Fic: Mathematics: Four Weeks (7/10)
Series Title: Mathematics
Segment Title: Four Weeks (7/10)
Author: kappamaki33
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Gaeta/Eight
Series Summary: Scenes from New Caprica. It was such a simple equation: Felix+Eight=valuable, effective death lists. But the math never remains that uncomplicated, once life gets factored in.
Part 7 Summary: “Four Weeks”: Eight makes a risky late-night visit and discovers two things that don’t surprise her and one that does.
Spoilers: Through “Face of the Enemy” Webisodes
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.
Series Notes: So, this is my first-ever fic. It’s going to be a ten-part series when I’m done. I wanted to impose some sort of structure on the story to make it a bit more challenging-and also to help me develop an overall framework-so each vignette has some connection to its number, in descending order from 10 to 1. The connection to the number is more obvious in some than in others, but it served its purpose as a structural framework.
Part 7 Notes: Though it wasn’t the first section I thought of, this was the first I drafted, some time not long after “Deadlock.” This section doesn’t so much deal with a question I have as with a problem I have with BSG. (Well, that and I couldn’t write a series without including Cottle somehow. Cottle rocks too much to be left out.) Now, I love the show, and even when I disagree with it, I almost always still enjoy it. However, I really despise the whole “it takes love to make babies” schtick, and I absolutely, positively, categorically abhor its corollary, “if you can’t make a baby, then you must not be in love.” It’s just one of my hot-button issues, like animal cruelty: I don’t care how good a story is, if it includes one of my hot-buttons and doesn’t criticize it, there’s a 99% chance I’ll resist it with every fiber of my being. Even so, the love equals baby belief is a part of the show and a part of Cylon beliefs, so here, I wanted to 1) come up with a plausible, rational explanation for why Cylons haven’t been able to have offspring, 2) acknowledge the Cylon belief while showing that it’s not universally accepted, and 3) write a story that involves the messiness of sex, love, and procreation between Cylons and humans but avoids the “Deadlock” scenario by allowing characters to chalk up sad stuff happening as just sad stuff happening, not as a punishment from God or a failing in themselves. I think I’ve accomplished #1 and #2, and I hope I’ve at least made a valiant effort at #3.
This segment is brought to you by the number 4, a very important number to Eight on her calendar.
Mathematics: Four Weeks
Lamplight shone through the tent so that she could see his silhouette, puffing on a cigarette. She noticed that her hands were shaking when she pulled out one of the spikes and lifted the now-loose canvas so she could slide under and in.
“Frak!” Doc Cottle hissed, dropping his cigarette in his fright. “We may not have much on this hellhole, but we do have a godsdamn front door!”
“I couldn’t be sure there weren’t guards,” Eight whispered. “Is there a room farther in we can use? Any idiot passing by can see there’s somebody in here with the light on.”
“This way,” Cottle said, cupping his hand around his lighter as he lit another cigarette and led Eight to a curtained-off exam table. “And just so you know, I sent the NCP guards on a wild goose chase to look for some stolen meds, just for you.” He sat down at a little desk in one corner of the curtained cubicle. Eight pushed herself up onto the table.
There was a folder on the desk. Cottle tapped his fingers on it for a few moments, then looked at her. “Now, before we go any further, I have to ask one question. Did he, whoever he is…get involved voluntarily? Because if you and your people have been ‘farming’ again, you can just take yourself out the same way you came in and get one of the Simons to take care of things.”
Eight sighed. “Nope, no farming. I’m a traditionalist.”
“Fine, then.” Cottle slipped his thumb into the folder and almost opened it, but he stopped half-way. “Why did you come to me instead of a Simon, anyway?”
Just open the frakking folder already. She answered with as measured a tone as she could, “He doesn’t have much experience with this.”
Cottle grunted. “I don’t exactly have a lot of experience with Cylon pregnancies, either. One hardly counts.”
Eight rolled her eyes. “The Fours think ‘love’ is the key ingredient for making a baby. Would you go to a doctor who believed that?”
Cottle looked surprised, but surprised in a way that made Eight think she’d just earned a new bit of respect from the crusty old human. “I’ve never met a Cylon who admitted what a crock the whole ‘all you need is love’ theory of reproduction is.” He swiveled in his chair so he faced Eight, observing her over the open file.
“We Eights actually tend to be pragmatists, when we’re not in love.”
“And I take it you’re a pragmatist?”
“Do you even have to ask?”
Cottle shrugged, and his eyes returned to the charts in the folder. “Well, it looks like you were right. The hCG level in your blood says congratulations are in order.”
Eight took a deep, slow breath. “Thank you, Doctor,” she said evenly.
“I’m assuming you want to continue your prenatal care with me?” asked Cottle. Eight nodded. “All right. When was your last menstrual cycle?”
“I’m four weeks overdue.”
“Four weeks, okay-wait, four weeks overdue? So eight weeks ago?” Eight nodded again. “Huh. Pretty long time to wait,” he said, almost to himself. “Might as well do an ultrasound, then. Do you mind if I bring in one of the medics to help? She’ll be discreet-you have my word.”
Eight nodded, and Cottle pointed at a gown hanging in the corner and then left the cubicle. She came down from the table, slipped out of her clothes, put on the gown, and lay back down.
Four weeks, plus four weeks. Eight had known after the first four; she’d felt that kind of nausea enough times before to know that the missed period wasn’t a coincidence.
Supposedly, God commanded his children to be fruitful and multiply. If He did, He had a sick sense of humor, Eight thought. The Cylons knew enough about genetics to know that all seven models were so close to sterile that a Cylon pairing producing offspring was nearly mathematically impossible. However, God hadn’t given them enough knowledge to do anything about it through gene therapy. That hadn’t stopped them from trying anyway. The Fours had invented machines to try to bring about organic life through conception and to monitor each nascent pregnancy minute-by-minute. Even after all their work, it hadn’t surprised anyone that of every possible combination, via every possible means, the best they had gotten in forty years were thousands upon thousands of Two/Eight embryos that failed to implant or were miscarried within a couple weeks.
Then, there came the farms. The Fours had figured that their best shot at getting a fetus carried to term was to impregnate human females using their machines, but there had been other experiments, too. The Threes had no chance, and the Sixes seemed to have a propensity for ectopic pregnancies, so the Eights had become the de facto workhorses of the female farms. Eight had served two tours of farm labor between her tours of military duty on the Colonies: one miscarriage at four weeks, one at eight weeks. That was a record, if you didn’t count the sister Eight who had gone mad and offered herself up to the humans as a prisoner, then lost the child anyway.
Eight had been killed in an ambush since that last miscarriage, so this body didn’t remember what it was like to have another body growing inside it. But Eight remembered. It was terrifying, but it was something else as well-something almost good that she didn’t quite have a word for. She should feel honored, blessed-that’s what the Sixes would say-or at least proud, the mother of God’s new generation. But the word that came closest to describing it, oddly, was possibility.
The lists had made Eight feel like she was steering and prodding a wild animal through a maze, cutting off dead-ends and alternate exits alike as she guided Felix inexorably toward the snare she knew awaited him at the maze’s heart. But for every crossroads Eight cut off from Felix, she cut it off for herself, too, boxing herself in until she was forcing herself down a track that was no less inescapable than Felix’s. But now, with this, there was no way of knowing what would come next, no rules, no path. It was as thrilling and dangerous and breathtaking as standing with her toes curled around the edge of a cliff.
The Cylon faith taught that God is Love. And in a way, Eight believed it. If there was a God, He was the God of randomness, of throwing wrenches and disruptions into the well-laid plans of Cylon and man to keep them from becoming too complacent or smug, to keep life from becoming too inevitable. Love was one manifestation of God’s power to upset His children’s schemes. Where the others went wrong in their faith, Eight thought, was their belief that love was the only manifestation. The proof of that was growing inside her.
She could tell the others, and then there would be no more lists, not for her, anyway. She would be far too important to risk getting killed and resurrected. Felix might even be safe for awhile, too. After what happened with her sister when they had threatened to kill her human lover, the others would be very careful with Felix, at least until after the birth.
But then what? They might treat her with the reverence a potential First Mother deserved, let her decide her own fate, but the fallout from her sister’s pregnancy by a human made that unlikely. There were so many unknowns with Cylon pregnancies. Even the Ones’ cockamamie theory that biological reproduction was so antithetical to Cylon programming that pregnancy could cause irreparable mental malfunctions had gained a little traction among the Threes and Fives after her sister defected. And though they had all striven for this goal, she knew even her own sisters would hold her in suspicion, wondering at and likely fearing whatever hidden difference there was in Eight that allowed her to succeed where they had failed so many times.
It was far more likely the others would keep her under constant scrutiny, Eight knew. Would they send her to one of the basehsips floating high above the strife on New Caprica for safekeeping? When her child was born, what then? Would they let her raise it, or would they decide the child was too important, that destiny weighed too heavily on his or her shoulders-the scriptures said it would be a ‘her’-to entrust her upbringing to a woman as different from her sisters and as skilled at deceit as Eight was?
As tempting as the thought of being free of the lists was to Eight, there were other, even more enticing paths. She could choose not to tell the others, to not confess until someone noticed she was showing, and to hide it as well as she could so no one would notice. That way, she could at least keep the Fours from monitoring the fetus to death the way she knew they would want to. It was a risk, but it was one Eight could afford. She was too valuable for anyone to object too strongly, so long as she told the right story if she was caught.
Or, before she began to show, she could tell One she had taken his advice on getting personal and that she needed to go deeper undercover, to cut ties with the government and move in with Felix, then continue feeding information about the Resistance through a dead drop. Or, she could join the Resistance for real. Of course, that would be very dangerous, but it was her only option so far in which whatever secrecy and control her ploy gained Eight didn’t end when the baby was born.
Even if she and Felix defected together and sweetened the pot by bringing vital information with them, which Eight knew was her only hope, there was still no telling how the Resistance would react to a pregnant Cylon turncoat. Eight had heard Boomer’s horror story, and Felix had always been reticent about how her sister on Galactica was treated, but it said something that her sister was alive and healthy and allowed to take on the name of a human, Agathon. The bloody, face-to-face human-Cylon conflict of the past few months would certainly make her position more precarious, but Eight also had something going for her that Boomer and her sister on Galactica didn’t: for all the Resistance and Felix knew, she had never been anything but unflaggingly loyal to the human cause on New Caprica.
Or she could run. Eight marveled at herself; it had always been an option, but she’d never considered anything so extreme before. Now, it didn’t seem so crazy to do a routine requisition for a Heavy Raider and then make a run for Kobol, jumping away before anyone in traffic control knew what was happening. Even if they guessed where she was going, the superstitious blood curse on Kobol would keep the others from pursuing her, so long as they didn’t know about the child, so long as she was nothing more than a sad, malfunctioning Eight. It would be a hard life, but it would be a free life, a life where her daughter wouldn’t be haunted by destiny or her unnatural bloodline. With enough supplies and a little planning, they could make a go of it.
As she waited in the chilly exam room, Eight tried on futures in her mind like trying on new clothes. The only thing Eight feared she couldn’t handle on her own was the birth itself, so she envisioned herself boiling water over a fire at her solitary camp, then imagined the raven-haired Six beside her in a much larger camp, home to maybe a dozen people. It would be easier with more, and there were others whom Eight knew were disillusioned with Boomer and Caprica Six’s pipedream. There was the outspoken Six who was growing her hair out, the short NCP with the big mouth and the frightened eyes who knew he was in over his head, the Two who was only happy anymore when he was tinkering with the nav. system of a captured Raptor, the woman in Main Filing who’d buried her son and grandson a month ago…all of them understood that no good could ever come of New Caprica now. All might very well take a chance to start anew.
And then there was Felix. If she told him this was the only way to keep their daughter safe, that they needed him, he would come. The real question was whether Eight wanted him there. She imagined herself walking back to camp through the thick, green underbrush of a Kobolian forest with Felix at her side, then by herself. Neither vision was repugnant, but she could live with or without him just fine. Felix was also certainly far from the worst father-figure her daughter could have; he was too naïve and trusting, but she could counterbalance that. Or, she could raise her daughter on stories of a man with all of Felix’s good traits, a man who would have loved her if he’d gotten the chance to know her but who had died before she was born.
But the possibilities that fascinated Eight most were those in the child herself. Eight had seen her own eyes, her nose, her lips, her cheekbones, on tens of thousands of other faces, each of her sisters a mirror of all the others; the scriptures described it as being one image of God refracted and reflected in a million-faceted jewel. The idea that Eight would see a face with her nose and his eyes, her mouth and his chin, that the girl’s hair might be curly or straight, that she might have both her mother’s laugh and her father’s sense of humor, simply astounded Eight. The miracle that the combination of just two people could create a nearly infinite number of potential new faces, new people…that was a gift from God, and from Felix, even though he hadn’t intended it.
Felix deserved something in return, and the gift Eight chose for him had the effect of settling the whirlwind of futures in Eight’s mind. She would tell him the truth about everything, or at least everything she could say without destroying him-that meant skirting the whole truth about the lists, but letting him know that they had both been used-and then lay out all their options in front of him. She would make the final decision for herself and the child, but she would at least give Felix the chance to voice his opinion. And if she chose to leave, Eight would make sure Felix could make his decision without undue guilt. She would make sure he knew that, if he still felt there was hope for New Caprica, if he thought he should stay and continue the fight, they would be all right without him.
Eight had nearly told Felix about the pregnancy the day he’d asked her how she knew he wasn’t a Cylon, but at that time, there had been no point getting his hopes up on such a slender, fragile chance. Would he have hoped? she wondered. Am I? Is this hope?
Cottle finally returned with a young woman wearing Galactica BDU’s, carting in an ultrasound machine that looked like it had seen better days. To her credit, the medic only hesitated for a moment in surprise upon seeing Eight lying on the table.
“Is this your first time having an ultrasound?” the medic asked as she set to work on the ultrasound machine.
“First in this body,” Eight replied without thinking. That made both the medic and Cottle stop in their tracks. “No, I’ve had them. Lots of them, in fact.”
“Okay. So you know there’s no need to be nervous,” the medic said, and Eight wondered just whose nerves the medic was referring to.
It turned out the sensations were no different with human ultrasounds than with Cylon ones. The picture wasn’t likely to be any different either, Eight thought, unless it was… But Cottle would tell her when it came time. Eight closed her eyes and let her mind drift, imagining rather than remembering.
Felix closes the tent flap behind her and casually asks about her day. When she tells him, his jaw hangs slack and his face turns a little gray. He slumps into his chair, stunned, but only for a moment. He apologizes, tripping over himself to give her his seat, his mind going a mile a minute as he paces.
“So you’ve seen Cottle already, that’s good-Cottle’s a good man, a good doctor… You’ll be on bed rest, no doubt, at some point, what with the-this being so unusual, and I’ll sign you up for the special pregnancy rations in the morning-do Cylons sign up for special health rations? I don’t know. I guess it’s never come up before. There isn’t much for baby…um, stuff, left in the universe, but I think there might still be some in storage on the Gemenon Traveler, and I can barter with the Tyrols and the Redmans, if they’ll speak to me. I bet Tyrol will-he and Helo got along all right- Do you want to move in with me, or am I supposed to move to Colonial One, or-I’m assuming since you told me, you want me involved, but if you don’t-wait, do the other Cylons-do they know about us? Are you going to be in trouble for being involved with me? If you’re in danger, we can get you out-I have sources, favors I can cash in… Why are you grinning at me like that?”
Leave it to Felix to confront the absurd, the near-miraculous, with an avalanche of mundane pragmatism. The sweetness and sincerity that she sees in his eyes, rooted in equal parts fear and strength, make her smile so deeply it hurts.
“Do you see it, Rinna?” Cottle said, the sound of his voice snapping Eight’s eyelids open.
“No…there’s definitely a gestational sac, but no fetal pole, no yolk…” Cottle and the medic looked at each other. Then Cottle looked back at the screen and cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, but-”
“Blighted ovum,” Eight said, then stared at the ceiling. “This isn’t the first time.”
“Now, I don’t want this to crush your enlightened view of pregnancy,” Cottle said, approaching the head of the table. “Anembryonic pregnancy happens when the body knows there’s something wrong with the embryo’s genes, some reason the baby shouldn’t or wouldn’t come to term anyway. It has nothing to do with anything you or he did.”
“I know,” Eight said.
“If it’s any consolation,” the medic added, “it was a real pregnancy. Your body wasn’t fooling you. It was real.”
“I know.”
*~*~*
Eight shuffled down the main path instead of bothering to sneak quietly along the alleyways between the tents the way she usually did. She didn’t much care who saw her or what they thought.
Felix knew about the Cylon beliefs concerning love and procreation. She wouldn’t have to connect the dots for him, or even mention the word. She could just tell him the facts and let the implications hang in the air, let him see sadness in her eyes and interpret it as blame, mistrust, betrayal, then transform it into guilt. Even though he didn’t believe in it any more than Eight did in reality, she knew Felix would do everything he could to assuage his Eight’s doubts and tears. It would bind him to her even more tightly. She could use it.
Felix was waiting for her outside his tent when she arrived. “Gods, you had me scared,” he said, ushering her in and tying the tent flap shut for the night. “It’s not safe for anybody to be out walking alone at night, not even you. I know life and death are different for you, but still-”
Eight wrapped her arms around Felix’s waist and buried her face in his shoulder. It took a few moments before Felix encircled her with his arms in return. “Whoa, you okay?”
Eight swallowed hard. As soon as she had actually looked him in the eyes, she knew she wasn’t going to tell him, ever. She was shocked at the conclusion she had reached. She knew that whatever it was that made her think this way, it wasn’t love, certainly not in the sense Caprica Six or Boomer or even the Fours talked about. The feeling that swept through her was heady and frightening; she was going against the plan for no more rational reason than that her gut told her she’d found a truth she refused to twist into a lie by telling it. Eight silently thanked her child that never was for giving her the chance to make a choice, even if it hadn’t been the choice she had envisioned.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. It’s just been a long day.”
Segment Title: Four Weeks (7/10)
Author: kappamaki33
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Gaeta/Eight
Series Summary: Scenes from New Caprica. It was such a simple equation: Felix+Eight=valuable, effective death lists. But the math never remains that uncomplicated, once life gets factored in.
Part 7 Summary: “Four Weeks”: Eight makes a risky late-night visit and discovers two things that don’t surprise her and one that does.
Spoilers: Through “Face of the Enemy” Webisodes
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.
Series Notes: So, this is my first-ever fic. It’s going to be a ten-part series when I’m done. I wanted to impose some sort of structure on the story to make it a bit more challenging-and also to help me develop an overall framework-so each vignette has some connection to its number, in descending order from 10 to 1. The connection to the number is more obvious in some than in others, but it served its purpose as a structural framework.
Part 7 Notes: Though it wasn’t the first section I thought of, this was the first I drafted, some time not long after “Deadlock.” This section doesn’t so much deal with a question I have as with a problem I have with BSG. (Well, that and I couldn’t write a series without including Cottle somehow. Cottle rocks too much to be left out.) Now, I love the show, and even when I disagree with it, I almost always still enjoy it. However, I really despise the whole “it takes love to make babies” schtick, and I absolutely, positively, categorically abhor its corollary, “if you can’t make a baby, then you must not be in love.” It’s just one of my hot-button issues, like animal cruelty: I don’t care how good a story is, if it includes one of my hot-buttons and doesn’t criticize it, there’s a 99% chance I’ll resist it with every fiber of my being. Even so, the love equals baby belief is a part of the show and a part of Cylon beliefs, so here, I wanted to 1) come up with a plausible, rational explanation for why Cylons haven’t been able to have offspring, 2) acknowledge the Cylon belief while showing that it’s not universally accepted, and 3) write a story that involves the messiness of sex, love, and procreation between Cylons and humans but avoids the “Deadlock” scenario by allowing characters to chalk up sad stuff happening as just sad stuff happening, not as a punishment from God or a failing in themselves. I think I’ve accomplished #1 and #2, and I hope I’ve at least made a valiant effort at #3.
This segment is brought to you by the number 4, a very important number to Eight on her calendar.
Mathematics: Four Weeks
Lamplight shone through the tent so that she could see his silhouette, puffing on a cigarette. She noticed that her hands were shaking when she pulled out one of the spikes and lifted the now-loose canvas so she could slide under and in.
“Frak!” Doc Cottle hissed, dropping his cigarette in his fright. “We may not have much on this hellhole, but we do have a godsdamn front door!”
“I couldn’t be sure there weren’t guards,” Eight whispered. “Is there a room farther in we can use? Any idiot passing by can see there’s somebody in here with the light on.”
“This way,” Cottle said, cupping his hand around his lighter as he lit another cigarette and led Eight to a curtained-off exam table. “And just so you know, I sent the NCP guards on a wild goose chase to look for some stolen meds, just for you.” He sat down at a little desk in one corner of the curtained cubicle. Eight pushed herself up onto the table.
There was a folder on the desk. Cottle tapped his fingers on it for a few moments, then looked at her. “Now, before we go any further, I have to ask one question. Did he, whoever he is…get involved voluntarily? Because if you and your people have been ‘farming’ again, you can just take yourself out the same way you came in and get one of the Simons to take care of things.”
Eight sighed. “Nope, no farming. I’m a traditionalist.”
“Fine, then.” Cottle slipped his thumb into the folder and almost opened it, but he stopped half-way. “Why did you come to me instead of a Simon, anyway?”
Just open the frakking folder already. She answered with as measured a tone as she could, “He doesn’t have much experience with this.”
Cottle grunted. “I don’t exactly have a lot of experience with Cylon pregnancies, either. One hardly counts.”
Eight rolled her eyes. “The Fours think ‘love’ is the key ingredient for making a baby. Would you go to a doctor who believed that?”
Cottle looked surprised, but surprised in a way that made Eight think she’d just earned a new bit of respect from the crusty old human. “I’ve never met a Cylon who admitted what a crock the whole ‘all you need is love’ theory of reproduction is.” He swiveled in his chair so he faced Eight, observing her over the open file.
“We Eights actually tend to be pragmatists, when we’re not in love.”
“And I take it you’re a pragmatist?”
“Do you even have to ask?”
Cottle shrugged, and his eyes returned to the charts in the folder. “Well, it looks like you were right. The hCG level in your blood says congratulations are in order.”
Eight took a deep, slow breath. “Thank you, Doctor,” she said evenly.
“I’m assuming you want to continue your prenatal care with me?” asked Cottle. Eight nodded. “All right. When was your last menstrual cycle?”
“I’m four weeks overdue.”
“Four weeks, okay-wait, four weeks overdue? So eight weeks ago?” Eight nodded again. “Huh. Pretty long time to wait,” he said, almost to himself. “Might as well do an ultrasound, then. Do you mind if I bring in one of the medics to help? She’ll be discreet-you have my word.”
Eight nodded, and Cottle pointed at a gown hanging in the corner and then left the cubicle. She came down from the table, slipped out of her clothes, put on the gown, and lay back down.
Four weeks, plus four weeks. Eight had known after the first four; she’d felt that kind of nausea enough times before to know that the missed period wasn’t a coincidence.
Supposedly, God commanded his children to be fruitful and multiply. If He did, He had a sick sense of humor, Eight thought. The Cylons knew enough about genetics to know that all seven models were so close to sterile that a Cylon pairing producing offspring was nearly mathematically impossible. However, God hadn’t given them enough knowledge to do anything about it through gene therapy. That hadn’t stopped them from trying anyway. The Fours had invented machines to try to bring about organic life through conception and to monitor each nascent pregnancy minute-by-minute. Even after all their work, it hadn’t surprised anyone that of every possible combination, via every possible means, the best they had gotten in forty years were thousands upon thousands of Two/Eight embryos that failed to implant or were miscarried within a couple weeks.
Then, there came the farms. The Fours had figured that their best shot at getting a fetus carried to term was to impregnate human females using their machines, but there had been other experiments, too. The Threes had no chance, and the Sixes seemed to have a propensity for ectopic pregnancies, so the Eights had become the de facto workhorses of the female farms. Eight had served two tours of farm labor between her tours of military duty on the Colonies: one miscarriage at four weeks, one at eight weeks. That was a record, if you didn’t count the sister Eight who had gone mad and offered herself up to the humans as a prisoner, then lost the child anyway.
Eight had been killed in an ambush since that last miscarriage, so this body didn’t remember what it was like to have another body growing inside it. But Eight remembered. It was terrifying, but it was something else as well-something almost good that she didn’t quite have a word for. She should feel honored, blessed-that’s what the Sixes would say-or at least proud, the mother of God’s new generation. But the word that came closest to describing it, oddly, was possibility.
The lists had made Eight feel like she was steering and prodding a wild animal through a maze, cutting off dead-ends and alternate exits alike as she guided Felix inexorably toward the snare she knew awaited him at the maze’s heart. But for every crossroads Eight cut off from Felix, she cut it off for herself, too, boxing herself in until she was forcing herself down a track that was no less inescapable than Felix’s. But now, with this, there was no way of knowing what would come next, no rules, no path. It was as thrilling and dangerous and breathtaking as standing with her toes curled around the edge of a cliff.
The Cylon faith taught that God is Love. And in a way, Eight believed it. If there was a God, He was the God of randomness, of throwing wrenches and disruptions into the well-laid plans of Cylon and man to keep them from becoming too complacent or smug, to keep life from becoming too inevitable. Love was one manifestation of God’s power to upset His children’s schemes. Where the others went wrong in their faith, Eight thought, was their belief that love was the only manifestation. The proof of that was growing inside her.
She could tell the others, and then there would be no more lists, not for her, anyway. She would be far too important to risk getting killed and resurrected. Felix might even be safe for awhile, too. After what happened with her sister when they had threatened to kill her human lover, the others would be very careful with Felix, at least until after the birth.
But then what? They might treat her with the reverence a potential First Mother deserved, let her decide her own fate, but the fallout from her sister’s pregnancy by a human made that unlikely. There were so many unknowns with Cylon pregnancies. Even the Ones’ cockamamie theory that biological reproduction was so antithetical to Cylon programming that pregnancy could cause irreparable mental malfunctions had gained a little traction among the Threes and Fives after her sister defected. And though they had all striven for this goal, she knew even her own sisters would hold her in suspicion, wondering at and likely fearing whatever hidden difference there was in Eight that allowed her to succeed where they had failed so many times.
It was far more likely the others would keep her under constant scrutiny, Eight knew. Would they send her to one of the basehsips floating high above the strife on New Caprica for safekeeping? When her child was born, what then? Would they let her raise it, or would they decide the child was too important, that destiny weighed too heavily on his or her shoulders-the scriptures said it would be a ‘her’-to entrust her upbringing to a woman as different from her sisters and as skilled at deceit as Eight was?
As tempting as the thought of being free of the lists was to Eight, there were other, even more enticing paths. She could choose not to tell the others, to not confess until someone noticed she was showing, and to hide it as well as she could so no one would notice. That way, she could at least keep the Fours from monitoring the fetus to death the way she knew they would want to. It was a risk, but it was one Eight could afford. She was too valuable for anyone to object too strongly, so long as she told the right story if she was caught.
Or, before she began to show, she could tell One she had taken his advice on getting personal and that she needed to go deeper undercover, to cut ties with the government and move in with Felix, then continue feeding information about the Resistance through a dead drop. Or, she could join the Resistance for real. Of course, that would be very dangerous, but it was her only option so far in which whatever secrecy and control her ploy gained Eight didn’t end when the baby was born.
Even if she and Felix defected together and sweetened the pot by bringing vital information with them, which Eight knew was her only hope, there was still no telling how the Resistance would react to a pregnant Cylon turncoat. Eight had heard Boomer’s horror story, and Felix had always been reticent about how her sister on Galactica was treated, but it said something that her sister was alive and healthy and allowed to take on the name of a human, Agathon. The bloody, face-to-face human-Cylon conflict of the past few months would certainly make her position more precarious, but Eight also had something going for her that Boomer and her sister on Galactica didn’t: for all the Resistance and Felix knew, she had never been anything but unflaggingly loyal to the human cause on New Caprica.
Or she could run. Eight marveled at herself; it had always been an option, but she’d never considered anything so extreme before. Now, it didn’t seem so crazy to do a routine requisition for a Heavy Raider and then make a run for Kobol, jumping away before anyone in traffic control knew what was happening. Even if they guessed where she was going, the superstitious blood curse on Kobol would keep the others from pursuing her, so long as they didn’t know about the child, so long as she was nothing more than a sad, malfunctioning Eight. It would be a hard life, but it would be a free life, a life where her daughter wouldn’t be haunted by destiny or her unnatural bloodline. With enough supplies and a little planning, they could make a go of it.
As she waited in the chilly exam room, Eight tried on futures in her mind like trying on new clothes. The only thing Eight feared she couldn’t handle on her own was the birth itself, so she envisioned herself boiling water over a fire at her solitary camp, then imagined the raven-haired Six beside her in a much larger camp, home to maybe a dozen people. It would be easier with more, and there were others whom Eight knew were disillusioned with Boomer and Caprica Six’s pipedream. There was the outspoken Six who was growing her hair out, the short NCP with the big mouth and the frightened eyes who knew he was in over his head, the Two who was only happy anymore when he was tinkering with the nav. system of a captured Raptor, the woman in Main Filing who’d buried her son and grandson a month ago…all of them understood that no good could ever come of New Caprica now. All might very well take a chance to start anew.
And then there was Felix. If she told him this was the only way to keep their daughter safe, that they needed him, he would come. The real question was whether Eight wanted him there. She imagined herself walking back to camp through the thick, green underbrush of a Kobolian forest with Felix at her side, then by herself. Neither vision was repugnant, but she could live with or without him just fine. Felix was also certainly far from the worst father-figure her daughter could have; he was too naïve and trusting, but she could counterbalance that. Or, she could raise her daughter on stories of a man with all of Felix’s good traits, a man who would have loved her if he’d gotten the chance to know her but who had died before she was born.
But the possibilities that fascinated Eight most were those in the child herself. Eight had seen her own eyes, her nose, her lips, her cheekbones, on tens of thousands of other faces, each of her sisters a mirror of all the others; the scriptures described it as being one image of God refracted and reflected in a million-faceted jewel. The idea that Eight would see a face with her nose and his eyes, her mouth and his chin, that the girl’s hair might be curly or straight, that she might have both her mother’s laugh and her father’s sense of humor, simply astounded Eight. The miracle that the combination of just two people could create a nearly infinite number of potential new faces, new people…that was a gift from God, and from Felix, even though he hadn’t intended it.
Felix deserved something in return, and the gift Eight chose for him had the effect of settling the whirlwind of futures in Eight’s mind. She would tell him the truth about everything, or at least everything she could say without destroying him-that meant skirting the whole truth about the lists, but letting him know that they had both been used-and then lay out all their options in front of him. She would make the final decision for herself and the child, but she would at least give Felix the chance to voice his opinion. And if she chose to leave, Eight would make sure Felix could make his decision without undue guilt. She would make sure he knew that, if he still felt there was hope for New Caprica, if he thought he should stay and continue the fight, they would be all right without him.
Eight had nearly told Felix about the pregnancy the day he’d asked her how she knew he wasn’t a Cylon, but at that time, there had been no point getting his hopes up on such a slender, fragile chance. Would he have hoped? she wondered. Am I? Is this hope?
Cottle finally returned with a young woman wearing Galactica BDU’s, carting in an ultrasound machine that looked like it had seen better days. To her credit, the medic only hesitated for a moment in surprise upon seeing Eight lying on the table.
“Is this your first time having an ultrasound?” the medic asked as she set to work on the ultrasound machine.
“First in this body,” Eight replied without thinking. That made both the medic and Cottle stop in their tracks. “No, I’ve had them. Lots of them, in fact.”
“Okay. So you know there’s no need to be nervous,” the medic said, and Eight wondered just whose nerves the medic was referring to.
It turned out the sensations were no different with human ultrasounds than with Cylon ones. The picture wasn’t likely to be any different either, Eight thought, unless it was… But Cottle would tell her when it came time. Eight closed her eyes and let her mind drift, imagining rather than remembering.
Felix closes the tent flap behind her and casually asks about her day. When she tells him, his jaw hangs slack and his face turns a little gray. He slumps into his chair, stunned, but only for a moment. He apologizes, tripping over himself to give her his seat, his mind going a mile a minute as he paces.
“So you’ve seen Cottle already, that’s good-Cottle’s a good man, a good doctor… You’ll be on bed rest, no doubt, at some point, what with the-this being so unusual, and I’ll sign you up for the special pregnancy rations in the morning-do Cylons sign up for special health rations? I don’t know. I guess it’s never come up before. There isn’t much for baby…um, stuff, left in the universe, but I think there might still be some in storage on the Gemenon Traveler, and I can barter with the Tyrols and the Redmans, if they’ll speak to me. I bet Tyrol will-he and Helo got along all right- Do you want to move in with me, or am I supposed to move to Colonial One, or-I’m assuming since you told me, you want me involved, but if you don’t-wait, do the other Cylons-do they know about us? Are you going to be in trouble for being involved with me? If you’re in danger, we can get you out-I have sources, favors I can cash in… Why are you grinning at me like that?”
Leave it to Felix to confront the absurd, the near-miraculous, with an avalanche of mundane pragmatism. The sweetness and sincerity that she sees in his eyes, rooted in equal parts fear and strength, make her smile so deeply it hurts.
“Do you see it, Rinna?” Cottle said, the sound of his voice snapping Eight’s eyelids open.
“No…there’s definitely a gestational sac, but no fetal pole, no yolk…” Cottle and the medic looked at each other. Then Cottle looked back at the screen and cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, but-”
“Blighted ovum,” Eight said, then stared at the ceiling. “This isn’t the first time.”
“Now, I don’t want this to crush your enlightened view of pregnancy,” Cottle said, approaching the head of the table. “Anembryonic pregnancy happens when the body knows there’s something wrong with the embryo’s genes, some reason the baby shouldn’t or wouldn’t come to term anyway. It has nothing to do with anything you or he did.”
“I know,” Eight said.
“If it’s any consolation,” the medic added, “it was a real pregnancy. Your body wasn’t fooling you. It was real.”
“I know.”
*~*~*
Eight shuffled down the main path instead of bothering to sneak quietly along the alleyways between the tents the way she usually did. She didn’t much care who saw her or what they thought.
Felix knew about the Cylon beliefs concerning love and procreation. She wouldn’t have to connect the dots for him, or even mention the word. She could just tell him the facts and let the implications hang in the air, let him see sadness in her eyes and interpret it as blame, mistrust, betrayal, then transform it into guilt. Even though he didn’t believe in it any more than Eight did in reality, she knew Felix would do everything he could to assuage his Eight’s doubts and tears. It would bind him to her even more tightly. She could use it.
Felix was waiting for her outside his tent when she arrived. “Gods, you had me scared,” he said, ushering her in and tying the tent flap shut for the night. “It’s not safe for anybody to be out walking alone at night, not even you. I know life and death are different for you, but still-”
Eight wrapped her arms around Felix’s waist and buried her face in his shoulder. It took a few moments before Felix encircled her with his arms in return. “Whoa, you okay?”
Eight swallowed hard. As soon as she had actually looked him in the eyes, she knew she wasn’t going to tell him, ever. She was shocked at the conclusion she had reached. She knew that whatever it was that made her think this way, it wasn’t love, certainly not in the sense Caprica Six or Boomer or even the Fours talked about. The feeling that swept through her was heady and frightening; she was going against the plan for no more rational reason than that her gut told her she’d found a truth she refused to twist into a lie by telling it. Eight silently thanked her child that never was for giving her the chance to make a choice, even if it hadn’t been the choice she had envisioned.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. It’s just been a long day.”