Fic: The Life Within Part 2/3
Aug. 31st, 2007 07:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
millarificTitle: The Life Within, Part 2/3 (Link here to part 1)
Author: millarific
Characters: Gaius, Caprica, D'Anna. Brief appearances by Gaeta, Boomer, The Hybrid and other Cylons.
Pairing: Gaius/Caprica
Wordcount: 3,936
Rating: PG, for brief sexual encounters and nondescript mentions of torture
SPOILERS: Through Season 3: "The Passage"
Warnings: A bit AU, but don't let that scare you. I make it all work out in canon by the end!
Summary: Gaius, Caprica, polyamory, angst, hybrids! What more could you want?
Author's Note: This was based on an idea by fahrbotdrusilla who participated in a vid-for-fic exchange with me. You can (and should!) view the high-quality, absolutely beautiful vid she made for me here. Btw, please see Part 1's header for more details and thank-yous.
This is probably a stupidly risky move. But he has been so very bored. And the Cylons – even D’Anna and Caprica – still tell him next to nothing.
The corridors are dead quiet, other than the constant droning of the basestar; but Gaius barely hears that anymore. He slinks down another long empty corridor of nothing but metal and pulsing lights, seconds ticking off in the back of his consciousness. He’s been watching the Centurions for days now. If his memory is accurate – and he’s not used to it failing him – he’s only two turns away; he has another fifteen minutes and thirty seconds before the Centurions will appear again.
He can’t stop the sharp intake of breath when he first sees her. She is madness incarnate, with eyes of palest blue, as if whatever they’d done to her had drained the very consciousness out of her head, leaving her dry and voided.
The Hybrid.
How can they keep her here this way, attached to pipes and left to babble incoherently in a tank of water? It occurs to Gaius that the animals on his family’s farm had had more autonomy.
Her brilliant mind simultaneously perceives and controls everything on this ship; she’s an organic computer. Gaius knows that if he can just get some quiet time alone with her, to listen, that he will understand her. If he can crack her code… that would be a real source of power for him among the Cylons, one that would make hybrid fatherhood look quaint.
As he approaches her, she visibly startles, jerks her head towards him. Her monologue begins almost immediately, with a single word: “Listen!”
He crouches down next to the tank.
“Far beneath the silence, every single silence, a symphony, beneath the surface of the sun; the way is shown to those who listen…”
“I’m listening,” he whispers to her, excitement pounding through him. “Tell me! I can speak for you, to the others.”
“Skies full of fire; gold glitters on the water; listen and bring them to new life; will you listen?”
“Yes! I will!” he exclaims, forgetting himself. He whirls his head around, fearful of the Centurions’ return. The Hybrid is staring at him, her body straining out of the water and against the pipes, as if trying to reach him; and yet, he can see that she is looking right through him. His mind races to attach meaning to her babble, which dances just on the edge of utter nonsense.
“The
“Bring what to life? I don’t understand.”
Her head and shoulders fall back into the water, as if she cannot support their weight any longer. Her glossolalia retreats into what he recognizes as the mindless bliss of algorithms, pointless cataloguing of the basestar’s procedural minutiae.
He thinks carefully, trying to open his mind to the chasm, to process the information she must be hiding in plain sight in her unmediated consciousness. He lets his mind parallel process – one part of his brain compiling a mental database of all her words and phrases, making potential associations and references, discarding irrelevancies; the other part poses rapid-fire questions:
Skies full of fire. Explosions? War? The Cylon attack on the Colonies? No. She’s referring to the future. He’s sure of it. He’s the one she’s chosen to speak to. He will listen. He will bring them to life.
“Listen to sounds? Listen to people?” He speaks aloud, trying to make sense of it all. “And who or what is them?”
“What are you doing, Gaius?”
He turns in slow dread. Standing behind him, only a few feet away, D’Anna regards him with head cocked, lips twisted in cynical amusement. It was the look he had seen just before they took him away to be tortured.
“Uh…nothing,” he stammers. “Nothing, really.”
“You know everything she says is technobabble and nonsense, don’t you?”
D’Anna’s moist eyes shine as she sways towards him. She drops a hand on his shoulder, a proprietary gesture he both hates and finds comforting.
“I think plenty of what she says is meaningful,” he insists. “I think she knows things that none of us know.”
“She talked to you?” D’Anna’s surprise quickly becomes a demand. “What did she say?” Aggression rises behind her deceptively even tones. “What did she say, Gaius?”
He turns back to take another look at the Hybrid, who has gone quiet now, her inscrutable litanies recited.
“She said I will burn brighter than the brightest of stars,” he says, already believing it as fact. “She said I will bring them to life.”
“Bring them to life?” D’Anna says, incredulous, but her words have softened around the edges. When he looks back at her, she is smiling. “Maybe there is something to her words after all,” she says.
“What do you mean?” he asks.
“She speaks the truth, Gaius. “You’ll be bringing two very special children into the world to usher in God’s new generation.”
“Two?” He can’t hide the surprise on his face.
“Yes, two,” D’Anna says, lifting the weight off his shoulders, taking his hand in hers. “Caprica’s and mine.”
Gaius gapes at her, swallowing hard. “This is a joke, right?”
She meets his gaze with raised eyebrows. “I wouldn’t joke about something like this.”
He turns back to the Hybrid. Could that really be what she meant?
“You’re going to have a child,” he confirms.
“Yes,” she says with a slow, emphatic nod, as if talking to an idiot.
“And I’m the father.”
“Yes, Gaius,” she says, the picture of beatific patience. “You’re the father.” She is still holding his hand, and now squeezes it. “I thought you’d be pleased.”
“Pleased?” he cries, pulling his hand away in a sharp movement. “I’m not some horse for you people to put out to stud, you know. I mean, what’s next? Are you going to introduce
She laughs at him. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” she says with a smirk. “But no, I don’t think so. I think you’ll be busy enough, actually.”
His arms cross over his chest. “I think you’re lying to me.”
At that, her eyes widen. “I don’t think you want to be calling me a liar, Gaius.” The violence behind her voice is a restless panther, pacing its cage. He damps down his haughty tone, but still, he argues.
“How can you be having my child? Cylons and humans can’t reproduce without love; that’s what you people believe. The
Her hands balance on her hips. “You’ve gotten Caprica pregnant, and you don’t love her, do you?”
Surprised, he doesn’t reply quickly enough, and she chuckles, triumphant. Suddenly, he doesn’t care whether or not D’Anna’s pregnant, but he knows he doesn’t want to go back to the days when he was lucky to have a bathrobe to wear. He knows he won’t live through another round of torture. He and Caprica bicker often, but overall, he can tell that the two of them have become fastened together in a uniquely powerful way; he’s not about to let D’Anna lay waste to that.
“Now look,” he snaps, then lowers his voice, his tone secretive. “I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing, but don’t you try and frak with me.
“Caprica loves me.” He raises this statement before him like a shield. “And I love her,” he adds eventually. “That is why she is pregnant, and you are not.”
Caprica sneaks away from her hiding place after Gaius leaves D’Anna. Their whole discussion was a test D’Anna devised to prove to Caprica, once and for all, the shallow depths of human love. She’s relieved that the ruse has proved D’Anna wrong, but she has to admit that her excitement goes even further than that: There’s a freedom in her love for Gaius right now that she hasn’t felt since the days before the Attack.
She finds Gaius lying on their bed, lost in thought. When he wakes out of his reverie and notices her, he immediately becomes vertical, decisively walking over to her and kissing her, his tongue snaking into her mouth with an urgency she hasn’t felt from him since the days when she used to come home to the waterfront house on Caprica and barely have time to say, “Miss me?” before he was pulling at her clothes.
Even the pregnant state of her body doesn’t seem to matter to him: He’s running his hands through her blonde ringlets, fumbling with buttons at the back of her dress, as frantic as she remembers from so long ago.
She kisses him back, and desire circulates throughout her body. “What brought this on?” she teases, trying to flirt the way she used to, nostalgic for the times when he saw her as nothing more than his lover. She wants to hear him say those words he said to D’Anna. To her face.
Before she can stop herself, she has asked the question:
“Do you love me?”
His kisses turn even more frenzied in response, and he answers with a question emitted in fitful bursts. “This child of ours,” he pants, “it means we…we love each other, right?”
“What?” she says, her voice muffled by Gaius’ hair, his mouth on her. She feels the press of his erection resting against her body through his clothes. He has always been so physically responsive to her.
“It wouldn’t have happened if we didn’t love each other, right?” he clarifies, frantically pushing her dress up over her hips. “The pregnancy, I mean.”
She freezes, retreats, the folds of her dress cascading back down her legs. She searches his eyes, sees the desperate hope there; it pierces right through her.
His question hangs over them for what seems like forever.
“Are you serious?” she finally says, tears welling in her eyes. D’Anna was right after all. He doesn’t even know for sure. He just hopes.
But he reaches up a soft, gentle hand to brush away the first of her tears. The gesture takes her so by surprise, her levies crumble to dust. She seizes him into an embrace, quick, before she has to face him with tears rolling down her cheeks. After a shocked moment, his arms flutter onto her back; she can sense the uncertainty in his fingers as they begin to caress her.
“I am so much better than you deserve,” she fiercely whispers over his shoulder, swaddling up her hurt in quiet indignation. She squeezes him so tight, she feels his body crumple under the violence of it.
“Yes, I know,” is all he replies, but the genuine admission there startles her. The desire has completely left his body, and his voice sounds strained and shaky, yet his fingers keep caressing her back. She’s pretty sure her grip is causing him pain, and that he’s choosing to silently endure it for the moment. She doesn’t know what to make of this gift he is giving her.
Sometimes, in her more blasphemous moments, Caprica suspects that Gaius is a test God uses to probe the limits of her faith.
She squeezes even tighter, giving him no relief. She takes every last ounce of vengeful satisfaction she can from trampling on Gaius’ rare moment of generosity, exhilarating at this tiny bit of control. With wistful chagrin, she remembers a time when she always felt this way.
Yet the acquiescence in his words and the language of his body give her the strength to release him, to guide his weak, unsteady trajectory back to the bed. He allows her to lay him out on his back, and exhales deeply, his hand reaching out to rest on her abdomen.
“What makes you so convinced I can do this?” he sighs. “What makes you think I won’t screw this up completely?”
There is genuine worry streaking through his voice, none of the usual dissembling behind his words. At first, she doesn’t even know how to respond. So she thinks.
“I believe this child has been ordained by God for something special,” she says finally. “I’m not entirely sure what, but it is nothing short of a miracle. And God gives us miracles to teach us, Gaius.”
To her surprise, he doesn’t scoff at her answer. He doesn’t agree with it, either; he just absorbs it, his fingers thumping restlessly on the mattress. “So what’s he got in mind to teach me, then?” he says, softly incredulous.
“I don’t know.”
Now it is he who is silent for a long time. “The sins of the mother, of the father, they pass down to the child,” he says, his voice cracking as he massages tightly-shut eyes. “What makes you think I’ll be any better a moral guardian?”
Caprica studies him, realizes after a moment that he isn’t referring to her. She stretches out on the bed next to him, interlaces her fingers into his hair and keeps them there. “God wants you to have this child, Gaius,” she says. “He wouldn’t ask you to do something you couldn’t do.”
His eyes open, and he reaches for her body, pulling her close, resting his head in the crook of her neck. When he speaks, his words are glib, but they lack conviction; he just sounds afraid.
“Why God would trust me, of all people, with a child, is beyond my comprehension.”
“He has faith in you,” she replies, soothing him with fingertips that just barely graze the back of his neck. “I only wish you had the same kind of faith in him.”
The next day, Gaius hides in the quietest corner he can find on the basestar, hoping for some undisturbed privacy.
He doesn’t know what is possessing him to do this. He was never sure what to make of what happened the last time. In the end, he’d chosen to believe that his deliverance from the lies of “Shelly Godfrey” had been nothing more than a well-timed coincidence.
There is no such thing as coincidence.
He remembers those words, uttered with muted anger, as D’Anna sent jolt after merciless jolt of pain throughout his body.
He’d told her then that he could reconcile her faith with rationalism. He still believes that, doesn’t he? So why is he doing this? Why is he sinking down to his knees, head down, hands folded into this absurdly iconic position? Is it because he feels so tired, so mentally exhausted? Or is it simply that even he, Doctor Gaius Baltar, the smartest man alive, is not creative enough to find another way to talk to a deity?
Shaking his head, he closes his eyes, shoulders hunched.
“Uh…dear God,” he begins, frustrated with how graceless he sounds. “I know we haven’t talked in a while. In a long while,” he corrects hurriedly.
In his mind, he rifles through a long list of stock phrases, trying to find just the one that will work like a magic switch to get God to talk back. A higher part of his thinking understands that this is exactly the attitude that will probably keep God away from him, and yet, as soon as he notices himself thinking this, another part of him is repulsed at giving himself over so abjectly to superstitious drivel. Still another moment later, he is cataloguing all the highly unlikely coincidences that have happened to him since his homeworld was destroyed.
Could God really have saved him from the Apocalypse for a special destiny?
“Is it my destiny to father this child?” he asks into the silence. He breathes in deeply, face buried in his hands. “I don’t know how to do this,” he mutters, unable to repress his anger. “None of it makes sense. It never does.” He feels like he’s one of those horses he used to see in
“Is that what you want from me?” he adds. “Why? Why would such an all-knowing being want children who never use their God-given capacity to reason?”
Again, no answer.
For the first time since Caprica and he announced her pregnancy, the full implication of what having a child will mean hits him – years and years of standing in place, the mundane existence of diapers and bottles, endless crying and cleaning up vomit. Then, the exhausting running – after crawling, toddling creatures, toys scattered everywhere, and eventually an endless barrage of compulsive questions about everything. He remembers this timeline well from all the nieces and nephews he’d already acquired by age sixteen, from spending what felt like every other day of his teenaged years conscripted into caring for all these offspring. The day he left Arielon, he’d sworn he’d never again be saddled with children.
“Please,” he implores, his voice turning a bit hoarse. “I’m not cut out for this. I’m going to ruin this child’s life. An all-knowing god surely must realize that.”
Silence.
“I’m just looking for some sort of confirmation,” he tries, “that this is really the correct path, that I’m not just making this all up in my head to give myself a sense of purpose.”
He looks around, feeling more helpless and adrift than when he started. And slightly stupid; he’s been fooling himself all along, hasn’t he? But as soon as he thinks this, the seemingly impossible pile of unlikely coincidences nags at him, taunts him with his plebian need to arrange them into some kind of meaning.
He startles, as the sound of a loud, frustrated wail breaks into his consciousness. It’s plaintive, uncomprehending. A moment later, he recognizes it as infantile.
Hera.
It’s just Hera. It’s the cry of a flesh and bone, an undeniably real baby, nothing more. This both comforts and frustrates him, but it doesn’t make the wailing any easier to ignore. Almost against his will, he feels the biological tug, the familiar, unconscious imperative of his teenaged self, the desperate need to find and quell the source of that crying. He can not think straight, do anything else, ever again, until it stops. It reels him through the indistinguishable halls of the basestar with the accuracy and intensity of a missile.
Hera’s small frame is precariously supporting itself against the rail of the bassinet as she sobs inconsolably, half-dried tears staining her cheeks. Off to one side, Sharon, the Cylon he knew on Galactica, slams her hands down on her hips, flabbergasted and angry.
“I’ve tried everything I can think of,” she says bitterly, as if to answer accusations he hasn’t made. “I don’t know why they thought I’d be any better at this than them.”
He nods – at her, at the screaming child. She looks as helpless as he feels. Except – his body realizes this before he does – he is not exactly helpless, is he?
His arms are already reaching out towards the bassinet when he figures out what they are doing. He watches them confidently pick up the sobbing child, surprised at how naturally Hera fits into his embrace. Her shining, flooded eyes watch him cooing at her, and almost immediately, her tears subside to a whimper, then to contented silence. Exhausted, she falls asleep in less than a minute, her tiny chest heaving with deep, contented breaths, her head nestled into the crook of his elbow.
Boomer looks on, her hostility quickly giving way to awe. “How did you do that?” she blurts out. “She’s been miserable for the last two and a half hours. When I tried to pick her up, finally, that’s when she started yelling her head off. None of them can handle her either,” she says, meaning the other Cylon models. Her tone becomes increasingly respectful.
“That’s the second time you’ve done that. What’s your secret?”
“I don’t know,” he quips, before he even thinks about it. “God-given talent?”
He freezes, hearing the words come out of his mouth. It is one of those metaphorical turns of phrase people use all the time without ever considering it. But now, now. He looks down at Hera with new eyes.
No, having a child probably won’t be a rapturous experience like the opera house in Kobol; it’ll be more like this. He can see that for certain now; but he also knows now that he can live with it. At least this time, the child will be actually his.
And as he brings up this new genotype of child, he will become the expert on everything about it and Hera, on everything to do with this new ordained generation. He will become indispensable. Fatherhood will give him a permanent role in Cylon society, a place to finally call home again. The way he has managed to quiet Hera when none of them can, feels like confirmation.
You can do this, he tells himself.
If this is what You want, he says to God in his head, carefully shifting Hera’s weight on his arms to avoid waking her, if it is truly my destiny to bear a child… He exhales deeply. ...then I stand ready to do Your will.
“I am so very proud of you, Gaius.”
The unexpected appearance of her husky voice almost makes him drop Hera.
“You okay, Doctor?”
Slowly, Gaius looks up, but not at
Her fingers are reaching out to caress his cheek. He closes his eyes in sensual appreciation of her touch; he realizes only just now how much he has missed it.
“Why?” he says, after a moment. Even that one-word question sounds strangled – crushed under the weight of his own surprise, anguish and relief.
“There are no ghosts,” he tells her hoarsely as Six plants a nurturing kiss on his forehead and gazes down lovingly at Hera.
“You’ve given yourself over to God’s will,” Six explains, looking back up into his confused expression. “Don’t you see? You’ve made Him very happy. You’ve made me very happy.”
It both thrills and worries him to see her, and he’s not sure on which emotion to settle. So he merely nods. “What happens now?” is all he can think to ask.
She smiles, slowly withdrawing her hand, fingers trailing along the nape of his neck and the bottom of his chin. He feels his face jutting out to extend the moment a little longer before her fingers leave him altogether. “Don’t worry, Gaius,” she intones. “All will be well. You’ll see. You’ve given Him your faith, now let Him take care of the rest.”
“But I…”
“Shhh…” She puts a finger up to his lips, shaking her head just very slightly no. “It’s okay, Gaius. All will be well. I promise. Just go to her. All will be well. ”
Somehow, he never, ever, sees her leave. It’s always like that; she leaves in the space of a blinked eye, a deleted piece of computer data. He wishes just once, he could predict when it was going to happen.
Part 3
Part 1
