the sound is not asleep [closed]

[lovethyneighb_or]

Who: Father Mulcahy (lovethyneighb_or), Felix Gaeta (not_a_traitor), Zivia Birnbaum (tehilim127_1), and maybe another
What: Mulcahy has a hard time with the aftershocks of Number 2's visit
When: 4 days after the party; September 25th
Where: His house, Downtown Hollow
Warning(s): Paranoia, ptsd, destruction, eating disorder, others in headers


It all starts simply enough. Mulcahy retreats to his house and entertains no visitors. I need some time, Mulcahy says, and who could blame him? After a night like that, it'd be difficult to deny him some peace and quiet. He's been something of a recluse for more than a year now. (Though perhaps a little worrying is that even Gaeta is denied his company, and he's taken a brief leave off of work. Even in his most reclusive days, he never did that; too committed to the work.)

After a day or two of this, though, his sending stone goes mostly radio silent. For those who do manage to get a call out to him, the conversations are short and strained.

Then, one more day of total silence; and then, one day, Zivia and Gaeta both find themselves tracked down by one of his two companions: Peter, jangling frantically at Gaeta, and Connor, stamping and huffing insistently at Zivia, both demanding they follow them back to the Father's home. When they arrive, the door is locked and the curtains are all drawn--but there are sounds coming from inside. Wooden, mostly--of wood being struck, wood creaking, wood splitting, but none of that seems particularly good. Concussive impacts thud out from the upper floor. Once in a while, there's a grunt and labored breathing.

Comments

[not_a_traitor]

Alarmed, "Hey, easy -- "

Gaeta catches Mulcahy by the forearms, helping to ease him back to the floor. The bowl wobbles a brief rotation before settling. "Easy," he says again, trying to soothe, "it's okay. It's okay. We can worry about it later, all right?"

That flicker of hurt a couple of days ago already felt a little ridiculous. Sitting here in the wreckage of Mulcahy's house, when the man himself can barely eat, can hardly walk -- that is not the time for anyone to be worrying about missed birthdays.

[tehilim127_1]

"It's okay," Zivia echoes, and shuts her teeth against anything further -- don't try to move that fast, just sit still, try another bite. She has to keep reminding herself not to tell him what to do.

Maybe asking him a question might be all right. If she can find one that won't sound intrusive, or like an interrogation, or, or, or.

(Even with her emotions calmed, she can't stop hearing his desperate shout: I don't know what you want from me, I didn't do anything, leave me alone.)

[lovethyneighb_or]

Her unsaid advice seems to be taken to heart anyway, at least; Mulcahy hangs onto Felix as he carefully eases back to sitting. In the other room, Peter can be seen flitting about, sifting through the scattered debris, looking for something.

“I’m sorry. I can’t believe I’d completely missed it. I—I should have at least called.”

He didn’t think he could feel any more rotten than he did, yet here they are. He takes a slow breath, as deep as he thinks he can risk it before his stomach flips again.

He looks over at Zivia, still across the ruined threshold, and at all the torn-up floorboards and splinters and broken things in between.

He puts his head down, covers his face, and whispers, "Goddamn."

[not_a_traitor]

Gaeta can count on one hand the number of times he's heard Mulcahy curse in his presence. It's another twist in his gut; another fracture in his own composure, quickly plastered over.

"It's okay," he repeats, softer. "I already knew you weren't feeling well." He traces Mulcahy's gaze around the room. Not feeling well -- gods, the understatement feels obscene. "And... there isn't anything here that can't be fixed. All right? We can figure it out."

Sitting this close to Mulcahy, and not quite so caught up in his own frantic need to comfort him, Gaeta finally notices just how many splinters dot his hands. He swallows.

"...Francis, do you want me to pull some of those splinters out?"

[lovethyneighb_or]

“Hm?” He holds them out to look—oh, right. Yes. Odd, isn’t it, how even with his arthritic hands he can barely feel the sting.

“Um… yes, that’s… that’s alright. Thank you.” He’d hold them out to Felix, but he’s too shaky, and lies them down in his lap instead.

[tehilim127_1]

"I've got a handkerchief," she says, "if you need one." If any of the splinter wounds need cleaning.

(If they were back home, she'd have hand sanitizer. And bandaids. And -- and it's pointless to think about.)

[not_a_traitor]

He looks up at Zivia. "Yeah, I think that's a good idea. Thanks. -- There might be some tweezers in the bathroom, too." To Francis: "Is it all right if she comes in to look?"

It seems likely the bathroom was ripped to shreds along with the rest of the house, but still. Maybe, if they're lucky, some of the toiletries will still be intact.

In the meantime, he gently cups one of Francis's hands, tugging it closer for a better look. A fair number of the splinters are big enough that he can pick them out without tweezers. Gaeta starts with those, focusing on the ones lodged near Mulcahy's fingertips.

cw emeto implied

[lovethyneighb_or]

A second's delay too long before he looks up at her and seems to be thinking about it. "Alright," Mulcahy says, and nods.

The bathroom is as sorry a sight as the rest of the house. There had been a first aid kit of sorts, but the contents are scattered God knows where. The walkways, at least, are open. A mostly-empty glass with tap water sits near the sink; his toothbrush and toothpaste are intact, sitting in a cleared little spot; a sour, bitter smell hangs in the air. Mulcahy's spent a lot of time in here.

He lets Gaeta handle him. He doesn't flinch or wince as the splinters are pulled out, piece by piece. He stays very still, ruminating on the tender touch of someone doing healer's work, and closes his eyes.

Quietly: "I'm sorry. For raising my voice. For... all of this." A breath. "Did I frighten you?"

[tehilim127_1]

Zivia nods back in acknowledgment, murmurs thanks, and moves through as unobtrusively as she can.

In the bathroom, she does a quick once-over of the mess, then finds a mostly intact towel, clears a space on the floor to spread it out flat, and starts picking things up and laying them down on the towel in something like order. No tweezers in the first sweep; she keeps looking.

At one point she very briefly runs cold water onto her fingertips, presses them to her eyes, and resumes working.

[not_a_traitor]

"A little," he admits, just as quiet. Honesty seems like the best recourse right now: no lies, not even little white ones. The small pile of splinters next to them grows. "But just because I'm worried about you. Not because of anything you did to me specifically."

He's dealt with much worse than raised voices or a broken dish chucked at his head. The rest, though --

I wish I'd been here earlier. But would it have helped at all? Would Gaeta have been able to stop the whirlwind in its tracks, or only make it worse?

[lovethyneighb_or]

He's quiet for a while, staring down at his hands and the splinters as they're pulled. Every little wood shard is a warning. An omen. A sign of what's to come for him, just beneath the safe veneer of the present, behind the blindness to their future.

There is darkness, and it's going to eat him whole.

"I considered myself free," he murmurs. "But I don't feel as though I am. I feel like a—a wretched dog whose master has suddenly died, still loping alone around the ruining house while the corpse rots in the kitchen. He's gone, but... I'm still living like this, as if he's always over my shoulder. I wish I knew why."

[not_a_traitor]

Gaeta nods. Briefly, he rubs his thumb over the center of Mulcahy's palm, in one of the few splinter-free spots.

"I think it's like adjusting to anything after spending so long in different circumstances," he murmurs. "Worse, this time, but -- similar. It's only been a year and a half. I still hoard food; I still half-expect a Cylon ship to jump into orbit someday, even though nobody in the whole frakking system has space travel yet. And that's without me running into any Cylons at the gala."

He turns over Mulcahy's hand. Gets to work on his knuckles.

"It takes a while to learn that you're somewhere else." A soft sigh. "And I guess it takes longer to forget where you used to be. Doesn't help when the worst reminder possible suddenly shows up again."

[tehilim127_1]

She pauses in the doorway back into the living room. Not at all sure she should be hearing this from Gaeta; hesitating to join them while he's still speaking.

So it's only when he falls silent that she steps in, holding up the tweezers. "Here," she says. "All right if I bring them over?"

Trying to keep the question light, as though it's perfectly normal to ask permission before approaching.

[lovethyneighb_or]

Mulcahy looks up. "Y-yes. Thank you."

He turns Gaeta's words over in his head. Oh, leave it to these two to be able to make his most frantic, rabid anxieties sound sane again. Yes, it's true; he's in good company among the haunted. He wonders how many of them have destroyed their own houses because of it, though.

He goes quiet again.

[not_a_traitor]

Gaeta murmurs a thank-you of his own, accepts the tweezers, and begins to pick out the smaller fragments he couldn't get with his fingers alone. He lets the silence pass by unremarked.

"I don't know how long it'll take," he says eventually. "I wish it was faster. For both of us. But I hope someday it isn't a, a reflex anymore, to look over our shoulders, or doubt, or -- be this afraid. Because we'll finally know for sure we're somewhere else."

[tehilim127_1]

Zivia's taken a seat on the floor, just over an arm's length away, tucking her skirt under her legs with the ease of unconscious habit.

"What I've heard," she says quietly, "from people with reason to know, is that it does pass. There isn't a simple or fast fix, but it does pass."

[lovethyneighb_or]

A pause.

"I fear that I won't make it that far."

He feels so cold.

"This is going to kill me. Look around you. I can feel it. The way pieces of me have been carved and carved away. Shreds of my spirit falling in ribbons. I can no longer eat. I cannot drink. I cannot sleep, or go outside, or bear the gaze of my neighbors; I can hardly exercise, I play no more music, I cannot keep my house, I..."

(Did Gaeta ever even know that he was a musician, once?)

"I am losing too much. Incomplete beyond repair, like a tree without most of its branches, struggling to live before it dies. One day, soon, it will have been too much, and I'll slip off into the dark."

He looks up. "Felix. I'm—sorry, about... all of this. I know that you didn't ask for any of it. If this is too much for you, I'll understand if..."

[not_a_traitor]

It's so familiar. Francis says, this is going to kill me, and Gaeta hears the echoes of the last stragglers of humanity, all of them losing more and more each day. What isn't lost ends up crushed and molded for the sake of survival until there's simply nothing left. It is inevitable; it is impossible to change. The weight Mulcahy describes cracks his heart along all the fault lines Galactica created.

(He thinks, I could've sang with him, if I knew him before.)

But they're both somewhere else. There must still be a chance. And if there's not -- gods, Gaeta knows what he wanted most desperately in the last days of his own unraveling.

He gathers both of Mulcahy's hands between his own, lifts them, and presses a kiss to an uninjured spot on his knuckles, eyes bright. "I'm not going anywhere," he says.

[tehilim127_1]

She shuts her eyes, hard, for just a moment, then opens them again.

It feels cruel, to insist that he keep trying. Heartless. But she can't think how to say anything else.

"Francis." Very low, and very clear. "Please believe me. You are not beyond repair."

[lovethyneighb_or]

He can't make himself believe it. He was getting a little better, but things like this just keep happening and he's going to get worse, unmeasurably worse, the way the patients in OR would deteriorate so quickly without any warning at all. He's brushed against it over the last few days, that vast black spectre. It'll get him. He sees no future of otherwise.

And yet. Still. Gaeta does not let go, and Zivia is still here. He can't make himself believe those words, but the insistence means the world.

"I need help." Strained, quiet. "I—I very badly need help, but I'm—I couldn't let myself weigh on other's lives like that. I just can't stand it. I won't do it."

[tehilim127_1]

"I don't --" Her voice wavers, almost breaks, firms again.

(Of all things, it's the relief when he says I need help that's pulled the tears up into her eyes. That he says it, when she's been fighting so hard not to tell him you need help.)

"I don't think," slow, careful, each phrase gingerly placed, "if that's your worry, I don't think you realize. Just how much. The loss of you. Would weigh on our lives."

She has to swallow before going on. "Helping you ... if you could let us ... would be so much lighter to carry."

[not_a_traitor]

Gaeta nods. He can't wipe his eyes while holding Mulcahy's hands, and he refuses to let go; all he can do is blink rapidly to try and dispel a few tears.

"We're willing to take it on," he says. "It's worth it. I swear. Francis, what I asked for, going into this, was to be with you. I didn't ask for it to be simple, or easy, all I asked for was... you. As you are."

A brief, muted sniffle.

"Zivia's right. Whatever weight you think you'd put on us wouldn't be anything compared to the weight of losing you."

[tehilim127_1]

"And it isn't just the two of us."

Only a few words more, but she can't not say them.

"There are a lot of people here who care about you."

[lovethyneighb_or]

How, he wants to ask. How can anyone feel so fondly for as bitter a creature as him? How can so many love him for anything beyond a fond, distant pity? Who among them; who?

He moves an exhausted, hunched movement, then straightens; abruptly, he feels his cross thud against his chest.

... No. Mulcahy's eyes achingly shut. No, he knows who. All those people who scrounged in the dirt and the bushes for something so pitifully inconsequential for everyone but him. And—and around one finger in the hands that Gaeta grasps, an enamel ring.

He almost thinks, Lord, save me from my own foolishness—but, no. He seems to have beaten him to the punch.

He puts his head down. Worn to his last nerve, no fight left to him, Mulcahy breaks one hand from Felix to reach for Zivia as well as him, and weeps.

[not_a_traitor]

When Gaeta scoots a bit closer, it is with no less caution than before. He doesn't let go of Francis's hand as -- carefully, ready to pull back if he makes any sign of flinching away -- he settles an arm around the other man's shoulders. He will gather him as close as he allows, while still leaving space for Zivia to do the same if she wants. (He's not familiar enough with her religion to realize she may not be able to.)

So soft it's barely above a breath: "I love you."