Fic: Centers of Gravity
Fandom: BSG
Pairing: Dualla/Gaeta
Rating: Language. Sexual “themes”
Word Count: 4156
AN: This is part of
Arc One . After finishing The Near Room, I realized I’d kind of
closed the first arc of the story I want to tell, freeing me to take a sort
of new tack. Ironically, given my (and the fen’s) dissatisfaction
with BSG’s gratuitous use of flashback story-telling, La Muse, Kink,
decided that was how this chapter needs to be told. Can we just chalk it
up to ironical? This takes place from the end of “Flight of the Phoenix”
through “Pegasus”, straight on out into the land of AU. It assumes
that the threatened attacks on Pegasus and Galactica did indeed take place.
I.
Now.
“Is he going to be okay?” Her voice is hoarse, like she’s
been screaming. She runs a quick review on the last several hours, and she
supposes that she has. She looks up at Doc Cottle and blinks the heat away
from her eyes.
Cottle leans tiredly against the bulkhead. “Shouldn’t you be
hitting the rack yourself?” he asks, in lieu of an answer. “You
hit your head pretty hard.” As if she’s going to be satisfied
with that.
“He can’t hear me,” she persists. Her grandmother always
called her stubborn. She can be stubborn for Felix. “The few moments
that he’s conscious, lucid…he can’t hear me.”
“Well, that generally is what happens when something explodes that
close to your ears,” Cottle says with a trace of his usual asperity.
“Will it get better?”
Cottle shrugs. She would think it careless, before seeing him with Roslin,
but now she knows better. “I don’t know. You sitting here all
night won’t make it any better.”
“No,” she agrees with a glance at Felix’s sleeping face.
And it is sleep now, not just unconsciousness. “But it does mean he
won’t wake up all alone.” Cottle opens his mouth to say something,
and she says firmly, “Not the first all-night duty I’ve pulled.”
Cottle throws up his hands and starts to stalk away. He turns back after
a step, though. “He’s an officer, you know,” he says,
easy as if she asked him for the time, or the weather, when there was such
a thing as weather.
“And I’m his friend,” she answers, a lie that gets easier
to say and harder to believe the more she repeats it, like pushing it up
into the air makes its imprint sink deeper inside her. She puts her fingers
over his, and tries not to feel heartsick about how cold they are. Felix’s
fingers are always cold. Well, except when they’re on her skin, but
she’s not going there. “That’s what friends do. They
look out for each other.”
“They do indeed,” Cottle murmurs.
He leaves and Dee goes back to running her hand lightly through Felix’s
hair—the part of it that’s not shaved and covered in bandages,
anyway. He doesn’t move. He might be dead, except for her compulsive
check and recheck of the rise and fall of his chest, the ‘accidental’
way she brings her wrist past his lips to feel his breath against her pulse.
“You have to be okay,” she whispers to him, no louder than the
squeak of the chair as she shifts to be closer to his ear. “Because
if you do not get better, Felix Gaeta, I will so kick your sorry ass up the
port side of this ship and down the starboard…”
She wants him to laugh. She wants him to wake up, look at her, say something.
Anything. She would even settle for one of his lectures on her total failure
at propriety. Really. She just wants him not to be lying here so still
and quiet. Well, he’s always been quiet, but he’s seldom still.
She unlaces her boots one handed and slides her feet free, then curls her
legs up under her and lays her head on the edge of his pillow. Close enough
she can hear the soft run of his breath, steady and deep. His hair still
smells like a wiring short. “You have to be okay,” she says
again, and then she’s too tired to say anymore, sliding.
II.
Then.
Dee’s tired. Well, she’s been tired for months, but this is
the kind of tired that goes well beyond the need for sleep and into pain.
Her body aches with it. She knows that what’s going to happen won’t
really be sleep so much as a state of profound unconsciousness. But even
that will be a blessing. A much-anticipated blessing. She starts undoing
the buttons on her blouse, anxious to save as much time as possible.
The corridor’s deserted, surprisingly enough. She has enough presence
of mind to wonder what time it is—she’s lost track of what shift
a long time ago. She pauses long enough to lift one leg and start loosening
her boot laces so that all she’ll have to do is toe them off and go
face down on her rack. It’s going to be great.
She’s halfway in the door when she sees Cally, hunched on her rack
and clearly crying her eyes out.
“Cally?” Dee hesitates, scanning the hall to make sure they
won’t be overheard, then goes to sit next to the Specialist on her
bunk. “Honey, what is it?”
Cally shakes her head, mopping her nose with an almost shredded piece of
tissue. She’s been crying for a while, if her red face and soft choking
sobs are anything to go by. Her hair is loose and fretted to spiky tangles.
Dee sighs and puts her arm around Cally, the only comfort she can really
offer, leaning her head against the Specialist’s wide shoulder. Cally
tips her head to rest against the crown of Dee’s and they sit like
that a while Cally cries herself out.
Finally, Cally gives one last gluey sniffle and says, “I got my test
results back from Cottle.”
Dee had nearly forgotten about the mandatory fertility testing, once her
own ordeal was over. So much had happened in the meantime. Still, at Cally’s
words, she feels the familiar twist and clench in the pit of her stomach.
“It was the bullet.” Cally sighs, the movement of her shoulder
indicating she wants to straighten. Dee lets her go and Cally sits up, scrubbing
her red-rimmed eyes with the heel of her hand. “Or really, the fever
after the bullet. And then the scarring.” A half-laugh that’s
not in the least funny. “And you know, it’s not like I ever
even thought about whether I wanted to have kids or not. I just wanted to
go to dental school. Fix people’s teeth.”
At once, the tears start up again and she turns into Dee. Dee catches her,
putting her cheek against Cally’s bent head. Her own eyes burn with
hurtful, hateful tears, but she swallows hard, swallows them back. She’d
like to say, it isn’t fair, but none of this is. What they’ve
done, what’s been done to them…none of it’s fair at all
and Cally knows it as well as she does.
“I’m sorry,” is what she says instead, over and over, a
whispered litany. “Oh Cally, I’m so sorry…”
III.
Now.
“Dee.”
As if against the weight of the bronze coins they laid over the eyes of
the dead, Dee fights to open her eyes. The unvarying and too-bright light
of the infirmary cuts at her like a sword, and she fumbles for something
like a rational thought. “B…Billy?”
She’d been dreaming of summer nights at her grandmother’s, after
all the men were back from their shifts at the mines and the air was warm
as blood and sweet with the aroma of honeysuckle and barbeque. A little
horrified, she realizes the smell of burnt flesh that permeates the infirmary
is very like that remembered scent. She looks at Felix, her fingers twined
through his unbandaged hand and bites down hard on her lip. “What
are you doing here?”
She’s surprised to see Billy here. Surely it would be safer at the
moment for Roslin to remain on Colonial One; Felix’s injuries can attest
to the dangers of being on Galactica.
Another slow and silent grope for the brain power to cut through her bone-deep
exhaustion, and she realizes he’s angry.
“I could ask you the same question,” he answers tightly, and
nods towards Felix.
“Did we have plans?” she asks stupidly, rubbing gunk from the
corners of her eyes. “I…there was an explosion. Another explosion,
when Pegasus… F… Lieutenant Gaeta was hurt.”
“I see that.” Again his words sound pressed flat, seething below
the surface but too smooth on top to leave her anything to grasp.
“Billy,” she says finally. “I don’t understand.”
“Is it him?” He nods towards Felix again, and the repressed
anger of that simple movement makes her fingers tighten protectively over
Felix’s. “Or is it Captain Apollo?”
“Lee?” she asks, still several steps behind.
“Yes, Lee.” Billy flings the name like a curse. “Or
do you even know?” His voice changes, cracking. “Dee, I thought…”
Oh. Oh. Dee feels like smacking herself in the forehead at her own
density. “Oh. Oh, Billy, I’m sorry…”
“No.” He wraps his arms around his shoulders, a tightly wound
picture of misery. “No, don’t be sorry, Dee.”
It’s her own fault. She’d told Felix she’d talk to Billy,
and she’d meant it, but so many things had conspired to take
her time and attention between then and now. And so it had gone on, unsaid.
Until now, when it’s too late and she’s going to end up hurting
a thoroughly nice young man for no good reason other than, I want something
else. Someone else.
Dee bites her lip and looks at Felix again, at his pale golden fingers twined
through hers, at the bandages that mar his face and arm, already stained faintly
with blood. She didn’t plan this. Not a bit of it, from beginning
to end, any more than she’d planned to kiss Billy, the tiny pebble
that started this whole avalanche of pain. But that doesn’t make it
any less her fault. Or any less the truth.
“I am sorry,” she says quietly. Her voice shakes, as
does the rest of her, but she sits straight, her hand unmoving where it rests
over Felix’s. “I made a mess of it, and I’ve hurt you
and I didn’t mean to, and I don’t have a good reason for any
of it, not that I know what would be a good reason, because you’re
great, Billy, you really are, but…”
Billy holds up a hand, stopping her mid-babble. “Stop. Just…stop,
Dee, please. I don’t want to hear how great I am, okay? Just…”
His mouth brackets. “Never mind. I don’t know what.”
He turns on his heel and leaves her there.
The guilty part of her wants to go and chase after him. She wants him to
understand. She wants him to forgive her. But those are both selfish desires,
and will only hurt him worse. She glances sideways again. Besides, she
doesn’t want Felix to wake alone. Having so spectacularly taken his
side, she can’t bring herself to abandon it now.
“Well,” she murmurs, trailing her other hand through the coarse
ruffle of his hair, “so much for careful.”
IV.
Then.
“So what’s up with the giant hickey on the back of your neck,
Ellll-Tee?” Kat draws out the letters mockingly.
“Huh? What?” Distracted, tired, Felix reaches towards the
back of his neck by reflex, but Hotdog gets there first, pushing the collar
of his open jacket and tanks aside for a better look. “Oooh!”
he crows as he tries vainly to bat him away. “Bite mark here too.”
Kara looks up curiously from her hand and tilts her head to see. “Looks
almost a week old,” the pilot observes, presumably speaking from long
experience. "Damn." She looks at her cards again and reaches to move one
card elsewhere in the spread. She stops halfway through the gesture, though,
and as Kat, Hotdog, and Jeffries from Laundry wrestle with him, discussing
whether they should strip him to look for other telltale marks, he sees her
lips part with surprise and that bright hazel gaze shoots back to him.
She always tells him his Triad face is for shit; he’s naked to her
now and he knows it, heart sinking.
She’s got that grin on her face, like when she’s won the last
‘double or nothing’ hand of the game, crooked and smug. He jerks
out of Hotdog and Jeffries grip and shoves Kat aside, plants himself in the
chair again and just waits for Kara to blow the big punchline.
Gaeta’s frakking Dee.
But she doesn’t. She just tips her head and cigar to him, and goes
back to the game. He’s too surprised—and too exhausted—to
feel grateful.
V.
Now.
“Dee?”
She’s spent so much time listening for the least little noise he might
make that the actual sound of his voice wakes her even from the deepest sleep
with a gasp. Her head comes up from the cradle of her arms, and she blinks
sleep away. “Felix?”
“That’s Lieutenant to you.” His voice is cracked and raspy,
but he’s feeling well enough to make jokes and that’s something.
“Yes, sir,” she replies, equally deadpan. “Sorry. Sir.”
He smiles at her and she smiles back, but even that little gesture must
hurt, because his breath catches and he suddenly goes very still, easing
back on the bed’s pillow. They are quiet a time, but she reaches to
clasp his hand again, her thumb stroking along the surface of his skin.
It feels so thin, so unendurably delicate.
Finally: “How long?”
Dee shakes her head. “Not long. Overnight.”
Something in his eyes moves, shadows she can’t read. “You stayed
with me?”
“Of course I did,” she answers sharply. Her insides are quaking,
the trembling release of the tension she’s held onto through all these
uneasy hours. “What do you think?”
His tongue wets dry, bitten lips, and his eyes break from hers to count tiles
on the ceiling. “Thank you.”
Something in his voice snags her, a minute fracture, a marginal shift. “Felix—“
“You should go,” he cuts in over her, his voice gaining in strength.
“You shouldn’t be here.”
“I wanted to make sure you were all right.”
“I’m fine. I appreciate your concern.” Now his voice
turns professional; politely cool.
She can’t help it; it hurts. “Felix—“ she tries
again.
“Dee—“ his voice breaks on her name, urgent. Something
in her shatters at the same time, vibrating to a note she can’t hear.
“You shouldn’t be here.”
“I’m not allowed to be concerned for my friends?” she
asks, stung that he would think she’s only here because he slept with
her. As if the time that went before it means nothing. As if she isn’t
the kind of person who would be here regardless, whether it was him, or Cally,
or even Helo.
He mumbles something, distorted by the dry grate of his voice. It sounds
like, “It’s not safe.”
“What?” She can’t have heard him right; that makes no
sense. Not safe?
“I’m tired,” he says instead, turning his face away from
her.
“I’m not on duty for another few hours,” she says gently,
trying to close the sudden and unexpected gap. “I can stay, in case
you dr…”
“Go, Dee. Please. Just go.” He pulls his hand from hers, a
gesture that causes him pain; she sees it in the way his teeth tighten behind
his lips.
A part of her wants to retreat—in pain, in confusion. Things
with Wentworth ended so badly; she remembers why it’s been so long
since she’s opened herself up to the possibility of this kind of miserable
uncertainty. But behind it is steely anger, inflexible and supernova hot.
Her grandmother did not raise her to back down from a fight, no matter
how pigheaded the other person was being, damn it.
“No,” she answers flatly, and sits back, planting herself deeper
in the chair through the aching protest of her body.
He isn’t expecting it; his head jerks back towards her. “What?”
“I said no,” she repeats and fights the urge to cross
her arms over her chest like a child. “Because whatever you seem to
think, we are still friends, dammit, and I’m going to act like
it.”
Felix draws in breath to speak, but at once, his chest hitches and what
comes out instead is a splatter of blood, darkly crimson and shocking.
VI.
Then.
She’s back on Sagittaron; the flat dusty plains called farmland
in the absence of anything better. Her mother’s father had had a house
out here; she remembers dimly because the old man had died when she was six.
She’d been there only once, twice, both times at a very young age,
but she recognizes the tired and rusty shoulders of the looming mountains,
and the strange, mucky green-black of the soil.
She has an especially good view of the dirt, buried in it to just above her
breasts, held trapped and immobile. She’s naked, and against her skin
it’s sticky and cold. She can see others, like her, also ensnared.
They are all women, as far as she can crane and turn and see. She can see
the panicked rim of white around their eyes and the way their hair—in
all possible colors—thrashes and threshes with the frantic movement
of their heads.
Terror is like a bubble, rising from her belly to her chest where it threatens
to explode;
not only with the reasonable fears of what happened? Who did this to
me—us? but with some unnamed and unknown sense of impending doom
even more terrible than the predicament she finds herself.
In the distance, impossible to see clearly, hazy flashes of sanguine red.
They strobe: left-right, left-right.
Cylons.
She redoubles her struggles against the weight of the mud, but it’s
no good. She’s too deep and held too firmly. The ground has no give.
She sees them now, coalescing out of the darkness; lanky silver bodies like
razors given life and movement and that single roving eye.
They stride up and down the rows, pause at each woman. Their hands lengthen
into sharp talon points and they bend, to scrape all the flesh away in a
single swipe, leaving only the skull, still screaming but in silence.
In their grip, the flesh changes, liquid and revolting, into a baby. A second
Cylon behind the first holds up a basket, prosaic and wooden, and the first
puts the baby inside. Further behind are trucks, windowless and huge, snuffling
like great beasts. A silver ant-trail of Cylons goes back and forth between
them, dumping the infants in great sobbing piles. The sound of their screaming,
and the screams of the women near her make Dee think she’s going to
go mad.
Knowing what’s coming, she almost wishes so. Madness would be a blessing.
Helpless to do anything other, she watches them come. No one is spared.
No plea, no curse, no scream produces any reaction other than that silent
and implacable efficiency. If the Lords are watching, they watch in silence,
and they do not interfere.
Dee refuses to give voice to her terror as she watches death walk closer
on stilt-like silver legs. She bites her tongue as the Cylon’s taloned
hand dips toward her upturned face, hard enough to taste blood.
The tips sink in, too fine for her to even feel pain until it starts to
rip…
In her bunk, Dee lurches awake, shuddering, heart hammering under her flattened
palm and the taste of blood on her bitten tongue.
VIII.
Now.
“Doc!” Dee shouts, lurching to her feet, then vibrating in place
as she battles between the impulse to touch him and the fear she’ll
only make it worse. “Doc!”
Cottle comes in and pushes her aside; one of the medics grabs her by the
shoulders and pulls firmly her out of the curtained area before going back
in to assist. Dee stands on unsteady legs, her hand over her mouth to hold
in whatever is rising up through her belly and diaphragm in hard, evil shudders.
She wants to move. She’s not even sure her thighs, her knees will
hold her, but she can’t. Every cell of her is bent in his
direction, listening to the mutter of medical jargon and the idiot yammer
of the machines and worst—o worst—Felix’s every choking
gasp.
I didn’t mean it, she thinks, hand still plastered over her
dry and spitless mouth. I wasn’t really angry… Don’t
die. Don’t you frakking die…
IX.
Then.
“So.” Kara turns the chair across from Dee and plops down in
it, crossing her arms over the high back. “You and Felix, huh?”
Dee spits tea and chokes. Kara’s lucky to have a pilot’s reflexes
because otherwise, she’d have gotten a faceful. Instead, she laughs
delightedly while pounding Dee on the back. “Who…” Dee
can’t finish, her lungs and throat closing as she coughs. “Who…”
“Well, I guess that would be…you,” Kara answers,
settling back as Dee straightens. “You got a hell of a bite on you.”
Dee chokes again, heat sweeping her heels to crown. Kara just cocks her
head and watches this time, still clearly amused as hell.
“You’re…enjoying this, aren’t you?” Dee growls,
when she can breathe again.
Kara grins. “Yeah, actually. I am. So Felix is ‘great sex’,
huh? Who’da thought? They say you gotta look out for the quiet ones.”
The pilot nods wisely.
“Kara…”
Kara gets up and ruffles Dee’s hair, messing it horribly. “Don’t
worry, Dee. I’m not going to tell anyone. Who would believe me anyway?”
X.
Now.
Dee doesn’t know how long she’s standing there before Ishay comes
up behind her. “Dee?” The medic puts her hand over Dee’s
shoulder, squeezing lightly. “Dee, honey, come away now. Come on.
There’s nothing you can do; Major Cottle’s got it. Come on
now…”
She doesn’t want to. She doesn’t want to, but her nerveless
lack of strength prevents her from being able to put up a good fight as Ishay
drags her away.
XI.
Then.
Time flies…except when it doesn’t.
Sometimes, contrary to all the laws of physics, it seems to slow, stretch,
bend.
Stop.
He remembers Tigh’s voice, bellowing. “Brace for impact!”
He remembers grabbing the edge of his console.
And then nothing.
Or, not quite nothing.
Light.
And then darkness.
And then pain.
His lungs are empty; he can’t make them fill.
But that pain is buried in the others; millions of cells each with it’s
own damage report, it’s own singular agony. He can’t collate
or separate them, and yet he feels every one.
There’s heat on his face; wetness. He thinks it’s blood.
It seems like there should be noise. The CIC is always noisy, but there’s
only a silence that is somehow cottony, and on top of it, a beat like a giant
fist demanding entrance.
Is it Cain? Is she pounding on Galactica’s hull? She’s crazy;
he wouldn’t put it past her.
Felix wishes he could see. Wishes he understood what was happening. There
are thoughts, but they’re as tumbled as the rest of him, out of order
and uncatalogued. He knows there’s a logical reason it’s not
Cain, but he can’t quite remember what it is. He knows there’s
a reason he hurts so much, but that thought vanishes into a darkness he can’t
penetrate as well. He should be at his action station, shouldn’t he?
Something—someone—touches his face, and he flinches, half in
memory, half in pain. A swipe across his eyes and suddenly, blearily he
can see.
Dee.
There’s blood on her face. Or he thinks it’s on her face; everything
is hazed in red, and he can’t tell if the crimson he sees is actual,
or something on the surface of his eye. It trickles, and he thinks it must
be hers. She’s hurt. Oh, no; she’s hurt. He tries to reach
for her, but she grabs his hand and forces it down to his side again.
Her lips move. He can’t hear her; Cain is still drumming on the hull,
drowning all other sound, but he knows her well enough to know the words.
“Stay down. Don’t move.”
“You’re hurt,” he tries to say, but nothing comes out.
Right; there’s no air in his lungs. Should do something about that.
Lungs need air. Sort of important. He wonders how exactly that works.
Normally, his lungs did all the work on their own, without any interference
from him.
And could someone please tell Cain to stop? he wants to ask. We
frakking hear her already!
Nope. Still no air.
On the other hand, he figures someone must have said something to Cain, because
the steady beat of her demented fist stutters.
Wait. No…
Cain isn’t here. Cain is on the Pegasus. She can’t be beating
on the hull. No air in space either. What is that noise?
It stutters again.
There are tears running down Dee’s face with the blood.
It’s okay , he wants to tell her. But it isn’t, and he
wouldn’t lie. He tries to touch her face again, brush away those tears,
that look, but this time he can’t make his hand move at all.
This should hurt, he thinks. The drum beat throb is discordant now,
it’s rhythm broken, falling off, fading away. I wonder why it doesn’t.
Dee’s lips are moving again, but he can’t hear anything at all.
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