ways_infirmary | (no subject)

(no subject)

"Alone she sleeps in the shirt of man
With my three wishes clutched in her hand..."

Simon finally hooked him up to a morpha -- morphine, whatever it's called here -- drip once the nerve block wore off and the supposedly unidentifiable opioid had left his system. Gaeta's half-drowsing, eyes closed in a vain attempt to sleep outright; the pain's still too great, though, and the exhaustion more prominent.

And if he sleeps, that means he can't do the only thing that's worked so far.

"The first that she be spared the pain
That comes from a dark and laughing rain..."

The words are a little roughened with hoarseness, a touch slurred by morpha -- but his voice still rings clear through the infirmary.

[ooc: for continuity's sake, all threads now take place before Boyd's and Simon's.]

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"Please."

His voice has thickened with renewed tears.

"I want to know. Please just tell me."

"Okay," he says swiftly. "Okay."

He glances around for a chair, finds one against the wall, drags it closer, sits down.

"It's like ... well, for starters, you know how there are people here from all different worlds? And some of them are worlds that sound kind of impossible?"

Gaeta manages to crack a weak, half-hearted smile.

"Yeah. Definitely know that."

That's a good start. "So have you ... run into anyone you recognize from a story? A book, or a movie, or ... anything like that?"

Less promising: the way the smile fades, and the way Gaeta blinks in confusion.

"Didn't we already talk about this?" he mumbles.

(They didn't; it was the other Andrew who engaged him on the topic.)

"... did we? Sorry."

He's had this conversation with a lot of people; he loses track of who, sometimes. Or maybe it was the other him who brought up the subject.

"Anyway, the point is ... I think some worlds get more stories than others. I don't know why. But I think mine's one of them. So there's ..."

Frith, this is awkward.

"There's a lot of people here whose stories I knew before I ever met them. So I knew what was going on with them, when we met. And ... and sometimes what was going to happen to them."

Silence.

What little blood was left in Gaeta's face has vanished. It makes his dark, sunken eyes stand out even more starkly, huge and round against his skin.

The heart monitor ticks up a little faster.

"I don't know yours."

Please believe me.

"But ... maybe the other me did."

"I'm just a story."

Blank; so blank he can't even force it into the question it ought to be.

"Everything that happened to me's just..."

(There's hardly a pause between the beeps of the monitor now.)

"No! No, no no no, it's not like that at all --"

Andrew reaches out and grasps one of the hands lying on the thin hospital coverlet, squeezes just enough for the other man to be able to feel the pressure.

"You're real. Trust me. You, and me, and -- and the other me -- and everybody else here. You have to believe me."

"He only knew me because he -- "

Read about me, is how he intends to finish it, but the words choke off into a thin, "Oh gods," before he can manage it.

"He knew everything about me, he, he has to know everything else that's coming, gods, it's just a story to him it doesn't mean anything -- "

"No, that's not true --"

Andrew's voice is scaling up from anxious to frantic; he has to convince him, he can't leave him here thinking anything so awful.

A straw presents itself, and he grasps at it. "You said, didn't you say he told you not to go? He was trying to warn you -- he wouldn't have done that if he thought you were just a, a fictional character, you know he wouldn't have, that wouldn't make any sense."

"It's not like it frakking did anything anyway -- "

His voice scales upward, splits in two; he squeezes his eyes shut and clamps his fingers down as hard as he can on Andrew's hand, like someone clinging to a life preserver.

(His grip isn't very strong at all.)

He has to shut his own eyes at that, in turn.

(It's been a long time since he's thought about Paravia.)

"I'm so sorry."

"I should've listened."

Small, and utterly miserable.

"I didn't listen to him, I didn't listen to Gaius when he..." Gaeta lifts his free hand an inch, then flops it back down onto the bed when the words don't alight where he can reach them.

"Gaius?"

The other Andrew might have known Felix's story, but he doesn't.

"Dr. Baltar."

Even like this, he doesn't want to elaborate any more than necessary.

"I met him here once. He was, um, further down our timeline than I was."

"... and he knew something about your future."

His voice, his face, are stricken.

Gaeta nods.

"He knew New Caprica was going to fall."

"Oh."

And he remembers, now, having heard Gaeta say the name Gaius before.

"I thought I could stop it." His mouth twitches at the corners. "Figured he must've been lying."

The barely-there smile disappears.

"Thought he was making up a story."

His throat aches.

(stop telling stories)

He can't think of a single thing to say.

"Doesn't matter." His grip loosens on Andrew's hand. "If it's all written down somewhere already -- "

(and even addled by drugs, weakened by pain, it's impossible not to think of President Roslin cradling the Book of Pythia, or of Starbuck throwing gobs of paint onto the walls of her rack -- )

" -- if enough's written down that he knew about this -- "

(This is not what he signed on for when he accepted that the Lords existed in some form.)

"... then what?"

He doesn't let go of the other man's hand.

"Then it doesn't matter."

He can't get his voice too much further above a whisper. That doesn't do anything to cancel out the vehemence.