Farewell Symphony (part II), for trovia
This post continues the story “Farewell Symphony.” First part here.
Title: “Farewell Symphony”
author: kappamaki33
Summary: Saying goodbye is never easy.
Characters: Dee, Gaeta, Helo, Tyrol, Hoshi, Romo, Hotdog
Rating: PG
Title, Author, and Original URL: Recapitulation, by trovia
Beta Thanks: Thank you so very, very much to my wonderful beta brennanspeaks!
Author Notes: Well, I ended up taking the concept of a “remix” somewhat literally. In music, a “recapitulation” is essentially a sub-division of a movement with a certain type of structure. Working from the musical theme of “recapitulation” and the word “remix” itself, I ended up writing the symphony in which trovia’s original fic fits, with a little mixing and tweaking to keep everything in tune.
Also, this is a songfic, of sorts. The structure is roughly based on Franz Josef Haydn’s “‘Farewell’ Symphony.”
III. Helo-Menuet-Alegretto
Helo hadn’t walked down that corridor that day intending to round up the last of Kara’s missing personal effects. In fact, he never went anywhere with that express purpose. It was just a project that he always kept in the back of his mind, that he dealt with whenever it came up. He hadn’t even had to seek out most of Kara’s things, since everybody but Kara knew what Helo was up to and usually brought her stuff to him when they remembered where they’d gotten it from. But when Helo heard the piano music he’d listened to in Kara’s apartment on Caprica, now wafting out of a particular bunkroom, he suddenly remembered who’d bought the tape at Kara’s wake-auction and fervently wished it had been anyone else.
For a moment, Helo entertained the hope that the person in Felix’s rack wasn’t Felix at all. He could see the person’s right arm, so he could tell that the man in the rack was wearing a sweatshirt. Felix never wore sweats-he was most comfortable at temperatures most sane people would consider frakking cold. He’d been absolutely miserable on the Demetrius. One time, Seelix had taken the little fan Felix had somehow dragged along and she wouldn’t give it back when he came off duty. Felix had gotten so incensed that he’d threatened to go naked the rest of the mission and started stripping in the middle of the common room until Seelix gave it back. If Felix hadn’t been so deadly serious, it would have been funny. In fact, Helo thought, it really had been a little funny, even so.
Helo came around the bunk before risking calling out a name. The flash of panic on Felix’s face and the glint of the needle that Felix hurriedly thrust under his pillow as he shoved his sleeve down over his elbow explained the sweatshirt all too well.
“Hey Felix,” Helo said as casually as he could manage.
Felix nodded but didn’t add anything. Helo couldn’t think of anything more to say, either, or at least nothing appropriate. “Nice music. Where’d you get it?” was hardly subtle enough. “Remember Kara’s auction?” would probably get him kicked out of the room, and rightly so. “How are you doing?” was just cruel, especially since Helo had only asked Felix that particular question twice since the amputation: once during Felix’s first shift back in the CIC, and once in the infirmary, when Felix had still been too drugged to really answer. Doing this without completely pissing Felix off was going to take a delicacy and subtlety Helo wasn’t quite sure he could muster.
Helo prided himself on living his life the same way he boxed: straightforward, no tricks, and only dancing around the point when absolutely necessary. Ever since he had come back to Galactica with Sharon, though, it had felt like he’d done nothing but dance: constantly holding things together without stepping on anyone’s toes, covering in CIC for Tigh, now Adama, without taking over, backing Kara on the Demetrius even when he’d stopped believing in her, acting as the human advocate for the Cylons as a whole even though he only loved one, and loved her in part because she wasn’t like the rest of them. He should be good at this sort of thing by now, be intimately familiar with the steps, but it had never gotten any easier.
Surprisingly, it was Felix who broke the awkward silence. “Sorry I’m not much for company. Just, the funeral, it-gods, I feel like I want to sleep for a week, but I can’t even nod off for twenty minutes in one shot.”
“Yeah, I’m sure,” said Helo, trying not to stare at the place where Felix’s leg should have been. “It’s a long walk to the...” Helo could see Felix’s jaw muscles twitch. He’d frakked that one up good. “A tough day for all of us, especially you,” Helo tried to cover. Felix relaxed a little at that-Helo was relieved he’d finally said something right-but he was still nowhere near cheerful. Helo groped in his mind for something more to say. “I don’t think I saw you at the service. Were you in back?”
Helo was surprised that Felix’s face could darken any further, but it did. “Oh, I went. In the back, yeah, because I needed a chair. And I left early.” He stared into space and shook his head slightly. “I just couldn’t do it, Karl.”
“Your leg still hurts that bad?”
Felix looked confused for a moment, but then it sank in. “Yes, it does still hurt that bad, but that’s not why I left.” Felix sighed. “Look, I’m not saying that Lee and the Old Man didn’t love her, because they did, and I’m not saying they don’t have a right to mourn, but my gods, the way they were at that funeral, weeping and fawning and giving speeches about how wonderful she was… If they’d acted like they cared half that much back when it would’ve actually made a difference- I’m sorry. I’m not blaming them. I’m not.”
“I know,” said Helo, realizing that he should have come here much sooner.
“Dee was always there to pick those two up when they hit rock bottom. Frak, she was always there to pick everybody up. But all those times where they left her disappointed and heartbroken, they just expected her to pick herself up.”
“But you were there,” Helo said simply. “She was lucky to have you.”
Felix grimaced from what Helo assumed was a stabbing pain from the phantom limb. “Yeah, I was there. Lot of good it did in the end.”
Frak, Helo thought. He hadn’t meant it that way, and he was pretty sure Felix knew it, too, but that didn’t make Helo feel any better about unintentionally reviving the memory of Felix crouching on the floor beside Dee’s body, desperately trying to pat her brains back into the hole the bullet blew in the side of her head.
“I saw her take off her dog tags. She never took her tags off, Karl. Never.” It was the first time that Felix actually met Helo’s eyes directly. That look made Helo want to turn away, but he didn’t allow himself to do so. “She wore them on a date with Lee even though she had on a low-cut dress, and then I saw her come back from the date and then take them off.”
“You did everything you could, Felix. You did everything anybody could,” Helo said. Felix turned away again, nowhere near crying, just hollow. “Nobody could’ve suspected. Frak, Athena and I were there that day, saw her when she came to watch Hera. I was there when she lost it in the Raptor on the way back up from the surface. There were probably a thousand little hints we could find in hindsight if we wanted to look hard enough, but it’s not going to do anybody any good.”
“I know you’re right,” said Felix in a tone that Helo knew meant Felix didn’t believe it at all.
Helo shifted his weight, and Felix stared straight ahead. The music that had brought him so much peace and serenity on Caprica certainly wasn’t restoring those feelings to Helo there in the bunkroom.
The familiar song ended, and another one Helo had never heard before began. He opened his mouth to strike up the conversation again-what he was going to say, he had no idea; he was just hoping something coherent would come out on its own-until he saw Felix’s expression soften. Even with what he’d learned from the six painful years of piano lessons his mother had subjected him to as a kid, Helo didn’t think the piano sounded all that different than it had during the previous song, but it was obvious that Felix heard something that he hadn’t in the other music.
But the next thing Helo heard made him freeze.
“Alone she sleeps in the shirt of man, with my three wishes clutched in her hand…”
A woman’s voice didn’t so much sing as swell out of the piano’s soft notes. Helo had heard Felix sing those same words when he’d taken Hera down to the infirmary for her ear infection, but it sounded so different when the woman sang it, not just because it was in a different octave, but because it felt like the words meant something different to her than what he’d heard in Felix’s voice.
Felix didn’t notice the look of confusion on Helo’s face because Felix’s eyes were closed. He was in his own world, at least for a few moments.
“That’s the song,” Helo finally managed, though still afraid of how Felix might react to him breaking the reverie. “This tape-is that where you got it from?”
Felix flashed an odd smile, then looked at Helo as if he were deciding between telling him a simple lie or a long, complex truth. “In a way,” he said slowly. He closed his eyes and grimaced. Truth it was, then, Helo thought to himself. “But not the way you think.” A pause. “I didn’t learn it from the recording. I learned it from the source of the recording.”
Felix waited as if to give Helo a chance to figure it out himself, but when the expression of utter incomprehension didn’t fade from Helo’s face, Felix rolled over and grabbed something off the shelf above his mattress. It was the tape’s case; Felix held it out and pointed at some text on the liner notes. “‘Kallikrates’s “Three Wishes” Lied, with soprano Danae Leukosia.’ Rather transparent stage name for a singer, but…I guess ‘Danae Gaeta’ just didn’t have the right ring to it for a performer’s name.”
Helo’s heart sank, but he tried not to let the feeling reach his face. “So this woman was your…”
“My mother.” Felix turned the tape case over in his hands idly. “She was something. Even pretty famous for awhile, at least to those who followed classical Aquarian musicians.”
Gods, I hate coincidences, Helo thought to himself. He was tempted to turn on his heel and leave the room right then-there was no way he was going to ask for the tape back now; Kara could fight Felix for it herself if she really wanted it-but that would have been the easy way out. He could do this dance a little while longer, and Lords knew Felix seemed like he needed somebody to talk to. Felix had probably needed that before now, too, Helo realized; he’d just been too afraid to look, for fear of frakking things up even more than they already were. Helo had told himself he had been waiting for some time when things had settled down a little more, but if he’d learned anything in the past five years, it was that things never really settled down.
“That must have been hard, growing up with your mom performing all the time, probably on tour a lot, right?”
“She gave it up before I was even born.” The look on Felix’s face wasn’t what Helo would call happy or even peaceful, but it was a change for the better, like a momentary escape from reality. “But still, a lot of musicians she knew in the old days would drop by for a visit every now and then. In fact, I think I even met this man, the one on the piano. He should’ve been more famous than he was, he was that good, but Mum said Dre had some alcohol issues that always held him back. Dre…Dreilide…Dreilide what-I know the name started with a ‘T’…” Felix flipped the case over again and squinted at the liner notes. Helo could tell the moment Felix read it; Felix winced and covered his face with his hand.
“I am an idiot,” Felix intoned. “Of course that’s where I got-gods, I’m an idiot.” He reached up and shut the tape player on the shelf above him off, killing the singer’s voice in the middle of a long, held note. The player clicked open, and he removed the tape and held it out, his gaze fixed on the tape rather than on Helo. All the warmth, even the warmth that had come from anger and frustration, drained from Felix’s voice. “Here. I’m sorry to have been a bother. I was mistaken. I thought you were here because Dee-I was mistaken.”
“Felix, that’s not why-it’s not a big deal. You can keep it. Or maybe we could even get a copy made of it.”
Helo barely managed to catch the tape when Felix tossed it at him. “No,” he said simply, rolling over on his side away from Helo. “You should find Louis, too. I bought him Kara’s alarm clock. Don’t worry, he doesn’t really need it now.”
Now, of course, there were a million things Helo wanted to say, but he knew none of them were the right words; none would do any good. Helo tucked the tape in his pocket and shuffled out of the room slowly, giving Felix the chance to call him back if he wanted to. He didn’t.
Helo looked back once more at Felix’s bunk. All he could see was the gray curve of Felix’s back, shivering.
People would say that it wasn’t Helo’s fault, that he’d done all he could do, and that if Gaeta couldn’t get over blaming Helo for his getting shot in the leg by a frakking Cylon, that was his problem. But Helo knew better. It wasn’t about the leg. The Karl Agathon that Felix knew never let anything slide. As much as that policy might frak things up, he never compromised when it came to doing the right thing, never let wrongs get swept under the rug.
But this time, Helo had done just that. He’d stood silently as the Old Man learned enough about what had happened that he had decided willful ignorance of the shooter’s identity and of the surrounding circumstances was the best course of action, even though the Admiral could read the whole story written on Sam’s face.
It wasn’t that Helo hadn’t wanted to speak up when Adama had hauled him, Kara, Sam, and Athena into his office for the grilling while Felix had still been in surgery. It was that damn dance again. If Helo had explained, had made the Admiral acknowledge what had happened, he would have had to make Adama acknowledge the mutiny, too. A mutiny against Kara, instigated in large part by Athena, the Cylon whom it seemed the Cylons themselves didn’t totally trust. There had been times later on that Helo had almost brought himself to march into the Admiral’s quarters and lay the whole mess out for the Old Man, but life kept presenting him with such solid reasons against taking that risk. Athena had shot the Cylon leader, the Six; he couldn’t risk getting her into even deeper trouble right then. Besides, with the way Adama had been acting since Earth’s discovery, there was no telling what he might do. Maneuvering through that minefield was so hard already.
This was not the way he’d wanted to end things with Felix, not at all, Helo thought as he finally left the bunkroom and wandered down the hall. But maybe it wasn’t an end, Helo comforted himself. Maybe when things really did settle down a bit, when both he and Felix had put enough time between themselves and the Demetrius to gain some perspective, when Felix had recovered more, maybe then Helo could set things right again. Felix needed more time, and some rest. Helo decided he’d talk to Colonel Tigh about arranging some R&R for Felix. That would help, at least a little. A lot of things had ended in the past few days, but this didn’t have to be one of them, Helo thought. There was still time.
IV. Tyrol-Presto
Tyrol was used to Nicky awakening him in the middle of the night. He rubbed his eyes and wondered groggily what wasn’t right about waking up this time. He squinted at his alarm clock: 0330. His quarters looked like they always did, and it was quiet in the corridor and in the room itself, the way it had been all night.
Quiet all night? Tyrol ruminated. Then the bottom dropped out of his stomach. Oh frak.
He sat up in bed and looked over at Nicky’s crib. It was empty.
“Frak! What did-where did I-frak, frak!”
Tyrol raced around his quarters, peering into corners, opening drawers and lockers, anywhere he could think of, as he simultaneously replayed the previous day in his mind. He’d spent most of his shift trying to make that frakking organic resin actually stick to the hull, then gone to the mess, then to daycare, then bed, like always-hadn’t he? The trouble was, his days were so routine that they all blended together, so Tyrol honestly couldn’t tell if the mental image of Nicky crying as he scooped him up and carried him away from his beloved set of blocks was from earlier that day or yesterday or last week.
Whatever had happened, Nicky wasn’t there, so Tyrol called up to the CIC as he pulled on socks and shoes.
“Has anyone reported seeing Nicholas Tyrol anywhere?”
“Uh, no, no one has. Is this Chief Tyrol?” said Lieutenant Hoshi on the other end of the line.
“Yes!” Tyrol snapped. “I can’t find my son! Are you sure nobody’s called in that they found him somewhere?”
“Yes, I’m sure,” Hoshi returned almost as curtly. “I can put out a notice that-”
“Frak.” Tyrol didn’t even bother to hang up the phone before he ran out of his quarters and into the hall.
He stumbled through corridor after corridor, shoving crates and boxes to make sure Nicky wasn’t hidden behind them and then leaving the mess in his wake. He yelled out for Nicky, even though he noted to himself how stupid and pointless it was to call to a kid who couldn’t even really walk yet.
“Chief, there you are.”
Tyrol was shocked to see Helo trotting down the corridor toward him. “Aren’t you on duty in CIC?”
Helo ignored the question. “Haven’t found him yet?”
Tyrol shook his head.
“Okay, then. We need a plan.” Tyrol wished he could be as calm as Helo. Then again, he reminded himself, this wasn’t Helo’s kid in danger. He tried to keep the next thought from forming, but he couldn’t: then again, this isn’t your kid in danger, either.
Helo continued, “I’ll check the daycare, you take the duty lockers, and we’ll work our way to the mess. Hoshi’s not making an all-call, just in case somebody took him on purpose. We don’t want to scare somebody like that into doing something stupid.”
Tyrol nearly choked. He hadn’t even considered the possibility that Nicky’s disappearance had been caused by anything but his own bone-headed mistake. Nobody thought he was half-Cylon anymore, and why else would anybody want to hurt a little kid? Tyrol did his best to brush Helo’s fear off as stemming far too much from Helo’s own experiences.
Helo must have noticed the worry on Tyrol’s face, because he added, “But, he’s calling around to some places-engine room, hangar deck, damage control, just to make sure. I bet Nicky’s up here, though. If somebody finds him before we do, Hoshi said he’d put it through on the comm system. Okay, Chief?”
Tyrol nodded, and Helo nodded in return before jogging off down the corridor.
Tyrol turned in the opposite direction and headed toward the duty lockers, still stopping to check behind every stack of crates he passed in the halls. He tried to stay calm, but he couldn’t help but think about how scared Nicky must be, lost and all alone on such a big, noisy, dark ship. Then again, maybe Nicky didn’t know enough about what was going on to even be afraid, Tyrol reassured himself. Nicky had spent most of his life on Galactica, had gotten used to being lulled to sleep by the dull thrum of the great ship’s engines. Nicky loved this ship.
Like father, like son, Tyrol mused to himself ruefully.
Tyrol had taken Nicky over to the basestar with him one night, when he was trying to figure out which side of the line of salt he should be standing on-because even if the Old Man said the Cylons and humans had reached across that old division with the alliance, you’d have to be an idiot not to realize there was still a line there. Though Tyrol still spent a lot of time with the Cylons and regularly shuttled back and forth between the baseship and Galactica, Nicky had made the final decision on where their home would be.
The baseship felt strange to Tyrol, but Nicky had flat-out hated it. The poor kid had screamed and bawled all night, no matter what Tyrol did. He’d even gone so far as to try to sing that frakking song Nicky loved so much-not the song, but the one Dee had used when she helped him take care of Nicky, apparently some morbid old Saggitarian hymn about wishes and shirts and rain that always put Nicky out like a light.
If he hadn’t been at wit’s end searching for Nicky in each bunkroom he passed, Tyrol would have grinned at how horrified his Geminese priest father and oracle mother would’ve been at their grandson being soothed to sleep with a heathen song like that. Then again, Nicky wasn’t really their grandkid, Tyrol remembered in spite of himself again. Not to mention they hadn’t even really been Tyrol’s parents, if they had even ever existed.
“When she finds love may it always stay true. This I beg for the second wish I made too…”
Tyrol stopped dead in his tracks at the voice. It certainly wasn’t a very tuneful performance, but he’d recognize the song anywhere, for as many times as he’d heard Dee sing it in those last few weeks before she died, and for as many times as he’d tried to sing it afterwards.
It took him four quick strides to get in the bunkroom and beside the rack that was the source of the music. Tyrol pulled back the privacy curtain. There was Hotdog, lying on his back and crooning idly to Nicky, who was quite happily sprawled on Hotdog’s chest, fast asleep.
“Hey there, Chief,” Hotdog whispered as he smiled sleepily. “What’s up?”
Tyrol replied as quietly as he could, though he still couldn’t suppress the note of panic in his voice, “I was looking for Nicky. I-couldn’t find him.”
“Huh? You remember it was my day to pick him up from daycare, right?” Tyrol tried to steady his heart rate as he racked his brain. No, he hadn’t remembered that at all.
“I kinda wondered what was up when you didn’t come to get him at 1800,” Hotdog continued, “but I figured you must’ve gotten stuck working an extra shift or something. It’s okay. We did fine.” Hotdog ruffled Nicky’s hair without waking the child.
Even though Nicky was safe, Tyrol couldn’t get a hold of himself; his body was still reacting as if he was terrified, and his mind was still racing. All he could think of to say was to ask a stupid question. “How the hell do you know his favorite song?”
“It’s his favorite? Luck, I guess,” Hotdog shrugged. “I think I heard it when I went down to visit Frosty in the infirmary after that bad landing. Gaeta sang it over and over again. I remembered it made everybody sort of mellow. Lucky for me it works on Nicky, too.” Hotdog patted the sleeping child on the back lightly, and Nicky sighed and stretched his arm before sinking back into deeper slumber.
Tyrol just stared at the two of them, snug in the bunk. After a few awkward moments of silence, Hotdog asked, “You want him back now?”
“No. No, that’s okay,” said Tyrol softly as he backed away. “I don’t want to wake him.”
Hotdog nodded and closed his eyes. Tyrol slunk out of the bunkroom.
He didn’t want to admit it, but the thing that had kept him from completely losing it when he had found out Hotdog was Nicky’s father-well, from losing it more completely than he had, Tyrol admitted-was the consolation that he was sure Hotdog wouldn’t be any good at being a dad. Tyrol knew from experience that parenting wasn’t a skill you just had naturally-and for frak’s sake, this was Hotdog. It burned him, how very wrong he had been. But what hurt even more was the odd feeling of loss that now accompanied him as he went back to his quarters to pack, like he was walking away from his own funeral.
Finale: Hoshi-Adagio
“Yo, Admiral Hoshi!”
Louis cringed, even though he wasn’t sure whether it was because he was offended at being hailed with the word “yo” by someone who was technically his subordinate, or, what was more likely, because “Yo, Admiral,” honestly sounded less ridiculous than “Admiral Hoshi.”
“Lieutenant-sorry, Captain Costanza, aren’t you supposed to be briefing your pilots?” said Louis as he eyed the chubby, blond, somewhat gassy child in Hotdog’s arms warily.
“Yep.” Hotdog didn’t even have the decency to look a little ashamed. “Anyway, I took the pilots’ photos down from the Memorial Hall, and I thought you should take them with you over to the baseship. To keep ‘em safe and all. I made sure I got all the Pegasus pilots, too.”
Hotdog pulled a haphazard stack of photos out of what Louis figured was Nicky’s baby bag, which was thrown over Hotdog’s shoulder. Louis knew Hotdog wasn’t exaggerating; he’d just come back from the Memorial Hall himself, and no Pegasus pilots had been left behind. He took the photos reverently and started neatening them like a deck of cards. “Thank you, Captain Costanza. I’ll take care of them, don’t worry.”
Hotdog smiled and patted Louis on the arm. “Cool. Thanks. Oh wait, one other thing…”
Louis panicked for a moment when he thought Hotdog was about to hand him his drooling son. Hotdog must have caught Louis’s expression of terror. “Don’t worry, it’s not him. Nicky’s going to stay with a nice lady on the Monarch, aren’t ya, Nicky?” Hotdog shifted the baby to his other arm and dug around in a velcroed pocket on his flight suit with his free hand. “I was gonna give her this, but I think you’d be better, since this lady never knew Cally. You at least knew her a little.”
Louis took two crumpled sheets of paper from Hotdog’s outstretched hand. Hotdog continued, “It’s just a list of stuff I figure Nicky should know about his parents when he’s old enough. I thought I’d better write it down, since we’re probably all gonna die on this mission.” Louis envied Hotdog’s ability to talk about near-certain death in a tone suggesting about the same level of concern as if he were commenting on how they were probably having algae meatloaf for dinner that night.
It took Louis a few moments to process what Hotdog was asking of him. “I’m honored that you’d give me this responsibility,” he finally said. “I’ll do my best to be worthy of your trust.”
Hotdog shrugged. “‘Course you will, ‘cause you’re Louis Hoshi. Anyway, I gotta go. See ya around. And good luck with the Admiral thing!” Hotdog gave Louis a thumbs up as he trotted away down the hall, Nicky laughing as his father bounced him.
Louis vowed not to read the list until the day came that Nicholas Tyrol-Costanza was old enough to be told its contents, but that resolution lasted all of about twenty minutes. Just after the Raptor’s hatch closed and Louis sat down across from the new President and First Dog, Romo Lampkin peeked at Louis over his sunglasses and said, “I thought we were going to have to leave without you, Admiral. Was there a private going-away party that you just couldn’t bring yourself to leave?”
Louis didn’t like Romo’s smile, and he especially didn’t like the way Romo was playing dumb. Everybody knew about him and Felix. It was an open secret, and there was no way someone like Romo wouldn’t have dug up such easy-to-learn dirt on a new colleague. And if Romo wasn’t playing dumb, if he thought Louis could get over Felix so quickly, that was even worse.
“Sorry for the inconvenience, Mr. President. I forgot something and had to go half-way across the ship to get it,” Louis said flatly, punctuating the end of the conversation by pulling the small bag of personals out from under his seat and setting it in his lap. He could see Romo lean in expectantly, so Louis took no little pleasure in quickly extracting the two pieces of paper and then zipping up the bag and placing it between his feet again, far out of reach of Romo’s prying eyes and fingers.
Louis smiled in spite of himself as he read. The way the list was written would tell Nicky as much about his dad as the items on the list themselves would. Hotdog had included a section on Galen Tyrol (“#3: A little grumpy, but a good guy overall”; “#9: Helluva right hook, but not as good as Starbuck’s”) in addition to ones on Cally (“#2: Was NOT dating Galen when she got pregnant by me, no matter what anybody else tells you. Was engaged to Galen about as long as Sam was to Starbuck. Hoshi will explain what that means”; “#7: Could fix busted avionics better than anybody, even Laird. Hoshi will explain who that was”; “#13: Did NOT smell like cabbage-that was the algae”) and himself (“#1: Washed out of flight school before the attacks. #2: Became Viper pilot, and was even CAG for one mission. Proof that sometimes people really do deserve second chances”; “#4: If you have a bad temper, that’s not my fault. If you have bad luck with women and math, that probably is”).
The best line of all, though, was the last one: “If I’m not here to tell you all this, it’s because I tried to save a little kid like you and I didn’t make it back. I did it because I love you, and if it were you who needed saving, I’d want somebody like me to help me get you back.”
The next few hours were such a whirlwind of meetings, orientations, briefings, and planning sessions that Louis didn’t even have time to think about how unprepared he felt until he gave Thornton and a Two the conn and headed down to his quarters to catch a few hours of sleep. The Cylons had done their best to be considerate of human culture and mores, even going so far as to install a door on the Admiral’s quarters in deference to the human concept of privacy, but Louis still felt like an alien in his new home. He didn’t know how he would ever sleep with the pulsing red light glowing through a slit in the wall that ran all the way around the room. Not only was it far too bright to just brush aside as a nightlight; it gave him the uneasy feeling he was being watched. In fact, he probably was. The Cylons had said their ship was a living thing, with the Hybrid as its brain and nervous system, after all. Worse yet, his new furniture, a red velvet chaise and a four-poster bed with red satin sheets, gave him the impression he was living on the set of a porno. Suddenly, the thought of the Hybrid watching made Louis shiver in disgust.
The only familiar items in his quarters were the dozens of boxes sent over from Galactica sitting in the middle of the room. Though Adama’s furniture had gotten lost in the shuffle of the rapid move and was still sitting in some unknown storage compartment, all of Adama’s and Roslin’s boxes of books and clothes and trinkets were there, intensifying Louis’s feeling that he was in the wrong room. Considering how quickly everything had happened, Louis was a little amazed that his boxes appeared to have all made it to these quarters as well. It took him a few minutes to dig the box he wanted out of the large pile.
Just as he placed that box on top of the stack of Roslin’s things and opened the lid, he heard a knock at his door. Romo Lampkin was over the threshold and digging around in the bag Louis had dropped by the door before Louis even had the chance to say ‘come in.’
“Excuse me, Mr. L-President,” said Louis firmly enough that Romo stopped pawing through Louis’s personal items. “Do you need something? Because it’s customary to ask to borrow something from someone rather than just hunt through their things right under their nose.”
Much to Louis’s frustration, he didn’t manage to faze Romo at all. He guessed he was going to have to get used to that.
“Nothing in particular. I simply heard that it was customary for presidents to pay courtesy visits to their chief military advisors.” Romo stood up and surveyed the room, his eyes bright and playful, even in the alien glow of the reddish light. The baseship corridors were too dark for him to wear sunglasses. Louis suppressed a smile at the thought of how that must be driving Romo nuts. “Ah, I see our new friends gave you the same…curious furnishings they put in my room. It’s reassuring that the Cylons simply seem to have a skewed view of human tastes, rather than that they have anything more risqué in mind for me. Or at least for me in particular.”
Romo had ambled farther into the room and was now peeking under the lids of various boxes as he spoke, stopping to dig through a few of them.
“Hey, knock it off,” Louis snapped. “I don’t care if you’re the President. That doesn’t give you the right to come in here and just start…”
It appeared Romo wasn’t listening. As he stared at the contents of one of the boxes, Romo laughed and shook his head. “Here’s proof that if the gods exist, they have quite the sense of humor.”
“What?”
“How else do you explain the mathematical absurdity of there being two kleptomaniacs alive out of-however many of us there are now?” Romo said as he studied a toy Raptor from the box the Agathons had asked Louis to take with him for them. “Even if we’re including the Cylons or the people who went on the mission to the Colony in the headcount, it’s still bizarre.”
“I am not a kleptomaniac,” Louis muttered as he fumbled to put the lids back on some of the boxes Romo had rummaged through.
Romo extracted a pink hairclip with a fake flower pasted on it from another box. “A man having an item like this only allows for one of three conclusions. I know you haven’t lived with a woman recently, so I went with kleptomania, seeing as it’s the less potentially embarrassing of the remaining two options.”
Louis snatched the hairclip out of Romo’s hand and dropped a lid over the box Romo was looking in. “It was a joke gift from Ruthie Grant, a little Specialist who worked in CIC who I helped get into flight training. Good kid. Quick-tempered, but just as quick to laugh, and quite creative when it came to pranks.” Louis placed the clip on top of the box gently and added quietly, almost as an afterthought, “It was a running gag with her. I had really bad hair, you see.”
“She dead?”
Louis nodded absently. “Ionian Nebula.”
“Fine. So we’re not going to be able to bond by talking shop and comparing pick-pocketing strategies,” Romo conceded, “but you have to admit, this collection of yours is a rather odd amalgamation. It wasn’t that unreasonable of a conclusion to draw.”
“No need to draw any conclusion from it,” said Louis. “It’s just what happens, when you’ve been in the Fleet for awhile. You lose things, you get things from other people…you do what you have to do to scrape by.”
Louis could tell Romo didn’t buy that explanation, but he didn’t press Louis on the issue, either.
Really, it wasn’t a lie; it just wasn’t the full story. Everything Louis had now originally belonged to someone else. When the Pegasus went on its suicide run over New Caprica, there hadn’t exactly been time to pack. In fact, Louis had been one of the lucky ones, since one of his bunkmates who’d stayed behind on a Raptor had been kind enough to toss a few photos and other trinkets in Louis’s locker into her own bag of personals. Of course, she didn’t know what was important to him-she’d saved a two-cubit dog figurine he’d gotten at a gift shop on Libron but left his grandfather’s ivory prayer beads-but it was the thought that counted.
As if that hadn’t been enough, two months later on Galactica, there had been a fire in his bunkroom. The idiot in the rack above his had fallen asleep with a lit cigarette. Since the fire had started so close, not even the stuff in Louis’s locker had survived. He’d lost literally everything but the shirt on his back and the photo of his parents and sister he’d put on the Memorial Wall.
The Supply Officer had issued him as many new-or at least new to him-necessaries as were available, but by that point in their journey, that had hardly been enough to live on. Louis had resorted to slowly accumulating things again on his own. Some things had been gifts, but others he’d won at triad, traded for, or gotten at wake-auctions. He’d stopped actively collecting after the Demetrius, since he could share a lot of things with Felix once they had essentially moved in together, first in Felix’s rack, then in Louis’s, after Dee died.
Louis had lost almost everything again when the new Sergeant-at-Arms took all of Felix’s personals as evidence in the investigation, and basically all of Louis’s, too, since their lives had become so entangled it was impossible for an outsider to separate their possessions. Louis had thought the whole thing was idiotic. Felix was already dead-what more did they need to take? As much as it had hurt to see his things again, though, Louis had nearly cried with joy the day a couple weeks later when he’d found the box waiting for him on his rack.
But something strange had been happening recently. People had taken to writing wills instead of leaving their belongings to auctions, and Louis had been named beneficiary in an inordinate number of them for reasons he himself didn’t understand. His best guess was that people had become so used to him scrounging for hand-me-downs that giving things to him had simply become a habit. By the time word came down they were abandoning Galactica, Louis’s locker had been chock full of other peoples’ stuff, as was the previously unoccupied locker beside his. Add to that all the people like Hotdog who, once they’d found out Adama was leaving Louis behind, had stopped him in the corridor with a little box or a bag of things they didn’t want left behind, not to mention all of Adama’s boxes, and now, ironically, Louis likely had far more possessions than anyone else in the military.
“Admiral Hoshi?” Louis’s focus snapped back to Romo. “You all right? You looked a little far away, for a moment. Anyway, I was just saying you needn’t worry. I’m not going to take the sweatshirt.”
Hoshi’s throat went dry. “What?” he croaked.
Romo smiled in a way that led Hoshi to believe Romo had expected he would be called on for more explanation. “Obviously my reputation for collecting items that concretize others’ characters, things of value to them, precedes me. And although that sweatshirt certainly fits the bill when it comes to you, I promise I don’t have any designs on it.” Romo raised his right hand like he had a few hours ago when he’d taken the Oath of Office, but this time he was wearing a cat-that-ate-the-canary grin. “Scout’s honor.”
“You think a raggedy old sweatshirt’s gonna tell you more about me than anything else?” Louis said, pulling himself back together enough to inject a little prickliness into his voice, even as his fingers dug into the fabric.
“You’re originally from the Pegasus, correct?” asked Romo. Louis nodded. “And yet the sweatshirt has a Galactica patch. You have to wear the uniform, but come on, no self-respecting Pegasus man would wear something as prissy as Galactica sweats. More importantly, the sleeves are too short for you, and you’ve been hovering around it like a mother hen the whole time I’ve been here.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” Louis countered, but he did it so weakly that not even he would have believed it.
Romo shoved his hands in his pockets and looked at Louis seriously, which Louis knew meant he was either speaking from the heart or lying like a rug. “Look, I came down here to assure you that although my clients and I did not exactly have the most positive experiences with your late boyfriend-”
“If you’re worried about me turning against your government, don’t,” Louis cut him off, his words quiet but sharp and harsh. Even so, a part of him was almost happy to hear someone finally say it, blunt and unveiled. “I’m not like him. Not the good parts or the bad parts.”
Louis was surprised that Romo had anything to say after that. “Which parts drove him to do it?” Romo asked as softly as his sandpapery voice would allow. “The good, or the bad?”
Louis fingered the sweatshirt as he stared down at it. “Both.”
For a long time, the only noise in the room was the unsettling heartbeat of the baseship. Finally, Romo pulled something small and silvery out of his pocket. “I’m not so sure we’re that different after all, Admiral. It’s funny. Lee Adama gave me this little memento before I got on the Raptor, in lieu of the traditional outgoing president’s letter to his successor that Roslin had told him to write. It’s his grandfather’s lighter. The funny thing is, I probably know more about this hunk of metal than Lee does. For instance, I know that Joe Adama got it as a gift from a man that Joe knew was guilty of murdering a witness in a case against a Tauron mob boss, but Joe still got him off scot-free.”
Louis gave Romo a look calculated to convey the sentiment, Why the hell are you still here?
Louis could tell that Romo correctly interpreted his look, but it inspired Romo to talk more rather than take the hint. “In other words, Admiral Hoshi, I’m not interested in taking that sweatshirt, or the hairclip, or the locket, or the photos, because I don’t need any thing to peg you.” Romo narrowed his eyes, an expression that suddenly made Louis wish Romo was wearing his sunglasses. “You really don’t get it, do you?”
Romo folded his hands together and paced, assuming the air of a man giving a closing argument. “Things themselves don’t mean much. We’ve all had to learn that the hard way over the past five years. And yet, people still cling to whatever scraps they have left, cling all the tighter as they lose more and more. That’s because, when people imbue these worthless little bits of metal and plastic and paper with memories, when they become ways of keeping their stories alive, then they become far more valuable than what they’re made of. All these people have trusted you as a repository for the detritus of their lives because they trust you as the repository of their memory.”
Louis straightened a stack of boxes a little roughly and mumbled, “Even if that’s true, why the hell did they all pick me?”
Romo sighed. “How many photos did you put up on the Memorial Wall, huh? I’d wager the last bottle of real ambrosia in the universe that you put little Ruthie Grant there, and all the other kids from the CIC who weren’t big and important enough for anybody else to take much notice of them, and all the Pegasus crew who didn’t last long enough to become a part of the Galactica family, and quite likely a lot of those people who nobody else would have the guts to put up after-”
Louis shot Romo a look, and for once, it actually shut him up, at least for a few seconds before he found a new approach. “And how many pictures did you take down? You were late to the Raptor because you were down there in that hall collecting all the abandoned photos. I know you were-you couldn’t possibly know all the civilians in the photos in that bag over there you brought over on the Raptor. More than that, I’m sure everyone on Galactica saw how you handled his memory.”
Romo’s tone softened again as he gestured to the sweatshirt. “For all we humans try to sugarcoat and sanctify our lives in obituaries and eulogies, most of us are content to have our foibles remembered along with our virtues, because that means we’re remembered as whole people.”
Romo stood looking at Louis for a moment, silent and contemplative. “Oh, by the way, you’ll probably want this back,” Romo said abruptly, digging some sheets of paper out of his jacket pocket. “As dedicated a student of human nature as I am, I don’t feel any need for further insight into the mind of one Brendan ‘Hotdog’ Costanza.”
Louis mumbled a befuddled thank-you to Romo as he closed the door, the click of the lock echoing hollowly off the room’s walls. The alien feeling crept back under Louis’s skin, aloneness even more intense than before. He almost wanted to call Romo back again.
Louis looked down at his collar and realized that his fingers had wandered unbidden to the Admiral’s stars. They were the greatest hand-me-downs of all: first Cain, then Adama, Tigh, Felix. They were so heavy, for little scraps of metal. Some things just had too much history.
He slipped off his uniform jacket, folding it neatly and setting it on the chaise. That felt better, but it was too cold in this room to wear just his tanks. Louis hesitated for a moment, but then he pulled the sweatshirt on over his head.
Louis couldn’t help but think of how hard Felix would be laughing at him right now, not only because the sleeves only reached half-way down his forearms, but because Felix would have never believed Louis would wear something with Galactica insignia completely voluntarily, just as Romo had said. Of course, all of Felix’s standard-issue stuff that could be of use to someone else had to be given away; the hard reality of dwindling supplies usually trumped sentimentality, especially when it came to clothing. Felix’s uniform jackets had been divvied up among officers who needed them, and all his one-legged pants had had to be ripped up for rags, but Louis had quietly saved this sweatshirt that didn’t even fit him. He’d kept it on the shelf above his bed, along with an old Pegasus uniform patch and the photos that he’d put back up again when he’d gotten Felix’s effects back. He didn’t talk about them with anyone, but he always left the privacy curtain open when he left his rack each morning. No one had questioned him. No one had accused him of being ashamed.
Maybe the sweatshirt wasn’t the perfect thing to remember Felix with. It certainly wouldn’t have been what Felix would’ve chosen himself. Felix had rarely worn it before he’d gone on morpha, and after that, he’d put it on because of the chills the meds gave him and because he was so embarrassed of the track marks. But he’d had it on the first time they’d gone down to the rec room together after the surgery, and the time when they’d sat on the floor and laughed over Dee’s porn collection, and that last night together. Most of all, it was warm, and it was the only thing he had that still smelled like Felix. He might never truly understand what had driven Felix to do what he had done, Louis thought, but it didn’t matter. He was still home.
Louis was folding up Hotdog’s list in order to slip it into the box for safekeeping when he noticed something strange. One of the pages was a slightly different color, more aged and crinkled. And hadn’t there only been two pages? He slid his thumb behind the front page and flipped it over. His heart stopped.
Even if he hadn’t recognized the words, which he did instantly, he would have known Felix’s handwriting anywhere.
After the initial shock, the pieces slid into place in Louis’s mind: of course Lee Adama’s things would be in Romo’s quarters, since before they’d planned the assault on the Colony, the President’s chambers were intended for Lee. So of course, that’s where Dee’s effects had ended up, too, and of course, Romo, in his odd, damned unsettling way, had figured out enough of the story behind this little scrap of music to guess its previous owner.
The sheet of music wasn’t as great a comfort to him as Louis might have thought it would be, finding this unexpected piece of Felix, and really of Dee, too. That was because Louis didn’t understand what it meant. Sure, he could read music, and he’d heard Felix sing it over and over again in the infirmary until his voice had gone hoarse, seen it in Dee’s locker, heard Felix’s recording of it, even run into other random people who must have heard Felix then now absently hum snatches of it, likely without even realizing what they were doing. It was the kind of song that stayed with you, seeped into your bones. But Louis still didn’t know why, and that transformed the constant, dull ache of not having anyone to ask why into a sharp, unrelenting pang.
Louis sank down on the bed and stared at the pulsing red light, wondering if, had Felix and Dee been alive, he would still be sitting in the middle of this mess. Would Felix have crossed the line in Galactica’s hangar deck? It was hard for Louis to even wrap his mind around the possibility. So many things would have had to have turned out so differently for Felix to have even been given the choice; there were just too many variables. Louis wondered for a moment if him crossing the line would have been enough to sway Felix into coming, too, but again, there were too many variables. Louis wasn’t even sure that, had Felix still been there, he could have muttered “what the hell” and marched across as heedlessly as he had.
If Felix hadn’t crossed the line, assuming he hadn’t turned on Adama, then it would’ve been Felix sitting in the Admiral’s quarters on the basestar right now, regardless of Louis’s decision, Louis knew. Felix was the best jump calculator there ever was, and even if he didn’t show it often, Adama knew Felix could lead if he had to.
If all three of them had crossed the line, then it would’ve been Dee that Adama had sent back, Louis was equally certain. She’d proven herself as XO on the Pegasus, keeping things together even when the Admiral’s own son had started falling apart. And even if she wasn’t Lee’s wife anymore, Dee was still an Adama in so many ways. The Admiral would want to leave a legacy of sorts behind with the remnants of the human race, and no one would’ve blamed the Admiral for desiring that much.
As for Louis, he certainly wouldn’t have begrudged Dee or Felix his job. He just missed them, missed not feeling alone, simple as that.
Louis leaned his head back and sighed. He knew sleep was out of the question now. Anyway, there would be plenty of time for sleep after the deadline, one way or another. He struggled out of the sweatshirt, glad no one was there to see how ridiculous he looked trying to wriggle out of the too-tight sleeves, and slipped his uniform jacket back on. Funny, it didn’t seem as heavy anymore, even with the added weight of making Dee and Felix proud that now rested on his shoulders, too. That didn’t feel like a burden at all.
Louis was thrilled to see the blip of a Colonial Raptor on the DRADIS screen in the basestar’s modified command center hours later, but he was even happier to see the Admiral’s stars finally laid to rest on Earth, even though Adama had returned. There were indeed some things that just had too much history, that had passed through too many hands for any one person to call them his or her own anymore. Louis wasn’t at all satisfied with Lee’s idea, but he was happy they were at least done struggling to keep the chain of command intact.
But not everything was so heavy that it needed to be buried or burned or left behind. Lee had visions of a blank slate and a pure new start, but Louis was sure even Lee knew that wasn’t how it was going to work in reality. Louis and Romo let Lee make his show of doing away with the big technology, all the ships and the computers and big weapons, which had already been falling apart and would have only been a siren’s song when the difficulty of life on this new world sank in, when people eventually became tempted to try for a different new start on some dream world they would never reach in the dying fleet.
But Romo lit the fire at their camp the first night with Joseph Adama’s lighter, and Louis hung his heavy extra bag from a tree limb to ensure the photos wouldn’t get damp from dew in the grass. And though Louis was quite certain that he was getting some of the lyrics wrong, and knew he was out-of-tune, Hotdog sang the familiar song to his son as he paced back and forth with the child in his arms. Even though he still couldn’t say he understood it, Louis did find far more comfort than he’d expected in knowing that the song, their song, had become the first Earth lullaby.
Title: “Farewell Symphony”
author: kappamaki33
Summary: Saying goodbye is never easy.
Characters: Dee, Gaeta, Helo, Tyrol, Hoshi, Romo, Hotdog
Rating: PG
Title, Author, and Original URL: Recapitulation, by trovia
Beta Thanks: Thank you so very, very much to my wonderful beta brennanspeaks!
Author Notes: Well, I ended up taking the concept of a “remix” somewhat literally. In music, a “recapitulation” is essentially a sub-division of a movement with a certain type of structure. Working from the musical theme of “recapitulation” and the word “remix” itself, I ended up writing the symphony in which trovia’s original fic fits, with a little mixing and tweaking to keep everything in tune.
Also, this is a songfic, of sorts. The structure is roughly based on Franz Josef Haydn’s “‘Farewell’ Symphony.”
III. Helo-Menuet-Alegretto
Helo hadn’t walked down that corridor that day intending to round up the last of Kara’s missing personal effects. In fact, he never went anywhere with that express purpose. It was just a project that he always kept in the back of his mind, that he dealt with whenever it came up. He hadn’t even had to seek out most of Kara’s things, since everybody but Kara knew what Helo was up to and usually brought her stuff to him when they remembered where they’d gotten it from. But when Helo heard the piano music he’d listened to in Kara’s apartment on Caprica, now wafting out of a particular bunkroom, he suddenly remembered who’d bought the tape at Kara’s wake-auction and fervently wished it had been anyone else.
For a moment, Helo entertained the hope that the person in Felix’s rack wasn’t Felix at all. He could see the person’s right arm, so he could tell that the man in the rack was wearing a sweatshirt. Felix never wore sweats-he was most comfortable at temperatures most sane people would consider frakking cold. He’d been absolutely miserable on the Demetrius. One time, Seelix had taken the little fan Felix had somehow dragged along and she wouldn’t give it back when he came off duty. Felix had gotten so incensed that he’d threatened to go naked the rest of the mission and started stripping in the middle of the common room until Seelix gave it back. If Felix hadn’t been so deadly serious, it would have been funny. In fact, Helo thought, it really had been a little funny, even so.
Helo came around the bunk before risking calling out a name. The flash of panic on Felix’s face and the glint of the needle that Felix hurriedly thrust under his pillow as he shoved his sleeve down over his elbow explained the sweatshirt all too well.
“Hey Felix,” Helo said as casually as he could manage.
Felix nodded but didn’t add anything. Helo couldn’t think of anything more to say, either, or at least nothing appropriate. “Nice music. Where’d you get it?” was hardly subtle enough. “Remember Kara’s auction?” would probably get him kicked out of the room, and rightly so. “How are you doing?” was just cruel, especially since Helo had only asked Felix that particular question twice since the amputation: once during Felix’s first shift back in the CIC, and once in the infirmary, when Felix had still been too drugged to really answer. Doing this without completely pissing Felix off was going to take a delicacy and subtlety Helo wasn’t quite sure he could muster.
Helo prided himself on living his life the same way he boxed: straightforward, no tricks, and only dancing around the point when absolutely necessary. Ever since he had come back to Galactica with Sharon, though, it had felt like he’d done nothing but dance: constantly holding things together without stepping on anyone’s toes, covering in CIC for Tigh, now Adama, without taking over, backing Kara on the Demetrius even when he’d stopped believing in her, acting as the human advocate for the Cylons as a whole even though he only loved one, and loved her in part because she wasn’t like the rest of them. He should be good at this sort of thing by now, be intimately familiar with the steps, but it had never gotten any easier.
Surprisingly, it was Felix who broke the awkward silence. “Sorry I’m not much for company. Just, the funeral, it-gods, I feel like I want to sleep for a week, but I can’t even nod off for twenty minutes in one shot.”
“Yeah, I’m sure,” said Helo, trying not to stare at the place where Felix’s leg should have been. “It’s a long walk to the...” Helo could see Felix’s jaw muscles twitch. He’d frakked that one up good. “A tough day for all of us, especially you,” Helo tried to cover. Felix relaxed a little at that-Helo was relieved he’d finally said something right-but he was still nowhere near cheerful. Helo groped in his mind for something more to say. “I don’t think I saw you at the service. Were you in back?”
Helo was surprised that Felix’s face could darken any further, but it did. “Oh, I went. In the back, yeah, because I needed a chair. And I left early.” He stared into space and shook his head slightly. “I just couldn’t do it, Karl.”
“Your leg still hurts that bad?”
Felix looked confused for a moment, but then it sank in. “Yes, it does still hurt that bad, but that’s not why I left.” Felix sighed. “Look, I’m not saying that Lee and the Old Man didn’t love her, because they did, and I’m not saying they don’t have a right to mourn, but my gods, the way they were at that funeral, weeping and fawning and giving speeches about how wonderful she was… If they’d acted like they cared half that much back when it would’ve actually made a difference- I’m sorry. I’m not blaming them. I’m not.”
“I know,” said Helo, realizing that he should have come here much sooner.
“Dee was always there to pick those two up when they hit rock bottom. Frak, she was always there to pick everybody up. But all those times where they left her disappointed and heartbroken, they just expected her to pick herself up.”
“But you were there,” Helo said simply. “She was lucky to have you.”
Felix grimaced from what Helo assumed was a stabbing pain from the phantom limb. “Yeah, I was there. Lot of good it did in the end.”
Frak, Helo thought. He hadn’t meant it that way, and he was pretty sure Felix knew it, too, but that didn’t make Helo feel any better about unintentionally reviving the memory of Felix crouching on the floor beside Dee’s body, desperately trying to pat her brains back into the hole the bullet blew in the side of her head.
“I saw her take off her dog tags. She never took her tags off, Karl. Never.” It was the first time that Felix actually met Helo’s eyes directly. That look made Helo want to turn away, but he didn’t allow himself to do so. “She wore them on a date with Lee even though she had on a low-cut dress, and then I saw her come back from the date and then take them off.”
“You did everything you could, Felix. You did everything anybody could,” Helo said. Felix turned away again, nowhere near crying, just hollow. “Nobody could’ve suspected. Frak, Athena and I were there that day, saw her when she came to watch Hera. I was there when she lost it in the Raptor on the way back up from the surface. There were probably a thousand little hints we could find in hindsight if we wanted to look hard enough, but it’s not going to do anybody any good.”
“I know you’re right,” said Felix in a tone that Helo knew meant Felix didn’t believe it at all.
Helo shifted his weight, and Felix stared straight ahead. The music that had brought him so much peace and serenity on Caprica certainly wasn’t restoring those feelings to Helo there in the bunkroom.
The familiar song ended, and another one Helo had never heard before began. He opened his mouth to strike up the conversation again-what he was going to say, he had no idea; he was just hoping something coherent would come out on its own-until he saw Felix’s expression soften. Even with what he’d learned from the six painful years of piano lessons his mother had subjected him to as a kid, Helo didn’t think the piano sounded all that different than it had during the previous song, but it was obvious that Felix heard something that he hadn’t in the other music.
But the next thing Helo heard made him freeze.
“Alone she sleeps in the shirt of man, with my three wishes clutched in her hand…”
A woman’s voice didn’t so much sing as swell out of the piano’s soft notes. Helo had heard Felix sing those same words when he’d taken Hera down to the infirmary for her ear infection, but it sounded so different when the woman sang it, not just because it was in a different octave, but because it felt like the words meant something different to her than what he’d heard in Felix’s voice.
Felix didn’t notice the look of confusion on Helo’s face because Felix’s eyes were closed. He was in his own world, at least for a few moments.
“That’s the song,” Helo finally managed, though still afraid of how Felix might react to him breaking the reverie. “This tape-is that where you got it from?”
Felix flashed an odd smile, then looked at Helo as if he were deciding between telling him a simple lie or a long, complex truth. “In a way,” he said slowly. He closed his eyes and grimaced. Truth it was, then, Helo thought to himself. “But not the way you think.” A pause. “I didn’t learn it from the recording. I learned it from the source of the recording.”
Felix waited as if to give Helo a chance to figure it out himself, but when the expression of utter incomprehension didn’t fade from Helo’s face, Felix rolled over and grabbed something off the shelf above his mattress. It was the tape’s case; Felix held it out and pointed at some text on the liner notes. “‘Kallikrates’s “Three Wishes” Lied, with soprano Danae Leukosia.’ Rather transparent stage name for a singer, but…I guess ‘Danae Gaeta’ just didn’t have the right ring to it for a performer’s name.”
Helo’s heart sank, but he tried not to let the feeling reach his face. “So this woman was your…”
“My mother.” Felix turned the tape case over in his hands idly. “She was something. Even pretty famous for awhile, at least to those who followed classical Aquarian musicians.”
Gods, I hate coincidences, Helo thought to himself. He was tempted to turn on his heel and leave the room right then-there was no way he was going to ask for the tape back now; Kara could fight Felix for it herself if she really wanted it-but that would have been the easy way out. He could do this dance a little while longer, and Lords knew Felix seemed like he needed somebody to talk to. Felix had probably needed that before now, too, Helo realized; he’d just been too afraid to look, for fear of frakking things up even more than they already were. Helo had told himself he had been waiting for some time when things had settled down a little more, but if he’d learned anything in the past five years, it was that things never really settled down.
“That must have been hard, growing up with your mom performing all the time, probably on tour a lot, right?”
“She gave it up before I was even born.” The look on Felix’s face wasn’t what Helo would call happy or even peaceful, but it was a change for the better, like a momentary escape from reality. “But still, a lot of musicians she knew in the old days would drop by for a visit every now and then. In fact, I think I even met this man, the one on the piano. He should’ve been more famous than he was, he was that good, but Mum said Dre had some alcohol issues that always held him back. Dre…Dreilide…Dreilide what-I know the name started with a ‘T’…” Felix flipped the case over again and squinted at the liner notes. Helo could tell the moment Felix read it; Felix winced and covered his face with his hand.
“I am an idiot,” Felix intoned. “Of course that’s where I got-gods, I’m an idiot.” He reached up and shut the tape player on the shelf above him off, killing the singer’s voice in the middle of a long, held note. The player clicked open, and he removed the tape and held it out, his gaze fixed on the tape rather than on Helo. All the warmth, even the warmth that had come from anger and frustration, drained from Felix’s voice. “Here. I’m sorry to have been a bother. I was mistaken. I thought you were here because Dee-I was mistaken.”
“Felix, that’s not why-it’s not a big deal. You can keep it. Or maybe we could even get a copy made of it.”
Helo barely managed to catch the tape when Felix tossed it at him. “No,” he said simply, rolling over on his side away from Helo. “You should find Louis, too. I bought him Kara’s alarm clock. Don’t worry, he doesn’t really need it now.”
Now, of course, there were a million things Helo wanted to say, but he knew none of them were the right words; none would do any good. Helo tucked the tape in his pocket and shuffled out of the room slowly, giving Felix the chance to call him back if he wanted to. He didn’t.
Helo looked back once more at Felix’s bunk. All he could see was the gray curve of Felix’s back, shivering.
People would say that it wasn’t Helo’s fault, that he’d done all he could do, and that if Gaeta couldn’t get over blaming Helo for his getting shot in the leg by a frakking Cylon, that was his problem. But Helo knew better. It wasn’t about the leg. The Karl Agathon that Felix knew never let anything slide. As much as that policy might frak things up, he never compromised when it came to doing the right thing, never let wrongs get swept under the rug.
But this time, Helo had done just that. He’d stood silently as the Old Man learned enough about what had happened that he had decided willful ignorance of the shooter’s identity and of the surrounding circumstances was the best course of action, even though the Admiral could read the whole story written on Sam’s face.
It wasn’t that Helo hadn’t wanted to speak up when Adama had hauled him, Kara, Sam, and Athena into his office for the grilling while Felix had still been in surgery. It was that damn dance again. If Helo had explained, had made the Admiral acknowledge what had happened, he would have had to make Adama acknowledge the mutiny, too. A mutiny against Kara, instigated in large part by Athena, the Cylon whom it seemed the Cylons themselves didn’t totally trust. There had been times later on that Helo had almost brought himself to march into the Admiral’s quarters and lay the whole mess out for the Old Man, but life kept presenting him with such solid reasons against taking that risk. Athena had shot the Cylon leader, the Six; he couldn’t risk getting her into even deeper trouble right then. Besides, with the way Adama had been acting since Earth’s discovery, there was no telling what he might do. Maneuvering through that minefield was so hard already.
This was not the way he’d wanted to end things with Felix, not at all, Helo thought as he finally left the bunkroom and wandered down the hall. But maybe it wasn’t an end, Helo comforted himself. Maybe when things really did settle down a bit, when both he and Felix had put enough time between themselves and the Demetrius to gain some perspective, when Felix had recovered more, maybe then Helo could set things right again. Felix needed more time, and some rest. Helo decided he’d talk to Colonel Tigh about arranging some R&R for Felix. That would help, at least a little. A lot of things had ended in the past few days, but this didn’t have to be one of them, Helo thought. There was still time.
IV. Tyrol-Presto
Tyrol was used to Nicky awakening him in the middle of the night. He rubbed his eyes and wondered groggily what wasn’t right about waking up this time. He squinted at his alarm clock: 0330. His quarters looked like they always did, and it was quiet in the corridor and in the room itself, the way it had been all night.
Quiet all night? Tyrol ruminated. Then the bottom dropped out of his stomach. Oh frak.
He sat up in bed and looked over at Nicky’s crib. It was empty.
“Frak! What did-where did I-frak, frak!”
Tyrol raced around his quarters, peering into corners, opening drawers and lockers, anywhere he could think of, as he simultaneously replayed the previous day in his mind. He’d spent most of his shift trying to make that frakking organic resin actually stick to the hull, then gone to the mess, then to daycare, then bed, like always-hadn’t he? The trouble was, his days were so routine that they all blended together, so Tyrol honestly couldn’t tell if the mental image of Nicky crying as he scooped him up and carried him away from his beloved set of blocks was from earlier that day or yesterday or last week.
Whatever had happened, Nicky wasn’t there, so Tyrol called up to the CIC as he pulled on socks and shoes.
“Has anyone reported seeing Nicholas Tyrol anywhere?”
“Uh, no, no one has. Is this Chief Tyrol?” said Lieutenant Hoshi on the other end of the line.
“Yes!” Tyrol snapped. “I can’t find my son! Are you sure nobody’s called in that they found him somewhere?”
“Yes, I’m sure,” Hoshi returned almost as curtly. “I can put out a notice that-”
“Frak.” Tyrol didn’t even bother to hang up the phone before he ran out of his quarters and into the hall.
He stumbled through corridor after corridor, shoving crates and boxes to make sure Nicky wasn’t hidden behind them and then leaving the mess in his wake. He yelled out for Nicky, even though he noted to himself how stupid and pointless it was to call to a kid who couldn’t even really walk yet.
“Chief, there you are.”
Tyrol was shocked to see Helo trotting down the corridor toward him. “Aren’t you on duty in CIC?”
Helo ignored the question. “Haven’t found him yet?”
Tyrol shook his head.
“Okay, then. We need a plan.” Tyrol wished he could be as calm as Helo. Then again, he reminded himself, this wasn’t Helo’s kid in danger. He tried to keep the next thought from forming, but he couldn’t: then again, this isn’t your kid in danger, either.
Helo continued, “I’ll check the daycare, you take the duty lockers, and we’ll work our way to the mess. Hoshi’s not making an all-call, just in case somebody took him on purpose. We don’t want to scare somebody like that into doing something stupid.”
Tyrol nearly choked. He hadn’t even considered the possibility that Nicky’s disappearance had been caused by anything but his own bone-headed mistake. Nobody thought he was half-Cylon anymore, and why else would anybody want to hurt a little kid? Tyrol did his best to brush Helo’s fear off as stemming far too much from Helo’s own experiences.
Helo must have noticed the worry on Tyrol’s face, because he added, “But, he’s calling around to some places-engine room, hangar deck, damage control, just to make sure. I bet Nicky’s up here, though. If somebody finds him before we do, Hoshi said he’d put it through on the comm system. Okay, Chief?”
Tyrol nodded, and Helo nodded in return before jogging off down the corridor.
Tyrol turned in the opposite direction and headed toward the duty lockers, still stopping to check behind every stack of crates he passed in the halls. He tried to stay calm, but he couldn’t help but think about how scared Nicky must be, lost and all alone on such a big, noisy, dark ship. Then again, maybe Nicky didn’t know enough about what was going on to even be afraid, Tyrol reassured himself. Nicky had spent most of his life on Galactica, had gotten used to being lulled to sleep by the dull thrum of the great ship’s engines. Nicky loved this ship.
Like father, like son, Tyrol mused to himself ruefully.
Tyrol had taken Nicky over to the basestar with him one night, when he was trying to figure out which side of the line of salt he should be standing on-because even if the Old Man said the Cylons and humans had reached across that old division with the alliance, you’d have to be an idiot not to realize there was still a line there. Though Tyrol still spent a lot of time with the Cylons and regularly shuttled back and forth between the baseship and Galactica, Nicky had made the final decision on where their home would be.
The baseship felt strange to Tyrol, but Nicky had flat-out hated it. The poor kid had screamed and bawled all night, no matter what Tyrol did. He’d even gone so far as to try to sing that frakking song Nicky loved so much-not the song, but the one Dee had used when she helped him take care of Nicky, apparently some morbid old Saggitarian hymn about wishes and shirts and rain that always put Nicky out like a light.
If he hadn’t been at wit’s end searching for Nicky in each bunkroom he passed, Tyrol would have grinned at how horrified his Geminese priest father and oracle mother would’ve been at their grandson being soothed to sleep with a heathen song like that. Then again, Nicky wasn’t really their grandkid, Tyrol remembered in spite of himself again. Not to mention they hadn’t even really been Tyrol’s parents, if they had even ever existed.
“When she finds love may it always stay true. This I beg for the second wish I made too…”
Tyrol stopped dead in his tracks at the voice. It certainly wasn’t a very tuneful performance, but he’d recognize the song anywhere, for as many times as he’d heard Dee sing it in those last few weeks before she died, and for as many times as he’d tried to sing it afterwards.
It took him four quick strides to get in the bunkroom and beside the rack that was the source of the music. Tyrol pulled back the privacy curtain. There was Hotdog, lying on his back and crooning idly to Nicky, who was quite happily sprawled on Hotdog’s chest, fast asleep.
“Hey there, Chief,” Hotdog whispered as he smiled sleepily. “What’s up?”
Tyrol replied as quietly as he could, though he still couldn’t suppress the note of panic in his voice, “I was looking for Nicky. I-couldn’t find him.”
“Huh? You remember it was my day to pick him up from daycare, right?” Tyrol tried to steady his heart rate as he racked his brain. No, he hadn’t remembered that at all.
“I kinda wondered what was up when you didn’t come to get him at 1800,” Hotdog continued, “but I figured you must’ve gotten stuck working an extra shift or something. It’s okay. We did fine.” Hotdog ruffled Nicky’s hair without waking the child.
Even though Nicky was safe, Tyrol couldn’t get a hold of himself; his body was still reacting as if he was terrified, and his mind was still racing. All he could think of to say was to ask a stupid question. “How the hell do you know his favorite song?”
“It’s his favorite? Luck, I guess,” Hotdog shrugged. “I think I heard it when I went down to visit Frosty in the infirmary after that bad landing. Gaeta sang it over and over again. I remembered it made everybody sort of mellow. Lucky for me it works on Nicky, too.” Hotdog patted the sleeping child on the back lightly, and Nicky sighed and stretched his arm before sinking back into deeper slumber.
Tyrol just stared at the two of them, snug in the bunk. After a few awkward moments of silence, Hotdog asked, “You want him back now?”
“No. No, that’s okay,” said Tyrol softly as he backed away. “I don’t want to wake him.”
Hotdog nodded and closed his eyes. Tyrol slunk out of the bunkroom.
He didn’t want to admit it, but the thing that had kept him from completely losing it when he had found out Hotdog was Nicky’s father-well, from losing it more completely than he had, Tyrol admitted-was the consolation that he was sure Hotdog wouldn’t be any good at being a dad. Tyrol knew from experience that parenting wasn’t a skill you just had naturally-and for frak’s sake, this was Hotdog. It burned him, how very wrong he had been. But what hurt even more was the odd feeling of loss that now accompanied him as he went back to his quarters to pack, like he was walking away from his own funeral.
Finale: Hoshi-Adagio
“Yo, Admiral Hoshi!”
Louis cringed, even though he wasn’t sure whether it was because he was offended at being hailed with the word “yo” by someone who was technically his subordinate, or, what was more likely, because “Yo, Admiral,” honestly sounded less ridiculous than “Admiral Hoshi.”
“Lieutenant-sorry, Captain Costanza, aren’t you supposed to be briefing your pilots?” said Louis as he eyed the chubby, blond, somewhat gassy child in Hotdog’s arms warily.
“Yep.” Hotdog didn’t even have the decency to look a little ashamed. “Anyway, I took the pilots’ photos down from the Memorial Hall, and I thought you should take them with you over to the baseship. To keep ‘em safe and all. I made sure I got all the Pegasus pilots, too.”
Hotdog pulled a haphazard stack of photos out of what Louis figured was Nicky’s baby bag, which was thrown over Hotdog’s shoulder. Louis knew Hotdog wasn’t exaggerating; he’d just come back from the Memorial Hall himself, and no Pegasus pilots had been left behind. He took the photos reverently and started neatening them like a deck of cards. “Thank you, Captain Costanza. I’ll take care of them, don’t worry.”
Hotdog smiled and patted Louis on the arm. “Cool. Thanks. Oh wait, one other thing…”
Louis panicked for a moment when he thought Hotdog was about to hand him his drooling son. Hotdog must have caught Louis’s expression of terror. “Don’t worry, it’s not him. Nicky’s going to stay with a nice lady on the Monarch, aren’t ya, Nicky?” Hotdog shifted the baby to his other arm and dug around in a velcroed pocket on his flight suit with his free hand. “I was gonna give her this, but I think you’d be better, since this lady never knew Cally. You at least knew her a little.”
Louis took two crumpled sheets of paper from Hotdog’s outstretched hand. Hotdog continued, “It’s just a list of stuff I figure Nicky should know about his parents when he’s old enough. I thought I’d better write it down, since we’re probably all gonna die on this mission.” Louis envied Hotdog’s ability to talk about near-certain death in a tone suggesting about the same level of concern as if he were commenting on how they were probably having algae meatloaf for dinner that night.
It took Louis a few moments to process what Hotdog was asking of him. “I’m honored that you’d give me this responsibility,” he finally said. “I’ll do my best to be worthy of your trust.”
Hotdog shrugged. “‘Course you will, ‘cause you’re Louis Hoshi. Anyway, I gotta go. See ya around. And good luck with the Admiral thing!” Hotdog gave Louis a thumbs up as he trotted away down the hall, Nicky laughing as his father bounced him.
Louis vowed not to read the list until the day came that Nicholas Tyrol-Costanza was old enough to be told its contents, but that resolution lasted all of about twenty minutes. Just after the Raptor’s hatch closed and Louis sat down across from the new President and First Dog, Romo Lampkin peeked at Louis over his sunglasses and said, “I thought we were going to have to leave without you, Admiral. Was there a private going-away party that you just couldn’t bring yourself to leave?”
Louis didn’t like Romo’s smile, and he especially didn’t like the way Romo was playing dumb. Everybody knew about him and Felix. It was an open secret, and there was no way someone like Romo wouldn’t have dug up such easy-to-learn dirt on a new colleague. And if Romo wasn’t playing dumb, if he thought Louis could get over Felix so quickly, that was even worse.
“Sorry for the inconvenience, Mr. President. I forgot something and had to go half-way across the ship to get it,” Louis said flatly, punctuating the end of the conversation by pulling the small bag of personals out from under his seat and setting it in his lap. He could see Romo lean in expectantly, so Louis took no little pleasure in quickly extracting the two pieces of paper and then zipping up the bag and placing it between his feet again, far out of reach of Romo’s prying eyes and fingers.
Louis smiled in spite of himself as he read. The way the list was written would tell Nicky as much about his dad as the items on the list themselves would. Hotdog had included a section on Galen Tyrol (“#3: A little grumpy, but a good guy overall”; “#9: Helluva right hook, but not as good as Starbuck’s”) in addition to ones on Cally (“#2: Was NOT dating Galen when she got pregnant by me, no matter what anybody else tells you. Was engaged to Galen about as long as Sam was to Starbuck. Hoshi will explain what that means”; “#7: Could fix busted avionics better than anybody, even Laird. Hoshi will explain who that was”; “#13: Did NOT smell like cabbage-that was the algae”) and himself (“#1: Washed out of flight school before the attacks. #2: Became Viper pilot, and was even CAG for one mission. Proof that sometimes people really do deserve second chances”; “#4: If you have a bad temper, that’s not my fault. If you have bad luck with women and math, that probably is”).
The best line of all, though, was the last one: “If I’m not here to tell you all this, it’s because I tried to save a little kid like you and I didn’t make it back. I did it because I love you, and if it were you who needed saving, I’d want somebody like me to help me get you back.”
The next few hours were such a whirlwind of meetings, orientations, briefings, and planning sessions that Louis didn’t even have time to think about how unprepared he felt until he gave Thornton and a Two the conn and headed down to his quarters to catch a few hours of sleep. The Cylons had done their best to be considerate of human culture and mores, even going so far as to install a door on the Admiral’s quarters in deference to the human concept of privacy, but Louis still felt like an alien in his new home. He didn’t know how he would ever sleep with the pulsing red light glowing through a slit in the wall that ran all the way around the room. Not only was it far too bright to just brush aside as a nightlight; it gave him the uneasy feeling he was being watched. In fact, he probably was. The Cylons had said their ship was a living thing, with the Hybrid as its brain and nervous system, after all. Worse yet, his new furniture, a red velvet chaise and a four-poster bed with red satin sheets, gave him the impression he was living on the set of a porno. Suddenly, the thought of the Hybrid watching made Louis shiver in disgust.
The only familiar items in his quarters were the dozens of boxes sent over from Galactica sitting in the middle of the room. Though Adama’s furniture had gotten lost in the shuffle of the rapid move and was still sitting in some unknown storage compartment, all of Adama’s and Roslin’s boxes of books and clothes and trinkets were there, intensifying Louis’s feeling that he was in the wrong room. Considering how quickly everything had happened, Louis was a little amazed that his boxes appeared to have all made it to these quarters as well. It took him a few minutes to dig the box he wanted out of the large pile.
Just as he placed that box on top of the stack of Roslin’s things and opened the lid, he heard a knock at his door. Romo Lampkin was over the threshold and digging around in the bag Louis had dropped by the door before Louis even had the chance to say ‘come in.’
“Excuse me, Mr. L-President,” said Louis firmly enough that Romo stopped pawing through Louis’s personal items. “Do you need something? Because it’s customary to ask to borrow something from someone rather than just hunt through their things right under their nose.”
Much to Louis’s frustration, he didn’t manage to faze Romo at all. He guessed he was going to have to get used to that.
“Nothing in particular. I simply heard that it was customary for presidents to pay courtesy visits to their chief military advisors.” Romo stood up and surveyed the room, his eyes bright and playful, even in the alien glow of the reddish light. The baseship corridors were too dark for him to wear sunglasses. Louis suppressed a smile at the thought of how that must be driving Romo nuts. “Ah, I see our new friends gave you the same…curious furnishings they put in my room. It’s reassuring that the Cylons simply seem to have a skewed view of human tastes, rather than that they have anything more risqué in mind for me. Or at least for me in particular.”
Romo had ambled farther into the room and was now peeking under the lids of various boxes as he spoke, stopping to dig through a few of them.
“Hey, knock it off,” Louis snapped. “I don’t care if you’re the President. That doesn’t give you the right to come in here and just start…”
It appeared Romo wasn’t listening. As he stared at the contents of one of the boxes, Romo laughed and shook his head. “Here’s proof that if the gods exist, they have quite the sense of humor.”
“What?”
“How else do you explain the mathematical absurdity of there being two kleptomaniacs alive out of-however many of us there are now?” Romo said as he studied a toy Raptor from the box the Agathons had asked Louis to take with him for them. “Even if we’re including the Cylons or the people who went on the mission to the Colony in the headcount, it’s still bizarre.”
“I am not a kleptomaniac,” Louis muttered as he fumbled to put the lids back on some of the boxes Romo had rummaged through.
Romo extracted a pink hairclip with a fake flower pasted on it from another box. “A man having an item like this only allows for one of three conclusions. I know you haven’t lived with a woman recently, so I went with kleptomania, seeing as it’s the less potentially embarrassing of the remaining two options.”
Louis snatched the hairclip out of Romo’s hand and dropped a lid over the box Romo was looking in. “It was a joke gift from Ruthie Grant, a little Specialist who worked in CIC who I helped get into flight training. Good kid. Quick-tempered, but just as quick to laugh, and quite creative when it came to pranks.” Louis placed the clip on top of the box gently and added quietly, almost as an afterthought, “It was a running gag with her. I had really bad hair, you see.”
“She dead?”
Louis nodded absently. “Ionian Nebula.”
“Fine. So we’re not going to be able to bond by talking shop and comparing pick-pocketing strategies,” Romo conceded, “but you have to admit, this collection of yours is a rather odd amalgamation. It wasn’t that unreasonable of a conclusion to draw.”
“No need to draw any conclusion from it,” said Louis. “It’s just what happens, when you’ve been in the Fleet for awhile. You lose things, you get things from other people…you do what you have to do to scrape by.”
Louis could tell Romo didn’t buy that explanation, but he didn’t press Louis on the issue, either.
Really, it wasn’t a lie; it just wasn’t the full story. Everything Louis had now originally belonged to someone else. When the Pegasus went on its suicide run over New Caprica, there hadn’t exactly been time to pack. In fact, Louis had been one of the lucky ones, since one of his bunkmates who’d stayed behind on a Raptor had been kind enough to toss a few photos and other trinkets in Louis’s locker into her own bag of personals. Of course, she didn’t know what was important to him-she’d saved a two-cubit dog figurine he’d gotten at a gift shop on Libron but left his grandfather’s ivory prayer beads-but it was the thought that counted.
As if that hadn’t been enough, two months later on Galactica, there had been a fire in his bunkroom. The idiot in the rack above his had fallen asleep with a lit cigarette. Since the fire had started so close, not even the stuff in Louis’s locker had survived. He’d lost literally everything but the shirt on his back and the photo of his parents and sister he’d put on the Memorial Wall.
The Supply Officer had issued him as many new-or at least new to him-necessaries as were available, but by that point in their journey, that had hardly been enough to live on. Louis had resorted to slowly accumulating things again on his own. Some things had been gifts, but others he’d won at triad, traded for, or gotten at wake-auctions. He’d stopped actively collecting after the Demetrius, since he could share a lot of things with Felix once they had essentially moved in together, first in Felix’s rack, then in Louis’s, after Dee died.
Louis had lost almost everything again when the new Sergeant-at-Arms took all of Felix’s personals as evidence in the investigation, and basically all of Louis’s, too, since their lives had become so entangled it was impossible for an outsider to separate their possessions. Louis had thought the whole thing was idiotic. Felix was already dead-what more did they need to take? As much as it had hurt to see his things again, though, Louis had nearly cried with joy the day a couple weeks later when he’d found the box waiting for him on his rack.
But something strange had been happening recently. People had taken to writing wills instead of leaving their belongings to auctions, and Louis had been named beneficiary in an inordinate number of them for reasons he himself didn’t understand. His best guess was that people had become so used to him scrounging for hand-me-downs that giving things to him had simply become a habit. By the time word came down they were abandoning Galactica, Louis’s locker had been chock full of other peoples’ stuff, as was the previously unoccupied locker beside his. Add to that all the people like Hotdog who, once they’d found out Adama was leaving Louis behind, had stopped him in the corridor with a little box or a bag of things they didn’t want left behind, not to mention all of Adama’s boxes, and now, ironically, Louis likely had far more possessions than anyone else in the military.
“Admiral Hoshi?” Louis’s focus snapped back to Romo. “You all right? You looked a little far away, for a moment. Anyway, I was just saying you needn’t worry. I’m not going to take the sweatshirt.”
Hoshi’s throat went dry. “What?” he croaked.
Romo smiled in a way that led Hoshi to believe Romo had expected he would be called on for more explanation. “Obviously my reputation for collecting items that concretize others’ characters, things of value to them, precedes me. And although that sweatshirt certainly fits the bill when it comes to you, I promise I don’t have any designs on it.” Romo raised his right hand like he had a few hours ago when he’d taken the Oath of Office, but this time he was wearing a cat-that-ate-the-canary grin. “Scout’s honor.”
“You think a raggedy old sweatshirt’s gonna tell you more about me than anything else?” Louis said, pulling himself back together enough to inject a little prickliness into his voice, even as his fingers dug into the fabric.
“You’re originally from the Pegasus, correct?” asked Romo. Louis nodded. “And yet the sweatshirt has a Galactica patch. You have to wear the uniform, but come on, no self-respecting Pegasus man would wear something as prissy as Galactica sweats. More importantly, the sleeves are too short for you, and you’ve been hovering around it like a mother hen the whole time I’ve been here.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” Louis countered, but he did it so weakly that not even he would have believed it.
Romo shoved his hands in his pockets and looked at Louis seriously, which Louis knew meant he was either speaking from the heart or lying like a rug. “Look, I came down here to assure you that although my clients and I did not exactly have the most positive experiences with your late boyfriend-”
“If you’re worried about me turning against your government, don’t,” Louis cut him off, his words quiet but sharp and harsh. Even so, a part of him was almost happy to hear someone finally say it, blunt and unveiled. “I’m not like him. Not the good parts or the bad parts.”
Louis was surprised that Romo had anything to say after that. “Which parts drove him to do it?” Romo asked as softly as his sandpapery voice would allow. “The good, or the bad?”
Louis fingered the sweatshirt as he stared down at it. “Both.”
For a long time, the only noise in the room was the unsettling heartbeat of the baseship. Finally, Romo pulled something small and silvery out of his pocket. “I’m not so sure we’re that different after all, Admiral. It’s funny. Lee Adama gave me this little memento before I got on the Raptor, in lieu of the traditional outgoing president’s letter to his successor that Roslin had told him to write. It’s his grandfather’s lighter. The funny thing is, I probably know more about this hunk of metal than Lee does. For instance, I know that Joe Adama got it as a gift from a man that Joe knew was guilty of murdering a witness in a case against a Tauron mob boss, but Joe still got him off scot-free.”
Louis gave Romo a look calculated to convey the sentiment, Why the hell are you still here?
Louis could tell that Romo correctly interpreted his look, but it inspired Romo to talk more rather than take the hint. “In other words, Admiral Hoshi, I’m not interested in taking that sweatshirt, or the hairclip, or the locket, or the photos, because I don’t need any thing to peg you.” Romo narrowed his eyes, an expression that suddenly made Louis wish Romo was wearing his sunglasses. “You really don’t get it, do you?”
Romo folded his hands together and paced, assuming the air of a man giving a closing argument. “Things themselves don’t mean much. We’ve all had to learn that the hard way over the past five years. And yet, people still cling to whatever scraps they have left, cling all the tighter as they lose more and more. That’s because, when people imbue these worthless little bits of metal and plastic and paper with memories, when they become ways of keeping their stories alive, then they become far more valuable than what they’re made of. All these people have trusted you as a repository for the detritus of their lives because they trust you as the repository of their memory.”
Louis straightened a stack of boxes a little roughly and mumbled, “Even if that’s true, why the hell did they all pick me?”
Romo sighed. “How many photos did you put up on the Memorial Wall, huh? I’d wager the last bottle of real ambrosia in the universe that you put little Ruthie Grant there, and all the other kids from the CIC who weren’t big and important enough for anybody else to take much notice of them, and all the Pegasus crew who didn’t last long enough to become a part of the Galactica family, and quite likely a lot of those people who nobody else would have the guts to put up after-”
Louis shot Romo a look, and for once, it actually shut him up, at least for a few seconds before he found a new approach. “And how many pictures did you take down? You were late to the Raptor because you were down there in that hall collecting all the abandoned photos. I know you were-you couldn’t possibly know all the civilians in the photos in that bag over there you brought over on the Raptor. More than that, I’m sure everyone on Galactica saw how you handled his memory.”
Romo’s tone softened again as he gestured to the sweatshirt. “For all we humans try to sugarcoat and sanctify our lives in obituaries and eulogies, most of us are content to have our foibles remembered along with our virtues, because that means we’re remembered as whole people.”
Romo stood looking at Louis for a moment, silent and contemplative. “Oh, by the way, you’ll probably want this back,” Romo said abruptly, digging some sheets of paper out of his jacket pocket. “As dedicated a student of human nature as I am, I don’t feel any need for further insight into the mind of one Brendan ‘Hotdog’ Costanza.”
Louis mumbled a befuddled thank-you to Romo as he closed the door, the click of the lock echoing hollowly off the room’s walls. The alien feeling crept back under Louis’s skin, aloneness even more intense than before. He almost wanted to call Romo back again.
Louis looked down at his collar and realized that his fingers had wandered unbidden to the Admiral’s stars. They were the greatest hand-me-downs of all: first Cain, then Adama, Tigh, Felix. They were so heavy, for little scraps of metal. Some things just had too much history.
He slipped off his uniform jacket, folding it neatly and setting it on the chaise. That felt better, but it was too cold in this room to wear just his tanks. Louis hesitated for a moment, but then he pulled the sweatshirt on over his head.
Louis couldn’t help but think of how hard Felix would be laughing at him right now, not only because the sleeves only reached half-way down his forearms, but because Felix would have never believed Louis would wear something with Galactica insignia completely voluntarily, just as Romo had said. Of course, all of Felix’s standard-issue stuff that could be of use to someone else had to be given away; the hard reality of dwindling supplies usually trumped sentimentality, especially when it came to clothing. Felix’s uniform jackets had been divvied up among officers who needed them, and all his one-legged pants had had to be ripped up for rags, but Louis had quietly saved this sweatshirt that didn’t even fit him. He’d kept it on the shelf above his bed, along with an old Pegasus uniform patch and the photos that he’d put back up again when he’d gotten Felix’s effects back. He didn’t talk about them with anyone, but he always left the privacy curtain open when he left his rack each morning. No one had questioned him. No one had accused him of being ashamed.
Maybe the sweatshirt wasn’t the perfect thing to remember Felix with. It certainly wouldn’t have been what Felix would’ve chosen himself. Felix had rarely worn it before he’d gone on morpha, and after that, he’d put it on because of the chills the meds gave him and because he was so embarrassed of the track marks. But he’d had it on the first time they’d gone down to the rec room together after the surgery, and the time when they’d sat on the floor and laughed over Dee’s porn collection, and that last night together. Most of all, it was warm, and it was the only thing he had that still smelled like Felix. He might never truly understand what had driven Felix to do what he had done, Louis thought, but it didn’t matter. He was still home.
Louis was folding up Hotdog’s list in order to slip it into the box for safekeeping when he noticed something strange. One of the pages was a slightly different color, more aged and crinkled. And hadn’t there only been two pages? He slid his thumb behind the front page and flipped it over. His heart stopped.
Even if he hadn’t recognized the words, which he did instantly, he would have known Felix’s handwriting anywhere.
After the initial shock, the pieces slid into place in Louis’s mind: of course Lee Adama’s things would be in Romo’s quarters, since before they’d planned the assault on the Colony, the President’s chambers were intended for Lee. So of course, that’s where Dee’s effects had ended up, too, and of course, Romo, in his odd, damned unsettling way, had figured out enough of the story behind this little scrap of music to guess its previous owner.
The sheet of music wasn’t as great a comfort to him as Louis might have thought it would be, finding this unexpected piece of Felix, and really of Dee, too. That was because Louis didn’t understand what it meant. Sure, he could read music, and he’d heard Felix sing it over and over again in the infirmary until his voice had gone hoarse, seen it in Dee’s locker, heard Felix’s recording of it, even run into other random people who must have heard Felix then now absently hum snatches of it, likely without even realizing what they were doing. It was the kind of song that stayed with you, seeped into your bones. But Louis still didn’t know why, and that transformed the constant, dull ache of not having anyone to ask why into a sharp, unrelenting pang.
Louis sank down on the bed and stared at the pulsing red light, wondering if, had Felix and Dee been alive, he would still be sitting in the middle of this mess. Would Felix have crossed the line in Galactica’s hangar deck? It was hard for Louis to even wrap his mind around the possibility. So many things would have had to have turned out so differently for Felix to have even been given the choice; there were just too many variables. Louis wondered for a moment if him crossing the line would have been enough to sway Felix into coming, too, but again, there were too many variables. Louis wasn’t even sure that, had Felix still been there, he could have muttered “what the hell” and marched across as heedlessly as he had.
If Felix hadn’t crossed the line, assuming he hadn’t turned on Adama, then it would’ve been Felix sitting in the Admiral’s quarters on the basestar right now, regardless of Louis’s decision, Louis knew. Felix was the best jump calculator there ever was, and even if he didn’t show it often, Adama knew Felix could lead if he had to.
If all three of them had crossed the line, then it would’ve been Dee that Adama had sent back, Louis was equally certain. She’d proven herself as XO on the Pegasus, keeping things together even when the Admiral’s own son had started falling apart. And even if she wasn’t Lee’s wife anymore, Dee was still an Adama in so many ways. The Admiral would want to leave a legacy of sorts behind with the remnants of the human race, and no one would’ve blamed the Admiral for desiring that much.
As for Louis, he certainly wouldn’t have begrudged Dee or Felix his job. He just missed them, missed not feeling alone, simple as that.
Louis leaned his head back and sighed. He knew sleep was out of the question now. Anyway, there would be plenty of time for sleep after the deadline, one way or another. He struggled out of the sweatshirt, glad no one was there to see how ridiculous he looked trying to wriggle out of the too-tight sleeves, and slipped his uniform jacket back on. Funny, it didn’t seem as heavy anymore, even with the added weight of making Dee and Felix proud that now rested on his shoulders, too. That didn’t feel like a burden at all.
Louis was thrilled to see the blip of a Colonial Raptor on the DRADIS screen in the basestar’s modified command center hours later, but he was even happier to see the Admiral’s stars finally laid to rest on Earth, even though Adama had returned. There were indeed some things that just had too much history, that had passed through too many hands for any one person to call them his or her own anymore. Louis wasn’t at all satisfied with Lee’s idea, but he was happy they were at least done struggling to keep the chain of command intact.
But not everything was so heavy that it needed to be buried or burned or left behind. Lee had visions of a blank slate and a pure new start, but Louis was sure even Lee knew that wasn’t how it was going to work in reality. Louis and Romo let Lee make his show of doing away with the big technology, all the ships and the computers and big weapons, which had already been falling apart and would have only been a siren’s song when the difficulty of life on this new world sank in, when people eventually became tempted to try for a different new start on some dream world they would never reach in the dying fleet.
But Romo lit the fire at their camp the first night with Joseph Adama’s lighter, and Louis hung his heavy extra bag from a tree limb to ensure the photos wouldn’t get damp from dew in the grass. And though Louis was quite certain that he was getting some of the lyrics wrong, and knew he was out-of-tune, Hotdog sang the familiar song to his son as he paced back and forth with the child in his arms. Even though he still couldn’t say he understood it, Louis did find far more comfort than he’d expected in knowing that the song, their song, had become the first Earth lullaby.