Fic - "Dead Man Walking part 23"
I might give this an epilogue, I might not. Here's the end.
Lee stepped into sickbay. Dee quickly let go of his arm to go see Felix. That had been his plan as well, because he wanted to temper how Dee described the Admiral’s actions over the supposed final five. Dee was just a little too pleased and smug about the whole situation. At the same time, Dee was likely to do a better job of reminding Gaeta that the Admiral wasn’t angry with him.
If anything Bill Adama was too busy avoiding President Roslin and defending his decision to not airlock four loyal members of the crew who just happened to be defective Cylons or half Cylon. Roslin was livid, especially when the Quorum sided with Adama. His father had transcribed some of what Gaeta had told them under interrogation, and that the Cavil Cylons pointedly considered all of the people arrested defective and damaged goods that couldn’t be salvaged. That, coupled with their records as resistance fighters, and his father’s assurances that Tigh couldn’t assume command had calmed down most of the protests. Laura Roslin was angry, it didn’t take knowing her well to understand that, but publicly she was resigned to accepting it. She would come around, Lee thought. She would never be comfortable with any of the Cylons, but the Admiral would keep them out of her direct line of sight as much as he could. It was, Lee thought, a fair decision. They were all loyal soldiers, except Tory, and Tory had been a resistance fighter on New Caprica and popular. It wasn’t going to be an easy transition for any of them and he didn’t envy his father’s job but at the same time… He was glad no one was going out the airlock. He didn’t envy his father having to deal with Laura Roslin’s anger but he assumed they would get past it eventually. They were in love, after all.
That was a piece of information that once Felix Gaeta had said it, he’d known it was true. There were a lot of things that Gaeta had said that he had realized were true. The Admiral was wise to not broadcast the fact that Gaeta’s Cylon induced fantasy involved a mutiny, not because it was so patently impossible but because the only reason it didn’t succeed in the fantasy was because the Cylons stacked the deck. Not because it was impossible. And not because there wasn’t a possibility that people were that unhappy. The fantasy had taken place over a year and the base events, the Final Five, an alliance with rebel Cylons, were false, but the underlying problems were there. People were unhappy and hopeless and he doubted it had ever occurred to the President that her vision of Earth might not work out. It was something that he intended to keep an eye on. Gaeta wasn’t likely to be the source of that threat… Lee had a feeling that his father was going to pay a lot more attention to the CIC staff in general and Gaeta in particular. Especially since Racetrack and Laird had spread the story around that Gaeta had nearly died to help protect the fleet and his friends. Lee knew Kara wasn’t going to appreciate hearing it, but the reality that the man who had been captured and tortured by Cylons thought the revealed Cylons were innocent victims was one of the major things that kept her from going out the airlock.
But those concerns weren’t why he was looking for Cottle instead of joining Dee in visiting Felix. He didn’t consider himself to be superstitious, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. It was possible that it was just him, that he was being paranoid after almost two months of trying to draw facts out of an insane scenario. If that was the case, if he was just being paranoid, Cottle would say so. Cottle would call him some sort of name, and tell him to get over himself.
He stepped into the cramped office and waited until Cottle closed the door. “There’s something still wrong.”
Cottle looked at him and then sighed. He sat down in his chair heavily and lit up a cigarette. “I know. There is something still wrong here and I don’t know what it is. I was hoping you had figured out. Something isn’t right. We’ve missed something.” He tapped the thick file. “I spent the last twenty four hours rereading all of this and I can’t find the red flag. Why do *you* think something is wrong?”
Lee took a seat as well and opened the small notebook he’d been keeping. “Everything that Gaeta said happened in the scenario meant something. Louis Hoshi was his lover because he knew deep down that Hoshi was dead. That’s the thing that made him not believe the Cylons. That Louis Hoshi was alive.” Lee felt stupid going there but talking it out helped him think. “Is… is there any chance that Hoshi is alive?”
Cottle snorted with laughter. “No… No, Major Adama, Lt. Hoshi was dead when he was brought into sick bay. It was a heart attack. Even if by chance you thought he might have somehow faked his death, he didn’t.” He puffed his cigarette, his expression pensive. It occurred to Lee that Jack Cottle was as curious as he was about the mystery. Finally he said, “I did an autopsy, Lee. Because he was a young man to have a massive heart attack and I was worried that, with conditions being what they are here, that he might have had some sickness that could spread.” He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a much thinner file. “In fact, Hoshi was remarkably healthy except for the massive fatty plaque deposits in his heart that ultimately killed him. But in order to confirm that, I had to cut up his heart.” Cottle shrugged. “In case they didn’t tell you this in your high school health class, there’s not a lot of bounce back from an autopsy. And Gaeta was the one who told me that his family had a history of dying of this. Hoshi isn’t the problem.”
“Agreed.” Lee stood up and went to the whiteboard that Cottle had set aside in the office. “Louis is a point of difference but I think he was an anchor point for Gaeta, not something wrong that he was suppressing. What was real and repressed in the fantasy and what doesn’t have an explanation.” He snapped his fingers. “Hotdog and Cally having an affair, with Cally’s suicide.”
Cottle shook his head. “No that’s explained. Please don’t throw it around but… Brendan Costanza is the father of Cally’s baby. And until the Cylons came to New Caprica, Gaeta was friendly with the Tyrols. That goes under explained. So does your father’s secret affair with Laura Roslin. He was afraid to reveal those things.”
Lee dutifully wrote them down. “Gaeta stabbing Baltar. That doesn’t relate to any secret being suppressed.”
“Put that in the maybe pile.” Cottle tapped his ash into a cup. “No, it doesn’t relate to a secret but most of the story arc surrounding Baltar is wrapped up in Gaeta’s love/hate relationship with him. Things that happened with Baltar were never significant events. The forgiveness at the end? He gets something he always wanted, Gauis Baltar validating him as an equal. What about Tom Zarek murdering the Quorum?”
After a moment Lee shook his head. “That’s an anchor point, like Hoshi. He doesn’t trust Zarek, but the projection didn’t have anyone else close to power to put in the role. Tom killed the Quorum for no reason, a point of unrealism. What about the Crazy Eight in the Raptor?” That was a part of the scenario that never made sense to him.
Cottle waved it off. “We’ll never know unless we capture one of the Cylons that was torturing him… but that was Felix’s guilt and suicidal ideation talking and I suspect it was a motherfrakker getting him to get out of that mess.” He sighed. “Maybe that’s the problem we’re sensing. He’s suicidal.”
“Saying it out loud doesn’t make me feel better,” Lee said after a moment. “We both have known that for a while. I assume you have some plans in place. To have him see a counselor or something.” Cottle nodded. “So that’s not it. What else?” They went on for close to an hour, suggesting and debating aspects of the story, looking for the thing that had both of them convinced something was wrong.
Lee looked at the filled whiteboard. “Everything mattered. They were either clues that the scenario wasn’t real or things that Gaeta didn’t want to acknowledge in real life. Except…. “ He looked at the list. They had been talking about the Demetrious, and Sam shooting Gaeta. Sam shooting Gaeta in the leg. Gaeta’s leg being amputated. He looked at Cottle. “There’s something wrong with Gaeta’s leg.”
Cottle shook his head. “No there isn’t.”
“You said it, not me,” Lee pressed. “Gaeta puts things together, he makes connections that other people don’t. That’s why he’s good with Cylon technology, that’s why he knows more gossip about everyone around him than I’ll ever be able to process. Something is wrong with his leg. His leg being amputated… yes it adds a touch of awful to the story but it was one of the details that was always there. You know what I mean. It always happened in the same spot. He knows something is wrong with his leg…. Something that will lead to an amputation.” As he said it, he knew he was right. He could tell that Cottle saw the parallels but was surprised when the older man shook his head.
“It sounds right,” Cottle said carefully. “I’ll give you that. But there’s nothing wrong with Gaeta’s leg.”
Lee smiled. “I know you’re good, sir, but you’ve never made a mistake?”
“Now you’re just trying to pick a fight,” Cottle said, not without some gruff humor. “Let me put you through a class in the Jack Cottle School of Medicine. If you do well, I might take you as an intern.” He opened Gaeta’s thick medical file and began rummaging through it. “You’re suggesting that Felix Gaeta knows he’s a sick man and repressed it. That makes sense with what we know about his ability to put things together and his amazing ability to hide reality from himself. There are even some medical conditions that can sneak up on a person. I’ve seen that before. Frak, Louis Hoshi’s death is a prime example of that. The problem is that most illnesses and injuries that would necessitate a limb amputation are… obvious. Gunshot wounds obviously, bad breaks that don’t heal… its tragic when it happens but when it does, the decision usually has to be made within days at most. The chronic conditions are usually the result of long term illness.” He held out an X-ray and then a copy of an MRI scan. “When you rescued Gaeta, one of the first things I did once I knew he was physically stable, was scan him completely. I was actually looking for bugs.”
Lee looked at him quizzically. “Bugs?”
“Tracking implants.” Cottle rolled his eyes. “It seemed at the time that you got him off the base star a little too easily. I thought it was a trap. I was wrong, fortunately. But I did do a full body work up.” He tapped the x-ray. “That’s his right leg. It’s perfectly healthy. If we are dealing with a chronic condition, there would already be signs and while it’s not impossible, most chronic conditions that would lead to amputation occur in much older people. That leaves us with one other possibility, bone cancer. Which… could happen. He has risk factors, family members that had it, so he’d know what to look for. And the time frame works. If he was beginning to suspect something was wrong when he was captured, a year down the road, bone cancer in his leg would have progressed to where amputating would be the only way to save his life. But…. “He tapped the x-ray again. “I thought of this, Lee, especially when I read his family history, because with his history and when I realized just how far his ability to live in denial went, the early indicators would be something he would analyze and shove away… but this is healthy bone.”
Lee considered that. It still felt right, that was the problem. “If he was in the early stages of bone cancer right now, could you do something?” There wasn’t much joy in being right about what they were missing if the end result was Gaeta’s slow death.
Cottle nodded. “The problem with bone cancer is that people don’t notice it until it’s too late. If you feel an ache or a pain, you wave it off because its just an ache. People usually don’t go to the doctor until the pain becomes constant. Even in the late stages, before… if I had the medical resources of the colonies, it wouldn’t necessarily come to amputation. Now, if I caught it early, I could still excise it and vaccinate him against a recurrence. It’s the people in later stages that I don’t have the drugs to treat. But there’s no cancer in his right leg.”
“But there has to be. It’s the only thing that makes sense.” Lee considered everything. Felix had tied himself up in mental knots to avoid and ignore the unpleasant things he figured out. If he had relatives with cancer, he would have known the early signs. It came to him in a flash. “He’s making himself avoid it. Did you look at his left leg?”
“Why would I…”Cottle stopped himself, and then grinned. He took a long drag of his cigarette. “That stupid mentally frakked son of a bitch….”
Tagged ptsdfic
Lee stepped into sickbay. Dee quickly let go of his arm to go see Felix. That had been his plan as well, because he wanted to temper how Dee described the Admiral’s actions over the supposed final five. Dee was just a little too pleased and smug about the whole situation. At the same time, Dee was likely to do a better job of reminding Gaeta that the Admiral wasn’t angry with him.
If anything Bill Adama was too busy avoiding President Roslin and defending his decision to not airlock four loyal members of the crew who just happened to be defective Cylons or half Cylon. Roslin was livid, especially when the Quorum sided with Adama. His father had transcribed some of what Gaeta had told them under interrogation, and that the Cavil Cylons pointedly considered all of the people arrested defective and damaged goods that couldn’t be salvaged. That, coupled with their records as resistance fighters, and his father’s assurances that Tigh couldn’t assume command had calmed down most of the protests. Laura Roslin was angry, it didn’t take knowing her well to understand that, but publicly she was resigned to accepting it. She would come around, Lee thought. She would never be comfortable with any of the Cylons, but the Admiral would keep them out of her direct line of sight as much as he could. It was, Lee thought, a fair decision. They were all loyal soldiers, except Tory, and Tory had been a resistance fighter on New Caprica and popular. It wasn’t going to be an easy transition for any of them and he didn’t envy his father’s job but at the same time… He was glad no one was going out the airlock. He didn’t envy his father having to deal with Laura Roslin’s anger but he assumed they would get past it eventually. They were in love, after all.
That was a piece of information that once Felix Gaeta had said it, he’d known it was true. There were a lot of things that Gaeta had said that he had realized were true. The Admiral was wise to not broadcast the fact that Gaeta’s Cylon induced fantasy involved a mutiny, not because it was so patently impossible but because the only reason it didn’t succeed in the fantasy was because the Cylons stacked the deck. Not because it was impossible. And not because there wasn’t a possibility that people were that unhappy. The fantasy had taken place over a year and the base events, the Final Five, an alliance with rebel Cylons, were false, but the underlying problems were there. People were unhappy and hopeless and he doubted it had ever occurred to the President that her vision of Earth might not work out. It was something that he intended to keep an eye on. Gaeta wasn’t likely to be the source of that threat… Lee had a feeling that his father was going to pay a lot more attention to the CIC staff in general and Gaeta in particular. Especially since Racetrack and Laird had spread the story around that Gaeta had nearly died to help protect the fleet and his friends. Lee knew Kara wasn’t going to appreciate hearing it, but the reality that the man who had been captured and tortured by Cylons thought the revealed Cylons were innocent victims was one of the major things that kept her from going out the airlock.
But those concerns weren’t why he was looking for Cottle instead of joining Dee in visiting Felix. He didn’t consider himself to be superstitious, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. It was possible that it was just him, that he was being paranoid after almost two months of trying to draw facts out of an insane scenario. If that was the case, if he was just being paranoid, Cottle would say so. Cottle would call him some sort of name, and tell him to get over himself.
He stepped into the cramped office and waited until Cottle closed the door. “There’s something still wrong.”
Cottle looked at him and then sighed. He sat down in his chair heavily and lit up a cigarette. “I know. There is something still wrong here and I don’t know what it is. I was hoping you had figured out. Something isn’t right. We’ve missed something.” He tapped the thick file. “I spent the last twenty four hours rereading all of this and I can’t find the red flag. Why do *you* think something is wrong?”
Lee took a seat as well and opened the small notebook he’d been keeping. “Everything that Gaeta said happened in the scenario meant something. Louis Hoshi was his lover because he knew deep down that Hoshi was dead. That’s the thing that made him not believe the Cylons. That Louis Hoshi was alive.” Lee felt stupid going there but talking it out helped him think. “Is… is there any chance that Hoshi is alive?”
Cottle snorted with laughter. “No… No, Major Adama, Lt. Hoshi was dead when he was brought into sick bay. It was a heart attack. Even if by chance you thought he might have somehow faked his death, he didn’t.” He puffed his cigarette, his expression pensive. It occurred to Lee that Jack Cottle was as curious as he was about the mystery. Finally he said, “I did an autopsy, Lee. Because he was a young man to have a massive heart attack and I was worried that, with conditions being what they are here, that he might have had some sickness that could spread.” He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a much thinner file. “In fact, Hoshi was remarkably healthy except for the massive fatty plaque deposits in his heart that ultimately killed him. But in order to confirm that, I had to cut up his heart.” Cottle shrugged. “In case they didn’t tell you this in your high school health class, there’s not a lot of bounce back from an autopsy. And Gaeta was the one who told me that his family had a history of dying of this. Hoshi isn’t the problem.”
“Agreed.” Lee stood up and went to the whiteboard that Cottle had set aside in the office. “Louis is a point of difference but I think he was an anchor point for Gaeta, not something wrong that he was suppressing. What was real and repressed in the fantasy and what doesn’t have an explanation.” He snapped his fingers. “Hotdog and Cally having an affair, with Cally’s suicide.”
Cottle shook his head. “No that’s explained. Please don’t throw it around but… Brendan Costanza is the father of Cally’s baby. And until the Cylons came to New Caprica, Gaeta was friendly with the Tyrols. That goes under explained. So does your father’s secret affair with Laura Roslin. He was afraid to reveal those things.”
Lee dutifully wrote them down. “Gaeta stabbing Baltar. That doesn’t relate to any secret being suppressed.”
“Put that in the maybe pile.” Cottle tapped his ash into a cup. “No, it doesn’t relate to a secret but most of the story arc surrounding Baltar is wrapped up in Gaeta’s love/hate relationship with him. Things that happened with Baltar were never significant events. The forgiveness at the end? He gets something he always wanted, Gauis Baltar validating him as an equal. What about Tom Zarek murdering the Quorum?”
After a moment Lee shook his head. “That’s an anchor point, like Hoshi. He doesn’t trust Zarek, but the projection didn’t have anyone else close to power to put in the role. Tom killed the Quorum for no reason, a point of unrealism. What about the Crazy Eight in the Raptor?” That was a part of the scenario that never made sense to him.
Cottle waved it off. “We’ll never know unless we capture one of the Cylons that was torturing him… but that was Felix’s guilt and suicidal ideation talking and I suspect it was a motherfrakker getting him to get out of that mess.” He sighed. “Maybe that’s the problem we’re sensing. He’s suicidal.”
“Saying it out loud doesn’t make me feel better,” Lee said after a moment. “We both have known that for a while. I assume you have some plans in place. To have him see a counselor or something.” Cottle nodded. “So that’s not it. What else?” They went on for close to an hour, suggesting and debating aspects of the story, looking for the thing that had both of them convinced something was wrong.
Lee looked at the filled whiteboard. “Everything mattered. They were either clues that the scenario wasn’t real or things that Gaeta didn’t want to acknowledge in real life. Except…. “ He looked at the list. They had been talking about the Demetrious, and Sam shooting Gaeta. Sam shooting Gaeta in the leg. Gaeta’s leg being amputated. He looked at Cottle. “There’s something wrong with Gaeta’s leg.”
Cottle shook his head. “No there isn’t.”
“You said it, not me,” Lee pressed. “Gaeta puts things together, he makes connections that other people don’t. That’s why he’s good with Cylon technology, that’s why he knows more gossip about everyone around him than I’ll ever be able to process. Something is wrong with his leg. His leg being amputated… yes it adds a touch of awful to the story but it was one of the details that was always there. You know what I mean. It always happened in the same spot. He knows something is wrong with his leg…. Something that will lead to an amputation.” As he said it, he knew he was right. He could tell that Cottle saw the parallels but was surprised when the older man shook his head.
“It sounds right,” Cottle said carefully. “I’ll give you that. But there’s nothing wrong with Gaeta’s leg.”
Lee smiled. “I know you’re good, sir, but you’ve never made a mistake?”
“Now you’re just trying to pick a fight,” Cottle said, not without some gruff humor. “Let me put you through a class in the Jack Cottle School of Medicine. If you do well, I might take you as an intern.” He opened Gaeta’s thick medical file and began rummaging through it. “You’re suggesting that Felix Gaeta knows he’s a sick man and repressed it. That makes sense with what we know about his ability to put things together and his amazing ability to hide reality from himself. There are even some medical conditions that can sneak up on a person. I’ve seen that before. Frak, Louis Hoshi’s death is a prime example of that. The problem is that most illnesses and injuries that would necessitate a limb amputation are… obvious. Gunshot wounds obviously, bad breaks that don’t heal… its tragic when it happens but when it does, the decision usually has to be made within days at most. The chronic conditions are usually the result of long term illness.” He held out an X-ray and then a copy of an MRI scan. “When you rescued Gaeta, one of the first things I did once I knew he was physically stable, was scan him completely. I was actually looking for bugs.”
Lee looked at him quizzically. “Bugs?”
“Tracking implants.” Cottle rolled his eyes. “It seemed at the time that you got him off the base star a little too easily. I thought it was a trap. I was wrong, fortunately. But I did do a full body work up.” He tapped the x-ray. “That’s his right leg. It’s perfectly healthy. If we are dealing with a chronic condition, there would already be signs and while it’s not impossible, most chronic conditions that would lead to amputation occur in much older people. That leaves us with one other possibility, bone cancer. Which… could happen. He has risk factors, family members that had it, so he’d know what to look for. And the time frame works. If he was beginning to suspect something was wrong when he was captured, a year down the road, bone cancer in his leg would have progressed to where amputating would be the only way to save his life. But…. “He tapped the x-ray again. “I thought of this, Lee, especially when I read his family history, because with his history and when I realized just how far his ability to live in denial went, the early indicators would be something he would analyze and shove away… but this is healthy bone.”
Lee considered that. It still felt right, that was the problem. “If he was in the early stages of bone cancer right now, could you do something?” There wasn’t much joy in being right about what they were missing if the end result was Gaeta’s slow death.
Cottle nodded. “The problem with bone cancer is that people don’t notice it until it’s too late. If you feel an ache or a pain, you wave it off because its just an ache. People usually don’t go to the doctor until the pain becomes constant. Even in the late stages, before… if I had the medical resources of the colonies, it wouldn’t necessarily come to amputation. Now, if I caught it early, I could still excise it and vaccinate him against a recurrence. It’s the people in later stages that I don’t have the drugs to treat. But there’s no cancer in his right leg.”
“But there has to be. It’s the only thing that makes sense.” Lee considered everything. Felix had tied himself up in mental knots to avoid and ignore the unpleasant things he figured out. If he had relatives with cancer, he would have known the early signs. It came to him in a flash. “He’s making himself avoid it. Did you look at his left leg?”
“Why would I…”Cottle stopped himself, and then grinned. He took a long drag of his cigarette. “That stupid mentally frakked son of a bitch….”
Tagged ptsdfic