at all in five years.
But then, just as she's deciding to say something to put him out of his misery, he straightens up and makes a declaration.
“Now look,” he insists. “However I may have acted with you in the past, the fact remains that I did a kind thing for you just now, didn't I, speaking on your behalf? I should think that that's what matters.”
Hearing no objections, he continues.
“I knew my word would carry a lot of weight with many of the people here. And to be quite honest, I knew if I told them that you'd been one of us, they wouldn't be able to tell one Eight from another.”
His last statement shouldn't hurt her feelings, she tells herself, but it does. She didn't come here today expecting Gaius Baltar to remember her. But somehow, the prospect he's now introduced that he might have remembered her, but doesn't, stabs into her.
He notices her expression, and adds hastily, “I'm sorry. I was just trying to help. You did seem so keen to join up with us.”
“Yes,” she acknowledges his good intentions. Her voice hitches with disappointment nonetheless. But she cannot change the past, only focus on the future. “Speaking of which,” she says, “I had beter go over there and start helping.”
Baltar looks surprised at the dismissal, and Eight leaves him there and heads over to the pile of clothes and machetes.
By the time she reaches them, Baltar has regained the power of speech.
“Ah … Eight, is it?” he experiments, unsure.
She looks over without much hope. “Yes?”
He pauses, as if searching for something grand to say, but settles on, “Welcome to our little group.”
There is something so earnest and free of human complication about the moment that it stops her in her tracks, machete in hand.
“Thank you, Gaius,” she says, the hint of a surprised smile on her lips. He nods at her and turns away and pretends to busy himself with really nothing, so she heads towards the group. Everyone but Paulla avoids her gaze, but people's tones are more relaxed now (at least with each other - they don't speak to her) as they focus their restless energy on the strenuous work at hand. Baltar joins them after a minute, and the work is mostly quiet and efficient for most of the day.
As dusk falls, the group takes stock and realizes they have accomplished far more for the day than they'd ever expected.
“We couldn't have done this much without you,” Paulla tells her conversationally around the fire as people reward themselves for their hard work of the day with cooked strips of elk meat. The compliment feels a bit orchestrated, but the effort involved feels like it's coming from a genuine place, and Eight smiles.
“Yeah, you were a really big help today,” a shirtless teenaged boy sitting next to Paulla offers, despite the rebuking glare from his father. “I'd say we got twice as much done today as usual,” he tells her.
“Thank you,” she says, truly pleased.
“So what's your name?”
“Perry!” his father hisses.
Perry dares not speak to her further after that, but he lets her see him roll his eyes at his father, who cannot see his expression at this angle. She represses a laugh at the playfully defiant gesture, not wanting to get him into more trouble.
Back at her longhouse, her brothers and sisters are clearly relieved to see her safe and sound. “Were they nice to you?” a Two asks. “Did they accept you?”
“Sort of,” she says absently, still thinking about Perry's question. “A few of them did. The others just kept quiet.”
“Well, that's a start,” a sister Eight offers support and takes her hand. “Come,” she urges, and pulls her into a corner of the dirt floor where they sit together, their bodies touching, reveling in their own familiarity, their sameness. Eight knows exactly what to expect as she curls into her sister Eight's body, and somehow, after her interactions with Paulla and Gaius and Perry, it feels just a bit less satisfying. This thought troubles her, feeling a little like treason; she is glad the Cylons no longer have the datastream.
“Are you really going to go back tomorrow?” her sister asks.
“Yes. I think I made some friends there today,” she says. Even in this close proximity to her sister, she can no longer experience the other's thoughts uploading into her neural networks. But she can feel the twinges of judgmental concern vibrating off her sister as if they were her own.
“We're worried about you, Eight,” she begins a speech that she has clearly crafted with the other Twos, Sixes and Eights. “Despite everything we've done to earn their trust, they still won't forgive us, won't ever forgive us. I think they hate us.” .
It's true that ever since they all arrived on Earth, the two sides, Cylon and human, have been moving further and further away from each other. The first sign was when they built two temporary longhouses of woven thatch and fallen branches - one for humans and one for Cylons. Then, the more their reserves from the Fleet became scarce, the more hostile the humans became.
“It's not safe to surround yourself with so many of them,” her sister frowns.
“Gaius Baltar is part of their group,” Eight resassures her. “It'll be fine. He won't let me get hurt.”
“I hope so,” her sister says, but her voice is even and neutral, and not at all convinced.
**
Within three weeks of sex with Gaius, she feels an unmistakable quickening. The life within her stirs.
“It's way too early for you to know without a medical test,” Paulla says with a skeptical air of authority. She has been delivering enough babies with Cottle by now that he's about to send her out to another settlement 50 klicks away to be their midwife. She leaves in the next week or two. So she feels she ought to know about these things.
But as it turns out, Cottle, who a year ago told Presidents Adama and/or Lampkin to go frak themselves when they came for his remaining medical equipment, still has some pregnancy tests lefts. Most people don't bother even with contraceptives anymore. And so Eight's intuition is confirmed by medical science.
Her brothers and sisters are thrilled.
“A spark of the Divine,” a Six says with reverence after Eight makes her announcement. She presses her fingers against Eight's not-yet distended belly and sighs, her expression beatifically content. Beside her, a Two looks on, pleased.
“Do you realize what this means, Eight?” he asks. “We are going to be able to survive as a species. Yours is the seed that will recultivate our race.” He pauses in appreciation. “You must feel very blessed.”
Eight wishes she felt blessed, but in truth, she already feels like she is drowning, especially when a sister Eight approaches her one day in the longhouse as she's trying to get some peace and tells her that her pregnancy is a permanent sign of God's favor on their model. It's a well-meant sentiment, and Eight can just barely remember a time when she might have thought the same way, but the idea just feels smothering now.
“I know they're your family,” Paulla comments one day when Eight arrives on her doorstep needing to get away from her brethren's well-meaning hovering. “But they sound like they've kind of gone off the deep end with this baby thing.”
Eight nods, mentally exhausted. “It's like I've stopped being me,” she confides. “To them, I've become nothing but a vessel - to this child, to their hopes for our survival.”
Gaius' reaction is far more direct.
“Y- you can't be serious.”
Eight stands in the plot of land outside his and Caprica's house. He's sweaty and disheveled from harvesting in the noontime sun, and it reminds her of how he looked as he slept after their brief tryst a month ago. Can something as ineffable as the birth of a new human life really have been conceived in such mundane circumstances?
“Of course I'm serious. Why wouldn't I be?” She shakes her head, bewildered. On the basestar, they never harbored secrets or hidden emotions from each other - difficult to imagine when you had the datastream automatically uploading your every thought to your entire model.
“But, but, it was just that one time,” Gaius argues stupidly, no filter on his innermost thoughts. “I barely even remember it! You can't truly be pregnant, can you?” His expression quickly becomes all hard muscles, dilated pupils. “I thought Cylons had a very hard time getting pregnant,” he accuses.
“You can go ask Cottle if you don't believe me,” she retorts, annoyance crossing her eyes. The man in the purple robes who had intrigued her, who had convinced a group of hostile humans to accept her into their fold has been replaced by a abject, distractible bundle of terror waving at Caprica Six, who is standing in the doorway, extremely round with with the new life she has been carrying. She is waving back at the two of them with a smile, but her head is cocked in curiosity, and Eight can see how for a moment, it nearly breaks Gaius.
But it also focuses him on the task at hand. “Does anyone know?” he demands.
“What, that I'm pregnant?” She is thrown off by the question. “Well, I guess just the Cylons,” she replies. “Oh, and Paulla.”
“No,” he cuts her off in his frantic impatience. “I mean, do they know that I'm the father?”
“Oh.” She thinks about it for a moment. “No, I guess not. No one's asked me. My brothers and sisters seem more focused on the baby than on who produced it.”
His eyes drift off as he thinks aloud, calculating. “Paulla probably knows. She saw us talking together that night. The fact that she hasn't asked you about it probably means she's not intending to spread gossip …” She can see his mind moving at a hundred klicks an hour.
“All right, now listen,” he concludes with newfound determination. “Now what we had was very nice, I'm sure. But the fact is that we haven't spoken in a month since it happened, and well, I was very drunk at the time, so ...” He trails off, gazing at her helplessly.
“What do you plan to do about it?” he asks with an undertone of desperation in his voice.
“Do about it?” Her brow furrows.
“Yes, do about it,” Gaius echoes, his words clipped and frustrated. “I keep hearing from Paulla about the work she's doing with Cottle as a midwife. In addition to delivering babies, they apparently have made great strides with finding just the right dose of a local abortafacient herb.”
She blinks in surprise. She hasn't been sure about the prospect of having a baby, certainly not the way her brothers and sisters have been elated about it. But she hadn't even considered the possibility of making the problem go away. But it doesn't feel right, and it annoys her that Gaius seems to have considered it even before her.
“Somehow I don't think the One True God would like you to abort your child, Gaius,” she observes with a sarcasm she realizes she's picked up from hanging around Paulla.
The comment momentarily flusters him, and he backs off the idea, shifting gears back to panic.
“Eight, I beg you. I can not help you with this. I love Caprica, and what I did with you was a mistake. His eyes widen a bit with his own foresworn emphasis. “It's a mistake that I've told myself will never happen again.” His voice drops down to almost a whisper, even though Caprica has gone into the house by now. “I think she would leave me if she knew what we had done.”
To Eight's amazement, there are the beginnings of tears in his eyes. She realizes that he thinks she's here to drag him away from the woman he truly loves. Before she even got here, he had already fit their night together into a neat mental container, with a label on top - Things Caprica must never find out.
“Fine,” she announces, weary of this conversation. Because it isn't a conversation, she realizes. It's a polemic. A pleading one, but a polemic nonetheless. “Don't worry about it, Gaius. I'll be okay.”
He is about to begin babbling pleas again, but her words have cut him off. He freezes.
“Are you sure?” he asks, his voice the equivalent of a child peering in terror around an open door into a pitch black room. “What are you going to do?”
She sighs. “As far as I can tell, you just made that entirely not your business.” She tries not to snap at him, because really, when she thinks about it, she doesn't want him involved. But she thinks she would have liked the opportunity to decline an offer.
He at least has the decency to look abashed at being let off the hook so easily.
“I'm sorry, Eight. Truly, I am,” he adds superfluously.
“It doesn't matter.” She turns on her heel to leave, trying to think of a place she can go that isn't home.
She has never felt that way before, she realizes. With all the changes and upheavals she and her siblings have gone through in the last two years - civil war, alliance with the humans, the end of resurrection - the embrace of her brethren has always been a place that meant comfort.
This understanding hones her decision.
“Have a nice life, Gaius,” she says, and doesn't turn back.
**
She can see the surprise in Paulla's eyes when she greets Eight at the door. “Did I forget we were getting together today?”
The first words out of Eight's mouth are: “When are you leaving for the other settlement? You know, to be their midwife?”
Paulla's eyes widen. “Why?” she teases. “You eager to see me go?”
“I want to go with you. Will you let me?”
**
Predictably, her siblings do not want to let her go. Nor do they understand.
“But why would you want to be alone?” the Eights ask her, their expression incredulous when she tells them first. “How could you possibly want to have our baby alone?”
Their use of pronoun tells her she has made the right decision.
“I won't be alone,” she replies, arms crossed against her chest, a self-protective emotional barrier she puts up between herself and them. “I'll be living in a whole other settlement of people.” She combats their worries by piling up logical facts. “Paulla knows how to help me have the baby.
“And anyway,” she finally remembers to say, “it's not for you to decide. I'm having this baby.”
She puts up a brave front, but in truth, it's a bit frightening to cut herself loose like this, especially as she begins to experience the first pangs of morning sickness and it reminds her of how much more vulnerable she will be once she is no longer here. But already she feels stronger, older too. Her days feel earned in a way they haven't before. And although she feels herself intertwining with the fate of this child, it feels like a choice and not just the result of fate or coincidence.
Still, the days before she leave are awkward. She has announced herself to be an Eight in self-imposed exile - another Boomer, another Athena, and yet she is still around. Her siblings, once they give in to her decision, are just as confused as her about how to handle the transition. They alternately cling harder to her - the Eights insisting that she sleep each night with them, like a pack of wolves in their den - and at othe times, push her away, telling her she's just like Athena or Boomer. She realizes after a while that they don't know what they're doing either, but it's exhausting and disorienting to manage their grief and her own.
Perhaps this is why she is more vulnerable.when Gaius comes looking for her at longhouse the evening before she is supposed to leave, asking if they can talk. They walk through the quickly cooling grass by the light of the setting sun, Gaius unable to come up with anything to say the entire time, until they arrive back outside the longhouse and he screws up his courage.
Perhaps it's the shadows created by the waning light, but there's something that seems gentler, more contrite about him when he finally does speak. It reminds her of when she first met him with his flock.
He opens with, “I was wrong to try and get you to abort your baby. Our baby, I mean.” As he self-corrects, his voice takes on a steely quality, but Eight realizes she can sense something underneath it, something terrified.
“I admit I was in denial when you first came to me with this news,” he tells her. “I even went to C ottle with questions, trying to catch you in a lie. But I have thought long and hard about this and I've come to a decision.
“I told myself when we arrived here that I would become a better person, for Caprica. And I have; I've worked very hard to be a good man, Eight.” He pauses, looking like he's trying not to wince. “What we did that one night was … reflexive.”
She feels bad for him at first, whatever he's doing; it looks very difficult for him. But as the rambling continues without a real point, it starts to confuse her and she finds that when she tries to interrupt for clarification, he's clearly come with something to say, something that is coming out of him no matter what, and he won't let her speak.
“My previous self would have given you money to get rid of the child and never thought about it ever again,” he confesses. “But I've told myself, I must become a better person.” He repeats the key phrase again, like it's a mantra. He looks up at her with eyes strained with worry. “Have I mentioned that I've been praying to God again lately?”
She shakes her head, mystified. He seems to have forgotten that they haven't spoken in a month.
“Gaius, I-” she begins.
“What I'm trying to say here,” he blurts out, like it's something afraid he will never say otherwise, “is that if you want to keep this baby, I will do the right thing. I am going to be a father soon - with Caprica, I mean - and I realized that I'll never be able to look that child in the eye knowing that I left another child out in the wilderness to die.”
His dramatic professions of loyalty and steadfastness and his desire to be a man who meets his debts overwhelm her. She stares him with eyes as round as Caprica's belly, trying to imagine the picture he is painting for her. But all she can envision is his voice, filling every last empty space of her pregnancy like this, drowning her in a sea of endless words and highminded ideals.
“I will help you take care of it,” he carries on, oblivious. “I will even tell Caprica. She loves children,” he offers. “And I'm certain that once she gets used to the idea, she will ...”
“Gaius!” she cuts him off with a sharp cry. It is the only way she knows to grab his attention.
“What is it?” he sputters, like her voice is an unexpected and disruptive variable in his calculations.
“This is irrelevant,” she announces. Her own calcuations are made up of simpler, cleaner lines. “I'm leaving tomorrow morning.”
The way his face falls with utter chagrin touches her for a moment, and she experiences a wave of nostalgia for the person she thought he was, back in the tall grass. Or maybe it's just nostalgia for a more innocent version of herself, who thought being an individual meant being reflected in the eyes of a human.
“Paulla is going to a settlement about 50 klicks from here to be a midwife,” she explains. “I've decided to go there with her-”
She's about to add, “so she can help me deliver the baby,” but Gaius, looking gutted by the news, starts up again.
“But I've already told you I would take care of it,” he says, his words stout and defensive, unable to understand the problem. “You can't leave now.”
She does know him well enough by now to realize that his last declarative sentence is meant with the best possible intentions. But it also fuels her with just enough exasperation to truly cut him loose the way she needs to.
“There is no baby,” she grunts, before thinking about it. “It died two days ago.”
A possibly cruel part of her is gratified at the way it renders him silent, his mouth a perfect round O of shock and remorse.
“Wait, what?” he gasps. “How?”
She still has much to learn about pregnancy, she realizes, for she has no contingency for this question. She has no idea how fetuses die.
“I don't really know,” she stalls a moment, then confabulates. “I don't think Cottle knows either.” She ends up going with the only thing she knows, adding a shrug. “Maybe it died because you didn't love it enough.”
His hand flies to cover his mouth, then pulls it back down determinedly by his side, as if to shut off something inside himself. She realizes too late how terrible a lie it is, but it's already having the desired effect. He's backing away from her.
“That's absurd,” he admonishes, his voice sounding strangled. ”Babies don't die like that. They don't. They just don't.”
Still, she has planted a seed. His habitual, nerves-induced head nodding that she recognizes from her now truly faint Boomer memories has returned, and she knows that he will believe this lie just enough to leave her alone.
“I've got to go pack,” she mutters, wanting to get away before this moment makes her feel any more heartless. “Thank you for everything, Gaius,” she says. It isn't an entirely meaningless statement in her eyes. She is grateful to him, for things she's sure he'd never understand.
He gazes at her with a startled expression, as if finally remembering that she's there. But pulling himself together, he flashes her a wordless nod and does leave, shaken and quiet.
She arrives at Paulla's home at dawn, a pack on her shoulders and the rueful concerns of her siblings still ringing in her ears. Contrary to the way she's made it look to everyone around her, it isn't easy to leave. But the way her brothers and sisters envelop her with their fussing over her departure helps, a multitude of hands lingering one last time over her still invisible fetus. And when she arrives at Paulla's, her friend says little, merely handing her a bag to carry and the compass. That helps too.
“You know,” Paulla finally says after they've walked far enough away to see the settlement becoming a set of large brown dots on the horizon behind them, “you've never told me and I've never asked you. Why do you want this baby anyway?”
A week ago, Eight doesn't think she would have had an answer.
“Because I've never been a child myself,” she replies easily.
Paulla's eyes narrow, then widen. “Huh? Oh, right. I guess I forget you're a Cylon sometimes.”
“Sometimes I think I've been mentally a child for a long time,” Eight reflects. “Maybe all my conscious life. But I think it's time for me to become an adult, my own separate person. I feel able to do that now.”
Paulla seems to be thinking about that.
“Kind of an odd reason to have a child,” she can't help remarking.
“I imagine there are humans who have successfully had babies for worse reasons,” she says.
“True,” Paulla admits. The silence hangs over them again. “Well, at any rate,” she offers, “I guess it doesn't matter what I think. It is your choice to make.”
Eight nods. For better or worse, this and all things to come, are indeed her choice to make.