Mathematics: Moment of Clarity (10/10!)
Series Title: Mathematics
Segment Title: Moment of Clarity (10/10)
( Part 1) ( Part 2) ( Part 3) ( Part 4) ( Part 5)( Part 6)( Part 7) ( Part 8) ( Part 9)
Author:kappamaki33
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Gaeta/Eight, Gaeta/Hoshi
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 10 Summary: Felix realizes what went wrong and decides he can't let it happen again, except he gives in to that same fatal weakness one last time.
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 10 Notes: Here we are at the end, my friends. Thank you for sticking with me for such a long piece, the writing of which involved a couple of hiatuses to boot. I don’t have much to say about this chapter, especially since you all know what happens next. Hope you enjoyed the journey!
This vignette is brought to you by the number 1, for the one person to whom Felix can’t completely close his heart.
Moment of Clarity
It took a moment for the harsh light to even register in Felix’s mind enough to make him shield his eyes. When he heard Louis’s voice and saw the outline of another Raptor out the windscreen rather than a Heavy Raider, he thought he was dreaming, or dead. “She did it,” he wheezed in disbelief before heaving himself past the dead bodies and reaching for the comm button. He heard himself hailing Galactica, even though he knew it was just a Raptor. Felix realized the oxygen deprivation was really starting to get to him-actually, it had probably been affecting his behavior for hours, if not days-but it was as if he was making these observations about somebody else, watching from the bottom of a deep, deep well.
Louis and Racetrack cheered on the other end of the comm. “You’re nowhere near the Fleet, baby, but you’re good!” The other Raptor tipped its nose down and shined its lights in the cabin of Felix’s Raptor again. Louis and Racetrack’s relieved laughter stopped. “Gods, that’s…not good.”
Felix heard Louis swallow hard. Then Louis said, “Baby, hang in there-you’re gonna be okay now. You’re all gonna need to put on flightsuits and helmets so Racetrack can pop the hatch, all right?”
“Copy,” Felix struggled to say, then slumped to the floor between the pilot and copilot seats. He zipped up his flightsuit and pulled on the gloves. His helmet was all the way back next to the ECO’s chair, so he just grabbed Easy’s.
“LT, you better scan for Raiders again. They must’ve gotten hit,” Felix heard Racetrack say.
“There’s nothing out here but us. Maybe the panel exploded-just a bad mechanical malfunction?”
“No, that looks like blood, not burns. Maybe-Hoshi, turn off the frakking comm! They don’t need to be hearing this!”
“What? Oh, sor-” The comm signal clicked off.
Then there was a long, long silence. It took Felix’s fingers a long time to fasten the neck ring to seal the helmet on. He felt like he was floating, and the world was stretching out into a very dark, very narrow tunnel, so that all he could see at the end of it was Eight’s hand resting lightly over the bloody gash in her stomach. As he watched, he noticed that the sheen of the blood changed. It was freezing.
“My gods…” he heard Racetrack say, and he noticed the hatch was open behind her. She had to step over Eight’s body and wedge herself between Easy and Shark to get hold of Felix. Felix felt himself being lifted. She said other things, but her voice sounded like she was underwater.
“LT! Lieutenant Gaeta, arms around my waist, now!”
He held out his arms automatically. He thought she must have strapped him to herself, and then he didn’t think anything.
The next thing he knew, he was coughing and someone was ripping his helmet off. He vaguely heard voices in the background, but the syllables wouldn’t resolve into anything that made sense. “Felix? Felix! Baby, stay with me.” “I couldn’t check his pulse with his flightsuit on, but it looked like he was breathing okay when I picked him up.” “Godsdamn it, you are not leaving me now.”
Felix slowly opened his eyes. Louis was the one speaking above him, but oddly, Louis wasn’t making eye contact. He looked like he was still panicking, in fact, but Felix couldn’t get his mind to focus on why. He took Felix’s head in his hands, but he turned it left, then right, then methodically ran his fingers through Felix’s hair.
“It’s not my blood,” Felix finally said.
Louis gave something between an exhale and a laugh of relief, then slid an oxygen mask over Felix’s mouth and nose and started mopping the blood off his face. “Gods, you had me scared there for a minute,” he said, this time stroking Felix’s curls slowly.
Racetrack was strapping herself into the pilot’s seat. “Spinning up the FTL…”
Louis said, “Wait, Racetrack, where’s Brooks?” No one answered. He hesitated. “What about the other Raptor?”
Racetrack didn’t turn around, but Felix could see, even from his vantage point lying in the back of the passenger compartment, that her face was white. “Nothing in the universe could get me to set foot on that Raptor again. If Galactica wants it back, they can send a Heavy Raider out to clean up their mess.”
Louis nodded absently, obviously confused. But when Louis turned back to him, Felix saw all that bewilderment melt away as if it had never been there. “I’m so sorry, Felix. I knew something was wrong when your Raptor didn’t come back right away, but I waited eight hours before I started hounding Colonel Tigh for a Raptor. If I’d followed my gut instinct, maybe we would’ve gotten here before- And to think, we were-”
“Hoshi! Is he all set back there?” Felix was glad Racetrack cut Louis off. He was still trying to process why Louis was even there, let alone why he was beating himself up about not finding them sooner. “Then hang on. Jumping in five, four, three, two, one…”
Jumps only took an instant, but Felix had often observed that jumps had the odd effect of changing the mood or tone of a situation as greatly as if they were hours-long interruptions; a few people even claimed that they saw their whole lives flash before their eyes during them. This one was no exception. In the space of a millisecond, Louis had gone from apologetic and distressed to calm and certain.
“No, no. There was a reason all this happened the way it did. We checked here at the Fleet’s last coordinates first, and your Raptor wasn’t here then. If we’d gone out any earlier, you wouldn’t have been here when we came back to check one last time. I guess whatever that greater power in the universe is, it even manages to make use of Tigh being a hard-ass.”
Things started to click into place. So there hadn’t been a rescue mission. They had been left behind as unavoidable casualties of war. It made sense; they’d jumped too far, and there was no way Galactica ever would have found them had Eight not jumped the Raptor back to the Fleet’s last known coordinates. On top of that, had Eight not killed anyone, they all would have been dead from lack of oxygen hours ago. Felix couldn’t blame the Admiral and Tigh for that decision, but he understood why Louis did. If Louis had been the one who’d gone missing, Felix would have blamed them, too.
“Louis-” Felix choked, wanting to say something comforting but having no idea what that would be. He was actually a little relieved when he discovered he could barely form those two syllables, let alone a complete sentence.
“No, don’t strain yourself, Felix,” Louis gently cut him off and re-positioned the oxygen mask Felix had tried to rip off. “I know how you feel about greater powers and destinies and all that. Whether I found you because I was meant to or by chance, it doesn’t matter. You’re here, and I’m here, and that’s what matters.”
Louis looked down at him with such unabashed, naked love that it made Felix heartsick. It wasn’t that he begrudged Louis his ability to stay so hopeful in the face of such horror in the past and present; he loved that about Louis. A part of it was the undeserved faith Louis put in him, but most of all, it was that even though Felix knew Louis wasn’t anything like Eight, he still couldn’t see any difference between the look in Louis’s eyes at that moment and the look in Eight’s eyes the night she came to him and first proposed the lists, so eager to build something new, something better, with him.
Felix couldn’t do it anymore. He squeezed his eyes shut and turned away.
He had tried to tell himself that the lists had worked, but after the first few weeks on Galactica, he saw too many of the faces he hadn’t really seen on New Caprica appear on the Memorial Wall, and his heart sank. Some might have died for other reasons, mere coincidence-like Heather Redman and her baby, he knew he saw them two days before the Second Exodus; they had to have died in the escape, not at his hands-but he couldn’t explain all of them away like that, not with that many faces staring back at him from the Wall. Even so, there were a thousand explanations for why things had gone so horribly wrong: maybe one of the Cylons had found out about Eight’s plan without her knowing; maybe Felix’s tent or Eight’s office had been bugged; maybe Eight had died in those few days right before the Second Exodus when he hadn’t seen her and had involuntarily revealed all her memories about the lists when she downloaded.
And then in the brig, Gaius, in true Gaius form, had dredged up the real fear Felix had been trying to force down the whole time: that, yet again, he had let his simple-minded faith in people reign over his good sense. There were worse things than being a traitor. Being a godsdamn fool was one of them.
Felix saw the future stretching before him in that long, dark tunnel. It would be a repeat of the Demetrius when they got back to Galactica. There would be too many doctors and debriefings for him to be able to think straight. He knew he had to reason through it now, while he still had time, before the clarity he’d found in that tunnel slipped away.
He had trusted too much, given too many people the benefit of the doubt, and paid for it dearly. Simple as that. It was long past time for Felix to place his trust only in cold, hard reality.
Felix loved the Old Man, no differently than the rest of his crew. But the hard facts said that the Admiral was making exactly the same mistakes that Felix had, placing his trust in people when it simply didn’t make sense. Giving his people second chances was as much a part of the Old Man’s persona as his glare that could liquefy even the most stalwart senior officer, but if a person looked at it objectively, that policy had brought them far too much trouble. Trusting Anders and Tyrol, the Cylons, and Kara, the gods-only-know-what, about a needle on a Viper’s sensors had led them to a dead Earth and the end of all hope. If Dee, of all people, couldn’t find anything…yes, it had brought them to the death of hope.
And now the Admiral had handed over control of Galactica to Tigh and entrusted a basestar to aid in the Fleet’s defense with even less hesitation than Felix had had handing over the lists to Eight. Maybe the Cylons really did want to be allies, and maybe Tigh truly did only want to help and didn’t have any hidden programming, but there was no way of knowing. Adama didn’t have the right to risk the future of humanity on a gut feeling, a bottle or two of liquor, and a desperate longing to believe Saul Tigh was unquestionably the man he said he was. It wouldn’t just be a few hundred people who would die if Adama repeated Felix’s mistake. The Old Man had to be made to understand that. He had to learn. He had to listen.
Felix opened his eyes. They were in the flight pod, and Racetrack was concentrating on landing. Racetrack had seen it. She would join, if worse came to worst and something had to be done. If the Admiral hadn’t put down the liquor bottle while Felix had been gone, Felix thought grimly that it may very well come to that.
Louis shifted over to the ECO’s chair to check the monitor, but he still kept a hand on Felix’s shoulder. Louis would follow him to the mouth of hell; he already had. All Felix had to do was ask. He would be an important asset, a key figure in CIC. It was the smart thing to do. It made sense.
But when Louis slid back down to the floor beside Felix, mopping more blood off Felix’s hands and unzipping his flightsuit part way to check for open wounds and broken bones once more, Felix knew he had to go against cold logic one last time. It would break his heart even more deeply than it would Louis’s, but it was the right thing to do, he was certain.
“You doing okay?” Louis asked, apparently seeing the trying thoughts bleeding through into Felix’s expression.
He wasn’t, and if he was honest with himself, the chances that he ever would be okay again were slim to none. But he had to do something…he could give something before the end.
He put his hand to Louis’s cheek and told him what he’d always wanted to hear, and even though he wasn’t as sure he meant what the words themselves stood for as he had been when he’d done this with Eight, Felix knew the feeling behind it was the most genuine feeling he’d had in a long time.
“Thank you.”
Louis smiled deeply and took Felix’s hand in his. He didn’t let go.
Segment Title: Moment of Clarity (10/10)
( Part 1) ( Part 2) ( Part 3) ( Part 4) ( Part 5)( Part 6)( Part 7) ( Part 8) ( Part 9)
Author:kappamaki33
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Gaeta/Eight, Gaeta/Hoshi
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 10 Summary: Felix realizes what went wrong and decides he can't let it happen again, except he gives in to that same fatal weakness one last time.
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 10 Notes: Here we are at the end, my friends. Thank you for sticking with me for such a long piece, the writing of which involved a couple of hiatuses to boot. I don’t have much to say about this chapter, especially since you all know what happens next. Hope you enjoyed the journey!
This vignette is brought to you by the number 1, for the one person to whom Felix can’t completely close his heart.
Moment of Clarity
It took a moment for the harsh light to even register in Felix’s mind enough to make him shield his eyes. When he heard Louis’s voice and saw the outline of another Raptor out the windscreen rather than a Heavy Raider, he thought he was dreaming, or dead. “She did it,” he wheezed in disbelief before heaving himself past the dead bodies and reaching for the comm button. He heard himself hailing Galactica, even though he knew it was just a Raptor. Felix realized the oxygen deprivation was really starting to get to him-actually, it had probably been affecting his behavior for hours, if not days-but it was as if he was making these observations about somebody else, watching from the bottom of a deep, deep well.
Louis and Racetrack cheered on the other end of the comm. “You’re nowhere near the Fleet, baby, but you’re good!” The other Raptor tipped its nose down and shined its lights in the cabin of Felix’s Raptor again. Louis and Racetrack’s relieved laughter stopped. “Gods, that’s…not good.”
Felix heard Louis swallow hard. Then Louis said, “Baby, hang in there-you’re gonna be okay now. You’re all gonna need to put on flightsuits and helmets so Racetrack can pop the hatch, all right?”
“Copy,” Felix struggled to say, then slumped to the floor between the pilot and copilot seats. He zipped up his flightsuit and pulled on the gloves. His helmet was all the way back next to the ECO’s chair, so he just grabbed Easy’s.
“LT, you better scan for Raiders again. They must’ve gotten hit,” Felix heard Racetrack say.
“There’s nothing out here but us. Maybe the panel exploded-just a bad mechanical malfunction?”
“No, that looks like blood, not burns. Maybe-Hoshi, turn off the frakking comm! They don’t need to be hearing this!”
“What? Oh, sor-” The comm signal clicked off.
Then there was a long, long silence. It took Felix’s fingers a long time to fasten the neck ring to seal the helmet on. He felt like he was floating, and the world was stretching out into a very dark, very narrow tunnel, so that all he could see at the end of it was Eight’s hand resting lightly over the bloody gash in her stomach. As he watched, he noticed that the sheen of the blood changed. It was freezing.
“My gods…” he heard Racetrack say, and he noticed the hatch was open behind her. She had to step over Eight’s body and wedge herself between Easy and Shark to get hold of Felix. Felix felt himself being lifted. She said other things, but her voice sounded like she was underwater.
“LT! Lieutenant Gaeta, arms around my waist, now!”
He held out his arms automatically. He thought she must have strapped him to herself, and then he didn’t think anything.
The next thing he knew, he was coughing and someone was ripping his helmet off. He vaguely heard voices in the background, but the syllables wouldn’t resolve into anything that made sense. “Felix? Felix! Baby, stay with me.” “I couldn’t check his pulse with his flightsuit on, but it looked like he was breathing okay when I picked him up.” “Godsdamn it, you are not leaving me now.”
Felix slowly opened his eyes. Louis was the one speaking above him, but oddly, Louis wasn’t making eye contact. He looked like he was still panicking, in fact, but Felix couldn’t get his mind to focus on why. He took Felix’s head in his hands, but he turned it left, then right, then methodically ran his fingers through Felix’s hair.
“It’s not my blood,” Felix finally said.
Louis gave something between an exhale and a laugh of relief, then slid an oxygen mask over Felix’s mouth and nose and started mopping the blood off his face. “Gods, you had me scared there for a minute,” he said, this time stroking Felix’s curls slowly.
Racetrack was strapping herself into the pilot’s seat. “Spinning up the FTL…”
Louis said, “Wait, Racetrack, where’s Brooks?” No one answered. He hesitated. “What about the other Raptor?”
Racetrack didn’t turn around, but Felix could see, even from his vantage point lying in the back of the passenger compartment, that her face was white. “Nothing in the universe could get me to set foot on that Raptor again. If Galactica wants it back, they can send a Heavy Raider out to clean up their mess.”
Louis nodded absently, obviously confused. But when Louis turned back to him, Felix saw all that bewilderment melt away as if it had never been there. “I’m so sorry, Felix. I knew something was wrong when your Raptor didn’t come back right away, but I waited eight hours before I started hounding Colonel Tigh for a Raptor. If I’d followed my gut instinct, maybe we would’ve gotten here before- And to think, we were-”
“Hoshi! Is he all set back there?” Felix was glad Racetrack cut Louis off. He was still trying to process why Louis was even there, let alone why he was beating himself up about not finding them sooner. “Then hang on. Jumping in five, four, three, two, one…”
Jumps only took an instant, but Felix had often observed that jumps had the odd effect of changing the mood or tone of a situation as greatly as if they were hours-long interruptions; a few people even claimed that they saw their whole lives flash before their eyes during them. This one was no exception. In the space of a millisecond, Louis had gone from apologetic and distressed to calm and certain.
“No, no. There was a reason all this happened the way it did. We checked here at the Fleet’s last coordinates first, and your Raptor wasn’t here then. If we’d gone out any earlier, you wouldn’t have been here when we came back to check one last time. I guess whatever that greater power in the universe is, it even manages to make use of Tigh being a hard-ass.”
Things started to click into place. So there hadn’t been a rescue mission. They had been left behind as unavoidable casualties of war. It made sense; they’d jumped too far, and there was no way Galactica ever would have found them had Eight not jumped the Raptor back to the Fleet’s last known coordinates. On top of that, had Eight not killed anyone, they all would have been dead from lack of oxygen hours ago. Felix couldn’t blame the Admiral and Tigh for that decision, but he understood why Louis did. If Louis had been the one who’d gone missing, Felix would have blamed them, too.
“Louis-” Felix choked, wanting to say something comforting but having no idea what that would be. He was actually a little relieved when he discovered he could barely form those two syllables, let alone a complete sentence.
“No, don’t strain yourself, Felix,” Louis gently cut him off and re-positioned the oxygen mask Felix had tried to rip off. “I know how you feel about greater powers and destinies and all that. Whether I found you because I was meant to or by chance, it doesn’t matter. You’re here, and I’m here, and that’s what matters.”
Louis looked down at him with such unabashed, naked love that it made Felix heartsick. It wasn’t that he begrudged Louis his ability to stay so hopeful in the face of such horror in the past and present; he loved that about Louis. A part of it was the undeserved faith Louis put in him, but most of all, it was that even though Felix knew Louis wasn’t anything like Eight, he still couldn’t see any difference between the look in Louis’s eyes at that moment and the look in Eight’s eyes the night she came to him and first proposed the lists, so eager to build something new, something better, with him.
Felix couldn’t do it anymore. He squeezed his eyes shut and turned away.
He had tried to tell himself that the lists had worked, but after the first few weeks on Galactica, he saw too many of the faces he hadn’t really seen on New Caprica appear on the Memorial Wall, and his heart sank. Some might have died for other reasons, mere coincidence-like Heather Redman and her baby, he knew he saw them two days before the Second Exodus; they had to have died in the escape, not at his hands-but he couldn’t explain all of them away like that, not with that many faces staring back at him from the Wall. Even so, there were a thousand explanations for why things had gone so horribly wrong: maybe one of the Cylons had found out about Eight’s plan without her knowing; maybe Felix’s tent or Eight’s office had been bugged; maybe Eight had died in those few days right before the Second Exodus when he hadn’t seen her and had involuntarily revealed all her memories about the lists when she downloaded.
And then in the brig, Gaius, in true Gaius form, had dredged up the real fear Felix had been trying to force down the whole time: that, yet again, he had let his simple-minded faith in people reign over his good sense. There were worse things than being a traitor. Being a godsdamn fool was one of them.
Felix saw the future stretching before him in that long, dark tunnel. It would be a repeat of the Demetrius when they got back to Galactica. There would be too many doctors and debriefings for him to be able to think straight. He knew he had to reason through it now, while he still had time, before the clarity he’d found in that tunnel slipped away.
He had trusted too much, given too many people the benefit of the doubt, and paid for it dearly. Simple as that. It was long past time for Felix to place his trust only in cold, hard reality.
Felix loved the Old Man, no differently than the rest of his crew. But the hard facts said that the Admiral was making exactly the same mistakes that Felix had, placing his trust in people when it simply didn’t make sense. Giving his people second chances was as much a part of the Old Man’s persona as his glare that could liquefy even the most stalwart senior officer, but if a person looked at it objectively, that policy had brought them far too much trouble. Trusting Anders and Tyrol, the Cylons, and Kara, the gods-only-know-what, about a needle on a Viper’s sensors had led them to a dead Earth and the end of all hope. If Dee, of all people, couldn’t find anything…yes, it had brought them to the death of hope.
And now the Admiral had handed over control of Galactica to Tigh and entrusted a basestar to aid in the Fleet’s defense with even less hesitation than Felix had had handing over the lists to Eight. Maybe the Cylons really did want to be allies, and maybe Tigh truly did only want to help and didn’t have any hidden programming, but there was no way of knowing. Adama didn’t have the right to risk the future of humanity on a gut feeling, a bottle or two of liquor, and a desperate longing to believe Saul Tigh was unquestionably the man he said he was. It wouldn’t just be a few hundred people who would die if Adama repeated Felix’s mistake. The Old Man had to be made to understand that. He had to learn. He had to listen.
Felix opened his eyes. They were in the flight pod, and Racetrack was concentrating on landing. Racetrack had seen it. She would join, if worse came to worst and something had to be done. If the Admiral hadn’t put down the liquor bottle while Felix had been gone, Felix thought grimly that it may very well come to that.
Louis shifted over to the ECO’s chair to check the monitor, but he still kept a hand on Felix’s shoulder. Louis would follow him to the mouth of hell; he already had. All Felix had to do was ask. He would be an important asset, a key figure in CIC. It was the smart thing to do. It made sense.
But when Louis slid back down to the floor beside Felix, mopping more blood off Felix’s hands and unzipping his flightsuit part way to check for open wounds and broken bones once more, Felix knew he had to go against cold logic one last time. It would break his heart even more deeply than it would Louis’s, but it was the right thing to do, he was certain.
“You doing okay?” Louis asked, apparently seeing the trying thoughts bleeding through into Felix’s expression.
He wasn’t, and if he was honest with himself, the chances that he ever would be okay again were slim to none. But he had to do something…he could give something before the end.
He put his hand to Louis’s cheek and told him what he’d always wanted to hear, and even though he wasn’t as sure he meant what the words themselves stood for as he had been when he’d done this with Eight, Felix knew the feeling behind it was the most genuine feeling he’d had in a long time.
“Thank you.”
Louis smiled deeply and took Felix’s hand in his. He didn’t let go.