Fic: Not a Person (The Pick Your Side Remix)
Title: Not a Person (The Pick Your Side Remix)
Characters: Felix Gaeta, Sweet!Eight, Noel Allison, Sharon Agathon
Pairing: Felix/Noel, Athena/Helo, Felix/Sweet!Eight
Rating: Explicit/Mature
Warnings: Scenes of sex of dubious consent
Summary: Things he remembers after it’s over.
Original Story: Pick Your Side by lorrainemarker
Four days after they escape, it’s still bright on his tongue like metal, the whole affair, sordid and dirty and cold and dry. When he’s dragged to the airlock by Starbuck, Tigh, Tyrol, Seelix and the two civilians, the judgement they lay at his feet seems just. Everything inside of him feels wrung out and clammy. He’s been stumbling around the ship, unable to find his feet, and in the airlock he doesn’t even try. The surrender feels good, feels right and clear and the promise of death is liberating and then it’s blood and pain and he’s tied back down to life again.
They leave him there, but someone must have the good sense to tap Noel, because he’s there maybe as soon as his shift ends, wrapped in a flight suit and still gleaming with sweat and Felix is lying on the corrugated metal, remembering.
It had been the afternoon. The Cylon horde had descended sometime around noon and he’d been getting them coffee, making them comfortable, performing all of the important political duties of a housekeeper. After two hours, Baltar emerged from bed to do what could only loosely be called governing, and had silently pleaded with Felix to stay in the room. He hadn’t.
It wouldn’t have even begun in other circumstances. If Baltar had been less compliant. If the ship and the planet and the tents and their overabundance of eyes had allowed him to do it any other way. If he hadn’t mentioned the misspelling on the ballot. He could have avoided it in any number of ways if he had only known.
He started off with a lie, one he knew she would appreciate. He was out, leaning against a Colonial One landing leg, taking a drag on a cigarette, or what passed for one on New Caprica. Partially dried leaves that gave off a weedy, acrid smoke that almost certainly didn’t have an appreciable effect, but that let him get out of The Office of The President at least once every few hours.
She stepped out, the eight, a folder loosely held in her left hand and he said, “Hey, what’s your name?” The way she looked around, like it wasn’t possible he could be talking to her, told him something quietly specific about her.
There was no one else around. “T--Tracie.” She said, frozen in place as though it was he, not her, who had the power in the situation. It wasn’t one of his proudest moments when the realized that it could be him lording something over a cylon rather than the other way around and the knowledge rippled through him in a warm, pleasurable wave.
He felt suddenly predatory, took a step toward her and leaned in the way he’d seen men do in bars, the way that always felt to him just a little bit closer to uncomfortable than conversational. “There’s something different about you.” And like it was nothing, like he did it all the time, like she wasn’t inches shorter and substantially slighter and just...different from what he liked and wanted, he leaned even further in and captured her mouth with his.
And it was something like pleasure when she shied away from him just slightly, dropped the papers she was holding and grasped his shoulders to slightly hoist herself up on him. He turned her toward the pylon he’d been leaning against, and nudged his leg in between hers both to shove her against the struts and to distract her from the way he kicked some sandy soil on top of the papers.
His thigh pressing her made her whimper; her thin fingers made their way to the front of his trousers and clumsily reached inside. He thrust against her and tried to think of someone less slight, less cold. Someone with stubble who smelled less like fresh showers with warm water and more like too-old plastic and hours of flight-suit sweat. It didn’t take long. The only one touching him for weeks had been himself. He collapsed against her in spite of his instinct to pull immediately away.
She said nothing. He said “That was nice. Let’s do it again sometime.” He lifted a hand to smooth over her chest, pulled down her shirt and sucked a mark just above the line of her bra, then laid a softer kiss against the side of her neck. He could almost see the moment she had the realization that this wasn’t the time for pillow talk. The moment she clicked away from romance and into a confused pragmatism. She took one step toward the ship again, paused, and he reached out for her hand. “Hey.” Brought it up to his lips and kissed her trembling palm. “Is there anywhere more private we can go next time?”
She nodded, her smile tender and open. He squeezed her hand, tilted the top of his head toward the Cylon building she’d been heading toward before he’d stopped her and smiled his most winning smile.
His cigarette was still in one hand and as she walked away he tapped the too-long ash off its end, sucked one last drag through the end and started coughing. The coughing doubled him over until he couldn’t breathe, until he lost the contents of his stomach on the grey-brown land. Then he picked up the folder she’d been holding, opened it up and skimmed the papers condemning some substantial number of his friends and former crewmates to prison, and did his best to memorize the names, the date and time, then put the folder on the ground, scuffed some more dirt over it.
~ ~
His first week back on Galactica, when he puts on his blues, they’re too loose and he can’t shake the feeling that there’s sand between his skin and the fabric, dry specks of hair from shaving, something making his skin crawl. Whenever Noel tries to kiss him he pulls away, but at oh-one-hundred he inevitably wakes in a cold sweat, pulls on his sweats and takes the six paces to the pilot bunk, pulls back his lover’s curtain and curls into his warm body for just a few hours. Wakes in a different type of sweat, retches into a trashcan and returns to his own bed.
Noel doesn’t say anything, after the first time he doesn’t even reach out to smooth a hand down Felix’s back; he just lets it happen.
After, on the lower-deck of Colonial One, in the three rows of airliner seats he’d claimed for his own, he held his head in his hands and tried to push down the slowly blooming guilt over that afternoon. The warmth of having her that firmly under his control combined with the disgust for it was overwhelming. Made him feel dirty: grime layered on a syrupy substance that he couldn’t clean, couldn’t see. He tucked the blanket over his head, ignored the sobs heaving through his chest, breathed in and out as calmly as possible until he drifted to sleep.
Those first seven days, every time Felix wakes up in Noel’s bed, in his arms, he’s disgusted with himself and with his need to be close to this man. He goes to the showers, closets himself in one of the perpetually steam-filled enclaves and racks himself with tears until he’s empty.
~ ~
One day, after dinner, after they were walking to the pilot’s break room to gamble or drink or anything to get their minds off of it, Felix realized that he couldn’t pinpoint the moment that Noel took his hand, or maybe he took Noel’s. That their hands were moistening from long contact and his skin wasn’t crawling. He looked at his lover and smiled, squeezed his hand. That night, after slipping into his sweats and tanks, brushing his teeth and scrubbing his face, he returned to the pilot’s bunk instead of his own.
She wasn’t human, wasn’t a person. That was the mantra that kept him sane. It was the mantra that kept him able to catch her eye just after a substantial document had been signed and she was about to take it to the government compound. He found out about the members of the first NCAP class in a tent formerly occupied by a prisoner. Her eyes, brown, soft, tender, not human, not a person. It got harder to perform, he spent time before going to sleep attempting to remember to insert her face alongside Noel’s in his fevered fantasies. Tried to make something sexy, something arousing out of what was essentially a practice in torture.
He frakked her from behind in the lower level bathroom cabin after Gaius acted deeply offended over some legislation on food for the prisoners, and when she said “I love you” he said it back. Not human. Not a person.
The words, the drop of sweat on her temple, the motion of catching it on his tongue, smoothing his hands over her waist. It jerked inside him like a wild animal pulling a bone from a carcass, tendons and ligaments giving way just a bit more each time, each moment. There’s nothing he doesn’t prefer to the sound of her breath as she’s panting and he’s grunting and his eyes are closed and her fingers are so thin, like twigs against his skin. But he can’t forget it, even in the silence afterward.
Noel’s breaths are deeper, throatier, he’s better at being quiet, better at concealing the sounds of their lovemaking. But the best thing about him is his fingers, thick and heavy and warm against Felix’s waist. Substantial fingers that overtake his own in size, that peel him open at a single stroke. He weighs more than Felix, and he holds himself aloft until Felix tugs his lover down to crush him against the mattress. The weight of Noel against his chest stills the frantic urge to yank himself into an inert core. He slows, smooths his motions into the utter calmness he feels, and his body coils into a pleasure so pure, so clean that his eyes brim warm tears. And he detaches from it all, finally, for the first time in months, falling into sleep without nightmares.
~ ~
He goes through stages with Athena. The first stage was a nausea-tinged gravity, the conditioned response of someone who had been trying too hard to convince himself desire was his real reaction to another woman who looked just like her.
The second stage was avoidance, recognizing the signals of her presence: Agathon, any number of other pilots who hadn’t quite avoided her as much as they might have. Taking a different path from the CIC to his bunk, pulling different shifts.
The third stage was understanding, truly, that Athena wasn’t the same eight. That what he did to his Eight was not done to Athena. The guilt faded, and a kind of hatred grew in its place.
There had been times he’d been close to trusting her. In the tent for the third time, her body curled into his side, catching their breath from exertion. He shivered for effect. It was getting colder, but he was hoping to worm his way into the cylon complex and it had to start slowly. He couldn’t ask, not right away. Instead, she asked. “Is there anyone you want me to check on?”
The meaning wasn’t immediately apparent, and he raised his eyebrow.
“Anyone in detention. I can’t promise anything but I might be able to get someone released, as long as the evidence against them isn’t…” She trails off, perhaps knowing that the evidence looks different from his side. He hasn’t said much to her to make it known that they disagree, but she’s been in the room as he whispered his objections to Baltar, surely she knew they weren’t on the same side. But perhaps she was beginning to find the edge, beginning to teeter.
He wrote out a few names, three he knew were dead, two from the NCAP list, and for good measure Shandri Kuiper, his best friend from grade school who’d most likely died on Caprica of a nuclear bomb.
Three days later, when he’d kissed her against the side of the cylon complex but hadn’t reached for her skin, shivering ramping up, she’d told him that the NCAP members had been released. The rest were all already dead, including Shandri, who’d died trying to escape while being moved between cells. It told him nothing except that she was lying. And that was all he needed to know.
~ ~
He wends his way to acceptance of what happened, what he did, and there are still moments, moments when his lover touches him and it transports him back. Moments when it’s slapped in his face. Anytime Dee passes a hand through his hair in a sisterly ruffle, when he hears Athena’s laugh from around a corner. He steels himself against those moments, but no steel will ever protect enough.
It’s the talk of the fleet when Karl Agathon shoots his wife and she returns with their daughter, and Dee tells him how big she is, how beautiful.
It’s by design that he hasn’t seen her. He is more alert for sounds of a child than he ever has been. Small feet and rapid steps take any conversation in a corridor to a different level, a high-pitched giggle in the mess becomes an obligation remembered or an object forgotten. He succeeds for nearly two months.
Their final calm day on New Caprica, she walked past him while he was eating his lunch on Colonial One’s dusty foundation piling. She walked past him nearly every day as he ate, staring usually into the vast emptiness beyond New Caprica City, and only occasionally at the city itself. Usually he made sure to catch her eye, lifted one corner of his mouth and spread his legs just slightly wider. Not a person. Not human. Today, though, she hesitated in her step when she saw him seeing her, then took an arcing turn so wide he wouldn’t have known she was coming to him except that he did.
The smile she gave him pushed on his ribs, crushed him just enough to prevent him giving any sort of smile back. It was soft, sweet, hopeful. Not human. Not human. “Felix, I’m pregnant.”
It had been sixty-three days from the first time. Five from the most recent. He wondered which of the eighteen times he’d frakked her had done it. The need to know was savage. Had the information been worthwhile? Had it been one of the six times he’d carefully planned to frak her without a motive? Would it matter to Noel that he’d been thinking about him, always, always thinking about his eyes, or the curve of his shoulder, or the scent between his earlobe and his hairline.
“I thought you’d be happy.” She said. She took his hand. “We’re having a baby.”
He stood. Everything in him felt brighter, sharper, meaner than it had before. Faster, louder, more. “Are you sure?” The words didn’t sound right coming out of his mouth, too slow, too facile. Not enough iron and ions and electricity.
Her face looked wrong, too. Softer, closer, blurred at the edges. “Yes. I had the test this morning. Simon says I’m probably only a month along.”
He can’t even perform the calculation. He can’t recollect whether it was the special meeting at night when she’d bit his fist to kept her quiet in the dark under the ship and had gotten the resistance intel on a shipment of weapons. Or maybe it was an alibi frak, a cover-up and it had meant nothing. Maybe none of this was happening and it was a bad dream. A long blink, a hallucination and he’s sitting again. She’s beside him, pressing his hand between hers. “You’re going to be a daddy.”
The way she says it; says “Daddy,” like she’s real, like she’s ever had a father of her own, rips every ounce of control out of him and he’s standing, walking away from her.
When they’re sent out on Demetrius, Dee brings Hera to the departure. Lee Adama is there, stroking Starbuck’s face, and when they hug, a more intimate moment than he’s ever seen between the two pilots, Dee’s face is like something out of a war painting. And he’s trying to focus on anything except for the laser bright spot in the crowd as he helps load MREs into stowage. Hera looks like his child. Dark skin, curly black hair, pudgy cheeks and he wants to scream at the Agathons for their ignorance. Their quiet smiles at one another promising that it’s love that made the child, love that allowed her to be formed, love pursing its lips and kicking at the engine and greasing it into life. Because it wasn’t love at all. Unless the words count on their own.
~ ~
Being so close to Athena for so many weeks does nothing to soften him to her. The ways she looks at Helo, the subtle gestures of her affection are carbon copies of his Eight’s and it makes him question whether her great betrayal of her race was so great after all. Would he have been able to turn his Eight against her kind? How long would it have taken?
On Demetrius, at least, he has his own cabin. It’s small and the cabins interlock like teeth on a gear so that he has to climb a ladder to his bunk and knows that even though he can’t see her, he’s sleeping above Seelix. The space is sepulchral, but when he closes his eyes, he’s alone.
He wishes he’d said “Yes” when Noel volunteered to sign up for the mission, mostly. Wishes there were another warm body to curl up against on the flat mattress. Wishes they could frak loudly in the isolated cabin, that he could bend his lover over the only other piece of furniture in the cabin and scream his satisfaction to the hermetically sealed air. He spends no lack of free time in fantasies of just such moments.
And then, fifty-nine days into the mission, when the space and food and smell of Galactica is tickling the back of his throat like a disease, he wishes his lover was there with him even more. His eyes closed against the pain and the knowledge of what’s to come, he wonders how that one specific ally would have changed the situation, if he would have been able to change it at all.
When they return, Athena and Helo look at him with such obvious guilt, become the ones to avoid his gaze and his obvious gait down the halls. He doesn’t have it in him to say that yes, some of this was their fault, but he knows where the blame truly lies.
~ ~
The first time he sees her, he freezes. It’s interesting that despite their identical genetics and epigenetics, he can still tell them apart. His Eight has a bit of a flare to her nose when she looks at him. Just a little bit of a widening of the nostrils. Athena’s face is softer, her cheeks slightly rounder. The others are blank slates, nothing inside, ready to be written on.
After that first time, he acts like he doesn’t know. Or tries to act like he doesn’t know. She’s on the ship for over a week before she approaches him and he plays ignorant to the best of his abilities. She’s in a black cylon flight suit, hands clasped behind her back.
She’s timid until she gets within a few feet of him and then emboldened, “Felix” comes out of her like a sigh, like a memory. One of her hands finds his arm, the other reaches up for his cheek and he flinches.
“Leave me alone.”
“Felix, it’s me.” She says, smiling that little smile of hers, and the wrenching inside of him pulls everything out of alignment. His hands are at his sides, clenched on a clipboard and nothing and he wonders that he can even breathe with his lungs twisted sideways and esophagus crushed.
Across the flight deck Athena calls, “Eight,” Her voice is sharp and his hatred quickly metamorphosizes into something like gratitude. “I’m sure Lieutenant Gaeta has duties to attend to.”
His Eight’s head turns, hand lifts for just the fraction of a second he needs to bolt through a corridor back to the CIC
~ ~
Noel knows. The rumor mill on Galactica is nothing but reliable, and he’s waiting just outside the door to the CIC when Felix’s shift ends. Felix says nothing, and Noel says nothing, just walks alongside and opens doors for Felix when they appear.
That night, he comes to Felix’s bunk after his CAP and pulls the curtain and they make love even though the door to the bunk is wide open and the lights are on and there are crewmen occasionally shuffling in and out. They’re as silent as space, but their eyes are open and locked on one another, and before it’s over, Felix’s eyes are leaking and that caged animal inside him has been released. It’s inside him, chittering and cavorting, stepping on tender spots and chewing at those rare memories of happiness. It’s joyful and he knows, in that moment, somehow, that he is going to be all right.
~ ~
So much happens so quickly after that. The mission to the Hub succeeds, the alliance with the Cylons does not. In the CIC after the news that their pilots are being slowly ejected from a cylon airlock he tries to reign in the biting panic that one of those pilots is Noel. That the body just released from the airlock might be his lover.
It does no good, so he stares at his screen, tries to respond to the orders he’s given, but instead he’s empty.
And then, eventually, it’s over, and they’re on a planet, and the planet is shit, and Lee Adama is giving what he must admit is a pretty inspirational speech, and then Dee is gone.
~ ~
He wishes he’d spent more time with Dee after getting back on the ship, but it was hard. She was in the fleet when he was on the ground, and she was babysitting for the Agathons. And of course after the whole situation with Apollo and Starbuck and her glinting, justified vindication at having been so poorly used by the Admiral’s son, he couldn’t tell her. But she’d give him this side-eye whenever he’d avoid Athena’s presence, whenever he’d turn more pointedly toward her and away from Hera in the mess, he wondered if she knew. If not exactly what happened, the glimpse of it from the corner of her eye.
He couldn’t tell her. He’s glad, even now, that he didn’t, but he wishes there had been some way to be her friend in spite of the chasm between them.
He feels strange at the funeral. Of course Noel is right at home, Pegasus crew outnumber Galactica crew ten to one and only the two men beside him are keeping him seated.
“...we release the body of our sister, Anastasia Dualla, back into your care...”
He’s bobbing to the surface so infrequently, the words meaningless and tears prickling at the edges of his eyes.
“...for every moment the Gods have given us to…”
Everyone stands. Felix follows a split second later, looking around at the heads bowed down, hands clasped. “So say we all.” And in the moment the heads lift he sees her standing in the back, looking at him, the only other head not paying respects, not here for Dee at all.
The minutes that follow are a blur, and somehow he doesn’t need to say a word to her, doesn’t make eye contact. She’s shuttled away as easily as if she’d never been there. He feels the hands of the Pegasus pilots, of Tom Zarek, even of Athena and Helo holding him up, checking his bones for breaks, pushing hair into place. He thinks that maybe this is what recovery looks like--bobbling around, bumping into pain until someone plucks you out of the water to walk a thin line with them, at risk of falling off for the rest of your life.
Noel kisses his temple. They return to shaking mourners hands.
~ ~
With his Eight walking around the ship feels like a minefield. There are so many of them, twenty or thirty women with the same face and who occasionally pull out just the same gesture. A brush of the hand through their hair, elbow bent and fingertips rubbing at their temple. It becomes easier to assume none of them is her. He wishes she had stayed on the basestar, that she wasn’t here and wasn’t part of the fleet, but she is. But if she’s here, the only way is to feign ignorance, demonstrate his indifference until she understands. Even when he thinks it’s her, knows it’s her, he tries not to react.
And he sees it working. They brush past each other on a causeway as he’s relieving the LSO and she doesn’t even pause.
After a few weeks, he can hardly tell which one is her anymore. Her features have smoothed into the horde, none of the eights he sees glance at him with that sad, possessive affection. He stops looking at them, hoping it’s sunk in, happy to put it behind him.
~ ~
He and Noel have been dreaming of a twenty-four hour pass off ship for as long as he can remember, and he trades on Tigh’s insistence that he take a break, to insist that his lover take one with him. He gets a five day release order and Noel will join him on the fourth day, but it’s fine, it’s better than sitting in a berth on the Zephyr for five days straight, sleeping and calling for someone to bring down his meals.
They’re saying goodbye on the flight deck when someone yells “Narcho, move!” and Noel’s body is covering his and there are two shots so close together that the sound is just one overly long explosion. And the body falls awkwardly over the wing of the Raptor, two tiny holes mauling everything inside. He watches the body as blood begins to pool in the wounds, begins to drip out.
It’s her. He wonders who knew it. His ears are ringing from the shots. He feels his body shaking but he can’t stop it. Noel’s arms are around him and there’s shouting, noise, guns. The light is too bright. He can see her. Athena says something and he sees his Eight in the way the mouth opens, now never to open again. She’s not a person, not human. But her body looks like Dee’s body: limp in a way the living can’t achieve, resting where it lay.
His vision is going grey from the edges. He finds his lover’s heat with a shoulder and turns into him. In a way, it’s over. But if he’s honest, he knows it never will be.
Characters: Felix Gaeta, Sweet!Eight, Noel Allison, Sharon Agathon
Pairing: Felix/Noel, Athena/Helo, Felix/Sweet!Eight
Rating: Explicit/Mature
Warnings: Scenes of sex of dubious consent
Summary: Things he remembers after it’s over.
Original Story: Pick Your Side by lorrainemarker
Four days after they escape, it’s still bright on his tongue like metal, the whole affair, sordid and dirty and cold and dry. When he’s dragged to the airlock by Starbuck, Tigh, Tyrol, Seelix and the two civilians, the judgement they lay at his feet seems just. Everything inside of him feels wrung out and clammy. He’s been stumbling around the ship, unable to find his feet, and in the airlock he doesn’t even try. The surrender feels good, feels right and clear and the promise of death is liberating and then it’s blood and pain and he’s tied back down to life again.
They leave him there, but someone must have the good sense to tap Noel, because he’s there maybe as soon as his shift ends, wrapped in a flight suit and still gleaming with sweat and Felix is lying on the corrugated metal, remembering.
It had been the afternoon. The Cylon horde had descended sometime around noon and he’d been getting them coffee, making them comfortable, performing all of the important political duties of a housekeeper. After two hours, Baltar emerged from bed to do what could only loosely be called governing, and had silently pleaded with Felix to stay in the room. He hadn’t.
It wouldn’t have even begun in other circumstances. If Baltar had been less compliant. If the ship and the planet and the tents and their overabundance of eyes had allowed him to do it any other way. If he hadn’t mentioned the misspelling on the ballot. He could have avoided it in any number of ways if he had only known.
He started off with a lie, one he knew she would appreciate. He was out, leaning against a Colonial One landing leg, taking a drag on a cigarette, or what passed for one on New Caprica. Partially dried leaves that gave off a weedy, acrid smoke that almost certainly didn’t have an appreciable effect, but that let him get out of The Office of The President at least once every few hours.
She stepped out, the eight, a folder loosely held in her left hand and he said, “Hey, what’s your name?” The way she looked around, like it wasn’t possible he could be talking to her, told him something quietly specific about her.
There was no one else around. “T--Tracie.” She said, frozen in place as though it was he, not her, who had the power in the situation. It wasn’t one of his proudest moments when the realized that it could be him lording something over a cylon rather than the other way around and the knowledge rippled through him in a warm, pleasurable wave.
He felt suddenly predatory, took a step toward her and leaned in the way he’d seen men do in bars, the way that always felt to him just a little bit closer to uncomfortable than conversational. “There’s something different about you.” And like it was nothing, like he did it all the time, like she wasn’t inches shorter and substantially slighter and just...different from what he liked and wanted, he leaned even further in and captured her mouth with his.
And it was something like pleasure when she shied away from him just slightly, dropped the papers she was holding and grasped his shoulders to slightly hoist herself up on him. He turned her toward the pylon he’d been leaning against, and nudged his leg in between hers both to shove her against the struts and to distract her from the way he kicked some sandy soil on top of the papers.
His thigh pressing her made her whimper; her thin fingers made their way to the front of his trousers and clumsily reached inside. He thrust against her and tried to think of someone less slight, less cold. Someone with stubble who smelled less like fresh showers with warm water and more like too-old plastic and hours of flight-suit sweat. It didn’t take long. The only one touching him for weeks had been himself. He collapsed against her in spite of his instinct to pull immediately away.
She said nothing. He said “That was nice. Let’s do it again sometime.” He lifted a hand to smooth over her chest, pulled down her shirt and sucked a mark just above the line of her bra, then laid a softer kiss against the side of her neck. He could almost see the moment she had the realization that this wasn’t the time for pillow talk. The moment she clicked away from romance and into a confused pragmatism. She took one step toward the ship again, paused, and he reached out for her hand. “Hey.” Brought it up to his lips and kissed her trembling palm. “Is there anywhere more private we can go next time?”
She nodded, her smile tender and open. He squeezed her hand, tilted the top of his head toward the Cylon building she’d been heading toward before he’d stopped her and smiled his most winning smile.
His cigarette was still in one hand and as she walked away he tapped the too-long ash off its end, sucked one last drag through the end and started coughing. The coughing doubled him over until he couldn’t breathe, until he lost the contents of his stomach on the grey-brown land. Then he picked up the folder she’d been holding, opened it up and skimmed the papers condemning some substantial number of his friends and former crewmates to prison, and did his best to memorize the names, the date and time, then put the folder on the ground, scuffed some more dirt over it.
~ ~
His first week back on Galactica, when he puts on his blues, they’re too loose and he can’t shake the feeling that there’s sand between his skin and the fabric, dry specks of hair from shaving, something making his skin crawl. Whenever Noel tries to kiss him he pulls away, but at oh-one-hundred he inevitably wakes in a cold sweat, pulls on his sweats and takes the six paces to the pilot bunk, pulls back his lover’s curtain and curls into his warm body for just a few hours. Wakes in a different type of sweat, retches into a trashcan and returns to his own bed.
Noel doesn’t say anything, after the first time he doesn’t even reach out to smooth a hand down Felix’s back; he just lets it happen.
After, on the lower-deck of Colonial One, in the three rows of airliner seats he’d claimed for his own, he held his head in his hands and tried to push down the slowly blooming guilt over that afternoon. The warmth of having her that firmly under his control combined with the disgust for it was overwhelming. Made him feel dirty: grime layered on a syrupy substance that he couldn’t clean, couldn’t see. He tucked the blanket over his head, ignored the sobs heaving through his chest, breathed in and out as calmly as possible until he drifted to sleep.
Those first seven days, every time Felix wakes up in Noel’s bed, in his arms, he’s disgusted with himself and with his need to be close to this man. He goes to the showers, closets himself in one of the perpetually steam-filled enclaves and racks himself with tears until he’s empty.
~ ~
One day, after dinner, after they were walking to the pilot’s break room to gamble or drink or anything to get their minds off of it, Felix realized that he couldn’t pinpoint the moment that Noel took his hand, or maybe he took Noel’s. That their hands were moistening from long contact and his skin wasn’t crawling. He looked at his lover and smiled, squeezed his hand. That night, after slipping into his sweats and tanks, brushing his teeth and scrubbing his face, he returned to the pilot’s bunk instead of his own.
She wasn’t human, wasn’t a person. That was the mantra that kept him sane. It was the mantra that kept him able to catch her eye just after a substantial document had been signed and she was about to take it to the government compound. He found out about the members of the first NCAP class in a tent formerly occupied by a prisoner. Her eyes, brown, soft, tender, not human, not a person. It got harder to perform, he spent time before going to sleep attempting to remember to insert her face alongside Noel’s in his fevered fantasies. Tried to make something sexy, something arousing out of what was essentially a practice in torture.
He frakked her from behind in the lower level bathroom cabin after Gaius acted deeply offended over some legislation on food for the prisoners, and when she said “I love you” he said it back. Not human. Not a person.
The words, the drop of sweat on her temple, the motion of catching it on his tongue, smoothing his hands over her waist. It jerked inside him like a wild animal pulling a bone from a carcass, tendons and ligaments giving way just a bit more each time, each moment. There’s nothing he doesn’t prefer to the sound of her breath as she’s panting and he’s grunting and his eyes are closed and her fingers are so thin, like twigs against his skin. But he can’t forget it, even in the silence afterward.
Noel’s breaths are deeper, throatier, he’s better at being quiet, better at concealing the sounds of their lovemaking. But the best thing about him is his fingers, thick and heavy and warm against Felix’s waist. Substantial fingers that overtake his own in size, that peel him open at a single stroke. He weighs more than Felix, and he holds himself aloft until Felix tugs his lover down to crush him against the mattress. The weight of Noel against his chest stills the frantic urge to yank himself into an inert core. He slows, smooths his motions into the utter calmness he feels, and his body coils into a pleasure so pure, so clean that his eyes brim warm tears. And he detaches from it all, finally, for the first time in months, falling into sleep without nightmares.
~ ~
He goes through stages with Athena. The first stage was a nausea-tinged gravity, the conditioned response of someone who had been trying too hard to convince himself desire was his real reaction to another woman who looked just like her.
The second stage was avoidance, recognizing the signals of her presence: Agathon, any number of other pilots who hadn’t quite avoided her as much as they might have. Taking a different path from the CIC to his bunk, pulling different shifts.
The third stage was understanding, truly, that Athena wasn’t the same eight. That what he did to his Eight was not done to Athena. The guilt faded, and a kind of hatred grew in its place.
There had been times he’d been close to trusting her. In the tent for the third time, her body curled into his side, catching their breath from exertion. He shivered for effect. It was getting colder, but he was hoping to worm his way into the cylon complex and it had to start slowly. He couldn’t ask, not right away. Instead, she asked. “Is there anyone you want me to check on?”
The meaning wasn’t immediately apparent, and he raised his eyebrow.
“Anyone in detention. I can’t promise anything but I might be able to get someone released, as long as the evidence against them isn’t…” She trails off, perhaps knowing that the evidence looks different from his side. He hasn’t said much to her to make it known that they disagree, but she’s been in the room as he whispered his objections to Baltar, surely she knew they weren’t on the same side. But perhaps she was beginning to find the edge, beginning to teeter.
He wrote out a few names, three he knew were dead, two from the NCAP list, and for good measure Shandri Kuiper, his best friend from grade school who’d most likely died on Caprica of a nuclear bomb.
Three days later, when he’d kissed her against the side of the cylon complex but hadn’t reached for her skin, shivering ramping up, she’d told him that the NCAP members had been released. The rest were all already dead, including Shandri, who’d died trying to escape while being moved between cells. It told him nothing except that she was lying. And that was all he needed to know.
~ ~
He wends his way to acceptance of what happened, what he did, and there are still moments, moments when his lover touches him and it transports him back. Moments when it’s slapped in his face. Anytime Dee passes a hand through his hair in a sisterly ruffle, when he hears Athena’s laugh from around a corner. He steels himself against those moments, but no steel will ever protect enough.
It’s the talk of the fleet when Karl Agathon shoots his wife and she returns with their daughter, and Dee tells him how big she is, how beautiful.
It’s by design that he hasn’t seen her. He is more alert for sounds of a child than he ever has been. Small feet and rapid steps take any conversation in a corridor to a different level, a high-pitched giggle in the mess becomes an obligation remembered or an object forgotten. He succeeds for nearly two months.
Their final calm day on New Caprica, she walked past him while he was eating his lunch on Colonial One’s dusty foundation piling. She walked past him nearly every day as he ate, staring usually into the vast emptiness beyond New Caprica City, and only occasionally at the city itself. Usually he made sure to catch her eye, lifted one corner of his mouth and spread his legs just slightly wider. Not a person. Not human. Today, though, she hesitated in her step when she saw him seeing her, then took an arcing turn so wide he wouldn’t have known she was coming to him except that he did.
The smile she gave him pushed on his ribs, crushed him just enough to prevent him giving any sort of smile back. It was soft, sweet, hopeful. Not human. Not human. “Felix, I’m pregnant.”
It had been sixty-three days from the first time. Five from the most recent. He wondered which of the eighteen times he’d frakked her had done it. The need to know was savage. Had the information been worthwhile? Had it been one of the six times he’d carefully planned to frak her without a motive? Would it matter to Noel that he’d been thinking about him, always, always thinking about his eyes, or the curve of his shoulder, or the scent between his earlobe and his hairline.
“I thought you’d be happy.” She said. She took his hand. “We’re having a baby.”
He stood. Everything in him felt brighter, sharper, meaner than it had before. Faster, louder, more. “Are you sure?” The words didn’t sound right coming out of his mouth, too slow, too facile. Not enough iron and ions and electricity.
Her face looked wrong, too. Softer, closer, blurred at the edges. “Yes. I had the test this morning. Simon says I’m probably only a month along.”
He can’t even perform the calculation. He can’t recollect whether it was the special meeting at night when she’d bit his fist to kept her quiet in the dark under the ship and had gotten the resistance intel on a shipment of weapons. Or maybe it was an alibi frak, a cover-up and it had meant nothing. Maybe none of this was happening and it was a bad dream. A long blink, a hallucination and he’s sitting again. She’s beside him, pressing his hand between hers. “You’re going to be a daddy.”
The way she says it; says “Daddy,” like she’s real, like she’s ever had a father of her own, rips every ounce of control out of him and he’s standing, walking away from her.
When they’re sent out on Demetrius, Dee brings Hera to the departure. Lee Adama is there, stroking Starbuck’s face, and when they hug, a more intimate moment than he’s ever seen between the two pilots, Dee’s face is like something out of a war painting. And he’s trying to focus on anything except for the laser bright spot in the crowd as he helps load MREs into stowage. Hera looks like his child. Dark skin, curly black hair, pudgy cheeks and he wants to scream at the Agathons for their ignorance. Their quiet smiles at one another promising that it’s love that made the child, love that allowed her to be formed, love pursing its lips and kicking at the engine and greasing it into life. Because it wasn’t love at all. Unless the words count on their own.
~ ~
Being so close to Athena for so many weeks does nothing to soften him to her. The ways she looks at Helo, the subtle gestures of her affection are carbon copies of his Eight’s and it makes him question whether her great betrayal of her race was so great after all. Would he have been able to turn his Eight against her kind? How long would it have taken?
On Demetrius, at least, he has his own cabin. It’s small and the cabins interlock like teeth on a gear so that he has to climb a ladder to his bunk and knows that even though he can’t see her, he’s sleeping above Seelix. The space is sepulchral, but when he closes his eyes, he’s alone.
He wishes he’d said “Yes” when Noel volunteered to sign up for the mission, mostly. Wishes there were another warm body to curl up against on the flat mattress. Wishes they could frak loudly in the isolated cabin, that he could bend his lover over the only other piece of furniture in the cabin and scream his satisfaction to the hermetically sealed air. He spends no lack of free time in fantasies of just such moments.
And then, fifty-nine days into the mission, when the space and food and smell of Galactica is tickling the back of his throat like a disease, he wishes his lover was there with him even more. His eyes closed against the pain and the knowledge of what’s to come, he wonders how that one specific ally would have changed the situation, if he would have been able to change it at all.
When they return, Athena and Helo look at him with such obvious guilt, become the ones to avoid his gaze and his obvious gait down the halls. He doesn’t have it in him to say that yes, some of this was their fault, but he knows where the blame truly lies.
~ ~
The first time he sees her, he freezes. It’s interesting that despite their identical genetics and epigenetics, he can still tell them apart. His Eight has a bit of a flare to her nose when she looks at him. Just a little bit of a widening of the nostrils. Athena’s face is softer, her cheeks slightly rounder. The others are blank slates, nothing inside, ready to be written on.
After that first time, he acts like he doesn’t know. Or tries to act like he doesn’t know. She’s on the ship for over a week before she approaches him and he plays ignorant to the best of his abilities. She’s in a black cylon flight suit, hands clasped behind her back.
She’s timid until she gets within a few feet of him and then emboldened, “Felix” comes out of her like a sigh, like a memory. One of her hands finds his arm, the other reaches up for his cheek and he flinches.
“Leave me alone.”
“Felix, it’s me.” She says, smiling that little smile of hers, and the wrenching inside of him pulls everything out of alignment. His hands are at his sides, clenched on a clipboard and nothing and he wonders that he can even breathe with his lungs twisted sideways and esophagus crushed.
Across the flight deck Athena calls, “Eight,” Her voice is sharp and his hatred quickly metamorphosizes into something like gratitude. “I’m sure Lieutenant Gaeta has duties to attend to.”
His Eight’s head turns, hand lifts for just the fraction of a second he needs to bolt through a corridor back to the CIC
~ ~
Noel knows. The rumor mill on Galactica is nothing but reliable, and he’s waiting just outside the door to the CIC when Felix’s shift ends. Felix says nothing, and Noel says nothing, just walks alongside and opens doors for Felix when they appear.
That night, he comes to Felix’s bunk after his CAP and pulls the curtain and they make love even though the door to the bunk is wide open and the lights are on and there are crewmen occasionally shuffling in and out. They’re as silent as space, but their eyes are open and locked on one another, and before it’s over, Felix’s eyes are leaking and that caged animal inside him has been released. It’s inside him, chittering and cavorting, stepping on tender spots and chewing at those rare memories of happiness. It’s joyful and he knows, in that moment, somehow, that he is going to be all right.
~ ~
So much happens so quickly after that. The mission to the Hub succeeds, the alliance with the Cylons does not. In the CIC after the news that their pilots are being slowly ejected from a cylon airlock he tries to reign in the biting panic that one of those pilots is Noel. That the body just released from the airlock might be his lover.
It does no good, so he stares at his screen, tries to respond to the orders he’s given, but instead he’s empty.
And then, eventually, it’s over, and they’re on a planet, and the planet is shit, and Lee Adama is giving what he must admit is a pretty inspirational speech, and then Dee is gone.
~ ~
He wishes he’d spent more time with Dee after getting back on the ship, but it was hard. She was in the fleet when he was on the ground, and she was babysitting for the Agathons. And of course after the whole situation with Apollo and Starbuck and her glinting, justified vindication at having been so poorly used by the Admiral’s son, he couldn’t tell her. But she’d give him this side-eye whenever he’d avoid Athena’s presence, whenever he’d turn more pointedly toward her and away from Hera in the mess, he wondered if she knew. If not exactly what happened, the glimpse of it from the corner of her eye.
He couldn’t tell her. He’s glad, even now, that he didn’t, but he wishes there had been some way to be her friend in spite of the chasm between them.
He feels strange at the funeral. Of course Noel is right at home, Pegasus crew outnumber Galactica crew ten to one and only the two men beside him are keeping him seated.
“...we release the body of our sister, Anastasia Dualla, back into your care...”
He’s bobbing to the surface so infrequently, the words meaningless and tears prickling at the edges of his eyes.
“...for every moment the Gods have given us to…”
Everyone stands. Felix follows a split second later, looking around at the heads bowed down, hands clasped. “So say we all.” And in the moment the heads lift he sees her standing in the back, looking at him, the only other head not paying respects, not here for Dee at all.
The minutes that follow are a blur, and somehow he doesn’t need to say a word to her, doesn’t make eye contact. She’s shuttled away as easily as if she’d never been there. He feels the hands of the Pegasus pilots, of Tom Zarek, even of Athena and Helo holding him up, checking his bones for breaks, pushing hair into place. He thinks that maybe this is what recovery looks like--bobbling around, bumping into pain until someone plucks you out of the water to walk a thin line with them, at risk of falling off for the rest of your life.
Noel kisses his temple. They return to shaking mourners hands.
~ ~
With his Eight walking around the ship feels like a minefield. There are so many of them, twenty or thirty women with the same face and who occasionally pull out just the same gesture. A brush of the hand through their hair, elbow bent and fingertips rubbing at their temple. It becomes easier to assume none of them is her. He wishes she had stayed on the basestar, that she wasn’t here and wasn’t part of the fleet, but she is. But if she’s here, the only way is to feign ignorance, demonstrate his indifference until she understands. Even when he thinks it’s her, knows it’s her, he tries not to react.
And he sees it working. They brush past each other on a causeway as he’s relieving the LSO and she doesn’t even pause.
After a few weeks, he can hardly tell which one is her anymore. Her features have smoothed into the horde, none of the eights he sees glance at him with that sad, possessive affection. He stops looking at them, hoping it’s sunk in, happy to put it behind him.
~ ~
He and Noel have been dreaming of a twenty-four hour pass off ship for as long as he can remember, and he trades on Tigh’s insistence that he take a break, to insist that his lover take one with him. He gets a five day release order and Noel will join him on the fourth day, but it’s fine, it’s better than sitting in a berth on the Zephyr for five days straight, sleeping and calling for someone to bring down his meals.
They’re saying goodbye on the flight deck when someone yells “Narcho, move!” and Noel’s body is covering his and there are two shots so close together that the sound is just one overly long explosion. And the body falls awkwardly over the wing of the Raptor, two tiny holes mauling everything inside. He watches the body as blood begins to pool in the wounds, begins to drip out.
It’s her. He wonders who knew it. His ears are ringing from the shots. He feels his body shaking but he can’t stop it. Noel’s arms are around him and there’s shouting, noise, guns. The light is too bright. He can see her. Athena says something and he sees his Eight in the way the mouth opens, now never to open again. She’s not a person, not human. But her body looks like Dee’s body: limp in a way the living can’t achieve, resting where it lay.
His vision is going grey from the edges. He finds his lover’s heat with a shoulder and turns into him. In a way, it’s over. But if he’s honest, he knows it never will be.