Sanctuary (Part 3 of 7)
Return to Chapter 2
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
-Requiem for a Nun
Three weeks later, Felix was still sure he’d never get used to having breakfast in the afternoon. Though the Prometheus never had a cover of darkness for people to transact their more unseemly business under, the vast majority of clients came at night, so the workers slept through the mornings. Even here, he was still an early riser, always the first in the kitchen. By the time the coffee was ready, Anthony had usually made his way downstairs, along with the twins, Rachel and Leah (and Rosie made fun of him for using an obviously fake name).
That morning, Daphne, normally a late sleeper, was the fifth to come down to eat. She padded through the kitchen, eyes still half-lidded, grumbling indistinctly. It didn’t seem like she registered Felix’s presence until she squeezed between him and Rachel to reach for something in the cupboard above the stove.
“You,” Daphne said accusatorily enough to make Felix wonder if he’d accidentally violated the arcane but sacred rules of the Rising Sun’s bathroom again. “I know why you’re so popular now.”
“Novelty,” Anthony commented from across the room at the kitchen table. “Everybody wants to give the new boy a test-drive. It’ll even out soon.”
“He’s just jealous. He’s never had such good competition in the pretty-boy market before,” Rachel whispered to Felix as she poked at her omelet. Felix did his best not to drool at the smell of eggs, real New Caprican grouse eggs.
“No, I don’t think so,” Daphne said, responding to Anthony. “I was the other third of Hylas’s first threesome last night-” Daphne glared at Rachel and Leah when they tittered in amusement-and really, Felix thought, why should they find something that they did all the time so funny when someone else did it?
“As I was saying,” Daphne cut in again when the giggles didn’t stop, “I watched him, and he is the real deal.”
“What?” both Felix and Anthony said, voices inflected very differently.
She turned to Felix. “Rosie tells you to sell ‘em a fantasy, right? The way most of us do that is, we act. You, however, live it.”
Felix stared at her in confusion.
Daphne sighed. “When I’m with a client-and I’m not bragging-but externally, I am exactly what they want me to be. But internally? I could be thinking about anything from my home on Canceron to my laundry bill. You, at least while you’re in that room, become what the client wants and believe you are it, body and soul.”
The others were staring at him with something between wonderment and fear.
Felix tried to shake it off. “I’ve always been a perfectionist, that’s all.” He shoved his bowl of hot cereal into Daphne’s hands. “Here, that’s what you wanted anyway, right? I’m going to take my coffee up to my room.”
“Perfectionism?” Anthony snorted as Felix walked past him. “What good is perfectionism when ninety-five percent of these guys are only in it for ‘wham, bam, thank you Sam’?”
Daphne followed him and stopped him at the door. “Kid, I didn’t say that to embarrass you,” she said low enough so the others couldn’t hear. Felix noted with no little irony that he and Daphne were about the same age. Up close, he could see her hair was starting to turn gray. “I only want you to be careful. You may end up with a few more repeat clients the way you do it, but that’s not worth ripping your soul apart for. Especially with some of the things these guys want out of it...that’s gotta frak with your mind.”
“Thanks for the warning. I appreciate it,” Felix snapped, pushing the bowl back towards Daphne when she tried to return it to him.
He did appreciate it, that someone cared. But the truth was, he wanted to lose himself in those dark, unspeakable places in other men’s minds. It was both penance and escape. And it was a hell of a lot better than going back to being Felix Gaeta.
~~**~~**~~
Saul thought he’d heard Kat mutter, “Good riddance,” when he’d gotten off the Raptor. Technically, he was still confined to quarters, but everybody but Bill would be happy to see him gone for good. Hell, Bill had enough problems on his plate that he might even breathe a sigh of relief when he discovered Saul’s quarters emptied of everything but his uniforms.
He hitched his bag higher on his shoulder and pulled his cap down lower on his brow. The Prometheus wasn’t so cold that he needed a hat, but it was easier to wear some of his extra clothes than carry them in the bag.
He’d thought it would be like New Caprica here, but it wasn’t. The light was harsher, and it smelled like piss. The streets-odd to think of a ship as having streets, but the way the civvies had built it up, it did-were narrow and claustrophobic, hemmed in by two and even some three-story structures.
The only familiar things were the crowds of people. There were twice as many of them here as there had been before New Caprica, at least, what with all the lost ships and haphazard shifting around of the population that had happened in the exodus. They were dirty and busy. But even more, there was an edge of nerves to everyone, a simmering uncertainty and desire to be safely back indoors that he remembered from when they’d set the first suicide bombs.
Blonde hair above the collar of a pink suit flashed in the corner of his eye. He knew by now that it wasn’t real, it wasn’t her, but that didn’t make the tug any less insistent.
“Godsdamn it,” he growled to himself, then pushed his way through the crowd to follow the phantom.
He’d gotten as close as one could to running in the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd, but he didn’t catch her. Most likely because she’s not there, Saul admitted to himself. He finally extricated himself from the throng and leaned against a building to catch his breath.
He heard a woman’s laughter. It wasn’t Ellen’s laugh, but he recognized its pitch and intention well. He looked up at the sign on the building he was standing next to: The House of the Rising Sun. So this was where old Rosie had set up shop after New Caprica. He’d never been there, but Bill had talked about it. Bill had said he’d heard about the Rising Sun through Lee, but Saul knew both Adamas had a taste for this kind of place. Anyway, he’d said Rosie had a reputation for keeping a clean, relatively disease- and drug-free operation.
Maybe this wild goose chase hadn’t been such a bad thing after all. Maybe this was exactly what he needed.
It took Saul’s eyes a few moments to adjust as he entered the dark front room, filled with deep red couches and draperies, and a few women lounging around and eyeing him speculatively. He walked past them and up to Rosie, a hefty older lady he didn’t know personally but whom pretty much everybody from New Caprica could recognize by sight.
“Good evening. Have a seat,” Rosie said, gesturing to the plush chair across from her. Saul could tell from her eyes that she recognized him but couldn’t place him. “How can we be of service?”
“I want a woman,” Saul said, staring at the carpet. “Blonde, with a nice laugh.”
When he looked up, Rosie’s face had softened considerably. “I think we can manage that. If you’ll wait a moment, please. In the meantime, help yourself,” she said, gesturing to a carafe of some kind of amber liquor.
Rosie hefted herself up from her chair and crossed the room to a dark-haired girl. She wasn’t right at all, so Saul hoped she was just a messenger. He poured himself a little of the liquor and knocked it back in one gulp. Not great, but not bad, either. He poured himself another.
Then he heard a laugh that was nothing like Ellen’s, and that made his blood run cold.
“Sir, please, you’re not allowed in that area,” Rosie called after him as Saul marched across the room and back into a half-hidden hallway.
He heard the laugh again. “Leah, I swear, nobody told me about the ‘no using the last of any scent of soap without buying a replacement’ rule. And your clients aren’t going to laugh at you if you smell like lavender. Mine would.”
Saul grabbed the man by the shoulder and twisted him around.
“I’ll be damned,” Saul said quietly enough so only Gaeta could hear him. “And here we all figured you’d skulked off and finished the Circle’s job for us.”
Gaeta still managed to look defiant through his shock.
“Him,” Saul said when Rosie caught up with him. “I’ll take him.”
Rosie raised an eyebrow and said, “Blonde woman with a nice laugh?” Saul could almost see the tumblers click in Gaeta’s head when she said that. Rosie continued, “You sure you’re all right with this, Hylas?”
Gaeta nodded, never taking his eyes off Saul. “It’s fine.”
Gaeta led him down the hall and up a stairway. He opened a door and walked in. Saul followed and shut it behind them.
“I should’ve finished the Circle’s job for you, huh? Haven’t you heard I’ve been sainted by the divinely inspired President Roslin herself?” Gaeta said. Saul hadn’t known what he’d expected Gaeta to say, but that caught him off guard.
“I meant after you disappeared, everybody assumed you’d killed yourself.”
“No, I think you were closer to what you meant the first time,” Gaeta said. He folded his arms and paced slowly in front of the bed. “So, short of throwing myself out the window and splattering my brains on the street, what the frak do you want from me, Colonel?”
Saul would’ve corrected anyone else about his non-existent rank, but it felt good to hear Gaeta slide them back into the dynamic of superior and disgruntled subordinate.
“What are you doing here?”
“Anyone that pays,” Gaeta deadpanned in a way that reminded Saul of how he said ‘yes, sir,’ when he wanted to make it known that he thought an order was stupid.
Gaeta sighed. “It’s not that complicated. Do you want to frak me up the ass, or for me to blow you? There are other options, but frankly, Colonel, you never struck me as being that creative.”
Saul gave Gaeta a tentative once-over, then felt very strange about it. For all the younger CIC crew flirted and passed dirty notes between their stations, Saul had always considered himself the father sitting on the porch with a shotgun, ready to blow the head off anybody who got too cozy. Not to mention, Gaeta really wasn’t his type-he was about as far from a leggy, lively female blonde as you could get.
“I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here,” Saul said, shaking his head and backing toward the door.
“Looking for somebody to play Mrs. Tigh, perhaps?” Felix pressed. He held his hands out, indicating his own body. “I can see why Rosie thought I was a strange choice. Then again, she doesn’t know your nickname for me from New Caprica.”
That stopped Saul dead in his tracks. What in the hell had come loose in the kid’s brain? The bastard was trying to reel him back in, and it was working. “Shut up.”
“How did Connor phrase it again?”
Saul’s fingernails dug into his palms. “Shut the frak up!”
“Something about how I’d whored myself out to the Cylons, for even less than-”
Saul was disappointed that Gaeta didn’t fall when his fist connected with his jaw. Gaeta’d been expecting it, wanting it. He rubbed his cheek and grinned with the unbruised half of his mouth.
“You want me to have been the whore and the sellout all along, right?” There was something truly scary about the flat, manic glare in Gaeta’s eyes, but Saul’s rage was burning too hotly for it to do more than dimly register with him. “Wish that it was me instead of her who-”
“Godsdamn it, yes, I wish I’d killed you instead of her!”
He could tell from the look on Gaeta’s face that he’d caught the slip-up. Something changed in him that Saul couldn’t pinpoint.
“You never should’ve let Chief let me go,” Gaeta said, much more quietly but no less frightening. “I frakked a Cylon, too.”
“Why?” Saul heard himself asking. He wasn’t quite sure what he’d do if Gaeta’s answer was ‘To protect Gaius Baltar.’
Gaeta narrowed his eyes and stepped in close. “Because I wanted a good frak.”
Saul grabbed Gaeta by the shoulders and shook him violently, but somehow he ended up the one with his back against the wall. He pushed Gaeta onto his knees in front of him and unzipped his pants. He wasn’t hard yet, but it didn’t take long once Gaeta took him deep in his throat.
Saul closed his eyes and thought hard about Ellen. Her scent, her lips. The way her eyes flashed in the dark. The way she laughed low in her throat when she stretched out on the bed after.
But it was all wrong. No one would ever accuse Ellen of being inhibited when it came to sex, but she never did anything that wasn’t good for the both of them. Gaeta was going well past being uncomfortable. Saul could tell he really didn’t know how to deep throat, and yet he kept taking him in a little deeper and a little deeper, through sheer force of will rather than a relaxed gag reflex.
And when he looked down, even more wrong than the too-broad shoulders and too-dark hair was that Gaeta was holding his hands strangely. He wasn’t touching him, or even doing the traditional submissive pose of clasping his hands behind his back. He held them even with his waist, wrists crossed. The same way he’d knelt in the launch tube with his wrists bound.
“Godsdamn it,” Saul muttered, pushing Gaeta away.
Gaeta sat back on his haunches and panted. “I frakked all of them,” he hissed before he’d even caught his breath. Saul didn’t believe a word of it, and he didn’t think Gaeta intended for him to, either. It made his blood boil all the same. “Especially the Cavils. Ellen hated her Cavil. I’d see her run to the head to throw up as soon as his door shut behind her. But I wanted it. I wanted their cocks so badly-”
This time, there was no imagining Ellen’s warmth or vitality. Saul let himself go and imagined he was Cavil, powerful and cynical enough that nothing could hurt him. His fingers tightened in Gaeta’s hair, but he was past caring. Pain was no more than an annoyance, and watching it in others was an academic study, or a source of a little amusement at most. No one haunted his dreams, or his waking hours. He had evolved past guilt, even guilt over killing the innocent, let alone the guilty but beloved.
And then it was over, and Saul looked down and saw the smart, sarcastic kid who’d first walked into his CIC six years ago, now on his hands and knees, dry heaving and shaking.
Saul sighed and rubbed the heel of his palm against his eye. Even leaving Galactica, he couldn’t manage to be self-destructive without destroying anybody who came close to him. He was a cancer, after all, and running away was just going to make it spread, not cure it.
When Gaeta stopped gagging, Saul slipped his hands under his arms, lifted him, and dragged him to the bed. He laid him on his side.
Gaeta looked up at him. For the first time, Gaeta let himself appear nervous and hurt, and like he expected something else was still coming.
“I don’t know what the frak you wanted to get out of this,” Saul said. He threw most of the cubits he’d brought with him onto the bedside table. All Saul needed was enough to pay for passage back to Galactica. “If it really was just the money, you got it.”
“Don’t tell anyone in CIC,” Gaeta finally said, averting his eyes. “Especially not Dee.”
Saul had long ago given up trying to understand Gaeta. Funny that here and now, of all places and times, he would finally grasp something about the way this kid’s mind worked. “I won’t.”
When Saul was almost at the door, Gaeta said, “I wish it’d been me instead of her, too, Colonel.”
Saul sighed, but he didn’t turn back. Both of them had done a lot of things they’d have a hard time living with. This evening was one more of those for Saul to add to his list. At least it’d made him realize there was no escaping that list; there was only coming to terms with it. He hoped Gaeta found a way to do that someday, too, even if he wasn’t counting on it.
CONTINUE TO CHAPTER 4
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
-Requiem for a Nun
Three weeks later, Felix was still sure he’d never get used to having breakfast in the afternoon. Though the Prometheus never had a cover of darkness for people to transact their more unseemly business under, the vast majority of clients came at night, so the workers slept through the mornings. Even here, he was still an early riser, always the first in the kitchen. By the time the coffee was ready, Anthony had usually made his way downstairs, along with the twins, Rachel and Leah (and Rosie made fun of him for using an obviously fake name).
That morning, Daphne, normally a late sleeper, was the fifth to come down to eat. She padded through the kitchen, eyes still half-lidded, grumbling indistinctly. It didn’t seem like she registered Felix’s presence until she squeezed between him and Rachel to reach for something in the cupboard above the stove.
“You,” Daphne said accusatorily enough to make Felix wonder if he’d accidentally violated the arcane but sacred rules of the Rising Sun’s bathroom again. “I know why you’re so popular now.”
“Novelty,” Anthony commented from across the room at the kitchen table. “Everybody wants to give the new boy a test-drive. It’ll even out soon.”
“He’s just jealous. He’s never had such good competition in the pretty-boy market before,” Rachel whispered to Felix as she poked at her omelet. Felix did his best not to drool at the smell of eggs, real New Caprican grouse eggs.
“No, I don’t think so,” Daphne said, responding to Anthony. “I was the other third of Hylas’s first threesome last night-” Daphne glared at Rachel and Leah when they tittered in amusement-and really, Felix thought, why should they find something that they did all the time so funny when someone else did it?
“As I was saying,” Daphne cut in again when the giggles didn’t stop, “I watched him, and he is the real deal.”
“What?” both Felix and Anthony said, voices inflected very differently.
She turned to Felix. “Rosie tells you to sell ‘em a fantasy, right? The way most of us do that is, we act. You, however, live it.”
Felix stared at her in confusion.
Daphne sighed. “When I’m with a client-and I’m not bragging-but externally, I am exactly what they want me to be. But internally? I could be thinking about anything from my home on Canceron to my laundry bill. You, at least while you’re in that room, become what the client wants and believe you are it, body and soul.”
The others were staring at him with something between wonderment and fear.
Felix tried to shake it off. “I’ve always been a perfectionist, that’s all.” He shoved his bowl of hot cereal into Daphne’s hands. “Here, that’s what you wanted anyway, right? I’m going to take my coffee up to my room.”
“Perfectionism?” Anthony snorted as Felix walked past him. “What good is perfectionism when ninety-five percent of these guys are only in it for ‘wham, bam, thank you Sam’?”
Daphne followed him and stopped him at the door. “Kid, I didn’t say that to embarrass you,” she said low enough so the others couldn’t hear. Felix noted with no little irony that he and Daphne were about the same age. Up close, he could see her hair was starting to turn gray. “I only want you to be careful. You may end up with a few more repeat clients the way you do it, but that’s not worth ripping your soul apart for. Especially with some of the things these guys want out of it...that’s gotta frak with your mind.”
“Thanks for the warning. I appreciate it,” Felix snapped, pushing the bowl back towards Daphne when she tried to return it to him.
He did appreciate it, that someone cared. But the truth was, he wanted to lose himself in those dark, unspeakable places in other men’s minds. It was both penance and escape. And it was a hell of a lot better than going back to being Felix Gaeta.
~~**~~**~~
Saul thought he’d heard Kat mutter, “Good riddance,” when he’d gotten off the Raptor. Technically, he was still confined to quarters, but everybody but Bill would be happy to see him gone for good. Hell, Bill had enough problems on his plate that he might even breathe a sigh of relief when he discovered Saul’s quarters emptied of everything but his uniforms.
He hitched his bag higher on his shoulder and pulled his cap down lower on his brow. The Prometheus wasn’t so cold that he needed a hat, but it was easier to wear some of his extra clothes than carry them in the bag.
He’d thought it would be like New Caprica here, but it wasn’t. The light was harsher, and it smelled like piss. The streets-odd to think of a ship as having streets, but the way the civvies had built it up, it did-were narrow and claustrophobic, hemmed in by two and even some three-story structures.
The only familiar things were the crowds of people. There were twice as many of them here as there had been before New Caprica, at least, what with all the lost ships and haphazard shifting around of the population that had happened in the exodus. They were dirty and busy. But even more, there was an edge of nerves to everyone, a simmering uncertainty and desire to be safely back indoors that he remembered from when they’d set the first suicide bombs.
Blonde hair above the collar of a pink suit flashed in the corner of his eye. He knew by now that it wasn’t real, it wasn’t her, but that didn’t make the tug any less insistent.
“Godsdamn it,” he growled to himself, then pushed his way through the crowd to follow the phantom.
He’d gotten as close as one could to running in the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd, but he didn’t catch her. Most likely because she’s not there, Saul admitted to himself. He finally extricated himself from the throng and leaned against a building to catch his breath.
He heard a woman’s laughter. It wasn’t Ellen’s laugh, but he recognized its pitch and intention well. He looked up at the sign on the building he was standing next to: The House of the Rising Sun. So this was where old Rosie had set up shop after New Caprica. He’d never been there, but Bill had talked about it. Bill had said he’d heard about the Rising Sun through Lee, but Saul knew both Adamas had a taste for this kind of place. Anyway, he’d said Rosie had a reputation for keeping a clean, relatively disease- and drug-free operation.
Maybe this wild goose chase hadn’t been such a bad thing after all. Maybe this was exactly what he needed.
It took Saul’s eyes a few moments to adjust as he entered the dark front room, filled with deep red couches and draperies, and a few women lounging around and eyeing him speculatively. He walked past them and up to Rosie, a hefty older lady he didn’t know personally but whom pretty much everybody from New Caprica could recognize by sight.
“Good evening. Have a seat,” Rosie said, gesturing to the plush chair across from her. Saul could tell from her eyes that she recognized him but couldn’t place him. “How can we be of service?”
“I want a woman,” Saul said, staring at the carpet. “Blonde, with a nice laugh.”
When he looked up, Rosie’s face had softened considerably. “I think we can manage that. If you’ll wait a moment, please. In the meantime, help yourself,” she said, gesturing to a carafe of some kind of amber liquor.
Rosie hefted herself up from her chair and crossed the room to a dark-haired girl. She wasn’t right at all, so Saul hoped she was just a messenger. He poured himself a little of the liquor and knocked it back in one gulp. Not great, but not bad, either. He poured himself another.
Then he heard a laugh that was nothing like Ellen’s, and that made his blood run cold.
“Sir, please, you’re not allowed in that area,” Rosie called after him as Saul marched across the room and back into a half-hidden hallway.
He heard the laugh again. “Leah, I swear, nobody told me about the ‘no using the last of any scent of soap without buying a replacement’ rule. And your clients aren’t going to laugh at you if you smell like lavender. Mine would.”
Saul grabbed the man by the shoulder and twisted him around.
“I’ll be damned,” Saul said quietly enough so only Gaeta could hear him. “And here we all figured you’d skulked off and finished the Circle’s job for us.”
Gaeta still managed to look defiant through his shock.
“Him,” Saul said when Rosie caught up with him. “I’ll take him.”
Rosie raised an eyebrow and said, “Blonde woman with a nice laugh?” Saul could almost see the tumblers click in Gaeta’s head when she said that. Rosie continued, “You sure you’re all right with this, Hylas?”
Gaeta nodded, never taking his eyes off Saul. “It’s fine.”
Gaeta led him down the hall and up a stairway. He opened a door and walked in. Saul followed and shut it behind them.
“I should’ve finished the Circle’s job for you, huh? Haven’t you heard I’ve been sainted by the divinely inspired President Roslin herself?” Gaeta said. Saul hadn’t known what he’d expected Gaeta to say, but that caught him off guard.
“I meant after you disappeared, everybody assumed you’d killed yourself.”
“No, I think you were closer to what you meant the first time,” Gaeta said. He folded his arms and paced slowly in front of the bed. “So, short of throwing myself out the window and splattering my brains on the street, what the frak do you want from me, Colonel?”
Saul would’ve corrected anyone else about his non-existent rank, but it felt good to hear Gaeta slide them back into the dynamic of superior and disgruntled subordinate.
“What are you doing here?”
“Anyone that pays,” Gaeta deadpanned in a way that reminded Saul of how he said ‘yes, sir,’ when he wanted to make it known that he thought an order was stupid.
Gaeta sighed. “It’s not that complicated. Do you want to frak me up the ass, or for me to blow you? There are other options, but frankly, Colonel, you never struck me as being that creative.”
Saul gave Gaeta a tentative once-over, then felt very strange about it. For all the younger CIC crew flirted and passed dirty notes between their stations, Saul had always considered himself the father sitting on the porch with a shotgun, ready to blow the head off anybody who got too cozy. Not to mention, Gaeta really wasn’t his type-he was about as far from a leggy, lively female blonde as you could get.
“I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here,” Saul said, shaking his head and backing toward the door.
“Looking for somebody to play Mrs. Tigh, perhaps?” Felix pressed. He held his hands out, indicating his own body. “I can see why Rosie thought I was a strange choice. Then again, she doesn’t know your nickname for me from New Caprica.”
That stopped Saul dead in his tracks. What in the hell had come loose in the kid’s brain? The bastard was trying to reel him back in, and it was working. “Shut up.”
“How did Connor phrase it again?”
Saul’s fingernails dug into his palms. “Shut the frak up!”
“Something about how I’d whored myself out to the Cylons, for even less than-”
Saul was disappointed that Gaeta didn’t fall when his fist connected with his jaw. Gaeta’d been expecting it, wanting it. He rubbed his cheek and grinned with the unbruised half of his mouth.
“You want me to have been the whore and the sellout all along, right?” There was something truly scary about the flat, manic glare in Gaeta’s eyes, but Saul’s rage was burning too hotly for it to do more than dimly register with him. “Wish that it was me instead of her who-”
“Godsdamn it, yes, I wish I’d killed you instead of her!”
He could tell from the look on Gaeta’s face that he’d caught the slip-up. Something changed in him that Saul couldn’t pinpoint.
“You never should’ve let Chief let me go,” Gaeta said, much more quietly but no less frightening. “I frakked a Cylon, too.”
“Why?” Saul heard himself asking. He wasn’t quite sure what he’d do if Gaeta’s answer was ‘To protect Gaius Baltar.’
Gaeta narrowed his eyes and stepped in close. “Because I wanted a good frak.”
Saul grabbed Gaeta by the shoulders and shook him violently, but somehow he ended up the one with his back against the wall. He pushed Gaeta onto his knees in front of him and unzipped his pants. He wasn’t hard yet, but it didn’t take long once Gaeta took him deep in his throat.
Saul closed his eyes and thought hard about Ellen. Her scent, her lips. The way her eyes flashed in the dark. The way she laughed low in her throat when she stretched out on the bed after.
But it was all wrong. No one would ever accuse Ellen of being inhibited when it came to sex, but she never did anything that wasn’t good for the both of them. Gaeta was going well past being uncomfortable. Saul could tell he really didn’t know how to deep throat, and yet he kept taking him in a little deeper and a little deeper, through sheer force of will rather than a relaxed gag reflex.
And when he looked down, even more wrong than the too-broad shoulders and too-dark hair was that Gaeta was holding his hands strangely. He wasn’t touching him, or even doing the traditional submissive pose of clasping his hands behind his back. He held them even with his waist, wrists crossed. The same way he’d knelt in the launch tube with his wrists bound.
“Godsdamn it,” Saul muttered, pushing Gaeta away.
Gaeta sat back on his haunches and panted. “I frakked all of them,” he hissed before he’d even caught his breath. Saul didn’t believe a word of it, and he didn’t think Gaeta intended for him to, either. It made his blood boil all the same. “Especially the Cavils. Ellen hated her Cavil. I’d see her run to the head to throw up as soon as his door shut behind her. But I wanted it. I wanted their cocks so badly-”
This time, there was no imagining Ellen’s warmth or vitality. Saul let himself go and imagined he was Cavil, powerful and cynical enough that nothing could hurt him. His fingers tightened in Gaeta’s hair, but he was past caring. Pain was no more than an annoyance, and watching it in others was an academic study, or a source of a little amusement at most. No one haunted his dreams, or his waking hours. He had evolved past guilt, even guilt over killing the innocent, let alone the guilty but beloved.
And then it was over, and Saul looked down and saw the smart, sarcastic kid who’d first walked into his CIC six years ago, now on his hands and knees, dry heaving and shaking.
Saul sighed and rubbed the heel of his palm against his eye. Even leaving Galactica, he couldn’t manage to be self-destructive without destroying anybody who came close to him. He was a cancer, after all, and running away was just going to make it spread, not cure it.
When Gaeta stopped gagging, Saul slipped his hands under his arms, lifted him, and dragged him to the bed. He laid him on his side.
Gaeta looked up at him. For the first time, Gaeta let himself appear nervous and hurt, and like he expected something else was still coming.
“I don’t know what the frak you wanted to get out of this,” Saul said. He threw most of the cubits he’d brought with him onto the bedside table. All Saul needed was enough to pay for passage back to Galactica. “If it really was just the money, you got it.”
“Don’t tell anyone in CIC,” Gaeta finally said, averting his eyes. “Especially not Dee.”
Saul had long ago given up trying to understand Gaeta. Funny that here and now, of all places and times, he would finally grasp something about the way this kid’s mind worked. “I won’t.”
When Saul was almost at the door, Gaeta said, “I wish it’d been me instead of her, too, Colonel.”
Saul sighed, but he didn’t turn back. Both of them had done a lot of things they’d have a hard time living with. This evening was one more of those for Saul to add to his list. At least it’d made him realize there was no escaping that list; there was only coming to terms with it. He hoped Gaeta found a way to do that someday, too, even if he wasn’t counting on it.
CONTINUE TO CHAPTER 4