BSG fic: Home (1/3)
This is my secret santa fic for puszysty who asked for Gaeta/Hoshi and fluff. Unfortunately, I suck at writing fluff and Gaeta/Hoshi doesn’t much float my boat. Instead, I tried to come up with something else she might enjoy. I hope I succeeded! And there even is a tiny bit of Gaeta/Hoshi in it, too. :)
Since there’s no chance I’ll finish this fic in time, I have split it up in three parts when usually I’d post it in one go. Sorry about that. :-/ I tried really hard but I just didn’t have enough energy to write more.
Title: Home
Characters: Gaeta, Starbuck, Boomer, Athena, Narcho, a bunch of Cylons.
Pairings: Gaeta/Hoshi
Wordcount: ~ 2000 for this part
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Rating: Teen.
Spoilers: S3
Summary: Felix Gaeta wakes up on a street of a foreign planet. He has a vague recollection of who he is, no idea how he got there, and there’s a woman following him around who he is pretty sure has tried to kill him once.
Beta: millari did a wonderful job both in helping me make up a story in the first place and getting it into shape once I wrote it down.
Home
Frankfurt, Germany. Tuesday, February 26th 2010, 4:20 AM CET.
He remembered: A man leaning over him in his bunk, brown eyes twinkling when he smiled and brushing a too long strand of curls out of Felix’ eyes to wake him up. It was an early shift or possibly a late one- hard to tell when he was working both all the time- and it was interesting, he thought in the daze of waking up, how Louis made him happy. He wasn’t quite able to cut through the pain and shadows that New Caprica had left behind but he managed to shoo them away so softly that Felix almost hadn’t caught it the first time it happened.
Then the image blurred, leaving nothing but the faint memory of astonishing eyes.
“Ich hab dir gleich gesagt, wir hätten einen Krankenwagen rufen sollen...”
“Ich glaube, er wacht auf...”
“Hey, Mann, geht’s Ihnen gut?”
Felix opened his eyes with a start, inhaling greedily. It was like somebody had turned on the power abruptly, and his surroundings came into focus with overwhelming speed. It was all there immediately, adrenaline coursing through his veins, and a thousand impressions burned into his retina at once: a sturdy woman with a hat bending over him, trying to turn him on his side; two teens kneeling next to her, chattering in the agitated excitement of those who finally took part in something interesting; a guy in a suit holding a tiny dark thing to his ear and barking an incomprehensible explosion of words into it. Like in one of the advertisement shots of Picon City- what’s Picon City?-, he stood illuminated against the lanterns of a majestic mansion in light and dark paint. On his other side, absurdly, a giant lizard was looming on a lawn. It was completely motionless, forelegs raised in apprehension, jaw thrown in the air with pride.
All of that faded and blurred when he hyperfocused on the silhouette in the shadow of its hind leg. Even in the yellow lights of the lanterns he could make out that the woman was breathing hard, pressing an arm against her abdomen like in pain.
There were sirens. A car turned the corner, and the front lights shone directly at her. She was blonde. Her blue jeans were torn, and there was something covering her face that might be blood. Her eyes were piercing directly into his, hate and fear and suspicion mixing there all at once.
Felix stared at her with wide eyes, not understanding or caring why she of all people should be more important than the others but knowing, nonetheless. She had a gun, didn’t she? Oh Gods she had a gun. Nobody had noticed her, and people were trying to hold him down but...
She had a gun.
He fought to get up.
“Immer mit der Ruhe, unten bleiben...”
“Irgendwie bezweifle ich, dass er zuhört.”
A hand was reaching for his face; Felix flinched away automatically, so hard the hands on his shoulders loosened their grip. Panicking, he jerked around to the person holding him, staring at her- just a random woman, just anybody, no recognition whatsoever. Something was wrong about her hair. Clothes, too. Something was off, something was off about all of this and he frantically tried to think of... of something, anything... What’s Picon City? ... There had to be something and he had to remember... He was hyperventilating.
“Gaeta, Felix, Lieutenant,” he managed. He was dizzy. Gods he was dizzy. But he had to get up. That blonde woman... He had to. “Gaeta, Felix, Lieutenant. Service number. Service number three... three one... three one...”
“Also, Englisch ist das jedenfalls nicht.”
“Es sei denn, er ist Australier.”
“Sehr witzig.”
“Hey, Sie! Parlez vous francais?”
“...three one two...”
Everything around him was reeling suddenly. But he couldn’t see that woman anymore, somebody was in the way and he shoved aside the young man in front of him...
The lizard was still there, guarding the lawn in exactly the same pose of attention. It was the most surreal thing he’d ever seen.
The woman was gone.
She tried to kill you, he thought, irrationally. She tried to kill you, she’ll try it ag...
But another wave of dizziness was washing over him and it was too hard to hold onto reality, thought and sight blurring and turning dark within seconds.
He woke up with a sense of loss as deep and old as only something can be that has been there for weeks or months or even years. There was a pillow under his hands, strangely soft, the smell of disinfectant and idleness intruding his nose. Although he wasn’t hurting physically, it felt too painful to get up; he just couldn’t make out a reason to try.
Grey skies. Endless grey skies and the metallic screech of footsteps ringing in his ears- another guard walking down the street, he knew without looking.
Groaning, he blinked his eyes open and looked around. He was in a bed with sheets whiter than was possible, in a room that looked bare and light and clean in a way that felt intrinsically foreign. His hand was fisting the corner of a blanket hard.
A person was standing right in front of him. Felix’ eyes traveled up and although it was a big, bulky man instead of a slender, awkward one, he somehow still expected the brown eyes he’d dreamed of.
Instead, the person’s face was square-jawed, his eyes were blue, and he was wearing scrubs. He beamed at Felix.
They hate me now, he found himself thinking, irrationally, without understanding what that thought even meant. I can’t go back. I couldn’t even kill Baltar when I had the perfect chance and they hate me now, even the Admiral does; he has to.
He didn’t recognize any of those names. It made him dizzy again.
“Na endlich,” the nurse said. “Ich hatte schon Angst, Sie wachen erst nach meiner Schicht wieder auf. Sie sind viel interessanter als die anderen Patienten, wie man so hört.”
Felix shook his head. He didn’t understand. “My name is Felix Gaeta,” he croaked. “I’m an officer of the Colonial Fleet. I have to go back now...” I can’t go back there, they’d kill me for real some day soon. “... go back to...”
He paused with growing horror.
He had no idea how to finish that sentence.
The nurse’s smile broadened, no sign of understanding in his eyes whatsoever. “Parla italiano?” he asked conversationally.
Felix stared at him blankly.
“Sobald ich mal wette, lieg ich falsch. War ja klar,” said the nurse.
His sense of time was amiss. It was impossible to keep track of hours and patterns when everything around him seemed as new and unfamiliar as if he’d never ever seen or heard or smelled it before. He was hoping that just a very long night had passed instead of days or weeks, when people came in to ask him questions. He didn’t understand. He could only shake his head. It confused him at first that no matter how hard he tried, he barely couldn’t make out repetitions at first, although surely a language couldn’t have that many words for you to never repeat any of them. They brought him food, good food- he’d inhaled it before he even thought to check what it was. Doctors came in and looked at scans of what he could only assume was his brain. The nurses smiled at him. He tried smiling back.
It was okay. People were nice. He could see it without understanding a word of what they said, even while knowing with absolute certainty that he didn’t belong to these people at all, didn’t even have remote familiarity with them. He knew things, not many but he knew some. He knew he hadn’t slept in a real bed for years. He knew he hadn’t seen the color white in what felt like forever. His eyes felt strained from the bright lights.
He thought he wasn’t from this planet.
Not all about this cozy place seemed to be organized well, he’d been thinking exactly when an elderly civvie- a civvie? no, that’s wrong- came walking in the room, sitting down on a chair with an absent smile and opening a notebook. He looked at Felix like a teacher about to examine a student, and said, “Wy gawariti parusski?”
“I don’t understand,” Felix said. He’d been saying it all day.
The man folded his hands on top of his notebook.
“Talar du svenska?” he asked.
Felix shook his head.
“Nihongo o hanashimasu ka?”
And so it went.
He figured it out fast, of course, and he marveled at it a bit- not just because they were so efficient about finding a language he spoke, bringing in what he assumed had to be a professor and having him work off a list, but also because this place had an astounding amount of languages. He had to assume they started repeating themselves after a while. But the guy was done at some point and yet no language had been found that he could understand. Felix wasn’t surprised.
Next they tried to record his voice, explaining with many signs they wanted him to say his name and place of origin. Felix recoiled with caution, then settled on reciting to them a poem instead, something he must have memorized in school... not that he remembered. Suppressing hysterical giggles, he thought he didn’t know enough to tell give them all his ID, anyway. He knew his name and rank. Most beyond that was a blank.
The tests provided some kind of routine at least. He didn’t dare wonder what would happen if they ran out of tests, feeling that it would be unusual if it was something good. Things didn’t ever go well. He was absolutely sure of that, dreading the day after this one already.
Bad things could happen to him just because.
Felix felt like there were things he should recall, places to be and orders to follow. He felt that following orders would be nice, not the only thing he’d ever done but something that’d be excellent right now, something that would orient him and, while not providing any of the answers he direly needed, at least taking some of the questions away. He recalled hallways. He recalled the uniforms, blue and grey and black. He recalled an endless rainy sky that never seemed to clear, though when he closed his eyes, he could almost remember somebody’s hand on his shoulders, somebody whispering kind words in his ear. He remembered brown eyes... Louis... Louis’ eyes. Maybe Louis was a soldier, too? A strange soldier he’d be then. Hard to imagine he’d know how to fire a gun.
“But Baltar can’t hurt you now, Felix. Forget about him. Forget about New Caprica.”
Frustrated about the words coming back to him without a context, Felix thought that whatever New Caprica was, he’d done one hell of a good job about that advice.
His name was Felix T. Gaeta, he was an officer who served on a battleship, and his service number was three one two five six five. He was too old to be a lieutenant but he was one anyway, he had almost died one time, and there was a war. He felt like there had always been a war- a piece of knowledge as deep and true as he knew that he didn’t belong to this planet. He was a command officer and his best friend the comm officer was called... she was called...
The strange thing was that the hallways in his chopped-off memories didn’t feel like home either, not at all.
on to part 2
Since there’s no chance I’ll finish this fic in time, I have split it up in three parts when usually I’d post it in one go. Sorry about that. :-/ I tried really hard but I just didn’t have enough energy to write more.
Title: Home
Characters: Gaeta, Starbuck, Boomer, Athena, Narcho, a bunch of Cylons.
Pairings: Gaeta/Hoshi
Wordcount: ~ 2000 for this part
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Rating: Teen.
Spoilers: S3
Summary: Felix Gaeta wakes up on a street of a foreign planet. He has a vague recollection of who he is, no idea how he got there, and there’s a woman following him around who he is pretty sure has tried to kill him once.
Beta: millari did a wonderful job both in helping me make up a story in the first place and getting it into shape once I wrote it down.
Home
Frankfurt, Germany. Tuesday, February 26th 2010, 4:20 AM CET.
He remembered: A man leaning over him in his bunk, brown eyes twinkling when he smiled and brushing a too long strand of curls out of Felix’ eyes to wake him up. It was an early shift or possibly a late one- hard to tell when he was working both all the time- and it was interesting, he thought in the daze of waking up, how Louis made him happy. He wasn’t quite able to cut through the pain and shadows that New Caprica had left behind but he managed to shoo them away so softly that Felix almost hadn’t caught it the first time it happened.
Then the image blurred, leaving nothing but the faint memory of astonishing eyes.
“Ich hab dir gleich gesagt, wir hätten einen Krankenwagen rufen sollen...”
“Ich glaube, er wacht auf...”
“Hey, Mann, geht’s Ihnen gut?”
Felix opened his eyes with a start, inhaling greedily. It was like somebody had turned on the power abruptly, and his surroundings came into focus with overwhelming speed. It was all there immediately, adrenaline coursing through his veins, and a thousand impressions burned into his retina at once: a sturdy woman with a hat bending over him, trying to turn him on his side; two teens kneeling next to her, chattering in the agitated excitement of those who finally took part in something interesting; a guy in a suit holding a tiny dark thing to his ear and barking an incomprehensible explosion of words into it. Like in one of the advertisement shots of Picon City- what’s Picon City?-, he stood illuminated against the lanterns of a majestic mansion in light and dark paint. On his other side, absurdly, a giant lizard was looming on a lawn. It was completely motionless, forelegs raised in apprehension, jaw thrown in the air with pride.
All of that faded and blurred when he hyperfocused on the silhouette in the shadow of its hind leg. Even in the yellow lights of the lanterns he could make out that the woman was breathing hard, pressing an arm against her abdomen like in pain.
There were sirens. A car turned the corner, and the front lights shone directly at her. She was blonde. Her blue jeans were torn, and there was something covering her face that might be blood. Her eyes were piercing directly into his, hate and fear and suspicion mixing there all at once.
Felix stared at her with wide eyes, not understanding or caring why she of all people should be more important than the others but knowing, nonetheless. She had a gun, didn’t she? Oh Gods she had a gun. Nobody had noticed her, and people were trying to hold him down but...
She had a gun.
He fought to get up.
“Immer mit der Ruhe, unten bleiben...”
“Irgendwie bezweifle ich, dass er zuhört.”
A hand was reaching for his face; Felix flinched away automatically, so hard the hands on his shoulders loosened their grip. Panicking, he jerked around to the person holding him, staring at her- just a random woman, just anybody, no recognition whatsoever. Something was wrong about her hair. Clothes, too. Something was off, something was off about all of this and he frantically tried to think of... of something, anything... What’s Picon City? ... There had to be something and he had to remember... He was hyperventilating.
“Gaeta, Felix, Lieutenant,” he managed. He was dizzy. Gods he was dizzy. But he had to get up. That blonde woman... He had to. “Gaeta, Felix, Lieutenant. Service number. Service number three... three one... three one...”
“Also, Englisch ist das jedenfalls nicht.”
“Es sei denn, er ist Australier.”
“Sehr witzig.”
“Hey, Sie! Parlez vous francais?”
“...three one two...”
Everything around him was reeling suddenly. But he couldn’t see that woman anymore, somebody was in the way and he shoved aside the young man in front of him...
The lizard was still there, guarding the lawn in exactly the same pose of attention. It was the most surreal thing he’d ever seen.
The woman was gone.
She tried to kill you, he thought, irrationally. She tried to kill you, she’ll try it ag...
But another wave of dizziness was washing over him and it was too hard to hold onto reality, thought and sight blurring and turning dark within seconds.
He woke up with a sense of loss as deep and old as only something can be that has been there for weeks or months or even years. There was a pillow under his hands, strangely soft, the smell of disinfectant and idleness intruding his nose. Although he wasn’t hurting physically, it felt too painful to get up; he just couldn’t make out a reason to try.
Grey skies. Endless grey skies and the metallic screech of footsteps ringing in his ears- another guard walking down the street, he knew without looking.
Groaning, he blinked his eyes open and looked around. He was in a bed with sheets whiter than was possible, in a room that looked bare and light and clean in a way that felt intrinsically foreign. His hand was fisting the corner of a blanket hard.
A person was standing right in front of him. Felix’ eyes traveled up and although it was a big, bulky man instead of a slender, awkward one, he somehow still expected the brown eyes he’d dreamed of.
Instead, the person’s face was square-jawed, his eyes were blue, and he was wearing scrubs. He beamed at Felix.
They hate me now, he found himself thinking, irrationally, without understanding what that thought even meant. I can’t go back. I couldn’t even kill Baltar when I had the perfect chance and they hate me now, even the Admiral does; he has to.
He didn’t recognize any of those names. It made him dizzy again.
“Na endlich,” the nurse said. “Ich hatte schon Angst, Sie wachen erst nach meiner Schicht wieder auf. Sie sind viel interessanter als die anderen Patienten, wie man so hört.”
Felix shook his head. He didn’t understand. “My name is Felix Gaeta,” he croaked. “I’m an officer of the Colonial Fleet. I have to go back now...” I can’t go back there, they’d kill me for real some day soon. “... go back to...”
He paused with growing horror.
He had no idea how to finish that sentence.
The nurse’s smile broadened, no sign of understanding in his eyes whatsoever. “Parla italiano?” he asked conversationally.
Felix stared at him blankly.
“Sobald ich mal wette, lieg ich falsch. War ja klar,” said the nurse.
His sense of time was amiss. It was impossible to keep track of hours and patterns when everything around him seemed as new and unfamiliar as if he’d never ever seen or heard or smelled it before. He was hoping that just a very long night had passed instead of days or weeks, when people came in to ask him questions. He didn’t understand. He could only shake his head. It confused him at first that no matter how hard he tried, he barely couldn’t make out repetitions at first, although surely a language couldn’t have that many words for you to never repeat any of them. They brought him food, good food- he’d inhaled it before he even thought to check what it was. Doctors came in and looked at scans of what he could only assume was his brain. The nurses smiled at him. He tried smiling back.
It was okay. People were nice. He could see it without understanding a word of what they said, even while knowing with absolute certainty that he didn’t belong to these people at all, didn’t even have remote familiarity with them. He knew things, not many but he knew some. He knew he hadn’t slept in a real bed for years. He knew he hadn’t seen the color white in what felt like forever. His eyes felt strained from the bright lights.
He thought he wasn’t from this planet.
Not all about this cozy place seemed to be organized well, he’d been thinking exactly when an elderly civvie- a civvie? no, that’s wrong- came walking in the room, sitting down on a chair with an absent smile and opening a notebook. He looked at Felix like a teacher about to examine a student, and said, “Wy gawariti parusski?”
“I don’t understand,” Felix said. He’d been saying it all day.
The man folded his hands on top of his notebook.
“Talar du svenska?” he asked.
Felix shook his head.
“Nihongo o hanashimasu ka?”
And so it went.
He figured it out fast, of course, and he marveled at it a bit- not just because they were so efficient about finding a language he spoke, bringing in what he assumed had to be a professor and having him work off a list, but also because this place had an astounding amount of languages. He had to assume they started repeating themselves after a while. But the guy was done at some point and yet no language had been found that he could understand. Felix wasn’t surprised.
Next they tried to record his voice, explaining with many signs they wanted him to say his name and place of origin. Felix recoiled with caution, then settled on reciting to them a poem instead, something he must have memorized in school... not that he remembered. Suppressing hysterical giggles, he thought he didn’t know enough to tell give them all his ID, anyway. He knew his name and rank. Most beyond that was a blank.
The tests provided some kind of routine at least. He didn’t dare wonder what would happen if they ran out of tests, feeling that it would be unusual if it was something good. Things didn’t ever go well. He was absolutely sure of that, dreading the day after this one already.
Bad things could happen to him just because.
Felix felt like there were things he should recall, places to be and orders to follow. He felt that following orders would be nice, not the only thing he’d ever done but something that’d be excellent right now, something that would orient him and, while not providing any of the answers he direly needed, at least taking some of the questions away. He recalled hallways. He recalled the uniforms, blue and grey and black. He recalled an endless rainy sky that never seemed to clear, though when he closed his eyes, he could almost remember somebody’s hand on his shoulders, somebody whispering kind words in his ear. He remembered brown eyes... Louis... Louis’ eyes. Maybe Louis was a soldier, too? A strange soldier he’d be then. Hard to imagine he’d know how to fire a gun.
“But Baltar can’t hurt you now, Felix. Forget about him. Forget about New Caprica.”
Frustrated about the words coming back to him without a context, Felix thought that whatever New Caprica was, he’d done one hell of a good job about that advice.
His name was Felix T. Gaeta, he was an officer who served on a battleship, and his service number was three one two five six five. He was too old to be a lieutenant but he was one anyway, he had almost died one time, and there was a war. He felt like there had always been a war- a piece of knowledge as deep and true as he knew that he didn’t belong to this planet. He was a command officer and his best friend the comm officer was called... she was called...
The strange thing was that the hallways in his chopped-off memories didn’t feel like home either, not at all.
on to part 2