White wings built the father, from wire and wax, Then strapped them fast upon their backs, And he then warned his son, when they took to the air: “Don’t stray from my shadow—you’re safer in there. Mind the spray of the sea, mind the heat of the light, For flight is a gift, though escape is our right.” Oh, these wings are a privilege, but freedom’s a right.
And what the frakking hells are you signing now, Felix doesn’t say.
Gaius is hunched over his elbows, the desk, and the reminder of humankind, in that order. Whoever’s holding his strings—what is the cross that moves a marionette called, anyway?—Whoever’s holding Gaius’ strings must have overslept. Or been taken out back and shot. Felix wishes.
It’s dawn. The only difference between dawn and twilight is which side of the room Gaius complains to first. He tends not to look Felix in the eyes, in the morning.
This is the part where the challenger wolf tears the alpha’s throat out, Felix also doesn’t say. Instead, just the usual “Good Morning, Mister President.”
Just once, he’d like Gaius to tell him to go frak himself. It’d be refreshingly honest.
But Gaius says nothing, groans and shoves his head back into the twisted cushion of his arms. And then hurls the pen in Felix’s general direction. It hits him in the shin, doesn’t bounce on the rug.
Felix stoops to pick it up, runs his hands along the pacing-flattened carpet. It would have been changed and deep-cleaned long ago if there were still people who did that and cleaner to do it with. He thinks about thick-bristled brushes spinning across terries that haven’t been upright for years. Of trying to mow a lawn where the grass is ingrown. Anthropology—humankind can’t look up anymore, let alone fly—step out of line and your wax wings’ll crumble, says Gaius with that frakking pen, every frakking time he puts it on the paper and lets the skinjobs guide his hand.
“You’re a waste of air,” Felix says.
Gaius mutters something that betrays incredulity.
It’s a declining resource but Felix doesn’t care, he’ll waste it for this. He scoops the pen up and snaps it clean in half, flings it into Gaius’ face. The ink leaves streaks, tears, an extension of his hair, of the oil that makes up that frakking bastard’s hair. “You’re a waste of air,” he says again, and swears there’s bile in it. “You don’t deserve a frakking say in history unless you write it in your own blood.”
It wakes Gaius up, at least. He stutters, shoves back his chair, smears the black across his face even though he probably meant to wipe it off. “You don’t think I have?” Gaius rolls his eyes—rolls his gods-damned eyes—except the one that’s dripping black ink, which is batting furiously, like he’s still asleep on that side. What does he dream, anymore? “You don’t think I’ve suffered—”
“No,” Felix spits, “I don’t.”
The ink’s all over the document, the desk, Gaius’ skin. “Well I have,” Gaius says around the black, trails of saliva mixing with it, with his accent. “I’ve suffered just as much if not more than y—”
Civilian clothes don’t hold Felix back.
He’s over, on the desk before he really knows what’s happening, grabbing Gaius by the tie and smearing the ink, the spit, through his stubble. Pinching his jaw. Shutting him the frak up. “Suffering is serving you,” he tries not to snarl, “not being you.”
Gaius shoves back, wrenches away. “You—Felix, you don’t know—”
He grinds the ink into Gaius’ teeth with his thumbs. Might’ve been because he slipped, might not, doesn’t matter. It glistens on their skin because of where dawn is coming from, because of what’s in it.
The president of the colonies sputters, “Felix,” and his tongue’s half-black like a lizard’s.
Felix can feel the paper tearing under his knee, can feel the desk mat shifting, flattening like the carpet. There’ll be inkstains here forever, however long forever is. But the spit running out of Gaius’ mouth is already absolving his face of it, skin cleans itself by killing itself and it’s not the first time Felix has hated himself for thinking Gaius Baltar was the greatest man alive.
So he pulls on Gaius’ tie, stains it. Yanks his shirt out of his pants, stains that too. Kicks the mat off the desk and the chair out from under the president’s shuddering legs and frames him, collapses against Gaius back and pins him facefirst to the papers. Gaius groans, sounds wet. Felix hears it in his neck. Over their dead bodies, Felix thinks, greatest man alive over their dead bodies.
“You’re going to frak me, aren’t you,” Gaius mumbles into the desk mat, into Felix’s neck. “You’re going to frak me because you think I need to suffer.”
I’m going to frak you because you want the attention, Felix doesn’t say. I’m going to frak you because I enjoy it despite what you’ve been all along. I’m going to frak you because I’m clearly insane for still giving a damn about you and what you feel.
“Make it easier for yourself,” he says instead.
“Oh god,” Gaius whimpers. God, singular.
Lubricant’s another declining resource, Felix thinks dryly. Underneath him Gaius is fumbling and shifting, hiking up his jacket and shimmying out of his pants. All that remains of humanity probably knows that Gaius Baltar doesn’t wear underwear. The thought’s sickening, that he hasn’t just frakked over everyone in the world.
Felix works himself up as best he can, tries to remember what it was like being able to dream about his idol without tasting bile. Black ink and spit slick his cock. The same stuff’s smeared across and into Gaius’ ass. He’s pushing up onto his hand like someone else is making him want it. Under Felix’s, his thighs are shaking.
Frak you, Felix doesn’t say. Frak you, Mister President. He doesn’t say, but he does. He holds Gaius down by the shoulders and up by the tie and spreads him over the desk. He doesn’t care what Gaius is doing with his own hands. Probably holding on, if that’s the sound of paper crunching and the feeling of his slow, methodical thrusts being answered anxiously. Culpably. He hopes that somewhere under the choked black moans that it’s hurting Gaius more than it’s hurting him.
Actually, what’s probably hurting him is that it’s not hurting Gaius at all.
Sweat traces patterns in the ink on their skin, turning pores into stars, moles into comets, some uncharted sector of the black. Constellations without names, equations without solution. Gaius Baltar, president of the colonies, is clenching his ass like a whore and whining in the back of his throat for someone to make him forget who he is.
Does it count if he signs history in his come? Felix doesn’t say.
Gaius does, to the same sounds of paper and his own voice, a melodramatic whimper, scripted pain. Felix doesn’t, but pulls out anyway, and his cock is surprisingly clean for where it’s been, with the ink burned off by friction. He knows he’s going to wilt otherwise. Sensation alone’s not enough if it has to contend with self-loathing.
“You frakked us out of the sky,” he says, hopes Gaius can hear it over his heaving. “Does this make you remember, or make you forget?”
If Gaius hears, he doesn’t answer, at least not yet. His muscles settle, the smears of ink stop changing. His shirt sticks to itself, sandwiching around the ink like it’s inviting Felix to make it white again.
He can’t.
Gaius sighs, turns his head like he’s going to sleep again, like the black on his cheeks is just stress ringing his eyes, his mouth. “I wish you would,” he mutters. “I wish I was allowed to fall.”