Fic: Wash Your Cares Away (Part 1 of 2)
Title: Wash Your Cares Away
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Hoshi, Gaeta, Tigh, Tory, Sam, Tyrol, Dee, Athena, and a few others briefly drop in
Summary: Hearing that music was a nightmare, but being a Cylon gives Louis a means of escape, too.
Pairings: Gaeta/Hoshi
Notes: For puszysty's "Never Will I Ever" prompt, "cylon!Hoshi"
(Link to Part 2)
“Be the man you want to be. Be the man you want to be.” Louis chanted Colonel Tigh’s words to himself at less than a whisper, lips barely moving, as he listened to the pilots’ chatter. Dee had been confused when he’d come to relieve her, but she’d shrugged it off and gone over to help the new petty officer who was still struggling to get the FTLs reprogrammed after the power outage.
Be the man you want to be. The Colonel was right. There was a certain comfort to the rhythm of the work, losing himself at least a little in the familiar rush of battle.
He stole a glance at the Colonel and Tory down at the command table. They looked the way he felt. He wondered how anyone could fail to notice the sheer terror in their eyes.
Then something in the comm chatter made him freeze. If it hadn’t been for Apollo, Louis would have been sure his hallucinations had moved from music to hearing the dead speak.
~~**~~**~~
“It can’t be her,” Felix said as he flipped open a small panel on the comm station and fiddled with some wires inside. “And yet, it had her Viper’s recognition codes-I checked them myself, twice. But it’s got to be some kind of a trick, right? It-frak!” Sparks flew, and Felix jerked his hand away and put his burnt fingertip in his mouth. “Damn.”
“Told you we should’ve waited for somebody to bring a toolbox,” Louis said without much real conviction.
“Like anyone’s coming up here to fix your call waiting button with all the action on the hangar deck.”
Louis paused for a moment to sum up his courage. “What if it is her, though?”
“Hmm? Then she’s a Cylon. There isn’t any other explanation how she could be dead for months and then suddenly reappear.”
He took a deep breath. “Yeah, but what if it is her?”
“Then she’s a Cylon,” Felix repeated, as if that was a complete answer in and of itself. That’s what Louis had been afraid of. “You feeling all right?”
He felt Felix rub his lower back with one hand. They had always been very good about remaining professional with each other on duty, but it was only Helo who had the deck right now, and it had been the sort of day when the only purpose rules seemed to serve was to be broken.
~~**~~**~~
“This is crazy.”
“It’s some kind of trick.”
“No, it’s real, and you know it.”
“It doesn’t make any sense.”
“It can’t be true. Maybe it’s some kind of implant, and we got it when we were on New Caprica-”
“But I wasn’t on New Caprica while the Cylons were there, Anders,” Louis said. It was the first time he’d spoken all evening. Colonel Tigh, Chief Tyrol, Sam Anders, and Tory Foster paced around the Colonel’s quarters to burn off some of their agitation, but Louis just sat by the table, idly turning the same glass of moonshine he’d been nursing since the Colonel had poured for him when he walked in.
“It’s real,” Chief Tyrol repeated. “Hadn’t any of you ever suspected, before you started hearing the song?”
“No,” Louis answered flatly, not bothering to look up from the glass.
Anders was the most energetically upset of them all. He ran his fingers through his hair as he marched back and forth across the small room. “If we are, what the frak does it even mean? Did we commit genocide and not know it? And how the hell does that work, if I was playing for the C-Bucks for five years before the attacks, and my teammates can’t all have been Cylons, too.”
Wet sand squishes pleasantly under his feet. The water is up to his waist, but then a wave hits him that splashes up almost to his shoulders. He points his arms up and out in front of him and dives, skimming just below the blue-green surface. The moving water roars around him-
Louis realized he was panting. Tory was the only one who noticed. “You okay?” she asked quietly.
“I just found out I’m a Cylon,” he rejoined. “But otherwise, yeah.”
Anders was still panicking. “But how do you know forgetting the safeties was a rook mistake and not programming?” he yelled at Tigh. “And what about Kara?”
Chief Tyrol shrugged. “There’s five of us, so that covers the Final Five. Whatever she is, she’s not one of us. So don’t do anything stupid and try to bond with her over your newfound Cylon identity, Sam. I say we just lie low for awhile-”
His head breaks through to the surface, and the first delicious gasp of air hits his lungs. He treads water as he looks out over the ocean. Then there’s a flash of light at the place where sea meets sky, and in an instant the waves are boiling and the cool breeze is on fire-
“‘Lie low’? That’s your plan? Are you frakking kidding me!” The other four turned and stared at Louis. He had to admit, even he was a little surprised at himself for that outburst, but he wasn’t going waste this burst of confidence. “As in stay on duty, pretend like nothing has happened? This is ridiculous. Colonel, Chief, you can’t be serious about risking another Boomer.”
“Don’t talk about Boomer,” Chief cut in. “You don’t know anything about her. We’re not like her.”
“How do you know?” Louis shook his head. “We have to tell them. Or at least I do.”
He was already out of his chair and half-way to the hatch when Colonel Tigh called, “Lieutenant, don’t try-”
“Don’t try to pull rank on me,” Louis spat. “Somehow I doubt chain of command applies to Cylons.”
~~**~~**~~
Louis took a deep breath before entering Felix’s bunkroom. He was at his locker, holding a duffel bag.
Louis took another moment to steel himself, and then, “Felix, I really need to-”
“Frak,” Felix said, slamming his locker shut. “Frak!” He hit the locker with his fist. He turned to Louis. “Sorry, it’s just-Starbuck.”
Louis pressed on, “I know it sounds crazy-”
“‘Crazy’ is too kind a word for it,” Felix said. “That woman and her special Earth detector sense have ‘Cylon Trap’ written all over them in big, red letters, and yet somehow I’m the only one who sees it.”
Louis knew Felix was too angry to listen to anything else until he got whatever this was out of his system, so he decided to hold off on his revelation until then. “Well, at least they’re keeping her in the brig now.”
Felix huffed, “No, they’re not. They’re giving her her own frakking ship.”
“What?” Louis looked at the duffel. “Oh gods, they’re sending you with her, aren’t they?”
Felix nodded.
Louis shrugged and held out his hands helplessly. “What can I do?”
In an instant, Felix’s mouth was desperate against his, and his hands were yanking at his uniform.
Louis was reluctant to break the kiss, but finally he had to pull away and say, “Hey, careful. You’re gonna rip the buttons off, and I need them when I go on duty.”
Under normal circumstances, that would’ve elicited a smile, but now Felix only paused. “Sorry,” he said. “I just don’t understand how everybody can be so comfortable with the fact that she’s obviously a Cylon, simply because they liked her before they knew that. We all liked Boomer, too, and look where that got us.”
Louis’s heart sank, but he didn’t show it. “Now’s not the time for that.”
He could tell Felix didn’t quite understand what sort of answer that was supposed to be, but Felix just asked, “Then what is it time for?”
Louis answered by grasping the back of Felix’s head and pulling him in to a hard, almost violent kiss.
Felix panted, “Right, time to frak like the world is ending, just like I thought.”
Louis considered pointing out that the world had already ended, and realized that whenever Felix found out, it would likely end for Louis again, but he lost all those thoughts in the sensation of Felix’s body against his.
~~**~~**~~
It didn’t surprise Louis that Colonel Tigh followed him when he stepped out of CIC for his ten-minute break. Of course the Colonel knew Louis hadn’t told, since Louis never would have been on duty if he had, but Louis could almost feel the questions and uncertainties radiating from the XO.
“Did you get the message?” he whispered as he walked beside Louis.
“Yes, sir,” he answered, looking sidelong at the Colonel. He had his blind side to Louis. That was well enough; then he could walk without having to worry about being rude by not making eye contact.
“Why weren’t you there?”
“I had things to do, sir. Didn’t want to call attention to myself.” Those “things” had been having a drink at Joe’s with Dee and Thornton before going to bed early to finish the book he’d borrowed from Racetrack, but that was none of the Colonel’s business.
The Colonel apparently accepted that excuse, but he didn’t go away. “You hear that music anymore?”
“No, sir. Not since the nebula.”
The Colonel leaned in closer and dropped his voice even lower. “Chief said he’s seeing things, flashes of some river...”
Louis stopped. He’d been seeing glimpses of a lot of different things-an office building, a forest, a lab, a commuter train-but mostly, it was a beach, a beach so real to all his senses that he still hadn’t convinced himself that he hadn’t gotten sand in his boots.
Louis squared himself to the Colonel and looked him in the eye. “I’m sorry, Colonel, but I need to use the head, and I’ve only got five minutes before I need to be back in CIC. So unless you want to continue this conversation over a urinal, if you’ll excuse me.”
The beach was the one good thing that had happened to him since that frakking nebula, Louis decided, and he wasn’t going to let the others to make him over-think it.
~~**~~**~~
Louis lay down in his rack and pulled the curtain shut. He debated for a few moments whether to jerk off or go to the beach house, noting only momentarily how pathetic it was that both of his options for things to do that evening were imaginary on some level. He had considered combining the two, but he was a little worried that he might forget that he had to keep very quiet in his rack if he was projecting himself somewhere private.
Louis closed his eyes, and when he opened them, he was looking out over the ocean.
He turned around and headed up the beach to a snug, one-storey white clapboard house sitting on a little bluff. He climbed the wooden stairs up the bluff and padded across the deck, the weather-beaten boards warmed by the sun.
He entered the house through the sliding glass door and wiped the sand off his feet on the rug. The kitchen was sparkling clean-no need to wash dishes in a projection; just forget you ever used them-as Louis was sure the bathroom and guest bedroom on the back side of the house were as well. He grabbed a can of soda from the fridge and continued on, peeking in the bedroom as he walked by, the big bed’s clean sheets already turned down and waiting. But he kept going until he got to the living room.
A part of Louis realized that, given the shape of the house as he saw it from the outside, the floor plan that he envisioned for the inside was impossible, but he didn’t care. On one side of the room was the door that went out to the main road, and on the opposite side were huge windows overlooking the beach. Between them was an odd but pleasant amalgam of overstuffed couches and chairs, and the wall behind him was covered with bookshelves. On the far wall stood the fireplace, photographs covering the mantle.
Louis approached the fireplace. Today, he hadn’t done anything special to himself, but other times, he’d projected himself at different ages (Do Cylons age? he wondered. Would he ever be anything other than forty-ish? Had he ever been anything else?) so he could see the pictures on the mantle change, see himself and Felix and their friends live life and grow old together in the instants of time caught in those photographs.
No matter how old he was in the projections, he never allowed himself to put photographs of a wedding or children on the mantle. They hadn't talked about that far ahead, and it was all so real that Louis felt there was something deeply wrong about going that far, like he was making a decision for the both of them that wasn't his to make. Even so, he cheated a little bit with the photos of Felix holding Dee's newborn son and the two of them with Hera at her high school graduation.
There were very few people in his projections, either. Occasionally there would be others on the beach a long ways off, no more than colorful dots that lounged on the sand or shrieked and laughed as they bobbed in the waves. He’d created a mail carrier once, just to see if he could fashion a believable person, and he was surprised at how well he’d done when he opened the door and took the letters and magazines from a totally lifelike middle-aged woman with curly brown hair and aviator sunglasses.
There were plenty of people he longed to see again: his parents (Were the actually his parents? Had they ever even existed?), his brothers (Had they?), his friends from school (Had he ever been a child?), friends from the Pegasus, Felix.... Felix was the most tempting. With the others, he knew it would be enough like necrophilia that he couldn’t enjoy it. And it wasn’t as if he didn’t think about Felix already-if he’d gone the wanking route for entertainment that evening, after all, he would’ve been envisioning Felix in very explicit detail. But daydreams and fantasies were very different from projections. Projections were too real for him to feel comfortable making a Felix the way he did the mail carrier. And how comforting would it be if that Felix was an automaton, doing what he did because Louis thought it and made it so? Maybe things would be different when Felix got back from his mission, when Louis would have a chance to explain who he was and what all had happened, if Felix could ever forgive him. For now, though, Louis left the house empty, waiting for Felix to come home.
~~**~~**~~
Louis dropped by Tyrol’s quarters a couple hours after the funeral to pay his respects. The Colonel and Tory had decided it would be best if Louis didn’t come to the service itself, since he’d never really known Cally and they didn’t need to draw any suspicion to themselves, making people wonder why all the sudden a Pegasus bridge bunny and a knuckledragger were such good friends. Louis was surprised to find Tyrol gone and the Colonel and Tory waiting inside.
“Chief got called down to fix a busted avionics pack on one of the Raptors,” Colonel Tigh informed him as he shut the hatch. “We said we’d watch over the kid ‘til he got back. Shouldn’t be long now.”
“Okay, I’ll wait then.” He sat down at the table across from Tory.
They sat in what Louis felt was relieving silence for a long time, but Tory finally broke it. “Do you really think she killed herself because she thought Galen and I were having an affair?”
Colonel Tigh growled, “Hell, life in this godsdamned Fleet is so bad that she could’ve killed herself because it was better than dragging herself through an ordinary day here.”
“But then why would she have hit Galen with a wrench?”
“Because she thought he was having an affair,” Louis answered, hoping that would shut Tory up.
It didn’t work. “No, I mean what if Cally thought something else was wrong with Galen? Maybe sensed something else had changed recently. Maybe Galen even told her.”
“No. Tory, just let it go,” the Colonel said, starting to sound just as exasperated as Louis felt.
“It’s something we should think about,” Tory pressed on. “What do we do if someone finds out?”
“Nobody’s gonna find out,” said the Colonel.
“But if someone does-”
That’s when Nicky Tyrol started bawling in his crib.
The Colonel sighed deeply. “He can’t be hungry, ‘cause Chief said he fed ‘em right before we got here. And I changed his diaper a half-hour ago.”
Louis, seeing this as an excellent opportunity to get away from Tory, got up and walked over to the crib.
He waved his hand in front of his nose. “Whew. Yep, definitely needs a new diaper.”
“My gods, what does he feed that kid?”
“Algae?” Louis deadpanned.
Tory cut in, “Now, back to if someone should happen to find out-”
“We’ll cross that bridge if we get there,” said the Colonel. “It’d depend on who it was, anyway, so no use worrying yet. The Old Man won’t believe me and the Chief are Cylons if just anybody tells him.” He stood up and moved over to where Louis was standing by Nicky’s changing table. “Need any help there, Lieutenant?”
“Nope, just about done...” Louis said as he put in a safety pin. “There.” He lifted Nicky up for inspection, and the Colonel nodded in approval.
“How’d you learn to do that?”
Louis set Nicky back in his crib. “I-” He paused in thought for a long time. “I didn’t. I don’t think I’ve ever changed a diaper before.”
Colonel Tigh matched Louis’s confused expression. “No, you can’t be a rook at it and do it that well.”
“Do you suppose they...programmed me? To know how to change diapers?” The full ridiculousness of that statement didn’t hit Louis until he actually said it.
The Colonel shook his head. “My gods. First the music, now this...just keeps getting weirder and weirder.”
~~**~~**~~
Louis looked out the glass door onto the deck. Several spider webs had sprung into being during the night, stretched between the railing’s wooden slats, and now drops of dew on their threads caught the earliest hints of sunlight and sparked while the ocean itself was still gray and the edge of the sky was barely glowing red. Had Felix been there, he would’ve already been cleaning the webs away; he was from the city, after all, where any insect was out-of-place and portended of an infestation. Louis liked them, in a way, though. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have had them there. They were a part of life on the ocean, made it feel even more like home.
He’d always wanted to, but Louis had never lived on the ocean. As he watched the sun rise, he wondered if that was really true.
~~**~~**~~
Louis was not pleased when the Colonel sent him to accompany Tory to the storage compartment where they were storing vaccines so she could inventory them for the President.
“Galen started coming to Gaius’s services, too,” she said. Louis worked very hard to restrain himself from rolling his eyes. “I know it sounds crazy, but it really does help. He’s preaching about our God, and he understands us.”
Louis’s eyes flared wide. “Tell me you haven’t told him about us.”
Tory snorted. It struck Louis as an oddly inappropriate noise for a Chief of Staff to make, but it endeared Tory to him just a little bit. “I’m not stupid. I think Gaius has a lot of things right, but when it comes to personal secrets, I don’t trust the man as far as I can throw him. Come on, Louis. Just try it out, once. You can come with me to his service tomorrow.”
“Thanks, but I think Felix might have a problem with that.”
Tory’s brow furrowed. “Felix? Why does he...”
“We’re together,” Louis said lightly. “Have been for quite awhile now, in fact. So yeah, going to the sex cult of my lover’s ex...I think I’ll pass.”
“It’s not all about sex,” Tory said, a little angry. She cooled down quickly, though. “But I get it. As much as I need it to feel sane, I still feel like I’m betraying the President every time I walk into that compartment. It’s not the same as you and him, but if you don’t think that it means anything to me...you don’t know me very well.”
They had arrived at the storage compartment. “To be honest, I don’t know you very well. But I do believe you.” Tory gave him an odd, almost sad look that he couldn’t quite gauge. He added, “I have to go now. If you need anything, just have a marine call up to CIC for you.”
“Thank you,” Tory said, and from the look on her face, Louis got the distinct impression she was talking about more than the escort.
~~**~~**~~
He had told himself that he’d sat in that chair because it had the best light in mid-mornings for reading the paper. And yet here he was, paper finished hours ago, still sitting there, watching, waiting for the door to open.
~~**~~**~~
It felt good, not holding back his Cylon strength for once. He’d been holding back his entire life, but he hadn’t known it nor had to consciously control it until the nebula. The crack of his fist against Sam Anders’s jaw was satisfying, but the sound of him crashing hard into the equipment locker several feet away was even better.
Tyrol gave a low whistle. “Good thing we meet in private. Somebody sees you give a right hook that makes somebody fly like that, you’d be out the airlock so fast you wouldn’t know who hit the button.”
“I deserved that,” Anders said, shaking his head and feeling for blood.
“What the frak was that about, Lieutenant?” Colonel Tigh drawled, eye wide. Louis saw Tory lean in and mutter something to Tigh, but he ignored everybody but Anders.
“I tried to go in and talk to him, say how sorry-sorry doesn’t begin to cover it. But then he started singing, and it got me thinking about how we all heard the music, and Kara said she heard something like that too, and maybe we’re all drawn to people who...who...”
Louis saw where Anders was going, and he couldn’t have cared less about it. “What the hell happened?”
“I-I don’t know.” The fact that Anders looked truly contrite and confused cooled Louis’s rage a little, but not much. “He and Helo and Athena were mutinying, or-Kara told him not to jump us back, and-I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Obviously you weren’t thinking.”
Tory caught hold of his arm as Louis stomped toward the door. “Louis, you have every right to be angry, but don’t do anything stupid. We’ve gotten this far, and there’s no reason to screw it up now.”
“‘Don’t do anything stupid?’” Louis gaped at her. “Keeping this secret, not turning ourselves in, has been stupid from the start! Apparently Anders’s programming kicked in, and he nearly killed Felix. How the frak do I know a switch won’t flip in my brain and tell me to finish the job?” He didn’t believe that last part for a moment-programming or no, he knew deep down he would never hurt Felix; he’d die first-but he could tell from their faces that he had struck a chord.
“Don’t bother inviting me to your Secret Cylon meetings anymore,” Louis spat as he jerked away from Tory and stormed out.
~~**~~**~~
Louis noticed the heart monitor’s steady beep was slowing a little, but not so much as to scare him, or at least to scare him any more than he already was. Felix’s eyelids fluttered occasionally, and his gaze was losing focus.
Cottle had told Louis about how Felix had refused to let them put him under for the surgery. He had wanted to be down in the infirmary with Felix so badly, but at the same time, he could barely imagine what it would’ve been like to see him go through that-
The bone saw buzzes to life. Felix clutches the table edges and his eyes go wide as Cottle cuts through-
Louis swallowed hard and closed his eyes until he’d willed the projection away.
Felix groaned and flinched, trying to shake himself awake. Louis leaned in toward Felix. “Baby, it’s okay, just go to sleep,” he murmured as he kissed Felix’s forehead, skin still cold and clammy and drenched with sweat.
“D’you have duty?” Felix asked, head wobbling as he turned to face Louis, obviously fighting hard against the drugs and the fatigue.
“No,” Louis said. His words to the other four flashed through his mind, and he truly did fear it, for a moment. But then that beautiful certainty welled within him again, and he was sliding his chair flush with Felix’s bed so he could comfortably take his hand. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“’Kay,” Felix said as his eyes finally fell shut.
Louis really couldn’t tell if he was projecting while awake or asleep. They lay together like two parallel S-curves: back to chest, hips aligned, thigh to quad. It felt very, very strange, how that connection ended at the knee on one side of his body, but Felix breathed deeply and evenly, and his skin was warm under the covers.
~~**~~**~~
The first thing Felix said when he next woke was, “I want to go home.” This made the new nurse’s eyes go wide in fear, and Louis couldn’t blame her, since he knew what very ill people often meant when they said that. But for once, Louis was glad Felix was such a died-in-the-wool atheist that he was sure he meant he wanted to move back to the racks rather than meaning he wanted to give up on life and depart for some Elysian abode.
“I don’t know...” Ishay said when Felix repeated his demand several hours later. She shook her head slowly as she checked Felix’s dressings.
“You said he was out of danger,” Louis added.
“Well, yes, but that hardly means he’s out of need for intensive medical care.” She put a thermometer in Felix’s mouth. “He’s still heavily medicated, at high risk for infection, in need a lot of physical therapy...”
“I’ve got to get-”
Ishay glared at him. “Felix, shut up for thirty more seconds so I can get you temperature, or you’re not going anywhere.”
Felix huffed and rolled his eyes, but he clamped his mouth shut. He started up again almost before Ishay pulled the thermometer out past his lips. “I’ve got to get out of here. This place makes me feel like an invalid-”
“I hate to point this out to you, but-”
Felix made a strange, frustrated noise, then pushed on, “I could handle going to the frakking head, Ishay, but instead I’ve got bed pans and sponge baths and-I’ve got to get some kind of routine again, and I’ve got to get back to work.”
“Felix, you just need time to recover-” Louis soothed.
“No,” he said surprisingly firmly but without any spite. “I mean, yes, I need time to recover, but how the hell am I supposed to get myself back to normal here?” He grabbed his IV stand and rattled it for emphasis.
Ishay sighed. Louis could tell she’d been around long enough to know when a patient was going to be more trouble than was worth it for anyone, the patient included. “I did have to turn away three patients from the Vena Capa yesterday because we’re so short on beds.” She kneaded her forehead with her fingers. “Frakking baseship brought us nothing but trouble.”
It didn’t register with Felix, of course, but Louis nodded sadly. The Vena Capa had been too close to the baseship when it jumped away, and the distortion left in the jump’s wake had ripped off a sizeable chunk of hull and vented a dozen civilians into space. A passenger liner couldn’t survive a jump with a gaping hole in her side like that, so crews had been frantically trying to patch it back together. Repairing a hull breach was dangerous work in the best of conditions, and barely trained mechanics working on an un-docked ship with bad equipment and no time was so far from the best of conditions that it came as no surprise that so many accidents and injuries had happened in so little time.
“Lieutenant Hoshi,” Ishay repeated. Louis snapped his attention back to her. “Well, can you make sure someone’s with him whenever he’s not here for therapy?”
“Yeah,” Louis said. “Yeah, Dee will help out when I’m on duty, and Thornton, and...yeah.”
Ishay crossed her arms. She and Felix stared each other down for a long time before she finally said, “All right. I’m not exactly comfortable with this, but I’ll talk to Cottle, see what we can do.”
~~**~~**~~
Felix stumbled into the ex-Presidential quarters, sweating, shaking, and looking almost as bad as he had when Louis had first made it down to the infirmary to see him after the surgery. Felix had insisted on walking with his canes the whole way from the infirmary to his new quarters himself. A journey that would have taken five minutes if Felix had let them put him in the wheelchair like Ishay had wanted had taken them nearly half an hour. Louis had tried to step in three separate times to help, but Felix had squirmed away from his touch each time, insisting that he could do it himself. “Gotta practice,” he had puffed, breathless. “How am I ever gonna get to CIC if I can’t make it here? Not going to work in a godsdamn wheelchair.”
Felix leaned heavily against the wall, and Louis shut the hatch behind them. He silently thanked the gods that Doc Cottle and the Colonel had arranged for Felix to stay in President Roslin’s former quarters rather than the junior officers’ bunkrooms, since those were all the way on the other end of the ship. He looked around. There was nothing fancy about it, but it was very comfortable: a metal table with two chairs, a desk, an upholstered chair in the corner, a bed instead of a rack, and best of all, a private head. Dee had already brought down their things: two boxes sitting side by side, plus uniforms and other clothes hanging and folded neatly in the two narrow lockers.
“Gods, I stink,” Felix said, the tremors in his body making his voice quaver. “Need a shower.”
Louis sighed and scrubbed his hand down his face. “Felix, you’re exhausted. Let’s just call it a day.”
“N-no,” Felix stuttered as he hauled himself painfully into the head. Louis followed him, figuring he might need help climbing in the shower.
Felix looked at the shower, then groaned and let his head fall against the wall.
“What?” He looked over Felix’s shoulder. “Oh, shit, they must not have had time to install the seat.” Felix looked so defeated. “Hey, I’ll run back to the infirmary and get some stuff for a sponge bath, okay?”
“No!” Felix closed the toilet lid and sat down on it. His canes fell to the floor with a clatter, and he started stripping off his tanks. “No. Whole point of this was to have a routine again, get things back to normal. I can hang onto the shower door.”
Louis, utterly at a loss for what to do, watched Felix struggle to get his pants off without standing up. By the time he actually got them off, he was panting again.
“Okay, fine,” Louis finally said. “You want normal, we’ll do normal, but on my terms.” Louis took his own tanks off and then stepped out of his pants. “We’ve done this before, right? Normal enough for you?”
Felix actually smiled.
It wasn’t much of a shower in terms of actually getting clean; it was more just Louis holding Felix up while the water beat down on them and Felix making a few valiant but tired attempts at lathering up his face and arms. Louis thought Felix might have been crying at one point, but he couldn’t really tell the difference between shower water and tears.
When Felix said he was done, Louis turned the water off and toweled them both dry. He would’ve liked to have carried Felix to the bed, and it probably would’ve been easier for everyone, but he knew better than to offer. Instead, they stepped carefully over where Felix had dropped his canes, Felix with an arm around Louis’s neck and Louis holding Felix by the waist, and then slowly limped their way over to the far side of the room.
Felix sank down on the bed with a sigh of relief, and Louis hurried over to the locker to grab sweats for him before he fell asleep. He helped Felix dress for bed, kissed him, then put on sweats himself and settled into the upholstered chair.
Felix eyed him from across the room as he lay sprawled on the bed. “What’re you doing?”
“Huh? Oh, I’m fine. Just go to sleep.”
Felix’s eyes narrowed. “You’re going to sleep in that chair?”
“Felix, I’m fine. Sleep.”
Felix propped himself up. “No, this is not how this works. If you think you’re gonna stay there, you can just as well get the hell out, ‘cause I did not haul my ass out of the infirmary so I could have another nursemaid in here.”
Louis tensed, but he decided honesty was better than tip-toeing around the issue at this point. “But what if I bump into it while we’re sleeping? I don’t want to hurt you.”
Felix nodded sleepily and scooted over on the bed. “I know. Come on, please.”
Louis slipped carefully under the covers and lay so close to the edge of the mattress that he was in danger of falling off. Felix, who was lying on his side, turned around and tugged on Louis’s arm. “No, c’mon.” Louis scooted in closer, draping his arm over Felix’s waist but still leaving a wide gap between their lower bodies.
“You know,” Louis said quietly, “I understand you want things to get back to normal, but you’re going to need help. Like with the shower.”
Felix chuckled sleepily. “What, showering with your lover isn’t romantic? I prefer to think of this evening not as needing help but rather as the least sexy date we’ve ever been on.”
Louis spluttered. “You’re ridiculous, you know that?” He nuzzled the back of Felix’s neck. “You’re beautiful, too. You know that, right?”
Felix’s voice was very quiet. “Still?”
“Always.”
Felix winced and sucked in his breath sharply. Louis pulled away. “What’d I do?”
“Nothing,” Felix said, taking Louis’s arm and replacing it again. “It just hurts.”
“Okay,” Louis said, though he wasn’t sure he believed Felix. Obviously, he needed this, so he wasn’t going to question it anymore.
As he drifted off to sleep, Louis couldn’t help but notice that he could almost smell the ocean.
~~**~~**~~
When Louis met Colonel Tigh in the Admiral’s quarters after he’d been called there, he assumed they were both waiting for the Admiral to get out of the head. Then he took a better look at the Colonel and was shocked to see the Admiral’s stars on his collar.
“Mr. Hoshi. I called you in here to tell you that Admiral Adama has temporarily relinquished command and put me in charge.” He dug in his pocket. “Seems like people are passing these things around like cubits in a Triad game today, but-” He held out his old Colonel insignia. “Congratulations. You’re the new XO of Galactica.” He dropped the pips into Louis’s hand.
Louis knew this was a chance he’d probably never get again. Jumping from Lieutenant to Colonel was not something that happened every day, but- “Sir, I’m honored, but I can’t accept this.”
“You’ve got to,” said Tigh. “Felix is higher than a kite on morpha most of the time, and Helo was on that frakking baseship along with half the Viper wing, including Anders.” Tigh paused, then stepped towards him. “I’m asking you to do this because I know you’re a very good, level-headed officer. Has nothing to do with the Cylon thing.”
“And the Cylon thing is the only reason I’m turning it down, sir.” He placed the pips on Adama’s desk. “The Fleet would have enough trouble handling having two Cylons in CIC. If they find out about us and we’re the commanding officer and XO-”
“-they’re gonna think it’s a Cylon takeover,” Tigh finished.
“Yes, sir.”
Tigh sighed. “Well, I suppose I should find Dee, then.”
“Good idea, sir.” Hoshi saluted and started out of the room.
“Lieutenant,” Tigh called after him. Louis stopped. “You want to tell him, don’t you?”
Louis paused for a moment. “Yes sir, I do, but I won’t. I understand that the best interests of the Fleet must come before personal feelings.” He turned again and left, shutting the hatch behind him.
~~**~~**~~
Louis stretched at the pleasant feeling of sunlight glancing across his closed eyelids and warming his skin. He smiled smugly. He was getting pretty good at projecting, if he did say so himself. Little details like the sunlight came about with him barely having to consciously think them into being, and projecting was so much more enjoyable when he wasn’t thinking so hard about making things work but rather just able to experience the sensations.
Then he opened his eyes and found himself confronted with something he was sure he hadn’t consciously conjured up.
“Good morning, sunshine,” Felix grinned at him. Felix was awake. This was new.
Felix was also in a very good mood. The first kiss was a nice good-morning kiss, the second involved a surprising amount of tongue, and by the third, Felix had pulled Louis on top of him and pressed his body against him in a way that made it clear that his mouth wasn’t the only part of him that was completely awake. Louis reveled in the contact without thinking for longer than he should have; after all, it had been such a long, long time.... Finally, reality-or more accurately, the lack thereof-sank in, and Louis pulled back a little.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
Felix laughed and rolled his eyes. “Funny, Louis. What do you think?” He leaned up, put his hand on the back of Louis’s neck, and kissed him, hard.
When it was over, Felix curled into Louis again and fell back asleep-one of the perks of always projecting weekends, Louis noted. And while the mid-morning sun streamed in on them, Louis was content, but when he woke to the beeping of their alarm clock in the cold room on Galactica with Felix nestled against him, smiling but shivering, he couldn’t help but feel achingly guilty.
~~**~~**~~
“Sir, we’re ready to jump on your mark,” Louis said from the nav station. He’d always wanted to learn nav, but pulling a double shift to cover for Felix while he was suffering through physical therapy was not the way he’d wanted it to happen.
Tigh grunted in his general direction and scanned the DRADIS screen for the twentieth time. They’d been waiting for a week for the baseship at the new rendezvous point Adama had set when he left in the Raptor. He had told them to wait for three days. Unless the FTL drive of one of the ships was down or they were performing mining operations, the Fleet never stayed in one place for more than five days for fear of the Cylons tracking them down.
Louis cleared his throat. “Admiral Tigh,” he called out. Tigh turned around. Louis recognized the look on his face; he’d seen it on Adama’s when they’d found the baseship wreckage. “Awaiting your mark, sir.”
Tigh clenched his jaw. “Get us outta here, Mr. Hoshi.”
~~**~~**~~
Felix and Dee were sitting at the table, laughing uproariously, when Louis came home. He’d learned long ago not to bother asking what the joke was, since most of the time it was about some shared experience they had five years ago that he wouldn’t get anyway. It had never really bothered him, but today especially, he was so happy to see Felix’s face light up like that that he didn’t care how it happened.
“Hey, Louis,” Dee said as their laughter subsided. She stood and picked up the two empty mess trays in front of them. “I brought you a plate, too. It’s sitting on the desk over there.” Louis fetched the tray and took the seat that Dee had just vacated. “So, anything interesting going on in CIC? Anything you need to warn me about before my shift?”
“Not really,” said Louis as he pulled back the tin foil on his tray. “Pretty quiet day. Hansen’s still bitching about the short in at her station-” Dee and Felix simultaneously rolled their eyes, having had plenty of opportunity to listen to Petty Officer Hansen’s complaining themselves, “-but otherwise, it’s running pretty smoothly.”
“I never thought I’d say this, but I have to give the man credit: Tigh has done a good job as CO,” Felix said.
“Well, you know the old saying: behind every good commanding officer, there’s an amazingly badass XO,” Louis said. Dee laughed.
“Suck up,” Felix said, elbowing Louis.
“So how was therapy?” Louis asked.
Dee cut in, “Oh, Felix, remember, you have to show him.”
Felix smiled, nodded, pushed his chair back from the table, and pointed down. “See? Isn’t it stylish?”
“You got your new prosthetic!”
Dee said, “It’s so much better than the old one, even I could tell that. It actually fits, for a start.”
Felix swiveled the prosthetic a little bit so it would catch the light. “So, Louis, what do you think? Sexier than the old one?”
“Very sexy,” Louis kidded. “It brings out the color of your eyes.”
“All the kids will be wearing them by next year,” Felix joked back.
Dee laughed again. “Ugh, wait until I’m out of here before you get all cutesy with each other, will you? I have to go be amazingly badass now, anyway,” Dee said, putting her hands on her hips in a mock-superhero pose. “You boys have a good evening.”
They said good-night to Dee, the hatch closed, and they fell easily into their routine. Louis ate while Felix sat with him and they talked. Occasionally they might go to Joe’s after that, but most of the time, they stayed home and did their paperwork together at the table, as they did that evening.
Louis lost his count on the inventory sheet he was working on when Felix spoke up abruptly. “I was just thinking,” he said. “Remember how at the beginning of all this, I said I wanted things to be back to normal?”
“Yeah, I don’t think I could forget that.”
“I was just thinking that today.... It’s not normal yet, but for the first time, it feels like this could be normal, someday.”
They looked each other in the eyes, and Louis put a hand on Felix’s arm. “It will be.”
Felix nodded hesitantly, then leaned in and kissed him. The kiss pretty much said it all: it was good, very good, though not quite the way it had been, but full of promise that someday it would be.
~~**~~**~~
After that morning when they’d had sex in the beach house, Louis had taken to waking up early, kissing the still-sleeping Felix on the cheek, and then going for a swim. It wasn’t that he hadn’t enjoyed it-on the contrary, it was that he’d enjoyed it far too much but knew it wasn’t fair to Felix.
He loved early mornings on the beach, the salty breeze sweeping in over the waves and ruffling his hair, the sand, a little coarse, shifting as he walked, sticking to the soles of his bare feet. It was early enough that save for the few gulls that swooped and cawed overhead, he was alone for as far as he could see down the beach in either direction. At first he’d been afraid of getting caught in a riptide and having no one to call out to for help, but then he realized he’d just make sure there were no riptides in his ocean.
And then there were the waves.
It had been years since Louis had been in more water than a quick shower. Here, he was surrounded by it, engulfed, consumed. The first waves hit him like a cold blast of fireworks, but he acclimated to the chill quickly. He cut through the water with precise, powerful strokes until his muscles gave in to the delicious ache of exhaustion. Then he flopped down on the shore, not caring about the sand that stuck to his back and basking in the sun.
After a few weeks of following this routine, one day Louis looked back toward the house as he lay on the beach after his swim and was startled to see Felix on the deck with a broom, whacking away at cobwebs. He saw Louis looking, waved to him, and then went back to battling the spiders.
~~**~~**~~
On to Part 2...
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Hoshi, Gaeta, Tigh, Tory, Sam, Tyrol, Dee, Athena, and a few others briefly drop in
Summary: Hearing that music was a nightmare, but being a Cylon gives Louis a means of escape, too.
Pairings: Gaeta/Hoshi
Notes: For puszysty's "Never Will I Ever" prompt, "cylon!Hoshi"
(Link to Part 2)
“Be the man you want to be. Be the man you want to be.” Louis chanted Colonel Tigh’s words to himself at less than a whisper, lips barely moving, as he listened to the pilots’ chatter. Dee had been confused when he’d come to relieve her, but she’d shrugged it off and gone over to help the new petty officer who was still struggling to get the FTLs reprogrammed after the power outage.
Be the man you want to be. The Colonel was right. There was a certain comfort to the rhythm of the work, losing himself at least a little in the familiar rush of battle.
He stole a glance at the Colonel and Tory down at the command table. They looked the way he felt. He wondered how anyone could fail to notice the sheer terror in their eyes.
Then something in the comm chatter made him freeze. If it hadn’t been for Apollo, Louis would have been sure his hallucinations had moved from music to hearing the dead speak.
~~**~~**~~
“It can’t be her,” Felix said as he flipped open a small panel on the comm station and fiddled with some wires inside. “And yet, it had her Viper’s recognition codes-I checked them myself, twice. But it’s got to be some kind of a trick, right? It-frak!” Sparks flew, and Felix jerked his hand away and put his burnt fingertip in his mouth. “Damn.”
“Told you we should’ve waited for somebody to bring a toolbox,” Louis said without much real conviction.
“Like anyone’s coming up here to fix your call waiting button with all the action on the hangar deck.”
Louis paused for a moment to sum up his courage. “What if it is her, though?”
“Hmm? Then she’s a Cylon. There isn’t any other explanation how she could be dead for months and then suddenly reappear.”
He took a deep breath. “Yeah, but what if it is her?”
“Then she’s a Cylon,” Felix repeated, as if that was a complete answer in and of itself. That’s what Louis had been afraid of. “You feeling all right?”
He felt Felix rub his lower back with one hand. They had always been very good about remaining professional with each other on duty, but it was only Helo who had the deck right now, and it had been the sort of day when the only purpose rules seemed to serve was to be broken.
~~**~~**~~
“This is crazy.”
“It’s some kind of trick.”
“No, it’s real, and you know it.”
“It doesn’t make any sense.”
“It can’t be true. Maybe it’s some kind of implant, and we got it when we were on New Caprica-”
“But I wasn’t on New Caprica while the Cylons were there, Anders,” Louis said. It was the first time he’d spoken all evening. Colonel Tigh, Chief Tyrol, Sam Anders, and Tory Foster paced around the Colonel’s quarters to burn off some of their agitation, but Louis just sat by the table, idly turning the same glass of moonshine he’d been nursing since the Colonel had poured for him when he walked in.
“It’s real,” Chief Tyrol repeated. “Hadn’t any of you ever suspected, before you started hearing the song?”
“No,” Louis answered flatly, not bothering to look up from the glass.
Anders was the most energetically upset of them all. He ran his fingers through his hair as he marched back and forth across the small room. “If we are, what the frak does it even mean? Did we commit genocide and not know it? And how the hell does that work, if I was playing for the C-Bucks for five years before the attacks, and my teammates can’t all have been Cylons, too.”
Wet sand squishes pleasantly under his feet. The water is up to his waist, but then a wave hits him that splashes up almost to his shoulders. He points his arms up and out in front of him and dives, skimming just below the blue-green surface. The moving water roars around him-
Louis realized he was panting. Tory was the only one who noticed. “You okay?” she asked quietly.
“I just found out I’m a Cylon,” he rejoined. “But otherwise, yeah.”
Anders was still panicking. “But how do you know forgetting the safeties was a rook mistake and not programming?” he yelled at Tigh. “And what about Kara?”
Chief Tyrol shrugged. “There’s five of us, so that covers the Final Five. Whatever she is, she’s not one of us. So don’t do anything stupid and try to bond with her over your newfound Cylon identity, Sam. I say we just lie low for awhile-”
His head breaks through to the surface, and the first delicious gasp of air hits his lungs. He treads water as he looks out over the ocean. Then there’s a flash of light at the place where sea meets sky, and in an instant the waves are boiling and the cool breeze is on fire-
“‘Lie low’? That’s your plan? Are you frakking kidding me!” The other four turned and stared at Louis. He had to admit, even he was a little surprised at himself for that outburst, but he wasn’t going waste this burst of confidence. “As in stay on duty, pretend like nothing has happened? This is ridiculous. Colonel, Chief, you can’t be serious about risking another Boomer.”
“Don’t talk about Boomer,” Chief cut in. “You don’t know anything about her. We’re not like her.”
“How do you know?” Louis shook his head. “We have to tell them. Or at least I do.”
He was already out of his chair and half-way to the hatch when Colonel Tigh called, “Lieutenant, don’t try-”
“Don’t try to pull rank on me,” Louis spat. “Somehow I doubt chain of command applies to Cylons.”
~~**~~**~~
Louis took a deep breath before entering Felix’s bunkroom. He was at his locker, holding a duffel bag.
Louis took another moment to steel himself, and then, “Felix, I really need to-”
“Frak,” Felix said, slamming his locker shut. “Frak!” He hit the locker with his fist. He turned to Louis. “Sorry, it’s just-Starbuck.”
Louis pressed on, “I know it sounds crazy-”
“‘Crazy’ is too kind a word for it,” Felix said. “That woman and her special Earth detector sense have ‘Cylon Trap’ written all over them in big, red letters, and yet somehow I’m the only one who sees it.”
Louis knew Felix was too angry to listen to anything else until he got whatever this was out of his system, so he decided to hold off on his revelation until then. “Well, at least they’re keeping her in the brig now.”
Felix huffed, “No, they’re not. They’re giving her her own frakking ship.”
“What?” Louis looked at the duffel. “Oh gods, they’re sending you with her, aren’t they?”
Felix nodded.
Louis shrugged and held out his hands helplessly. “What can I do?”
In an instant, Felix’s mouth was desperate against his, and his hands were yanking at his uniform.
Louis was reluctant to break the kiss, but finally he had to pull away and say, “Hey, careful. You’re gonna rip the buttons off, and I need them when I go on duty.”
Under normal circumstances, that would’ve elicited a smile, but now Felix only paused. “Sorry,” he said. “I just don’t understand how everybody can be so comfortable with the fact that she’s obviously a Cylon, simply because they liked her before they knew that. We all liked Boomer, too, and look where that got us.”
Louis’s heart sank, but he didn’t show it. “Now’s not the time for that.”
He could tell Felix didn’t quite understand what sort of answer that was supposed to be, but Felix just asked, “Then what is it time for?”
Louis answered by grasping the back of Felix’s head and pulling him in to a hard, almost violent kiss.
Felix panted, “Right, time to frak like the world is ending, just like I thought.”
Louis considered pointing out that the world had already ended, and realized that whenever Felix found out, it would likely end for Louis again, but he lost all those thoughts in the sensation of Felix’s body against his.
~~**~~**~~
It didn’t surprise Louis that Colonel Tigh followed him when he stepped out of CIC for his ten-minute break. Of course the Colonel knew Louis hadn’t told, since Louis never would have been on duty if he had, but Louis could almost feel the questions and uncertainties radiating from the XO.
“Did you get the message?” he whispered as he walked beside Louis.
“Yes, sir,” he answered, looking sidelong at the Colonel. He had his blind side to Louis. That was well enough; then he could walk without having to worry about being rude by not making eye contact.
“Why weren’t you there?”
“I had things to do, sir. Didn’t want to call attention to myself.” Those “things” had been having a drink at Joe’s with Dee and Thornton before going to bed early to finish the book he’d borrowed from Racetrack, but that was none of the Colonel’s business.
The Colonel apparently accepted that excuse, but he didn’t go away. “You hear that music anymore?”
“No, sir. Not since the nebula.”
The Colonel leaned in closer and dropped his voice even lower. “Chief said he’s seeing things, flashes of some river...”
Louis stopped. He’d been seeing glimpses of a lot of different things-an office building, a forest, a lab, a commuter train-but mostly, it was a beach, a beach so real to all his senses that he still hadn’t convinced himself that he hadn’t gotten sand in his boots.
Louis squared himself to the Colonel and looked him in the eye. “I’m sorry, Colonel, but I need to use the head, and I’ve only got five minutes before I need to be back in CIC. So unless you want to continue this conversation over a urinal, if you’ll excuse me.”
The beach was the one good thing that had happened to him since that frakking nebula, Louis decided, and he wasn’t going to let the others to make him over-think it.
~~**~~**~~
Louis lay down in his rack and pulled the curtain shut. He debated for a few moments whether to jerk off or go to the beach house, noting only momentarily how pathetic it was that both of his options for things to do that evening were imaginary on some level. He had considered combining the two, but he was a little worried that he might forget that he had to keep very quiet in his rack if he was projecting himself somewhere private.
Louis closed his eyes, and when he opened them, he was looking out over the ocean.
He turned around and headed up the beach to a snug, one-storey white clapboard house sitting on a little bluff. He climbed the wooden stairs up the bluff and padded across the deck, the weather-beaten boards warmed by the sun.
He entered the house through the sliding glass door and wiped the sand off his feet on the rug. The kitchen was sparkling clean-no need to wash dishes in a projection; just forget you ever used them-as Louis was sure the bathroom and guest bedroom on the back side of the house were as well. He grabbed a can of soda from the fridge and continued on, peeking in the bedroom as he walked by, the big bed’s clean sheets already turned down and waiting. But he kept going until he got to the living room.
A part of Louis realized that, given the shape of the house as he saw it from the outside, the floor plan that he envisioned for the inside was impossible, but he didn’t care. On one side of the room was the door that went out to the main road, and on the opposite side were huge windows overlooking the beach. Between them was an odd but pleasant amalgam of overstuffed couches and chairs, and the wall behind him was covered with bookshelves. On the far wall stood the fireplace, photographs covering the mantle.
Louis approached the fireplace. Today, he hadn’t done anything special to himself, but other times, he’d projected himself at different ages (Do Cylons age? he wondered. Would he ever be anything other than forty-ish? Had he ever been anything else?) so he could see the pictures on the mantle change, see himself and Felix and their friends live life and grow old together in the instants of time caught in those photographs.
No matter how old he was in the projections, he never allowed himself to put photographs of a wedding or children on the mantle. They hadn't talked about that far ahead, and it was all so real that Louis felt there was something deeply wrong about going that far, like he was making a decision for the both of them that wasn't his to make. Even so, he cheated a little bit with the photos of Felix holding Dee's newborn son and the two of them with Hera at her high school graduation.
There were very few people in his projections, either. Occasionally there would be others on the beach a long ways off, no more than colorful dots that lounged on the sand or shrieked and laughed as they bobbed in the waves. He’d created a mail carrier once, just to see if he could fashion a believable person, and he was surprised at how well he’d done when he opened the door and took the letters and magazines from a totally lifelike middle-aged woman with curly brown hair and aviator sunglasses.
There were plenty of people he longed to see again: his parents (Were the actually his parents? Had they ever even existed?), his brothers (Had they?), his friends from school (Had he ever been a child?), friends from the Pegasus, Felix.... Felix was the most tempting. With the others, he knew it would be enough like necrophilia that he couldn’t enjoy it. And it wasn’t as if he didn’t think about Felix already-if he’d gone the wanking route for entertainment that evening, after all, he would’ve been envisioning Felix in very explicit detail. But daydreams and fantasies were very different from projections. Projections were too real for him to feel comfortable making a Felix the way he did the mail carrier. And how comforting would it be if that Felix was an automaton, doing what he did because Louis thought it and made it so? Maybe things would be different when Felix got back from his mission, when Louis would have a chance to explain who he was and what all had happened, if Felix could ever forgive him. For now, though, Louis left the house empty, waiting for Felix to come home.
~~**~~**~~
Louis dropped by Tyrol’s quarters a couple hours after the funeral to pay his respects. The Colonel and Tory had decided it would be best if Louis didn’t come to the service itself, since he’d never really known Cally and they didn’t need to draw any suspicion to themselves, making people wonder why all the sudden a Pegasus bridge bunny and a knuckledragger were such good friends. Louis was surprised to find Tyrol gone and the Colonel and Tory waiting inside.
“Chief got called down to fix a busted avionics pack on one of the Raptors,” Colonel Tigh informed him as he shut the hatch. “We said we’d watch over the kid ‘til he got back. Shouldn’t be long now.”
“Okay, I’ll wait then.” He sat down at the table across from Tory.
They sat in what Louis felt was relieving silence for a long time, but Tory finally broke it. “Do you really think she killed herself because she thought Galen and I were having an affair?”
Colonel Tigh growled, “Hell, life in this godsdamned Fleet is so bad that she could’ve killed herself because it was better than dragging herself through an ordinary day here.”
“But then why would she have hit Galen with a wrench?”
“Because she thought he was having an affair,” Louis answered, hoping that would shut Tory up.
It didn’t work. “No, I mean what if Cally thought something else was wrong with Galen? Maybe sensed something else had changed recently. Maybe Galen even told her.”
“No. Tory, just let it go,” the Colonel said, starting to sound just as exasperated as Louis felt.
“It’s something we should think about,” Tory pressed on. “What do we do if someone finds out?”
“Nobody’s gonna find out,” said the Colonel.
“But if someone does-”
That’s when Nicky Tyrol started bawling in his crib.
The Colonel sighed deeply. “He can’t be hungry, ‘cause Chief said he fed ‘em right before we got here. And I changed his diaper a half-hour ago.”
Louis, seeing this as an excellent opportunity to get away from Tory, got up and walked over to the crib.
He waved his hand in front of his nose. “Whew. Yep, definitely needs a new diaper.”
“My gods, what does he feed that kid?”
“Algae?” Louis deadpanned.
Tory cut in, “Now, back to if someone should happen to find out-”
“We’ll cross that bridge if we get there,” said the Colonel. “It’d depend on who it was, anyway, so no use worrying yet. The Old Man won’t believe me and the Chief are Cylons if just anybody tells him.” He stood up and moved over to where Louis was standing by Nicky’s changing table. “Need any help there, Lieutenant?”
“Nope, just about done...” Louis said as he put in a safety pin. “There.” He lifted Nicky up for inspection, and the Colonel nodded in approval.
“How’d you learn to do that?”
Louis set Nicky back in his crib. “I-” He paused in thought for a long time. “I didn’t. I don’t think I’ve ever changed a diaper before.”
Colonel Tigh matched Louis’s confused expression. “No, you can’t be a rook at it and do it that well.”
“Do you suppose they...programmed me? To know how to change diapers?” The full ridiculousness of that statement didn’t hit Louis until he actually said it.
The Colonel shook his head. “My gods. First the music, now this...just keeps getting weirder and weirder.”
~~**~~**~~
Louis looked out the glass door onto the deck. Several spider webs had sprung into being during the night, stretched between the railing’s wooden slats, and now drops of dew on their threads caught the earliest hints of sunlight and sparked while the ocean itself was still gray and the edge of the sky was barely glowing red. Had Felix been there, he would’ve already been cleaning the webs away; he was from the city, after all, where any insect was out-of-place and portended of an infestation. Louis liked them, in a way, though. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have had them there. They were a part of life on the ocean, made it feel even more like home.
He’d always wanted to, but Louis had never lived on the ocean. As he watched the sun rise, he wondered if that was really true.
~~**~~**~~
Louis was not pleased when the Colonel sent him to accompany Tory to the storage compartment where they were storing vaccines so she could inventory them for the President.
“Galen started coming to Gaius’s services, too,” she said. Louis worked very hard to restrain himself from rolling his eyes. “I know it sounds crazy, but it really does help. He’s preaching about our God, and he understands us.”
Louis’s eyes flared wide. “Tell me you haven’t told him about us.”
Tory snorted. It struck Louis as an oddly inappropriate noise for a Chief of Staff to make, but it endeared Tory to him just a little bit. “I’m not stupid. I think Gaius has a lot of things right, but when it comes to personal secrets, I don’t trust the man as far as I can throw him. Come on, Louis. Just try it out, once. You can come with me to his service tomorrow.”
“Thanks, but I think Felix might have a problem with that.”
Tory’s brow furrowed. “Felix? Why does he...”
“We’re together,” Louis said lightly. “Have been for quite awhile now, in fact. So yeah, going to the sex cult of my lover’s ex...I think I’ll pass.”
“It’s not all about sex,” Tory said, a little angry. She cooled down quickly, though. “But I get it. As much as I need it to feel sane, I still feel like I’m betraying the President every time I walk into that compartment. It’s not the same as you and him, but if you don’t think that it means anything to me...you don’t know me very well.”
They had arrived at the storage compartment. “To be honest, I don’t know you very well. But I do believe you.” Tory gave him an odd, almost sad look that he couldn’t quite gauge. He added, “I have to go now. If you need anything, just have a marine call up to CIC for you.”
“Thank you,” Tory said, and from the look on her face, Louis got the distinct impression she was talking about more than the escort.
~~**~~**~~
He had told himself that he’d sat in that chair because it had the best light in mid-mornings for reading the paper. And yet here he was, paper finished hours ago, still sitting there, watching, waiting for the door to open.
~~**~~**~~
It felt good, not holding back his Cylon strength for once. He’d been holding back his entire life, but he hadn’t known it nor had to consciously control it until the nebula. The crack of his fist against Sam Anders’s jaw was satisfying, but the sound of him crashing hard into the equipment locker several feet away was even better.
Tyrol gave a low whistle. “Good thing we meet in private. Somebody sees you give a right hook that makes somebody fly like that, you’d be out the airlock so fast you wouldn’t know who hit the button.”
“I deserved that,” Anders said, shaking his head and feeling for blood.
“What the frak was that about, Lieutenant?” Colonel Tigh drawled, eye wide. Louis saw Tory lean in and mutter something to Tigh, but he ignored everybody but Anders.
“I tried to go in and talk to him, say how sorry-sorry doesn’t begin to cover it. But then he started singing, and it got me thinking about how we all heard the music, and Kara said she heard something like that too, and maybe we’re all drawn to people who...who...”
Louis saw where Anders was going, and he couldn’t have cared less about it. “What the hell happened?”
“I-I don’t know.” The fact that Anders looked truly contrite and confused cooled Louis’s rage a little, but not much. “He and Helo and Athena were mutinying, or-Kara told him not to jump us back, and-I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Obviously you weren’t thinking.”
Tory caught hold of his arm as Louis stomped toward the door. “Louis, you have every right to be angry, but don’t do anything stupid. We’ve gotten this far, and there’s no reason to screw it up now.”
“‘Don’t do anything stupid?’” Louis gaped at her. “Keeping this secret, not turning ourselves in, has been stupid from the start! Apparently Anders’s programming kicked in, and he nearly killed Felix. How the frak do I know a switch won’t flip in my brain and tell me to finish the job?” He didn’t believe that last part for a moment-programming or no, he knew deep down he would never hurt Felix; he’d die first-but he could tell from their faces that he had struck a chord.
“Don’t bother inviting me to your Secret Cylon meetings anymore,” Louis spat as he jerked away from Tory and stormed out.
~~**~~**~~
Louis noticed the heart monitor’s steady beep was slowing a little, but not so much as to scare him, or at least to scare him any more than he already was. Felix’s eyelids fluttered occasionally, and his gaze was losing focus.
Cottle had told Louis about how Felix had refused to let them put him under for the surgery. He had wanted to be down in the infirmary with Felix so badly, but at the same time, he could barely imagine what it would’ve been like to see him go through that-
The bone saw buzzes to life. Felix clutches the table edges and his eyes go wide as Cottle cuts through-
Louis swallowed hard and closed his eyes until he’d willed the projection away.
Felix groaned and flinched, trying to shake himself awake. Louis leaned in toward Felix. “Baby, it’s okay, just go to sleep,” he murmured as he kissed Felix’s forehead, skin still cold and clammy and drenched with sweat.
“D’you have duty?” Felix asked, head wobbling as he turned to face Louis, obviously fighting hard against the drugs and the fatigue.
“No,” Louis said. His words to the other four flashed through his mind, and he truly did fear it, for a moment. But then that beautiful certainty welled within him again, and he was sliding his chair flush with Felix’s bed so he could comfortably take his hand. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“’Kay,” Felix said as his eyes finally fell shut.
Louis really couldn’t tell if he was projecting while awake or asleep. They lay together like two parallel S-curves: back to chest, hips aligned, thigh to quad. It felt very, very strange, how that connection ended at the knee on one side of his body, but Felix breathed deeply and evenly, and his skin was warm under the covers.
~~**~~**~~
The first thing Felix said when he next woke was, “I want to go home.” This made the new nurse’s eyes go wide in fear, and Louis couldn’t blame her, since he knew what very ill people often meant when they said that. But for once, Louis was glad Felix was such a died-in-the-wool atheist that he was sure he meant he wanted to move back to the racks rather than meaning he wanted to give up on life and depart for some Elysian abode.
“I don’t know...” Ishay said when Felix repeated his demand several hours later. She shook her head slowly as she checked Felix’s dressings.
“You said he was out of danger,” Louis added.
“Well, yes, but that hardly means he’s out of need for intensive medical care.” She put a thermometer in Felix’s mouth. “He’s still heavily medicated, at high risk for infection, in need a lot of physical therapy...”
“I’ve got to get-”
Ishay glared at him. “Felix, shut up for thirty more seconds so I can get you temperature, or you’re not going anywhere.”
Felix huffed and rolled his eyes, but he clamped his mouth shut. He started up again almost before Ishay pulled the thermometer out past his lips. “I’ve got to get out of here. This place makes me feel like an invalid-”
“I hate to point this out to you, but-”
Felix made a strange, frustrated noise, then pushed on, “I could handle going to the frakking head, Ishay, but instead I’ve got bed pans and sponge baths and-I’ve got to get some kind of routine again, and I’ve got to get back to work.”
“Felix, you just need time to recover-” Louis soothed.
“No,” he said surprisingly firmly but without any spite. “I mean, yes, I need time to recover, but how the hell am I supposed to get myself back to normal here?” He grabbed his IV stand and rattled it for emphasis.
Ishay sighed. Louis could tell she’d been around long enough to know when a patient was going to be more trouble than was worth it for anyone, the patient included. “I did have to turn away three patients from the Vena Capa yesterday because we’re so short on beds.” She kneaded her forehead with her fingers. “Frakking baseship brought us nothing but trouble.”
It didn’t register with Felix, of course, but Louis nodded sadly. The Vena Capa had been too close to the baseship when it jumped away, and the distortion left in the jump’s wake had ripped off a sizeable chunk of hull and vented a dozen civilians into space. A passenger liner couldn’t survive a jump with a gaping hole in her side like that, so crews had been frantically trying to patch it back together. Repairing a hull breach was dangerous work in the best of conditions, and barely trained mechanics working on an un-docked ship with bad equipment and no time was so far from the best of conditions that it came as no surprise that so many accidents and injuries had happened in so little time.
“Lieutenant Hoshi,” Ishay repeated. Louis snapped his attention back to her. “Well, can you make sure someone’s with him whenever he’s not here for therapy?”
“Yeah,” Louis said. “Yeah, Dee will help out when I’m on duty, and Thornton, and...yeah.”
Ishay crossed her arms. She and Felix stared each other down for a long time before she finally said, “All right. I’m not exactly comfortable with this, but I’ll talk to Cottle, see what we can do.”
~~**~~**~~
Felix stumbled into the ex-Presidential quarters, sweating, shaking, and looking almost as bad as he had when Louis had first made it down to the infirmary to see him after the surgery. Felix had insisted on walking with his canes the whole way from the infirmary to his new quarters himself. A journey that would have taken five minutes if Felix had let them put him in the wheelchair like Ishay had wanted had taken them nearly half an hour. Louis had tried to step in three separate times to help, but Felix had squirmed away from his touch each time, insisting that he could do it himself. “Gotta practice,” he had puffed, breathless. “How am I ever gonna get to CIC if I can’t make it here? Not going to work in a godsdamn wheelchair.”
Felix leaned heavily against the wall, and Louis shut the hatch behind them. He silently thanked the gods that Doc Cottle and the Colonel had arranged for Felix to stay in President Roslin’s former quarters rather than the junior officers’ bunkrooms, since those were all the way on the other end of the ship. He looked around. There was nothing fancy about it, but it was very comfortable: a metal table with two chairs, a desk, an upholstered chair in the corner, a bed instead of a rack, and best of all, a private head. Dee had already brought down their things: two boxes sitting side by side, plus uniforms and other clothes hanging and folded neatly in the two narrow lockers.
“Gods, I stink,” Felix said, the tremors in his body making his voice quaver. “Need a shower.”
Louis sighed and scrubbed his hand down his face. “Felix, you’re exhausted. Let’s just call it a day.”
“N-no,” Felix stuttered as he hauled himself painfully into the head. Louis followed him, figuring he might need help climbing in the shower.
Felix looked at the shower, then groaned and let his head fall against the wall.
“What?” He looked over Felix’s shoulder. “Oh, shit, they must not have had time to install the seat.” Felix looked so defeated. “Hey, I’ll run back to the infirmary and get some stuff for a sponge bath, okay?”
“No!” Felix closed the toilet lid and sat down on it. His canes fell to the floor with a clatter, and he started stripping off his tanks. “No. Whole point of this was to have a routine again, get things back to normal. I can hang onto the shower door.”
Louis, utterly at a loss for what to do, watched Felix struggle to get his pants off without standing up. By the time he actually got them off, he was panting again.
“Okay, fine,” Louis finally said. “You want normal, we’ll do normal, but on my terms.” Louis took his own tanks off and then stepped out of his pants. “We’ve done this before, right? Normal enough for you?”
Felix actually smiled.
It wasn’t much of a shower in terms of actually getting clean; it was more just Louis holding Felix up while the water beat down on them and Felix making a few valiant but tired attempts at lathering up his face and arms. Louis thought Felix might have been crying at one point, but he couldn’t really tell the difference between shower water and tears.
When Felix said he was done, Louis turned the water off and toweled them both dry. He would’ve liked to have carried Felix to the bed, and it probably would’ve been easier for everyone, but he knew better than to offer. Instead, they stepped carefully over where Felix had dropped his canes, Felix with an arm around Louis’s neck and Louis holding Felix by the waist, and then slowly limped their way over to the far side of the room.
Felix sank down on the bed with a sigh of relief, and Louis hurried over to the locker to grab sweats for him before he fell asleep. He helped Felix dress for bed, kissed him, then put on sweats himself and settled into the upholstered chair.
Felix eyed him from across the room as he lay sprawled on the bed. “What’re you doing?”
“Huh? Oh, I’m fine. Just go to sleep.”
Felix’s eyes narrowed. “You’re going to sleep in that chair?”
“Felix, I’m fine. Sleep.”
Felix propped himself up. “No, this is not how this works. If you think you’re gonna stay there, you can just as well get the hell out, ‘cause I did not haul my ass out of the infirmary so I could have another nursemaid in here.”
Louis tensed, but he decided honesty was better than tip-toeing around the issue at this point. “But what if I bump into it while we’re sleeping? I don’t want to hurt you.”
Felix nodded sleepily and scooted over on the bed. “I know. Come on, please.”
Louis slipped carefully under the covers and lay so close to the edge of the mattress that he was in danger of falling off. Felix, who was lying on his side, turned around and tugged on Louis’s arm. “No, c’mon.” Louis scooted in closer, draping his arm over Felix’s waist but still leaving a wide gap between their lower bodies.
“You know,” Louis said quietly, “I understand you want things to get back to normal, but you’re going to need help. Like with the shower.”
Felix chuckled sleepily. “What, showering with your lover isn’t romantic? I prefer to think of this evening not as needing help but rather as the least sexy date we’ve ever been on.”
Louis spluttered. “You’re ridiculous, you know that?” He nuzzled the back of Felix’s neck. “You’re beautiful, too. You know that, right?”
Felix’s voice was very quiet. “Still?”
“Always.”
Felix winced and sucked in his breath sharply. Louis pulled away. “What’d I do?”
“Nothing,” Felix said, taking Louis’s arm and replacing it again. “It just hurts.”
“Okay,” Louis said, though he wasn’t sure he believed Felix. Obviously, he needed this, so he wasn’t going to question it anymore.
As he drifted off to sleep, Louis couldn’t help but notice that he could almost smell the ocean.
~~**~~**~~
When Louis met Colonel Tigh in the Admiral’s quarters after he’d been called there, he assumed they were both waiting for the Admiral to get out of the head. Then he took a better look at the Colonel and was shocked to see the Admiral’s stars on his collar.
“Mr. Hoshi. I called you in here to tell you that Admiral Adama has temporarily relinquished command and put me in charge.” He dug in his pocket. “Seems like people are passing these things around like cubits in a Triad game today, but-” He held out his old Colonel insignia. “Congratulations. You’re the new XO of Galactica.” He dropped the pips into Louis’s hand.
Louis knew this was a chance he’d probably never get again. Jumping from Lieutenant to Colonel was not something that happened every day, but- “Sir, I’m honored, but I can’t accept this.”
“You’ve got to,” said Tigh. “Felix is higher than a kite on morpha most of the time, and Helo was on that frakking baseship along with half the Viper wing, including Anders.” Tigh paused, then stepped towards him. “I’m asking you to do this because I know you’re a very good, level-headed officer. Has nothing to do with the Cylon thing.”
“And the Cylon thing is the only reason I’m turning it down, sir.” He placed the pips on Adama’s desk. “The Fleet would have enough trouble handling having two Cylons in CIC. If they find out about us and we’re the commanding officer and XO-”
“-they’re gonna think it’s a Cylon takeover,” Tigh finished.
“Yes, sir.”
Tigh sighed. “Well, I suppose I should find Dee, then.”
“Good idea, sir.” Hoshi saluted and started out of the room.
“Lieutenant,” Tigh called after him. Louis stopped. “You want to tell him, don’t you?”
Louis paused for a moment. “Yes sir, I do, but I won’t. I understand that the best interests of the Fleet must come before personal feelings.” He turned again and left, shutting the hatch behind him.
~~**~~**~~
Louis stretched at the pleasant feeling of sunlight glancing across his closed eyelids and warming his skin. He smiled smugly. He was getting pretty good at projecting, if he did say so himself. Little details like the sunlight came about with him barely having to consciously think them into being, and projecting was so much more enjoyable when he wasn’t thinking so hard about making things work but rather just able to experience the sensations.
Then he opened his eyes and found himself confronted with something he was sure he hadn’t consciously conjured up.
“Good morning, sunshine,” Felix grinned at him. Felix was awake. This was new.
Felix was also in a very good mood. The first kiss was a nice good-morning kiss, the second involved a surprising amount of tongue, and by the third, Felix had pulled Louis on top of him and pressed his body against him in a way that made it clear that his mouth wasn’t the only part of him that was completely awake. Louis reveled in the contact without thinking for longer than he should have; after all, it had been such a long, long time.... Finally, reality-or more accurately, the lack thereof-sank in, and Louis pulled back a little.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
Felix laughed and rolled his eyes. “Funny, Louis. What do you think?” He leaned up, put his hand on the back of Louis’s neck, and kissed him, hard.
When it was over, Felix curled into Louis again and fell back asleep-one of the perks of always projecting weekends, Louis noted. And while the mid-morning sun streamed in on them, Louis was content, but when he woke to the beeping of their alarm clock in the cold room on Galactica with Felix nestled against him, smiling but shivering, he couldn’t help but feel achingly guilty.
~~**~~**~~
“Sir, we’re ready to jump on your mark,” Louis said from the nav station. He’d always wanted to learn nav, but pulling a double shift to cover for Felix while he was suffering through physical therapy was not the way he’d wanted it to happen.
Tigh grunted in his general direction and scanned the DRADIS screen for the twentieth time. They’d been waiting for a week for the baseship at the new rendezvous point Adama had set when he left in the Raptor. He had told them to wait for three days. Unless the FTL drive of one of the ships was down or they were performing mining operations, the Fleet never stayed in one place for more than five days for fear of the Cylons tracking them down.
Louis cleared his throat. “Admiral Tigh,” he called out. Tigh turned around. Louis recognized the look on his face; he’d seen it on Adama’s when they’d found the baseship wreckage. “Awaiting your mark, sir.”
Tigh clenched his jaw. “Get us outta here, Mr. Hoshi.”
~~**~~**~~
Felix and Dee were sitting at the table, laughing uproariously, when Louis came home. He’d learned long ago not to bother asking what the joke was, since most of the time it was about some shared experience they had five years ago that he wouldn’t get anyway. It had never really bothered him, but today especially, he was so happy to see Felix’s face light up like that that he didn’t care how it happened.
“Hey, Louis,” Dee said as their laughter subsided. She stood and picked up the two empty mess trays in front of them. “I brought you a plate, too. It’s sitting on the desk over there.” Louis fetched the tray and took the seat that Dee had just vacated. “So, anything interesting going on in CIC? Anything you need to warn me about before my shift?”
“Not really,” said Louis as he pulled back the tin foil on his tray. “Pretty quiet day. Hansen’s still bitching about the short in at her station-” Dee and Felix simultaneously rolled their eyes, having had plenty of opportunity to listen to Petty Officer Hansen’s complaining themselves, “-but otherwise, it’s running pretty smoothly.”
“I never thought I’d say this, but I have to give the man credit: Tigh has done a good job as CO,” Felix said.
“Well, you know the old saying: behind every good commanding officer, there’s an amazingly badass XO,” Louis said. Dee laughed.
“Suck up,” Felix said, elbowing Louis.
“So how was therapy?” Louis asked.
Dee cut in, “Oh, Felix, remember, you have to show him.”
Felix smiled, nodded, pushed his chair back from the table, and pointed down. “See? Isn’t it stylish?”
“You got your new prosthetic!”
Dee said, “It’s so much better than the old one, even I could tell that. It actually fits, for a start.”
Felix swiveled the prosthetic a little bit so it would catch the light. “So, Louis, what do you think? Sexier than the old one?”
“Very sexy,” Louis kidded. “It brings out the color of your eyes.”
“All the kids will be wearing them by next year,” Felix joked back.
Dee laughed again. “Ugh, wait until I’m out of here before you get all cutesy with each other, will you? I have to go be amazingly badass now, anyway,” Dee said, putting her hands on her hips in a mock-superhero pose. “You boys have a good evening.”
They said good-night to Dee, the hatch closed, and they fell easily into their routine. Louis ate while Felix sat with him and they talked. Occasionally they might go to Joe’s after that, but most of the time, they stayed home and did their paperwork together at the table, as they did that evening.
Louis lost his count on the inventory sheet he was working on when Felix spoke up abruptly. “I was just thinking,” he said. “Remember how at the beginning of all this, I said I wanted things to be back to normal?”
“Yeah, I don’t think I could forget that.”
“I was just thinking that today.... It’s not normal yet, but for the first time, it feels like this could be normal, someday.”
They looked each other in the eyes, and Louis put a hand on Felix’s arm. “It will be.”
Felix nodded hesitantly, then leaned in and kissed him. The kiss pretty much said it all: it was good, very good, though not quite the way it had been, but full of promise that someday it would be.
~~**~~**~~
After that morning when they’d had sex in the beach house, Louis had taken to waking up early, kissing the still-sleeping Felix on the cheek, and then going for a swim. It wasn’t that he hadn’t enjoyed it-on the contrary, it was that he’d enjoyed it far too much but knew it wasn’t fair to Felix.
He loved early mornings on the beach, the salty breeze sweeping in over the waves and ruffling his hair, the sand, a little coarse, shifting as he walked, sticking to the soles of his bare feet. It was early enough that save for the few gulls that swooped and cawed overhead, he was alone for as far as he could see down the beach in either direction. At first he’d been afraid of getting caught in a riptide and having no one to call out to for help, but then he realized he’d just make sure there were no riptides in his ocean.
And then there were the waves.
It had been years since Louis had been in more water than a quick shower. Here, he was surrounded by it, engulfed, consumed. The first waves hit him like a cold blast of fireworks, but he acclimated to the chill quickly. He cut through the water with precise, powerful strokes until his muscles gave in to the delicious ache of exhaustion. Then he flopped down on the shore, not caring about the sand that stuck to his back and basking in the sun.
After a few weeks of following this routine, one day Louis looked back toward the house as he lay on the beach after his swim and was startled to see Felix on the deck with a broom, whacking away at cobwebs. He saw Louis looking, waved to him, and then went back to battling the spiders.
~~**~~**~~
On to Part 2...