Like Rogue Unicorns (the head!baby crackfic)
Title: Like Rogue Unicorns
Author: Nicole Anell
Length: 4,028 words (!)
Genre: Humor, epic crackfic
Pairing: Baltar/Six
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 4,029
Summary: Inspired here by fahrbotdrusilla and fictionbya. Baltar, Caprica-Six, and their brain-lovers get married and have six children. Three of whom live in their minds. In other words, crackfic.
Spoilers: I can't imagine where, but let's say vaguely into season 3.
Warning: This fanfic should not be expected to follow Earth logic, Caprica logic, or the logic of any other planet, real or fictitious.
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"In some ways, Bret, I think your children aren't gonna be affected by a lot of things that affect other children. Because your children... aren't real."
"Yeah, okay, but they still have issues. Uh, they don't get taken seriously. And they- they have to deal with all the imaginary stuff. Like, um, rogue unicorns for example."
"Bret's wife is unable to have children because she's not a real woman."
"No, she's imaginary. The kids take after her in that sense."
~ Flight of the Conchords, HBO Comedy Special
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1.
This worked out nicely, though. Caprica-Six had never wanted a big wedding, and Gaius had once placed "a wedding of any size" right under syphilis on his own personal list of Things That Wake Me Up in a Cold Terror Screaming Obscenities in the Middle of the Night. (It no longer cracked the top ten, but to be fair, the list itself had grown much longer and more specific in the last three years.) So really, all they'd needed was a few candles and some new jewelry. It was more of a symbolic ceremony. One witness did tag along for a while, rambling about the mole on her back until Gaius promised to touch it with a stick if she shut up and read the vows. He was looking particularly messianic at the moment. It was, sadly enough, the best day of all their lives.
At any rate, the lack of intrusion from any other guests (or cultish nuts or marines running around in helmets) was one of the small perks of the destruction of another large chunk of the human race. This had happened around 7:00 yesterday. It was still a raw wound, but they decided to soldier on and focus on things like the dress, mainly. (It was white and lovely!) And they had hardly been responsible at all this time, so frankly, it was more like a 8,000-body vindication for getting on with their lives and seizing the day, you know? Well.
Once alone with the candles and the new jewelry, the happy couple was struck by -- there was no other word for it -- the ginormity of this event. For they were not only gaining one spouse, but two imaginary ones as well. Once this common bond was out in the open, it was clear that plural marriage was the answer. As Caprica-Six watched Head-Gaius go about his bored and sexy business (partially sexy because he was not covered in messianic facial hair), occasionally saying some kind of cryptic love couplet, she knew this was the right choice. She'd been burned by threesomes before, after all, but (as far as she knew) Head-Gaius was not a duplicitous whore. He couldn't possibly go off on some destiny kick and abandon the only person who could see him. Yes, this time it would work. So she took in a big, healthy, totally sane breath and embarked on her life as a secret imaginary Cylon polygamist. She hoped her sisterwife would like her! But she would have no way of knowing, what with her being a figment of somebody else's imagination.
Meanwhile Gaius held Head-Six's invisible hands tightly. She was saying, "Lord who is the only Lord and smites Kobol with lightning bolts in his spare time, watch over our union." She had written her own vows. She continued, "Bless us with the ability to express our love for each other, and for some of us, to retain that one last shred of functioning sanity."
Gaius said, "Uh, am... so say we- amen" with as much decisiveness as he could muster, which is never very much.
She concluded, "We will be north and south, east and west to each other. We will grow in our passion every day. And the one true God will lead us to our paths in love and faith, so we may one day bask in the glory of His all-encompassing presence."
And then they stepped on a bottle and had sex.
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2.
Their first child was now seven, the younger four. Gaius and Caprica did not hesitate on the multiplying fruitfulness, or as it's known in the sacred texts of both Cylons and humans, "that one commandment that's fun." They had been thorough in their plans, even taking into account their financial situation (still no money, still in a moneyless dystopia where that didn't matter) and their medical histories (cancer did not run in their family, only curing it by accident).
They could still remember when little Hope was first born. It was touching on many levels, and they would've loved her whether she was 100% average (she wasn't) or had special hybrid baby blood that cures everything and talks to raiders (she did) or had been recently diagnosed with low-level ADHD (she had). Back on her first night of baby life, her little neck was so sweet and tiny that Caprica-Six thought about snapping it for a second, but then she remembered that snapping necks is wrong now, unless they are adult necks standing in the way of more babies.
Naming was, of course, a difficult task. They had set some initial rules against naming their children after human gods, prominent Colonial officers, and any former sexual partners of the father (which would be a reasonable enough request, if his stint as president alone hadn't cut the name book in half and made Caprica wary of the otherwise lovely name "Felix."). So they started with uplifting word-names like Hope and Unity, and planned to carry on in this manner, but ever since finding a signal to Earth, Caprica had taken to shoving band names in there too, making their second child's full name Unity Thalia Fleetwoodmac Baltar. She was lately figuring that their next expected child -- five months along -- was to be christened Daniel Patience Speedwagon.
"She's unhinged," Six noted in Baltar's mind one day. "It has to be all the resurrecting, or some kind of guilt for betraying our people. Her brain is damaged and I doubt she'll recover."
"Don't be absurd," insisted her visible lover. "She's just- well, she's very enthusiastic about finding Earth, is all."
"You don't need to be so defensive, Gaius. I've been supportive of the idea since the day I married both of you. I just don't know why you had to pick a woman with whom I don't have the first thing in common."
"What?" he boggled. "She is you. My entire mental perception of you is based on her!"
"I guess," Six shrugged and twirled her hair invisibly. "Whatever helps you through all this conception, anyway. I'll tell you this: she's less me than Gina at this point. At least that one never got tired of post-coital mass destruction."
"Well, regardless, dear, she is the mother of my children, you know, so- so if you could just be a bit nicer."
"Is that what this is about?" Six asked, with a sudden lightbulb going off in her eyes. Her voice became precise and controlled, like one would expect from an angel and/or robot. "Because I can give you children too, Gaius. Much more like the ones you deserve. The kind to carry on your legacy." With this, she nodded generally toward the other end of the room, where two dark-haired toddlers were suddenly immersed in a Science Is Fun!! activity book.
"I had twins," Six clarified. "Technically the boy is the first of God's new generation, but only by about 80 seconds."
Gaius gaped at his newly discovered mind babies and said something like "Wha... uh, wuh- w..?" continuously for the next few minutes, before he finally came out with, "When did all this happen??"
"Well, just now," she answered calmly. "Aren't they beautiful?" He had to agree they were. Having skipped right over their squirmy, vomitty phase, little Gaius Jr. and Gaia eagerly doodled in their activity book, bouncing and twitching occasionally. In fact, looking at the two-year-old twins was sort of like looking into a tiny, double, adorable baby-mirror, and he fell instantly in love with himself. But it was still very disconcerting.
"Um... all this happened before, then?" he asked slowly.
"Roughly. It's in the missing scrolls somewhere. Are you doubting the will of God?"
"Of course not," he said quickly, glancing back at the mind babies. Gaius Jr. adjusted his baby-glasses and looked generally flustered. Gaia's mauve crayon strayed outside a line, adding an extra half-leg to the personified neutron she was coloring in, and she promptly burst into inconsolable tears. "I- I just don't know what to say," their father offered with a proud, if slightly terrified, smile.
On an unrelated note, later that day Gaius Jr. (in a total accident related to trying to obtain a cookie) broke 45 pieces of the family's invisible 50-piece china set. He and his twin promptly burst into tears again and backed out of the room. The first complete sentence he ever uttered was "Oh no!"
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3.
So, they were moving a lot. They were, to be honest, running out of places to raise their children where (a) nothing vital had just exploded, and (b) no one had clued in to their impeccable, fool-proof disguise of wearing glasses and pulling their hair back while in public. Baltar's cult had gotten sick of him almost six years ago, by virtue of having spent a fraction of that time actually listening to him (they also had some issue with him shaving, a habit he blessedly regained as soon the first baby came along and decided that Daddy's beard was a toy). Eventually they ended up back in Galactica's refugee zone, which at least had hot water and Lt. Sharon occasionally promising to get them stuff that she never came back with.
They actually didn't run into many problems. It was difficult to accept how much less famous they were now. On the bright side, this meant they would not have to use the children as cute little baby human shields. (Gaius later swore that he was kidding. Head-Six knew he totally wasn't. Caprica sighed and projected herself into the woods for three hours, like she does.)
Caprica was not always coping well. It caused a lot of stress to be constantly responsible for two children, another parasitic fetus, a not-particularly-mature real husband, and a snarky and often insensitive head-husband. One reason she hardly had any time to herself was that they were homeschooling the girls, due to some irrational lingering spite toward the education system and schoolteachers in general. The first thing little Hope and Unity learned was never to ask about why they weren't in school with other children, if they wanted to avoid a rant about airlocks and/or the brig and/or the class system and/or the sanctity of free elections.
"It's just so hard," she would complain in the forest in her head. "It's not what I expected from post-apocalyptic motherhood. And they're getting older now," she marked down her list of complaints with her fingers, "They don't listen. I can't hold them anymore."
"Well, then maybe this is a good time to tell you," Head-Gaius said, looking characteristically shifty, but even moreso. She suddenly looked down and saw a three-year-old girl with blond ringlets and tastefully sophisticated baby-earrings.
"Mummy," she declared in a posh, erudite baby-accent much like Baltar's on a less squirelly day. "Want bottle?"
Caprica stared in shock. She felt instinctively maternal toward her, even though from her first words she was rather too generous to come from her non-imaginary husband's gene pool. Having no time for a creative soft-rock-based name, in that instant she called her Six-Point-One.
Six-Point-One helpfully held out her little arms. "Want pick-up?"
Caprica obliged, lifting her out of her crib.
"Want to fo... ffff..." the little girl looked to her Head-Daddy for help.
"Foment Civil War among the Cylons," he prompted.
"Want to fomop sibillwomong Cylons?"
Caprica bristled and put her down, shooting a look at Head-Gaius. "That's really unfair."
"Before you judge me, darling, you have to admit it sounds adorable when she says it."
She pouted and returned her attention to little Six-Point-One, who began to drink some milkish formula out of an invisible baby-sized martini glass.
"I just don't understand!" Caprica wailed. "You and your mind baby make it look so easy! Why do all my non-imaginary children have hyperactivity disorders? Am I such a bad mother?"
"No, no," Head-Gaius reassured her, "Six-Point-One can be a handful sometimes too. Just yesterday she took all her dolls outside and threw pebbles at them, and then pretended they were resurrecting, and then threw more pebbles. Does that sound normal?" Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed that Six-Point-One was carrying on an animated conversation with one of the dolls and offering it a baby-formula martini bottle as well. "It's all right, they're all back in love now," Head-Gaius added.
Thus the newest member of their family had arrived, and again they had to adjust. If it was difficult for their secret imaginary polygamous marriage to work, it soon became twice as difficult to take care of all the children -- the invisible and non-invisible ones all had their own special needs. And no one adequately appreciated the effort Gaius Baltar was putting into it, in his own opinion. That Friday, while Caprica was off doing some dull lamaze thing, he struggled to pay attention to the fun watching-pilots-run-around-saying-"frak"-a-lot-and-what-does-that-mean-daddy story Hope and Unity were trying to tell, while at the same time he had to figure out how many imaginary paint chips Gaius Jr. and Gaia had just eaten off the wall.
Just then, Hope flinched backward and wrinkled her nose in confusion. Moments later, Unity seemed to shove herself face-first into the rug. (Not to be outdone, invisible Gaius Jr. witnessed this and promptly burst into tears in the face of the vague threat that something similar would happen to him.) Luckily Caprica had emerged in the doorway. "Six-Point-One! Don't hit your sisters!" She looked at Gaius with absolutely no gratitude for the effort he'd been making, in his own opinion. "You were supposed to watch her."
"In my defense," he sputtered, still catching his breath from his very great deal of parental exertion, "I can't actually see her."
"Mummy," Six-Point-One spoke up invisibly in her own defense, "I'm misturbed by their lack of faith!" Meanwhile Gaia, who (unlike her brother) had stopped crying, was currently trying to reason with the violent patch of intangible air by crossing her arms and demanding in baby-talk whether the patch of air knew who she was, and if so, if it could please use her full name and title when addressing her.
Times were hard! It was like living in an imaginary zoo that hadn't been destroyed in the robot apocalypse. It was obvious that something had to be done. And they'd be able to come up with that something, if only there was a single person in the family whose ideas didn't normally lead people to use words like "disastrous" and "holocaust" and "you frakking douche" in retrospect.
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4.
It was obvious they needed some form of family counseling, but unfortunately, a therapist would only be able to cover the visible spouses and children. They might do better with some kind of vision-having Oracle, but some people had noticed how seeing an Oracle often directly coincided with impending death.
Either way, Caprica decided that the time had come to get to know her imaginary twin-sisterwife better, so against all logic they had a family meeting.
"Well, I'll start," Caprica offered. She glanced to the invisible area of the room where the other Six may or may not have been standing on the astral plane. "Six, I sometimes feel jealous about the time you've spent with Gaius before I was back in the picture. I'm happy I married the both of you, but... I also feel left out of the whole 'insanity' part of his life. And considering my advanced pregnancy, I would appreciate feeling more like you're pitching in and looking after all the children. And not telling Gaius to sell mine into that thriving black market sex ring." Caprica was particularly proud of her use of "I think/I feel" sentences.
Head-Six put in her two cents. "You're broken and a sinner and a traitor to your people, and I think we've all lowered ourselves by taking part in this meeting." She was 1-for-2 on "I" sentences.
"Uh," said Gaius, "she- well, she's had some disagreements with you, but she's here and willing to work on them."
"That's good to hear," said Caprica.
"Can I just add that I'm just not sure what to make of either of you," said Gaius. "I've been nothing but devoted and I'm just being bounced around and walked on, you know?" Everyone was impressed with his own use of "I" sentences, but really, he just couldn't imagine any other way to start a sentence.
"Oh," said Head-Six, "and I still can't figure out what that leather jacket was about, either. Tell her that, Gaius. That whole Cylon peace-and-love brigade could stand less froofy scarves and khaki, overall."
"What's she saying now?" asked Caprica.
"Erm," answered Gaius. "Well, it's not important nor efficient, really, to dwell on every last detail, is it?"
"God is in the details, Gaius," Six chimed in. "Or do you think this giant invisible bracelet I wear every day is a sign of random chance?"
"That's not the point I was-"
"It matches the straps on my heels."
Caprica nudged his arm. "What's she saying now, about the point?"
"I'm not sure this was a good idea, honey," said Gaius. "Honeys."
"Oh, this is unbearable," sighed Head-Gaius. "I'm just depressed now." But depression looked exponentially sexier on him that it did on Regular-Gaius.
"Head-Gaius feels depressed," Caprica reported. "And he- he agrees with me, by the way!"
"Well, that's very nice," Gaius rubbed his forehead. "But maybe we need to step back from all this and- and focus mainly... well, mainly on the children, because you know, the world would-"
"Oh Gaius, shut up," said Caprica and Head-Six in complete unison. It was a tremendous step forward for them.
"You know I can't take this kind of pressure!" he shouted, and with that he promptly burst into tears.
"Mmm," declared Head-Six impassively, "I knew that didn't come from my genes," as Gaius Jr. and Gaia followed his lead, clearly distressed. Caprica didn't see this, but she did distinctly notice Six-Point-One roll her imaginary baby eyes and toddle off regally.
In the meantime, the two non-figment children had a private discussion on the state of their parents. "So weird," said the older one.
"Really, really, really, really," confirmed the younger one, who had calculated the perfect number of reallys for emphasis, "weird." And it was at this point that Hope and Unity, having officially become the most rational members of the family, decided that it was time to run away from home.
This was exceedingly difficult because they lived on a spaceship.
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5.
Nonetheless they put their plan in motion, because they were full of baby determination. Armed with a duffel bag of toys, an impressive stealth ability due to their tiny size, two space helmets that didn't fit at all, and the knowledge that nothing Uncle Helo was good at could be too hard to learn, Hope Judith and Unity Thalia Fleetwoodmac infiltrated the Galactica hangar deck and stole a Raptor around 3:30. They were tired of not being appreciated!
"It's just getting ridiculous!" said the older one. "We were here first." Unity nodded vigorously to this. She added, "Other people can see us!" which also earned a vigorous nodding from her sister.
"Are we gonna go back?" the tinier one asked, in between the nodding.
"We'll go back when, um, God tells us too. Duh." Her little sister gave a reluctant nod to this, taking it as a sound argument rather than evidence of the flaws in crazy toaster homeschooling. With that, they tried to turn the computers on to the best of their ability. Luckily they did not get very far before alarms started going off.
Which is to say, they'd only piloted the shuttle nine feet away from the airlock successfully before someone noticed.
But even more luckily, Caprica and Baltar and their invisible entourage had caught up with them before this happened, driven by love and parental intuition (and also the fact they'd left behind a note detailing their plans in calligraphy with perfect spelling and grammar, which suggested that crazy toaster homeschooling has its benefits, too). From the girls' perspective, it was mostly exasperated exclamations of love and kisses and frantic putting-on-of-baby-spacesuits that followed. Meanwhile Head-Six and Head-Baltar were viciously tearing them new baby asses, but they couldn't hear them. It was not the best disciplinary tactic, in hindsight.
No one was quite sure what happened next, although you can probably estimate how many times-per-week the words "divine hand" would be used to describe it later. The truth is, when they first got into the ship 60 seconds earlier, Unity got an owie and spilled a drop of her special hybrid baby blood into the FTL mainframe. And unsure what to do in the face of an official military computer, Hope had punched her telephone number into it, followed by a random series of numbers that translated in sister spy code as WE-DEMAND-ATTENTION. (Ironically, when asked about it later, Hope would blame this on her imaginary friend Mr. Button-Push, the only person in the ship who actually didn't exist.)
So moments later, when the ship spun up and jumped, Caprica's head-daughter merely blinked her baby eyes dramatically in response. Baltar's invisible children chewed their twin baby hair and clutched their twin baby necks, terribly worried by the vague threat of being far away from where they were two seconds ago. Everyone else fell somewhere between these two extremes.
And that's how the kids accidentally found Earth.
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6.
Upon making the incredible discovery, there was some brief questioning of what to do. Head-Gaius was firmly in the camp of telling humans about it, and Head-Six was firmly in the camp of telling Cylons about it, and by "firmly," I mean she used her most quietly terrifying voice and the words "mortal sin" were invoked repeatedly, emphasized by the head-twins throwing their concerned toddler arms around her ankles and yelling "OH NO!" at appropriate moments. Torn and not wanting to cause another war just yet, Gaius and Caprica decided to simply settle there and not tell anyone.
Admittedly, one might hate them for this and be fairly justified, but that was nothing new.
Just before landing, Caprica and Gaius sat down and drew up a thorough and detailed plan regarding their weekly schedules, which took into account childcare, family togetherness, and the occasional brain-orgasms which they each euphemistically referred to as "projection/me-time." Unfortunately the plan somehow found its way into an airlock and they ended up back at square one, but they were glad to have talked it out and were marginally saner for it.
After a few months on Earth, they decided their next, more important plan was to invent the first-ever completely airtight Windows firewall and buy a mansion.
When Daniel Patience Speedwagon was finally born, Hope and Unity were thrilled to have another sibling who wasn't imaginary. Gaius Jr. and Gaia found him very cute, although they were briefly consumed with baby jealousy and looked to their head-mommy for reassurance that they were cuter and smarter and more capable of leading a baby nation if they wanted to. The new baby had blue eyes and was so small and adorable that little Six-Point-One thought about snapping his neck, but then she remembered that snapping necks is wrong, so she wandered off to make her invisible daddy and his gorgeous voice read her a bedtime story.
As they stared over their new, fully-on-the-physical-plane baby that night, Caprica-Six and Baltar linked their arms together, while Head-Gaius smiled sexily and Head-Six affectionately pet Baltar's hair. And in the other room, their mind babies curled up adorably next to their visible siblings, who could not see them but seemed to feel their presence, as Six-Point-One tugged at the younger one's hair in an attempt to style it into something less pedestrian, while the twins clung fiercely to their oldest sister, terrified for a moment by thunder and the vague threat of more thunder, but soon they all drifted into a calm and peaceful sleep, and they dreamed about equations and forests and how awesome it was when they lived on a spaceship, and everything was wonderful for the rest of their lives.
The End.
Author: Nicole Anell
Length: 4,028 words (!)
Genre: Humor, epic crackfic
Pairing: Baltar/Six
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 4,029
Summary: Inspired here by fahrbotdrusilla and fictionbya. Baltar, Caprica-Six, and their brain-lovers get married and have six children. Three of whom live in their minds. In other words, crackfic.
Spoilers: I can't imagine where, but let's say vaguely into season 3.
Warning: This fanfic should not be expected to follow Earth logic, Caprica logic, or the logic of any other planet, real or fictitious.
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"In some ways, Bret, I think your children aren't gonna be affected by a lot of things that affect other children. Because your children... aren't real."
"Yeah, okay, but they still have issues. Uh, they don't get taken seriously. And they- they have to deal with all the imaginary stuff. Like, um, rogue unicorns for example."
"Bret's wife is unable to have children because she's not a real woman."
"No, she's imaginary. The kids take after her in that sense."
~ Flight of the Conchords, HBO Comedy Special
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1.
This worked out nicely, though. Caprica-Six had never wanted a big wedding, and Gaius had once placed "a wedding of any size" right under syphilis on his own personal list of Things That Wake Me Up in a Cold Terror Screaming Obscenities in the Middle of the Night. (It no longer cracked the top ten, but to be fair, the list itself had grown much longer and more specific in the last three years.) So really, all they'd needed was a few candles and some new jewelry. It was more of a symbolic ceremony. One witness did tag along for a while, rambling about the mole on her back until Gaius promised to touch it with a stick if she shut up and read the vows. He was looking particularly messianic at the moment. It was, sadly enough, the best day of all their lives.
At any rate, the lack of intrusion from any other guests (or cultish nuts or marines running around in helmets) was one of the small perks of the destruction of another large chunk of the human race. This had happened around 7:00 yesterday. It was still a raw wound, but they decided to soldier on and focus on things like the dress, mainly. (It was white and lovely!) And they had hardly been responsible at all this time, so frankly, it was more like a 8,000-body vindication for getting on with their lives and seizing the day, you know? Well.
Once alone with the candles and the new jewelry, the happy couple was struck by -- there was no other word for it -- the ginormity of this event. For they were not only gaining one spouse, but two imaginary ones as well. Once this common bond was out in the open, it was clear that plural marriage was the answer. As Caprica-Six watched Head-Gaius go about his bored and sexy business (partially sexy because he was not covered in messianic facial hair), occasionally saying some kind of cryptic love couplet, she knew this was the right choice. She'd been burned by threesomes before, after all, but (as far as she knew) Head-Gaius was not a duplicitous whore. He couldn't possibly go off on some destiny kick and abandon the only person who could see him. Yes, this time it would work. So she took in a big, healthy, totally sane breath and embarked on her life as a secret imaginary Cylon polygamist. She hoped her sisterwife would like her! But she would have no way of knowing, what with her being a figment of somebody else's imagination.
Meanwhile Gaius held Head-Six's invisible hands tightly. She was saying, "Lord who is the only Lord and smites Kobol with lightning bolts in his spare time, watch over our union." She had written her own vows. She continued, "Bless us with the ability to express our love for each other, and for some of us, to retain that one last shred of functioning sanity."
Gaius said, "Uh, am... so say we- amen" with as much decisiveness as he could muster, which is never very much.
She concluded, "We will be north and south, east and west to each other. We will grow in our passion every day. And the one true God will lead us to our paths in love and faith, so we may one day bask in the glory of His all-encompassing presence."
And then they stepped on a bottle and had sex.
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2.
Their first child was now seven, the younger four. Gaius and Caprica did not hesitate on the multiplying fruitfulness, or as it's known in the sacred texts of both Cylons and humans, "that one commandment that's fun." They had been thorough in their plans, even taking into account their financial situation (still no money, still in a moneyless dystopia where that didn't matter) and their medical histories (cancer did not run in their family, only curing it by accident).
They could still remember when little Hope was first born. It was touching on many levels, and they would've loved her whether she was 100% average (she wasn't) or had special hybrid baby blood that cures everything and talks to raiders (she did) or had been recently diagnosed with low-level ADHD (she had). Back on her first night of baby life, her little neck was so sweet and tiny that Caprica-Six thought about snapping it for a second, but then she remembered that snapping necks is wrong now, unless they are adult necks standing in the way of more babies.
Naming was, of course, a difficult task. They had set some initial rules against naming their children after human gods, prominent Colonial officers, and any former sexual partners of the father (which would be a reasonable enough request, if his stint as president alone hadn't cut the name book in half and made Caprica wary of the otherwise lovely name "Felix."). So they started with uplifting word-names like Hope and Unity, and planned to carry on in this manner, but ever since finding a signal to Earth, Caprica had taken to shoving band names in there too, making their second child's full name Unity Thalia Fleetwoodmac Baltar. She was lately figuring that their next expected child -- five months along -- was to be christened Daniel Patience Speedwagon.
"She's unhinged," Six noted in Baltar's mind one day. "It has to be all the resurrecting, or some kind of guilt for betraying our people. Her brain is damaged and I doubt she'll recover."
"Don't be absurd," insisted her visible lover. "She's just- well, she's very enthusiastic about finding Earth, is all."
"You don't need to be so defensive, Gaius. I've been supportive of the idea since the day I married both of you. I just don't know why you had to pick a woman with whom I don't have the first thing in common."
"What?" he boggled. "She is you. My entire mental perception of you is based on her!"
"I guess," Six shrugged and twirled her hair invisibly. "Whatever helps you through all this conception, anyway. I'll tell you this: she's less me than Gina at this point. At least that one never got tired of post-coital mass destruction."
"Well, regardless, dear, she is the mother of my children, you know, so- so if you could just be a bit nicer."
"Is that what this is about?" Six asked, with a sudden lightbulb going off in her eyes. Her voice became precise and controlled, like one would expect from an angel and/or robot. "Because I can give you children too, Gaius. Much more like the ones you deserve. The kind to carry on your legacy." With this, she nodded generally toward the other end of the room, where two dark-haired toddlers were suddenly immersed in a Science Is Fun!! activity book.
"I had twins," Six clarified. "Technically the boy is the first of God's new generation, but only by about 80 seconds."
Gaius gaped at his newly discovered mind babies and said something like "Wha... uh, wuh- w..?" continuously for the next few minutes, before he finally came out with, "When did all this happen??"
"Well, just now," she answered calmly. "Aren't they beautiful?" He had to agree they were. Having skipped right over their squirmy, vomitty phase, little Gaius Jr. and Gaia eagerly doodled in their activity book, bouncing and twitching occasionally. In fact, looking at the two-year-old twins was sort of like looking into a tiny, double, adorable baby-mirror, and he fell instantly in love with himself. But it was still very disconcerting.
"Um... all this happened before, then?" he asked slowly.
"Roughly. It's in the missing scrolls somewhere. Are you doubting the will of God?"
"Of course not," he said quickly, glancing back at the mind babies. Gaius Jr. adjusted his baby-glasses and looked generally flustered. Gaia's mauve crayon strayed outside a line, adding an extra half-leg to the personified neutron she was coloring in, and she promptly burst into inconsolable tears. "I- I just don't know what to say," their father offered with a proud, if slightly terrified, smile.
On an unrelated note, later that day Gaius Jr. (in a total accident related to trying to obtain a cookie) broke 45 pieces of the family's invisible 50-piece china set. He and his twin promptly burst into tears again and backed out of the room. The first complete sentence he ever uttered was "Oh no!"
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3.
So, they were moving a lot. They were, to be honest, running out of places to raise their children where (a) nothing vital had just exploded, and (b) no one had clued in to their impeccable, fool-proof disguise of wearing glasses and pulling their hair back while in public. Baltar's cult had gotten sick of him almost six years ago, by virtue of having spent a fraction of that time actually listening to him (they also had some issue with him shaving, a habit he blessedly regained as soon the first baby came along and decided that Daddy's beard was a toy). Eventually they ended up back in Galactica's refugee zone, which at least had hot water and Lt. Sharon occasionally promising to get them stuff that she never came back with.
They actually didn't run into many problems. It was difficult to accept how much less famous they were now. On the bright side, this meant they would not have to use the children as cute little baby human shields. (Gaius later swore that he was kidding. Head-Six knew he totally wasn't. Caprica sighed and projected herself into the woods for three hours, like she does.)
Caprica was not always coping well. It caused a lot of stress to be constantly responsible for two children, another parasitic fetus, a not-particularly-mature real husband, and a snarky and often insensitive head-husband. One reason she hardly had any time to herself was that they were homeschooling the girls, due to some irrational lingering spite toward the education system and schoolteachers in general. The first thing little Hope and Unity learned was never to ask about why they weren't in school with other children, if they wanted to avoid a rant about airlocks and/or the brig and/or the class system and/or the sanctity of free elections.
"It's just so hard," she would complain in the forest in her head. "It's not what I expected from post-apocalyptic motherhood. And they're getting older now," she marked down her list of complaints with her fingers, "They don't listen. I can't hold them anymore."
"Well, then maybe this is a good time to tell you," Head-Gaius said, looking characteristically shifty, but even moreso. She suddenly looked down and saw a three-year-old girl with blond ringlets and tastefully sophisticated baby-earrings.
"Mummy," she declared in a posh, erudite baby-accent much like Baltar's on a less squirelly day. "Want bottle?"
Caprica stared in shock. She felt instinctively maternal toward her, even though from her first words she was rather too generous to come from her non-imaginary husband's gene pool. Having no time for a creative soft-rock-based name, in that instant she called her Six-Point-One.
Six-Point-One helpfully held out her little arms. "Want pick-up?"
Caprica obliged, lifting her out of her crib.
"Want to fo... ffff..." the little girl looked to her Head-Daddy for help.
"Foment Civil War among the Cylons," he prompted.
"Want to fomop sibillwomong Cylons?"
Caprica bristled and put her down, shooting a look at Head-Gaius. "That's really unfair."
"Before you judge me, darling, you have to admit it sounds adorable when she says it."
She pouted and returned her attention to little Six-Point-One, who began to drink some milkish formula out of an invisible baby-sized martini glass.
"I just don't understand!" Caprica wailed. "You and your mind baby make it look so easy! Why do all my non-imaginary children have hyperactivity disorders? Am I such a bad mother?"
"No, no," Head-Gaius reassured her, "Six-Point-One can be a handful sometimes too. Just yesterday she took all her dolls outside and threw pebbles at them, and then pretended they were resurrecting, and then threw more pebbles. Does that sound normal?" Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed that Six-Point-One was carrying on an animated conversation with one of the dolls and offering it a baby-formula martini bottle as well. "It's all right, they're all back in love now," Head-Gaius added.
Thus the newest member of their family had arrived, and again they had to adjust. If it was difficult for their secret imaginary polygamous marriage to work, it soon became twice as difficult to take care of all the children -- the invisible and non-invisible ones all had their own special needs. And no one adequately appreciated the effort Gaius Baltar was putting into it, in his own opinion. That Friday, while Caprica was off doing some dull lamaze thing, he struggled to pay attention to the fun watching-pilots-run-around-saying-"frak"-a-lot-and-what-does-that-mean-daddy story Hope and Unity were trying to tell, while at the same time he had to figure out how many imaginary paint chips Gaius Jr. and Gaia had just eaten off the wall.
Just then, Hope flinched backward and wrinkled her nose in confusion. Moments later, Unity seemed to shove herself face-first into the rug. (Not to be outdone, invisible Gaius Jr. witnessed this and promptly burst into tears in the face of the vague threat that something similar would happen to him.) Luckily Caprica had emerged in the doorway. "Six-Point-One! Don't hit your sisters!" She looked at Gaius with absolutely no gratitude for the effort he'd been making, in his own opinion. "You were supposed to watch her."
"In my defense," he sputtered, still catching his breath from his very great deal of parental exertion, "I can't actually see her."
"Mummy," Six-Point-One spoke up invisibly in her own defense, "I'm misturbed by their lack of faith!" Meanwhile Gaia, who (unlike her brother) had stopped crying, was currently trying to reason with the violent patch of intangible air by crossing her arms and demanding in baby-talk whether the patch of air knew who she was, and if so, if it could please use her full name and title when addressing her.
Times were hard! It was like living in an imaginary zoo that hadn't been destroyed in the robot apocalypse. It was obvious that something had to be done. And they'd be able to come up with that something, if only there was a single person in the family whose ideas didn't normally lead people to use words like "disastrous" and "holocaust" and "you frakking douche" in retrospect.
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4.
It was obvious they needed some form of family counseling, but unfortunately, a therapist would only be able to cover the visible spouses and children. They might do better with some kind of vision-having Oracle, but some people had noticed how seeing an Oracle often directly coincided with impending death.
Either way, Caprica decided that the time had come to get to know her imaginary twin-sisterwife better, so against all logic they had a family meeting.
"Well, I'll start," Caprica offered. She glanced to the invisible area of the room where the other Six may or may not have been standing on the astral plane. "Six, I sometimes feel jealous about the time you've spent with Gaius before I was back in the picture. I'm happy I married the both of you, but... I also feel left out of the whole 'insanity' part of his life. And considering my advanced pregnancy, I would appreciate feeling more like you're pitching in and looking after all the children. And not telling Gaius to sell mine into that thriving black market sex ring." Caprica was particularly proud of her use of "I think/I feel" sentences.
Head-Six put in her two cents. "You're broken and a sinner and a traitor to your people, and I think we've all lowered ourselves by taking part in this meeting." She was 1-for-2 on "I" sentences.
"Uh," said Gaius, "she- well, she's had some disagreements with you, but she's here and willing to work on them."
"That's good to hear," said Caprica.
"Can I just add that I'm just not sure what to make of either of you," said Gaius. "I've been nothing but devoted and I'm just being bounced around and walked on, you know?" Everyone was impressed with his own use of "I" sentences, but really, he just couldn't imagine any other way to start a sentence.
"Oh," said Head-Six, "and I still can't figure out what that leather jacket was about, either. Tell her that, Gaius. That whole Cylon peace-and-love brigade could stand less froofy scarves and khaki, overall."
"What's she saying now?" asked Caprica.
"Erm," answered Gaius. "Well, it's not important nor efficient, really, to dwell on every last detail, is it?"
"God is in the details, Gaius," Six chimed in. "Or do you think this giant invisible bracelet I wear every day is a sign of random chance?"
"That's not the point I was-"
"It matches the straps on my heels."
Caprica nudged his arm. "What's she saying now, about the point?"
"I'm not sure this was a good idea, honey," said Gaius. "Honeys."
"Oh, this is unbearable," sighed Head-Gaius. "I'm just depressed now." But depression looked exponentially sexier on him that it did on Regular-Gaius.
"Head-Gaius feels depressed," Caprica reported. "And he- he agrees with me, by the way!"
"Well, that's very nice," Gaius rubbed his forehead. "But maybe we need to step back from all this and- and focus mainly... well, mainly on the children, because you know, the world would-"
"Oh Gaius, shut up," said Caprica and Head-Six in complete unison. It was a tremendous step forward for them.
"You know I can't take this kind of pressure!" he shouted, and with that he promptly burst into tears.
"Mmm," declared Head-Six impassively, "I knew that didn't come from my genes," as Gaius Jr. and Gaia followed his lead, clearly distressed. Caprica didn't see this, but she did distinctly notice Six-Point-One roll her imaginary baby eyes and toddle off regally.
In the meantime, the two non-figment children had a private discussion on the state of their parents. "So weird," said the older one.
"Really, really, really, really," confirmed the younger one, who had calculated the perfect number of reallys for emphasis, "weird." And it was at this point that Hope and Unity, having officially become the most rational members of the family, decided that it was time to run away from home.
This was exceedingly difficult because they lived on a spaceship.
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5.
Nonetheless they put their plan in motion, because they were full of baby determination. Armed with a duffel bag of toys, an impressive stealth ability due to their tiny size, two space helmets that didn't fit at all, and the knowledge that nothing Uncle Helo was good at could be too hard to learn, Hope Judith and Unity Thalia Fleetwoodmac infiltrated the Galactica hangar deck and stole a Raptor around 3:30. They were tired of not being appreciated!
"It's just getting ridiculous!" said the older one. "We were here first." Unity nodded vigorously to this. She added, "Other people can see us!" which also earned a vigorous nodding from her sister.
"Are we gonna go back?" the tinier one asked, in between the nodding.
"We'll go back when, um, God tells us too. Duh." Her little sister gave a reluctant nod to this, taking it as a sound argument rather than evidence of the flaws in crazy toaster homeschooling. With that, they tried to turn the computers on to the best of their ability. Luckily they did not get very far before alarms started going off.
Which is to say, they'd only piloted the shuttle nine feet away from the airlock successfully before someone noticed.
But even more luckily, Caprica and Baltar and their invisible entourage had caught up with them before this happened, driven by love and parental intuition (and also the fact they'd left behind a note detailing their plans in calligraphy with perfect spelling and grammar, which suggested that crazy toaster homeschooling has its benefits, too). From the girls' perspective, it was mostly exasperated exclamations of love and kisses and frantic putting-on-of-baby-spacesuits that followed. Meanwhile Head-Six and Head-Baltar were viciously tearing them new baby asses, but they couldn't hear them. It was not the best disciplinary tactic, in hindsight.
No one was quite sure what happened next, although you can probably estimate how many times-per-week the words "divine hand" would be used to describe it later. The truth is, when they first got into the ship 60 seconds earlier, Unity got an owie and spilled a drop of her special hybrid baby blood into the FTL mainframe. And unsure what to do in the face of an official military computer, Hope had punched her telephone number into it, followed by a random series of numbers that translated in sister spy code as WE-DEMAND-ATTENTION. (Ironically, when asked about it later, Hope would blame this on her imaginary friend Mr. Button-Push, the only person in the ship who actually didn't exist.)
So moments later, when the ship spun up and jumped, Caprica's head-daughter merely blinked her baby eyes dramatically in response. Baltar's invisible children chewed their twin baby hair and clutched their twin baby necks, terribly worried by the vague threat of being far away from where they were two seconds ago. Everyone else fell somewhere between these two extremes.
And that's how the kids accidentally found Earth.
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6.
Upon making the incredible discovery, there was some brief questioning of what to do. Head-Gaius was firmly in the camp of telling humans about it, and Head-Six was firmly in the camp of telling Cylons about it, and by "firmly," I mean she used her most quietly terrifying voice and the words "mortal sin" were invoked repeatedly, emphasized by the head-twins throwing their concerned toddler arms around her ankles and yelling "OH NO!" at appropriate moments. Torn and not wanting to cause another war just yet, Gaius and Caprica decided to simply settle there and not tell anyone.
Admittedly, one might hate them for this and be fairly justified, but that was nothing new.
Just before landing, Caprica and Gaius sat down and drew up a thorough and detailed plan regarding their weekly schedules, which took into account childcare, family togetherness, and the occasional brain-orgasms which they each euphemistically referred to as "projection/me-time." Unfortunately the plan somehow found its way into an airlock and they ended up back at square one, but they were glad to have talked it out and were marginally saner for it.
After a few months on Earth, they decided their next, more important plan was to invent the first-ever completely airtight Windows firewall and buy a mansion.
When Daniel Patience Speedwagon was finally born, Hope and Unity were thrilled to have another sibling who wasn't imaginary. Gaius Jr. and Gaia found him very cute, although they were briefly consumed with baby jealousy and looked to their head-mommy for reassurance that they were cuter and smarter and more capable of leading a baby nation if they wanted to. The new baby had blue eyes and was so small and adorable that little Six-Point-One thought about snapping his neck, but then she remembered that snapping necks is wrong, so she wandered off to make her invisible daddy and his gorgeous voice read her a bedtime story.
As they stared over their new, fully-on-the-physical-plane baby that night, Caprica-Six and Baltar linked their arms together, while Head-Gaius smiled sexily and Head-Six affectionately pet Baltar's hair. And in the other room, their mind babies curled up adorably next to their visible siblings, who could not see them but seemed to feel their presence, as Six-Point-One tugged at the younger one's hair in an attempt to style it into something less pedestrian, while the twins clung fiercely to their oldest sister, terrified for a moment by thunder and the vague threat of more thunder, but soon they all drifted into a calm and peaceful sleep, and they dreamed about equations and forests and how awesome it was when they lived on a spaceship, and everything was wonderful for the rest of their lives.
The End.