Nine days after Earth, Felix Gaeta drifts in a Raptor, covered in blood. His thoughts are dim and whirling things; he's running out of oxygen, nearly dead from morpha. He is an addict and an amputee; he is a believer, and his heart is broken. He remembers a list of names, a woman's hand bleeding, a pair of pliers, and the fight. He's been in the Raptor for three days. Dee's been dead a week now. They shared dreams of a better world. His leg still itches sometimes; sometimes it aches.
Six days after Earth, Felix was running on little sleep. The Colonel was worried about him, worried over him, ordered him to take a week's leave aboard the Zephyr. Felix swore he didn't need it, that he could soldier on, that the morpha keeping him right should remain a secret: "I naturally don't need a lot of sleep," he said. As though there was something special about him. "I can't have you in the CIC like this," said Tigh. "You're on the verge of seeing ghosts on the dradis screen." Felix swore he was fine, but Saul looked him in the eye. "It's a gift, son. It's not a punishment." Tigh called him son, and handed him a gift. "Get drunk, sleep for a week, recover. Shuttle leaves twice a day. You better hurry."
All the way to the Z, for a week? Hoshi met him in the hall outside the hangar deck, handed him morpha for the trip, kissed him goodbye. "Go. Get better. I'll be waiting." This isn't something you can just sleep or drink away; it's not something any amount of love or drugs can factor out. It still itches sometimes. No matter how many people are on the list, no matter how many call him son, or lover, and try their blind best to take care of him, it doesn't really signify, because what's aching isn't there anymore and there's no way to make it stop. What needs to stop is a list with nothing on it. They're trying their best to help solve the problem, but the problem isn't there anymore. That's the problem.
A deckhand (Brooks), two Eights, and the flight crew for Raptor 718, Shark Finnegan and Easy Esrin. There's tension, but relief too. A week on the Z, a relief if only so that the people he loves will stop offering him relief. Earth was meant to be a gift, to replace everything he took from Anastasia, from Kara, from Saul, when he took back the election for Gaius Baltar. A checklist of redemption.
Most people find one right thing and stick to it, maybe die for it. Actually, that's not true: most people see the right thing, and then don't do anything about it. Or they give up, or they give in. It's not very often we're put into a position to see all the right things, the ways they counterbalance and conflict, the chaos they introduce. It's a rare man who tries to hold them all in his hands, stop the tides of chaos and keep the world alive. On New Caprica, Felix tried to play both sides: to support the freely elected government, to appease the occupational forces, to feed the Resistance its codes and secrets, to save lives one at a time. Felix found himself in the right places at the right times, and did the best he could. He was almost killed for it, more than once: almost killed, for doing the right thing. For doing all the right things, the ones they couldn't see, the ones nobody else was prepared to do.
Fifteen minutes away from the Zephyr, Raptor shuttle crew cracking jokes, and Galactica picks up hostile Cylons on dradis. Hoshi sees the incoming enemy, and the Fleet is forced to make an emergency jump. There's no time to get to the Zephyr, so when the shuttle jumps, it jumps into nothingness. There's no Fleet at all, just the black. And no matter how many times they call out -- for help, for home, for anyone -- there's no answer. The Eights onboard suggest they'd be afraid to give away their location, with Cavil's ships arriving: maybe they can hear you calling out, all alone in the black, and they're too scared to answer. Putting the Fleet's safety before yours; doing the right thing.
But Felix Gaeta is a believer, and he knows they wouldn't just leave a Raptor behind. They'll notice that they're gone, and send someone back to look. All alone in the black, Brooks the deckhand begins to pray, to Poseidon. The Eights know our scripture better than we do, but they're pretty literal: when one Eight asks him why he's praying to Poseidon, so from the ocean, he just says they're on a ship, after all. If there are no oceans, no rivers, no lakes or streams, ever again -- if the Colonies just drift in the black forever, without the hope of Earth -- Poseidon won't have much to do.
Remember the red line? It's how far you can jump before you can ever come back. You're not supposed to cross it -- technically, you shouldn't be allowed to -- but they're crossed it this time. The calculations for such a jump are so complex they are nonlinear; home is an itch you can't scratch. Hard Eight doesn't recognize the star patterns around them in the black. Cylons can do that. But humans have their skills, too: soon enough, Felix figures out that the FTL calculations were corrupted: high-energy particles, flipping one bit of data in the coordinates from one to zero. The chaos in the system. The group pulls together for a moment, worrying about Cavil's army, about the nonlinear calculations that will bring them home, the possibility of other complications they can't see yet. Sweet Eight smiles at him, shaking her head: "Don't you recognize me, Felix? It's me." His leg itches sometimes; there are complications he can't see yet.
The enemy attack was a false alarm, ghosts on the dradis screen. It's been two days, since the Raptor was lost en route to the Zephyr. Earth was a week ago; Hoshi's not been sleeping. If they knew it was a false alarm, they would have jumped back immediately. A blind jump into nowhere, past the red line, means they can't jump back at all. Someone is going to have to go and find them, find Felix, and steer him back home, lead him into the light. Hoshi means "star."
Hoshi begs the Colonel for a Raptor, to go searching for Felix; Tigh tells him to pull it together, but he can't. Not after the wonders he has seen: "There is something in the universe. Something let us find Earth, dead as it is. And I know, I know I can find Felix. Lieutenant, me and Felix... There's been too much loss already." Tigh nods. There has been too much loss already. Too much loss and too much hate, to let love go so easily. He knows what it's like, now, to lose the one you love, and then to find that love again. There was something in the universe, down on that ruined planet, that led him out into the sea. There are random jumps, and there are jumps that aren't so random. Sometimes it takes a great notion to lead you places you wouldn't ever have looked. He promises to ask the old man, and watches Hoshi run off down the corridor with a smile in his eyes.
718 was just a shuttle, so the CO2 scrubbers weren't a huge priority. Now, of course, it's a big deal. They have food and water for two weeks ("if we're not fussy about recycling"), so the issue is air. Twenty hours, give or take; this includes extending it as far as possible by thinning it out to 68% of normal. Easy points out that this will mean memory loss, irrational behavior, depression, dizziness; this is a list of things that won't matter since they're going to need to keep very still, in the dark, limit exertion, sleep as much as possible. Try not to dream. Deckhand Brooks opens up a panel to check out the CO2 scrubbers, and Gaeta finally recognizes her.
Fifteen months ago, Felix Gaeta was a high-placed human administrator on Cylon-occupied New Caprica. He would meet with Sweet Eight, and hand over lists of names. He was doing the right thing.
Brooks can't quite get his fingers inside the panel to fix the loose connection; Hard Eight offers to take over and he gives her his pliers. She reaches the connection, and adjusts it, and then before anyone can move, she's shaking, jerking, struck by lightning. Esrin kicks her free, and Gaeta checks for her pulse, but she's gone. Brooks begins to scream in fear, about how it could have been him, but Sweet Eight distracts him, pointing to the pliers: the rubber insulation on the grips has all been stripped away. Shark figures they just wore off, but Sweet Eight suggests it was a human, trying to kill a Cylon, "someone didn't like the idea of a machine breathing their air."
Brooks points out that they were his, and a more slender hand on his part would have resulted in his death, but she calls him out: how could he, a deckhand, not have noticed the bare metal? Tempers flare, craziness abounds, oxygen depletes; Gaeta tells them all to shut up, issues the word that it was an accident, and wonders what to do about the corpse. Sweet Eight makes the hard call: her sister's mortal body will soon begin to decay, release methane and hydrogen sulfide, and corrupt their air. She talks the five who are left into putting on flight suits, and spacing her dead sister in the unknown black. While they're putting on their flight suits, she tells Gaeta she has an idea; she'll tell him about how they can get home when everyone's asleep, but he has to trust her.
On New Caprica, Gaeta wrote down names for her, and numbers. "This list... Some of these people I haven't seen in a long time. They may already be... Gods." Sweet Eight assured him that the Ones kept excellent records, as machines were meant to do, and that, as per their agreement, she would free the prisoners on the list. She swore they could do it; she promised.
Fifteen months later, Racetrack and Hoshi launch Raptor 1029 from Galactica. Because if you're looking for something at random, Racetrack will always be your best bet.
Hard Eight floats among unfamiliar stars; the makeshift crew of 718 beds down for their last night of sleep. Gaeta's leg begins to ache, and he guiltily injects himself with morpha. Sweet Eight pretends to be asleep, but she sees it. She sees it all: his weakness and his needs, his hungers; the way he'd give his other leg, for a better world. How he will trust anyone that promises to lead him home again. A list you could love anyone for. A fire inside.
Fifteen months ago, she wept in his tent: a man named Jeremiah got sick and died while still locked up. Another woman killed herself. Two more, she was able to rescue; but only two. One child, she couldn't find at all, not even news about his fate. That's the one that sent her crying. "You saved so many of them. Okay?" They promised, in their fear, in the middle of the night with no one watching, to make more lists, to save more lives, and he reached out, to kiss her. Softly at first: one more right thing, to add to the list.
There are as many kinds of love as there are Tribes of Kobol; there are more kinds of love than there are survivors. Up the hill, in the detention center, in a room so secret it barely existed, Kara Thrace killed Leoben for the forty-seventh time, as he pled his love. Down in the city, Galen Tyrol wrapped his arm tighter around his wife, her belly, as Nicky kicked and Cally pretended to be asleep. Sam Anders dreamed of her, and woke up coughing in the cold. Up in the sky, Anastasia Dualla Adama lay with one leg below her husband's, an arm across her chest, and looked up at the ceiling, imagining the stars just beyond it. Dreaming of the day when they could leave their cages, and head for Earth again. On Colonial One Gaius Baltar awoke lying half-off his Presidential bed, one palm on the floor, where he'd passed out; at first he thought the girl beside him was Caprica Six, but when his eyes adjusted he saw her, in a chair across the room, watching his every move, quietly and without moving. Across the camp, in a much finer room than Felix's, Ellen closed her eyes and smelled the whiskey on his breath. She was thankful for it; it helped her picture Saul, above her in the dark.
Sweet Eight wakes Gaeta once the others are asleep, and proposes to connect to the Raptor's systems, as Sharons do, to find the corrupted memory. To scratch the itch that nobody else can see. She asks him to cover for her, while she works, in case the others think she's doing mischief in the night. He agrees, but accidentally bumps Brooks. They freeze, but the knuckledragger doesn't wake; he is dead. Now there are four, on the list of living crewmen. He died of an overdose, Felix's morpha injected in a vein. The Raptor crewmen, Shark and Easy, wake up and immediately accuse Sweet Eight of killing him; Easy aims at the shackled Eight. When Gaeta protests, Sweet Eight promises she understands. With death at the door you can't look into the face of your enemy and see anything but fear.
Raptor 1029 jumps into empty space; Hoshi and Racetrack don't see anything, and spin the dial to jump again. To anywhere.
Nine and a half hours of half-alive oxygen left, and everyone's asleep again. Felix dreams of Hoshi. When he wakes again, slow and confused, he sees Sweet Eight's freed herself. She wonders if he's going to tie her down again, but he tells her he was planning to unlock her, to plot the drive home with her. He knows that he can trust her. She reminds him to be careful; reflexes dulled and responses weak, he can't afford to wake Shark and Easy again. He hands her a scalpel so that she can link to the ship.
Sweet Eight slices open her own palm, like a razor, but she can't do the rest. She asks him to help, and with her breathing roughly, trying to be quiet, he cuts his way into her flesh, feeding in the data cable, connecting her to the ship. She would project, she says, and walk away from all this pain, but the oxygen level's making it too hard. He knows what she'd be dreaming of, but asks her anyway. There are more kinds of love than there are survivors.
She tries to remind him, tries to kiss him back to wakefulness, tries to make of them a team again, like Eights do, but he stops her: Hoshi. He's found someone. She says she's happy, that he deserves joy and love; she kisses him again, and just as his passion ignites under all that quiet and breathless air, she gasps: the Fleet. She makes ready for the jump.
On another Raptor, Racetrack's happy for them, too. "Been making book on it for... Since forever. Took you long enough!" Hoshi's been dreaming of him for hours now, and smiles to himself. "He's got this... This fire about doing the right thing." Racetrack nods. That moral core. Rarer than it should be. "Guess it's because they can get you so killed..." She remembers where she is, who she's talking to, and blushes. "Frak me, I'm sorry, I didn't..." He assures her it's okay. The reason we quash that fire for the right thing is because it gets you so killed; he gets that. But this, tonight, Felix out in the black without a hope or a way home, that wasn't because of his moral core. It was because it's been killing him all along; it's because every fire burns. It's because Earth and the better world died on the same day, and Felix is hopping along on his one leg, trying to catch up with whatever happens . He's getting tired, he's getting old, and his heart is broken. Hoshi loves Felix for this list: the same reasons that Felix hates himself. Knowing that is what keeps him out here, looking. Someone's got to bring him home.
718 completes its jump, with eight hours and change left of air. The jump, Felix finds, drained nearly all the Raptor's reserves, but there's still nothing on dradis. No Galactica, no Fleet, no Hoshi out of the blue, sitting in space with a copy of Searider Falcon. Just stars, and emptiness, and the hope of the Fleet just beyond dradis range. Eight says she'll send a pulse: if they're in the system, they'll come running in ten hours. That's two more than we've got.
But as luck would have it, Shark and Easy are dead, throats slashed. There are only two survivors left on Raptor 718, and one of them has killed the other four. It wasn't Felix, hands covered in blood from his attempts to revive them; she doesn't answer, just looks him in the eye. But they have enough air now to wait it out. They will live now.
Hoshi and Racetrack complete their third jump, but don't see anything. Racetrack offers another, and Hoshi agrees: Felix wouldn't give up on him, so how can he do the same? On the other hand, Hoshi wonders if there's any point at all, and when he asks if they're crazy to keep going, Racetrack's answer is reluctant but quick. They've reached the end of line. Felix would know that further searches were futile, and eventually, she says, he would give up. That's not an indictment of love, it's an acknowledgement of reality. He wouldn't be seduced by hope; he wouldn't glut himself on it. He would deal with the world as it is, even if it meant finally giving up on love, and life, and Hoshi. Hoshi agrees, and decides to pack it in and head back home. Racetrack's heart breaks for him.
Eight doesn't screw around, admitting what she did. She's calm, and right. They have enough air, now, to make it back to the Fleet. They'll hear the pulse and come running, from the other side of the solar system, and they will be saved. She stripped the pliers, thinking that Brooks would die, and when he didn't, she shot him up with the OD.
"Felix. I picked you over my own kind. Over my own model. I protected you from something you never could have done, but you were thinking all along." He swears she's lying, but he's not even sure anymore. "There is a fine line between ignorance and hope. I would have thought you'd have learned that by now." He refuses to hear it, refuses to see it; it aches sometimes but the problem doesn't exist. He rips the cabling from her palm, screaming. "Felix! You have to open your eyes. You have to see what the world is really like! You gave me the names, Felix! The rest was easy."
Felix slept, on New Caprica, blissfully asleep, while Sweet Eight took his list and handed it to her sister. Eights know more of our scripture than we do, but they're very literal. "Kill everyone on this list."
He knows she's lying, now; it itches in a place he can't scratch, but he remembers. He saved Jenkins, and Pembroke, put their names on the list and watched them walking in the sunlight again. Saw Heather Redmond and her baby, playing together. Those weren't dreams, or lies. He was doing the right thing. Eight shakes her head at him, sadly.
"I'm a woman, and a Cylon: I didn't seduce you. Hope seduced you. And the more you ate of it, the less you saw. You ate yourself blind." Felix calls out, lost to pain, worlds aching beyond his grasp, leg burning, asking why she didn't just kill them all, when she knew that they were lost. "I'm not a monster, I didn't want to do what I did. I did it when the probabilities dictated it." Same moment, different world, fifteen months and lifetimes apart. "You kill when you're in a war. You kill when you have to. You kill the ones your enemy values. It's basic. You should know that." He does know that; he did know that.
"I'd tell you that they'd run off," she reminds him, "Or they were at the infirmary. Some of them I'd say I saw them eating with their families. Didn't you see them? Oh, I'm sure you'll see them tomorrow." Some nights it itched so bad he'd double up his dose, singing at the top of his lungs in some forgotten corner of the world; when they put him on his knees in the launch tube he nearly touched it. It was too big. But Gaius knew, didn't he? When they had him in the brig, right before his trial, and sent lovesick Felix in to gain his trust, that's exactly what Gaius said.
"What did you tell them? That you stayed behind till the grisly end on New Caprica, so that you could what? So you could feed information to the Resistance? Who do you think allowed you to do that? You think I'm blind? You see, I literally had a gun pointed to my head. But nobody forced you to play both sides. There's not much difference between my brain and yours, Felix. We can choose to not make the connection! You can see someone kill in front of you, twice, and still hang on to your ignorance. Instead of calling it a flaw, you call it hope, or faith. Love. So I'm asking you, Mr. Gaeta: who is the real traitor in this room?" And Felix swore he wasn't. "No, of course! Because there are far worse things than being a traitor, aren't there? If your friends only knew the truth. But don't worry, I know about your little secret."
"I know what your Eight did," Gaius whispered into his ear, begging for death, and Felix picked up a pen and shoved it in Gaius's throat. Something singing, burning in a place he couldn't see. His leg burns, aches more than any morpha could salve: nothing hurts as much as something that's not there anymore. There is no relief, so he must strike out, and that's what he did. And that's what he does now. It's still too big, so he grabs the scalpel and kills Sweet Eight, too. For doing the right thing. And then he is alone.
Felix tries to inject the morpha he has left, first one wish and then the other, but loses it before sticking himself with the second dose. He begins to sing:
Alone, she sleeps in the shirt of man
With my three wishes clutched in her hand
The first, that she be spared the pain
That comes from a dark and laughing rain
He sings it for a better world, ended. It was the only song that brought him solace. It was the song he sang to the empty space, to the itch he couldn't scratch, to make it quiet down again. It was too big. There were too many kinds of love, in the world, in the end. Too many ways for the song to die.
When she finds love, may it always stay true
This I beg, for the second wish I made too
But wish no more
My life you can take
He sings it as a small retribution, losing consciousness altogether, falling asleep in a net of unfamiliar stars. Most of all, he sings it for a fire that has gone out. A dream for a better world, finally extinguished. Literally translated, her name means "she who will rise again." He sings for her.
To have her please just one day wake
To have her please just one day wake
Maybe it's hope, or faith. Maybe it's love. Maybe it's oxygen depletion. Maybe they were right, and his will to survive burns brighter than the fire that Hoshi loves so much in him. Maybe he's waiting to rise again. Maybe he's waiting to die out here, alone, in the black, among unfamiliar stars. Maybe that's his salvation. Or maybe that's a very long list with nothing on it: Maybe he's just already dead.
The Raptor cabin is illuminated: Hoshi and Racetrack, hailing from the edge of hope. The light falls on blood, and torn bodies. He can barely make it out; he's trying not to dream. "You're nowhere near the Fleet, baby, but you're good!" All around him are the bodies: the deckhand, the crewmen, and the girl who saved his life. The girl who broke his heart, and killed him, with a list of truths too large to tell.
Nine days after Earth, the Colonel tells Felix that they won't be investigating. A pile of bodies, a single Cylon onboard, would only jeopardize the alliance. Felix says, without preamble, that the alliance shouldn't exist at all. He's lived that story; he can taste it on his lips. It's too big. "Cylon technology is gonna keep this fleet moving," Tigh says lightly -- or as lightly as Tigh says things -- but Felix asks to speak directly with Adama, since the Colonel is a Cylon. The Colonel, who called him son; who gave him the gift of a week's vacation and turned him into a Razor; who now wants to sweep it all away. Tigh's taken aback, but invites Felix to the senior staff meeting this afternoon. "There's a meeting later today to discuss some new idea of Mr. Tyrol's. You can let the Admiral in on your views there." Oh, and he will.
In the corridor, Hoshi's confused. Why set up a meeting with Adama? What could have happened out there, to change Felix's views on the basics of the Fleet? Why rock the boat, when survival is changing definition right before them? Too many questions, scratching at places that have been burnt black. Too much fear, too much hate, too much of anything but the right thing, that nobody else can see yet. And Hoshi can't see it, so he comes off the list too. No faith, no hope, no love.
"Look. You found me and you saved me, so I'll protect you. But if this doesn't work out, and if I'm wrong... You have a bright future, Louis. Keep your head down."
First Hoshi, and then Sickbay, and then the meeting. He won't be heard; his eyes will be hooded, he will learn to hate them all again. And then Zarek. And that fire will light him up again.