Our House, for kappamaki33
Title: Our House
author: millari
Summary: “I just didn’t think this would come up so soon,” Louis sighed.
Characters: Gaeta, Hoshi, Sharon, Helo, Cottle, OCs
Pairings: Gaeta/Hoshi
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: none
Title, Author and URL of original story: Mr. Gaeta Builds His Dream House, by kappamaki33
Beta Thanks: Thanks to daybreak777 for her careful shepherding of this story.
Author Notes: AU post-finale fic in which Felix Gaeta has survived the mutiny and settled on Earth 2.0 with Louis Hoshi.
The child had this totally unnerving way of staring right through him.
“Look, I’m not saying I’m flat-out opposed to the idea,” Louis tried whispering.
A few feet away, Doc Cottle stood with a six-year-old girl in front of him that he wanted to leave with them forever. Louis had just managed to get over his shock enough to form coherent speech.
“You agreed that if Cottle ever had a child in need of adoption that we’d do it,” Felix countered loudly, taking away all Louis’ hopes of having this conversation out of earshot. The tense excitement in Felix’s voice told Louis that Felix really, really wanted this.
He looked over again at her and sighed, giving up the pretense of the two of them having a private conversation.
“Felix, we don’t know the first thing about raising a child.”
“Oh come on, you know we’ll be great to her,” Felix pounced. “And who really knows their first time what they’re doing, anyway?” He squeezed Louis’ hand and grinned at him. “Come on. She even looks a little bit like me, don’t you think?”
Louis stared over at her chocolate brown curls and matching brown eyes. She wore a thin, yellow sun dress - worn and grass-stained in a few places. Her lanky arms and face were well-tanned, like she had already started out darker than either of them. He got an image of her playing in the sun all day and tried unsuccessfully to imagine himself inserted into that scene.
“But…” he trailed off helplessly. “…if this were a normal situation, we would be learning something about how to do this. There’d be books we could read, other parents we could talk to…”
He looked back at Cottle, who stood with his hands resting on the girl’s shoulders. She shrank slightly into the grizzled doctor at Louis’ sudden attentions.
“Wait, what about the Agathons?” Louis tried, his mind racing, trying to think of people he remembered from Galactica with children. “Why don’t you take her to them? They’ve already got a kid. She’ll fit right in.”
He ignored Felix’s huffing sound of disappointment at what felt like a perfectly reasonable idea to Louis. But Cottle shook his head.
“No can do. Sharon Agathon just had a miscarriage less than a month ago. She’s not ready, physically or emotionally for another child. And nobody else around here is as well off as you two.”
This was true, Louis acknowledged with a touch of pride. Felix was a Caprica City boy, so about the only thing he’d known how to grow were moldy experiments in his refrigerator. But Louis had grown up on a farm, had belonged to a youth farming club, and had even won prizes for his eggplants and his squashes at the Picon National Fair. And Felix had been an apt pupil, finding that he liked watching things grow. He did whatever he physically could to nurture their crops. Their “house” - a hut made of a combination of smaller trees, random branches, cattails and dung for sealant - had more or less survived the winter, and Louis was already working on a much better one. They’d had to abandon Felix’s more grandiose ideas and aim for something not unlike the barns Louis grew up with, just shorter and made with logs instead of uniform planks of wood.
The result had been a very successful first season, all things considered, and they’d even had enough food left over to share with some of the less talented or less fortunate people living nearby.
“Face it,” Cottle said, eyeing their tidy rows of green, leafy things well on their way to being edibles, “you boys are the best option she’s got. So will you do it or what?”
Louis looked back at Felix, who was directing smiles at the girl despite her impassive expression.
“I just didn’t think this would come up so soon,” Louis sighed. But he felt himself giving in already. It wasn’t every day that he got to see delight like this in his partner’s eyes. Plus, Felix had given Cottle his word, and Louis wasn’t about to sabotage the value of that, especially when this kid obviously needed someone to take care of her.
“Yeah, of course we will.”
Felix gave him an enthusiastic kiss on the cheek and started ambulating to where Cottle stood.
Louis followed him, uncertain.
“Hello, there,” he said softly. “I’m Louis. What’s your name?”
The little girl shrank against Cottle yet again, this time burying her face in the doctor’s pant leg. Louis sighed. It had been a difficult year, and Louis felt a sudden pang that from now on, their lives might never be easy again. But then, really, he couldn’t remember anymore the last time he’d considered his life easy.
“Her name’s Penelope,” Cottle answered when it became clear she was too shy to answer.
“Hi Penelope,” Felix said brightly, trying to make up for his inability to bend down properly to greet her. “I’m Felix. We’d be glad to have you come live with us from now on.”
The girl clung to Cottle wordlessly, her face still buried.
“She’s still getting over losing her parents,” Cottle growled. “Why don’t we have a talk?”
***
“She lived in the settlement about fifteen klicks from here. Her parents died of one of these Earth diseases I still don’t have a name for.”
Felix watched Penelope - she’s our daughter now, he told himself - playing silently in a cleared area nearby with some small rocks.
“No one knew for over twenty-four hours that her parents had died,” Cottle explained. “I’d been there about two weeks ago, when her mother fell sick. The father held out a little longer, but in the end, they died more or less at the same time, within twelve hours of each other. When I came back around to check on them, I found her in the house with her parents’ corpses.”
Louis emitted a low whistle. “Poor kid,” he whispered, looking over at her. She was totally lost in her own world, silent and seemingly oblivious to their presence.
Cottle took another puff from his pipe. “As you can see, she doesn’t talk. She hasn’t said a word since I got her. Her parents died a pretty horrific death. It may take her a while to talk again.”
“Do you know how we can help her?” Felix asked. Although he didn’t want to admit it to Louis, he was more wary now of what they’d just taken on.
“I’m no shrink,” Cottle groused as he stubbed out the embers of his pipe with a small stick and put the pipe into his jacket pocket. “But in my expert medical opinion…” He shrugged. “I guess you just gotta wait for her to work it out.”
***
Forty-eight hours later, when she still wasn’t talking, Felix and Louis started to worry.
“I suppose we should expect this,” Felix murmured as he watched her out of the corner of his eye. She picked desultorily at the meat he’d cooked for her over the open fire they had built under a small shelter outside their home. “She’s probably afraid of attaching to new people in case they die too.”
“Yes, probably,” Louis agreed. He wished they had more to go on than just guessing.
“All right, I’ll admit it,” Felix murmured later that night as he and Louis spooned into each other in the bed they had made together out of branches, hay and blankets. Luckily, fabrics had been excepted in what Felix liked to refer to as the Lee Adama's Great Slingshot Into the Sun. Why guns and computers and even plates and cups, but not fabrics, he'd often wondered. Not that he was about to complain about getting to keep his clothes and blankets. He wondered with a trace of bitterness if the Cylons, who mostly lived on their own here on Earth, were reducing themselves to such restrictive living conditions.
“Admit what?” Louis asked.
“That this is harder than I thought it would be.”
“Yeah, I know.” Louis breathed a sigh of relief to know that he wasn’t the only one who felt this way. "Shouldn't we be doing something more? I mean, if we just let her be and pretend like she's behaving normally, what if she just stays that way? What if she never talks again?"
"Whoa, Louis,” Felix cut him off, a chuckle underneath his words as he kissed Louis on the back of the neck. "You’re getting a little ahead of yourself, aren’t you?” he teased. then turned thoughtful.
"But you know, if you really consider it, you've already had plenty of experience at something like this."
"I've never taken care of kids in my life!” Louis protested. “Not even a sister or a brother! I was the youngest child, remember?”
"But you do know about being patient with someone who’s getting over stuff,” Felix insisted. “Think about how you helped me after New Caprica. And after the Demetrius. And the Raptor.”
He could hear Louis thinking.
"We just gotta be patient like you were with me," Felix concluded, hoping he was actually right about this. "Give her space, but make sure she knows that we're here when she's ready.”
"Hmm..." Louis considered Felix's argument. "And what do we do in the meantime while she's figuring it out?"
"Just be ourselves, I guess."
"All right,” Louis replied, even though he wasn’t really very certain. Not certain at all.
***
It wasn’t a bad plan. The devil was in the details, though, especially when a week later, Penelope began waking up in the middle of the night with nightmares.
The first time, her screaming triggered for Felix a nightmare about the detention centers on New Caprica. He awoke in a panic - just as one of the Dorals was handing him over to a Centurion - to find Louis shaking him into consciousness.
“Sorry. You were screaming too.” Louis’ voice was terse as he crawled out of their bed and over to where Penelope was thrashing in her sleep.
“Sssh, it’s okay,” he tried to soothe her, but her ear-piercing shrieks merely subsided to inconsolable sobbing that soon propelled Felix out of the bed too, sliding himself towards them without his crutches, listening to them wordlessly in the dark.
“You’re safe now, Penelope,” Louis comforted her. “We’re here for you. We won’t let anything hurt you.”
Louis wanted to take the child into his arms, to comfort her, but even stroking her hair seemed to upset her. In fact, the only thing that worked at all was them both simply staying by her side until she cried herself back to sleep.
The dreams came back the following night, then the next, and then again and again. By the time a week had passed, the two of them were so exhausted, they walked around zombie-like and cranky. Felix knew things were bad when the normally long-tempered Louis snapped at him for not weeding one of the plots like he’d promised. But the simple fact was, Felix was having trouble remembering his own name. He’d tried to do the weeding one day while Louis was out hunting, but had stopped when he’d accidentally pulled out several vegetable plants instead of weeds. Penelope looked tired too, and they would find her taking impromptu naps all over the place - in her bed, but also in between the crops or in the tall grasses behind the house.
Meanwhile, the nightmares continued unabated.
By the ninth night of this, Felix found himself wide awake in the dark, long after Louis had fallen asleep. He realized he was waiting for the screaming to begin. But of course, it only came after his body had given up out of boredom and exhaustion.
When her cries startled him awake, Felix knew he had to get out of the bed, but his body refused to cooperate. He elbowed Louis in the ribs, but Louis’ body was rebelling too. Felix didn’t know how it was possible, but the man continued to sleep right through the noise.
Godsdamn it, Louis, he grumbled inwardly and tried again to push himself out of bed, knowing the shrieks would continue until he pulled her out of her dreams. But he was so exhausted, he could only get himself a few inches towards her. He lay back on the dirt floor, pressed his palm to his forehead in frustration, and wondered what his mother would have done in this situation.
A moment later, their home was filled with Felix’s singing - a simple, soothing tune about the stars at night that he remembered his mom singing to his younger sister. He sang loudly at first, but once he realized she was definitely awake, he made it into a soft, sing-song melody, inserting her name clumsily into the song like his mother used to do.
Penelope’s shrieks stopped abruptly as she awoke. Her cries soon returned, but thankfully only as gulping sniffles. He kept singing the song again and again, long after he’d run out of lyrics he could remember. He sang until he was as certain as he could be in the dark that she’d fallen asleep.
In silent relief, he found the strength to slide himself back to the bed and into Louis’ arms. The disembodied kiss that greeted him on the cheek startled him.
“Oh, now you’re awake,” he mock groaned. “How convenient.”
“That was brilliant,” Louis told him sleepily. “Worked like a charm.” He turned over. “Good thing we have one musician in the family. If we’d had to rely on my singing, she’d be back in another nightmare.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Felix scoffed, stifling back a yawn. Privately, though, he had to admit that Louis was kind of blissfully tone-deaf. “I’m just glad I found something that worked.” He drew their blanket over his shoulders, grateful for the silence. “I can’t wait until she talks again and this all gets easier.”
“Me too,” Louis managed to get out before they both fell asleep in utter exhaustion.
***
The nightmares continued, but luckily Felix’s singing meant they didn’t even have to get out of their bed anymore. Her body soon trained itself to wake her up to the sound of his singing, even from across the room, and soon she wasn’t even truly waking up anymore. She seemed to just let the sound of his lullabies permeate her subconscious and soothe her back into quietude. The three of them got more sleep and Louis found himself considering more normal parental thoughts again.
“She needs toys,” he announced, a bit horrified at the omission. “She must have had at least a couple of toys, right? Why didn’t Cottle bring any of her things with her?”
“Well, if her parents both died of an unknown disease, he was probably afraid her toys were contaminated,” Felix said logically.
“Yeah, but she needs toys,” he insisted. “Kids play, right? Isn’t it really important for their development?”
“You’re right,” Felix agreed. “She needs something to keep her mind active.”
“Felix,” Louis admonished. “She needs to have fun.”
They gave her whatever toys they could beg, borrow, or improvise, but to their consternation, she played with none of them. She didn’t seem to want to play at all.
But she did seem interested in their daily routines. She was an extraordinarily light sleeper, and she would wake up with Louis and the dawn - rubbing her eyes sleepily but alert - when he rose to work their plots in the coolest part of the day. The first morning, he tried to coax her back to bed, but the whole exercise only succeeded in waking a groaning Felix, who needed more sleep these days due to the strain of walking around on the prosthetic and crutches; not to mention, waking up in the middle of every night to sing to Penelope was slowly taking its toll.
Her favorite pastime seemed to be sitting on the ground outside and staring at Louis working the field. She’d sit and watch for hours, clinging to the one toy that she would even deign to touch - a faceless, simple doll Felix had made for her out of dried grasses and a scrap of fabric that served as a makeshift dress. She didn’t really play with it, just clung to it.
“It does seem sort of unnatural, doesn’t it?” Felix admitted. “I thought kids naturally gravitated to any sort of play they could get.”
“You know what I noticed today?” Louis said thoughtfully. “She doesn’t like to get too close, but she always stays near.”
“You know, you’re right. She never lets me out of her sight when we’re together, which I guess makes sense if you think about it. If you just lost your both your parents at the same time, you’d want to keep an eye on the new ones, right? Make sure you don’t lose them too.”
“She needs to be able to count on us,” Louis declared. “From now on, we make sure one of us is in her sight at all times. Until she decides otherwise, she doesn’t face the world without one of us nearby, all right?”
Felix squeezed his hand. “It’s a good idea.”
***
This plan was easy enough to execute when Louis was working the land or on his long-term project of building them a bigger and better home. Or when Louis went on his half-day hunting or foraging trips and Penelope sat with Felix under an open shelter making meals from tubers and roots they stored in a small, cool pit out behind the house.
However, it was difficult to stay in her sight when it came to anything that required privacy. Using the outhouse proved particularly tricky. The first time, she’d patiently watched Louis go inside and close the door behind him, but when he’d came back out, she’d moved up so close to the door that he banged right into her. Louis had emerged to her indignant squeals and the sight of her small hand vigorously rubbing her forehead.
“Oh Gods, Penelope! I’m sorry!” he cried, reaching out to touch the red spot on her face. She let him check it, but he felt how her body went stiff and immediately withdrew his hand.
“Sorry,” he reassured her. “I won’t touch you until you’re okay with it, all right?”
She didn’t answer, but her shoulders seemed to relax a bit. Louis smiled.
“Just don’t stand so close next time, okay?” he warned.
But she repeated the same behavior with Felix the next day. The shock of running right into her made Felix lose his balance and go tumbling into the dirt, his crutches clattering around him. For the millionth time, he cursed the loss of his leg.
As he tried to compose himself, he saw the alarm in her eyes at the way his leg and the prosthetic had splayed on the ground. She took off running.
“Penelope!” he cried after her, as soon as he could push himself into a sitting position but her legs were already taking her as fast as she could run back towards the house. He sighed and slid himself over to grab his crutches.
When he finally made it back, he found her sitting on her bed, clutching the doll like a lifeline.
“Hey,” he intoned. “Penelope…” he began. The syllables felt awkward in his mouth.
“You know, ‘Penelope’ is an awfully big name for such a little girl,” he observed. “Can I call you ‘Penny’ instead?”
Her head shot up at the nickname. “Huh,” he said, wondering. “Did your mom and dad call you that? Do you like that name better?”
She clung silently to the doll, but he noticed that she kept his gaze.
“All right then,” he announced. “Penny it is.”
He bent down with his good leg and maneuvered himself onto the ground to be at her level. He noticed how her eyes seemed transfixed by the prosthetic.
“It’s not that different from your leg.” He smiled and tapped the metal. “You want to touch it?”
She reached out a tentative hand, her fingers barely grazing along the prosthetic until they reached the spot where his end cap met his pants leg. She blinked and looked back up at him, her eyes wide.
“The rest of my leg’s just like yours,” he reassured her. “I just had … an accident.” He pushed the memory deep down. He hadn’t thought of the shooting for almost a year now.
“It’s a little harder for me to walk than you, so I may fall again sometime,” he explained. “But it’s no big deal, okay? It doesn’t mean I’m sick or that I’m hurt or anything. I just get up again, and I’m fine. I’m not going anywhere, and neither is Louis, understand?”
It took a few moments, but she eventually nodded, and the thrill of that simple, unexpected gesture, after so much blankness from her, barreled right through him.
“So when one of us is in another room, or with a door closed,” he continued, “you’re trying to listen, aren’t you, to make sure we’re still there?”
She looked away.
“Just because you can’t see one of us doesn’t mean that we’ve left you, okay? So don’t stand so close to the doors like that. We don’t want to accidentally hurt you.”
This time, she remained still, but she put the doll back down onto the bed.
“All right, then,” he said. “Let’s get back to cooking, huh?”
They remained mostly in silence for the rest of the day, but Felix liked to think that it was a companionable one. He whistled to himself as he turned the tubers over in a long, slow roast over the open fire. The second time he rousted himself up, groaning, to get more wood for the fire, she surprised him by shooting up and running to the pile herself. What her little hands brought back wasn’t nearly enough to keep the fire going for much longer, but he praised her anyway.
“Thank you, Penny,” he said with quiet excitement. “We make a good team.”
She still didn’t speak, but nevertheless, Felix felt that something had changed between them. She met his gaze now when he spoke to her, as if she were really hearing him now. When he asked her again to bring some wood from the pile, she dashed off immediately and brought some back. She seemed to like the responsibility.
The next day, when Louis went off fishing, Felix came up with an idea.
“You know what?” he told her. “I’ve got another job you could help me with.”
He took her to the plots where their vegetables were growing nicely, and maneuvered himself onto the ground again, this time taking off the prosthetic, keeping his voice even and untroubled as he showed her the amputation at his knee.
“Don’t worry. I’m taking it off because it’s actually easier to get around this way when I need to do this kind of a job.”
He began the arduous task of weeding, sliding along the furrows between the vegetables so he could easily reach the offending plants. This task always resulted in his clothes becoming intolerably messy, but really, it was the only way that was actually convenient for him to do this, and he would be damned if he was going to let Louis be entirely responsible for all the food they ate. Louis already did all the planting and watering and was the only one who could realistically forage and go after game.
“See the much bigger plants that are growing in a straight line?” he pointed towards the crops. “Those are our food. The other, smaller stuff? Those are weeds; we don’t want those. Pull those out and toss them outside the plot, okay?”
He watched her carefully select a weed and yank it out. She examined it for a moment, then gestured towards him with it in her hand.
“Yes, exactly,” he nodded. “Good job.”
When Louis returned a couple of hours later with a cloth sack filled with fruits, he was startled to find Penelope and Felix in the garden, each in their own row, throwing their weeds into a communal pile behind them.
“What are you two doing in my plots?” he asked, bemused.
“We’re weeding,” Felix said matter-of-factly. Both of them were covered in dust, their thick curls damp with sweat and sticking to their foreheads.
“I can see that,” Louis grinned, putting down the fruit and walking over to them. “I should have known you’d raise a kid with an overdeveloped work ethic. Remember what I said about fun?”
He bent down. “Penelope, honey.” He was still chuckling under his breath. “You don’t have to do that, you know. You can go play with your toys if you want.”
“Louis,” Felix interrupted as Penelope tossed yet another weed onto their pile. “She nodded at me today when I talked to her,” he informed him in a lower tone. “Trust me, we’re fine.”
Louis stopped immediately, finally getting it, his heart fluttering with hope. “Oh,” he said with quiet excitement.
“You’re doing a great job, Penelope,” he told her, his voice full of quiet awe.
She didn’t acknowledge him, absorbed in her task, but that was just fine, Louis thought.
“Oh, and we decided,” Felix added, a gleam in his eyes that Louis hadn’t seen since the first day they’d said yes to Cottle. “She’s not Penelope anymore. She’s Penny.”
“Penny.” Louis tried the name out for size.
“She likes it better,” Felix told him confidently.
“She does?” Louis glanced at her again. “Is that true, Penny?”
To his surprise, she raised her head and met his gaze, just for a moment, as if in affirmation. An amazed smile crept across his face as he absorbed the communication that had just transpired between them. He watched her for a while as she yanked weeds out of the ground like she had a personal vendetta against each one.
“Wow, she’s really good at that, isn’t she?” he remarked.
“She’s much faster at it than me,” Felix agreed with a satisfied smile. “I think we should make it her job once in a while. Would you like that, Penny?”
Her head rose again, and after a moment, she nodded. Louis uttered something between a laugh and a cry of delight, attracting her startled attention.
“No, it’s okay,” he said quickly, fearful of making her retreat back into herself. “You’re doing great.”
Thank you, he mouthed at Felix, who just shrugged and extended his hand for Louis to help him up.
“You know,” Louis whispered in his ear as he put his arm around Felix, “for the first time, I feel like she’s really our daughter.”
He heard a percussive sound at the back of Felix’s throat. “Yeah, I know what you mean.”
The two of them just stood like that for a long time, absurdly happy at the sight of her weeding.
***
The nightmares went away after that, and soon, the days were flying by nicely, with Penny and Louis falling into a routine of getting up together at dawn, alternating their work between weeding and the harvesting of mid-season crops. Louis showed Penny how to plant the seeds of a bean he’d discovered growing not far from their homestead the previous year. He gave her a little section of the plot that had already been harvested, and soon, she was tending her own little sprouts alongside the sweet potato and yam-like vegetables still growing to maturity. In fact, she took to it so well, he wondered if her parents had been starting to teach her things.
Sometimes, for variety, he’d take her instead on foraging trips, looking for nuts and edible roots, or edible greens he was teaching her to identify in among the grasses. By mid-morning, when they’d return home, Felix would have gotten up and prepared a breakfast for them of mashed legumes or tubers drenched with crushed berries for flavor and vitamin content. They’d sit together in the dirt at a short dining table of sorts they’d created last year by arduously dragging a large, flat rock they’d found when they’d broke ground for the new house Louis was building.
In the late afternoons, when the work was done for the day, they showed her how to draw with a stick in the dirt. Often, they would draw their own checkerboard into the ground and try playing chess, using different rocks and inedible berries for the pieces. But they inevitably lost track of which piece was which, and would give up their game, preferring to relax with their backs against the table, watching Penny draw.
They always made a point of including her in most of their conversations, even if she probably didn’t understand half of them, and even though she never spoke back.
Until one day, without warning, she did.
Her first words with them were hardly momentous, but difficult to argue with.
“I wish we had cereal,” she pronounced one morning at breakfast.
At the sound of her voice - tinny and girlish - Felix choked on a bite of yam. He spent the next several seconds coughing, while Louis stared at her with his hand over his mouth.
“Cereal?” Felix could hear the bewilderment in Louis’ voice.
“Can we have oatmeal for breakfast?” she asked, unfazed by their reactions. “I’m sick of yams.”
They sat there for a long moment, totally flabbergasted by the randomness of her first words. But then, forgetting himself, Louis reached out for her and pulled her into a excited hug. The expression on her face - startled, but not unhappy - and the way her small, stiff frame relaxed and then sank into Louis’ arms, told Felix he would have gone out and hunted down an elk if that’s what she had asked for. Hot cereal seemed like a bargain by comparison.
“Anything you want, Penny,” he told her, his words tinged with joy and relief. “Keep talking, and I’ll get you all the cereal you want.
“Just give me a few days.”
Thinking about it, he realized that they had some old sweet potatoes from the previous year that had dried out and become mostly unpalatable. Felix had been saving them in case they ever ran into truly desperate times, but he realized that they were dried out enough that he could use a rock to grate them into a powder. He could then pour hot water over it and make a sort of approximation of hot cereal. It could work.
Felix reached out and stroked her hair, thrilled at the barrier that had just fallen away between them. She looked back at him, her brown eyes calm and focused. He wanted to hug her, but she was still in Louis’ arms and he didn’t want to overwhelm her.
***
They ate Felix’s “oatmeal” for a week straight, much to Penny’s vocal delight. Now that she had found her words, she was a fountain of them spilling out into their lives.
Once she realized the power that her happiness held over them, new requests surfaced - bread, chocolate milk, candy. Most of these requests introduced them to the newfound value of the word “no,” but Felix realized after his powdered potato innovations that he could rather easily fashion a crude oven using a dug out pit and some of the thin rock slabs they’d been neatly piling up over time behind the site of their unfinished new home. He made the dried potato powder into a dough of sorts, and after a few days of experimentation, they sat by the fire, tearing off chunks from sheets of warm flatbread. They were very flat, of course, but were still heavenly when warm and dipped into a gourd filled with mashed berries.
“Gods, I think this is the most delicious thing I’ve had in years.” Louis laid back and tossed another piece of the delicacy into his mouth before tearing off a piece and gesturing with it towards Penny, who opened her mouth and let him aim a piece at her. He missed wildly, provoking tiny squeals of outrage as she scrambled to pick up the piece of bread that had fallen into the dirt.
“You always miss!” she protested as she popped the escaped piece into her mouth.
“What?” He adopted a wounded tone. “I do not!”
“No, she’s right,” Felix piped up unhelpfully, reaching out an impatient hand for the bread. “You do always miss, Louis.”
“Hmmph.” Louis pretended to grumble at her. “It’s possible I liked you better when you didn’t talk so much.”
But of course, the two of them were absolutely thrilled. To encourage her, Felix instituted a new ritual of spending the early evening after dinner around the dying fire, telling each other stories. Her imagination was filled with badly thought out stories about princesses and talking animals, which always made less sense than theirs, but they felt they could hardly complain, since theirs were mainly veiled retellings of the misadventures of various crew members on Galactica, designed on one level to entertain her with fairytale kings, wizards, and cartoonish villains, and on another level to make each other laugh:
“…so then the King Papadama was touched by an magic curse and turned into an evil ogre. He persecuted his subjects by bringing monsters into the kingdom to persecute them…”
Louis quirked an eyebrow at that. They hadn’t talked much at all about the mutiny after the Admiral had reluctantly granted Felix clemency and kept Felix in the brig. When they had reached this new Earth, even Adama had seen that keeping Felix in jail was pointless.
“…the worst of them was a fire-breathing dragon…” Felix continued.
“What was its name?” Penny interrupted him with bated breath.
“What?” Felix asked in surprise. “It was a dragon. It didn’t have a name.”
Penny made a dubious face. “It has to have a name!”
“Oh,” he said, momentarily nonplussed. He didn’t particularly see why it particularly needed a name. “Uh, I guess its name was uh….” He racked his brain.
“…the dreaded Thrace Monster,” he decided. “That was its name. It liked to taunt its enemies before it breathed fire on them.”
Louis nearly died laughing, confusing Penny. When he caught his breath, he saw Felix’s knowing, mischievous grin. Apparently, Penny wasn’t the only one in this family that was maybe, just maybe finally starting to heal.
Family. That’s what they were becoming, he realized with a start. Not the kind that either of them had envisioned when they’d first agreed they both wanted children, but a family nonetheless.
Still, Louis thought, this can’t be it. It can’t possibly be this easy.
Penny had lost both her parents, at the same time, to what must have been a horrific disease. He knew too well from his time on the Pegasus, from his experiences with Felix, and from the rumors he’d heard about people who’d been in the jails on New Caprica, that people didn’t just forget trauma that easily. Penny’s happiness was too fledgling to ruin right now with all sorts of troubling questions about her parents, and the last thing he wanted to do was re-traumatize her. But those memories were going to resurface again sometime.
“…and then the curse was lifted, and there was much rejoicing throughout the kingdom…” Felix told the story in his most singsong voice, “and the Thrace Monster was banished forever. Everyone lived happily ever after. The End.”
Louis watched the pleased light in Penny’s eyes and tried to not get caught up in his sense of unease.
***
After Penny kept speaking for a few weeks, Louis had made the five-klick walking journey to the home of Ron and Nancy Provo. He returned in the evening with a “play date” for Penny with the Provos’ six-year-old daughter, Melissa.
Louis had first met Ron on the Pegasus, when the man had been perpetually whipping out his wallet-sized photos of his new baby girl, Melissa. The two men had met again when they’d all first arrived on Earth and Louis had volunteered to build temporary shelters while waiting to find out Felix’s fate. He’d been shocked to see the tiny infant in Ron’s pictures transformed into a chatty six-year-old girl, and the memory had stayed with him even after Provo and his wife had settled on their own homestead.
Much to everyone’s delight, Penny and Melissa became fast friends. The two families took turns making the journey to each other’s homes to let their daughters socialize regularly. A month passed this way, while Ron and Louis spent these visits predictably reminiscing and Felix and Nancy half-listened to their partners’ stories about life on the Pegasus. If the stories were boring, they fell asleep contentedly in the hot afternoon sun.
Today was one of those days. Felix realized he’d been asleep for a while when he abruptly woke up to the sound of Louis and Ron’s raucous laughter over some shared joke he knew he wouldn’t get. Yawning, he felt Nancy tap him on the shoulder. “Hey, you want some of this cold tea we made out of those maroon berries that are everywhere around here?” she offered.
Felix nodded, still drowsy and relaxed, and pulled himself up out of the grass and onto the support of his crutch. As he walked towards the house with Nancy, he cast an idle glance towards the tall grasses where Penny and Melissa were contentedly swinging themselves around a low tree branch like gymnasts. He smiled to see Penny so happy. He found it hard to believe that not long ago, she’d been such a withdrawn, silent child.
We’re lucky, he thought as Nancy gave him the tea in a dried out gourd. It was funny. He never would have thought to use that word to describe them last year when they’d begun the arduous process of setting up camp and building a home with virtually no tools to help them.
When they returned, Nancy happily settled back into a nap. Ron and Louis had started talking now about the rescue of Hera Agathon.
Felix swallowed back a guilt-ridden lump in his throat as he stood there listening to the two men getting nostalgic about events he had missed completely because he was in the brig. Ron and Louis had such an easy amiability together.
This was how it had been between him and Helo once.
That’s a useless road to go down, he thought. There had been times in the last year when he’d let himself consider (just for a second) the possibility of making the trek to Karl and Sharon’s homestead, just showing up at their door and trying his luck with them. But realistically, he couldn’t imagine facing them, not after all that had happened.
He was sure he must have spent several minutes feeling slightly sorry for himself, until he looked back over at the tree where Penny and Melissa had been playing and saw no one at all.
“Frak!” he exclaimed.
Louis and Ron abruptly stopped chatting, and Nancy woke up with a start. They followed his stunned gaze and soon caught up to the fact that they were all looking at an empty space where there should be two children playing in the tall grass.
Felix tried to run until he was rudely reminded of the limitations of his prosthetic and crutches, and had to limp over at a frustratingly slow pace, far behind Louis and the Provos.
They found the girls right by the tree, hidden by the grass’ height. Melissa lay
on the ground unconscious. Penny sat on the ground a foot away, her legs tucked underneath her as she rocked back and forth, crying silently.
“Penny! What happened?” Louis grabbed her by the shoulders and looked her over for signs of injury, but she seemed fine physically. She stared at him through her tears, doing nothing to wipe them away. Nancy started crying too, as her husband picked their daughter up in his arms and started carrying her back towards their home.
“You take care of Penny,” Louis told Felix, his feet already in motion. “I’ll get Cottle.”
***
No matter what Felix tried, Penny wouldn’t move from the spot where they’d found her. She’d finally stopped crying, but in a moment of panic, Penny had retreated back into the safety of total, detached silence.
“Penny,” he pleaded with her, sitting awkwardly in the grass next to her. “Tell me what you’re thinking. Trust me, it’ll be better once you talk about it.”
She didn’t reply. She just kept staring at the long matted blades where Melissa had been lying before her father had taken her away.
“Melissa’s going to be fine,” he assured her, even though he didn’t really know that yet. “She just bumped her head.”
Still nothing. She wouldn’t even look at him.
“Come on, Penny, Talk to me. Are you scared? What are you scared of?”
Her head whirled around at the question. She grabbed onto his shirt and buried her face in it, exploding into a crying fit like he hadn’t seen since the nightmares.
He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her shaking body into his lap, rocking her back and forth, feeling her hot tears soak through his shirt.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” he said soothingly for several minutes, until she had exhausted herself into stillness and she lay silent against his body, listening to his heartbeat.
“Melissa fell from the tree,” she confessed, her voice muffling into his shirt. “We were climbing and she fell…”
“It’s okay,” he exhaled deeply, his relief palpable at hearing her speak again. “Louis is getting the doctor.”
She went quiet again for a few minutes.
“My mom went to sleep. I was playing,” she sniffled. “Then she didn’t wake up anymore.”
Felix winced at the image.
“Penny, I’m so sorry. I wish I could bring them back for you.” He cupped her face in his palms. “But we love you very, very much, and we’re trying our best to make you happy with us.”
He felt her turn stiff. “But they’re right there!” She pointed at the ground where they’d found Melissa. “Make them wake up!” she demanded, on the verge of tears again.
Poor thing, he thought. Of all the things for her imagination to conjure up… He tried to go along with her, to think of a good spin to put on her imagination. “Don’t you think they look happy asleep? Maybe we should leave them be.”
“No!” she scoffed. “They’re sick! Look at them!”
Her hands grabbed his own like a tiny vise around his fingers. Suddenly, Felix felt an overwhelming sensation shoot through him, like a jolt of electricity coursing through his body. There was a brief but vivid flash - almost like a memory, but distinctly not - of a woman and man, both in their twenties, aged beyond their years by the sallow color to their faces, and the red lesions all over their faces. He pulled back in shocked realization, staring at Penny, unable to say a word.
This was not happening. It couldn’t be.
***
Though he couldn’t exactly take an x-ray to confirm it, Cottle decided that Melissa had most likely had experienced a mild concussion from her fall - serious but not deadly. Her parents just needed to take some precautions over the next few days, and she’d be fine. By the evening, the two children were playing quietly but happily in the house where the four adults could keep an eye on them.
As soon as things calmed down, Felix took Cottle outside without saying anything to Louis, who was busy distracting Penny with playing games anyway. Cottle looked less than surprised at Felix’s insisting on a private talk and shuttling him out the door. This told Felix everything he needed to know.
“She’s a Cylon, and you knew from the beginning, didn’t you?” he rounded on him as soon as they were out of earshot. “Why did you hide it from us?”
Cottle lit his pipe with maddening nonchalance.
“First of all, genius, she’s not a Cylon. She’s a half-Cylon, half-human. A hybrid. There’s a difference. And second of all, Why do you think I didn’t tell you? You led an anti-Cylon mutiny!”
Felix hadn’t been expecting that answer. “Then why did you give her to us?” he asked, genuinely puzzled.
Cottle scowled, unrepentant. “I didn’t have anyone else to ask.”
“No Cylon wanted her?”
“I didn’t ask any Cylons,” he said flatly. “The girl had been raised as a human, and frankly, from what I can tell, most Cylons tend to get pretty nutty when it comes to the subject of children. She’d already lost her parents and didn’t need more trauma.”
He offered Felix an apologetic drag from his pipe. After a moment, Felix accepted it.
“How did you know she was a hybrid?” he asked in between puffs.
“Her mother confided in me. The child didn’t know. The adoptive father never knew. She decided when she got sick that wanted someone to know, so that they could tell the kid one day.” He turned a questioning gaze on Felix. “So how did you know?”
“Which Cylon model is her father?” Felix asked instead. It was disturbing to think back to New Caprica and imagine that one of those models that had terrified him every day was Penny’s father.
“A Simon. They slept together on Gemenon a few times, a year before the Attacks, when the Cylons were still infiltrating the Colonies. She didn’t know what he was. They’d already broken up when she got pregnant, so she never bothered telling him. Then, once she saw endless copies of him on New Caprica, she realized the truth. She never told anyone. She was afraid that either the Cylons or the humans might take her child away.”
Cottle paused, realization suddenly dawning.
“Wait,” he frowned. “No one but me knew about this. How did you ever figure it out?”
That’s when Felix told him about the projection. The pipe almost fell out of Cottle’s mouth.
“Seriously?” he said. “How did you even recognize it for what it was?”
Felix looked away. “That Eight on the Raptor. The one I had to … ” he drifted off uncomfortably. “Anyway, she projected at one point on the Raptor to try and find our lost coordinates. I got a glimpse of it.”
Cottle stared at him in wonder. “You know that it shouldn’t even be possible for a human to share a Cylon’s projection, right?” he said.
“I have no idea how this works.” He swallowed hard. “This isn’t what I signed on for.”
Cottle quirked an eyebrow. “Felix, I don’t have anyone else who can take her…”
“No! I know that! And I’m not saying …” His head lolled back on his shoulders in frustration. “I love Penny.”
Cottle took a contemplative puff. “Well, all right, then. Good.”
“I just … “ He tapped a foot in the dirt. “What do I know about raising a Cylon-human hybrid child? What if this projection stuff is just the beginning, and Louis and I are out of our depth?”
Cottle considered the question over a long drag. “Listen, go talk to Sharon Agathon,” he concluded. “She’ll know more about this hybrid stuff than anyone else.”
“Lieutenant Agathon?” Felix grimaced. “We’re not exactly friends.”
Cottle’s expression turned wan. “Not exactly friends as in, ‘She’ll make me grovel a bit,’ or ‘I’m taking my life into my own hands darkening her door?’
“To be honest, I’m not really sure.”
He offered Felix a drag off his pipe again. This time, Felix took it.
“Well, take Hoshi with you,” he growled. “And take the girl. She can hardly kill you in front of both of them, right?”
***
Once Louis had gotten over the initial shock of learning the truth about Penny, his first and only question had been: “Do we still get to keep her?”
Felix had been amazed at how that one question had cut through all of his doubts like a scythe hacking a clear path through the savannah. All his lingering questions about the trustworthiness of Cylons, about the need to hold them accountable for their actions, seemed insignificant and petty when he actually stopped thinking of Penny as an abstraction.
But none of that made this journey any easier.
“Might as well get it over with,” Felix had grumbled to cover over the million butterflies fluttering about in his stomach at the thought of seeing the Agathons again. They had stayed overnight at the Provos, deciding to travel to Sharon and Helo’s early the next morning. Louis was excited about seeing Helo and Sharon again. Felix was not so sure.
Penny ran ahead of them excitedly in one of the tops and shorts Nancy had found for them among Melissa’s hand-me-downs. She had found Penny three outfits in all, which Louis was carrying in his pack.
They arrived at the Agathons’ homestead around mid-morning. Helo and Sharon were outside harvesting some of their crops. As soon as Sharon recognized who they were, she called Hera immediately to her side, her voice strained and suspicious.
“Hoshi,” she said simply, the single, terse word her only greeting. Felix held onto Penny’s hand even more tightly. He’d forgotten how scary Sharon could be when she got hostile like this. She seemed more Cylon in those moments, more cold machine.
Hera stood obediently still next to her mother. Felix’s heart clenched, remembering helping Dee babysit the girl.
After a long moment with everybody standing around unsure of what to say, Helo finally broke the silence. “What are you doing here?”
Felix noticed that both the Agathons’ eyes were falling with curiosity upon Penny, who drew herself closer to him as she felt herself being scrutinized. She stared at Hera, intrigued by the equally nervous child, who stood silent behind her mother’s protective arm.
Louis stood beside Felix and ran a nervous hand through Penny’s dark curls. “This is our daughter, Penelope,” he breathed. “But we call her Penny. We could use a little help understanding her.”
Sharon’s eyes narrowed, instantly ready for disdain. “What makes you think we’d be willing to help you with anything?” Although she was answering Louis’ question, she had turned her gaze squarely onto Felix.
“You want parenting lessons now, Felix?” She glared down at Penny for a moment before returning her gaze to him. “Here’s an idea, for starters. Try not imprisoning your daughter, like you did mine.”
“Sharon…” he began, trying to cut through her hostility and physically close the distance between them; but he saw as he moved how she reflexively clutched Hera tighter to her and he froze.
“Please,” Louis tried interacting with Helo, but he merely stood by stiffly, saying nothing, focused on protecting his wife and daughter - from a man with a prosthetic leg, half-leaning on a six-year-old girl, Louis thought in annoyance. He turned back to Sharon.
“You’re the only ones who can help us,” he said evenly. “Don’t you see that? You don’t see what she is?”
“What the frak are you talking about, Louis?” Sharon asked, but she was distracted momentarily into glancing down at Penny again. Both he and Felix held their breath as they saw her double take morph into understanding. She walked a few steps closer towards Penny and Felix, then gasped aloud and fell to her knees, wrapping Hera close to her, scanning Penny with her eyes. Felix saw her doing math in her mind.
“How is this even possible?” she muttered in awe, to herself more than anyone.
“What is it, Sharon?” Helo said sharply, confused by the sudden change in his wife’s demeanor.
“Karl.” she choked on the word. “She’s a hybrid. Like Hera.”
Helo looked unable to speak.
“Come over here, honey,” Sharon rasped, hoarse with shock. Penny looked up at Felix, uncertain.
“It’s okay,” he told her. “Nobody’s gonna hurt you here. I promise. Go ahead.”
Penny hesitated, then shuffled into Sharon’s waiting arms, letting Sharon trace along her face with an index finger, looking back once at Louis and Felix.
“Does she know?” Sharon intoned without looking away from Penny.
“No,” Felix replied. “We just found out ourselves yesterday.”
“Do you feel like something’s buzzing in your body right now?” Sharon turned back to Penny. “Like a bunch of bees inside you?”
Louis and Felix watched, transfixed, as Penny nodded.
“You’ve never felt that before, have you?”
The child shook her head.
“Well, that’s because you’ve never been around your people before. You’re feeling it right now because you’re near Hera and me. All three of us come from the same people.”
“What’s her name again?” Sharon asked Felix and Louis.
Louis recovered first. “Penny,” he answered. “We call her Penny.”
“Don’t worry, Penny,” Sharon reassured her. “That feeling is a good thing. If you learn to pay attention to it, you’ll always be able to tell when your people are nearby.”
She let go of her daughter and rose to a standing position. “Hera,” she said, her eyes unreadable as they settled on Felix again. “Why don’t you take Penny into the house and show her your toys?”
Hera surveyed Penny, also with her mother’s unreadable expression, then stuck out her hand. Penny stared at it, unsure.
“Go on if you want,” Louis encouraged her. “We’re not going anywhere.”
After a moment, Penny let Hera take her into the Agathons’ domed structure as the four adults watched.
“All right,” Sharon said stiffly once the girls had disappeared, “so what do you want?”
Felix hesitated. “Hera’s grown a lot since I last saw her,” he tried.
“And you have a half-Cylon child now,” she cut him off snippily. “A lot can change in a year, can’t it?”
“Hey,” Helo chided and put an arm around his wife. The sight of the two of them so united reminded Felix of old resentments about the Demetrius mission that he tried not to think about anymore. He scratched at his amputated knee absently.
“What the frak do you want from us, Felix?” Sharon scowled. For some reason, Felix found himself remembering lying on his rack on the Demetrius, begging Helo not to let them take his leg. He scowled back at the both of them, and Louis’ hand suddenly appeared on his arm, squeezing hard.
“We’re here because Penny needs us,” Louis broke in, capturing Felix’s gaze. The look in Louis’ eyes was virtually a command.
“Both her parents died four months ago,” Louis continued before Felix could say anything. “She’s a lot happier now than she was when she first came to us, but what about when she starts growing up? She seems like any other kid now, but what’s going to change as she grows up? I don’t know what the frak I’m doing here. Neither does Felix. We don’t know at all what to expect.”
Felix nodded, chastened out of his anger by Louis’ plaintiveness.
“Penny shared a projection with me and I had no idea what to do,” Felix admitted. “We don’t even know if that’s normal. Cottle said even a glimpse of her projections shouldn’t be possible.”
“Please,” Louis entreated. “You have to help us.”
“I don’t have to do anything…” Sharon began, but then trailed off. Something in her gaze softened as she stared out at the crops.
“Cottle doesn’t know his ass from his elbow,” she finally muttered. “Not about this.”
A tight grin passed over Helo’s face at the remark. Felix felt a wave of relief pass over him.
“A human can totally share a projection with a Cylon,” she told them. “Especially if you’re talking about a very young child and a human with a vivid enough imagination.”
“Yeah, it’s happened between me and Hera,” Helo chimed in. “What did she project for you?” he asked Felix.
“Her parents dead on the floor of their home.”
Helo went white. “Gods.” He reached out and placed a comforting hand on Felix’s shoulder. “A lot of the stuff that happened to Hera on the basestar is just starting to come out now,” he commiserated.
“Actually, the shared projections are probably a good thing,” Sharon jumped in. “You should encourage them. You might never get more than glimpses, unless you seriously train yourself to see them, but it really helped us understand more and bond with Hera in the last year.”
“Yeah, but Louis is right,” Felix sighed, worry crinkling at the corners of his eyes. “We don’t know what we’re doing with a half-Cylon child. I mean, what are the chances of us messing her up completely?”
“Always calculating odds, Gaeta, huh?” Her wry smile and felt to Felix like the beginnings of some kind of reconciliation. “Seriously? If I had to guess, I’d say your chances are about the same as any other parent.”
***
Actually, the Agathons upped the odds in their favor by allowing Louis and Felix to bring Penny by their homestead on a regular basis. Sharon taught them games they could all play with Penny and Hera to teach the girls about projection and to show Felix and Louis how to share Penny’s projections more reliably. Penny and Hera became friends after not too long, and Louis and Felix appreciated having someone around who could be a bit of a mother figure for Penny. Also, Louis was glad to see Penny have another little friend in addition to Melissa.
Things normalized enough that Felix and Louis forgot to notice when the seventh month since Penny first arrived had passed. By then, Felix and Louis had gotten good enough that they could share an image of Penny’s projections. They could never really collaborate with her on conjuring the projections, but it was still fascinating to see what she would come up with, especially when they started to tell her stories about their old lives back on the Twelve Colonies. One day, Felix described the beach on the coast of Caprica City in loving detail. She rewarded him with an image of it so close to the real thing that he gasped with recognition.
One particularly hot day, the three of them decided to get some relief by trying their luck with fishing at the nearby river. Really, it was Louis who did the fishing, but he was glad for the company. At one point, Louis looked over to see that Felix had fallen asleep against a large rock, with Penny sitting between his outstretched legs, leaning contentedly with her back against his chest. He could tell what she was doing by the way her eyes seemed to look everywhere and yet also at nothing.
“What are you projecting this time?” he teased her. “Cookies, cake, or ice cream?”
“I’m making a present for Felix,” she told him. (Out of respect for Penny’s memories of her parents, they had not yet suggested the possibility of her calling them anything like “Daddy” or “Papa”. Which was just as well, since they totally disagreed on who should be called what anyway.)
Louis put his fishing pole down and walked over to her. The fish weren’t biting anyway. “May I?” he asked her in a gentle tone. When she nodded, he took her hand in his and waited to be deluged by an imaginary feast of childish delights.
But when Louis realized exactly what he and Penny were looking at, he poked Felix in the ribs in his excitement.
“Felix!” he cried. “Look at this! Look!”
“What?” Felix’s eyes fluttered open, still filled with sleep. “Everything okay?” His arms found themselves around Penny’s shoulders and squeezed them with sleepy protectiveness.
“Look!” Louis said, delighted as he indicated the empty air before them. “It’s your house!”
Felix was very suddenly wide awake.
“Penny,” he choked, as she walked into the images she had made for him. He took her extended hand, speechless, as his daughter guided him through room after room of an expansive home with an open floor plan punctuated by random spiral staircases.
“How did you …”
His voice trailed off in amazement as she led him up a final set of stairs to the roof, where he was surrounded by the lush greenery of an architecturally impossible rooftop deck overlooking a mountainous landscape. It was every inch the dream house he’d built for her in his mind, one he’d told her about night after night, as a sort of ongoing bedtime story. She tugged at his hand as he got lost in the sheer, complex beauty of it all.
“I made it for you,” she said. Her open, expectant expression suddenly filled him with a desire to show her everything he’d had before the Attacks - the sandy beaches of his home planet, the cartoons he’d loved as a child and that she’d never get to see, the operas he’d never take her to. He’d never get to show her his lab on Galactica.
He felt a light touch caressing his back and turned to see Louis there leaning against a trellis, next to a vining plant with dozens of climbing, purple flowers. Felix smiled to see him standing there and ruefully wiped the tears that had sprang from his eyes ruefully.
“You okay, baby?” Louis asked, bending his head down to plant a kiss on Felix’s lips. Felix pulled away, his thoughts torn and tumultuous.
“I …” he said, stunned. He turned back to look at Penny, who was still by the railing, framed by a staggeringly beautiful orange-red sunset of her own creation. “It’s just…” he began, struggling to explain, “…it’s this house. This is the house I’ve been designing in my head since I was a child. I drew it everywhere - in notebooks, on blackboards, in library books, even on the floors and the walls of my parents’ house!
“It’s just that, seeing her realize this house in front of me like this, it … it hit me …” He choked up again. “Louis, she’ll never have all the things I had as a child, all the things that stimulated my curiosity.” He sighed in resignation. “All the knowledge, all the culture we’ll never be able to give her now.”
Louis blinked back surprise. It took him a moment to be able to reply.
“You’re right,” he acknowledged. “It’s true. Even if I could, I wouldn’t try to convince you otherwise.”
His arm went around Felix’s shoulders.
“But she’s got a family again, Felix. All the knowledge and culture in the world isn’t worth a damn without that. And we gave that to her.”
In silent thought, Felix watched Penny leaning on the railing, her chin resting on one arm. He remembered when they’d first met her, how she’d shrank into Cottle whenever they so much as looked at her. She looked so content, so comfortable in her own skin now.
He nestled comfortably into the crook of Louis’ arm. They would give her literacy, he decided, drawing up the alphabet in the damned dirt with a frakking stick, if necessary. They would tell her about art, about history, about the cities and the skyscrapers they had once known. They would tell her about their mothers and their fathers.
And one day, one day, he thought, maybe she would tell them about hers.
author: millari
Summary: “I just didn’t think this would come up so soon,” Louis sighed.
Characters: Gaeta, Hoshi, Sharon, Helo, Cottle, OCs
Pairings: Gaeta/Hoshi
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: none
Title, Author and URL of original story: Mr. Gaeta Builds His Dream House, by kappamaki33
Beta Thanks: Thanks to daybreak777 for her careful shepherding of this story.
Author Notes: AU post-finale fic in which Felix Gaeta has survived the mutiny and settled on Earth 2.0 with Louis Hoshi.
The child had this totally unnerving way of staring right through him.
“Look, I’m not saying I’m flat-out opposed to the idea,” Louis tried whispering.
A few feet away, Doc Cottle stood with a six-year-old girl in front of him that he wanted to leave with them forever. Louis had just managed to get over his shock enough to form coherent speech.
“You agreed that if Cottle ever had a child in need of adoption that we’d do it,” Felix countered loudly, taking away all Louis’ hopes of having this conversation out of earshot. The tense excitement in Felix’s voice told Louis that Felix really, really wanted this.
He looked over again at her and sighed, giving up the pretense of the two of them having a private conversation.
“Felix, we don’t know the first thing about raising a child.”
“Oh come on, you know we’ll be great to her,” Felix pounced. “And who really knows their first time what they’re doing, anyway?” He squeezed Louis’ hand and grinned at him. “Come on. She even looks a little bit like me, don’t you think?”
Louis stared over at her chocolate brown curls and matching brown eyes. She wore a thin, yellow sun dress - worn and grass-stained in a few places. Her lanky arms and face were well-tanned, like she had already started out darker than either of them. He got an image of her playing in the sun all day and tried unsuccessfully to imagine himself inserted into that scene.
“But…” he trailed off helplessly. “…if this were a normal situation, we would be learning something about how to do this. There’d be books we could read, other parents we could talk to…”
He looked back at Cottle, who stood with his hands resting on the girl’s shoulders. She shrank slightly into the grizzled doctor at Louis’ sudden attentions.
“Wait, what about the Agathons?” Louis tried, his mind racing, trying to think of people he remembered from Galactica with children. “Why don’t you take her to them? They’ve already got a kid. She’ll fit right in.”
He ignored Felix’s huffing sound of disappointment at what felt like a perfectly reasonable idea to Louis. But Cottle shook his head.
“No can do. Sharon Agathon just had a miscarriage less than a month ago. She’s not ready, physically or emotionally for another child. And nobody else around here is as well off as you two.”
This was true, Louis acknowledged with a touch of pride. Felix was a Caprica City boy, so about the only thing he’d known how to grow were moldy experiments in his refrigerator. But Louis had grown up on a farm, had belonged to a youth farming club, and had even won prizes for his eggplants and his squashes at the Picon National Fair. And Felix had been an apt pupil, finding that he liked watching things grow. He did whatever he physically could to nurture their crops. Their “house” - a hut made of a combination of smaller trees, random branches, cattails and dung for sealant - had more or less survived the winter, and Louis was already working on a much better one. They’d had to abandon Felix’s more grandiose ideas and aim for something not unlike the barns Louis grew up with, just shorter and made with logs instead of uniform planks of wood.
The result had been a very successful first season, all things considered, and they’d even had enough food left over to share with some of the less talented or less fortunate people living nearby.
“Face it,” Cottle said, eyeing their tidy rows of green, leafy things well on their way to being edibles, “you boys are the best option she’s got. So will you do it or what?”
Louis looked back at Felix, who was directing smiles at the girl despite her impassive expression.
“I just didn’t think this would come up so soon,” Louis sighed. But he felt himself giving in already. It wasn’t every day that he got to see delight like this in his partner’s eyes. Plus, Felix had given Cottle his word, and Louis wasn’t about to sabotage the value of that, especially when this kid obviously needed someone to take care of her.
“Yeah, of course we will.”
Felix gave him an enthusiastic kiss on the cheek and started ambulating to where Cottle stood.
Louis followed him, uncertain.
“Hello, there,” he said softly. “I’m Louis. What’s your name?”
The little girl shrank against Cottle yet again, this time burying her face in the doctor’s pant leg. Louis sighed. It had been a difficult year, and Louis felt a sudden pang that from now on, their lives might never be easy again. But then, really, he couldn’t remember anymore the last time he’d considered his life easy.
“Her name’s Penelope,” Cottle answered when it became clear she was too shy to answer.
“Hi Penelope,” Felix said brightly, trying to make up for his inability to bend down properly to greet her. “I’m Felix. We’d be glad to have you come live with us from now on.”
The girl clung to Cottle wordlessly, her face still buried.
“She’s still getting over losing her parents,” Cottle growled. “Why don’t we have a talk?”
***
“She lived in the settlement about fifteen klicks from here. Her parents died of one of these Earth diseases I still don’t have a name for.”
Felix watched Penelope - she’s our daughter now, he told himself - playing silently in a cleared area nearby with some small rocks.
“No one knew for over twenty-four hours that her parents had died,” Cottle explained. “I’d been there about two weeks ago, when her mother fell sick. The father held out a little longer, but in the end, they died more or less at the same time, within twelve hours of each other. When I came back around to check on them, I found her in the house with her parents’ corpses.”
Louis emitted a low whistle. “Poor kid,” he whispered, looking over at her. She was totally lost in her own world, silent and seemingly oblivious to their presence.
Cottle took another puff from his pipe. “As you can see, she doesn’t talk. She hasn’t said a word since I got her. Her parents died a pretty horrific death. It may take her a while to talk again.”
“Do you know how we can help her?” Felix asked. Although he didn’t want to admit it to Louis, he was more wary now of what they’d just taken on.
“I’m no shrink,” Cottle groused as he stubbed out the embers of his pipe with a small stick and put the pipe into his jacket pocket. “But in my expert medical opinion…” He shrugged. “I guess you just gotta wait for her to work it out.”
***
Forty-eight hours later, when she still wasn’t talking, Felix and Louis started to worry.
“I suppose we should expect this,” Felix murmured as he watched her out of the corner of his eye. She picked desultorily at the meat he’d cooked for her over the open fire they had built under a small shelter outside their home. “She’s probably afraid of attaching to new people in case they die too.”
“Yes, probably,” Louis agreed. He wished they had more to go on than just guessing.
“All right, I’ll admit it,” Felix murmured later that night as he and Louis spooned into each other in the bed they had made together out of branches, hay and blankets. Luckily, fabrics had been excepted in what Felix liked to refer to as the Lee Adama's Great Slingshot Into the Sun. Why guns and computers and even plates and cups, but not fabrics, he'd often wondered. Not that he was about to complain about getting to keep his clothes and blankets. He wondered with a trace of bitterness if the Cylons, who mostly lived on their own here on Earth, were reducing themselves to such restrictive living conditions.
“Admit what?” Louis asked.
“That this is harder than I thought it would be.”
“Yeah, I know.” Louis breathed a sigh of relief to know that he wasn’t the only one who felt this way. "Shouldn't we be doing something more? I mean, if we just let her be and pretend like she's behaving normally, what if she just stays that way? What if she never talks again?"
"Whoa, Louis,” Felix cut him off, a chuckle underneath his words as he kissed Louis on the back of the neck. "You’re getting a little ahead of yourself, aren’t you?” he teased. then turned thoughtful.
"But you know, if you really consider it, you've already had plenty of experience at something like this."
"I've never taken care of kids in my life!” Louis protested. “Not even a sister or a brother! I was the youngest child, remember?”
"But you do know about being patient with someone who’s getting over stuff,” Felix insisted. “Think about how you helped me after New Caprica. And after the Demetrius. And the Raptor.”
He could hear Louis thinking.
"We just gotta be patient like you were with me," Felix concluded, hoping he was actually right about this. "Give her space, but make sure she knows that we're here when she's ready.”
"Hmm..." Louis considered Felix's argument. "And what do we do in the meantime while she's figuring it out?"
"Just be ourselves, I guess."
"All right,” Louis replied, even though he wasn’t really very certain. Not certain at all.
***
It wasn’t a bad plan. The devil was in the details, though, especially when a week later, Penelope began waking up in the middle of the night with nightmares.
The first time, her screaming triggered for Felix a nightmare about the detention centers on New Caprica. He awoke in a panic - just as one of the Dorals was handing him over to a Centurion - to find Louis shaking him into consciousness.
“Sorry. You were screaming too.” Louis’ voice was terse as he crawled out of their bed and over to where Penelope was thrashing in her sleep.
“Sssh, it’s okay,” he tried to soothe her, but her ear-piercing shrieks merely subsided to inconsolable sobbing that soon propelled Felix out of the bed too, sliding himself towards them without his crutches, listening to them wordlessly in the dark.
“You’re safe now, Penelope,” Louis comforted her. “We’re here for you. We won’t let anything hurt you.”
Louis wanted to take the child into his arms, to comfort her, but even stroking her hair seemed to upset her. In fact, the only thing that worked at all was them both simply staying by her side until she cried herself back to sleep.
The dreams came back the following night, then the next, and then again and again. By the time a week had passed, the two of them were so exhausted, they walked around zombie-like and cranky. Felix knew things were bad when the normally long-tempered Louis snapped at him for not weeding one of the plots like he’d promised. But the simple fact was, Felix was having trouble remembering his own name. He’d tried to do the weeding one day while Louis was out hunting, but had stopped when he’d accidentally pulled out several vegetable plants instead of weeds. Penelope looked tired too, and they would find her taking impromptu naps all over the place - in her bed, but also in between the crops or in the tall grasses behind the house.
Meanwhile, the nightmares continued unabated.
By the ninth night of this, Felix found himself wide awake in the dark, long after Louis had fallen asleep. He realized he was waiting for the screaming to begin. But of course, it only came after his body had given up out of boredom and exhaustion.
When her cries startled him awake, Felix knew he had to get out of the bed, but his body refused to cooperate. He elbowed Louis in the ribs, but Louis’ body was rebelling too. Felix didn’t know how it was possible, but the man continued to sleep right through the noise.
Godsdamn it, Louis, he grumbled inwardly and tried again to push himself out of bed, knowing the shrieks would continue until he pulled her out of her dreams. But he was so exhausted, he could only get himself a few inches towards her. He lay back on the dirt floor, pressed his palm to his forehead in frustration, and wondered what his mother would have done in this situation.
A moment later, their home was filled with Felix’s singing - a simple, soothing tune about the stars at night that he remembered his mom singing to his younger sister. He sang loudly at first, but once he realized she was definitely awake, he made it into a soft, sing-song melody, inserting her name clumsily into the song like his mother used to do.
Penelope’s shrieks stopped abruptly as she awoke. Her cries soon returned, but thankfully only as gulping sniffles. He kept singing the song again and again, long after he’d run out of lyrics he could remember. He sang until he was as certain as he could be in the dark that she’d fallen asleep.
In silent relief, he found the strength to slide himself back to the bed and into Louis’ arms. The disembodied kiss that greeted him on the cheek startled him.
“Oh, now you’re awake,” he mock groaned. “How convenient.”
“That was brilliant,” Louis told him sleepily. “Worked like a charm.” He turned over. “Good thing we have one musician in the family. If we’d had to rely on my singing, she’d be back in another nightmare.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Felix scoffed, stifling back a yawn. Privately, though, he had to admit that Louis was kind of blissfully tone-deaf. “I’m just glad I found something that worked.” He drew their blanket over his shoulders, grateful for the silence. “I can’t wait until she talks again and this all gets easier.”
“Me too,” Louis managed to get out before they both fell asleep in utter exhaustion.
***
The nightmares continued, but luckily Felix’s singing meant they didn’t even have to get out of their bed anymore. Her body soon trained itself to wake her up to the sound of his singing, even from across the room, and soon she wasn’t even truly waking up anymore. She seemed to just let the sound of his lullabies permeate her subconscious and soothe her back into quietude. The three of them got more sleep and Louis found himself considering more normal parental thoughts again.
“She needs toys,” he announced, a bit horrified at the omission. “She must have had at least a couple of toys, right? Why didn’t Cottle bring any of her things with her?”
“Well, if her parents both died of an unknown disease, he was probably afraid her toys were contaminated,” Felix said logically.
“Yeah, but she needs toys,” he insisted. “Kids play, right? Isn’t it really important for their development?”
“You’re right,” Felix agreed. “She needs something to keep her mind active.”
“Felix,” Louis admonished. “She needs to have fun.”
They gave her whatever toys they could beg, borrow, or improvise, but to their consternation, she played with none of them. She didn’t seem to want to play at all.
But she did seem interested in their daily routines. She was an extraordinarily light sleeper, and she would wake up with Louis and the dawn - rubbing her eyes sleepily but alert - when he rose to work their plots in the coolest part of the day. The first morning, he tried to coax her back to bed, but the whole exercise only succeeded in waking a groaning Felix, who needed more sleep these days due to the strain of walking around on the prosthetic and crutches; not to mention, waking up in the middle of every night to sing to Penelope was slowly taking its toll.
Her favorite pastime seemed to be sitting on the ground outside and staring at Louis working the field. She’d sit and watch for hours, clinging to the one toy that she would even deign to touch - a faceless, simple doll Felix had made for her out of dried grasses and a scrap of fabric that served as a makeshift dress. She didn’t really play with it, just clung to it.
“It does seem sort of unnatural, doesn’t it?” Felix admitted. “I thought kids naturally gravitated to any sort of play they could get.”
“You know what I noticed today?” Louis said thoughtfully. “She doesn’t like to get too close, but she always stays near.”
“You know, you’re right. She never lets me out of her sight when we’re together, which I guess makes sense if you think about it. If you just lost your both your parents at the same time, you’d want to keep an eye on the new ones, right? Make sure you don’t lose them too.”
“She needs to be able to count on us,” Louis declared. “From now on, we make sure one of us is in her sight at all times. Until she decides otherwise, she doesn’t face the world without one of us nearby, all right?”
Felix squeezed his hand. “It’s a good idea.”
***
This plan was easy enough to execute when Louis was working the land or on his long-term project of building them a bigger and better home. Or when Louis went on his half-day hunting or foraging trips and Penelope sat with Felix under an open shelter making meals from tubers and roots they stored in a small, cool pit out behind the house.
However, it was difficult to stay in her sight when it came to anything that required privacy. Using the outhouse proved particularly tricky. The first time, she’d patiently watched Louis go inside and close the door behind him, but when he’d came back out, she’d moved up so close to the door that he banged right into her. Louis had emerged to her indignant squeals and the sight of her small hand vigorously rubbing her forehead.
“Oh Gods, Penelope! I’m sorry!” he cried, reaching out to touch the red spot on her face. She let him check it, but he felt how her body went stiff and immediately withdrew his hand.
“Sorry,” he reassured her. “I won’t touch you until you’re okay with it, all right?”
She didn’t answer, but her shoulders seemed to relax a bit. Louis smiled.
“Just don’t stand so close next time, okay?” he warned.
But she repeated the same behavior with Felix the next day. The shock of running right into her made Felix lose his balance and go tumbling into the dirt, his crutches clattering around him. For the millionth time, he cursed the loss of his leg.
As he tried to compose himself, he saw the alarm in her eyes at the way his leg and the prosthetic had splayed on the ground. She took off running.
“Penelope!” he cried after her, as soon as he could push himself into a sitting position but her legs were already taking her as fast as she could run back towards the house. He sighed and slid himself over to grab his crutches.
When he finally made it back, he found her sitting on her bed, clutching the doll like a lifeline.
“Hey,” he intoned. “Penelope…” he began. The syllables felt awkward in his mouth.
“You know, ‘Penelope’ is an awfully big name for such a little girl,” he observed. “Can I call you ‘Penny’ instead?”
Her head shot up at the nickname. “Huh,” he said, wondering. “Did your mom and dad call you that? Do you like that name better?”
She clung silently to the doll, but he noticed that she kept his gaze.
“All right then,” he announced. “Penny it is.”
He bent down with his good leg and maneuvered himself onto the ground to be at her level. He noticed how her eyes seemed transfixed by the prosthetic.
“It’s not that different from your leg.” He smiled and tapped the metal. “You want to touch it?”
She reached out a tentative hand, her fingers barely grazing along the prosthetic until they reached the spot where his end cap met his pants leg. She blinked and looked back up at him, her eyes wide.
“The rest of my leg’s just like yours,” he reassured her. “I just had … an accident.” He pushed the memory deep down. He hadn’t thought of the shooting for almost a year now.
“It’s a little harder for me to walk than you, so I may fall again sometime,” he explained. “But it’s no big deal, okay? It doesn’t mean I’m sick or that I’m hurt or anything. I just get up again, and I’m fine. I’m not going anywhere, and neither is Louis, understand?”
It took a few moments, but she eventually nodded, and the thrill of that simple, unexpected gesture, after so much blankness from her, barreled right through him.
“So when one of us is in another room, or with a door closed,” he continued, “you’re trying to listen, aren’t you, to make sure we’re still there?”
She looked away.
“Just because you can’t see one of us doesn’t mean that we’ve left you, okay? So don’t stand so close to the doors like that. We don’t want to accidentally hurt you.”
This time, she remained still, but she put the doll back down onto the bed.
“All right, then,” he said. “Let’s get back to cooking, huh?”
They remained mostly in silence for the rest of the day, but Felix liked to think that it was a companionable one. He whistled to himself as he turned the tubers over in a long, slow roast over the open fire. The second time he rousted himself up, groaning, to get more wood for the fire, she surprised him by shooting up and running to the pile herself. What her little hands brought back wasn’t nearly enough to keep the fire going for much longer, but he praised her anyway.
“Thank you, Penny,” he said with quiet excitement. “We make a good team.”
She still didn’t speak, but nevertheless, Felix felt that something had changed between them. She met his gaze now when he spoke to her, as if she were really hearing him now. When he asked her again to bring some wood from the pile, she dashed off immediately and brought some back. She seemed to like the responsibility.
The next day, when Louis went off fishing, Felix came up with an idea.
“You know what?” he told her. “I’ve got another job you could help me with.”
He took her to the plots where their vegetables were growing nicely, and maneuvered himself onto the ground again, this time taking off the prosthetic, keeping his voice even and untroubled as he showed her the amputation at his knee.
“Don’t worry. I’m taking it off because it’s actually easier to get around this way when I need to do this kind of a job.”
He began the arduous task of weeding, sliding along the furrows between the vegetables so he could easily reach the offending plants. This task always resulted in his clothes becoming intolerably messy, but really, it was the only way that was actually convenient for him to do this, and he would be damned if he was going to let Louis be entirely responsible for all the food they ate. Louis already did all the planting and watering and was the only one who could realistically forage and go after game.
“See the much bigger plants that are growing in a straight line?” he pointed towards the crops. “Those are our food. The other, smaller stuff? Those are weeds; we don’t want those. Pull those out and toss them outside the plot, okay?”
He watched her carefully select a weed and yank it out. She examined it for a moment, then gestured towards him with it in her hand.
“Yes, exactly,” he nodded. “Good job.”
When Louis returned a couple of hours later with a cloth sack filled with fruits, he was startled to find Penelope and Felix in the garden, each in their own row, throwing their weeds into a communal pile behind them.
“What are you two doing in my plots?” he asked, bemused.
“We’re weeding,” Felix said matter-of-factly. Both of them were covered in dust, their thick curls damp with sweat and sticking to their foreheads.
“I can see that,” Louis grinned, putting down the fruit and walking over to them. “I should have known you’d raise a kid with an overdeveloped work ethic. Remember what I said about fun?”
He bent down. “Penelope, honey.” He was still chuckling under his breath. “You don’t have to do that, you know. You can go play with your toys if you want.”
“Louis,” Felix interrupted as Penelope tossed yet another weed onto their pile. “She nodded at me today when I talked to her,” he informed him in a lower tone. “Trust me, we’re fine.”
Louis stopped immediately, finally getting it, his heart fluttering with hope. “Oh,” he said with quiet excitement.
“You’re doing a great job, Penelope,” he told her, his voice full of quiet awe.
She didn’t acknowledge him, absorbed in her task, but that was just fine, Louis thought.
“Oh, and we decided,” Felix added, a gleam in his eyes that Louis hadn’t seen since the first day they’d said yes to Cottle. “She’s not Penelope anymore. She’s Penny.”
“Penny.” Louis tried the name out for size.
“She likes it better,” Felix told him confidently.
“She does?” Louis glanced at her again. “Is that true, Penny?”
To his surprise, she raised her head and met his gaze, just for a moment, as if in affirmation. An amazed smile crept across his face as he absorbed the communication that had just transpired between them. He watched her for a while as she yanked weeds out of the ground like she had a personal vendetta against each one.
“Wow, she’s really good at that, isn’t she?” he remarked.
“She’s much faster at it than me,” Felix agreed with a satisfied smile. “I think we should make it her job once in a while. Would you like that, Penny?”
Her head rose again, and after a moment, she nodded. Louis uttered something between a laugh and a cry of delight, attracting her startled attention.
“No, it’s okay,” he said quickly, fearful of making her retreat back into herself. “You’re doing great.”
Thank you, he mouthed at Felix, who just shrugged and extended his hand for Louis to help him up.
“You know,” Louis whispered in his ear as he put his arm around Felix, “for the first time, I feel like she’s really our daughter.”
He heard a percussive sound at the back of Felix’s throat. “Yeah, I know what you mean.”
The two of them just stood like that for a long time, absurdly happy at the sight of her weeding.
***
The nightmares went away after that, and soon, the days were flying by nicely, with Penny and Louis falling into a routine of getting up together at dawn, alternating their work between weeding and the harvesting of mid-season crops. Louis showed Penny how to plant the seeds of a bean he’d discovered growing not far from their homestead the previous year. He gave her a little section of the plot that had already been harvested, and soon, she was tending her own little sprouts alongside the sweet potato and yam-like vegetables still growing to maturity. In fact, she took to it so well, he wondered if her parents had been starting to teach her things.
Sometimes, for variety, he’d take her instead on foraging trips, looking for nuts and edible roots, or edible greens he was teaching her to identify in among the grasses. By mid-morning, when they’d return home, Felix would have gotten up and prepared a breakfast for them of mashed legumes or tubers drenched with crushed berries for flavor and vitamin content. They’d sit together in the dirt at a short dining table of sorts they’d created last year by arduously dragging a large, flat rock they’d found when they’d broke ground for the new house Louis was building.
In the late afternoons, when the work was done for the day, they showed her how to draw with a stick in the dirt. Often, they would draw their own checkerboard into the ground and try playing chess, using different rocks and inedible berries for the pieces. But they inevitably lost track of which piece was which, and would give up their game, preferring to relax with their backs against the table, watching Penny draw.
They always made a point of including her in most of their conversations, even if she probably didn’t understand half of them, and even though she never spoke back.
Until one day, without warning, she did.
Her first words with them were hardly momentous, but difficult to argue with.
“I wish we had cereal,” she pronounced one morning at breakfast.
At the sound of her voice - tinny and girlish - Felix choked on a bite of yam. He spent the next several seconds coughing, while Louis stared at her with his hand over his mouth.
“Cereal?” Felix could hear the bewilderment in Louis’ voice.
“Can we have oatmeal for breakfast?” she asked, unfazed by their reactions. “I’m sick of yams.”
They sat there for a long moment, totally flabbergasted by the randomness of her first words. But then, forgetting himself, Louis reached out for her and pulled her into a excited hug. The expression on her face - startled, but not unhappy - and the way her small, stiff frame relaxed and then sank into Louis’ arms, told Felix he would have gone out and hunted down an elk if that’s what she had asked for. Hot cereal seemed like a bargain by comparison.
“Anything you want, Penny,” he told her, his words tinged with joy and relief. “Keep talking, and I’ll get you all the cereal you want.
“Just give me a few days.”
Thinking about it, he realized that they had some old sweet potatoes from the previous year that had dried out and become mostly unpalatable. Felix had been saving them in case they ever ran into truly desperate times, but he realized that they were dried out enough that he could use a rock to grate them into a powder. He could then pour hot water over it and make a sort of approximation of hot cereal. It could work.
Felix reached out and stroked her hair, thrilled at the barrier that had just fallen away between them. She looked back at him, her brown eyes calm and focused. He wanted to hug her, but she was still in Louis’ arms and he didn’t want to overwhelm her.
***
They ate Felix’s “oatmeal” for a week straight, much to Penny’s vocal delight. Now that she had found her words, she was a fountain of them spilling out into their lives.
Once she realized the power that her happiness held over them, new requests surfaced - bread, chocolate milk, candy. Most of these requests introduced them to the newfound value of the word “no,” but Felix realized after his powdered potato innovations that he could rather easily fashion a crude oven using a dug out pit and some of the thin rock slabs they’d been neatly piling up over time behind the site of their unfinished new home. He made the dried potato powder into a dough of sorts, and after a few days of experimentation, they sat by the fire, tearing off chunks from sheets of warm flatbread. They were very flat, of course, but were still heavenly when warm and dipped into a gourd filled with mashed berries.
“Gods, I think this is the most delicious thing I’ve had in years.” Louis laid back and tossed another piece of the delicacy into his mouth before tearing off a piece and gesturing with it towards Penny, who opened her mouth and let him aim a piece at her. He missed wildly, provoking tiny squeals of outrage as she scrambled to pick up the piece of bread that had fallen into the dirt.
“You always miss!” she protested as she popped the escaped piece into her mouth.
“What?” He adopted a wounded tone. “I do not!”
“No, she’s right,” Felix piped up unhelpfully, reaching out an impatient hand for the bread. “You do always miss, Louis.”
“Hmmph.” Louis pretended to grumble at her. “It’s possible I liked you better when you didn’t talk so much.”
But of course, the two of them were absolutely thrilled. To encourage her, Felix instituted a new ritual of spending the early evening after dinner around the dying fire, telling each other stories. Her imagination was filled with badly thought out stories about princesses and talking animals, which always made less sense than theirs, but they felt they could hardly complain, since theirs were mainly veiled retellings of the misadventures of various crew members on Galactica, designed on one level to entertain her with fairytale kings, wizards, and cartoonish villains, and on another level to make each other laugh:
“…so then the King Papadama was touched by an magic curse and turned into an evil ogre. He persecuted his subjects by bringing monsters into the kingdom to persecute them…”
Louis quirked an eyebrow at that. They hadn’t talked much at all about the mutiny after the Admiral had reluctantly granted Felix clemency and kept Felix in the brig. When they had reached this new Earth, even Adama had seen that keeping Felix in jail was pointless.
“…the worst of them was a fire-breathing dragon…” Felix continued.
“What was its name?” Penny interrupted him with bated breath.
“What?” Felix asked in surprise. “It was a dragon. It didn’t have a name.”
Penny made a dubious face. “It has to have a name!”
“Oh,” he said, momentarily nonplussed. He didn’t particularly see why it particularly needed a name. “Uh, I guess its name was uh….” He racked his brain.
“…the dreaded Thrace Monster,” he decided. “That was its name. It liked to taunt its enemies before it breathed fire on them.”
Louis nearly died laughing, confusing Penny. When he caught his breath, he saw Felix’s knowing, mischievous grin. Apparently, Penny wasn’t the only one in this family that was maybe, just maybe finally starting to heal.
Family. That’s what they were becoming, he realized with a start. Not the kind that either of them had envisioned when they’d first agreed they both wanted children, but a family nonetheless.
Still, Louis thought, this can’t be it. It can’t possibly be this easy.
Penny had lost both her parents, at the same time, to what must have been a horrific disease. He knew too well from his time on the Pegasus, from his experiences with Felix, and from the rumors he’d heard about people who’d been in the jails on New Caprica, that people didn’t just forget trauma that easily. Penny’s happiness was too fledgling to ruin right now with all sorts of troubling questions about her parents, and the last thing he wanted to do was re-traumatize her. But those memories were going to resurface again sometime.
“…and then the curse was lifted, and there was much rejoicing throughout the kingdom…” Felix told the story in his most singsong voice, “and the Thrace Monster was banished forever. Everyone lived happily ever after. The End.”
Louis watched the pleased light in Penny’s eyes and tried to not get caught up in his sense of unease.
***
After Penny kept speaking for a few weeks, Louis had made the five-klick walking journey to the home of Ron and Nancy Provo. He returned in the evening with a “play date” for Penny with the Provos’ six-year-old daughter, Melissa.
Louis had first met Ron on the Pegasus, when the man had been perpetually whipping out his wallet-sized photos of his new baby girl, Melissa. The two men had met again when they’d all first arrived on Earth and Louis had volunteered to build temporary shelters while waiting to find out Felix’s fate. He’d been shocked to see the tiny infant in Ron’s pictures transformed into a chatty six-year-old girl, and the memory had stayed with him even after Provo and his wife had settled on their own homestead.
Much to everyone’s delight, Penny and Melissa became fast friends. The two families took turns making the journey to each other’s homes to let their daughters socialize regularly. A month passed this way, while Ron and Louis spent these visits predictably reminiscing and Felix and Nancy half-listened to their partners’ stories about life on the Pegasus. If the stories were boring, they fell asleep contentedly in the hot afternoon sun.
Today was one of those days. Felix realized he’d been asleep for a while when he abruptly woke up to the sound of Louis and Ron’s raucous laughter over some shared joke he knew he wouldn’t get. Yawning, he felt Nancy tap him on the shoulder. “Hey, you want some of this cold tea we made out of those maroon berries that are everywhere around here?” she offered.
Felix nodded, still drowsy and relaxed, and pulled himself up out of the grass and onto the support of his crutch. As he walked towards the house with Nancy, he cast an idle glance towards the tall grasses where Penny and Melissa were contentedly swinging themselves around a low tree branch like gymnasts. He smiled to see Penny so happy. He found it hard to believe that not long ago, she’d been such a withdrawn, silent child.
We’re lucky, he thought as Nancy gave him the tea in a dried out gourd. It was funny. He never would have thought to use that word to describe them last year when they’d begun the arduous process of setting up camp and building a home with virtually no tools to help them.
When they returned, Nancy happily settled back into a nap. Ron and Louis had started talking now about the rescue of Hera Agathon.
Felix swallowed back a guilt-ridden lump in his throat as he stood there listening to the two men getting nostalgic about events he had missed completely because he was in the brig. Ron and Louis had such an easy amiability together.
This was how it had been between him and Helo once.
That’s a useless road to go down, he thought. There had been times in the last year when he’d let himself consider (just for a second) the possibility of making the trek to Karl and Sharon’s homestead, just showing up at their door and trying his luck with them. But realistically, he couldn’t imagine facing them, not after all that had happened.
He was sure he must have spent several minutes feeling slightly sorry for himself, until he looked back over at the tree where Penny and Melissa had been playing and saw no one at all.
“Frak!” he exclaimed.
Louis and Ron abruptly stopped chatting, and Nancy woke up with a start. They followed his stunned gaze and soon caught up to the fact that they were all looking at an empty space where there should be two children playing in the tall grass.
Felix tried to run until he was rudely reminded of the limitations of his prosthetic and crutches, and had to limp over at a frustratingly slow pace, far behind Louis and the Provos.
They found the girls right by the tree, hidden by the grass’ height. Melissa lay
on the ground unconscious. Penny sat on the ground a foot away, her legs tucked underneath her as she rocked back and forth, crying silently.
“Penny! What happened?” Louis grabbed her by the shoulders and looked her over for signs of injury, but she seemed fine physically. She stared at him through her tears, doing nothing to wipe them away. Nancy started crying too, as her husband picked their daughter up in his arms and started carrying her back towards their home.
“You take care of Penny,” Louis told Felix, his feet already in motion. “I’ll get Cottle.”
***
No matter what Felix tried, Penny wouldn’t move from the spot where they’d found her. She’d finally stopped crying, but in a moment of panic, Penny had retreated back into the safety of total, detached silence.
“Penny,” he pleaded with her, sitting awkwardly in the grass next to her. “Tell me what you’re thinking. Trust me, it’ll be better once you talk about it.”
She didn’t reply. She just kept staring at the long matted blades where Melissa had been lying before her father had taken her away.
“Melissa’s going to be fine,” he assured her, even though he didn’t really know that yet. “She just bumped her head.”
Still nothing. She wouldn’t even look at him.
“Come on, Penny, Talk to me. Are you scared? What are you scared of?”
Her head whirled around at the question. She grabbed onto his shirt and buried her face in it, exploding into a crying fit like he hadn’t seen since the nightmares.
He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her shaking body into his lap, rocking her back and forth, feeling her hot tears soak through his shirt.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” he said soothingly for several minutes, until she had exhausted herself into stillness and she lay silent against his body, listening to his heartbeat.
“Melissa fell from the tree,” she confessed, her voice muffling into his shirt. “We were climbing and she fell…”
“It’s okay,” he exhaled deeply, his relief palpable at hearing her speak again. “Louis is getting the doctor.”
She went quiet again for a few minutes.
“My mom went to sleep. I was playing,” she sniffled. “Then she didn’t wake up anymore.”
Felix winced at the image.
“Penny, I’m so sorry. I wish I could bring them back for you.” He cupped her face in his palms. “But we love you very, very much, and we’re trying our best to make you happy with us.”
He felt her turn stiff. “But they’re right there!” She pointed at the ground where they’d found Melissa. “Make them wake up!” she demanded, on the verge of tears again.
Poor thing, he thought. Of all the things for her imagination to conjure up… He tried to go along with her, to think of a good spin to put on her imagination. “Don’t you think they look happy asleep? Maybe we should leave them be.”
“No!” she scoffed. “They’re sick! Look at them!”
Her hands grabbed his own like a tiny vise around his fingers. Suddenly, Felix felt an overwhelming sensation shoot through him, like a jolt of electricity coursing through his body. There was a brief but vivid flash - almost like a memory, but distinctly not - of a woman and man, both in their twenties, aged beyond their years by the sallow color to their faces, and the red lesions all over their faces. He pulled back in shocked realization, staring at Penny, unable to say a word.
This was not happening. It couldn’t be.
***
Though he couldn’t exactly take an x-ray to confirm it, Cottle decided that Melissa had most likely had experienced a mild concussion from her fall - serious but not deadly. Her parents just needed to take some precautions over the next few days, and she’d be fine. By the evening, the two children were playing quietly but happily in the house where the four adults could keep an eye on them.
As soon as things calmed down, Felix took Cottle outside without saying anything to Louis, who was busy distracting Penny with playing games anyway. Cottle looked less than surprised at Felix’s insisting on a private talk and shuttling him out the door. This told Felix everything he needed to know.
“She’s a Cylon, and you knew from the beginning, didn’t you?” he rounded on him as soon as they were out of earshot. “Why did you hide it from us?”
Cottle lit his pipe with maddening nonchalance.
“First of all, genius, she’s not a Cylon. She’s a half-Cylon, half-human. A hybrid. There’s a difference. And second of all, Why do you think I didn’t tell you? You led an anti-Cylon mutiny!”
Felix hadn’t been expecting that answer. “Then why did you give her to us?” he asked, genuinely puzzled.
Cottle scowled, unrepentant. “I didn’t have anyone else to ask.”
“No Cylon wanted her?”
“I didn’t ask any Cylons,” he said flatly. “The girl had been raised as a human, and frankly, from what I can tell, most Cylons tend to get pretty nutty when it comes to the subject of children. She’d already lost her parents and didn’t need more trauma.”
He offered Felix an apologetic drag from his pipe. After a moment, Felix accepted it.
“How did you know she was a hybrid?” he asked in between puffs.
“Her mother confided in me. The child didn’t know. The adoptive father never knew. She decided when she got sick that wanted someone to know, so that they could tell the kid one day.” He turned a questioning gaze on Felix. “So how did you know?”
“Which Cylon model is her father?” Felix asked instead. It was disturbing to think back to New Caprica and imagine that one of those models that had terrified him every day was Penny’s father.
“A Simon. They slept together on Gemenon a few times, a year before the Attacks, when the Cylons were still infiltrating the Colonies. She didn’t know what he was. They’d already broken up when she got pregnant, so she never bothered telling him. Then, once she saw endless copies of him on New Caprica, she realized the truth. She never told anyone. She was afraid that either the Cylons or the humans might take her child away.”
Cottle paused, realization suddenly dawning.
“Wait,” he frowned. “No one but me knew about this. How did you ever figure it out?”
That’s when Felix told him about the projection. The pipe almost fell out of Cottle’s mouth.
“Seriously?” he said. “How did you even recognize it for what it was?”
Felix looked away. “That Eight on the Raptor. The one I had to … ” he drifted off uncomfortably. “Anyway, she projected at one point on the Raptor to try and find our lost coordinates. I got a glimpse of it.”
Cottle stared at him in wonder. “You know that it shouldn’t even be possible for a human to share a Cylon’s projection, right?” he said.
“I have no idea how this works.” He swallowed hard. “This isn’t what I signed on for.”
Cottle quirked an eyebrow. “Felix, I don’t have anyone else who can take her…”
“No! I know that! And I’m not saying …” His head lolled back on his shoulders in frustration. “I love Penny.”
Cottle took a contemplative puff. “Well, all right, then. Good.”
“I just … “ He tapped a foot in the dirt. “What do I know about raising a Cylon-human hybrid child? What if this projection stuff is just the beginning, and Louis and I are out of our depth?”
Cottle considered the question over a long drag. “Listen, go talk to Sharon Agathon,” he concluded. “She’ll know more about this hybrid stuff than anyone else.”
“Lieutenant Agathon?” Felix grimaced. “We’re not exactly friends.”
Cottle’s expression turned wan. “Not exactly friends as in, ‘She’ll make me grovel a bit,’ or ‘I’m taking my life into my own hands darkening her door?’
“To be honest, I’m not really sure.”
He offered Felix a drag off his pipe again. This time, Felix took it.
“Well, take Hoshi with you,” he growled. “And take the girl. She can hardly kill you in front of both of them, right?”
***
Once Louis had gotten over the initial shock of learning the truth about Penny, his first and only question had been: “Do we still get to keep her?”
Felix had been amazed at how that one question had cut through all of his doubts like a scythe hacking a clear path through the savannah. All his lingering questions about the trustworthiness of Cylons, about the need to hold them accountable for their actions, seemed insignificant and petty when he actually stopped thinking of Penny as an abstraction.
But none of that made this journey any easier.
“Might as well get it over with,” Felix had grumbled to cover over the million butterflies fluttering about in his stomach at the thought of seeing the Agathons again. They had stayed overnight at the Provos, deciding to travel to Sharon and Helo’s early the next morning. Louis was excited about seeing Helo and Sharon again. Felix was not so sure.
Penny ran ahead of them excitedly in one of the tops and shorts Nancy had found for them among Melissa’s hand-me-downs. She had found Penny three outfits in all, which Louis was carrying in his pack.
They arrived at the Agathons’ homestead around mid-morning. Helo and Sharon were outside harvesting some of their crops. As soon as Sharon recognized who they were, she called Hera immediately to her side, her voice strained and suspicious.
“Hoshi,” she said simply, the single, terse word her only greeting. Felix held onto Penny’s hand even more tightly. He’d forgotten how scary Sharon could be when she got hostile like this. She seemed more Cylon in those moments, more cold machine.
Hera stood obediently still next to her mother. Felix’s heart clenched, remembering helping Dee babysit the girl.
After a long moment with everybody standing around unsure of what to say, Helo finally broke the silence. “What are you doing here?”
Felix noticed that both the Agathons’ eyes were falling with curiosity upon Penny, who drew herself closer to him as she felt herself being scrutinized. She stared at Hera, intrigued by the equally nervous child, who stood silent behind her mother’s protective arm.
Louis stood beside Felix and ran a nervous hand through Penny’s dark curls. “This is our daughter, Penelope,” he breathed. “But we call her Penny. We could use a little help understanding her.”
Sharon’s eyes narrowed, instantly ready for disdain. “What makes you think we’d be willing to help you with anything?” Although she was answering Louis’ question, she had turned her gaze squarely onto Felix.
“You want parenting lessons now, Felix?” She glared down at Penny for a moment before returning her gaze to him. “Here’s an idea, for starters. Try not imprisoning your daughter, like you did mine.”
“Sharon…” he began, trying to cut through her hostility and physically close the distance between them; but he saw as he moved how she reflexively clutched Hera tighter to her and he froze.
“Please,” Louis tried interacting with Helo, but he merely stood by stiffly, saying nothing, focused on protecting his wife and daughter - from a man with a prosthetic leg, half-leaning on a six-year-old girl, Louis thought in annoyance. He turned back to Sharon.
“You’re the only ones who can help us,” he said evenly. “Don’t you see that? You don’t see what she is?”
“What the frak are you talking about, Louis?” Sharon asked, but she was distracted momentarily into glancing down at Penny again. Both he and Felix held their breath as they saw her double take morph into understanding. She walked a few steps closer towards Penny and Felix, then gasped aloud and fell to her knees, wrapping Hera close to her, scanning Penny with her eyes. Felix saw her doing math in her mind.
“How is this even possible?” she muttered in awe, to herself more than anyone.
“What is it, Sharon?” Helo said sharply, confused by the sudden change in his wife’s demeanor.
“Karl.” she choked on the word. “She’s a hybrid. Like Hera.”
Helo looked unable to speak.
“Come over here, honey,” Sharon rasped, hoarse with shock. Penny looked up at Felix, uncertain.
“It’s okay,” he told her. “Nobody’s gonna hurt you here. I promise. Go ahead.”
Penny hesitated, then shuffled into Sharon’s waiting arms, letting Sharon trace along her face with an index finger, looking back once at Louis and Felix.
“Does she know?” Sharon intoned without looking away from Penny.
“No,” Felix replied. “We just found out ourselves yesterday.”
“Do you feel like something’s buzzing in your body right now?” Sharon turned back to Penny. “Like a bunch of bees inside you?”
Louis and Felix watched, transfixed, as Penny nodded.
“You’ve never felt that before, have you?”
The child shook her head.
“Well, that’s because you’ve never been around your people before. You’re feeling it right now because you’re near Hera and me. All three of us come from the same people.”
“What’s her name again?” Sharon asked Felix and Louis.
Louis recovered first. “Penny,” he answered. “We call her Penny.”
“Don’t worry, Penny,” Sharon reassured her. “That feeling is a good thing. If you learn to pay attention to it, you’ll always be able to tell when your people are nearby.”
She let go of her daughter and rose to a standing position. “Hera,” she said, her eyes unreadable as they settled on Felix again. “Why don’t you take Penny into the house and show her your toys?”
Hera surveyed Penny, also with her mother’s unreadable expression, then stuck out her hand. Penny stared at it, unsure.
“Go on if you want,” Louis encouraged her. “We’re not going anywhere.”
After a moment, Penny let Hera take her into the Agathons’ domed structure as the four adults watched.
“All right,” Sharon said stiffly once the girls had disappeared, “so what do you want?”
Felix hesitated. “Hera’s grown a lot since I last saw her,” he tried.
“And you have a half-Cylon child now,” she cut him off snippily. “A lot can change in a year, can’t it?”
“Hey,” Helo chided and put an arm around his wife. The sight of the two of them so united reminded Felix of old resentments about the Demetrius mission that he tried not to think about anymore. He scratched at his amputated knee absently.
“What the frak do you want from us, Felix?” Sharon scowled. For some reason, Felix found himself remembering lying on his rack on the Demetrius, begging Helo not to let them take his leg. He scowled back at the both of them, and Louis’ hand suddenly appeared on his arm, squeezing hard.
“We’re here because Penny needs us,” Louis broke in, capturing Felix’s gaze. The look in Louis’ eyes was virtually a command.
“Both her parents died four months ago,” Louis continued before Felix could say anything. “She’s a lot happier now than she was when she first came to us, but what about when she starts growing up? She seems like any other kid now, but what’s going to change as she grows up? I don’t know what the frak I’m doing here. Neither does Felix. We don’t know at all what to expect.”
Felix nodded, chastened out of his anger by Louis’ plaintiveness.
“Penny shared a projection with me and I had no idea what to do,” Felix admitted. “We don’t even know if that’s normal. Cottle said even a glimpse of her projections shouldn’t be possible.”
“Please,” Louis entreated. “You have to help us.”
“I don’t have to do anything…” Sharon began, but then trailed off. Something in her gaze softened as she stared out at the crops.
“Cottle doesn’t know his ass from his elbow,” she finally muttered. “Not about this.”
A tight grin passed over Helo’s face at the remark. Felix felt a wave of relief pass over him.
“A human can totally share a projection with a Cylon,” she told them. “Especially if you’re talking about a very young child and a human with a vivid enough imagination.”
“Yeah, it’s happened between me and Hera,” Helo chimed in. “What did she project for you?” he asked Felix.
“Her parents dead on the floor of their home.”
Helo went white. “Gods.” He reached out and placed a comforting hand on Felix’s shoulder. “A lot of the stuff that happened to Hera on the basestar is just starting to come out now,” he commiserated.
“Actually, the shared projections are probably a good thing,” Sharon jumped in. “You should encourage them. You might never get more than glimpses, unless you seriously train yourself to see them, but it really helped us understand more and bond with Hera in the last year.”
“Yeah, but Louis is right,” Felix sighed, worry crinkling at the corners of his eyes. “We don’t know what we’re doing with a half-Cylon child. I mean, what are the chances of us messing her up completely?”
“Always calculating odds, Gaeta, huh?” Her wry smile and felt to Felix like the beginnings of some kind of reconciliation. “Seriously? If I had to guess, I’d say your chances are about the same as any other parent.”
***
Actually, the Agathons upped the odds in their favor by allowing Louis and Felix to bring Penny by their homestead on a regular basis. Sharon taught them games they could all play with Penny and Hera to teach the girls about projection and to show Felix and Louis how to share Penny’s projections more reliably. Penny and Hera became friends after not too long, and Louis and Felix appreciated having someone around who could be a bit of a mother figure for Penny. Also, Louis was glad to see Penny have another little friend in addition to Melissa.
Things normalized enough that Felix and Louis forgot to notice when the seventh month since Penny first arrived had passed. By then, Felix and Louis had gotten good enough that they could share an image of Penny’s projections. They could never really collaborate with her on conjuring the projections, but it was still fascinating to see what she would come up with, especially when they started to tell her stories about their old lives back on the Twelve Colonies. One day, Felix described the beach on the coast of Caprica City in loving detail. She rewarded him with an image of it so close to the real thing that he gasped with recognition.
One particularly hot day, the three of them decided to get some relief by trying their luck with fishing at the nearby river. Really, it was Louis who did the fishing, but he was glad for the company. At one point, Louis looked over to see that Felix had fallen asleep against a large rock, with Penny sitting between his outstretched legs, leaning contentedly with her back against his chest. He could tell what she was doing by the way her eyes seemed to look everywhere and yet also at nothing.
“What are you projecting this time?” he teased her. “Cookies, cake, or ice cream?”
“I’m making a present for Felix,” she told him. (Out of respect for Penny’s memories of her parents, they had not yet suggested the possibility of her calling them anything like “Daddy” or “Papa”. Which was just as well, since they totally disagreed on who should be called what anyway.)
Louis put his fishing pole down and walked over to her. The fish weren’t biting anyway. “May I?” he asked her in a gentle tone. When she nodded, he took her hand in his and waited to be deluged by an imaginary feast of childish delights.
But when Louis realized exactly what he and Penny were looking at, he poked Felix in the ribs in his excitement.
“Felix!” he cried. “Look at this! Look!”
“What?” Felix’s eyes fluttered open, still filled with sleep. “Everything okay?” His arms found themselves around Penny’s shoulders and squeezed them with sleepy protectiveness.
“Look!” Louis said, delighted as he indicated the empty air before them. “It’s your house!”
Felix was very suddenly wide awake.
“Penny,” he choked, as she walked into the images she had made for him. He took her extended hand, speechless, as his daughter guided him through room after room of an expansive home with an open floor plan punctuated by random spiral staircases.
“How did you …”
His voice trailed off in amazement as she led him up a final set of stairs to the roof, where he was surrounded by the lush greenery of an architecturally impossible rooftop deck overlooking a mountainous landscape. It was every inch the dream house he’d built for her in his mind, one he’d told her about night after night, as a sort of ongoing bedtime story. She tugged at his hand as he got lost in the sheer, complex beauty of it all.
“I made it for you,” she said. Her open, expectant expression suddenly filled him with a desire to show her everything he’d had before the Attacks - the sandy beaches of his home planet, the cartoons he’d loved as a child and that she’d never get to see, the operas he’d never take her to. He’d never get to show her his lab on Galactica.
He felt a light touch caressing his back and turned to see Louis there leaning against a trellis, next to a vining plant with dozens of climbing, purple flowers. Felix smiled to see him standing there and ruefully wiped the tears that had sprang from his eyes ruefully.
“You okay, baby?” Louis asked, bending his head down to plant a kiss on Felix’s lips. Felix pulled away, his thoughts torn and tumultuous.
“I …” he said, stunned. He turned back to look at Penny, who was still by the railing, framed by a staggeringly beautiful orange-red sunset of her own creation. “It’s just…” he began, struggling to explain, “…it’s this house. This is the house I’ve been designing in my head since I was a child. I drew it everywhere - in notebooks, on blackboards, in library books, even on the floors and the walls of my parents’ house!
“It’s just that, seeing her realize this house in front of me like this, it … it hit me …” He choked up again. “Louis, she’ll never have all the things I had as a child, all the things that stimulated my curiosity.” He sighed in resignation. “All the knowledge, all the culture we’ll never be able to give her now.”
Louis blinked back surprise. It took him a moment to be able to reply.
“You’re right,” he acknowledged. “It’s true. Even if I could, I wouldn’t try to convince you otherwise.”
His arm went around Felix’s shoulders.
“But she’s got a family again, Felix. All the knowledge and culture in the world isn’t worth a damn without that. And we gave that to her.”
In silent thought, Felix watched Penny leaning on the railing, her chin resting on one arm. He remembered when they’d first met her, how she’d shrank into Cottle whenever they so much as looked at her. She looked so content, so comfortable in her own skin now.
He nestled comfortably into the crook of Louis’ arm. They would give her literacy, he decided, drawing up the alphabet in the damned dirt with a frakking stick, if necessary. They would tell her about art, about history, about the cities and the skyscrapers they had once known. They would tell her about their mothers and their fathers.
And one day, one day, he thought, maybe she would tell them about hers.