Fic: Mathematics: Three Wishes (8/10)
Series Title: Mathematics
Segment Title: Three Wishes (8/10)
( Part 1) ( Part 2) ( Part 3) ( Part 4) ( Part 5)( Part 6)( Part 7)
Author:
kappamaki33
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Gaeta/Eight; implied Caprica/Baltar and Gaeta/Baltar
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 8 Summary: “Three Wishes”: Felix does his penance by providing others with what little comfort he can, and he finds an answer to a question asked many years ago.
Spoilers: Through “Face of the Enemy” Webisodes
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 8 Notes: Be warned: this one gets dark, folks. There’s no violence or gore, but emotionally, I think it’s harder than the chapter with the bomb at the checkpoint. This idea is what started me down the road with this whole series, though it’s one of the last I actually wrote. It turned out as sort of a mirror of “Order of Operations” (Part 3). This section presents two of the three key questions that inspired this series: where did Gaeta learn his lament, and how did he cope with the fact that the Resistance used his smuggled information to plan suicide bombings?
This segment is brought to you by the number 3, which is the number of wishes Felix makes (or does he?).
Mathematics: Three Wishes
“Alone she sleeps in the shirt of man, with my three wishes clutched in her hand…”
Felix hears his mother’s voice wafting through the open kitchen window at the back of the house when he comes to the gate. “Mum, I’m home!” he calls out, but she must not have heard him, because she just keeps singing.
It only takes Felix about five running steps to get from the gate to the front door. The house doesn’t have much for a yard, more a strip of scraggly grass and volunteer violets separating the house from the sidewalk like a moat. Felix has vague memories of a house with a huge, rolling lawn with flower gardens and fish ponds and bushes that Germaine trimmed to look like animals, but that feels like a long time ago, like maybe it isn’t even his life he’s remembering. He knows his mother misses the gardens dearly, though. He thinks that’s why they moved to a house covered with such thick vines: so she would still have some of those pretty, open greens. The only difference is the ones from before had been horizontal, whereas these are vertical.
The crumbling, creaky old-two story house encased in ivy always reminds Felix of the castle in “Sleeping Beauty.” Of course, ivy isn’t as scary as thorns, and he makes his way in with a key instead of a sword (always careful to lock the door again as soon as he’s slid inside-this is not the sort of neighborhood where a person leaves the door unlocked any longer than absolutely necessary, his mother continually reminds him). Even so, he still likes to think of himself as a knight in shining armor, braving the wilds to sneak into the castle and slay the ogre or giant or witch or whatever it is this time that’s holding the beautiful princess captive.
“Mum!” Felix calls out again when he steps into the dark drawing room. Still no answer.
It’s a very, very old house, so the kitchen is in the back, behind the long, narrow drawing room. Nobody ever uses this room. The protective sheets are still on the furniture from when they moved in, and the half-dozen bookcases are coated with a thick layer of dust, except in the few places where Felix has pulled out a volume out of curiosity. It doesn’t bother Felix, since the room wouldn’t be homey if they used it, anyway. It’s crammed full of all the fancy stuff that was too good for him to ever sit on in the old house, except on special occasions, and then all the cushions were stiff and itchy and uncomfortable.
His mother likes the clutter, though, or at least likes hanging on to the insides of the old house, even if it doesn’t fit this one at all. Felix accepts that she has an odd sort of pride that way, though he doesn’t understand it. She’s willing to send Felix to school in uniforms that he’s outgrowing and the most patched and threadbare choir robe, even out of all his fellow scholarship boys, but not to part with family heirlooms. He’s pretty certain that even if they were starving, she would never sell a single end table.
All the chairs and sofas covered in sheets that billow in a breeze whose source he can never pinpoint give Felix the feeling the whole house is haunted, though he doesn’t believe in ghosts anymore. Or almost all the house, at least. His room is nice and bright, full of posters of superheroes that would scare off any ghosts (though that does not mean he believes in ghosts) and a big window that lets in plenty of light during the day and is a perfect spot to look out at the stars with his telescope at night. The kitchen isn’t haunted, either, because that’s Mum’s place.
If he’s too old to even believe in ghosts, Felix knows he’s definitely too old to play the game of sneaking past the ghosts to get from the front door to the kitchen. He hesitates only for a moment, though, before he bolts across the room and hides behind a claw-footed couch, cautiously peeking out around it to make sure the coast is clear. He races to the next bit of cover, a sideboard sitting out in the middle of the room, and then dives behind it. It takes him two more duck-and-cover maneuvers, but he traverses the room without being detected.
Felix thrusts open the kitchen door triumphantly and slides into a chair at the table before his mother can turn around and either scold him for running inside the house or tease him for being so silly about the ghosts, depending on her mood.
She flashes him a quick, tight smile over her shoulder and asks, “Are you hungry?”
“Yeah, really hungry,” he answers, trying hard not to pant.
“Silly question, isn’t it? When is a growing boy not hungry?” she says, not quite enough humor in her voice to make Felix feel completely at ease. She starts in on her project all right, setting out bread, peanut butter, jam, and a knife, but then something happens. It’s as if she loses her train of thought, her hands fluttering uselessly back and forth between the peanut butter and jam jars as a crease forms in the middle of her brow.
He wants to get up and make the sandwich himself, but he knows that would only fluster her more. It’s not that she’s lazy, Felix knows. She’s always full of energy, even to the point of being jittery-it’s just directionless, sometimes. He doesn’t remember her being this way in the old house, but he notices it more and more here. His father even started noticing, to the point where he’d hired a girl to come in and clean once a week, even though they couldn’t really afford it.
His mother starts singing again, and her hands relax. After a few bars, she picks up the knife and goes back to work.
“Mum,” Felix interrupts, “why is the girl in the song wearing a man’s shirt?”
His mother stops singing, but when she speaks, she sounds as if he’s woken her from a deep sleep. “Pardon?”
“The song says she’s sleeping in a man’s shirt. Why is she doing that?”
He sees his mother blush a little before she turns back to the refrigerator to get the milk. “Actually, that’s not what the song says. It says she ‘sleeps in the shirt of man,’ not a man’s shirt.”
“Oh,” says Felix, pausing to think. “I don’t get it. What’s the difference?”
His mother brings the sandwich and glass of milk to the table and sits down across from Felix. “‘The shirt of man’ is a metaphor. You know what a metaphor is, don’t you, Felix?”
Felix recites his answer smoothly, having just learned about figures of speech in school last week. “A metaphor is a figure of speech that uses a word to refer to something that it isn’t, and it makes you think of the connection between the word you’re using and the thing you’re actually talking about.”
“And…?” his mother leads.
“And…” Felix takes a bite out of his sandwich to give himself time to think. “And there’s no ‘like’ or ‘as’ used, because that makes it a simile.”
His mother smiles with her eyes. “Very good, Felix.” She turns away from Felix as if to look out the window, but Felix can see her eyes aren’t focusing on anything at all. “‘The shirt of man’ is a metaphor for the human body. Our souls live in our bodies, wear them like shirts. Souls may be immortal and endless, but bodies aren’t. They’re a home for the soul, and a prison, too.”
Felix leans back, stunned. He feels as if he’s hearing this favorite old song for the first time. “So the girl, she’s…dead?”
“Yes, she is,” she answers. “How do you know that, from the song?”
Felix is used to his mother quizzing him like this, especially over things like similes and metaphors ever since Ms. Allini sent home the note saying Felix wasn’t always paying attention in language arts class. It was true, but it isn’t that Felix doesn’t like language arts-it’s because he sits next to Timmy Saunders in that class-but he’d rather that his mother think he hates figures of speech than have her ask Ms. Allini to separate him and Timmy. But something about this lesson, the sad, expectant look on his mother’s face that deepens with each new question, makes Felix’s stomach flip-flop, and not in the pleasant way Timmy makes it do that. “Well, ‘cause…’cause-”
“Be-cause, Felix.”
“Sorry. Because, after the shirt thing you talked about, I guess now it sounds like the singer’s so sad the girl’s asleep that her third wish is to die to bring the girl back.”
“So sleep is a what for death?”
“Huh?” His mother raises her eyebrows expectantly. “Oh, a metaphor!”
“Excellent, Felix. In fact, that’s how most scholars interpret ‘Three Wishes.’ However…” She’s silent for a moment, as if she’s debating whether or not to continue. The corners of her mouth twitch into something that really isn’t a smile, even if her lips are turned upward. “What are the three wishes, Felix?”
Felix is relieved to get such an easy question. He’s heard the song countless times before. “One, ‘that she be spared the pain that comes from a dark and laughing rain,’ two, ‘when she finds love may it always stay true,’ and three, ‘wish no more, my life you can take, to have…’ Wait a minute. That third one…”
“‘Wish no more’-the one everybody thinks is the third wish isn’t a wish at all, is it, darling?” she says sweetly. “The first two are just as treacherous. Wishing that someone be spared the pain of this dark, unpredictable world and wishing that someone find true love forever are well and good separately. But can’t you feel the contradiction, when you put the two together?”
Felix wants to ask what “contradiction” means-he’s pretty sure he knows, but just to be certain-but his throat is suddenly dry. When he was younger, Felix’s parents had once taken him to an oracle. The way the woman’s words and face hadn’t matched, how tears had rolled down her cheeks without her eyes crinkling up in sadness or her voice even wavering, had terrified Felix at the time. The hairs on the back of his neck stand on end when he recognizes that look on his mother’s face.
“Pain is a necessary part of love, at least any kind of love that lasts at all,” she continues, looking through Felix rather than at him. “You can’t have one without the other. That’s just how things work. To be spared the pain of the ‘dark and laughing rain,’ the girl would have had to close her heart off from love and its unavoidable failings, or die before she has the chance to get hurt. Without knowing it, the singer wished for the beloved’s death. And the singer’s heart is breaking because only now does she realize it, now that she’s wracked with pain from the loss of her beloved.”
Felix’s hands are shaking, but he doesn’t know why. He hides them under the table. “Oh.”
She gives him a look that Felix knows is calculated to be comforting, but all he can think of are the tears running down the oracle’s smooth, pale cheeks. “There are worse things than death, Felix.”
“‘Three Wishes’ was your favorite thing to sing at concerts, right?” Felix says, desperate to change the subject without seeming like that’s what he’s doing. Getting her to talk about the old days on tour with the Minoan Symphony or the Aegis City Choir usually cheers her up.
“Yes, it was my best, my signature piece,” she says, looking distant but not nearly as contented as bringing up the old days normally makes her . “That was because I understood the conflict that very few others seem to catch. Everyone sings ‘Three Wishes’ full of sadness, grief, loss. And those are all there, too, but…do you know what it’s really about?”
Felix sits in thought a long time. It feels strange to him, running across a question like this that he can’t puzzle out. This sort of thing never happens to him with lessons at school. He’s suddenly terribly afraid he’s disappointing his mother even more, that he’s the reason she always sounds like she’s singing in a minor key.
She must have seen the worry on Felix’s face, because her expression softens. “It’s all right, Felix,” she says, staring at him steadily. “In fact, I hope you never do find out.”
~*~*~
“We are gathered here today to remember before God the lives of the departed, to bless these, their remains, and to commend their souls to God’s keeping and infinite mercy. We are also here in sympathy and love to comfort all who mourn with a proclamation of our hope, no, our conviction, that all those who accept the love of the only true God, whether they live one or one hundred lives within this universe, will find eternal life and peace in the world to come…”
Felix felt Eight’s fingers graze the heel of his hand hanging down at his side, but he drew it away and clasped his hands in front of his body. It was a risk, not letting her comfort him the way she wanted, but Felix was past caring that day. Standing next to Eight in a crowd that size was a bit of a risk in the other direction, too, he supposed, but the sly looks he’d been getting from the D’Annas and the Simons lately whenever they spotted him talking to Eight suggested the Cylons knew and found it nothing worse than amusing. As for whether other humans saw, it hardly mattered at that point. Everyone assumed Baltar was frakking him, and most people were far more angry at their turncoat human President than any one random skinjob.
Felix watched the D’Anna’s face cycle through an impressively wide range of expressions as she spoke from the podium on the stage, the wind whipping her hair in her face and playing with the edges of the paper on which her speech was written. She was a decent orator, and by far the best of the Cylons’ limited options. The first time the Cylons had done this ceremony, they’d had a Cavil officiate. They’d never made that mistake again.
“…as difficult as it is to comprehend such senseless, morally reprehensible violence. But the first article of faith-so basic that even those who do not yet acknowledge the love of our one true God still intuitively know it as truth-is that ‘this is not all that we are.’
“Those whom we honor here today understood that truth, gave their lives to defend that truth. They made the ultimate sacrifice in the service of something greater than themselves, of the dream that one day Cylon and human may live together in peace, that our children will consider each other brothers and sisters rather than parents and progeny. And because we must not let them die in vain, we must…”
Felix thought detachedly that the D’Anna was doing an especially good job, considering how Cylon culture had never envisaged funerals until New Caprica. Cylons had died, permanently, before then, but the only ceremony they’d had was the short, simple Prayer to the Cloud of Unknowing.
About the same time that the Resistance had started killing human collaborators-back then, they’d just been collateral damage when going after Cylons, not even targets in and of themselves-a Doral had also been censoring Roslin’s proposed history text. He’d become completely enamored with Roslin’s description of Adama’s funeral speech, the one when the Old Man told everyone he knew the way to Earth. Though the Doral edited that portion out of Roslin’s textbook, he and a few D’Annas decided that that sort of solemnity and pomp was exactly what they needed to bridge the gap between the Cylons and the humans.
Felix noted as he half-listened that the D’Anna’s theology still needed some fine-tuning. It certainly wasn’t an easy task, preaching Cylon religion over the bodies of Colonial “pagans,” as the Cylons called them, but she veered from being so wishy-washy that there was no substance at all to not-so-subtly damning the dead human heroes and their mourners to eternal damnation and torment.
“And now, as we prepare to make our final farewells, let us stand in quiet reflection as one of your own makes an offering of music to the true and living God. Mr. Gaeta?”
Felix nodded absently and made his way to the stage, doing his best to pretend he wasn’t keenly aware of all the curious stares from the Cylons and the cold glares from the few humans he passed.
The Cylons were adamant about keeping all vestiges of Colonial faiths out of the funeral services, but the Cylon religion didn’t have any music. The Doral in charge of the logistics for these ceremonies loved the added pageantry that music afforded, though, so he’d snapped up the opportunity when Felix had offered his services for the first funeral, and for each and every one that followed.
Felix still had to clear his song selection with a Doral and a D’Anna before each funeral, to ensure he wasn’t surreptitiously slipping in something pagan. Not being able to use any traditional hymns made it difficult for Felix to select appropriately comforting music, especially since the Doral demanded that Felix use a different song each time, apparently to enhance the spectacle of it all.
When he’d heard what Duck had done, when he’d realized he hadn’t gotten the message about Baltar to the garbage dump in time, Felix hadn’t even waited for the funeral committee to call him in. He’d walked right into the office that the Doral and D’Anna shared and sang his selection for their authorization.
They had just stared at him, completely befuddled. There was nothing overtly religious about it, so they didn’t object, but it was clear they didn’t understand it and suspected that Felix had gone mad.
Felix had almost smiled at their expressions. That had been exactly what he was hoping for.
Felix mounted the stage and shook his head when the D’Anna offered him her spot behind the podium. He stood on the edge of the platform. The only thing between him and the crowd was the double row of bodies covered in the pure, plain white of the Cylon flag, now speckled with gray New Caprican soil.
He cleared his throat and began. “Alone she sleeps in the shirt of man, with my three wishes clutched in her hand…”
The first few times he had sung at funerals on New Caprica, his singing voice had been rusty and a bit uncontrollable after so many years of disuse. But it had all come back to him very quickly, especially since he’d gotten so many opportunities to practice as the Cylons clamped down on their own security and the Resistance went after softer, human-populated targets in response.
At the beginning of the song, Felix fixed his eyes on the bodies. Even after so many funerals that he’d lost count, it still unsettled him every time he saw the outline of a body under a flag. Coffins were only traditional on Aquaria, Caprica, and some parts of Libron, and they certainly weren’t going to waste what little timber New Caprica had on the dead, but his disquiet at the sight never went away. He could tell from the silhouettes that some of the bodies were incomplete, missing arms or legs or, in one case, had an empty space where half a torso should have been. He wondered for a moment what the Cylons had done with Duck’s remains, or if there had even been enough of him left to bury.
Felix wished the wind would peel back the Cylon flags so he could see the faces of the dead. He knew all their names, and he’d seen the aftermath of the bomb when he and all the other human workers on Colonial One had rushed over to the NCP Academy building to help with triage. But if the lists were his grace, the song was his penance, his way of doing his best to commend these souls to some sort of rest by ripping his own apart, offering whatever little peace he had left up as a sacrifice. He didn’t regret what he’d done-he didn’t, he couldn’t. That didn’t mean he could brush it aside as purely the casualties of war.
Since he couldn’t see the faces of the dead, Felix contented himself with lifting his gaze to the cold, angry eyes of the living.
Except they weren’t angry. Felix was almost disappointed. Even though a person would never know it from the way the D’Anna had addressed her speech, the crowd was mostly Cylons; very few humans were in attendance. Some of the dead simply weren’t lucky enough to have any family left to mourn them. Many families were too disgusted with the Cylons’ sacrilege to stand the official ceremony. Most were just too afraid to go anywhere that a large group of people were gathered, especially when that group contained Cylons, making it a perfect Resistance target. The few people who were there understood the song, though; he could see it in their eyes.
What startled Felix most was the responses of some of the Cylons. Most wore stoic expressions or mirrors of the puzzlement he’d seen with the D’Anna and the Doral, but a few reacted. Two Sixes stood a little off to the side, one’s face buried against the other’s shoulder, her back shaking. A Sharon that might have been Boomer bowed her head and covered her eyes. A Leoben stared at Felix steadily, tears streaming freely down his cheeks.
Felix looked at Eight. She was almost hugging herself, but he couldn’t quite make sense of the expression on her face. The closest he could get was that she looked like there was an earthquake that only she could feel.
“…To have her, please, just one day wake…”
The one face he longed to see there most was nowhere to be found. Maybe Gaius really couldn’t do anything. He wasn’t cut out to be a leader under the best of circumstances-Felix had learned the hard way. But Gaius still had the power to face his people, to look them in the eye and feel what he had done to them, what he had let happen. That was why, had the assassination plan worked, Felix wouldn’t have regretted it, no matter how much it hurt.
It wasn’t a surprise, not seeing him there; Gaius hadn’t been to a funeral in a long, long time, even before the Cylons came. The hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach made Felix realize that he had still been hoping.
The last note caught in the wind and ended more abruptly than Felix was used to, having grown up hearing his voice echoing back to him from the stone walls of the Temple of Apollo. He walked off the stage and back to Eight’s side. His mind was in a cold haze for the remainder of the service. When the crowd started to disperse, his feet turned toward home of their own volition.
Eight fell into step beside him. “Felix,” she said. He didn’t answer.
“Felix-” she repeated, reaching for his elbow. He cringed at her touch, and she felt it and recoiled. She shoved her hands in her jacket pockets and continued alongside him in silence for a long time.
Felix slowed when a flicker of light caught his eye. A small group huddled in the walkway between two tents. When one of the people in the circle shifted his weight, Felix saw a small fire in the center. It puzzled him for a moment, but then he took a closer look at the faces gathered around it. Of course. It was John Merrian’s funeral pyre, without the body. Ally Merrian and her daughter bowed their shaved heads. It was a rare thing to see widows do nowadays, but Felix wasn’t surprised, since the Merrians were from a particularly traditionalist region of Geminon. He could see their lips moving, but he couldn’t hear what they were saying. Had this been before the Cylons came to New Caprica, their wailing would have been so loud that everyone in the quarter would have heard and remembered John.
“Felix,” Eight said softly, her voice catching. It was only then that Felix realized they had both stopped in the middle of the street. “That song. What’s that song about?”
Felix started walking again, Eight trailing a little behind him now. “It’s just a song,” he mumbled. “It means what it says.”
“But-”
“What?” Felix challenged, wheeling around and staring Eight in the face.
He instantly regretted snapping at Eight like that. He could see she was one word away from bursting into tears.
“Because it sounded like you were wondering if you would be better off if you were lying under one of those flags.”
Felix sighed heavily, wrapped one arm around Eight’s shoulder, and kissed her on the forehead. “Gods, Eight,” he whispered into her hair. “You know I can’t promise I’ll always be here. But I swear I’d never do that on purpose. I wouldn’t do that to you.”
They walked the rest of the way to Felix’s tent that way, his arm around her, her head resting on his shoulder. That was the closest he had ever been to telling her the words “I love you,” even though that wasn’t what he meant at all. He was fairly certain that was how Eight had interpreted it, though. He hated lying to her like that, but explaining what he really meant would be too hard on the best of days.
It had happened not too long after Felix’s voice changed from a pure, clear boy-soprano to a rich baritone. His father jokingly called it “Felix’s lucky break,” since this new voice had turned out so lovely that the academy was not only renewing his music scholarship but moving him from the Temple Boys’ Choir to the renowned Sacred Delian Choir. His mother had been so proud of him that she’d cried.
Later on, Felix would realize that his mother had tried to be conscientious that day. She’d chosen a Thursday, the day when the cleaning girl came over a good half-hour before Felix would be home from choir practice. It probably would have worked, too, if the girl hadn’t been late that Thursday.
Felix had found the girl stomping her booted feet on the doorstep to keep warm and pounding her fist on the door when he came home.
“Felix!” she said, her eyes shining with unspilled tears. “Why won’t your mum let me in? She’s always here when I come to clean. I been knocking for near ten minutes. She at the doctor’s or something?”
“No, she’s home. I can let you in, though,” Felix said, fumbling for his keys with his mittened hand. “Don’t worry. She probably just fell asleep and didn’t hear you.”
The girl-what had her name been? Mia?-nodded but didn’t look very comforted. In fact, Felix was surprised Mia was so upset about being locked out in the first place. She was a tough girl, never at a loss for a snide comeback when the boys who hung out on the street corners made catcalls after her. She couldn’t be afraid of being chastised by Mrs. Gaeta for being late.
“What’s that noise?” Mia said, voice quavering as Felix struggled with the lock.
“What noise? Just somebody warming up their car next door.” Felix looked up at Mia, her eyes wide. The sound from the engine wasn’t coming from the right direction to be the neighbors’ car. “No.”
Mia took off around the house back toward the garage, Felix close on her heels. He realized they’d both sensed something was wrong-maybe had for a long time-but not in any way either of them could have articulated.
The noise grew louder as they approached the garage. Mia threw the side door open as Felix rounded the corner. She screamed.
“Don’t go in, Felix!” sobbed Mia as she braced her arms against the doorframe to block Felix’s way. “Go to the neighbors, get help. Don’t look!”
Felix ducked under her arm and pushed past her.
Felix’s first thought was that Mia’s plea was stupid. The fact of it was so horrible he couldn’t wrap his mind around it, but not seeing it would hardly change that. And there was nothing horrible about the way the scene looked at all. His mother was just sitting in the driver’s seat of the car, eyes closed. She looked as if she was sleeping.
It would have been easy for Felix to remember his childhood as terrible after that, but he was honest with himself. The warmth and safety of the kitchen died with his mother, but it was hardly unbearable. In fact, there were times when Felix would have said he was happy. For one, his father took a far more active interest in him after that. The two of them clung to each other as the only family they had left, even if they didn’t have much else in common. In time, his father’s den, though not without its own ghosts, became a place of retreat from the cold of the rest of the house.
Cyrus Gaeta was a little man with a big voice and riotous curls that had gone from deep black to completely white in the space of two years, starting with the First Aquarian Stock Market Crash, when he’d lost the family fortune like so many of the other old families had. Most nights after Felix’s father returned home from the cramped little cubicle where he mindlessly crunched numbers for an accounting firm, Felix and his father would sit in the study and eat their microwave dinners on paper plates, and Cyrus would rage against the injustices of the system that had made their family rich and that he’d never questioned until he’d seen it from the other side. Listening to and occasionally arguing with his father had proved invaluable training for dealing with Chief Tyrol and the union; in fact, Felix had more than once reflected that the only real difference between his father and Tyrol was a university education. Eventually, late dinners with his father became almost as normal as late afternoons in the kitchen with his mother had been.
Felix’s room remained a safe place, too. It was where he studied, where he fell in love with science and discovered that it could not only free him from the shabby old house but take him to the stars he’d gazed at so longingly through his telescope. His father had not been at all happy when Felix showed him the brochure for the Colonial ROTC, but after studying his finances, Cyrus had reluctantly given in.
But there was no place for music in Felix’s life after that day. His father had understood when Felix quit choir and took the cut in his scholarship. Cyrus even took out a loan to cover the high school tuition costs Felix couldn’t meet with the remainder of his academic scholarship and the money he made at the part-time jobs that replaced choir practice. Felix had packed away his voice along with his scores, pitch pipe, metronome, everything, into a little box in the drawing room with all the other ghosts. He’d left it there almost completely undisturbed, until now.
When they arrived back at the tent, Felix and Eight fell silently into their daily routine. Felix warmed a kettle of water on the stove and poured it into the washbasin while Eight swept the dirt floor (that chore had seemed so oxymoronic to Felix at first, but he’d come to learn it was a necessity). By the time Eight finished, Felix was nearly done washing their few dishes, so Eight joined him in drying them.
“You asked earlier about what that song means,” Felix said, staring intently at the cup in his hand.
“Yes,” she stated, no hint of questioning in her voice.
“It’s about feeling…trapped.”
“I understand.”
Felix looked up at Eight. He believed her.
Segment Title: Three Wishes (8/10)
( Part 1) ( Part 2) ( Part 3) ( Part 4) ( Part 5)( Part 6)( Part 7)
Author:
kappamaki33
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Gaeta/Eight; implied Caprica/Baltar and Gaeta/Baltar
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 8 Summary: “Three Wishes”: Felix does his penance by providing others with what little comfort he can, and he finds an answer to a question asked many years ago.
Spoilers: Through “Face of the Enemy” Webisodes
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 8 Notes: Be warned: this one gets dark, folks. There’s no violence or gore, but emotionally, I think it’s harder than the chapter with the bomb at the checkpoint. This idea is what started me down the road with this whole series, though it’s one of the last I actually wrote. It turned out as sort of a mirror of “Order of Operations” (Part 3). This section presents two of the three key questions that inspired this series: where did Gaeta learn his lament, and how did he cope with the fact that the Resistance used his smuggled information to plan suicide bombings?
This segment is brought to you by the number 3, which is the number of wishes Felix makes (or does he?).
Mathematics: Three Wishes
“Alone she sleeps in the shirt of man, with my three wishes clutched in her hand…”
Felix hears his mother’s voice wafting through the open kitchen window at the back of the house when he comes to the gate. “Mum, I’m home!” he calls out, but she must not have heard him, because she just keeps singing.
It only takes Felix about five running steps to get from the gate to the front door. The house doesn’t have much for a yard, more a strip of scraggly grass and volunteer violets separating the house from the sidewalk like a moat. Felix has vague memories of a house with a huge, rolling lawn with flower gardens and fish ponds and bushes that Germaine trimmed to look like animals, but that feels like a long time ago, like maybe it isn’t even his life he’s remembering. He knows his mother misses the gardens dearly, though. He thinks that’s why they moved to a house covered with such thick vines: so she would still have some of those pretty, open greens. The only difference is the ones from before had been horizontal, whereas these are vertical.
The crumbling, creaky old-two story house encased in ivy always reminds Felix of the castle in “Sleeping Beauty.” Of course, ivy isn’t as scary as thorns, and he makes his way in with a key instead of a sword (always careful to lock the door again as soon as he’s slid inside-this is not the sort of neighborhood where a person leaves the door unlocked any longer than absolutely necessary, his mother continually reminds him). Even so, he still likes to think of himself as a knight in shining armor, braving the wilds to sneak into the castle and slay the ogre or giant or witch or whatever it is this time that’s holding the beautiful princess captive.
“Mum!” Felix calls out again when he steps into the dark drawing room. Still no answer.
It’s a very, very old house, so the kitchen is in the back, behind the long, narrow drawing room. Nobody ever uses this room. The protective sheets are still on the furniture from when they moved in, and the half-dozen bookcases are coated with a thick layer of dust, except in the few places where Felix has pulled out a volume out of curiosity. It doesn’t bother Felix, since the room wouldn’t be homey if they used it, anyway. It’s crammed full of all the fancy stuff that was too good for him to ever sit on in the old house, except on special occasions, and then all the cushions were stiff and itchy and uncomfortable.
His mother likes the clutter, though, or at least likes hanging on to the insides of the old house, even if it doesn’t fit this one at all. Felix accepts that she has an odd sort of pride that way, though he doesn’t understand it. She’s willing to send Felix to school in uniforms that he’s outgrowing and the most patched and threadbare choir robe, even out of all his fellow scholarship boys, but not to part with family heirlooms. He’s pretty certain that even if they were starving, she would never sell a single end table.
All the chairs and sofas covered in sheets that billow in a breeze whose source he can never pinpoint give Felix the feeling the whole house is haunted, though he doesn’t believe in ghosts anymore. Or almost all the house, at least. His room is nice and bright, full of posters of superheroes that would scare off any ghosts (though that does not mean he believes in ghosts) and a big window that lets in plenty of light during the day and is a perfect spot to look out at the stars with his telescope at night. The kitchen isn’t haunted, either, because that’s Mum’s place.
If he’s too old to even believe in ghosts, Felix knows he’s definitely too old to play the game of sneaking past the ghosts to get from the front door to the kitchen. He hesitates only for a moment, though, before he bolts across the room and hides behind a claw-footed couch, cautiously peeking out around it to make sure the coast is clear. He races to the next bit of cover, a sideboard sitting out in the middle of the room, and then dives behind it. It takes him two more duck-and-cover maneuvers, but he traverses the room without being detected.
Felix thrusts open the kitchen door triumphantly and slides into a chair at the table before his mother can turn around and either scold him for running inside the house or tease him for being so silly about the ghosts, depending on her mood.
She flashes him a quick, tight smile over her shoulder and asks, “Are you hungry?”
“Yeah, really hungry,” he answers, trying hard not to pant.
“Silly question, isn’t it? When is a growing boy not hungry?” she says, not quite enough humor in her voice to make Felix feel completely at ease. She starts in on her project all right, setting out bread, peanut butter, jam, and a knife, but then something happens. It’s as if she loses her train of thought, her hands fluttering uselessly back and forth between the peanut butter and jam jars as a crease forms in the middle of her brow.
He wants to get up and make the sandwich himself, but he knows that would only fluster her more. It’s not that she’s lazy, Felix knows. She’s always full of energy, even to the point of being jittery-it’s just directionless, sometimes. He doesn’t remember her being this way in the old house, but he notices it more and more here. His father even started noticing, to the point where he’d hired a girl to come in and clean once a week, even though they couldn’t really afford it.
His mother starts singing again, and her hands relax. After a few bars, she picks up the knife and goes back to work.
“Mum,” Felix interrupts, “why is the girl in the song wearing a man’s shirt?”
His mother stops singing, but when she speaks, she sounds as if he’s woken her from a deep sleep. “Pardon?”
“The song says she’s sleeping in a man’s shirt. Why is she doing that?”
He sees his mother blush a little before she turns back to the refrigerator to get the milk. “Actually, that’s not what the song says. It says she ‘sleeps in the shirt of man,’ not a man’s shirt.”
“Oh,” says Felix, pausing to think. “I don’t get it. What’s the difference?”
His mother brings the sandwich and glass of milk to the table and sits down across from Felix. “‘The shirt of man’ is a metaphor. You know what a metaphor is, don’t you, Felix?”
Felix recites his answer smoothly, having just learned about figures of speech in school last week. “A metaphor is a figure of speech that uses a word to refer to something that it isn’t, and it makes you think of the connection between the word you’re using and the thing you’re actually talking about.”
“And…?” his mother leads.
“And…” Felix takes a bite out of his sandwich to give himself time to think. “And there’s no ‘like’ or ‘as’ used, because that makes it a simile.”
His mother smiles with her eyes. “Very good, Felix.” She turns away from Felix as if to look out the window, but Felix can see her eyes aren’t focusing on anything at all. “‘The shirt of man’ is a metaphor for the human body. Our souls live in our bodies, wear them like shirts. Souls may be immortal and endless, but bodies aren’t. They’re a home for the soul, and a prison, too.”
Felix leans back, stunned. He feels as if he’s hearing this favorite old song for the first time. “So the girl, she’s…dead?”
“Yes, she is,” she answers. “How do you know that, from the song?”
Felix is used to his mother quizzing him like this, especially over things like similes and metaphors ever since Ms. Allini sent home the note saying Felix wasn’t always paying attention in language arts class. It was true, but it isn’t that Felix doesn’t like language arts-it’s because he sits next to Timmy Saunders in that class-but he’d rather that his mother think he hates figures of speech than have her ask Ms. Allini to separate him and Timmy. But something about this lesson, the sad, expectant look on his mother’s face that deepens with each new question, makes Felix’s stomach flip-flop, and not in the pleasant way Timmy makes it do that. “Well, ‘cause…’cause-”
“Be-cause, Felix.”
“Sorry. Because, after the shirt thing you talked about, I guess now it sounds like the singer’s so sad the girl’s asleep that her third wish is to die to bring the girl back.”
“So sleep is a what for death?”
“Huh?” His mother raises her eyebrows expectantly. “Oh, a metaphor!”
“Excellent, Felix. In fact, that’s how most scholars interpret ‘Three Wishes.’ However…” She’s silent for a moment, as if she’s debating whether or not to continue. The corners of her mouth twitch into something that really isn’t a smile, even if her lips are turned upward. “What are the three wishes, Felix?”
Felix is relieved to get such an easy question. He’s heard the song countless times before. “One, ‘that she be spared the pain that comes from a dark and laughing rain,’ two, ‘when she finds love may it always stay true,’ and three, ‘wish no more, my life you can take, to have…’ Wait a minute. That third one…”
“‘Wish no more’-the one everybody thinks is the third wish isn’t a wish at all, is it, darling?” she says sweetly. “The first two are just as treacherous. Wishing that someone be spared the pain of this dark, unpredictable world and wishing that someone find true love forever are well and good separately. But can’t you feel the contradiction, when you put the two together?”
Felix wants to ask what “contradiction” means-he’s pretty sure he knows, but just to be certain-but his throat is suddenly dry. When he was younger, Felix’s parents had once taken him to an oracle. The way the woman’s words and face hadn’t matched, how tears had rolled down her cheeks without her eyes crinkling up in sadness or her voice even wavering, had terrified Felix at the time. The hairs on the back of his neck stand on end when he recognizes that look on his mother’s face.
“Pain is a necessary part of love, at least any kind of love that lasts at all,” she continues, looking through Felix rather than at him. “You can’t have one without the other. That’s just how things work. To be spared the pain of the ‘dark and laughing rain,’ the girl would have had to close her heart off from love and its unavoidable failings, or die before she has the chance to get hurt. Without knowing it, the singer wished for the beloved’s death. And the singer’s heart is breaking because only now does she realize it, now that she’s wracked with pain from the loss of her beloved.”
Felix’s hands are shaking, but he doesn’t know why. He hides them under the table. “Oh.”
She gives him a look that Felix knows is calculated to be comforting, but all he can think of are the tears running down the oracle’s smooth, pale cheeks. “There are worse things than death, Felix.”
“‘Three Wishes’ was your favorite thing to sing at concerts, right?” Felix says, desperate to change the subject without seeming like that’s what he’s doing. Getting her to talk about the old days on tour with the Minoan Symphony or the Aegis City Choir usually cheers her up.
“Yes, it was my best, my signature piece,” she says, looking distant but not nearly as contented as bringing up the old days normally makes her . “That was because I understood the conflict that very few others seem to catch. Everyone sings ‘Three Wishes’ full of sadness, grief, loss. And those are all there, too, but…do you know what it’s really about?”
Felix sits in thought a long time. It feels strange to him, running across a question like this that he can’t puzzle out. This sort of thing never happens to him with lessons at school. He’s suddenly terribly afraid he’s disappointing his mother even more, that he’s the reason she always sounds like she’s singing in a minor key.
She must have seen the worry on Felix’s face, because her expression softens. “It’s all right, Felix,” she says, staring at him steadily. “In fact, I hope you never do find out.”
~*~*~
“We are gathered here today to remember before God the lives of the departed, to bless these, their remains, and to commend their souls to God’s keeping and infinite mercy. We are also here in sympathy and love to comfort all who mourn with a proclamation of our hope, no, our conviction, that all those who accept the love of the only true God, whether they live one or one hundred lives within this universe, will find eternal life and peace in the world to come…”
Felix felt Eight’s fingers graze the heel of his hand hanging down at his side, but he drew it away and clasped his hands in front of his body. It was a risk, not letting her comfort him the way she wanted, but Felix was past caring that day. Standing next to Eight in a crowd that size was a bit of a risk in the other direction, too, he supposed, but the sly looks he’d been getting from the D’Annas and the Simons lately whenever they spotted him talking to Eight suggested the Cylons knew and found it nothing worse than amusing. As for whether other humans saw, it hardly mattered at that point. Everyone assumed Baltar was frakking him, and most people were far more angry at their turncoat human President than any one random skinjob.
Felix watched the D’Anna’s face cycle through an impressively wide range of expressions as she spoke from the podium on the stage, the wind whipping her hair in her face and playing with the edges of the paper on which her speech was written. She was a decent orator, and by far the best of the Cylons’ limited options. The first time the Cylons had done this ceremony, they’d had a Cavil officiate. They’d never made that mistake again.
“…as difficult as it is to comprehend such senseless, morally reprehensible violence. But the first article of faith-so basic that even those who do not yet acknowledge the love of our one true God still intuitively know it as truth-is that ‘this is not all that we are.’
“Those whom we honor here today understood that truth, gave their lives to defend that truth. They made the ultimate sacrifice in the service of something greater than themselves, of the dream that one day Cylon and human may live together in peace, that our children will consider each other brothers and sisters rather than parents and progeny. And because we must not let them die in vain, we must…”
Felix thought detachedly that the D’Anna was doing an especially good job, considering how Cylon culture had never envisaged funerals until New Caprica. Cylons had died, permanently, before then, but the only ceremony they’d had was the short, simple Prayer to the Cloud of Unknowing.
About the same time that the Resistance had started killing human collaborators-back then, they’d just been collateral damage when going after Cylons, not even targets in and of themselves-a Doral had also been censoring Roslin’s proposed history text. He’d become completely enamored with Roslin’s description of Adama’s funeral speech, the one when the Old Man told everyone he knew the way to Earth. Though the Doral edited that portion out of Roslin’s textbook, he and a few D’Annas decided that that sort of solemnity and pomp was exactly what they needed to bridge the gap between the Cylons and the humans.
Felix noted as he half-listened that the D’Anna’s theology still needed some fine-tuning. It certainly wasn’t an easy task, preaching Cylon religion over the bodies of Colonial “pagans,” as the Cylons called them, but she veered from being so wishy-washy that there was no substance at all to not-so-subtly damning the dead human heroes and their mourners to eternal damnation and torment.
“And now, as we prepare to make our final farewells, let us stand in quiet reflection as one of your own makes an offering of music to the true and living God. Mr. Gaeta?”
Felix nodded absently and made his way to the stage, doing his best to pretend he wasn’t keenly aware of all the curious stares from the Cylons and the cold glares from the few humans he passed.
The Cylons were adamant about keeping all vestiges of Colonial faiths out of the funeral services, but the Cylon religion didn’t have any music. The Doral in charge of the logistics for these ceremonies loved the added pageantry that music afforded, though, so he’d snapped up the opportunity when Felix had offered his services for the first funeral, and for each and every one that followed.
Felix still had to clear his song selection with a Doral and a D’Anna before each funeral, to ensure he wasn’t surreptitiously slipping in something pagan. Not being able to use any traditional hymns made it difficult for Felix to select appropriately comforting music, especially since the Doral demanded that Felix use a different song each time, apparently to enhance the spectacle of it all.
When he’d heard what Duck had done, when he’d realized he hadn’t gotten the message about Baltar to the garbage dump in time, Felix hadn’t even waited for the funeral committee to call him in. He’d walked right into the office that the Doral and D’Anna shared and sang his selection for their authorization.
They had just stared at him, completely befuddled. There was nothing overtly religious about it, so they didn’t object, but it was clear they didn’t understand it and suspected that Felix had gone mad.
Felix had almost smiled at their expressions. That had been exactly what he was hoping for.
Felix mounted the stage and shook his head when the D’Anna offered him her spot behind the podium. He stood on the edge of the platform. The only thing between him and the crowd was the double row of bodies covered in the pure, plain white of the Cylon flag, now speckled with gray New Caprican soil.
He cleared his throat and began. “Alone she sleeps in the shirt of man, with my three wishes clutched in her hand…”
The first few times he had sung at funerals on New Caprica, his singing voice had been rusty and a bit uncontrollable after so many years of disuse. But it had all come back to him very quickly, especially since he’d gotten so many opportunities to practice as the Cylons clamped down on their own security and the Resistance went after softer, human-populated targets in response.
At the beginning of the song, Felix fixed his eyes on the bodies. Even after so many funerals that he’d lost count, it still unsettled him every time he saw the outline of a body under a flag. Coffins were only traditional on Aquaria, Caprica, and some parts of Libron, and they certainly weren’t going to waste what little timber New Caprica had on the dead, but his disquiet at the sight never went away. He could tell from the silhouettes that some of the bodies were incomplete, missing arms or legs or, in one case, had an empty space where half a torso should have been. He wondered for a moment what the Cylons had done with Duck’s remains, or if there had even been enough of him left to bury.
Felix wished the wind would peel back the Cylon flags so he could see the faces of the dead. He knew all their names, and he’d seen the aftermath of the bomb when he and all the other human workers on Colonial One had rushed over to the NCP Academy building to help with triage. But if the lists were his grace, the song was his penance, his way of doing his best to commend these souls to some sort of rest by ripping his own apart, offering whatever little peace he had left up as a sacrifice. He didn’t regret what he’d done-he didn’t, he couldn’t. That didn’t mean he could brush it aside as purely the casualties of war.
Since he couldn’t see the faces of the dead, Felix contented himself with lifting his gaze to the cold, angry eyes of the living.
Except they weren’t angry. Felix was almost disappointed. Even though a person would never know it from the way the D’Anna had addressed her speech, the crowd was mostly Cylons; very few humans were in attendance. Some of the dead simply weren’t lucky enough to have any family left to mourn them. Many families were too disgusted with the Cylons’ sacrilege to stand the official ceremony. Most were just too afraid to go anywhere that a large group of people were gathered, especially when that group contained Cylons, making it a perfect Resistance target. The few people who were there understood the song, though; he could see it in their eyes.
What startled Felix most was the responses of some of the Cylons. Most wore stoic expressions or mirrors of the puzzlement he’d seen with the D’Anna and the Doral, but a few reacted. Two Sixes stood a little off to the side, one’s face buried against the other’s shoulder, her back shaking. A Sharon that might have been Boomer bowed her head and covered her eyes. A Leoben stared at Felix steadily, tears streaming freely down his cheeks.
Felix looked at Eight. She was almost hugging herself, but he couldn’t quite make sense of the expression on her face. The closest he could get was that she looked like there was an earthquake that only she could feel.
“…To have her, please, just one day wake…”
The one face he longed to see there most was nowhere to be found. Maybe Gaius really couldn’t do anything. He wasn’t cut out to be a leader under the best of circumstances-Felix had learned the hard way. But Gaius still had the power to face his people, to look them in the eye and feel what he had done to them, what he had let happen. That was why, had the assassination plan worked, Felix wouldn’t have regretted it, no matter how much it hurt.
It wasn’t a surprise, not seeing him there; Gaius hadn’t been to a funeral in a long, long time, even before the Cylons came. The hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach made Felix realize that he had still been hoping.
The last note caught in the wind and ended more abruptly than Felix was used to, having grown up hearing his voice echoing back to him from the stone walls of the Temple of Apollo. He walked off the stage and back to Eight’s side. His mind was in a cold haze for the remainder of the service. When the crowd started to disperse, his feet turned toward home of their own volition.
Eight fell into step beside him. “Felix,” she said. He didn’t answer.
“Felix-” she repeated, reaching for his elbow. He cringed at her touch, and she felt it and recoiled. She shoved her hands in her jacket pockets and continued alongside him in silence for a long time.
Felix slowed when a flicker of light caught his eye. A small group huddled in the walkway between two tents. When one of the people in the circle shifted his weight, Felix saw a small fire in the center. It puzzled him for a moment, but then he took a closer look at the faces gathered around it. Of course. It was John Merrian’s funeral pyre, without the body. Ally Merrian and her daughter bowed their shaved heads. It was a rare thing to see widows do nowadays, but Felix wasn’t surprised, since the Merrians were from a particularly traditionalist region of Geminon. He could see their lips moving, but he couldn’t hear what they were saying. Had this been before the Cylons came to New Caprica, their wailing would have been so loud that everyone in the quarter would have heard and remembered John.
“Felix,” Eight said softly, her voice catching. It was only then that Felix realized they had both stopped in the middle of the street. “That song. What’s that song about?”
Felix started walking again, Eight trailing a little behind him now. “It’s just a song,” he mumbled. “It means what it says.”
“But-”
“What?” Felix challenged, wheeling around and staring Eight in the face.
He instantly regretted snapping at Eight like that. He could see she was one word away from bursting into tears.
“Because it sounded like you were wondering if you would be better off if you were lying under one of those flags.”
Felix sighed heavily, wrapped one arm around Eight’s shoulder, and kissed her on the forehead. “Gods, Eight,” he whispered into her hair. “You know I can’t promise I’ll always be here. But I swear I’d never do that on purpose. I wouldn’t do that to you.”
They walked the rest of the way to Felix’s tent that way, his arm around her, her head resting on his shoulder. That was the closest he had ever been to telling her the words “I love you,” even though that wasn’t what he meant at all. He was fairly certain that was how Eight had interpreted it, though. He hated lying to her like that, but explaining what he really meant would be too hard on the best of days.
It had happened not too long after Felix’s voice changed from a pure, clear boy-soprano to a rich baritone. His father jokingly called it “Felix’s lucky break,” since this new voice had turned out so lovely that the academy was not only renewing his music scholarship but moving him from the Temple Boys’ Choir to the renowned Sacred Delian Choir. His mother had been so proud of him that she’d cried.
Later on, Felix would realize that his mother had tried to be conscientious that day. She’d chosen a Thursday, the day when the cleaning girl came over a good half-hour before Felix would be home from choir practice. It probably would have worked, too, if the girl hadn’t been late that Thursday.
Felix had found the girl stomping her booted feet on the doorstep to keep warm and pounding her fist on the door when he came home.
“Felix!” she said, her eyes shining with unspilled tears. “Why won’t your mum let me in? She’s always here when I come to clean. I been knocking for near ten minutes. She at the doctor’s or something?”
“No, she’s home. I can let you in, though,” Felix said, fumbling for his keys with his mittened hand. “Don’t worry. She probably just fell asleep and didn’t hear you.”
The girl-what had her name been? Mia?-nodded but didn’t look very comforted. In fact, Felix was surprised Mia was so upset about being locked out in the first place. She was a tough girl, never at a loss for a snide comeback when the boys who hung out on the street corners made catcalls after her. She couldn’t be afraid of being chastised by Mrs. Gaeta for being late.
“What’s that noise?” Mia said, voice quavering as Felix struggled with the lock.
“What noise? Just somebody warming up their car next door.” Felix looked up at Mia, her eyes wide. The sound from the engine wasn’t coming from the right direction to be the neighbors’ car. “No.”
Mia took off around the house back toward the garage, Felix close on her heels. He realized they’d both sensed something was wrong-maybe had for a long time-but not in any way either of them could have articulated.
The noise grew louder as they approached the garage. Mia threw the side door open as Felix rounded the corner. She screamed.
“Don’t go in, Felix!” sobbed Mia as she braced her arms against the doorframe to block Felix’s way. “Go to the neighbors, get help. Don’t look!”
Felix ducked under her arm and pushed past her.
Felix’s first thought was that Mia’s plea was stupid. The fact of it was so horrible he couldn’t wrap his mind around it, but not seeing it would hardly change that. And there was nothing horrible about the way the scene looked at all. His mother was just sitting in the driver’s seat of the car, eyes closed. She looked as if she was sleeping.
It would have been easy for Felix to remember his childhood as terrible after that, but he was honest with himself. The warmth and safety of the kitchen died with his mother, but it was hardly unbearable. In fact, there were times when Felix would have said he was happy. For one, his father took a far more active interest in him after that. The two of them clung to each other as the only family they had left, even if they didn’t have much else in common. In time, his father’s den, though not without its own ghosts, became a place of retreat from the cold of the rest of the house.
Cyrus Gaeta was a little man with a big voice and riotous curls that had gone from deep black to completely white in the space of two years, starting with the First Aquarian Stock Market Crash, when he’d lost the family fortune like so many of the other old families had. Most nights after Felix’s father returned home from the cramped little cubicle where he mindlessly crunched numbers for an accounting firm, Felix and his father would sit in the study and eat their microwave dinners on paper plates, and Cyrus would rage against the injustices of the system that had made their family rich and that he’d never questioned until he’d seen it from the other side. Listening to and occasionally arguing with his father had proved invaluable training for dealing with Chief Tyrol and the union; in fact, Felix had more than once reflected that the only real difference between his father and Tyrol was a university education. Eventually, late dinners with his father became almost as normal as late afternoons in the kitchen with his mother had been.
Felix’s room remained a safe place, too. It was where he studied, where he fell in love with science and discovered that it could not only free him from the shabby old house but take him to the stars he’d gazed at so longingly through his telescope. His father had not been at all happy when Felix showed him the brochure for the Colonial ROTC, but after studying his finances, Cyrus had reluctantly given in.
But there was no place for music in Felix’s life after that day. His father had understood when Felix quit choir and took the cut in his scholarship. Cyrus even took out a loan to cover the high school tuition costs Felix couldn’t meet with the remainder of his academic scholarship and the money he made at the part-time jobs that replaced choir practice. Felix had packed away his voice along with his scores, pitch pipe, metronome, everything, into a little box in the drawing room with all the other ghosts. He’d left it there almost completely undisturbed, until now.
When they arrived back at the tent, Felix and Eight fell silently into their daily routine. Felix warmed a kettle of water on the stove and poured it into the washbasin while Eight swept the dirt floor (that chore had seemed so oxymoronic to Felix at first, but he’d come to learn it was a necessity). By the time Eight finished, Felix was nearly done washing their few dishes, so Eight joined him in drying them.
“You asked earlier about what that song means,” Felix said, staring intently at the cup in his hand.
“Yes,” she stated, no hint of questioning in her voice.
“It’s about feeling…trapped.”
“I understand.”
Felix looked up at Eight. He believed her.