Fic: Blown

I had the worst time with this part; I'm not quite sure why.

Fandom: BSG
Pairing: Gaeta/Dualla
Rating: Gen. Some language; mention of rape.
Word Count: 2022 I.

The damn stupid thing is that she sees it coming.

Later, she’ll hear all the platitudes; fatigue, ‘it happened so fast’, ‘there’s no way you could’ve known’, blah blah sugar. But it’s crap. The truth is, she froze.

She knows the board shouldn’t light up like a frakking Midwinter tree; so bright the lines of code fade to ghosts imprinted on the back of her eyelids when it finally blows and she’s shoved back hard as if by a giant fist to the chest.

She hears “Dee!” but can’t tell where it’s coming from. Whose voice. And then she must lose some time, because the next thing she knows clearly is she can’t breathe and there’s blood in her nose and the Old Man’s leaning over her.

Oh Gods; she’s flat on her back and the Old Man’s watching. She should be at her station.

“I’m okay. I’m okay, sir.” She is . She has to be. Frak, what happened? She tries to sit up, but Adama won’t let her. It irritates her, as does as her own dumbness in getting herself blown up.

“Mr. Gaeta, find out what happened,” Tigh snaps, and Dee tries to get on her feet again, so she can see what’s going on. Something’s wrong. What’s wrong? What happened?

Something’s wrong with Felix; she knows that. She saw it when he came back up from the infirmary. He’d been so pale, his thumb rubbing his first two fingers in that nervous habit he has. She hadn’t had time to ask him what, but Tigh ragging him won’t help. Is Felix okay? Is that what’s wrong? Finneran comes up from behind and pulls her up like a doll.

“I’m okay,” she says again, impatient, and jerks out of his hands. It doesn’t matter that her legs don’t quite feel strong enough to hold her; she’ll manage.

“Dee,” Finneran hisses and pulls on her arm, “I gotta get you down to the Doc. Orders.”

“Wait, no…” Gods, her head aches ; she can’t think. She should be at the board, shouldn’t she? She doesn’t remember hearing the chime for shift change. She wipes her nose and comes away with a handful of gore without quite understanding why. Finneran puts an arm around her and half-lifts her from her feet.

“…it’s a frakking fact!”

She looks back over Finneran’s shoulder. Felix is shouting. Why is Felix shouting?

“I’m fine ,” she tells Finneran yet again. She tries to rip free. Finneran lets her go, but it’s another mistake, another miscalculation. Her legs won’t hold, after all. She takes an unsteady step and plunges feet first into darkness.


II.

The problem is that he can’t focus.

Oh, his hands still move two steps in front of his brain, but it’s all autopilot, moving from one mechanical task to the next; chasing, hunting, following trails of light and air down electronic paths.

How did this happen? How could this happen?

Behind it is a massive standing wave of darkness, a sucking terror in which the only sounds that can be heard is the race of his breath and his heart, and the endless litany of what did I do, what did she make me do, what’s happened to me, what the frak is WRONG with me…?

Worst is Dee. Gods, Dee. He keeps replaying the explosion in his mind. He keeps hearing her scream. And he wonders.

Wonders if she’s okay.

Wonders if he’s responsible, another shard of broken time he can’t quite recall.

Wonders what else is buried inside him, biding its time.

He doesn’t trust himself, but he can’t bring himself to tell Tigh, and anyway, there is no one else. No one knows the system like he does, and their skeleton crew gets more skeletal every day.

He brushes the end of a stripped wire, and gets shocked for his trouble.

Gods, Felix, focus…

He remembers what Tigh did to Tyrol, after Sharon-the-First shot the Old Man. The bruises that took a couple weeks to heal, the cracked rib. Tyrol was only frakking Sharon; he can’t imagine what the XO will do to him, if he ever discovers that Felix is the one who gave Sharon the gun. Or rather, he imagines all too well.

Wait… What? No, that’s not right… A-ha! There! He’s pulled away from his reveries of being vented from an airlock by an anomalous data string that tries to wriggle from his prying fingers like a fish on the hook. What the frak?

He blinks, and it’s gone again.

Ugh. He scrubs tiredly at his eyes. This is getting him nowhere.


III.

Her head hurts.

Dee floats up from soft and enfolding darkness with only that thought. Despite the pain, it’s rather a nice change; just the one thought rather than dozens circling like frightened or hungry birds.

But of course, it doesn’t last long.

Eventually, she has to ask the question: Why does my head hurt? And then everything else comes dragging in its wake. The explosion. Adama leaning over her. The blood from her face, smeared across her palm.

Dee opens her eyes and brings her hand up to her face. The skin’s been sponged clean. It’s ashy with dryness. She’s got a little tube of hand lotion in her fatigues—her fingers ache when they get too dry—she reaches for it, and only then realizes she’s not wearing her fatigues.

Wait. No. Step back. Where is she?

She lifts her head. The infirmary. Okay; that makes sense. She hit her head, probably her side too, considering how it’s hurting. Of course they’d bring her to the infirmary. She’s not naked, and she’s never been real body-shy, but Dee nonetheless wraps the sheet around her as she sits.

Or tries to sit; her aching head is quick to tell her why that’s a bad idea, black edging her vision and a red throb of agony behind her eyes. She settles for hiking herself a little higher on the flat pillow.

Where is everyone? Anyone? Did they just strip her and abandon her unconscious body? “Hello?”

Oh. Ow. Okay, even talking is not our friend right now; check.

After a few moments, Cottle appears, pushing aside the curtain. This time there is a cigarette dangling lazily from his lips, although yet unlit. He regards her in silence with hangdog eyebrows raised.

“Um. My clothes?” she asks, making sure to pitch her voice much lower this time. It still jags through her skull, but less so. A hammer, versus sledgehammer. See? She learns.

“You have a concussion,” Cottle says, also considerately in a stage whisper. “Where exactly do you think you’re going?”

“I have to get back to the board.” She’s surprised he even has to ask. “Fema’s not good enough to handle the day watch.”

“Well, today, she’ll have to be.” Cottle digs a penlight from the pocket of his lab coat and shines it fast across both her eyes. Dee blinks away little colored spots, each of them their own particular flavor of agony.

“She’ll drop calls,” Dee insists.

Cottle shrugs. “If it’s really important, I’m sure they’ll call back.”

“You’re not listening to me.”

“No, I heard you quite well, young lady. There’s nothing wrong with my hearing. Now you listen to me. You. Have. A. Concussion. Fortunately a fairly mild one, but bad enough that I don’t want you going anywhere near the board for the time being. You are off-shift.”

Dee’s fists clenched, ire sparking in her chest like a fire no bigger than her cupped palm. “I’m fine.”

“Who’s the doctor here?” Cottle asks. She glares at him. Cottle’s lips twist and he steps back from her bedside. “But by all means..” He gestures towards her clothes, laid over the back of a chair. They didn’t even fold them, dammit.

Irritated, she swings her feet from the bed. The curtained little cubicle revolves slowly around her, but she ignores it, as she ignores the renewed grating throb behind her eyeballs and temples. She slides slowly and carefully down until her toes touch the deck, which, as usual, is cold. Ha. So far so good; she’d told him she was fi…

Cottle is surprisingly deft on his feet for a man his age; he steps in and catches her as her knees buckle, easing her back on the mattress. “Now perhaps you’ll be more inclined to listen to me when I tell you you’re not ready to go somewhere.”

“I’m fine,” Dee insists defiantly.

“Of course you are.” Cottle produces a lighter and ignites his cigarette. The smell of the smoke makes her stomach spin and turn queasily. “I’m sure it was just the massive unevenness of the deck at that particular spot, made you fall. Don’t think twice about it. I’ll get Maintance to look into it right away.”

“I’m fine,” Dee says a third time, as she brings her legs back up and slides them under the blanket.

“Yeah, okay.”


IV.

“I helped you,” he says without preamble, the moment Baltar undogs his door and peers out with one suspicious and slightly lunatic eye. He crowds past the doctor, rubbing his thumb restlessly over the balls of his first two fingers. “Now I need your help.”

It galls him to have to play this card. Uncovering Godfrey’s tampering with the vid of Baltar bombing the defense net had been his duty, not a favor. To play on something he would’ve done anyway seems cheap and sordid. Nonetheless, it’s really the only card he has to play.

“My help?” Baltar sounds vaguely panicky as he hastily tucks his shirt into his pants. Felix just doesn’t want to know. Close proximity over the past few weeks has made him realize that while Baltar may be brilliant, he’s nonetheless several Vipers short of a squadron. He’s not interested in the other man’s aberrant behavior, only his brain.

“Is this about why the lights keep flickering?”

Oh, right. That. “Yes. No. Well, yes but no.” Coming to Baltar had been an impulse, and Felix is the first to admit he doesn’t do well on impulse. He’s a planner by nature. Now that he’s here, he’s not sure what to say, or how to say it.

I think Shelley Godfrey was a Cylon.

I think she raped me, and then somehow made me forget about it.

I think she’s done something to my brain.

I think she made me help Sharon try to kill Adama.

It seems like a lot to swallow, even by someone as unbalanced as Gaius Baltar. Not to mention that Baltar is far from the bravest of men. Felix isn’t really sure that Baltar wouldn’t sell him out to Tigh, if he thought it was in his best interest.

Has he tried to have you, yet?

It’s a bitter pill to swallow, when considering how he’s admired Baltar’s teachings for years.

It’s even bitterer to realize that he really doesn’t have any other options.

As long as he doesn’t know what sort of time bomb might be lurking in the back recesses of his mind, he’s a danger to the ship and everyone on it.

He said to Dee, I don’t want to let anyone down. It’s no less true now, just because he’s not talking about an affair between an officer and a noncom. If anything, it’s more. He doesn’t want to be spaced from an airlock, but even that’s preferable to helping the Cylons eradicate the last of humanity from the universe. He doesn’t think of himself as particularly brave, but he’s always known there are things he’s willing to die for.

“I need…” What does he need? What will help him unravel this knot inside of him, and when and if it’s finally untangled, will he find out it’s the only thing holding him together? Frak. He hates this too; asking for help. The Lords help those who help themselves, his father had said, more times than there are stars in the sky. Don’t go pushing yourself off on others, boy; stand on your own two feet.

“I need a brain scan. Will you help me?”

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