fic: Sounds Mute and Silenced
Fic: Sounds Mute and Silenced
Fandom: BSG with a dash of SGA
Pairing: Felix Gaeta/John Sheppard
Spoilers: BSG: Crossroads II/SGA: none
Rating: sex, the odd fistfight and some serious musings.
Summary:There are two things Felix Gaeta wants - now that he knows he can never clear his name or his conscience in the eyes of humanity's last vestiges - one is to kill Gaius Baltar, and the other is to show John Sheppard the one thing left still worth protecting.
Notes: A continuation of The Drowning Bell, which has been a long, long time in coming. 6400 words, give or take.
I.
When Gaeta woke up in sick bay, one eye swollen mostly shut and with the dim ringing of a medicated concussion faint in his ears, the armed marine standing over the bed told him that he'd better shape up, because the Admiral wanted to see him.
The old man must have sensed his guilt, because even through the fog of low-dose painkillers, Gaeta heard no admonishments. A coded comment on the sucker punch that'd knocked him out cold - functionally an apology, though not in so many words - and a rehashing of the circumstances that disallowed him from offering Gaeta relief from his CIC duties, so he could better utilize what guidance Baltar had managed to give. And how still - still - redoubled efforts would not be amiss. “You're the only one who can get us home, now, Mr. Gaeta,” the old man dismissed him.
In the corridor outside, his escort released to other functions, Gaeta knew he'd been spared for one reason only. Whatever they believed about his motives on New Caprica, whatever they thought of him and Baltar, all of Galactica was now his prison.
II.
He still ate alone in the mess. Now they had algae bricks, steamed up and served with the acrid recycled water, and no one was starving to death or madness, but he still avoided the shift change rush and Kara Thrace. Three days before he'd tossed his sheet aside and thrown on his uniform and talked his way past the marine standing outside Baltar's cell, he'd lingered too long while eating, and had been cornered when the daily CAP briefing let out.
He'd had no recourse but to duck his head and curl his arm around his partitioned tray - wet algae, dry algae, ketchup - as a half dozen pilots sauntered in like so many feral barn cats. Pack predators, vicious, half of them had shouldered past him in the corridors, laughing, or seized his forearm and hissed explicit condemnations. He could feel Thrace's self-righteous glare on him from across the room - like the bitch blamed him for all of her personal failings - and it sparked his own sense of injustice enough to make him set his jaw, raise his chin, look her in the eye.
Instead, his eyes found Sheppard's. The man was paused at the end of the bar, tray in hand, looking like he'd been set there by the gods and damned if he'd move his feet before a second apocalypse moved them for him. The pilots filtered by him, finding seats at the tables around Starbuck's, and Sheppard just looked back at Gaeta long enough to let a frown deepen the lines around his mouth before he turned into a corner and sat with his own head bowed, his own arm curled around the algae.
Gaeta's stomach turned a sick twist, half misery, half frightened resolve. Four months since they'd met, spoken, since he'd dropped a hint or two around Major Adama, since Sheppard had been assigned a rack in the pilot's quarters, a bird to fly. Four months of complete silence. As the bragging and cursing got louder, a female voice doused with vindication leading the rest, Gaeta dumped his tray and left.
III.
The night he'd tried to kill Baltar he'd gone to find Sheppard, first. Seeing him in the mess had done bad things to him. Guilt kept him awake so he was a dead man for his CIC shifts, and useless at the star charts. He thought about the ancient, decrepit Atalanta, how she'd been scavenged and abandoned like he'd predicted, how he hadn't been able to fix her, hadn't been able to keep Sheppard independent in the air. He thought about the nebulous star cluster, and how she'd never have made it through, how Sheppard would've been lost in that blinding, holy expanse had he remained a civilian. Instead, he'd piloted a raptor, and guided four ships through himself. Four, even though he'd lost Celadon on his fourth run, and been grounded for the fifth. Four, because on the first run he'd found Hot Dog's Adriatic and brought her home himself.
Gaeta's own part in all of that didn't bear much thinking about.
So in the middle of the late watch, when most of Galactica lay dormant, he'd gone to find Sheppard, guilt-wracked, sick and desperate for something he'd felt aboard the little science ship, in the shadows of a grey cot devoid of accessory or personality. A reminder, that was what he wanted, even as he knew Sheppard would tell him no such thing existed.
He found him on the hangar deck, going over his freshly landed bird with one of the young kids, a dead man's callsign - Ares - printed in faded letters under her glassy eyes. Gaeta hung back, watched as Sheppard mostly ignored the kid with the checklists, setting aside his helmet and cracking open her side plating himself. The kid hovered around, asked a question, two, didn't get a response, looked annoyed and hopeful at the same time, looked back down at his clipboard and fiddled with his tool harness.
Gaeta came forward, then, with Sheppard's green gaze safely directed into the innards of this new, inadequate replacement ship, and waved off the deckhand. Self-conscious, he buttoned, and unbuttoned the jacket over his tanks. Gods, he swore to himself, cleared his throat.
Sheppard looked over his shoulder, elbow deep in engine, and paused. “Can I help you, Lieutenant?” he sounded like any of the others did, inconvenienced by a bureaucrat. His hair was sodden, and sweat ran down the back of his neck, caught in the dogtag chain. His flightsuit was rucked down around his hips. Gaeta had taken four months to try and smother memories that Sheppard obviously didn't welcome, either. Memories that lingered over the press of those hips, hands rough with grease and metal. The briefest flicker of human warmth in the cold vast black. So here he was.
“I have something that I need you to look at.” He couldn't keep his eyes from flicking away, couldn't stop from looking down and over Sheppard's body. Fitter now, hair regrown after the radiation poisoning had run its course, musculature almost restored since the food shortage emaciated him, a walking skeleton.
“I'm busy this week,” Sheppard trained his gaze back into the bird's belly.
“It's not something that can wait.” Gaeta pressed him, stepped forward to regain his attention. Couldn't he just look, couldn't he just figure it out by looking at him? Gaeta was not a man who willingly painted himself desperate.
Sheppard did not look, but growled into the innards, “You aren't in a position to be asking favours, Lieutenant.”
“This isn't a favour. Trust me, this is the entire fleet, this is our future -”
Sheppard cut him off, and hands slathered in grease warm as blood grabbed his collar, forced him up against the curve of the hull. Gaeta's skull cracked against metal. He scanned the deck, but the kid had disappeared somewhere, and no one else cared. Sheppard's voice was muted, hissing with anger. “I don't trust you, Lieutenant. You had them draft me, you had them tear my ship into scrap. Don't talk to me about a future for the people, when they're holding me prisoner here so I can protect them.”
Gaeta scrabbled against the pilot's bare arms, slipping and choking where fists pressed against his throat. “Something worth protecting,” he retorted, his own voice cracking. “Isn't that what you asked for? On Atalanta?”
Sheppard dropped his hands, stepped away, his eyes suddenly dark, “No such thing.” He turned back to his ship, and Gaeta, cold with guilt, felt a strange relief - a conviction - in hearing those words. When he left the hangar deck, he headed for the cell where Baltar slept.
IV.
The death threats, which had almost stopped, started up again with terrifying violence. A civilian tried to knife him on his way between the head and his rack the night after word got out. If she'd been any larger than Dee, he wouldn't have been able to stop her. Instead he broke her wrist and turned away so she wouldn't see him raise his hand to his mouth and start to sob.
Serving Baltar during his presidency had made the Fleet think he was an opportunist and a coward. Trying to kill Baltar - now, under these circumstances when he could be of so much help to them all, willing or no - made the Fleet think he was the true collaborator, the Cylon pet, the genocidal monster.
He asked leave to give up his rack and move a cot into Baltar's lab, which was at least more secure than a sheet and a curtain. He didn't leave very often, as the old man - with Tigh pushing for an airlocking all the way, no doubt - had finally found a replacement for his CIC shifts.
Dee brought him food, but made it seem like she'd just stopped by to chat, brought some things from the mess as an afterthought. He knew she hated being by herself in her quarters almost as much as he did - the unheard-of luxury of privacy on this ship was actually the loneliest cage either had ever stepped into. He'd try to talk small like they used to, when she was still a rookie from Sagitarron who blushed when the pilots talked dirty and he was still trying to decide whether he wanted a doctorate or his major's brass more. But there were two subjects that both refused to touch on: her marriage, and his time on New Caprica.
Gaeta did not spend the time, imprisoned and quarantined as he was, fruitfully. He found himself sleeping twelve, fourteen hours at a time, littered in notes and papers, staring at calculations and losing track of all meaning, all purpose. For a while he almost convinced himself it would be better if he emptied his bladder into cups and bottles, rather than risk the trip to the head. He had no guards posted to escort him - he had to wait for the late watch, when the greatest percentage of people were asleep. But the split was fairly even and he'd get scared hearing the lowest echo down the corridor. Still, he forced himself to do it, to make the trip, if only to keep some semblance of humanity about him.
He thought about Baltar. He thought about the man's genius, the casual flick of the pen that had summarily negated months worth of work on the course to Earth. He thought about the pen in the man's throat, and looked at his hands, and wondered where Doctor/Major Felix Gaeta had gone, and who had replaced him as his future.
V.
Eventually, Sheppard came.
The knock on the hatch sent adrenaline through his recluse's veins: louder, more aggressive and demanding than Dee's casual tap. He had no weapons. His only protection was that hatch, and there was nothing else should he choose to open it. How could he? He saw Kara Thrace standing there, sidearm in hand; Saul Tigh, drunk and backed by a half dozen marines; any number of murdering civilians, deckhands, NCOs, pilots, marines, recruits. They'd all kill him, any of them.
“It's Sheppard,” came the impatient voice through a half foot of metal.
Gaeta felt himself relax, although he knew he had no good reason to. Without hesitation, he spun loose and swung open the hatch. Sheppard stepped in, made a face at what Gaeta guessed was the even more pronounced smell of stale, recycled air in the cell. He didn't say anything, though, and watched as Gaeta immediately, compulsively, sealed the entryway.
They both paused, and Gaeta ran a hand through his hair, reached to button up his uniform, and found himself in his tanks. He frowned in embarrassment, coughed. “Would you like to sit down?” He gestured at the single chair, and moved to pour some of the even staler water into a cup. Sheppard waved a negating hand, leaned instead on the lab's steel workstation, looking over the morass of notes written in two hands. He didn't look up.
“This is a nice spot. Like your own little island.” Sheppard looked up, but not quite at him, then down again just as quickly. Gaeta realized, with a bit of a jolt, that he'd been drinking. Sheppard opened his mouth and kept talking at the countertop. “So last night Starbuck comes back to her rack pissed on gutrot - I don't know where that husband of hers got to - but she comes back, calling his name and giggling and falling over everything. And I'm flying CAP in two hours so I tell her to shut it, and she starts coming back with this top dog bullshit, calling me out, telling me I'm gonna have to earn a callsign sometime, so why not right now.” He shook his head heavily, looking up almost by accident. “If I wanted drunk whores coming on to me, don't you think I'd be over on that pleasure boat, paying in pain meds with the rest of them? Instead I have my CAG's second in command acting like screwing me is gonna make her a better pilot.”
“Captain Thrace has always been aggressive,” Gaeta heard himself say, sounding suddenly like the mindless toaster skinjob he was sometimes rumoured to be.
Sheppard looked back at him, a retort obvious on his lips, but instead he just smirked, shook his head. Gaeta saw the smile, disbelieving, and for a moment they laughed, quietly, together.
Sheppard straightened, traced a finger over a long equation. “You know I knew a man once who could've helped you with these.”
“I need help,” Gaeta admitted. He sat down on his cot, set his elbows on his knees. “I thought - since you were a scientist,”
“A pilot.” Sheppard corrected, “McKay was always the scientist.”
“But you worked closely with them, and you found your way through the outer systems just fine.”
Sheppard didn't respond. He reached for the glass of still water and drank from it in long swallows.
“This is what I meant, you know, when I said that I had something worth your time, worth fighting the Cylons for.” Felix watched as the other man put down the glass, came around the corner of the workbench. “Hope,” he suggested, in a small voice.
“It's not why I'm here,” Sheppard dropped to his haunches before him, balance perfect even though Felix could smell, on his breath, the same gutrot that had inspired Captain Thrace.
“John,” Felix tried the name that he'd read on the register, foreign on his tongue, foreign enough to the man in front of him to soften the kiss to something almost gentle. The palms braced on the mattress moved to his waist and shoulders as John leaned forward from his crouch between Felix's knees into a kneel.
Confused, but very averse to questioning the human warmth of John's mouth, it nearly broke him to murmur “Why, then?” into the nearest ear. John's hands kept moving, pushed up at his tanks, down at his slacks, ran up and down his thigh with urgency. John's mouth traced a trail down his throat, and he nudged and pulled until Felix was close enough, hard enough, to grind against through the frustrating stretch of their uniforms.
And then John was tugging at his belt, at Felix's buttons, kicking off shoes and shucking layers of blue and grey with insistent fingers. Crawling forward, onto him, pushing him down onto the mattress and straddling him, pinning him down at the shoulders. Rubbing and jacking himself through his shorts, seizing Felix's hand and making him rub it, while he ground his ass hard down against Felix's own cock. Neither of them able to keep to any sort of rhythm, neither of them doing much but catching moans in their throats, because it'd been four months since they'd even found this place, this warmth, to begin with, and how could they have been so stupid ?
So John paused, long enough to flip Felix over, tug down the last scraps of standard-issue grey, slick up his cock with spit and rub its length in the exposed cleft, stroking and squeezing even as Felix grabbed hold of himself underneath and, raising himself a bit on his knees, started a rocking cadence that had John coming in ropes along his spine in half a minute.
There was a moment then, while Felix twisted his head against the sheets to look over his shoulder, when John let something like a gasp, a shuddered prayer, die in his throat. In under a second, though, he was crawling over Felix, stretching the lengths of their bodies out together, cradling his head with one arm and reaching around to finish him off with the other.
Felix resisted. “You didn't answer my question.”
John, taller and stronger and a sight more determined, forced him still and started stroking and talking simultaneously. His voice was low, calm. Words slipped into Felix's ear straight from the vocal chords, “You said he was humanity's future, and then you tried to kill him. In the same night, Felix. I don't know what that makes you.” His hand was as steady, insistent as his voice. “I thought it might mean you'd given up. I got scared.”
“What,” asked Felix, through a groan, “What about-”
John hushed him, a nip at the jaw line, a wet exploration back to the ear. His hand increased the pace, the pressure, and Felix was suddenly coming, unintelligent, helpless. John confessed: “I found something worth protecting.”
VI.
Eating together in the mess, even as silent and guarded as they were, was an unexpected pleasure. He caught Dee glancing their way, once, as she sat at an empty table, and he saw her smile to herself before Major Adama sat down with two trays and a glass of red-dyed sugar drink that no one else in the room had access to.
That was the thing about Sheppard: he sat down to meals whenever he felt like it, never so much as glancing at a clock, much less calculating patrol rosters. He never looked around, never acknowledged anyone else in the corridors or even at the table, if the mess was particularly busy. Gaeta followed his lead, not any less afraid of being knifed, but buoyed and warmed by the fact that he wasn't alone. That, and Sheppard would probably return whatever violence came their way in much, much greater proportions. That thought, which came with its own guilty pleasure, made the risk seem worthwhile.
The risk, though, always boiled back down to Starbuck. She was on Sheppard, always, like her great, terrifying swath of self-hatred had to have an outlet, and with Kat dead and Apollo playing at fidelity again, there was only him. She hated his talent, that much was obvious, with the constant taunting during training runs, the blunt provocations that would've so easily led to an out and out dogfight if Sheppard had cared at all. So she hated his reticence, too, his complete and utter apathy when it came to her reputation, the pilot's pecking order, their holy callsigns. On the comms, Gaeta had never heard Sheppard call any of them by name, referring to his wingmen by their positions if necessary: left wing, lead, or just 'pilot' if someone was doing something particularly stupid. His voice, over the radio, was cold and curt. It reminded Gaeta of the freezing black, and of the distance between them.
They were sitting after the early watch, eating in silence and not looking anywhere, even at each other, although a quarter of an hour ago Sheppard had been bracing Gaeta against Baltar's workstation while he sucked a new supernova into existence, one that travelled up Gaeta's spine in white hot waves. Still, they shovelled refined algae into their mouths, Gaeta preparing himself to go back to the lab and resume work on the new figures that Sheppard had come up with, pre-coitus, while Sheppard would report for duty on the flight deck and probably fly someone else's CAP before heading back to his rack.
Starbuck pulled up a chair, red drink in hand, smirking. “Lieutenant,” she tipped the glass to Sheppard, took a gulp. “You seem to have a lot of free time for a man who didn't report for duty two hours ago.”
Sheppard didn't even pause in his chewing, he sawed another piece off his brick, reached for the ketchup. “I wasn't scheduled for duty two hours ago.”
“Last minute changes, you should've checked the roster,” she set the plastic cup down, folded her arms on the table. Gaeta remembered her posture the day they'd decided to airlock him, and he was chilled. He hated this woman more than anyone else in the Fleet, more than anyone he'd ever known before or after the holocaust.
“Captain, if you've decided to start screwing around with Major Adama's schedule, it's your duty to inform those affected.” Gaeta sounded like a bureaucrat, he knew that, he knew she didn't respect it, but until recently he had lived by the regulations she so enjoyed flouting, and he had no other choice but to remind her.
Starbuck tilted her chin, glanced sideways at him, then laughed a toothy, delighted laugh in Sheppard's face. “Oh, Lieutenant, your little lover is killing me here.” The smile evaporated. “Shut him up.”
Sheppard didn't respond, but he did look at her, finally, shoddy metal utensils poised in hand.
“Captain, if you want to make a formal complaint about Lieutenant Sheppard's absence today, I suggest you start filling out the reprimand forms,” Gaeta continued.
“Ah, because you are so good with forms,” Starbuck nodded, raising her voice. “Did you submit one before you shoved that pen in Baltar's neck, Gaeta? What was your official justification for trying to murder an unarmed prisoner: protecting your own worthless ass?”
Gaeta had no answer for that, but Sheppard did. He stood up, pushing his chair back from the table, and as Starbuck turned to rise as well, he dealt out a right hook that snapped her head back and pushed her body sprawling into the table behind. Instantly, everyone who'd been watching covertly before was on their feet, and the rest of the diners were slack-jawed, gaping. From the floor, Starbuck kicked out Sheppard's knee, and he staggered, only half blocking another kick to the groin before she was back up, wiping the tears from her swelling left eye. She feinted a left jab, and then threw herself forward, three rapid punches all aimed for his face. She was on him, too close, and he snaked an arm around so quick that no one saw how he'd gotten her in a half nelson. But there she was, and he was behind her, hammering her in the ribs with one fist, and pushing her head down till she was gasping. The look on his face left no doubt as to whether or not he was about to break her neck.
Three pilots were on him, and Major Adama was shouting, throwing himself into it, too, and Starbuck was roaring death and bloody revenge as soon as they'd pried him off her. Immediately, Sheppard's hands rose in truce to the peacemakers. He backed off as far as they'd let him. Gaeta, shoved by the crowd of sweaty, bare-armed soldiers, didn't even try to get to him. He watched as Apollo delivered a lecture to the two of them, too fraught with emotion to be credible, and found himself turning away with the dispersing crowd.
Again, Dee caught his eye. She looked probably as sick and scared as he did.
VII.
Major Adama caught him in the corridor outside the CIC, only a few days after he'd started taking shifts as Officer of the Watch again. Gaeta snapped him a salute, folding away his reports and papers, and trying to look more professional than his exhaustion allowed.
Lee didn't have much patience for it. He was an exhausted man himself.
“I don't know about this pilot of yours, Lieutenant,” he waved a hand at the clipboard he was carrying, “He's good in the air, but as far as the roster goes, no one trusts him. No one wants to fly wing to a sociopath.”
Gaeta kept his mouth closed. They flew just fine with Thrace.
Adama shifted his weight, uncomfortable. “You knew about Sheppard, when he was flying like a maniac through the star cluster. You warned me then. So can you explain him now?”
“Explain what, exactly, Major?” Gaeta was astonished at the tone he took. He'd meant it as a genuine question, but Adama's head came back like a threatened dog's.
“I'll ground him. Piloting may look like a solitary business, but it's not. Alright? Sheppard is becoming a liability, not because of his skills - it's his attitude.”
That was mighty funny, coming from a man who'd been jailed, demoted, accused of treason and mutiny. Especially when the only reason he kept bouncing back up to the top was his father's well-hidden nepotistic soft spot. Lee Adama might feel guilty, in his role as the right hand of the autocracy their society had disintegrated into, but he sure played it to perfection. The good guy, brave and righteous in all of his risks and stunts. The voices on the wireless still referred to him as a demi-god, golden Apollo. Gaeta knew he ranked monstrous in comparison.
He lowered his voice to a hiss, and leaned in, pushing Adama back a step with his intensity. “Ground him, he'd love that. But get him off Galactica, before Thrace provokes him to another fight. They'll kill each other. They're pit bulls, they want blood, both of them.”
He knew, because he felt it, too. Baltar, Tigh, Thrace. He thought of the scraps of the Atalanta and he wanted to throw up. He thought of what Sheppard had tried to do to himself in the blinding expanse of the star cluster - starving himself and leaving the food for Gaeta, flying anyway, as canny and insane as an addict through the glare of a million half-born suns - and he wanted to die, too.
Adama didn't cow, just thrust his jaw and backed off. “It's more for his safety than hers, I'd say.”
“The bitch has a lot of friends,” Gaeta muttered, and turned away, ignoring whatever loyalties registered on the other man's face.
VIII.
In Baltar's lab, they didn't speak. Sheppard's transfer was less a transfer and more a prison sentence: a stint stacking bullets on the munitions plant, for an amount of time yet to be determined. Read: permanent. Gaeta stared at star charts without seeing them, Sheppard lay on the rack with one hand trailing on the floor. His eyelids lowered to slits. He breathed evenly, but shallow. He sounded like an old dog, wheezing.
Gaeta imagined a precise, small explosion on the floor; or exposure to some chemical that would eat up his insides in a way that baffled the doctors, almost like he'd ate it on his algae brick; or just a simple incident with the simplest of weapons. A utility knife. A sidearm sent in for refurbishment. Gaeta didn't imagine that a ship with the working population of a battlestar, half the floorspace and twice the machinery would really suit Sheppard's need for isolation all that well. But, if he didn't like the hours or his supervisor, that ship - more than any other assignment - could provide a means of escape.
He couldn't recall the words he'd said to the Major without wishing he'd been born mute, maybe with a club foot so the military would never have let him in in the first place. He'd be dead in Caprica City, a half-finished dissertation on his desk.
Gaeta didn't imagine that his extreme morbidness was healthy, either. Lately, means of escape was all he ever thought about. Sometimes it involved stealing a Raptor and heading in a straight line till they ran out of air or fuel. Sometimes it was more elaborate, or more simple.
Sheppard sat up. “I guess we better finish this off before I go, huh?”
Gaeta looked over. What was there to finish? They'd barely accomplished anything. The Eye of Jupiter had been a decent landmark, and the jumps to the Ionian Nebula were good and plotted, part of his CIC duties. But past that, they were left with a lot of space and very little to work with. He was not the President, to have faith in signs and portents, sudden revelations upon their arrival at one gas cloud among a billion. Once they were there, the way to Earth wouldn't be any clearer. Baltar had given him a wealth of negatives and rejections with a few quick strokes of his pen, but Gaeta wasn't even sure he could read the equations anymore. It felt like most of his brain had seeped out with what was left of his dignity. And Sheppard was a pilot and a navigator, it was true. Rodney had been the scientist. Certainly Felix had found that out. Really. What was left?
Gaeta watched Sheppard get up and move over to the workbench, stiff and slow. He'd be gone in a few hours, on the next transport run between Galactica and Atropos. A steady finger selected one of their potentials from more than thirty others, all shattering out in a spiderweb of directions. “In what, twenty-odd jumps we'll reach the nebula. They'll want something. Give them this one.”
Gaeta snorted, looked at the lines marking Sheppard's forehead and lining his mouth. He knew there was no joke, here. But he couldn't set the entire fleet running in a straight line, waiting for the air to get stale.
“I have a feeling,” said Sheppard. And Gaeta looked at the various read-outs, the sinuous, faint lines that demarcated thousands of light years of travel, leading to gods knew what blackness in the end. “It's also the only one that makes any sense. You should bring it to Baltar.”
“I'll bring it to his execution.” Felix stood up, paced the three steps to the opposite wall. “Maybe he'll sign off on it before they push him out the airlock.”
Sheppard licked his lips. “I have a flight to catch.” He was out of uniform, back into the ragged greys he'd worn on Atalanta. Back to being ex-military.
Gaeta watched him stand, look around at the cot and papers and unused machinery, go to the hatch. Sheppard hadn't even mentioned the transfer. On early watch, Dee had handed Gaeta the day's personnel log once it had been signed off by the Admiral. Otherwise, he'd have barely known before the man was gone.
Gaeta nodded. And they parted ways without looking at each other again, silent.
IX.
When Starbuck threw herself face-first into the brick wall pressure of the blue gas giant, Gaeta didn't feel much of anything, besides the reflected shock and grief thrown off the glaring surface of the entire CIC, emanating centrally from the Admiral himself. He didn't even have the self-righteousness to feel satisfied that the problem pilot had finally torn herself apart. Mostly because she'd taken out the fleet's nerve centre along with her. At times, people - professionals, soldiers - would act like the world had ended all over again, and he'd try to smirk to himself, but end up aghast.
When Tigh got bumped off the roster for being drunk and crazy and a public embarrassment, and Helo replaced him - a model of sobriety and clear-headedness - Gaeta could at least manage something closer to pleasure. His hatred of Thrace had been abstract, whereas working day in and day out with Tigh had strung him tighter and tighter. The grating voice and belligerent orders hooked into his skin like insect pincers and tugged constantly. The Colonel had tried to execute him for a traitor, and yet people applauded when he'd come back on deck that first time. This world was insane. But Agathon, at least, was a kindred spirit: a worker, a thinker. A man who would do his duty till the day he died with no hope for change and no reward but a family that the greater population looked upon as an abomination.
And Baltar. Lieutenant Gaeta lied through his teeth to the entire fleet, but as far as he was concerned, the only lie was that he'd been there when Baltar signed the death list. He had no illusions as to what had actually gone on in that moment - but for the judges and the listeners-in he omitted the standard whimpering and rationalizations that came with every sentence Baltar uttered. He wasn't lying, he was telling the truth as he knew it had occurred. He'd seen enough to put the pieces together. And when Baltar lost it, screaming from his seat and upsetting his lawyers and shaking the testimony as best he could, Gaeta felt vindication. He would see this man frozen and turned inside out - not just for his crimes against the last vestiges of humanity, but for his lies and betrayals to Felix personally.
X.
With Helo as XO and Adama playing at lawyering, someone elected Racetrack to be acting CAG. Gaeta had gone to her, personnel list in hand, and said, “Get Sheppard back from the munitions ship, you're shorthanded as it is.”
She hadn't even looked at him, stalking across the deck from bird to bird, looking for the knuckledragger that had half-dismantled the port thruster on Hotdog's viper and then gone for a bathroom break. “I ain't that shorthanded, LT.”
“Yes, you are. You're looking at double shifts as is. Either you promote all your nuggets to flight status next week, or you're handing out stims just to fly the CAP.”
“Apollo grounded him as unfit son of a bitch, and I don't see any reason why my opinion should be any different. Bastard was cold as space and he wouldn't touch cards to save his life.”
“Major Adama isn't around right now. Neither is Helo. Neither is Starbuck. There are your three top-rankers and your two best pilots and you're telling me that you can't use a man with Sheppard's skills?”
“That's exactly what I'm saying, Lieutenant.” Racetrack levelled her gunner's stare at him. “Especially since, as I recall, the Officer of the Watch doesn't have any frakking say in who's flying on my deck.”
“Fine.” Gaeta tossed the sheet at her and held up his hands.
XI.
Three days later Baltar was acquitted and Felix found him roaming the halls with a box of his belongings in his hands. They stopped each other short, Felix on his way to the launch bay to catch a flight to the Atropos to personally inspect their FTL drive before the last jump to the Ionian Nebula. Baltar looked at him with nothing but fear, like he was looking death in the familiar face.
There were a dozen people milling through the corridor, all of them cognisant of this man's identity, this man's crimes. Felix found himself invisible, under the hate that lapped in waves at Baltar's feet. And all he could think of was Baltar's cry in the courtroom, And you missed! Butterfingers! Like that was the worst expletive he could think of, in the face of Felix's perjury, all of the betrayals he had enacted upon Baltar, in the months during and since the Occupation. It occurred to him that perhaps Baltar was not capable of holding the kind of poison in his heart that Felix did. It occurred to him that this man was more pathetic, more terrified than any other he had ever known.
Felix had a pen in his hand, along with the inspection clipboard he carried. He reached out to Baltar, tucked it in the man's shirt pocket. “If you have to use it on someone, try not to miss,” he said, and kept walking.
XII.
Sheppard was dirty, and oily and sweaty. They'd put him on warheads, because he'd been so good with the Viper ordnance. The move made no sense, but it meant that Sheppard wasn't sweating because of the heat. Gaeta took a cursory look around the factory set-up, and told the Atropos' Captain that he needed Sheppard with the FTL drive.
“I got a call from Agathon,” Sheppard muttered as they walked. “They want me back now Thrace is dead.”
“They want you back regardless,” said Gaeta, not making eye contact. He nodded at the mechanic who let them down the ladder into the drive crawlspace. “You want to turn on the lights down here, please? Great. That's all we need. Thanks.”
There was nothing wrong with the munition ship's FTL drive. He'd re-arranged the numbers on the daily report so it looked like they were outside safety parameters, then he'd booked a Raptor for shuttle service, then he'd asked Helo for a favour by making it seem like the only logical decision. He was basically holding up the entire fleet on a thinly-fabricated exaggeration. He thought of Adama's speech at the trial and hoped for forgiveness.
In the crawlspace, which was lit orange, crammed with the various trailing tentacles of the drive and maybe two meters tall at most, he pushed Sheppard up against the coils and put his mouth on his throat. Their hands were everywhere and their teeth knocked together and they both tasted like oil, salt, stale air and nervous exhaustion. On his knees already, Felix hit the metal flooring hard, and grunted as John's bare arms pinned him at the shoulders, thrusting and rubbing. His black, damp hair in Felix's face, his hand in Felix's hair, their entire bodies held together at groin and thigh and chest, pressed like plating, constructed soundly as a bulkhead and near as likely to fall apart.
“We'll find it,” Felix gasped, muttered into the nearest ear, “We'll find earth for them.”
Sheppard didn't look up, but smiled down into orange shadows.
Fandom: BSG with a dash of SGA
Pairing: Felix Gaeta/John Sheppard
Spoilers: BSG: Crossroads II/SGA: none
Rating: sex, the odd fistfight and some serious musings.
Summary:There are two things Felix Gaeta wants - now that he knows he can never clear his name or his conscience in the eyes of humanity's last vestiges - one is to kill Gaius Baltar, and the other is to show John Sheppard the one thing left still worth protecting.
Notes: A continuation of The Drowning Bell, which has been a long, long time in coming. 6400 words, give or take.
I.
When Gaeta woke up in sick bay, one eye swollen mostly shut and with the dim ringing of a medicated concussion faint in his ears, the armed marine standing over the bed told him that he'd better shape up, because the Admiral wanted to see him.
The old man must have sensed his guilt, because even through the fog of low-dose painkillers, Gaeta heard no admonishments. A coded comment on the sucker punch that'd knocked him out cold - functionally an apology, though not in so many words - and a rehashing of the circumstances that disallowed him from offering Gaeta relief from his CIC duties, so he could better utilize what guidance Baltar had managed to give. And how still - still - redoubled efforts would not be amiss. “You're the only one who can get us home, now, Mr. Gaeta,” the old man dismissed him.
In the corridor outside, his escort released to other functions, Gaeta knew he'd been spared for one reason only. Whatever they believed about his motives on New Caprica, whatever they thought of him and Baltar, all of Galactica was now his prison.
II.
He still ate alone in the mess. Now they had algae bricks, steamed up and served with the acrid recycled water, and no one was starving to death or madness, but he still avoided the shift change rush and Kara Thrace. Three days before he'd tossed his sheet aside and thrown on his uniform and talked his way past the marine standing outside Baltar's cell, he'd lingered too long while eating, and had been cornered when the daily CAP briefing let out.
He'd had no recourse but to duck his head and curl his arm around his partitioned tray - wet algae, dry algae, ketchup - as a half dozen pilots sauntered in like so many feral barn cats. Pack predators, vicious, half of them had shouldered past him in the corridors, laughing, or seized his forearm and hissed explicit condemnations. He could feel Thrace's self-righteous glare on him from across the room - like the bitch blamed him for all of her personal failings - and it sparked his own sense of injustice enough to make him set his jaw, raise his chin, look her in the eye.
Instead, his eyes found Sheppard's. The man was paused at the end of the bar, tray in hand, looking like he'd been set there by the gods and damned if he'd move his feet before a second apocalypse moved them for him. The pilots filtered by him, finding seats at the tables around Starbuck's, and Sheppard just looked back at Gaeta long enough to let a frown deepen the lines around his mouth before he turned into a corner and sat with his own head bowed, his own arm curled around the algae.
Gaeta's stomach turned a sick twist, half misery, half frightened resolve. Four months since they'd met, spoken, since he'd dropped a hint or two around Major Adama, since Sheppard had been assigned a rack in the pilot's quarters, a bird to fly. Four months of complete silence. As the bragging and cursing got louder, a female voice doused with vindication leading the rest, Gaeta dumped his tray and left.
III.
The night he'd tried to kill Baltar he'd gone to find Sheppard, first. Seeing him in the mess had done bad things to him. Guilt kept him awake so he was a dead man for his CIC shifts, and useless at the star charts. He thought about the ancient, decrepit Atalanta, how she'd been scavenged and abandoned like he'd predicted, how he hadn't been able to fix her, hadn't been able to keep Sheppard independent in the air. He thought about the nebulous star cluster, and how she'd never have made it through, how Sheppard would've been lost in that blinding, holy expanse had he remained a civilian. Instead, he'd piloted a raptor, and guided four ships through himself. Four, even though he'd lost Celadon on his fourth run, and been grounded for the fifth. Four, because on the first run he'd found Hot Dog's Adriatic and brought her home himself.
Gaeta's own part in all of that didn't bear much thinking about.
So in the middle of the late watch, when most of Galactica lay dormant, he'd gone to find Sheppard, guilt-wracked, sick and desperate for something he'd felt aboard the little science ship, in the shadows of a grey cot devoid of accessory or personality. A reminder, that was what he wanted, even as he knew Sheppard would tell him no such thing existed.
He found him on the hangar deck, going over his freshly landed bird with one of the young kids, a dead man's callsign - Ares - printed in faded letters under her glassy eyes. Gaeta hung back, watched as Sheppard mostly ignored the kid with the checklists, setting aside his helmet and cracking open her side plating himself. The kid hovered around, asked a question, two, didn't get a response, looked annoyed and hopeful at the same time, looked back down at his clipboard and fiddled with his tool harness.
Gaeta came forward, then, with Sheppard's green gaze safely directed into the innards of this new, inadequate replacement ship, and waved off the deckhand. Self-conscious, he buttoned, and unbuttoned the jacket over his tanks. Gods, he swore to himself, cleared his throat.
Sheppard looked over his shoulder, elbow deep in engine, and paused. “Can I help you, Lieutenant?” he sounded like any of the others did, inconvenienced by a bureaucrat. His hair was sodden, and sweat ran down the back of his neck, caught in the dogtag chain. His flightsuit was rucked down around his hips. Gaeta had taken four months to try and smother memories that Sheppard obviously didn't welcome, either. Memories that lingered over the press of those hips, hands rough with grease and metal. The briefest flicker of human warmth in the cold vast black. So here he was.
“I have something that I need you to look at.” He couldn't keep his eyes from flicking away, couldn't stop from looking down and over Sheppard's body. Fitter now, hair regrown after the radiation poisoning had run its course, musculature almost restored since the food shortage emaciated him, a walking skeleton.
“I'm busy this week,” Sheppard trained his gaze back into the bird's belly.
“It's not something that can wait.” Gaeta pressed him, stepped forward to regain his attention. Couldn't he just look, couldn't he just figure it out by looking at him? Gaeta was not a man who willingly painted himself desperate.
Sheppard did not look, but growled into the innards, “You aren't in a position to be asking favours, Lieutenant.”
“This isn't a favour. Trust me, this is the entire fleet, this is our future -”
Sheppard cut him off, and hands slathered in grease warm as blood grabbed his collar, forced him up against the curve of the hull. Gaeta's skull cracked against metal. He scanned the deck, but the kid had disappeared somewhere, and no one else cared. Sheppard's voice was muted, hissing with anger. “I don't trust you, Lieutenant. You had them draft me, you had them tear my ship into scrap. Don't talk to me about a future for the people, when they're holding me prisoner here so I can protect them.”
Gaeta scrabbled against the pilot's bare arms, slipping and choking where fists pressed against his throat. “Something worth protecting,” he retorted, his own voice cracking. “Isn't that what you asked for? On Atalanta?”
Sheppard dropped his hands, stepped away, his eyes suddenly dark, “No such thing.” He turned back to his ship, and Gaeta, cold with guilt, felt a strange relief - a conviction - in hearing those words. When he left the hangar deck, he headed for the cell where Baltar slept.
IV.
The death threats, which had almost stopped, started up again with terrifying violence. A civilian tried to knife him on his way between the head and his rack the night after word got out. If she'd been any larger than Dee, he wouldn't have been able to stop her. Instead he broke her wrist and turned away so she wouldn't see him raise his hand to his mouth and start to sob.
Serving Baltar during his presidency had made the Fleet think he was an opportunist and a coward. Trying to kill Baltar - now, under these circumstances when he could be of so much help to them all, willing or no - made the Fleet think he was the true collaborator, the Cylon pet, the genocidal monster.
He asked leave to give up his rack and move a cot into Baltar's lab, which was at least more secure than a sheet and a curtain. He didn't leave very often, as the old man - with Tigh pushing for an airlocking all the way, no doubt - had finally found a replacement for his CIC shifts.
Dee brought him food, but made it seem like she'd just stopped by to chat, brought some things from the mess as an afterthought. He knew she hated being by herself in her quarters almost as much as he did - the unheard-of luxury of privacy on this ship was actually the loneliest cage either had ever stepped into. He'd try to talk small like they used to, when she was still a rookie from Sagitarron who blushed when the pilots talked dirty and he was still trying to decide whether he wanted a doctorate or his major's brass more. But there were two subjects that both refused to touch on: her marriage, and his time on New Caprica.
Gaeta did not spend the time, imprisoned and quarantined as he was, fruitfully. He found himself sleeping twelve, fourteen hours at a time, littered in notes and papers, staring at calculations and losing track of all meaning, all purpose. For a while he almost convinced himself it would be better if he emptied his bladder into cups and bottles, rather than risk the trip to the head. He had no guards posted to escort him - he had to wait for the late watch, when the greatest percentage of people were asleep. But the split was fairly even and he'd get scared hearing the lowest echo down the corridor. Still, he forced himself to do it, to make the trip, if only to keep some semblance of humanity about him.
He thought about Baltar. He thought about the man's genius, the casual flick of the pen that had summarily negated months worth of work on the course to Earth. He thought about the pen in the man's throat, and looked at his hands, and wondered where Doctor/Major Felix Gaeta had gone, and who had replaced him as his future.
V.
Eventually, Sheppard came.
The knock on the hatch sent adrenaline through his recluse's veins: louder, more aggressive and demanding than Dee's casual tap. He had no weapons. His only protection was that hatch, and there was nothing else should he choose to open it. How could he? He saw Kara Thrace standing there, sidearm in hand; Saul Tigh, drunk and backed by a half dozen marines; any number of murdering civilians, deckhands, NCOs, pilots, marines, recruits. They'd all kill him, any of them.
“It's Sheppard,” came the impatient voice through a half foot of metal.
Gaeta felt himself relax, although he knew he had no good reason to. Without hesitation, he spun loose and swung open the hatch. Sheppard stepped in, made a face at what Gaeta guessed was the even more pronounced smell of stale, recycled air in the cell. He didn't say anything, though, and watched as Gaeta immediately, compulsively, sealed the entryway.
They both paused, and Gaeta ran a hand through his hair, reached to button up his uniform, and found himself in his tanks. He frowned in embarrassment, coughed. “Would you like to sit down?” He gestured at the single chair, and moved to pour some of the even staler water into a cup. Sheppard waved a negating hand, leaned instead on the lab's steel workstation, looking over the morass of notes written in two hands. He didn't look up.
“This is a nice spot. Like your own little island.” Sheppard looked up, but not quite at him, then down again just as quickly. Gaeta realized, with a bit of a jolt, that he'd been drinking. Sheppard opened his mouth and kept talking at the countertop. “So last night Starbuck comes back to her rack pissed on gutrot - I don't know where that husband of hers got to - but she comes back, calling his name and giggling and falling over everything. And I'm flying CAP in two hours so I tell her to shut it, and she starts coming back with this top dog bullshit, calling me out, telling me I'm gonna have to earn a callsign sometime, so why not right now.” He shook his head heavily, looking up almost by accident. “If I wanted drunk whores coming on to me, don't you think I'd be over on that pleasure boat, paying in pain meds with the rest of them? Instead I have my CAG's second in command acting like screwing me is gonna make her a better pilot.”
“Captain Thrace has always been aggressive,” Gaeta heard himself say, sounding suddenly like the mindless toaster skinjob he was sometimes rumoured to be.
Sheppard looked back at him, a retort obvious on his lips, but instead he just smirked, shook his head. Gaeta saw the smile, disbelieving, and for a moment they laughed, quietly, together.
Sheppard straightened, traced a finger over a long equation. “You know I knew a man once who could've helped you with these.”
“I need help,” Gaeta admitted. He sat down on his cot, set his elbows on his knees. “I thought - since you were a scientist,”
“A pilot.” Sheppard corrected, “McKay was always the scientist.”
“But you worked closely with them, and you found your way through the outer systems just fine.”
Sheppard didn't respond. He reached for the glass of still water and drank from it in long swallows.
“This is what I meant, you know, when I said that I had something worth your time, worth fighting the Cylons for.” Felix watched as the other man put down the glass, came around the corner of the workbench. “Hope,” he suggested, in a small voice.
“It's not why I'm here,” Sheppard dropped to his haunches before him, balance perfect even though Felix could smell, on his breath, the same gutrot that had inspired Captain Thrace.
“John,” Felix tried the name that he'd read on the register, foreign on his tongue, foreign enough to the man in front of him to soften the kiss to something almost gentle. The palms braced on the mattress moved to his waist and shoulders as John leaned forward from his crouch between Felix's knees into a kneel.
Confused, but very averse to questioning the human warmth of John's mouth, it nearly broke him to murmur “Why, then?” into the nearest ear. John's hands kept moving, pushed up at his tanks, down at his slacks, ran up and down his thigh with urgency. John's mouth traced a trail down his throat, and he nudged and pulled until Felix was close enough, hard enough, to grind against through the frustrating stretch of their uniforms.
And then John was tugging at his belt, at Felix's buttons, kicking off shoes and shucking layers of blue and grey with insistent fingers. Crawling forward, onto him, pushing him down onto the mattress and straddling him, pinning him down at the shoulders. Rubbing and jacking himself through his shorts, seizing Felix's hand and making him rub it, while he ground his ass hard down against Felix's own cock. Neither of them able to keep to any sort of rhythm, neither of them doing much but catching moans in their throats, because it'd been four months since they'd even found this place, this warmth, to begin with, and how could they have been so stupid ?
So John paused, long enough to flip Felix over, tug down the last scraps of standard-issue grey, slick up his cock with spit and rub its length in the exposed cleft, stroking and squeezing even as Felix grabbed hold of himself underneath and, raising himself a bit on his knees, started a rocking cadence that had John coming in ropes along his spine in half a minute.
There was a moment then, while Felix twisted his head against the sheets to look over his shoulder, when John let something like a gasp, a shuddered prayer, die in his throat. In under a second, though, he was crawling over Felix, stretching the lengths of their bodies out together, cradling his head with one arm and reaching around to finish him off with the other.
Felix resisted. “You didn't answer my question.”
John, taller and stronger and a sight more determined, forced him still and started stroking and talking simultaneously. His voice was low, calm. Words slipped into Felix's ear straight from the vocal chords, “You said he was humanity's future, and then you tried to kill him. In the same night, Felix. I don't know what that makes you.” His hand was as steady, insistent as his voice. “I thought it might mean you'd given up. I got scared.”
“What,” asked Felix, through a groan, “What about-”
John hushed him, a nip at the jaw line, a wet exploration back to the ear. His hand increased the pace, the pressure, and Felix was suddenly coming, unintelligent, helpless. John confessed: “I found something worth protecting.”
VI.
Eating together in the mess, even as silent and guarded as they were, was an unexpected pleasure. He caught Dee glancing their way, once, as she sat at an empty table, and he saw her smile to herself before Major Adama sat down with two trays and a glass of red-dyed sugar drink that no one else in the room had access to.
That was the thing about Sheppard: he sat down to meals whenever he felt like it, never so much as glancing at a clock, much less calculating patrol rosters. He never looked around, never acknowledged anyone else in the corridors or even at the table, if the mess was particularly busy. Gaeta followed his lead, not any less afraid of being knifed, but buoyed and warmed by the fact that he wasn't alone. That, and Sheppard would probably return whatever violence came their way in much, much greater proportions. That thought, which came with its own guilty pleasure, made the risk seem worthwhile.
The risk, though, always boiled back down to Starbuck. She was on Sheppard, always, like her great, terrifying swath of self-hatred had to have an outlet, and with Kat dead and Apollo playing at fidelity again, there was only him. She hated his talent, that much was obvious, with the constant taunting during training runs, the blunt provocations that would've so easily led to an out and out dogfight if Sheppard had cared at all. So she hated his reticence, too, his complete and utter apathy when it came to her reputation, the pilot's pecking order, their holy callsigns. On the comms, Gaeta had never heard Sheppard call any of them by name, referring to his wingmen by their positions if necessary: left wing, lead, or just 'pilot' if someone was doing something particularly stupid. His voice, over the radio, was cold and curt. It reminded Gaeta of the freezing black, and of the distance between them.
They were sitting after the early watch, eating in silence and not looking anywhere, even at each other, although a quarter of an hour ago Sheppard had been bracing Gaeta against Baltar's workstation while he sucked a new supernova into existence, one that travelled up Gaeta's spine in white hot waves. Still, they shovelled refined algae into their mouths, Gaeta preparing himself to go back to the lab and resume work on the new figures that Sheppard had come up with, pre-coitus, while Sheppard would report for duty on the flight deck and probably fly someone else's CAP before heading back to his rack.
Starbuck pulled up a chair, red drink in hand, smirking. “Lieutenant,” she tipped the glass to Sheppard, took a gulp. “You seem to have a lot of free time for a man who didn't report for duty two hours ago.”
Sheppard didn't even pause in his chewing, he sawed another piece off his brick, reached for the ketchup. “I wasn't scheduled for duty two hours ago.”
“Last minute changes, you should've checked the roster,” she set the plastic cup down, folded her arms on the table. Gaeta remembered her posture the day they'd decided to airlock him, and he was chilled. He hated this woman more than anyone else in the Fleet, more than anyone he'd ever known before or after the holocaust.
“Captain, if you've decided to start screwing around with Major Adama's schedule, it's your duty to inform those affected.” Gaeta sounded like a bureaucrat, he knew that, he knew she didn't respect it, but until recently he had lived by the regulations she so enjoyed flouting, and he had no other choice but to remind her.
Starbuck tilted her chin, glanced sideways at him, then laughed a toothy, delighted laugh in Sheppard's face. “Oh, Lieutenant, your little lover is killing me here.” The smile evaporated. “Shut him up.”
Sheppard didn't respond, but he did look at her, finally, shoddy metal utensils poised in hand.
“Captain, if you want to make a formal complaint about Lieutenant Sheppard's absence today, I suggest you start filling out the reprimand forms,” Gaeta continued.
“Ah, because you are so good with forms,” Starbuck nodded, raising her voice. “Did you submit one before you shoved that pen in Baltar's neck, Gaeta? What was your official justification for trying to murder an unarmed prisoner: protecting your own worthless ass?”
Gaeta had no answer for that, but Sheppard did. He stood up, pushing his chair back from the table, and as Starbuck turned to rise as well, he dealt out a right hook that snapped her head back and pushed her body sprawling into the table behind. Instantly, everyone who'd been watching covertly before was on their feet, and the rest of the diners were slack-jawed, gaping. From the floor, Starbuck kicked out Sheppard's knee, and he staggered, only half blocking another kick to the groin before she was back up, wiping the tears from her swelling left eye. She feinted a left jab, and then threw herself forward, three rapid punches all aimed for his face. She was on him, too close, and he snaked an arm around so quick that no one saw how he'd gotten her in a half nelson. But there she was, and he was behind her, hammering her in the ribs with one fist, and pushing her head down till she was gasping. The look on his face left no doubt as to whether or not he was about to break her neck.
Three pilots were on him, and Major Adama was shouting, throwing himself into it, too, and Starbuck was roaring death and bloody revenge as soon as they'd pried him off her. Immediately, Sheppard's hands rose in truce to the peacemakers. He backed off as far as they'd let him. Gaeta, shoved by the crowd of sweaty, bare-armed soldiers, didn't even try to get to him. He watched as Apollo delivered a lecture to the two of them, too fraught with emotion to be credible, and found himself turning away with the dispersing crowd.
Again, Dee caught his eye. She looked probably as sick and scared as he did.
VII.
Major Adama caught him in the corridor outside the CIC, only a few days after he'd started taking shifts as Officer of the Watch again. Gaeta snapped him a salute, folding away his reports and papers, and trying to look more professional than his exhaustion allowed.
Lee didn't have much patience for it. He was an exhausted man himself.
“I don't know about this pilot of yours, Lieutenant,” he waved a hand at the clipboard he was carrying, “He's good in the air, but as far as the roster goes, no one trusts him. No one wants to fly wing to a sociopath.”
Gaeta kept his mouth closed. They flew just fine with Thrace.
Adama shifted his weight, uncomfortable. “You knew about Sheppard, when he was flying like a maniac through the star cluster. You warned me then. So can you explain him now?”
“Explain what, exactly, Major?” Gaeta was astonished at the tone he took. He'd meant it as a genuine question, but Adama's head came back like a threatened dog's.
“I'll ground him. Piloting may look like a solitary business, but it's not. Alright? Sheppard is becoming a liability, not because of his skills - it's his attitude.”
That was mighty funny, coming from a man who'd been jailed, demoted, accused of treason and mutiny. Especially when the only reason he kept bouncing back up to the top was his father's well-hidden nepotistic soft spot. Lee Adama might feel guilty, in his role as the right hand of the autocracy their society had disintegrated into, but he sure played it to perfection. The good guy, brave and righteous in all of his risks and stunts. The voices on the wireless still referred to him as a demi-god, golden Apollo. Gaeta knew he ranked monstrous in comparison.
He lowered his voice to a hiss, and leaned in, pushing Adama back a step with his intensity. “Ground him, he'd love that. But get him off Galactica, before Thrace provokes him to another fight. They'll kill each other. They're pit bulls, they want blood, both of them.”
He knew, because he felt it, too. Baltar, Tigh, Thrace. He thought of the scraps of the Atalanta and he wanted to throw up. He thought of what Sheppard had tried to do to himself in the blinding expanse of the star cluster - starving himself and leaving the food for Gaeta, flying anyway, as canny and insane as an addict through the glare of a million half-born suns - and he wanted to die, too.
Adama didn't cow, just thrust his jaw and backed off. “It's more for his safety than hers, I'd say.”
“The bitch has a lot of friends,” Gaeta muttered, and turned away, ignoring whatever loyalties registered on the other man's face.
VIII.
In Baltar's lab, they didn't speak. Sheppard's transfer was less a transfer and more a prison sentence: a stint stacking bullets on the munitions plant, for an amount of time yet to be determined. Read: permanent. Gaeta stared at star charts without seeing them, Sheppard lay on the rack with one hand trailing on the floor. His eyelids lowered to slits. He breathed evenly, but shallow. He sounded like an old dog, wheezing.
Gaeta imagined a precise, small explosion on the floor; or exposure to some chemical that would eat up his insides in a way that baffled the doctors, almost like he'd ate it on his algae brick; or just a simple incident with the simplest of weapons. A utility knife. A sidearm sent in for refurbishment. Gaeta didn't imagine that a ship with the working population of a battlestar, half the floorspace and twice the machinery would really suit Sheppard's need for isolation all that well. But, if he didn't like the hours or his supervisor, that ship - more than any other assignment - could provide a means of escape.
He couldn't recall the words he'd said to the Major without wishing he'd been born mute, maybe with a club foot so the military would never have let him in in the first place. He'd be dead in Caprica City, a half-finished dissertation on his desk.
Gaeta didn't imagine that his extreme morbidness was healthy, either. Lately, means of escape was all he ever thought about. Sometimes it involved stealing a Raptor and heading in a straight line till they ran out of air or fuel. Sometimes it was more elaborate, or more simple.
Sheppard sat up. “I guess we better finish this off before I go, huh?”
Gaeta looked over. What was there to finish? They'd barely accomplished anything. The Eye of Jupiter had been a decent landmark, and the jumps to the Ionian Nebula were good and plotted, part of his CIC duties. But past that, they were left with a lot of space and very little to work with. He was not the President, to have faith in signs and portents, sudden revelations upon their arrival at one gas cloud among a billion. Once they were there, the way to Earth wouldn't be any clearer. Baltar had given him a wealth of negatives and rejections with a few quick strokes of his pen, but Gaeta wasn't even sure he could read the equations anymore. It felt like most of his brain had seeped out with what was left of his dignity. And Sheppard was a pilot and a navigator, it was true. Rodney had been the scientist. Certainly Felix had found that out. Really. What was left?
Gaeta watched Sheppard get up and move over to the workbench, stiff and slow. He'd be gone in a few hours, on the next transport run between Galactica and Atropos. A steady finger selected one of their potentials from more than thirty others, all shattering out in a spiderweb of directions. “In what, twenty-odd jumps we'll reach the nebula. They'll want something. Give them this one.”
Gaeta snorted, looked at the lines marking Sheppard's forehead and lining his mouth. He knew there was no joke, here. But he couldn't set the entire fleet running in a straight line, waiting for the air to get stale.
“I have a feeling,” said Sheppard. And Gaeta looked at the various read-outs, the sinuous, faint lines that demarcated thousands of light years of travel, leading to gods knew what blackness in the end. “It's also the only one that makes any sense. You should bring it to Baltar.”
“I'll bring it to his execution.” Felix stood up, paced the three steps to the opposite wall. “Maybe he'll sign off on it before they push him out the airlock.”
Sheppard licked his lips. “I have a flight to catch.” He was out of uniform, back into the ragged greys he'd worn on Atalanta. Back to being ex-military.
Gaeta watched him stand, look around at the cot and papers and unused machinery, go to the hatch. Sheppard hadn't even mentioned the transfer. On early watch, Dee had handed Gaeta the day's personnel log once it had been signed off by the Admiral. Otherwise, he'd have barely known before the man was gone.
Gaeta nodded. And they parted ways without looking at each other again, silent.
IX.
When Starbuck threw herself face-first into the brick wall pressure of the blue gas giant, Gaeta didn't feel much of anything, besides the reflected shock and grief thrown off the glaring surface of the entire CIC, emanating centrally from the Admiral himself. He didn't even have the self-righteousness to feel satisfied that the problem pilot had finally torn herself apart. Mostly because she'd taken out the fleet's nerve centre along with her. At times, people - professionals, soldiers - would act like the world had ended all over again, and he'd try to smirk to himself, but end up aghast.
When Tigh got bumped off the roster for being drunk and crazy and a public embarrassment, and Helo replaced him - a model of sobriety and clear-headedness - Gaeta could at least manage something closer to pleasure. His hatred of Thrace had been abstract, whereas working day in and day out with Tigh had strung him tighter and tighter. The grating voice and belligerent orders hooked into his skin like insect pincers and tugged constantly. The Colonel had tried to execute him for a traitor, and yet people applauded when he'd come back on deck that first time. This world was insane. But Agathon, at least, was a kindred spirit: a worker, a thinker. A man who would do his duty till the day he died with no hope for change and no reward but a family that the greater population looked upon as an abomination.
And Baltar. Lieutenant Gaeta lied through his teeth to the entire fleet, but as far as he was concerned, the only lie was that he'd been there when Baltar signed the death list. He had no illusions as to what had actually gone on in that moment - but for the judges and the listeners-in he omitted the standard whimpering and rationalizations that came with every sentence Baltar uttered. He wasn't lying, he was telling the truth as he knew it had occurred. He'd seen enough to put the pieces together. And when Baltar lost it, screaming from his seat and upsetting his lawyers and shaking the testimony as best he could, Gaeta felt vindication. He would see this man frozen and turned inside out - not just for his crimes against the last vestiges of humanity, but for his lies and betrayals to Felix personally.
X.
With Helo as XO and Adama playing at lawyering, someone elected Racetrack to be acting CAG. Gaeta had gone to her, personnel list in hand, and said, “Get Sheppard back from the munitions ship, you're shorthanded as it is.”
She hadn't even looked at him, stalking across the deck from bird to bird, looking for the knuckledragger that had half-dismantled the port thruster on Hotdog's viper and then gone for a bathroom break. “I ain't that shorthanded, LT.”
“Yes, you are. You're looking at double shifts as is. Either you promote all your nuggets to flight status next week, or you're handing out stims just to fly the CAP.”
“Apollo grounded him as unfit son of a bitch, and I don't see any reason why my opinion should be any different. Bastard was cold as space and he wouldn't touch cards to save his life.”
“Major Adama isn't around right now. Neither is Helo. Neither is Starbuck. There are your three top-rankers and your two best pilots and you're telling me that you can't use a man with Sheppard's skills?”
“That's exactly what I'm saying, Lieutenant.” Racetrack levelled her gunner's stare at him. “Especially since, as I recall, the Officer of the Watch doesn't have any frakking say in who's flying on my deck.”
“Fine.” Gaeta tossed the sheet at her and held up his hands.
XI.
Three days later Baltar was acquitted and Felix found him roaming the halls with a box of his belongings in his hands. They stopped each other short, Felix on his way to the launch bay to catch a flight to the Atropos to personally inspect their FTL drive before the last jump to the Ionian Nebula. Baltar looked at him with nothing but fear, like he was looking death in the familiar face.
There were a dozen people milling through the corridor, all of them cognisant of this man's identity, this man's crimes. Felix found himself invisible, under the hate that lapped in waves at Baltar's feet. And all he could think of was Baltar's cry in the courtroom, And you missed! Butterfingers! Like that was the worst expletive he could think of, in the face of Felix's perjury, all of the betrayals he had enacted upon Baltar, in the months during and since the Occupation. It occurred to him that perhaps Baltar was not capable of holding the kind of poison in his heart that Felix did. It occurred to him that this man was more pathetic, more terrified than any other he had ever known.
Felix had a pen in his hand, along with the inspection clipboard he carried. He reached out to Baltar, tucked it in the man's shirt pocket. “If you have to use it on someone, try not to miss,” he said, and kept walking.
XII.
Sheppard was dirty, and oily and sweaty. They'd put him on warheads, because he'd been so good with the Viper ordnance. The move made no sense, but it meant that Sheppard wasn't sweating because of the heat. Gaeta took a cursory look around the factory set-up, and told the Atropos' Captain that he needed Sheppard with the FTL drive.
“I got a call from Agathon,” Sheppard muttered as they walked. “They want me back now Thrace is dead.”
“They want you back regardless,” said Gaeta, not making eye contact. He nodded at the mechanic who let them down the ladder into the drive crawlspace. “You want to turn on the lights down here, please? Great. That's all we need. Thanks.”
There was nothing wrong with the munition ship's FTL drive. He'd re-arranged the numbers on the daily report so it looked like they were outside safety parameters, then he'd booked a Raptor for shuttle service, then he'd asked Helo for a favour by making it seem like the only logical decision. He was basically holding up the entire fleet on a thinly-fabricated exaggeration. He thought of Adama's speech at the trial and hoped for forgiveness.
In the crawlspace, which was lit orange, crammed with the various trailing tentacles of the drive and maybe two meters tall at most, he pushed Sheppard up against the coils and put his mouth on his throat. Their hands were everywhere and their teeth knocked together and they both tasted like oil, salt, stale air and nervous exhaustion. On his knees already, Felix hit the metal flooring hard, and grunted as John's bare arms pinned him at the shoulders, thrusting and rubbing. His black, damp hair in Felix's face, his hand in Felix's hair, their entire bodies held together at groin and thigh and chest, pressed like plating, constructed soundly as a bulkhead and near as likely to fall apart.
“We'll find it,” Felix gasped, muttered into the nearest ear, “We'll find earth for them.”
Sheppard didn't look up, but smiled down into orange shadows.