Fic: Faithful Son
Title: Faithful Son
Author: kappamaki33
Rating: PG
Characters: Mainly Roslin and Gaeta
Summary: Laura visits Gaeta in the infirmary. She asks about a vision but learns something else she shouldn’t have forgotten instead.
Spoilers: Through series finale
Notes: Missing scene fic that comes a bit before the last game of triad in “ Five Times Dee Didn’t Play Cards and One Time She Did.” I wrote it mainly because 1) Roslin is so twitchy about prophecy at this point that she’d definitely investigate any unearthly singing, 2) I wanted to see Gaeta in the Opera House, even if he had no connection to the Final Five, and 3) I really like the idea of Kara as the “prodigal son” and Gaeta as the “faithful son,” and I think stories with that structure tend not to give enough credit to the anguish and confusion the faithful sons must have. (Link to Parable of the Prodigal Son, Luke 15: 11-32). I played a little fast and loose with the chronology of Gaeta’s singing (as I did in the “Five Times” fic), since GWCTD intercuts Gaeta’s singing with the Quorum meeting and the baseship jump that comes after this, but I always figured the cuts between his song and the rest of the events of the episode were meant to be more thematic than chronological.
Faithful Son
“So he answered and said to his father, ‘Lo, these many years I have been serving you; I never transgressed your commandment at any time; and yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might make merry with my friends. But as soon as this son of yours came, who has devoured your livelihood with harlots, you killed the fatted calf for him.’
“And he said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that I have is yours. It was right that we should make merry and be glad, for your brother was dead and is alive again, and was lost and is found.’” -Luke 15: 29-32.
Laura Roslin was intrigued by how many people very pointedly did not visit Mr. Gaeta in the infirmary. Dee and a tall, pale, and very frightened-looking officer Laura recognized from the CIC simply had the misfortune of making it down there at the one time Gaeta had finally drifted off to sleep and getting called back to duty before he woke up. Watching the other not-visitors, however, had made for strange entertainment. Strange or not, Laura was grateful for any entertainment she could get that didn’t involve her moving and adding to the particularly bad nausea the diloxin was giving her that day.
She could tell that Anders wasn’t going to speak to Gaeta long before Anders figured it out himself. Trembling, pacing, and wide-eyed with shock, Anders had made six distinct, sincere attempts to part the curtain and walk in, by Laura’s count, but each time Gaeta’s song built to a crescendo just as Anders’s fingertips grazed the cloth, and each time that exquisite expression of pain made Anders wince and recoil. Laura could read the guilt all over Anders’s face when he finally gave up and left, passing her bedsit without even registering her presence.
When Lee had come down to lecture her-the only thing more annoying than Lee’s lectures in general was when Lee actually had a good point buried somewhere in the bullshit, Laura mused to herself-she could tell he felt a tug in two different directions. Delegate Adama should make his carefully-worded political and emotional plea to the President before rushing off to the emergency Quorum meeting concerning the Cylon baseship. But Laura had seen a glimmer of Captain Apollo when he’d first walked in and heard that voice breaking like a wave over their usually uncomfortably quiet corner of the infirmary. Of course, Lee had let Delegate Adama prevail, despite how much she’d been hoping for Gaeta’s and Lee’s sakes that Captain Apollo might win out for once.
Bill had called down to find out how she was doing and to give her an update on the Cylon situation, even though he knew one of Laura’s junior staff and Lee had already briefed her.
“So, since Kara’s managed to turn the Fleet upside down yet again, it looks like I’m gonna have my hands too full to make it down for Chapter Sixteen today,” Bill said in a tone that Laura knew meant he was pinching the bridge of his nose in fatigue and frustration.
“Maybe this isn’t the time to discuss it, but have you ever noticed that Captain Thrace has a tendency to bring home stray Cylons? First the Raider, then Sharon Agathon and the Heavy Raider from Caprica, and now a whole baseship…” Laura said, at least partially jokingly.
“They keep getting bigger, don’t they?” Bill said, a little bit of humor finally creeping into his voice. “At least she can’t go up from here, unless next time she jumps back towing the Cylon homeworld behind her.” Laura was tempted to press Bill into drawing a logical inference about Thrace from this pattern, but he spoke before she had the chance. “Laura, could you turn the wireless down?”
“That’s not the wireless. That’s Mr. Gaeta. I doubt hearing him over the phone does him justice, but if there was a good day for you to not be able to read to me, this is it. Still, I wish you could hear him with me.”
“Gaeta? What?”
“It’s an unusual reaction to trauma, to be sure, but my gods, Bill, why didn’t you ever mention he had such a beautiful voice?”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “I didn’t know.”
That was a surprise. It always seemed Bill knew everything about his kids, especially those that had been with him since before the attacks. “Well, maybe you’ll hear what I mean when you come down to visit him later.”
“Hm.” There was as much guilt in Bill’s voice as one syllable could sustain. “It’s a madhouse up here, so it may be awhile. Take care, Laura.” The phone clicked off.
If nothing else, observing the traffic around Mr. Gaeta’s cubicle had convinced Laura that the woman who had come back in the shiny new Viper was not the same Kara Thrace that had died two months ago. For all her faults, the old Thrace would have been down to check on a man who’d been severely wounded under her command by now.
Even Baltar made a very odd appearance-well, even odder than usual. Laura had long ago ceased trying to figure out why Baltar did the things he did, since the analysis boiled down to merely figuring out how he could twist any given transaction into a benefit to himself. Even the sermons on the wireless, Laura thought ruefully. To think, for a few moments she’d actually let herself buy into the idea that Gaius Baltar was preaching because he felt some higher power was compelling him. Then he’d revealed the shared vision with the Six and Sharon Agathon, and the pieces had disappointingly fallen back into their old places. Frakking hypocrite, Laura thought. The gall he had, implicating her visions without mentioning the fact that the only way he could know about them is if he was there, too, walking into the Opera House with Hera in his arms as she’d seen him do countless times.
Laura would have been amused and at least a little gratified at the uncertainty on Baltar’s face if she could have convinced herself he was merely there to proselytize, but even Laura had to admit, his conflict clearly ran deeper than that.
She couldn’t remember when or how, but somewhere in these thoughts about Baltar, Laura slipped into the Opera House. Even her mere dreams of this place had become so vivid by now that she couldn’t really tell them from the true visions anymore, at least not at the start. The only tell-tale difference was that the dreams usually had more variety in their endings. The start was always the same: cavernous hallways, blood red carpet, stairways, and a child’s laughter. When she reached the grand staircase and didn’t see Athena on the other side, she wondered if that was because this was a dream or because Athena was probably still on the Cylon baseship. Did proximity matter in visions? Laura couldn’t even remember whether or not she’d seen Athena there while the Demetrius had been gone.
Then Laura was in the auditorium, sitting in a plush seat half-way down the center aisle. This was new, which suggested dream, but the seat felt so real-carpet beneath her feet, whorls from knots in the wood in the armrest under her fingertips… She allowed herself the slim hope that the vision was actually progressing, now that she’d somehow gotten through the door.
Suddenly there was an audience around her that hadn’t been there before, not a packed house by any means, but the people in front of her were so tall they partially blocked her view of the person on stage. She could see the singer’s hands stretched out before him in supplication; in supplication to what, she couldn’t tell. But she didn’t need to see his face to know who he was.
“But wish no more-My life you can take, to have her please just one day wake…”
No orchestra, no piano, not even the accompaniment of the audience’s breathing, just one voice reverberating through the hall, reaching for the vaulted ceiling and whatever lay beyond it.
“To have her please, just one day wake.”
She woke with a start and was surprised that the aural part of her dream didn’t stop. Gaeta started the song yet again, though the singing was finally wearing him down; the voice was still beautiful, but weaker, rougher, more strained. But Laura understood. That was the point. She knew that, no matter how well-intentioned, kindness and pity couldn’t soothe that sort of pain. The only thing you could do was drown it out with some other, more bearable hurt, or stop feeling altogether.
It was only a dream. It had to have been a dream, but… Laura felt something within her willing her to go to that voice. The Opera House haunted her so much that sometimes the deadening fatigue of the treatments was almost a relief in comparison. She had to make it stop, soon. She really had nothing to lose, and even though the chance of finding an answer was slight, there was so much to gain.
Laura caught herself taking off her wig. She could tell herself she was removing it simply because it was itchy and she knew she’d have to put it on for the Quorum meeting Lee had guilted her into agreeing to attend. But was that the real reason, she wondered? Was it tactical, to soften Gaeta up by reminding him of her own fragility? Or was it truly in commiseration, to uncover her scars for him because they were the only song she could offer in return for his? It frightened Laura that even upon reflection, she wasn’t sure of her own motives on a lot of things anymore. She compromised and arranged Emily’s scarf on her bare head.
Laura slid out of the bed and stood up. She slowly made her way across the room, her hand tight around her IV pole, using it almost like a walking stick for balance.
“But wish no more-my life you can take…” She could hear the exhaustion in his voice, how it cracked and failed and yet he pushed on anyway. Now it was beautiful like a shattered stained-glass window: full of brilliance and color, but with sharp edges and broken, missing pieces.
“…To have her please just one day wake…” Laura parted the curtain a few inches with her fingers and peeked in. She was shocked, not at the leg-she’d seen enough amputees down here in Cottle’s dungeon before. But Gaeta wasn’t merely pale; he was gray. He looked far too old, older than Lee and Helo. She’d seen the beginnings of this in the young lieutenant the day he stabbed Baltar-no, if she was honest with herself, it was before that, the day after he’d found Baltar hanging himself in his cell. But when she’d next really seen him again, at the trial, she’d thought that whatever had happened, Gaeta had healed as well as one could. He had seemed so confident and pulled-together on the witness stand, closing whatever painful chapter there apparently was between himself and Baltar with that last act of catharsis, or so Laura had assumed at the time. Now, even with the loss of blood and the trauma contributing, Laura wasn’t so sure she’d read him right before.
“…To have her please just one day wake.”
She stood just outside the curtain for a moment, uncomfortable with the feeling, unusual for a politician, of not knowing what to say. Then Laura accepted that there was no such thing as wise or appropriate words in a situation like this, so she stepped around the curtain and spoke before Gaeta had a chance to begin the song again. “How are you doing, Mr. Gaeta?”
He jumped at the sound of her voice, eyes wide as a frightened, caged wild animal. He pulled the bed sheet up over the bandaged stump so quickly and with such painful embarrassment that Laura felt like she’d walked in on him naked. “Madame President,” the man mumbled in something between a greeting and a question.
Laura spoke to him calmly and slowly to put him at ease. “I don’t mean to bother you, Mr. Gaeta, but I was nearby, and I just wanted to see how you were.”
Gaeta’s eyes were a little glassy and unfocused. Laura would have thought she’d awoken him from a deep sleep, if she hadn’t heard the singing. It took him a few moments to gather his thoughts, but he finally said, “Be back in CIC by end of the week, Admiral says. Cottle had some choice words for him, but…you know the Admiral.”
Laura smiled knowingly. “Indeed, I do.”
“So then you know that the Admiral is going to give Captain Thrace a pass, too.”
She was surprised that the normally tamped-down Mr. Gaeta was being so candid. Likely the work of the cocktail of drugs Cottle was pumping into him, Laura thought. She could still remember how the combination of morpha and mortality had made her perhaps more forthright than was wise those last few days when she was dying the first time, before the hybrid fetus’s blood sent her into remission.
If Gaeta had brought up any other name, she would have let it go out of deference and decency, but she simply couldn’t afford to forgo information about Captain Thrace right now. “Captain Thrace did this?”
“She didn’t pull the trigger, no,” Felix said, his hand creeping down toward the bandaged stump beneath the sheet, “but it was her mission, her crew, and she could see exactly where it was going and she poured fuel on the flame anyway. She was always a loose cannon, but since she died… Frak, it’s like living in a bad dream-discussing how being dead for a few months changed your superior officer’s personality.”
“Tell me about it,” she scoffed. “Frak, she held me at gunpoint, and twelve hours later, he’s giving her a frakking ship to command.” Laura took a deep breath and dialed her frustration back a bit. Expressing empathy was one thing, but this was no time to let what could be an important conversation spiral into a pity party. “I’ve come to accept that the Admiral has a Starbuck-shaped blind spot, and there’s not much I can do about it.”
“I’m not telling you this to get any favors,” Felix said hurriedly. Laura could see Gaeta had already relaxed, though. Not that she’d calculated it to have that effect, but apparently, her criticizing Thrace had paid off, Laura thought.
“I never thought you were,” she said.
“I’ll take whatever punishment he sees fit for the mutiny, and I will be held responsible for my part, I know that. I accept that. But I also know it was the right call. Even Starbuck admitted the first plan was crazy.”
Laura didn’t press for any more explanation. Between what Gaeta said and the look on Anders’s face, maybe even the tone of Bill’s voice on the phone, she could fill in the blanks well enough on her own. “I wouldn’t worry too much about that,” she said, pulling the chair in the corner of the cubicle up closer to Gaeta’s bed and sitting down. “For all his willful blindness, the Admiral understands that sometimes Captain Thrace’s ability to so fantastically frak things up calls for extreme countermeasures. He forgave me for trying to shoot Kara in the head, after all.”
“What were you doing in the officer’s head? Oh, you mean…” Felix made his hand into a gun and put it to his temple, pulling the trigger. His words slurred together at the edges. “Huh, didn’t hear about that part. No offense, but that’s cold comfort when it comes to me. Even Helo’s got a better chance at getting the Admiral…frak…” he looked over at the machinery he was attached to, head wobbling a bit. “Think I just got another dose of morpha.”
She wished she could take her time with this conversation, let things progress naturally, but Gaeta was already starting to drift under the influence of the meds. Laura could tell she was going to lose the opportunity to ask if she waited much longer. “I have a confession, Mr. Gaeta,” said Roslin, putting a hand on Gaeta’s bed, but not touching his body; she knew that would be too much. “I came over here in large part because I heard your singing.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb anyone-”
“No, no, Mr. Gaeta, that’s not it at all. If you could see the faces of the people listening… I’ve spent a lot of time down here, and I’ve never seen their faces full of such…peace. It’s as if you’re singing exactly what we’re all feeling, but the rest of us have no way to let it out like that.” Laura felt a bit guilty, even though she was speaking the truth. It felt cheap to use something she meant so deeply to lead the conversation, but she did it anyway. “That song, where did you learn it?”
A wave of pain passed over Gaeta’s face, but Laura could tell it wasn’t from the phantom limb. It was an old ache from some hidden wound that never quite healed. “My mother. A long, long time ago.”
She took a deep breath. “Did your mother…did she ever tell you anything about an opera house?”
Gaeta’s brow furrowed. “Opera house? No. What opera house? Why would she do that?”
Laura’s heart sank. Gaeta couldn’t fake ingenuousness that well, not while this heavily drugged. Then again, stranger things had happened; several had happened in the last few hours, in fact. She decided she didn’t have much to lose by pressing on at this point. “Yes, the Opera House, the one we found on Kobol, only not in ruins. There are staircases on both sides of the lobby, with white balustrades and red carpet, and there’s a doorway into the auditorium…”
“You’re having visions again.” He said it without a hint of judgment, just a statement of fact. “So that means Baltar was telling the truth?” Gaeta snorted in disgust, or at least made as valiant an attempt at snorting as one can with oxygen tubes up his nose. “That’s a first.”
Laura hesitated, remembering the incident with the pen. “Do you listen to his broadcasts?”
“No. I heard the nurses talking, though, and how he’s preaching for an alliance with the Cylons now, too. We couldn’t exactly pick up wireless stations out on the Demetrius.”
“Of course,” said Laura. “Yes, what Baltar has said about me and Lieutenant Agathon and the Six in the brig is…true. I fail to see what relevance it has to his one god or the stream between life and death or any of his other teachings, but apparently he thinks it does.”
“So you listen, or at least you’ve heard enough to know about his…” Laura let Gaeta search for the word for awhile, but when it became clear the drugs weren’t going to let him find it, she simply nodded. He regrouped and said, “I’ve got a question for you, but I don’t know if you’re going to want to answer it. Maybe you can’t.”
Laura braced herself for another round of the conversation she’d had with Lee about the visions, knowing that with Gaeta, she was at the additional disadvantage of not being able to use an ideological debate to sidetrack him the way she had with Lee. “I’ll do my best, but I can’t promise any solid answers.”
She was surprised when Gaeta’s question went in a completely different direction.
“I’m not much for religion. But there’s something about Baltar’s religion that I’ve tried and tried but I can’t wrap my head around,” said Gaeta, squeezing his eyes shut as a flash of pain from the phantom limb apparently swept through him. Like the fact that Baltar of all people has his own cult? thought Roslin, but she refrained from commenting. “He says that his one god loves all of us. Now at least with many gods, when something bad happens you can say, well, Artemis and Apollo love me, but I pissed off Poseidon, so that’s why my life is a mess, and all I’ve got to do is make sure the ones who love me love me more than the ones who hate me, and they’ll take care of things for me.”
“Even with multiple gods, it’s hard to make sense of absurd tragedies and loss in our lives,” said Laura, willing herself not to let her hand reach up to touch her headscarf.
“No, no, that’s not what I mean,” said Gaeta. “It’s something that Brother Cavil told me, before we found out he was a Cylon.” Laura raised her eyebrows-or at least raised the skin where her eyebrows would have been-and Gaeta caught the gesture. “Cottle made me do it, after I let the Cylon virus into Galactica with the network and I was beating myself up over it. Said I had to talk to either a psychiatrist or a priest. I figured I could write off anything I didn’t like hearing more easily with a priest than a shrink.”
“Apparently that plan backfired?”
“Yeah,” said Gaeta. His voice was cracking from the strain of merely speaking now. Laura offered him the cup full of ice chips sitting on his bedside table, but Felix waved it away and struggled on. “It’s probably blasphemy, but… He said, what good is universal love? Isn’t love all about differentiation? We all want to hear, ‘I love you,’ not ‘I love you, and you, and you, and oh, you, too.’ He told me, if you love everybody, then you love nobody, or whatever it is you call love isn’t worth much. And maybe he’s right, but then… If you can’t earn love, ‘cause you can’t-and let me tell you, I know you can’t-then it’s just…arbitrary, and cruel. For it to work, there have to be people…left unloved for no good reason. To be cast out…”
It was then Laura realized they hadn’t been talking about God or the gods at all.
“You’re a good kid, Gaeta,” Laura said. She wanted to take his hand or put a hand on his arm, but she was afraid any touch might very well break him. “Bill told that to me, on New Caprica, after you’d joined Baltar’s staff. Said it in those very words. Don’t you forget that.”
She knew it wasn’t enough, but it was all she could give that Gaeta would believe. Little as it was, she could see that it had at least some effect. It rekindled a tiny spark of the hope in Gaeta’s eyes that she recognized from that sunny day on New Caprica, even though on this day it flickered and died again a moment later.
“How was your lunch, Felix?” said Cottle as he walked into the cubicle.
“Good,” Gaeta rasped, his voice all but gone.
“Really?” said Cottle, bending down to pick something up from under Gaeta’s bed. “You need to learn how to lie better. Nobody thinks algae is a good lunch.”
He held out a bedpan filled with algae mash. Since it was algae, after all, Laura couldn’t tell if it had been regurgitated or if it had just been scooped untouched from a food tray to the pan.
“You’ve been teaching him your tricks, haven’t you?” Cottle said, addressing Laura. “Fine. Having company is good for both of you. But right now, I need to have a chat with the Lieutenant here, so make yourself scarce for awhile.”
Laura rolled her IV stand back to her bed and sat down, waiting for Cottle to emerge and tell her she could continue her visit. Laura knew there was more that needed to be said, but she was afraid she wasn’t the one who needed to say it. Gaeta was one of Bill’s kids, she knew that. But Bill needed to feel like everybody’s parent, and he didn’t know what to do when his children grew up, like Lee had. Kara was still a damaged child in so many ways, Helo needed someone to reign him in and knock him down a peg or two every now and then, Athena had never known what family was until she came to the Galactica, and Dee needed a father whom she could not only respect but who respected her in return.
Gaeta, on the other hand, seemed like the sort of person who’d been born grown-up. Bill had all but said so in the way he depended on Gaeta, never questioning whether a task assigned to him would get done and get done well. But anyone who looked closely now could see that competence wasn’t the same thing as total self-sufficiency. Bill had simply been wrong, Laura realized. She would tell him. He would listen. Whether or not it would make a difference would be up to Bill and Gaeta, but Laura promised herself that she would tell Bill what she knew. She could do that much.
In a few hours, Laura will forget this promise. In a few hours, Kara will finally come down to the infirmary for a visit, though not to Gaeta, and she will turn the world upside-down again with one sentence of prophecy. After that, Laura will barely have time to breathe until hope dies in another apocalypse, and after that, she will try to forget everything.
She will remember it again, twice, before the end. The first will be when she is in Bill’s quarters-their quarters, now-while Bill and Lee are down in the launch tube, doing what they must. She will be looking through Bill’s drawers for more paper and find the picture of Dee and Lee’s wedding party instead, tucked safely with the picture she knows is of Carolanne. She will remember it when she sees Gaeta, young and smiling in the sunlight, alongside Dee and Lee and Bill, and she will comfort herself with the belief that even if she had remembered before, it would have been too late to do any good. The man in the photo had died on the Demetrius, or maybe even before that: on the witness stand, in the brig, in the launch tube the first time.
But she will remember it once more, on Earth. In the Raptor on the way down to the planet’s surface, as Lee and Romo argue over which one of them technically served the shortest presidential term in Colonial history, Laura will finally connect the name to the face of the youngest retired admiral in Colonial history and will remember where she has seen him before. When Bill wanders off to talk to Lee, this man will be the one Bill charges to stay with her and watch over her. They will sit beside each other on a hilltop and not speak, because there is no need to. And then he will hum the song to himself, a little out of tune, and Laura will wonder if it might very well have made a difference, and she will know that it definitely would not have been too late to try.
Author: kappamaki33
Rating: PG
Characters: Mainly Roslin and Gaeta
Summary: Laura visits Gaeta in the infirmary. She asks about a vision but learns something else she shouldn’t have forgotten instead.
Spoilers: Through series finale
Notes: Missing scene fic that comes a bit before the last game of triad in “ Five Times Dee Didn’t Play Cards and One Time She Did.” I wrote it mainly because 1) Roslin is so twitchy about prophecy at this point that she’d definitely investigate any unearthly singing, 2) I wanted to see Gaeta in the Opera House, even if he had no connection to the Final Five, and 3) I really like the idea of Kara as the “prodigal son” and Gaeta as the “faithful son,” and I think stories with that structure tend not to give enough credit to the anguish and confusion the faithful sons must have. (Link to Parable of the Prodigal Son, Luke 15: 11-32). I played a little fast and loose with the chronology of Gaeta’s singing (as I did in the “Five Times” fic), since GWCTD intercuts Gaeta’s singing with the Quorum meeting and the baseship jump that comes after this, but I always figured the cuts between his song and the rest of the events of the episode were meant to be more thematic than chronological.
Faithful Son
“So he answered and said to his father, ‘Lo, these many years I have been serving you; I never transgressed your commandment at any time; and yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might make merry with my friends. But as soon as this son of yours came, who has devoured your livelihood with harlots, you killed the fatted calf for him.’
“And he said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that I have is yours. It was right that we should make merry and be glad, for your brother was dead and is alive again, and was lost and is found.’” -Luke 15: 29-32.
Laura Roslin was intrigued by how many people very pointedly did not visit Mr. Gaeta in the infirmary. Dee and a tall, pale, and very frightened-looking officer Laura recognized from the CIC simply had the misfortune of making it down there at the one time Gaeta had finally drifted off to sleep and getting called back to duty before he woke up. Watching the other not-visitors, however, had made for strange entertainment. Strange or not, Laura was grateful for any entertainment she could get that didn’t involve her moving and adding to the particularly bad nausea the diloxin was giving her that day.
She could tell that Anders wasn’t going to speak to Gaeta long before Anders figured it out himself. Trembling, pacing, and wide-eyed with shock, Anders had made six distinct, sincere attempts to part the curtain and walk in, by Laura’s count, but each time Gaeta’s song built to a crescendo just as Anders’s fingertips grazed the cloth, and each time that exquisite expression of pain made Anders wince and recoil. Laura could read the guilt all over Anders’s face when he finally gave up and left, passing her bedsit without even registering her presence.
When Lee had come down to lecture her-the only thing more annoying than Lee’s lectures in general was when Lee actually had a good point buried somewhere in the bullshit, Laura mused to herself-she could tell he felt a tug in two different directions. Delegate Adama should make his carefully-worded political and emotional plea to the President before rushing off to the emergency Quorum meeting concerning the Cylon baseship. But Laura had seen a glimmer of Captain Apollo when he’d first walked in and heard that voice breaking like a wave over their usually uncomfortably quiet corner of the infirmary. Of course, Lee had let Delegate Adama prevail, despite how much she’d been hoping for Gaeta’s and Lee’s sakes that Captain Apollo might win out for once.
Bill had called down to find out how she was doing and to give her an update on the Cylon situation, even though he knew one of Laura’s junior staff and Lee had already briefed her.
“So, since Kara’s managed to turn the Fleet upside down yet again, it looks like I’m gonna have my hands too full to make it down for Chapter Sixteen today,” Bill said in a tone that Laura knew meant he was pinching the bridge of his nose in fatigue and frustration.
“Maybe this isn’t the time to discuss it, but have you ever noticed that Captain Thrace has a tendency to bring home stray Cylons? First the Raider, then Sharon Agathon and the Heavy Raider from Caprica, and now a whole baseship…” Laura said, at least partially jokingly.
“They keep getting bigger, don’t they?” Bill said, a little bit of humor finally creeping into his voice. “At least she can’t go up from here, unless next time she jumps back towing the Cylon homeworld behind her.” Laura was tempted to press Bill into drawing a logical inference about Thrace from this pattern, but he spoke before she had the chance. “Laura, could you turn the wireless down?”
“That’s not the wireless. That’s Mr. Gaeta. I doubt hearing him over the phone does him justice, but if there was a good day for you to not be able to read to me, this is it. Still, I wish you could hear him with me.”
“Gaeta? What?”
“It’s an unusual reaction to trauma, to be sure, but my gods, Bill, why didn’t you ever mention he had such a beautiful voice?”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “I didn’t know.”
That was a surprise. It always seemed Bill knew everything about his kids, especially those that had been with him since before the attacks. “Well, maybe you’ll hear what I mean when you come down to visit him later.”
“Hm.” There was as much guilt in Bill’s voice as one syllable could sustain. “It’s a madhouse up here, so it may be awhile. Take care, Laura.” The phone clicked off.
If nothing else, observing the traffic around Mr. Gaeta’s cubicle had convinced Laura that the woman who had come back in the shiny new Viper was not the same Kara Thrace that had died two months ago. For all her faults, the old Thrace would have been down to check on a man who’d been severely wounded under her command by now.
Even Baltar made a very odd appearance-well, even odder than usual. Laura had long ago ceased trying to figure out why Baltar did the things he did, since the analysis boiled down to merely figuring out how he could twist any given transaction into a benefit to himself. Even the sermons on the wireless, Laura thought ruefully. To think, for a few moments she’d actually let herself buy into the idea that Gaius Baltar was preaching because he felt some higher power was compelling him. Then he’d revealed the shared vision with the Six and Sharon Agathon, and the pieces had disappointingly fallen back into their old places. Frakking hypocrite, Laura thought. The gall he had, implicating her visions without mentioning the fact that the only way he could know about them is if he was there, too, walking into the Opera House with Hera in his arms as she’d seen him do countless times.
Laura would have been amused and at least a little gratified at the uncertainty on Baltar’s face if she could have convinced herself he was merely there to proselytize, but even Laura had to admit, his conflict clearly ran deeper than that.
She couldn’t remember when or how, but somewhere in these thoughts about Baltar, Laura slipped into the Opera House. Even her mere dreams of this place had become so vivid by now that she couldn’t really tell them from the true visions anymore, at least not at the start. The only tell-tale difference was that the dreams usually had more variety in their endings. The start was always the same: cavernous hallways, blood red carpet, stairways, and a child’s laughter. When she reached the grand staircase and didn’t see Athena on the other side, she wondered if that was because this was a dream or because Athena was probably still on the Cylon baseship. Did proximity matter in visions? Laura couldn’t even remember whether or not she’d seen Athena there while the Demetrius had been gone.
Then Laura was in the auditorium, sitting in a plush seat half-way down the center aisle. This was new, which suggested dream, but the seat felt so real-carpet beneath her feet, whorls from knots in the wood in the armrest under her fingertips… She allowed herself the slim hope that the vision was actually progressing, now that she’d somehow gotten through the door.
Suddenly there was an audience around her that hadn’t been there before, not a packed house by any means, but the people in front of her were so tall they partially blocked her view of the person on stage. She could see the singer’s hands stretched out before him in supplication; in supplication to what, she couldn’t tell. But she didn’t need to see his face to know who he was.
“But wish no more-My life you can take, to have her please just one day wake…”
No orchestra, no piano, not even the accompaniment of the audience’s breathing, just one voice reverberating through the hall, reaching for the vaulted ceiling and whatever lay beyond it.
“To have her please, just one day wake.”
She woke with a start and was surprised that the aural part of her dream didn’t stop. Gaeta started the song yet again, though the singing was finally wearing him down; the voice was still beautiful, but weaker, rougher, more strained. But Laura understood. That was the point. She knew that, no matter how well-intentioned, kindness and pity couldn’t soothe that sort of pain. The only thing you could do was drown it out with some other, more bearable hurt, or stop feeling altogether.
It was only a dream. It had to have been a dream, but… Laura felt something within her willing her to go to that voice. The Opera House haunted her so much that sometimes the deadening fatigue of the treatments was almost a relief in comparison. She had to make it stop, soon. She really had nothing to lose, and even though the chance of finding an answer was slight, there was so much to gain.
Laura caught herself taking off her wig. She could tell herself she was removing it simply because it was itchy and she knew she’d have to put it on for the Quorum meeting Lee had guilted her into agreeing to attend. But was that the real reason, she wondered? Was it tactical, to soften Gaeta up by reminding him of her own fragility? Or was it truly in commiseration, to uncover her scars for him because they were the only song she could offer in return for his? It frightened Laura that even upon reflection, she wasn’t sure of her own motives on a lot of things anymore. She compromised and arranged Emily’s scarf on her bare head.
Laura slid out of the bed and stood up. She slowly made her way across the room, her hand tight around her IV pole, using it almost like a walking stick for balance.
“But wish no more-my life you can take…” She could hear the exhaustion in his voice, how it cracked and failed and yet he pushed on anyway. Now it was beautiful like a shattered stained-glass window: full of brilliance and color, but with sharp edges and broken, missing pieces.
“…To have her please just one day wake…” Laura parted the curtain a few inches with her fingers and peeked in. She was shocked, not at the leg-she’d seen enough amputees down here in Cottle’s dungeon before. But Gaeta wasn’t merely pale; he was gray. He looked far too old, older than Lee and Helo. She’d seen the beginnings of this in the young lieutenant the day he stabbed Baltar-no, if she was honest with herself, it was before that, the day after he’d found Baltar hanging himself in his cell. But when she’d next really seen him again, at the trial, she’d thought that whatever had happened, Gaeta had healed as well as one could. He had seemed so confident and pulled-together on the witness stand, closing whatever painful chapter there apparently was between himself and Baltar with that last act of catharsis, or so Laura had assumed at the time. Now, even with the loss of blood and the trauma contributing, Laura wasn’t so sure she’d read him right before.
“…To have her please just one day wake.”
She stood just outside the curtain for a moment, uncomfortable with the feeling, unusual for a politician, of not knowing what to say. Then Laura accepted that there was no such thing as wise or appropriate words in a situation like this, so she stepped around the curtain and spoke before Gaeta had a chance to begin the song again. “How are you doing, Mr. Gaeta?”
He jumped at the sound of her voice, eyes wide as a frightened, caged wild animal. He pulled the bed sheet up over the bandaged stump so quickly and with such painful embarrassment that Laura felt like she’d walked in on him naked. “Madame President,” the man mumbled in something between a greeting and a question.
Laura spoke to him calmly and slowly to put him at ease. “I don’t mean to bother you, Mr. Gaeta, but I was nearby, and I just wanted to see how you were.”
Gaeta’s eyes were a little glassy and unfocused. Laura would have thought she’d awoken him from a deep sleep, if she hadn’t heard the singing. It took him a few moments to gather his thoughts, but he finally said, “Be back in CIC by end of the week, Admiral says. Cottle had some choice words for him, but…you know the Admiral.”
Laura smiled knowingly. “Indeed, I do.”
“So then you know that the Admiral is going to give Captain Thrace a pass, too.”
She was surprised that the normally tamped-down Mr. Gaeta was being so candid. Likely the work of the cocktail of drugs Cottle was pumping into him, Laura thought. She could still remember how the combination of morpha and mortality had made her perhaps more forthright than was wise those last few days when she was dying the first time, before the hybrid fetus’s blood sent her into remission.
If Gaeta had brought up any other name, she would have let it go out of deference and decency, but she simply couldn’t afford to forgo information about Captain Thrace right now. “Captain Thrace did this?”
“She didn’t pull the trigger, no,” Felix said, his hand creeping down toward the bandaged stump beneath the sheet, “but it was her mission, her crew, and she could see exactly where it was going and she poured fuel on the flame anyway. She was always a loose cannon, but since she died… Frak, it’s like living in a bad dream-discussing how being dead for a few months changed your superior officer’s personality.”
“Tell me about it,” she scoffed. “Frak, she held me at gunpoint, and twelve hours later, he’s giving her a frakking ship to command.” Laura took a deep breath and dialed her frustration back a bit. Expressing empathy was one thing, but this was no time to let what could be an important conversation spiral into a pity party. “I’ve come to accept that the Admiral has a Starbuck-shaped blind spot, and there’s not much I can do about it.”
“I’m not telling you this to get any favors,” Felix said hurriedly. Laura could see Gaeta had already relaxed, though. Not that she’d calculated it to have that effect, but apparently, her criticizing Thrace had paid off, Laura thought.
“I never thought you were,” she said.
“I’ll take whatever punishment he sees fit for the mutiny, and I will be held responsible for my part, I know that. I accept that. But I also know it was the right call. Even Starbuck admitted the first plan was crazy.”
Laura didn’t press for any more explanation. Between what Gaeta said and the look on Anders’s face, maybe even the tone of Bill’s voice on the phone, she could fill in the blanks well enough on her own. “I wouldn’t worry too much about that,” she said, pulling the chair in the corner of the cubicle up closer to Gaeta’s bed and sitting down. “For all his willful blindness, the Admiral understands that sometimes Captain Thrace’s ability to so fantastically frak things up calls for extreme countermeasures. He forgave me for trying to shoot Kara in the head, after all.”
“What were you doing in the officer’s head? Oh, you mean…” Felix made his hand into a gun and put it to his temple, pulling the trigger. His words slurred together at the edges. “Huh, didn’t hear about that part. No offense, but that’s cold comfort when it comes to me. Even Helo’s got a better chance at getting the Admiral…frak…” he looked over at the machinery he was attached to, head wobbling a bit. “Think I just got another dose of morpha.”
She wished she could take her time with this conversation, let things progress naturally, but Gaeta was already starting to drift under the influence of the meds. Laura could tell she was going to lose the opportunity to ask if she waited much longer. “I have a confession, Mr. Gaeta,” said Roslin, putting a hand on Gaeta’s bed, but not touching his body; she knew that would be too much. “I came over here in large part because I heard your singing.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb anyone-”
“No, no, Mr. Gaeta, that’s not it at all. If you could see the faces of the people listening… I’ve spent a lot of time down here, and I’ve never seen their faces full of such…peace. It’s as if you’re singing exactly what we’re all feeling, but the rest of us have no way to let it out like that.” Laura felt a bit guilty, even though she was speaking the truth. It felt cheap to use something she meant so deeply to lead the conversation, but she did it anyway. “That song, where did you learn it?”
A wave of pain passed over Gaeta’s face, but Laura could tell it wasn’t from the phantom limb. It was an old ache from some hidden wound that never quite healed. “My mother. A long, long time ago.”
She took a deep breath. “Did your mother…did she ever tell you anything about an opera house?”
Gaeta’s brow furrowed. “Opera house? No. What opera house? Why would she do that?”
Laura’s heart sank. Gaeta couldn’t fake ingenuousness that well, not while this heavily drugged. Then again, stranger things had happened; several had happened in the last few hours, in fact. She decided she didn’t have much to lose by pressing on at this point. “Yes, the Opera House, the one we found on Kobol, only not in ruins. There are staircases on both sides of the lobby, with white balustrades and red carpet, and there’s a doorway into the auditorium…”
“You’re having visions again.” He said it without a hint of judgment, just a statement of fact. “So that means Baltar was telling the truth?” Gaeta snorted in disgust, or at least made as valiant an attempt at snorting as one can with oxygen tubes up his nose. “That’s a first.”
Laura hesitated, remembering the incident with the pen. “Do you listen to his broadcasts?”
“No. I heard the nurses talking, though, and how he’s preaching for an alliance with the Cylons now, too. We couldn’t exactly pick up wireless stations out on the Demetrius.”
“Of course,” said Laura. “Yes, what Baltar has said about me and Lieutenant Agathon and the Six in the brig is…true. I fail to see what relevance it has to his one god or the stream between life and death or any of his other teachings, but apparently he thinks it does.”
“So you listen, or at least you’ve heard enough to know about his…” Laura let Gaeta search for the word for awhile, but when it became clear the drugs weren’t going to let him find it, she simply nodded. He regrouped and said, “I’ve got a question for you, but I don’t know if you’re going to want to answer it. Maybe you can’t.”
Laura braced herself for another round of the conversation she’d had with Lee about the visions, knowing that with Gaeta, she was at the additional disadvantage of not being able to use an ideological debate to sidetrack him the way she had with Lee. “I’ll do my best, but I can’t promise any solid answers.”
She was surprised when Gaeta’s question went in a completely different direction.
“I’m not much for religion. But there’s something about Baltar’s religion that I’ve tried and tried but I can’t wrap my head around,” said Gaeta, squeezing his eyes shut as a flash of pain from the phantom limb apparently swept through him. Like the fact that Baltar of all people has his own cult? thought Roslin, but she refrained from commenting. “He says that his one god loves all of us. Now at least with many gods, when something bad happens you can say, well, Artemis and Apollo love me, but I pissed off Poseidon, so that’s why my life is a mess, and all I’ve got to do is make sure the ones who love me love me more than the ones who hate me, and they’ll take care of things for me.”
“Even with multiple gods, it’s hard to make sense of absurd tragedies and loss in our lives,” said Laura, willing herself not to let her hand reach up to touch her headscarf.
“No, no, that’s not what I mean,” said Gaeta. “It’s something that Brother Cavil told me, before we found out he was a Cylon.” Laura raised her eyebrows-or at least raised the skin where her eyebrows would have been-and Gaeta caught the gesture. “Cottle made me do it, after I let the Cylon virus into Galactica with the network and I was beating myself up over it. Said I had to talk to either a psychiatrist or a priest. I figured I could write off anything I didn’t like hearing more easily with a priest than a shrink.”
“Apparently that plan backfired?”
“Yeah,” said Gaeta. His voice was cracking from the strain of merely speaking now. Laura offered him the cup full of ice chips sitting on his bedside table, but Felix waved it away and struggled on. “It’s probably blasphemy, but… He said, what good is universal love? Isn’t love all about differentiation? We all want to hear, ‘I love you,’ not ‘I love you, and you, and you, and oh, you, too.’ He told me, if you love everybody, then you love nobody, or whatever it is you call love isn’t worth much. And maybe he’s right, but then… If you can’t earn love, ‘cause you can’t-and let me tell you, I know you can’t-then it’s just…arbitrary, and cruel. For it to work, there have to be people…left unloved for no good reason. To be cast out…”
It was then Laura realized they hadn’t been talking about God or the gods at all.
“You’re a good kid, Gaeta,” Laura said. She wanted to take his hand or put a hand on his arm, but she was afraid any touch might very well break him. “Bill told that to me, on New Caprica, after you’d joined Baltar’s staff. Said it in those very words. Don’t you forget that.”
She knew it wasn’t enough, but it was all she could give that Gaeta would believe. Little as it was, she could see that it had at least some effect. It rekindled a tiny spark of the hope in Gaeta’s eyes that she recognized from that sunny day on New Caprica, even though on this day it flickered and died again a moment later.
“How was your lunch, Felix?” said Cottle as he walked into the cubicle.
“Good,” Gaeta rasped, his voice all but gone.
“Really?” said Cottle, bending down to pick something up from under Gaeta’s bed. “You need to learn how to lie better. Nobody thinks algae is a good lunch.”
He held out a bedpan filled with algae mash. Since it was algae, after all, Laura couldn’t tell if it had been regurgitated or if it had just been scooped untouched from a food tray to the pan.
“You’ve been teaching him your tricks, haven’t you?” Cottle said, addressing Laura. “Fine. Having company is good for both of you. But right now, I need to have a chat with the Lieutenant here, so make yourself scarce for awhile.”
Laura rolled her IV stand back to her bed and sat down, waiting for Cottle to emerge and tell her she could continue her visit. Laura knew there was more that needed to be said, but she was afraid she wasn’t the one who needed to say it. Gaeta was one of Bill’s kids, she knew that. But Bill needed to feel like everybody’s parent, and he didn’t know what to do when his children grew up, like Lee had. Kara was still a damaged child in so many ways, Helo needed someone to reign him in and knock him down a peg or two every now and then, Athena had never known what family was until she came to the Galactica, and Dee needed a father whom she could not only respect but who respected her in return.
Gaeta, on the other hand, seemed like the sort of person who’d been born grown-up. Bill had all but said so in the way he depended on Gaeta, never questioning whether a task assigned to him would get done and get done well. But anyone who looked closely now could see that competence wasn’t the same thing as total self-sufficiency. Bill had simply been wrong, Laura realized. She would tell him. He would listen. Whether or not it would make a difference would be up to Bill and Gaeta, but Laura promised herself that she would tell Bill what she knew. She could do that much.
In a few hours, Laura will forget this promise. In a few hours, Kara will finally come down to the infirmary for a visit, though not to Gaeta, and she will turn the world upside-down again with one sentence of prophecy. After that, Laura will barely have time to breathe until hope dies in another apocalypse, and after that, she will try to forget everything.
She will remember it again, twice, before the end. The first will be when she is in Bill’s quarters-their quarters, now-while Bill and Lee are down in the launch tube, doing what they must. She will be looking through Bill’s drawers for more paper and find the picture of Dee and Lee’s wedding party instead, tucked safely with the picture she knows is of Carolanne. She will remember it when she sees Gaeta, young and smiling in the sunlight, alongside Dee and Lee and Bill, and she will comfort herself with the belief that even if she had remembered before, it would have been too late to do any good. The man in the photo had died on the Demetrius, or maybe even before that: on the witness stand, in the brig, in the launch tube the first time.
But she will remember it once more, on Earth. In the Raptor on the way down to the planet’s surface, as Lee and Romo argue over which one of them technically served the shortest presidential term in Colonial history, Laura will finally connect the name to the face of the youngest retired admiral in Colonial history and will remember where she has seen him before. When Bill wanders off to talk to Lee, this man will be the one Bill charges to stay with her and watch over her. They will sit beside each other on a hilltop and not speak, because there is no need to. And then he will hum the song to himself, a little out of tune, and Laura will wonder if it might very well have made a difference, and she will know that it definitely would not have been too late to try.