Crack!fic: Mr. Gaeta Builds His Dream House
Title: Mr. Gaeta Builds His Dream House
Author: kappamaki33
Rating: PG-13ish?
Pairing: Gaeta/Hoshi
Summary: Crack!fic. Gaeta and Hoshi build a house on Earth.
Spoilers: Through Series Finale
Disclaimer: I do not own BSG or any of the characters described herein. These works are for fan appreciation and entertainment only, and I do not benefit financially from them.
Notes: Inspired by let_fate_decide’s comment about Hoshi building Felix their dream house on Earth, but in a completely angst-free way (so I hope I’m not stepping on your idea!). This is AU in that Gaeta survived the mutiny. In my mind, everything else goes down pretty much the same, except Adama sent all the mutineers, Gaeta included, to the prison ship rather than executing anybody, and Gaeta volunteered for the final mission, earned his freedom, and regained the respect of a fair number of people. Also, I stand firm in the belief that while Lee might have convinced everyone to hurl their FTLs and guns into the sun, most people wouldn’t let go of a few of the other things they still had left…
Title stolen with apologies Cary Grant and Myrna Loy.
Lee did a final head-count of the group Doc Cottle was leading to their new home. Fifty-seven. Lee was surprised more people hadn’t chosen to go with Cottle; it made sense to settle with one of the last doctors alive, and the territory Cottle had chosen seemed to be a particularly pleasant spot: an area with thick woods, gentle streams, and even a few little lakes. He had considered joining them, until he remembered what he’d said to Kara and how much he really meant it. He’d at least start out his explorations in a place that, should he so choose, he could make it back to an encampment eventually. At least for now, though, he needed to strike out on his own. So, Lee had walked a little ways with the group, talking with Cottle about their plans, before shaking hands with the old doctor and heading back toward the Raptor to fly Galen Tyrol to his cold, lonely island. He stopped to say good-bye to several of the people trailing behind Cottle along the way.
Louis Hoshi and Felix Gaeta, who had been lagging behind the group a bit already, had stopped. Louis had dropped his rucksack and knelt down beside Felix, helping Felix adjust his prosthetic leg. Lee saw something peeking out of Louis’s bag that glinted in the sunlight. Lee approached the men and pulled the shiny object and another beside it out of the bag.
“Oh no, Lieutenant,” Lee said, drawing Louis's and Felix’s attention to his presence for the first time. Lee held up a slide rule and a T-square.
Louis stood up, walked over to Lee in three quick strides, and snatched the T-square and slide rule from Lee’s hands. “If you want them, you’ll have to pry them from my cold, dead hands, sir.”
Lee did his best to keep a straight face. “Come on, Hoshi. You know they need to go on the one-way trip the ships are taking.”
Louis’s face turned red, and he clutched the T-square as if it were a weapon. “Sir, you let your father keep the binoculars. And Felix-Felix gets his whole metal leg!”
“Shut up, Louis,” Felix whispered. “I’m an easy lunch for wild animals already-you don’t need to make me slower yet.”
“No, you keep the leg, so long as you put it away if any natives come around,” said Lee. “That was the deal Colonel Tigh cut for you.”
Louis turned to Felix, brow furrowed. “You didn’t tell me Colonel Tigh got it for you. How did…?”
“I believe his exact words were that with all the craaap I’ve had dumped on me for the past five years, I’d earned a little leeway.”
Louis nodded in acknowledgment of Tigh’s reasonableness, but he still refused to release his grip on the T-square and slide rule. “Anyway, Major Adama, I outrank you now. Or I did. Wait a minute, do we even have ranks anymore?”
Lee looked as if he hadn’t considered that before, then sighed and rolled his eyes. “What the frak do I care now, anyway. Fine, just don’t go showing these to any Earthlings and pretending to be a god, all right?” Louis exhaled in relief and grinned so brightly that even Lee couldn’t suppress a little smile. He put a hand on Louis's and Felix’s shoulders. “Good luck, boys. Have a bright future.” Then Lee left them, ambling down the hill in the opposite direction of the rest of Cottle’s bunch.
Louis stowed his hard-won spoils in his rucksack and threw it over his shoulder. Cottle and the others were quite a ways ahead of Felix and Louis by now, but they’d stopped to let the two catch up. Cottle was yelling something snide at them, but they couldn’t hear what.
“What are you laughing at?”
Felix shot Louis a wry sidelong glance. “The thought of anyone mistaking you for a god.”
Louis did his best to feign umbrage, but mostly failed. “Hey, it was a legitimate concern. Isn’t there a god of mathematics?”
“I think that would be Apollo. Louis, I love you and I wouldn’t trade you for Adonis himself, but somehow, I don’t think anybody is going to mistake you for Apollo, no matter how good that windswept look is on you.”
~*~*~
Louis was surprised to find the blanket empty beside him when he woke the next morning. He got up and stumbled out of the makeshift tent and into the bright morning sunlight. The only sounds to be heard were the warbling of birds and the rush of water in a nearby stream; he and Felix had chosen to live a bit apart from Cottle’s main encampment, since though the rest of the people in Cottle’s group has accepted Felix back into the fold, Felix was still rubbed pretty raw emotionally from the events of the past few months and wasn’t really comfortable around people anymore, besides Louis.
Louis found Felix, already up and dressed, sitting on a small boulder not far from the tent and drawing in the sand with a stick.
“What got you up so early, Baby?” Louis mumbled, leaning down to kiss Felix on the cheek and rubbing his shoulders.
“Just planning our house,” Felix said as casually as he could, but Louis knew Felix was bubbling with excitement. “I’ll put the final draft on paper, but since we’ve got such a limited supply, I figured I’d better save it until I had a fairly solid idea of what we want.”
Louis leaned over Felix’s shoulder to get a better look at his handiwork. He spluttered and his eyebrows crept amazingly close to his hairline when he saw the incredibly intricate, complicated, multi-story floor plan Felix had laid out. “Felix-”
“Hey, you did bring a T-square,” Felix grinned.
“Yeah, but I didn’t pack a carpenter.”
“Oh, come on, we can do it,” Felix said, placing his hand over Louis’s on his shoulder. “And I can scale it back a bit. You should’ve seen my first sketch. At least we’re not going to be living in a house that looks like a hamburger.” Louis nearly collapsed in laughter behind him. “What? I was hungry.”
~*~*~
Louis decided to broach the difficult subject the evening they were putting the finishing touches on their first really successful technical endeavors: two beautiful stone axes.
“You know we’re not going to be able to build a second story, Felix, right?”
Felix set down his axe and grabbed Louis’s arm. “What? But we could-”
“Baby, come on. I know you want to show off that we’re the smartest couple left in the known universe, but how smart are we going to look if we waste our time building a mansion and forget to plant crops?”
Felix looked a little panicked. “But-what about rooms for the children!”
Now it was Louis’s turn to look panicked. “Children-where? What children? Oh my gods, Hannah Entley’s twins-they do have your hair! I’d heard rumors, but I never believed-”
“What? No! Hannah? Definitely no.” Felix, realizing that he’d been letting his imagination carry him a bit farther afield than he’d been telling his lover, blushed. “I was just thinking we might adopt, someday,” he said, trying to sound like he hadn’t thought about it very much. “You said before that you’d like kids.” He hesitated. “I sort of told Cottle that, if there was ever a need, we would…” Felix couldn’t manage anything more than a shy, apologetic smile.
Louis put his hand on Felix’s cheek and turned Felix’s face so he could kiss him. “I think that’s a lovely idea,” he said, their foreheads still touching. “But, we’ll build an extra room on the back of the house when the time comes.”
After that, Felix relaxed, but his terse answers to Louis’s attempts at conversation made it clear he was still pouting.
Then it dawned on Louis. “You don’t care about the second floor. You just want a stairway, don’t you?”
Felix blushed again. “No…yes.”
“How about we dig a cellar and put steps in? That’s a compromise.”
“No, that’s cheating, shaping dirt that’s already there instead of constructing one on our own. Oh, but we could use some of those nice, thin rock slabs as the surface for the steps, the ones not far from the river. You know which ones I’m talking about?”
Louis smiled to himself. Yes, Felix may have some strange predilections, Louis thought, but that didn’t really matter since Louis had plenty of time now to discover all those quirks.
~*~*~
“Well, you got your wish of making a building that looks like food.”
“How do you figure?”
“Don’t you see it? It’s a loaf of bread.”
“Oh, bread…I miss bread,” Felix said as he and Louis surveyed their newly-finished home. “You know, maybe we should invest our spare time in figuring out how to make familiar foods out of the plants here, rather than on architecture.”
Louis chuckled. “I think that is a genius idea.”
Louis and Felix had scaled back their plans for a log cabin when it became clear that Louis was going to kill himself trying to fell enough trees with a stone axe before winter, and Felix’s leg kept him from being able to help with that job. So, they had gone back to the drawing board and come up with the idea of cutting down small trees and branches and using them as poles to construct an oval, round-topped skeleton for the house, which they then covered with mats woven from bark and cattails and filled in the places likely to permit drafts with daub. Not only was it much easier than chopping down trees, but the building process was faster and much more enjoyable because Felix was able work alongside Louis in almost every step in the process.
They weren’t giving up on having a cabin someday, just putting it on the back-burner until they were settled in and had their food situation well in order. They set up a patch of land a bit bigger than a garden but smaller than a field for cultivating, which was where Felix spent most of his time. It was a good fit for him; not only did it allow him to stay close to home and didn’t require foot speed, but he also found he took a certain delight in seeing things grow. Louis foraged and brought home seeds for Felix to try in the garden, and he put his engineering background to good use constructing snares and traps for small animals. He occasionally tried his hand at spear-fishing, and Felix usually came along to sit on the bank and watch, alternately napping in the sun and laughing at Louis’s clumsiness.
Even though neither of them saw it as permanent, they both had to admit, the oval bark-mat hut was a very snug, comfy design for a home, even if it wasn’t much to look at. And even though it wasn’t a technical masterpiece, it was becoming envy of everyone in the main encampment, who all still had nothing better than makeshift lean-to’s and the like. As the two had been building, more and more people from the encampment had come out to see their progress, and much to Felix’s surprise, he hadn’t disliked having occasional visitors.
“Did you ever think we’d end up like this?” Louis asked Felix as they stood outside the front door, still looking the place over.
“That we’d end up living on a prehistoric planet in a hut that’s shaped like a loaf of bread and smells like animal dung? No, Louis, I can’t say I ever entertained that thought.”
“One, it does not smell like animal dung, now that the daub is dried, and two, you know that’s not what I asked.”
Felix thought for a moment. “You know that when we first got together, I was in a dark place. After New Caprica, I couldn’t really bring myself to believe any of us had a future at all, let alone that I did.” Felix looked into Louis’s eyes. “But, over time…you changed that for me. You gave me hope that, even if the future didn’t turn out perfect, it was going to be worth the ride, so long as I could take it with you."
They were both about to tear up, so Felix changed the subject. “Well, Louis,” Felix said, draping his arm around the other man’s shoulders, “are you ready to go home?”
“Yes, I am, Felix,” Louis said, wrapping his arm around Felix’s waist. “Let’s go home.”
They crossed the threshold of their house together, but they both knew they had already found their home.
~*~*~
Epilogue: 150,000 years later
“Mara, have you seen what Jake and Andy have been working on?”
The graduate student wiped the sweat from her brow with her forearm, hoping that it was cleaner than her gloves and hadn’t left a smudge of dirt across her face. “No, not since Tuesday. Has he got something interesting?”
“You better believe it. Come on, take a break.”
Benjamin held out his hand and helped Mara out of the hole she’d been working in. It was nice to get out into the open air, Mara thought to herself; this place really did have pleasant weather, if you weren’t stuck digging a few meters below ground level, cut off from the light breezes that wended their way through the woods.
“Find anything interesting?” Benjamin asked as they made their way to an area of the dig where a small group had assembled.
“Not really,” she said. “I think there’s evidence of cultivation, but Professor Byrd wasn’t so sure. Hey, Jake! Whatcha got there?”
“Mara, you’re gonna hate me for having drawn the lot to work over here,” Jake said, looking at Mara over his dirt-encrusted sunglasses. “I won the lottery. Not only is this quite the burial site-seven bodies so far-but these two fellows are particularly fascinating.”
Mara slid through the crowd and leaned in over Jake’s shoulder. “Hmm, definitely adult male, pretty tall and healthy for such an early specimen, and-what the hell is that?”
Jake’s eyes lit up. “Yeah, I know. It’s pretty banged up, but it looks like he’s holding something metal to me. This is huge-nobody ever dreamed we’d find something like this at a Middle Paleolithic burial site. If I wasn’t seeing it myself, I’d say it was impossible. It upsets nearly everything we thought we knew about early homo sapiens.
“What do you suppose it is?” asked Benjamin.
“Some kind of ceremonial weapon for the dead to take to the underworld, maybe? Not that you could fend anything off with something that flimsy, but the "T" shape is definitely intentional.”
“Um, guys?” said Andy, who was working on the remains beside Jake’s.
“What is it?” said Mara.
Andy stared down at the remains, unable to form words. He just shook his head and pointed at something.
Mara, Benjamin, and Jake all moved behind Andy. Their jaws dropped simultaneously.
“It can’t be-”
“No, this is some kind of prank-”
“Is that…a prosthetic leg?”
Author: kappamaki33
Rating: PG-13ish?
Pairing: Gaeta/Hoshi
Summary: Crack!fic. Gaeta and Hoshi build a house on Earth.
Spoilers: Through Series Finale
Disclaimer: I do not own BSG or any of the characters described herein. These works are for fan appreciation and entertainment only, and I do not benefit financially from them.
Notes: Inspired by let_fate_decide’s comment about Hoshi building Felix their dream house on Earth, but in a completely angst-free way (so I hope I’m not stepping on your idea!). This is AU in that Gaeta survived the mutiny. In my mind, everything else goes down pretty much the same, except Adama sent all the mutineers, Gaeta included, to the prison ship rather than executing anybody, and Gaeta volunteered for the final mission, earned his freedom, and regained the respect of a fair number of people. Also, I stand firm in the belief that while Lee might have convinced everyone to hurl their FTLs and guns into the sun, most people wouldn’t let go of a few of the other things they still had left…
Title stolen with apologies Cary Grant and Myrna Loy.
Lee did a final head-count of the group Doc Cottle was leading to their new home. Fifty-seven. Lee was surprised more people hadn’t chosen to go with Cottle; it made sense to settle with one of the last doctors alive, and the territory Cottle had chosen seemed to be a particularly pleasant spot: an area with thick woods, gentle streams, and even a few little lakes. He had considered joining them, until he remembered what he’d said to Kara and how much he really meant it. He’d at least start out his explorations in a place that, should he so choose, he could make it back to an encampment eventually. At least for now, though, he needed to strike out on his own. So, Lee had walked a little ways with the group, talking with Cottle about their plans, before shaking hands with the old doctor and heading back toward the Raptor to fly Galen Tyrol to his cold, lonely island. He stopped to say good-bye to several of the people trailing behind Cottle along the way.
Louis Hoshi and Felix Gaeta, who had been lagging behind the group a bit already, had stopped. Louis had dropped his rucksack and knelt down beside Felix, helping Felix adjust his prosthetic leg. Lee saw something peeking out of Louis’s bag that glinted in the sunlight. Lee approached the men and pulled the shiny object and another beside it out of the bag.
“Oh no, Lieutenant,” Lee said, drawing Louis's and Felix’s attention to his presence for the first time. Lee held up a slide rule and a T-square.
Louis stood up, walked over to Lee in three quick strides, and snatched the T-square and slide rule from Lee’s hands. “If you want them, you’ll have to pry them from my cold, dead hands, sir.”
Lee did his best to keep a straight face. “Come on, Hoshi. You know they need to go on the one-way trip the ships are taking.”
Louis’s face turned red, and he clutched the T-square as if it were a weapon. “Sir, you let your father keep the binoculars. And Felix-Felix gets his whole metal leg!”
“Shut up, Louis,” Felix whispered. “I’m an easy lunch for wild animals already-you don’t need to make me slower yet.”
“No, you keep the leg, so long as you put it away if any natives come around,” said Lee. “That was the deal Colonel Tigh cut for you.”
Louis turned to Felix, brow furrowed. “You didn’t tell me Colonel Tigh got it for you. How did…?”
“I believe his exact words were that with all the craaap I’ve had dumped on me for the past five years, I’d earned a little leeway.”
Louis nodded in acknowledgment of Tigh’s reasonableness, but he still refused to release his grip on the T-square and slide rule. “Anyway, Major Adama, I outrank you now. Or I did. Wait a minute, do we even have ranks anymore?”
Lee looked as if he hadn’t considered that before, then sighed and rolled his eyes. “What the frak do I care now, anyway. Fine, just don’t go showing these to any Earthlings and pretending to be a god, all right?” Louis exhaled in relief and grinned so brightly that even Lee couldn’t suppress a little smile. He put a hand on Louis's and Felix’s shoulders. “Good luck, boys. Have a bright future.” Then Lee left them, ambling down the hill in the opposite direction of the rest of Cottle’s bunch.
Louis stowed his hard-won spoils in his rucksack and threw it over his shoulder. Cottle and the others were quite a ways ahead of Felix and Louis by now, but they’d stopped to let the two catch up. Cottle was yelling something snide at them, but they couldn’t hear what.
“What are you laughing at?”
Felix shot Louis a wry sidelong glance. “The thought of anyone mistaking you for a god.”
Louis did his best to feign umbrage, but mostly failed. “Hey, it was a legitimate concern. Isn’t there a god of mathematics?”
“I think that would be Apollo. Louis, I love you and I wouldn’t trade you for Adonis himself, but somehow, I don’t think anybody is going to mistake you for Apollo, no matter how good that windswept look is on you.”
~*~*~
Louis was surprised to find the blanket empty beside him when he woke the next morning. He got up and stumbled out of the makeshift tent and into the bright morning sunlight. The only sounds to be heard were the warbling of birds and the rush of water in a nearby stream; he and Felix had chosen to live a bit apart from Cottle’s main encampment, since though the rest of the people in Cottle’s group has accepted Felix back into the fold, Felix was still rubbed pretty raw emotionally from the events of the past few months and wasn’t really comfortable around people anymore, besides Louis.
Louis found Felix, already up and dressed, sitting on a small boulder not far from the tent and drawing in the sand with a stick.
“What got you up so early, Baby?” Louis mumbled, leaning down to kiss Felix on the cheek and rubbing his shoulders.
“Just planning our house,” Felix said as casually as he could, but Louis knew Felix was bubbling with excitement. “I’ll put the final draft on paper, but since we’ve got such a limited supply, I figured I’d better save it until I had a fairly solid idea of what we want.”
Louis leaned over Felix’s shoulder to get a better look at his handiwork. He spluttered and his eyebrows crept amazingly close to his hairline when he saw the incredibly intricate, complicated, multi-story floor plan Felix had laid out. “Felix-”
“Hey, you did bring a T-square,” Felix grinned.
“Yeah, but I didn’t pack a carpenter.”
“Oh, come on, we can do it,” Felix said, placing his hand over Louis’s on his shoulder. “And I can scale it back a bit. You should’ve seen my first sketch. At least we’re not going to be living in a house that looks like a hamburger.” Louis nearly collapsed in laughter behind him. “What? I was hungry.”
~*~*~
Louis decided to broach the difficult subject the evening they were putting the finishing touches on their first really successful technical endeavors: two beautiful stone axes.
“You know we’re not going to be able to build a second story, Felix, right?”
Felix set down his axe and grabbed Louis’s arm. “What? But we could-”
“Baby, come on. I know you want to show off that we’re the smartest couple left in the known universe, but how smart are we going to look if we waste our time building a mansion and forget to plant crops?”
Felix looked a little panicked. “But-what about rooms for the children!”
Now it was Louis’s turn to look panicked. “Children-where? What children? Oh my gods, Hannah Entley’s twins-they do have your hair! I’d heard rumors, but I never believed-”
“What? No! Hannah? Definitely no.” Felix, realizing that he’d been letting his imagination carry him a bit farther afield than he’d been telling his lover, blushed. “I was just thinking we might adopt, someday,” he said, trying to sound like he hadn’t thought about it very much. “You said before that you’d like kids.” He hesitated. “I sort of told Cottle that, if there was ever a need, we would…” Felix couldn’t manage anything more than a shy, apologetic smile.
Louis put his hand on Felix’s cheek and turned Felix’s face so he could kiss him. “I think that’s a lovely idea,” he said, their foreheads still touching. “But, we’ll build an extra room on the back of the house when the time comes.”
After that, Felix relaxed, but his terse answers to Louis’s attempts at conversation made it clear he was still pouting.
Then it dawned on Louis. “You don’t care about the second floor. You just want a stairway, don’t you?”
Felix blushed again. “No…yes.”
“How about we dig a cellar and put steps in? That’s a compromise.”
“No, that’s cheating, shaping dirt that’s already there instead of constructing one on our own. Oh, but we could use some of those nice, thin rock slabs as the surface for the steps, the ones not far from the river. You know which ones I’m talking about?”
Louis smiled to himself. Yes, Felix may have some strange predilections, Louis thought, but that didn’t really matter since Louis had plenty of time now to discover all those quirks.
~*~*~
“Well, you got your wish of making a building that looks like food.”
“How do you figure?”
“Don’t you see it? It’s a loaf of bread.”
“Oh, bread…I miss bread,” Felix said as he and Louis surveyed their newly-finished home. “You know, maybe we should invest our spare time in figuring out how to make familiar foods out of the plants here, rather than on architecture.”
Louis chuckled. “I think that is a genius idea.”
Louis and Felix had scaled back their plans for a log cabin when it became clear that Louis was going to kill himself trying to fell enough trees with a stone axe before winter, and Felix’s leg kept him from being able to help with that job. So, they had gone back to the drawing board and come up with the idea of cutting down small trees and branches and using them as poles to construct an oval, round-topped skeleton for the house, which they then covered with mats woven from bark and cattails and filled in the places likely to permit drafts with daub. Not only was it much easier than chopping down trees, but the building process was faster and much more enjoyable because Felix was able work alongside Louis in almost every step in the process.
They weren’t giving up on having a cabin someday, just putting it on the back-burner until they were settled in and had their food situation well in order. They set up a patch of land a bit bigger than a garden but smaller than a field for cultivating, which was where Felix spent most of his time. It was a good fit for him; not only did it allow him to stay close to home and didn’t require foot speed, but he also found he took a certain delight in seeing things grow. Louis foraged and brought home seeds for Felix to try in the garden, and he put his engineering background to good use constructing snares and traps for small animals. He occasionally tried his hand at spear-fishing, and Felix usually came along to sit on the bank and watch, alternately napping in the sun and laughing at Louis’s clumsiness.
Even though neither of them saw it as permanent, they both had to admit, the oval bark-mat hut was a very snug, comfy design for a home, even if it wasn’t much to look at. And even though it wasn’t a technical masterpiece, it was becoming envy of everyone in the main encampment, who all still had nothing better than makeshift lean-to’s and the like. As the two had been building, more and more people from the encampment had come out to see their progress, and much to Felix’s surprise, he hadn’t disliked having occasional visitors.
“Did you ever think we’d end up like this?” Louis asked Felix as they stood outside the front door, still looking the place over.
“That we’d end up living on a prehistoric planet in a hut that’s shaped like a loaf of bread and smells like animal dung? No, Louis, I can’t say I ever entertained that thought.”
“One, it does not smell like animal dung, now that the daub is dried, and two, you know that’s not what I asked.”
Felix thought for a moment. “You know that when we first got together, I was in a dark place. After New Caprica, I couldn’t really bring myself to believe any of us had a future at all, let alone that I did.” Felix looked into Louis’s eyes. “But, over time…you changed that for me. You gave me hope that, even if the future didn’t turn out perfect, it was going to be worth the ride, so long as I could take it with you."
They were both about to tear up, so Felix changed the subject. “Well, Louis,” Felix said, draping his arm around the other man’s shoulders, “are you ready to go home?”
“Yes, I am, Felix,” Louis said, wrapping his arm around Felix’s waist. “Let’s go home.”
They crossed the threshold of their house together, but they both knew they had already found their home.
~*~*~
Epilogue: 150,000 years later
“Mara, have you seen what Jake and Andy have been working on?”
The graduate student wiped the sweat from her brow with her forearm, hoping that it was cleaner than her gloves and hadn’t left a smudge of dirt across her face. “No, not since Tuesday. Has he got something interesting?”
“You better believe it. Come on, take a break.”
Benjamin held out his hand and helped Mara out of the hole she’d been working in. It was nice to get out into the open air, Mara thought to herself; this place really did have pleasant weather, if you weren’t stuck digging a few meters below ground level, cut off from the light breezes that wended their way through the woods.
“Find anything interesting?” Benjamin asked as they made their way to an area of the dig where a small group had assembled.
“Not really,” she said. “I think there’s evidence of cultivation, but Professor Byrd wasn’t so sure. Hey, Jake! Whatcha got there?”
“Mara, you’re gonna hate me for having drawn the lot to work over here,” Jake said, looking at Mara over his dirt-encrusted sunglasses. “I won the lottery. Not only is this quite the burial site-seven bodies so far-but these two fellows are particularly fascinating.”
Mara slid through the crowd and leaned in over Jake’s shoulder. “Hmm, definitely adult male, pretty tall and healthy for such an early specimen, and-what the hell is that?”
Jake’s eyes lit up. “Yeah, I know. It’s pretty banged up, but it looks like he’s holding something metal to me. This is huge-nobody ever dreamed we’d find something like this at a Middle Paleolithic burial site. If I wasn’t seeing it myself, I’d say it was impossible. It upsets nearly everything we thought we knew about early homo sapiens.
“What do you suppose it is?” asked Benjamin.
“Some kind of ceremonial weapon for the dead to take to the underworld, maybe? Not that you could fend anything off with something that flimsy, but the "T" shape is definitely intentional.”
“Um, guys?” said Andy, who was working on the remains beside Jake’s.
“What is it?” said Mara.
Andy stared down at the remains, unable to form words. He just shook his head and pointed at something.
Mara, Benjamin, and Jake all moved behind Andy. Their jaws dropped simultaneously.
“It can’t be-”
“No, this is some kind of prank-”
“Is that…a prosthetic leg?”