fic: The Drowning Bell
2600ish words
BSG/SGA, spoilers to whatever's recent for BSG, not much of anything for SGA.
Written for opprobrium, who wants A fic in which Gaeta gets the guy. I don't know, perhaps he is assigned temporarily to another ship to help them fix their FTL drive and the ship is captained by a stubborn ex-Viper pilot with crazy hair, a knack for numbers and ferocious loyalty to his ragtag crew. He had lost his genius lover in the original genocide and has been sullen and bitter since. True love ensues and together, via smarts and a death-wish, they destroy the Cylons for good. Le sigh.
If the problem that got him assigned to the Atalanta was a hopeless one, Gaeta found he didn't particularly mind the vacation. Crouched down and peering under the bulkheads that comprised most of the shielding for the inexplicably mute FTL drive, he could still name half a dozen hands better suited to the grease and skinned knuckles that came with actual interaction with the stolid, unfriendly physicality of jump technology. He was more a computer-type technician himself. Still, he was grateful: the man responsible for the uncooperative drive - the one that put in the reluctant request to Galactica for some skilled help in the first place - didn't seem to mind squirming in between folds of metal and dismantling the thing screw by screw. Which he'd insisted he'd done twice already. Gaeta had to insist, though, on one more hard boot, and he rocked back onto his heels and waited for a decisive comment, trying to aim the flashlight helpfully.
“Yeah. That's it, I'd say.” Atalanta's pilot - narrow and notably unwashed due to civilian rationing, water, food and otherwise - twisted onto his elbow to squint back along the length of his body at Gaeta. The generator whirred up to a low hum above their heads. “You mind?”
Gaeta averted the light, and tried to look a little more interested. “We're going to have to assume it's the nav computer, then. I mean, look at her: she's breathing, but not thinking.”
Captain Sheppard didn't do much past lift a pained eyebrow at the statement and crawl ass backwards out from the work hole. He stood, wiping his hands uselessly on a pair of grubby utility pants that Gaeta couldn't help but register as admiralty-issued, if a little worn. He tried to mimic Sheppard's natural stoop under the low ceiling with little success, and gestured toward the cockpit, a bare twenty feet away on the little sloop, but still a good half dozen twists and turns through halls and hatches. The Atalanta was a long-range science vessel, built to float around collecting data as quiet as an insect, jumping back to home systems every month or so for refueling and information offload, and so she was built as efficient and ugly as anything military Gaeta had ever seen. Looking at wear and tear alone, she could be older than Galactica, easy. She was on her last legs, at any rate.
With Sheppard waiting for a prognosis, Gaeta tried to lead the conversation out of the hot, close little engine room: “I just needed to double check there weren't any hardware problems, loose wires, you know, connections,” he said. “Now we can move on to the probable issues - nav, comm, any number of standard system misfires.”
“Yeah, you went over her, alright. Fine-toothed comb.” Sheppard uncrossed his arms and ducked out the hatch. Gaeta followed him out into the corridor, nodding at the young woman and child pressed politely into the pantry - literally a two foot by two foot shelf space indented off the causeway. Sheppard didn't introduce them, nor the collection of older children visible through a partition, lounging in the sleeping berths, but Gaeta nodded and waved, half-smiling.
The relative spaciousness of the cockpit/observatory was a relief, and Gaeta selected the co-pilot's chair without half a thought: with access to monitoring programs, the last few hundred systems checks and the useless banks of information regarding space dust and solar radiation in a few backwater quadrants off Scorpia, he could at least sort through the ship's internal complaints. He leaned into the computer, starting with simple queries and progressing upwards with ever-increasing specificity. It took a bit, and eventually he looked over his should to register Sheppard loitering in the hatchway. He waved him in to sit down. “It's going to ask you for permission to run some of these - they'll fuss with the DRADIS and the sensors will reset. Say yes.”
Sheppard sat, dutifully entering his ID. The screens flickered, went blank, and then acknowledged the start of the long reset process. Gaeta felt confident. At least he'd be able to tell exactly which systems were hopeless. “So she's your ship?”
Sheppard was watching the load bar, looking a little unthrilled. “Nine years, now.”
“You were out on assignment then? I mean, during the attack.” Not an unpopular question: how come you aren't dead? One sometimes asked with hostility, or blame. Gaeta always found himself just curious, ready to marvel at cruel fortune.
“Yeah, we were refuelling when the first wave hit.” Something of a pause, and Sheppard looked absent when he continued. “We docked for maybe half an hour off Sagitarron: food, tylium. Lone raider blew the anchorage right out from under us. Dumb luck I didn't go with it. Took the plating off her belly.”
Gaeta nodded, sympathetic and optimistic in the same way he would've been three years ago if someone had told him they'd lost their job, defaulted on their mortgage one month. “You were lucky, having your family on board. Not a lot of people-”
Sheppard cut him off. His tone didn't let much loose. “They aren't my family. Refugees off the Gideon. I had the room, since my crew blew up with the fuel station.”
Gaeta shut his mouth. A few seconds later he managed, “I'm sorry,” and then scowled at himself and down at the screen. Everyone had stories like that. Relatives separated because they went to wash their hands thirty seconds before the attack, children lost in terminals, ships frozen and torn to bits by flights of raiders while the luckier ones jumped away, passengers gaping at fellow tourists, fellow citizens, in terror and shock.
“The comm system check is complete.” Sheppard said, after a while.
“I know, I'll have to cross-check with a few others before I can start isolating discrepancies.” Gaeta went back to the keyboard, watching the screens and occasionally making a reminder note or two on a piece of scrap paper torn out of his pocket.
“Up on Galactica, you must've been losing people every day for a while.”
Gaeta glanced over to Sheppard, who hadn't much changed his position, leaning backwards with his hands behind his head, long legs stretched out under the console. “A lot, yeah.” He said, conversational, “Viper pilots mostly, regularly. We took a few hits - I'm sure you, I mean, the press gave off some statistics retroactively afterwards - there was that one hit right in the first wave, a lot of good deckhands went with that. Familiar faces, you know?”
“Yeah.”
Gaeta tried to imagine the crew the man had lost. A handful of people, low turnover for a job like theirs, because no one with portside obligations would've ever signed up in the first place. Scientists and explorers, trampling out the last few wild spots in the solar systems, surveying out mining ops or travel hazards, but really looking for some high science. Always keeping an ear out for something strange or disturbing. Bored as all hell, knowing the only thing lonelier, more desperate would've been living out your life stuck on just one planet.
Galactica checked in an hour after the reports finished running, when Gaeta had already mired himself in a stew of hardcopy, and only just managed to get Sheppard to dig him up a calculator out of the dead co-pilot's things.
“I would say another four hours if we're lucky and hit it right off.” He reported, trying to sound as if the prospect was as likely as not.
“And if we aren't lucky?” Helo crackled back.
“A good eight. Ten at most. We aren't dealing with a Battlestar here, old little boats like these don't exactly speak English, or say please and thank you when there's something wrong them.” Gaeta winced a little even as the words came out of his mouth. He could picture the old man and Helo exchanging sideways looks at his bitching, or glee, or whatever it was he was expressing. Both. “It'll take a few more hours of going through the codes, anyway, sir. To know.”
“Baltar's lab will be waiting for you, Lieutenant.” Helo reminded him, “Along with the entire fleet. Report back in the morning, we'll send over a mechanic if we can spare one off the birds.”
“Yessir.” Gaeta switched off the comm and caught a look from Sheppard.
“They miss you much over there?”
“No.” Gaeta said immediately, thinking of his solitary meals, the less and less frequent, but still present, death threats and intimidations. Sheppard's eyebrows rose in the faintest hint of offense at the retort, and Gaeta rose his hands. “And yes. They need someone to go through Baltar's notes. That isn't to say they like me.”
Evidently mollified, Sheppard snorted. “New Capricans. A year's worth of planet-living and you evolve into a whole other species of petty.”
Gaeta, jaw slack at the offhand dismissal of the past year's universal torture and deprivation, looked over at a very mildly smirking Sheppard, who was absently reconciling spare algorithms and refusing to look up. The man continued: “Didn't they just publish your name as, what, one of the sole reasons humanity still struggles on? I mean, right below Adama. Hero of the Resistance, feeding misinformation to the Cylon oppressors and smooth-talking children and women out of the prisons. Leaving priceless tactical intelligence under a dogbowl. They practically wrote an epic ballad about you, Lieutenant Felix Gaeta.”
Gaeta was having trouble finding the joke. He stared at the captain, the deep circles under his eyes and the wreck of dirty hair. He could see three year's worth of insomnia in the jawline and pallid skin. He felt sorry for the man, and his year alone in the cold black. “Yeah, well. They must've wrote that after they sentenced me to death via airlock.”
“So you're lucky to be over here, then.” Sheppard smirked straight at him, stood, and stretched. “I'll at least offer you a meal for your troubles.”
They ate their foil-wrapped rations in the cockpit, because the silent woman and her collection of yapping children occupied most of the abandoned lab space, which looked to have doubled as the social arena back when the Atalanta had contained a breathing crew. Sheppard seemed pretty much dead set on avoiding the horde, and Gaeta said nothing to upset the arrangement, barely even rose from his seat before he was settled back down, masticating the horse-glue and fibre concoction with little enjoyment.
Sheppard noticed. “So what do they feed you military types, instant eggs, instant potatoes? Gelatin, I bet, and lots of it.”
“Yeah, we're regular aristocrats up there.” Gaeta said around his mouthful of half-melted plastic.
“I'd take it. Any day.”
“So you were military for a while?” Gaeta voiced his untested theory with his eyebrows raised politely, watching Sheppard for signs of insult.
He didn't get much of a rise. “I was a pilot on Solaria for a few years before my contract expired. Got out quick, earned myself a discounted lease on this boat.” He paused to breath, chewing with his mouth open. “Almost wish I'd stayed - canned corn sounds pretty much gourmet at this point.”
Gaeta pushed harder. “If you stayed in service you would've died in orbit around Tauron, along with a hundred thousand other pilots.”
“I heard. Floating like so much driftwood.” Sheppard looked over the Atalanta's stubby nose, at the rest of the fleet, near and distant. “Preferable, maybe.”
“So why aren't you training for Galactica now? As few vipers as we have, we still don't have enough pilots to fly them.” Gaeta got his feet up under him, computers and ship half-forgotten as his voice rose.
Sheppard, habitual smirk back in place, shook his head. “What did I say? I said I wish the food was better. Doesn't mean I'm going to start turning fancy tricks for Commander Adama.” Gaeta, shocked a little silent at the venom in his voice, drew breath to retort. Sheppard cut him off: “You try to find me something worth protecting - out of all the humanity we have left, ships or civilization or whatever you want - and I bet that I die of old age before you can put it in front of me.” Sheppard stood, brushing smudges of resin off his shirt, and left him alone.
For a while, Gaeta sat in the silence of the ship's calculations, the faltering murmur of her close presence. There were hiccups, interruptions in her burble of information. He worked a bit, looked at the time. He'd be back on board Galactica in a few hours, and Tyrol would send some knuckledragger with a crowbar to shape up the drive, before they all gave up and abandoned the old boat to her fate as a weightless scrapheap. And they'd send the refugees back to the Gideon, and press Sheppard into service as a pilot, so he could fulfil his death wish to humanity's best advantage.
Gaeta found the man in his berth: lying on his back, staring at the bunk above. He looked a mournful cross between a young boy, stargazing, and a veteran pilot working his way out of a drunk. Gaeta, unacknowledged, stood over him. He crouched down on his heels. He leaned in, and kissed him through the cloth on his shoulder. Something of an apology.
In the bunk, behind the curtain or tucked up in the slats overhead, there were no pictures of the dead crew, the dead lover who had doubtless pushed for the end to Sheppard's military career in the first place. Sheppard lay staring at blank grey fixtures. Gaeta crawled in, awkward, hunched, and careful of his knees, and Sheppard rolled over to press him up against the cold metal wall, mouth hard and hands harder as they pushed and rubbed. The hatchway was open, so the curtain was pulled closed, and brave fingers found purchase even as clothing got rucked out of the way and zippers came loose. Their breath stank of the plastic rations, and their dry lips, dry skin, dry hands got slicked with spit and pulled ineffectively at each other, wet and messy. Sheppard had their pants down off the hips, his erection rubbing hard on Felix's hip, his right hand wedged between them to stroke and tease. There wasn't much room for creativity, and after Sheppard came, the hot mess sticking and dripping between them, he rolled Felix back to the cold wall, and jacked him with a vicious single-mindedness until he came as well, gasping and coughing.
Gaeta, his fingers roving through the wet, congealing puddle on his stomach, eventually rose his hand to check his watch.
Sheppard who could feel the movement, hear the slight sigh even without seeing the gesture, said, “You're trying to prove my point?”
“I'm trying to fix your ship.” Gaeta crawled over him, closed the hatch and turned to pull his pants back up around his middle.
“You can't fix her. Either can I.”
Gaeta didn't respond. He bent to tie his shoes. He had to keep pretending. He sat in the cockpit for the final three and a half hours. When the raptor came to pick him up, he slid through the connector without hearing another word from Sheppard, who hadn't emerged from his bunk.
On Galactica, he sat back down at Baltar's desk, and turned his mind to the problem of Earth: star systems, religious prophecies, half-spun theories that stretched present navigational capabilities far beyond the fleet's greatest hopes. Gaeta sat, deciphering the notes of humanity's most traitorous son, and despaired for Sheppard's broken ship.
BSG/SGA, spoilers to whatever's recent for BSG, not much of anything for SGA.
Written for opprobrium, who wants A fic in which Gaeta gets the guy. I don't know, perhaps he is assigned temporarily to another ship to help them fix their FTL drive and the ship is captained by a stubborn ex-Viper pilot with crazy hair, a knack for numbers and ferocious loyalty to his ragtag crew. He had lost his genius lover in the original genocide and has been sullen and bitter since. True love ensues and together, via smarts and a death-wish, they destroy the Cylons for good. Le sigh.
If the problem that got him assigned to the Atalanta was a hopeless one, Gaeta found he didn't particularly mind the vacation. Crouched down and peering under the bulkheads that comprised most of the shielding for the inexplicably mute FTL drive, he could still name half a dozen hands better suited to the grease and skinned knuckles that came with actual interaction with the stolid, unfriendly physicality of jump technology. He was more a computer-type technician himself. Still, he was grateful: the man responsible for the uncooperative drive - the one that put in the reluctant request to Galactica for some skilled help in the first place - didn't seem to mind squirming in between folds of metal and dismantling the thing screw by screw. Which he'd insisted he'd done twice already. Gaeta had to insist, though, on one more hard boot, and he rocked back onto his heels and waited for a decisive comment, trying to aim the flashlight helpfully.
“Yeah. That's it, I'd say.” Atalanta's pilot - narrow and notably unwashed due to civilian rationing, water, food and otherwise - twisted onto his elbow to squint back along the length of his body at Gaeta. The generator whirred up to a low hum above their heads. “You mind?”
Gaeta averted the light, and tried to look a little more interested. “We're going to have to assume it's the nav computer, then. I mean, look at her: she's breathing, but not thinking.”
Captain Sheppard didn't do much past lift a pained eyebrow at the statement and crawl ass backwards out from the work hole. He stood, wiping his hands uselessly on a pair of grubby utility pants that Gaeta couldn't help but register as admiralty-issued, if a little worn. He tried to mimic Sheppard's natural stoop under the low ceiling with little success, and gestured toward the cockpit, a bare twenty feet away on the little sloop, but still a good half dozen twists and turns through halls and hatches. The Atalanta was a long-range science vessel, built to float around collecting data as quiet as an insect, jumping back to home systems every month or so for refueling and information offload, and so she was built as efficient and ugly as anything military Gaeta had ever seen. Looking at wear and tear alone, she could be older than Galactica, easy. She was on her last legs, at any rate.
With Sheppard waiting for a prognosis, Gaeta tried to lead the conversation out of the hot, close little engine room: “I just needed to double check there weren't any hardware problems, loose wires, you know, connections,” he said. “Now we can move on to the probable issues - nav, comm, any number of standard system misfires.”
“Yeah, you went over her, alright. Fine-toothed comb.” Sheppard uncrossed his arms and ducked out the hatch. Gaeta followed him out into the corridor, nodding at the young woman and child pressed politely into the pantry - literally a two foot by two foot shelf space indented off the causeway. Sheppard didn't introduce them, nor the collection of older children visible through a partition, lounging in the sleeping berths, but Gaeta nodded and waved, half-smiling.
The relative spaciousness of the cockpit/observatory was a relief, and Gaeta selected the co-pilot's chair without half a thought: with access to monitoring programs, the last few hundred systems checks and the useless banks of information regarding space dust and solar radiation in a few backwater quadrants off Scorpia, he could at least sort through the ship's internal complaints. He leaned into the computer, starting with simple queries and progressing upwards with ever-increasing specificity. It took a bit, and eventually he looked over his should to register Sheppard loitering in the hatchway. He waved him in to sit down. “It's going to ask you for permission to run some of these - they'll fuss with the DRADIS and the sensors will reset. Say yes.”
Sheppard sat, dutifully entering his ID. The screens flickered, went blank, and then acknowledged the start of the long reset process. Gaeta felt confident. At least he'd be able to tell exactly which systems were hopeless. “So she's your ship?”
Sheppard was watching the load bar, looking a little unthrilled. “Nine years, now.”
“You were out on assignment then? I mean, during the attack.” Not an unpopular question: how come you aren't dead? One sometimes asked with hostility, or blame. Gaeta always found himself just curious, ready to marvel at cruel fortune.
“Yeah, we were refuelling when the first wave hit.” Something of a pause, and Sheppard looked absent when he continued. “We docked for maybe half an hour off Sagitarron: food, tylium. Lone raider blew the anchorage right out from under us. Dumb luck I didn't go with it. Took the plating off her belly.”
Gaeta nodded, sympathetic and optimistic in the same way he would've been three years ago if someone had told him they'd lost their job, defaulted on their mortgage one month. “You were lucky, having your family on board. Not a lot of people-”
Sheppard cut him off. His tone didn't let much loose. “They aren't my family. Refugees off the Gideon. I had the room, since my crew blew up with the fuel station.”
Gaeta shut his mouth. A few seconds later he managed, “I'm sorry,” and then scowled at himself and down at the screen. Everyone had stories like that. Relatives separated because they went to wash their hands thirty seconds before the attack, children lost in terminals, ships frozen and torn to bits by flights of raiders while the luckier ones jumped away, passengers gaping at fellow tourists, fellow citizens, in terror and shock.
“The comm system check is complete.” Sheppard said, after a while.
“I know, I'll have to cross-check with a few others before I can start isolating discrepancies.” Gaeta went back to the keyboard, watching the screens and occasionally making a reminder note or two on a piece of scrap paper torn out of his pocket.
“Up on Galactica, you must've been losing people every day for a while.”
Gaeta glanced over to Sheppard, who hadn't much changed his position, leaning backwards with his hands behind his head, long legs stretched out under the console. “A lot, yeah.” He said, conversational, “Viper pilots mostly, regularly. We took a few hits - I'm sure you, I mean, the press gave off some statistics retroactively afterwards - there was that one hit right in the first wave, a lot of good deckhands went with that. Familiar faces, you know?”
“Yeah.”
Gaeta tried to imagine the crew the man had lost. A handful of people, low turnover for a job like theirs, because no one with portside obligations would've ever signed up in the first place. Scientists and explorers, trampling out the last few wild spots in the solar systems, surveying out mining ops or travel hazards, but really looking for some high science. Always keeping an ear out for something strange or disturbing. Bored as all hell, knowing the only thing lonelier, more desperate would've been living out your life stuck on just one planet.
Galactica checked in an hour after the reports finished running, when Gaeta had already mired himself in a stew of hardcopy, and only just managed to get Sheppard to dig him up a calculator out of the dead co-pilot's things.
“I would say another four hours if we're lucky and hit it right off.” He reported, trying to sound as if the prospect was as likely as not.
“And if we aren't lucky?” Helo crackled back.
“A good eight. Ten at most. We aren't dealing with a Battlestar here, old little boats like these don't exactly speak English, or say please and thank you when there's something wrong them.” Gaeta winced a little even as the words came out of his mouth. He could picture the old man and Helo exchanging sideways looks at his bitching, or glee, or whatever it was he was expressing. Both. “It'll take a few more hours of going through the codes, anyway, sir. To know.”
“Baltar's lab will be waiting for you, Lieutenant.” Helo reminded him, “Along with the entire fleet. Report back in the morning, we'll send over a mechanic if we can spare one off the birds.”
“Yessir.” Gaeta switched off the comm and caught a look from Sheppard.
“They miss you much over there?”
“No.” Gaeta said immediately, thinking of his solitary meals, the less and less frequent, but still present, death threats and intimidations. Sheppard's eyebrows rose in the faintest hint of offense at the retort, and Gaeta rose his hands. “And yes. They need someone to go through Baltar's notes. That isn't to say they like me.”
Evidently mollified, Sheppard snorted. “New Capricans. A year's worth of planet-living and you evolve into a whole other species of petty.”
Gaeta, jaw slack at the offhand dismissal of the past year's universal torture and deprivation, looked over at a very mildly smirking Sheppard, who was absently reconciling spare algorithms and refusing to look up. The man continued: “Didn't they just publish your name as, what, one of the sole reasons humanity still struggles on? I mean, right below Adama. Hero of the Resistance, feeding misinformation to the Cylon oppressors and smooth-talking children and women out of the prisons. Leaving priceless tactical intelligence under a dogbowl. They practically wrote an epic ballad about you, Lieutenant Felix Gaeta.”
Gaeta was having trouble finding the joke. He stared at the captain, the deep circles under his eyes and the wreck of dirty hair. He could see three year's worth of insomnia in the jawline and pallid skin. He felt sorry for the man, and his year alone in the cold black. “Yeah, well. They must've wrote that after they sentenced me to death via airlock.”
“So you're lucky to be over here, then.” Sheppard smirked straight at him, stood, and stretched. “I'll at least offer you a meal for your troubles.”
They ate their foil-wrapped rations in the cockpit, because the silent woman and her collection of yapping children occupied most of the abandoned lab space, which looked to have doubled as the social arena back when the Atalanta had contained a breathing crew. Sheppard seemed pretty much dead set on avoiding the horde, and Gaeta said nothing to upset the arrangement, barely even rose from his seat before he was settled back down, masticating the horse-glue and fibre concoction with little enjoyment.
Sheppard noticed. “So what do they feed you military types, instant eggs, instant potatoes? Gelatin, I bet, and lots of it.”
“Yeah, we're regular aristocrats up there.” Gaeta said around his mouthful of half-melted plastic.
“I'd take it. Any day.”
“So you were military for a while?” Gaeta voiced his untested theory with his eyebrows raised politely, watching Sheppard for signs of insult.
He didn't get much of a rise. “I was a pilot on Solaria for a few years before my contract expired. Got out quick, earned myself a discounted lease on this boat.” He paused to breath, chewing with his mouth open. “Almost wish I'd stayed - canned corn sounds pretty much gourmet at this point.”
Gaeta pushed harder. “If you stayed in service you would've died in orbit around Tauron, along with a hundred thousand other pilots.”
“I heard. Floating like so much driftwood.” Sheppard looked over the Atalanta's stubby nose, at the rest of the fleet, near and distant. “Preferable, maybe.”
“So why aren't you training for Galactica now? As few vipers as we have, we still don't have enough pilots to fly them.” Gaeta got his feet up under him, computers and ship half-forgotten as his voice rose.
Sheppard, habitual smirk back in place, shook his head. “What did I say? I said I wish the food was better. Doesn't mean I'm going to start turning fancy tricks for Commander Adama.” Gaeta, shocked a little silent at the venom in his voice, drew breath to retort. Sheppard cut him off: “You try to find me something worth protecting - out of all the humanity we have left, ships or civilization or whatever you want - and I bet that I die of old age before you can put it in front of me.” Sheppard stood, brushing smudges of resin off his shirt, and left him alone.
For a while, Gaeta sat in the silence of the ship's calculations, the faltering murmur of her close presence. There were hiccups, interruptions in her burble of information. He worked a bit, looked at the time. He'd be back on board Galactica in a few hours, and Tyrol would send some knuckledragger with a crowbar to shape up the drive, before they all gave up and abandoned the old boat to her fate as a weightless scrapheap. And they'd send the refugees back to the Gideon, and press Sheppard into service as a pilot, so he could fulfil his death wish to humanity's best advantage.
Gaeta found the man in his berth: lying on his back, staring at the bunk above. He looked a mournful cross between a young boy, stargazing, and a veteran pilot working his way out of a drunk. Gaeta, unacknowledged, stood over him. He crouched down on his heels. He leaned in, and kissed him through the cloth on his shoulder. Something of an apology.
In the bunk, behind the curtain or tucked up in the slats overhead, there were no pictures of the dead crew, the dead lover who had doubtless pushed for the end to Sheppard's military career in the first place. Sheppard lay staring at blank grey fixtures. Gaeta crawled in, awkward, hunched, and careful of his knees, and Sheppard rolled over to press him up against the cold metal wall, mouth hard and hands harder as they pushed and rubbed. The hatchway was open, so the curtain was pulled closed, and brave fingers found purchase even as clothing got rucked out of the way and zippers came loose. Their breath stank of the plastic rations, and their dry lips, dry skin, dry hands got slicked with spit and pulled ineffectively at each other, wet and messy. Sheppard had their pants down off the hips, his erection rubbing hard on Felix's hip, his right hand wedged between them to stroke and tease. There wasn't much room for creativity, and after Sheppard came, the hot mess sticking and dripping between them, he rolled Felix back to the cold wall, and jacked him with a vicious single-mindedness until he came as well, gasping and coughing.
Gaeta, his fingers roving through the wet, congealing puddle on his stomach, eventually rose his hand to check his watch.
Sheppard who could feel the movement, hear the slight sigh even without seeing the gesture, said, “You're trying to prove my point?”
“I'm trying to fix your ship.” Gaeta crawled over him, closed the hatch and turned to pull his pants back up around his middle.
“You can't fix her. Either can I.”
Gaeta didn't respond. He bent to tie his shoes. He had to keep pretending. He sat in the cockpit for the final three and a half hours. When the raptor came to pick him up, he slid through the connector without hearing another word from Sheppard, who hadn't emerged from his bunk.
On Galactica, he sat back down at Baltar's desk, and turned his mind to the problem of Earth: star systems, religious prophecies, half-spun theories that stretched present navigational capabilities far beyond the fleet's greatest hopes. Gaeta sat, deciphering the notes of humanity's most traitorous son, and despaired for Sheppard's broken ship.