Fic: Sketches from the Journal of a Dead Man (Gaeta, Baltar - G)

[millarific]

Title: Sketches From the Journal of a Dead Man
Author: millari
Characters: Baltar, Gaeta
Pairing: implied Gaeta/Baltar
Rating: G
Warnings: none
Wordcount: 600
Summary: On New Caprica, Gaeta plays a private but deadly game.
Author's Note: This was written for the community's Shipper War Challenge Inspired by a prompt by the lovely selphish.


The Cylons left the core of Colonial One with no more answers than when their meeting had started. They filed past Gaius' desk one by one, expressions ranging from grim to annoyed. Only he and Felix were left behind to contemplate their existence in this glorified prison.

Felix, as usual, avoided his gaze, as he often did when his job didn't require him to interact with the President. Gaius watched his chief of staff and former lover, body curled like a question mark over his legal pad, scribbling something with great intention into the margins. Gaius sighed. There was a time when Felix would have been the one watching him, he thought, with rapt attention no less. At the moment, however, Felix didn't even seem to even remember that he was there.

“Why do you bother?” he broke the silence, voice dripping with enough sarcasm to cover the bittersweet nostalgia.

Felix's head startled upward, his expression hunted as he briefly focused on Gaius, then looked back down at his pad. “Bother with what?”

“You do know that they make you take those notes just to keep you feeling like you have a role.”

Felix's features twisted in annoyance as his gaze dove back down over the pad, in a way that was so familiar, yet so unsatisfying at the same time. “Since when do you care in the least about anything I do?” he replied, an evenness to his tone that Gaius couldn't decide whether it was depressing or maddening. Maddening seemed the more desirable option. At least there was agency in that.

He let his voice adopt a deliberate sneer. “Do you really think they ever look at your little sheets of paper once you file them away, Felix?” He hoped the man would rise to the bait. Even a screaming match would be better than this wall of nothingness between them ever since the occupation. But as usual, Felix retreated into silence, his only reply the sound of his pen scratching loudly, angrily against the pad, a resolute dismissal. It made Gaius itch for a fight.

He propelled himself out of his chair and closed the space between them, his words goading and aggressive. “Give here,” he ordered, grabbing the pad out of his hands before Felix could catch up. "What the frak do you even write on there anyway?”

Felix snatched back at it, like the victim of a schoolyard game of keep-away-the-Pyramid-ball. The moment of panic in Felix's eyes only bolstered Gaius' resolve that he was finally getting somewhere. All bets were off though when his gaze fell upon the contents in the pad's margins. He gasped, stunned.

At the edges of a set of perfectly unremarkable notes, hidden in the margins, was an excellent and tiny likeness of a Cavil in mid-rant, miniscule arms spread wide, catching a hail of tiny black bullets in his chest, coming from somewhere off the page. Gaius stood there, unable to take his eyes off it.

The moment of shock gave Felix enough time to snatch the pad back with a scowl. “Of course they don't read them,” he said. He ripped the pages off his pad, his tone clipped and bitter, and gave Gaius a real chance to meet his gaze for the first time. His eyes held the vacant expression of a man who thought himself already dead. “If they ever do, I'm sure I'll be the first to know.”

Comments

[lls-mutant.livejournal.com]

Oh, wow, that last line is chilling!!!! I always wondered about Felix's sketches there, and man... what a way to spin such a little detail. Lovely!

[millarific.livejournal.com]

Thank you for reading!

Yeah, I had always wondered too about those drawings, and how the Cylons never noticed him doing that and never said something, but I guess he was just that invisible to them. But I was reminded of this detail by a prompt from selphish wanting something about Gaeta's drawings, and this just came to me in a flash. Glad you liked what I did with it!

[trovia.livejournal.com]

Agreeing with Mutant. It really is chilling to think that Gaeta would have drawn those pictures knowing he's just that invisible, and that useless to the Cylons that there's a fair chance they'd just get rid of him because of those pictures (Baltar, after all, could draw pictures all he wants. And you automatically contrast Felix and Baltar if you read this, since it's a story from Baltar's POV but about Felix). The fact that he really never was caught must have fucked him up so much. Add to that the fact that he must have known on some subconscious level, or at least on a subconscious level of concern, that the Eight was using him to kill people on top of that. If there ever was anything that would give you PTSD.

I certainly agree that that's why he was shown drawing pictures, too, as a way of showing how invisible he was.

[millari.livejournal.com]

Glad you liked this. It was a lot of dark fun to write. This is a very numbed-out Gaeta, for sure, one who truly feels as impotent as Baltar claims to in all his dramatic speeches to Caprica in canon. While Baltar talks about having no agency and no importance, in fact his actions and even complaints show you the contrast between him and someone like Gaetaa. For all that he is shown under the thumb of the Cylons, he is also shown lecturing them and arguing with them. They take him seriously in a way that they do not take Gaeta. In a New Caprica fic I'm currently working on, I have Cavil only ever refer to him as "The Notetaker". I think they saw him much like that, someone that they kept around because he was a mindless appendage to Baltar's administration that they were propping up "to cover their existential asses" as Cavil once said.

I liked the idea that he felt so powerless and fucked-up that he passive-aggressively flirted with their wrath in order just to feel like he had agency at all. Nice that you can see it that way too.

[nicole-anell.livejournal.com]

I've never read this before seeing it in the remix and I'm so glad I found it now. I just love this little glimpse of New Caprica Gaeta! There's something really adorable about the idea of his violent little doodles but that last line kills me. :(

[millari.livejournal.com]

Hey! Nice to see you around. :)

Thanks for reading and for the comment. I got a great remix of this story, didn't I? I'm pleased that it intrigued you enough to go back and look over this story too. I was always curious about his doodling we saw in "Exodus", and this came to me very quickly once the prompt reminded me of it. I find the idea wonderfully disturbing that Felix would be playing with his life like this.

You remind me that I need to get back to the Remix and finish checking out stories there.

[fragrantwoods.livejournal.com]

Oh, this was chilling and very tense, but I do love the idea of him taking such risk to make a few jabs, even if no one else saw them :-)

[millari.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I find very interesting the perspective of Gaeta on New Caprica, working for the puppet administration, how he saw himself during that period. I kind of picture this little vignette happening possibly before Felix connected with the Resistance and felt more doomed in his situation. I think the doodles were part impotent anger at the Cylons and part self-destructive anger at himself for staying with the Occupation government and feeling like he was not achieving anything. I think he originally stayed when the Cylons took over, thinking that he would find a way to undermine the Cylons, but then after a while, when he wasn't finding a way to do that, he realized that he had trapped himself into being nothing but a pointless collaborator. I think he was losing hope a couple of months in, and the doodles were a way to express some kind of agency against the Cylons, to feel less like an invisible, compliant tool that they didn't even take seriously as a threat.