Fic: Mathematics: And Then There Were Two (9/10)
This segment is brought to you by the number 2, which is the number of people Eight thinks deserve to be consuming oxygen at this point.
Mathematics: And Then There Were Two
She wasn’t lying. There really wasn’t enough air left for even the real kiss to make the projection block out all the sensations inside the Raptor. She could still feel the dull ache of the cut in her palm, and the odd pressure of the fiber optic cable sliding around inside her wrist whenever she moved. But the kiss was enough to let her split her mind more comfortably between rummaging through the Raptor’s computer and lying curled up next to a warm body in a cold tent on New Caprica.
From the tenor of the kiss, Felix was projecting nights-weak candlelight soon extinguished, stifled moans, clothing littering the dirt floor along a path to the cot. That wasn’t where Eight was.
Felix’s Eight was the kind of girl who would never leave right afterward, so Eight never did. Felix would drift off to sleep not long after, but Eight would struggle to stay awake, try to keep her eyes open but her body languid and relaxed and relatively immobile, so Felix wouldn’t wake and ask why she couldn’t sleep.
Eight had created this ritual because she had always been terrified that one night she would snap Felix’s neck in her sleep. Staying awake was little more than superstition, Eight knew. If she was programmed, that was that-awake or asleep, it wouldn’t matter. But maybe, just maybe, she could try to fight the impulse if it came when she was awake. At the very least, she would know if she did something with her eyes open, instead of waking up one morning to find him dead beside her.
Inevitably, some nights she would fail, succumbing to the warmth and quiet and drifting off into fitful, dream-filled sleep. But she never woke in a panic in the morning.
She heard herself talking to Felix in the Raptor, Felix moving around. Even though she knew Felix wasn’t really kissing her anymore, she still held herself in that moment.
She is in one of those mornings, fighting through half-formed nightmares, full of terror with no clear source. The pressure on her lips slowly brings her out of the miasma, pulls her disparate, confused threads of thought together to focus on the first real thing, that touch. Concentrating on that touch makes all the shapeless horrors fade away, and she’s left with the black behind her eyelids. She stirs; he mumbles something against her cheek; she smells the staleness of his breath. She opens her eyes. He’s barely awake himself, curls even more disheveled than normal. His eyes reveal he’s already far away. The kiss, like it is every morning she doesn’t push things, is not a prelude to anything; it’s no more than a half-asleep simple kindness.
It’s a little warmer than usual this morning. It might even be sunny outside. Felix still shivers as he slides out of bed and tucks the blanket back around her. He stands up and collects their clothes from the floor, shaking the dirt from them.
Eight rolls over and stares at Felix’s back as he dresses. She finds herself drifting into a projection even while inside the projection of the tent. It feels very strange, like trying to sleep through an FTL jump.
She is on Galactica, moving as if to take Commander Adama’s extended hand but pulling out the gun and squeezing off two rounds instead. She watches the Old Man’s smile turn to a grimace as his head rocks backwards, as his body falls. Apollo cries out in anguish, struggling madly in his cuffs. Colonel Tigh dives to stanch the blood. Lieutenant Gaeta stands frozen for just a moment, unable to process how the woman whose hand he shook seconds ago could have just snapped before his eyes. The moment passes, and he turns his back to her and runs for the nearest handset, calling for a medic, for more Marines, for all those sensible things Gaeta would think of under pressure.
The weird feeling of being pulled inside-out by the Galactica projection diminishes as the uniformed back cross-fades into the image of a naked back, and Felix said something to her in a worried, exhausted tone as he pulls on his pants. She is warm again beneath the wool blanket. Felix says to her, “Wake up. We jumped. We’re almost home.” There is wind outside, making the tent flap pull and flutter; that makes the slivers of sunlight coming in through the gaps flicker. Felix turns around, looking at his outstretched hands. They were covered in blood.
“You stripped the pliers,” Felix said with quiet certainty.
Finally. She’d thought all along that Felix would have to know it all in the end for her plan to work. That’s why she’d slit throats this time-no way he could write that off as an accident. “I didn’t think he’d hand them to her, but it didn’t make a difference.”
“You injected Brooks with my morpha.”
Speaking was so hard, with so little oxygen left. Eight wondered detachedly at how Felix still had the energy to act so incensed. “You started to wake up when I took it and put it back, but…you trusted me.”
Eight could see Felix going back to his old standbys, condescending horror and disbelief, as he hobbled toward her. “No. No! You killed them all!”
Glittering gold spirals expand and fade as she watches the explosion from the ECO chair in the Heavy Raider. Is that what souls looks like? she wonders.
She breathed as deeply as she could to keep from catching Felix’s panic, not to mention to control the projections still pulsing through her brain and monitor the voice of the Raptor still whispering to her. The most important thing was to calm Felix down, appeal to his logic and hope his amazing ability to rationalize and block out whatever didn’t fit would take care of the rest. If Eight could keep him half-way composed, he might go along with the plan, with a little additional poking at sensitive spots, of course. If nothing else, New Caprica had taught her that Felix Gaeta was surprisingly adaptive. “We needed the air,” she said matter-of-factly.
Felix just stood, stuttering. She talked slowly, like she would to a spooked animal. “I picked you…over my own kind…over my own model.”
It wasn’t a lie; it honestly wasn’t. Of course she’d saved him until the very end-it only made sense. Of all the passengers, Eight knew the most about Felix to blackmail him into playing along with whatever story they needed to make up to explain the others’ deaths. It was a good plan, or as good a plan as could be expected under such circumstances. So long as there were two survivors whose stories agreed, and four bodies lost in deep space, no one would ever suspect the truth.
“It’s an honor to be chosen for this,” a Two says, then just a Two, now someone distinct, someone she would say she knows. “To be picked for this mission over all your sisters. Do you feel blessed?”
“Yes,” she says, because at that time, he is just a Two. Now, knowing what she does, she might have the courage to speak the truth.
Moreover, even if she couldn’t convince him, Eight knew that if there was one person she’d most want to have her word up against when words were the only evidence to be had-one person that people would be most willing to believe had finally gone mad from all the strain-it was Felix. Frak, if the co-pilot hadn’t been such a Cylon-hater and had just thought through things logically, it would’ve been Felix they’d trussed up after the mechanic died from the morpha.
She continued, “I protected you from something you never could have done but you were thinking all along.”
His eyes went even wider with horror. “No!”
Felix lunged at her.
The physical sensation of Felix ripping the cable out of her wrist wasn’t half as painful as the damage to her mind. The connection to the Raptor had already been so fragile that she’d had to cling to it so it wouldn’t slip away, wrap her mind around it the way a mountain climber loops her rope around her arm in case she loses her grip. Having that tether yanked away without warning was like being ripped in two.
Eight felt ill. The oxygen level wasn’t helping-it was getting so bad, Felix’s lips were turning blue-but the worst was that the jolting projection flashes wouldn’t stop. In fact, they were worse once the link was broken, less controllable, more intense. She couldn’t let Felix see how weak she was, though, or it would be all over. She knew she had to keep her voice slow, steady, measured.
Felix nearly yelled, “I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. No one could!”
Her cool reasonableness faltered a little at Felix’s rationalization. No, he wasn’t going to absolve himself that easily.
“That is not true.” It made her sick, how hard she’d fought the programming she’d feared was buried inside her, while Felix had so easily allowed himself to succumb to his. “Felix, there is a fine line between ignorance and hope. I would have thought you’d learned that by now.”
Her sisters, thousands of them, scream inside her head as she tries to keep her hand steady in the data stream, making evasive maneuvers with a crippled basestar even more impossible. Then, blinding white light, and silence.
“What-what are you talking about?”
She could tell his bewilderment was genuine, which made him all the more infuriating. “Felix! You have to open your eyes.”
The metal is cold against her lips. She’s trembling, but the way her hand jerks and swivels and presses the muzzle to the inside of her cheek the moment the trigger clicks is most definitely not merely nerves getting the better of her.
“You have to see what the world is really like. You gave me the names, Felix. The rest was easy,” she spat.
Anger welled up inside her at the sight of Felix’s shocked expression-some fury at Felix, but mostly at herself. What the frak had happened to the strategy of keeping him calm? Was she trying to sabotage her own plan?
She’d been feeling herself doing it the whole time: she’d been waffling for two days over whether to kill Feilx or frame him or save him and use the lists to keep him quiet. This damned indecision, this wasn’t her. That was something Felix’s Eight would do. Something Boomer would do. Why the frak did she have to carry them around inside her, too? Why couldn’t she find that sharp line she’d drawn between herself and all the other people she’d been?
Fine then, she thought to herself. I can make this approach work, too. Just no more hesitating.
She felt the ugly truth spill from her mouth more than she actually heard it, harshly mimicking his Eight’s vapid sweetness and cutting off Felix’s babbled excuses and fantasies with the cool, careless fact that yes, she had gotten a few out to help him delude himself. There was no way she could let him get away with his self-deception, not when she had to carry the memories with her every day. She was determined to force him to choose a side, once and for all, or to make him tear himself to pieces in the process.
Felix slumped onto a seat, so terrified he looked like he was about to pass out. “I saw…I saw Heather Redman and her baby. They were playing together. I know I saw them.”
A holiday, at the woods instead of the beach. Mom and Hannah pick flowers in the clearing. She climbs over a white cornerstone cleft in two, watching sunlight on a broken column.
Dad speaks behind her. “It doesn’t seem right, to have ruins already on a world as young as this one.”
A laundry list of who made it and who didn’t wasn’t going to get them anywhere, so Eight tried to steer Felix back on track while she also desperately tried to shake her own stray thought back into line. “Felix, I’m a woman, and a Cylon. I didn’t seduce you. Hope seduced you.”
Gathered tight around a card table, pressing shoulder-to-shoulder so there’s room for Scarecrow to join in. Light, laughter, ambrosia running like water. Home.
“And the more you ate of it, the less you saw. You ate yourself blind.”
Small fingers trace the letters engraved on a stone marking an empty grave: A…B….R….A…H…A…M…V…A…L…E…R…I…I
He was crying. She closed her eyes.
“Why-Why didn’t you just kill us when you knew we were lost?”
“I’m not a monster. I didn’t want to do what I did.”
A Four lies dead at her feet. Smoke from the gun barrel stings her nose.
“I did it when the probabilities dictated it. You kill when you’re in a war.”
“What’s going on? What happened?”
There is so much blood. It drips down the side of the CIC console.
It wasn’t me! I know it was my hand, my eyes that went cold, but it wasn’t me! she wants to say, but all she manages is a strangled “No!”
“You kill when you have to. You kill the ones your enemy values. It’s basic.”
A rough hand with familiar calluses cups her cheek as the corridor fades from blue to black.
“You should know that.”
The cloth pressed to his neck quickly changes from white to red, heavy and wet with blood.
“Did we do that, Felix?” she says, adding a waver to her voice and a tremor in her hands.
The knowledge is in his eyes, she can see it; maybe, finally-and then he breathes deep, pushing the realization back down. “No. We’re freeing wrongly imprisoned people, and there’s nothing evil about that. They decide what they do when they get out.”
Why not just call them what they are, casualties of war? she thinks.
Eight swallowed her own confusion and fear down and leveled a steady gaze at Felix. She’d become very good at that, keeping her surface impassive as turmoil raged inside. New Caprica had trained her well in that art.
Felix, on the other hand, clearly was not so skilled at hiding his inner conflict. He was so close; she watched how he mumbled almost to himself, how his hand shook as he scrubbed it down his face. He still needed one last blow to a sensitive spot.
She wasn’t even sure Baltar had ever figured it out. Probably, but it hardly mattered what had actually happened. All that was important was what Felix thought had happened. After all, it was obvious that that was exactly how he’d lived with himself this long.
When she saw the look that Baltar's name elicited, Eight knew she'd won. She'd shattered Felix. All that was left was to figure out what prize she'd won.
Eight pulled herself to her feet with difficulty. The Raptor interior spun and random flashes of projections still played behind her eyes, but she kept her focus fixed on Felix. “There’s not much difference between my brain and yours, Felix.”
If that was true, he should have gone mad by now, she thought. It was too much for even her now; she was too full of memories. And she’d never even been a traitor. Not really.
“We can choose not to make the connection. You can see someone kill in front of you, twice, and still hang on to your ignorance. Instead of calling it a flaw, you call it hope, faith, love.”
A woman in a dark cell. One of the human police comments that the prisoner looks remarkably like her, though having lived with thousands of identical twins for most of her life, she fails to see how a passing resemblance is worthy of comment. She considers saving this one but decides against it; she’s already let out three this week, that’s enough. She signals to the One and Four with her. They unlock the door and drag the prisoner out. The woman locks eyes with her as she passes, suspended between the One and Four, and suddenly the similarity is so uncanny it makes her stomach churn.
Eight only felt a momentary flicker of surprise when Felix dug the scalpel into her gut the first time. She choked on a smirk; finally, he’d honestly chosen his side. A part of her was actually happy that he’d done it in a way that required no more choices of her.
She’s heard him sing at a dozen funerals, but the notes never got under her skin before that day. The only way she can describe this feeling is…hollowness. Not unfeeling or unaffected, just-depleted, used up. Empty. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely, it’s almost a relief.
She looks up at him, sees the tears and rage in his eyes. Almost a relief.