Tech Manuals, Commands, and Tactics

At best, Gaeta's mun and AIM have an uneasy truce going on. At worst, AIM sometimes likes to wear a red dress, saunter up to the mun, plant a big smooch on her, and then blow her up.

Or something like that.

Anyway! If you need to get in touch and your instant messenger of choice is coming up with no joy, drop a comment here. Everything's screened by default and will only be unscreened with permission. (For general mun info and availability, you can also check here.)

This is one of those days where everything seems to go wrong.

First, Gaeta tripped getting out of bed and slammed his bad knee into the floor. Then he burned breakfast. Then he burned lunch. Down in the Milliways kitchen, half his equipment had gotten swallowed by a miniature vortex overnight (as evidenced by the sorry I opened a tiny vortex last night! note somebody left on the counter), and really, by the end of it, all he wanted to do was get room service and watch trashy movies until Louis got home.

Which, of course, means that as he's easing his way out from behind the bar, he knocks his already-tender knee against a barstool.

"Ow, frak -- !"

The rest of the day passes uneventfully. Gaeta sticks to the guest room for most of it, quietly paging through the comics Steve lent him, sipping the coffee Orpheus provided. When he ventures out for dinner, he surreptitiously sizes up the kitchen: maybe if he wakes early enough, he could make them breakfast tomorrow morning.

Maybe he would have been all right in Milliways after all. If he's not even going to leave the godsdamn apartment --

(But he could leave the apartment if he wanted. That's the difference. He's not trapped by the celebration downstairs; when he looks out the window, he can see a landscape he's never seen before.)

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Over a year since the last time he passed through Milliways' front door, Gaeta has to exercise a considerable amount of energy not to sprint through it as soon as Steve turns the handle.

He's also exercising a considerable amount of energy not to start hyperventilating again, or running back up to his room, or doing anything except devolve into a panic attack. Even after he's safely on the other side of the threshold, he can still hear the mechanical clicking of Bar's Cubefall hardware; all he wants to do is plug his ears.

The whole time, he didn't even stop to wonder if he could leave Milliways. Luckily, nothing untoward seems to have happened yet.

[Shortly after this.]

Soup seems like a good idea tonight. It's warm, and comforting, and doesn't need a hell of a lot of work to turn out well.

Gaeta dumps all the ingredients into the biggest pot he owns, dropping it on the stove's back burner to let it simmer for a couple hours. Gogo hasn't strayed far from his side since they left the bar; when Gaeta gives up and opts to sit on the kitchen floor, rather than take a proper seat at the table, the dodo scoots closer with all seeming intention to climb into his lap.

"No," he murmurs, pushing him back a little. "Stay there."

Gogo cocks his head, as if considering the request, then thumps down next to him and sets his beak on Gaeta's shoulder. Gaeta has to crane his chin back to make room for Gogo's head; with a defeated sigh, he draws an arm around the bird to ground himself a little further.

He can breathe. The anger hasn't ebbed back as far as he thought -- a meal that doesn't require much work means he can spend more time replaying the conversation in his head -- but the tension isn't as bad. Even if his palm hurts like all frak, he didn't do anything worse than sling a few insults Javert's way.

Gaeta still wouldn't mind staying on the floor a little while longer.

Once upon a time, New Caprica City sat on the dusty mouth of a riverbed.

The alluvial deposits have turned rust red, oxidized by air that scrapes at Gaeta's mouth every time he breathes. He stands at the boundary between water and ground, arms tucked close, shivering as he stares out at the river. The water, too, has turned red.

It's not water.

It laps at Gaeta's shoes -- both shoes, both feet -- and he can feel its sickly warmth even through the thickness of his boots. Every so often, something washes ashore. A torn jacket. A hand. A limb.

(He can't tell if it's his own lost limb or not.)

His stomach clenches, and he can't stop shaking, and his eyes are frozen open: unable to blink, let alone look away from the shoreline.

Several days later, the good hurt of a decent workout morphs into true pain. It wakes Gaeta up in the middle of the night; terrified, not fully cognizant, he thinks oh, gods, it's come back. He makes it through a verse and a half of song, each word whispered with the fervency of prayer, before realizing what it must be.

One leg has been assisted by crutches for that year, and the other has borne no weight at all.

Of course it's going to hurt.

The pain's enough that he briefly -- but seriously -- considers finding a wheelchair once morning comes around. Instead, achy and limping, he makes his way down to the infirmary under his own power.

[After this.]

At this stage, walking with a prosthesis isn't much easier than walking without one. That doesn't matter. He has a prosthesis again.

So even though hauling a bag of groceries upstairs took a good twenty minutes, and even though Gaeta had to rest for another twenty once he made it to room 372, he moves with an unaccustomed buoyancy once he gets back on his feet. (Feet. Plural. Gods, if he's dreaming this is the best one he's had in a while.) Soon, he's hard at work on the evening's meal.

Whatever it is smells delicious as it wafts down the upstairs hallway.

CURRENT auxiliarySurveyor has invited aquarianStargazer to join private transtimeline bulletin board TO LOUIS

CURRENT auxiliarySurveyor 26 MINUTES AGO opened memo on board TO LOUIS

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( Read more... )

[After this.]

"Okay," says Gaeta -- out of breath, as always, from the climb up the stairs -- as he shoulders open the door. The bird immediately weaves around him and darts in, plocking happily at its return to its new nest.

Once it became obvious that Gaeta would be a permanent resident, Bar kindly supplied a few additions and expansions to his room: a kitchenette, a couch and TV, a small bookshelf, a wooden partition to separate his bed from everything else. It looks more like a studio apartment now than the hotel atmosphere of most Milliways rooms.

Stepping aside as best he's able, he holds the door so Louis can come in.

It's spring, as far as Gaeta can tell, but the days don't seem to be getting any warmer. The nights are worse: after he was released from the infirmary -- sans prosthesis still -- he attempted a half-hearted return to his PT routine with a walk around the lake, but barely made it a hundred yards before doing an about-face and hobbling back to the bar. No matter how many layers he puts on, it never seems to get any better.

It never stops, the voice still whispers, and with every repetition Gaeta feels himself curling tighter. Maybe if he's lucky, he'll curl up so small that he'll finally wink out of existence.

He can't leave. He won't do that to Louis again. But Louis still hasn't come back, despite the promise to return as soon as Gaeta was out of sickbay, and all he can do is hope to every god that something got frakked up between the passage of time here and on Galactica. The other alternative...he can only bear so much.

Especially since the worst thoughts have deepened and darkened ever since their conversation. Some days, he has to spend an hour or more before he convinces himself to get out of bed and get the frak downstairs. Once or twice, he gives up and doesn't move any more than necessary: just stares blindly at the wall and tries not to think of all the ways he could circumvent Simon's opiate ban. (In particular, the idea of hacking into the infirmary's medical files has settled in like a bad roommate, taking up space, stealing the mental energy he desperately frakking needs to direct elsewhere.)

Then one day, in a burst of need to do something, he asks Bar for a bucket of baseballs.

( Warning for some disturbing imagery. (But also cute animals, so...maybe it balances out?) )

Dr. Tam -- along with his small army of non-opiate painkillers and anti-nausea meds -- has worked to make Gaeta's stay as comfortable as possible, but...the fact remains that detoxing from morpha will never be a pleasant experience. The chills and nausea peaked a couple hours ago; the pain comes and goes, but (fortunately) never sticks around too long to become intolerable.

It's like the flu, he tells himself. It'll be over in a few more days. Knowing it would be over now if they'd just give him some frakking morpha doesn't help, though.

He's curled on his left side, one arm loosely draped over his stomach, and watching the wall as he shivers. His heart monitor beeps out a steady rhythm.

It's kind of soothing, in a way.

It's been barely over a day since Gaeta tumbled through the Milliways door for the last time, and somehow -- despite being dead -- he's already coming down with something.

He can't tell what; it's just a general malaise, a chill that made him ask for a blanket along with his dinner when he went to the bar. Everything just seems...too bright, he guesses. Too loud. And he's starting to ache in a way that means he might've spoke too soon about the pain being gone for good.

Maybe he'll go to the infirmary later. For now, he's going to enjoy his soup.