itstopped: (Default)
User Name/Nick: Juniper
AIM/IM: ricinbeens
E-mail: iamthejunipertree at gmail.com
Other Characters: Jesse Pinkman

Character Name: Lieutenant Felix Gaeta (pronounced Gay-tah, not Guy-tah, for the curious)
Series: Battlestar Galactica
Age: 29
From When?: In canon: after 4x14, "Blood on the Scales"; also after his previous stint on the Barge

Inmate/Warden: Inmate. It's a tricky call, because Gaeta does achieve a measure of peace before his death. However, there's still the whole "he started a coup where a bunch of people got brutally murdered" thing. Also, my take on it is that while he accepts his failure because it was basically inevitable, that doesn't mean he's come to terms with the issues that drove him to mutiny in the first place: his extreme bitterness towards the Cylons and military command, his rage towards the status quo, and a rather bleak outlook on life in general. None of these are necessarily inmate-worthy in and of themselves, but I think they're all things he needs to deal with before he could start helping other people. Oh, and also he used to make his boyfriend smuggle him drugs, because apparently all of my inmates are connected to drugs in some way.

Abilities/Powers: No supernatural powers. He has an extremely high and likely genius-level IQ, with a particular capacity for engineering/computer technology and genetics. He also has a decent singing voice and an eye for art?

Also, Gaeta is a below-the-knee amputee on his right side and received an upgraded prosthetic when he was previously on the Barge, which I'd like for him to keep. It allows him to walk normally with minimal side effects/issues.

Personality: As Gaeta did not make much progress before, I am leaving his personality section the same. It's hard to talk about how Gaeta is now without talking about how Gaeta used to be before the Cylon Holocaust, and even for a year or so afterwards. Young, brilliant, and with a bright future ahead of him, Gaeta was a believer. Not in the Twelve Gods of the Colonies -- at his most faithful, he's still fairly agnostic -- but in the building blocks that made up his life: science; the military; his personal role models, Commander William Adama and Dr. Gaius Baltar. He was a good military man, quiet and reserved on the job, saving his emotional outlets for down time, and for the most part respecting the chain of command and, above all, the mission. He wasn't slavishly devoted -- for example, he knowingly hid information about his friend Dee's involvement in Laura Roslin's escape from Galactica -- but he generally followed the rules, because he genuinely believed. The one word to describe Felix Gaeta, from childhood until the settlement of New Caprica three years ago, is probably "idealistic."

But since the Cylon occupation of New Caprica, and especially the two major events that happened to Gaeta there (the moral downfall of then-President Gaius Baltar and Gaeta's destructive relationship with a female Cylon known as Sweet Eight), his idealism has steadily been eroding. As he's come to understand more about the new world order and his place in it, and the many failures of those in charge, his beliefs have been replaced by bitter resentment, moral and ethical outrage, and ultimately a very real and personal pain (first in the loss of Dee, and then the loss of his leg).

In some ways, though, the Gaeta who died is still an idealist. He genuinely wanted to believe that he could stage a mutiny/coup without bloodshed. He wanted to believe in the power of the truth, and the idea that if enough people just stood up for the right side, things would change. Despite what ended up happening, that idealistic streak has not been totally killed in him, but it's going to be an uphill battle for him to find it again. And he definitely no longer has any respect for democratic process, bureaucracy, or the military chain of command.

Now, Gaeta is still prone to be somewhat of an introvert, but his emotional releases are more common and much more intense. After all, one such outburst led to his stabbing Gaius in the neck with a pen. On the Barge, stuck back in a confined and rigid environment, he'll probably seek out the classic escapes: booze, cigarettes, gambling, drugs and sex. Although he mostly prefers men, especially after his disastrous affair with Sweet Eight, he does on rare occasions sleep with women. On Galactica, he had a mild addiction to pain meds due to his leg, but this will have stopped with his death (as his final words, "it stopped," indicate that the pain no longer haunts him to the same degree).

Along with his general disdain for military authority, Gaeta has also developed a deep distrust of hyper-advanced technology (to a certain degree -- he comes from a futuristic society with spaceships and such, so this distrust mostly extends to, like, AI and robotics). But because the Cylons are linked with networks in his mind, he'll be very reluctant to use the comm system, despite his interest and skills in engineering. He'll also likely be reluctant to get too emotionally close to anyone, as virtually everyone he was close to in life either betrayed him (like Gaius and Sweet Eight) or died.

Basically, although Gaeta has achieved some measure of peace with the events that led to his death -- enough that he was able to make peace with his execution itself -- he never got closure on the things that led to those events. The Cylons still became members of the fleet, despite more-than-decimating the human race. The people who were responsible for his leg never paid for it. The men who allowed these things to happen never ended up answering to anyone at all, or even admitting they were wrong. So while his despair and anger are no longer the only thing powering him, they're simmering below the surface, along with a lot of bitter resignation. Outwardly, he may seem relaxed, even personable, if also rather cynical. Inwardly, things are going to be pretty bleak.

Barge Reactions: As Gaeta will have his Barge memories, he won't have any particular reaction. He hates the Barge and resents the Admiral and will continue to feel this way for the time being.

Path to Redemption: In some ways, Gaeta's redemption shouldn't be that difficult. He knows what he did wrong and he's come to terms with his own death. The problem is that he honestly feels that he should have remained dead, and he has very little interest in progressing further or graduating, in part because he has no interest in returning to the world that (from his perspective) chose the genocidal monsters over people like him. After having his idealism crushed, he's swung around to being very paranoid and cynical, and what he needs most is to come to reconcile those two parts of himself: to reclaim some of his hope and will to thrive, while no longer putting people on pedestals and going to extremes when he's disappointed. He also needs to deal with what is essentially speciesism and a great deal of anger. Basically, what he really needs is not so much a redemption, per se, as a rehabilitation. Even if his negative feelings are somewhat justifiable, he has many issues -- his hatred of the Cylons, the various grudges he has against those who wronged him, his tendency to lie to himself, his habit of succumbing to hero-worship -- that need to be worked through for him to truly be whole again.

Right now, he thinks he has peace, and he may even really have it, but it's a very sad and broken kind of peace. He can get the real thing. Really, he just needs someone to actually listen to him and help him work through this stuff, so that he can become the kind of person he used to want to be.

Previously, he made very little progress, but this was due in part to the fact that Gaius was greatly impeding him. With Gaius gone, a warden will likely have more luck.

History: Felix Gaeta was born to a middle-class family in Perkinston on the ocean planet Picon, part of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol. Growing up, he was lucky enough that his parents always supported his various academic endeavors -- perhaps being happy to know that they had a genius in the family. Indeed, young Felix was a model citizen in just about every way: a top student, mindful of rules and manners, respectful to his elders and betters, friendly with his peers. If he had one problem, it was that he couldn't settle down: he flitted from hobby to hobby, Dream Job to Dream Job. Architecture, medicine, photography; he was quietly passionate about everything, but stuck with nothing.

Eventually, Felix found his way to both the hard sciences and the military and blossomed. He used the Colonial equivalent of ROTC to fund a degree in computer science at Helicon University and became a junior officer. He rose through the ranks, receiving a promotion to junior lieutenant and joining the crew of Commander William Adama's Battlestar Galactica as the Tactical Officer and eventually Senior Officer of the Watch. He spent three years on Galactica, seeing it through to its decommission... except that just as the old ship was having its decommission ceremony, the Cylons attacked and destroyed the Twelve Colonies.

Lt. Gaeta spent the next year on the run from the Cylons as a member of Galactica's crew. During this time, he got to meet Dr. Gaius Baltar, a living scientific legend. Harboring a great respect and a certain degree of attraction to the man, Gaeta was delighted when he was assigned to assist Gaius on the creation of a Cylon detector. Gaius proved to be unbalanced and difficult to work with, but Gaeta continued to believe in him, even proving his innocence in colluding with the Cylons. When the fleet held its first elections, Gaeta uncovered then-President Roslin's staff committing fraud and, still believing in the ideals of truth and justice, reported the crime to Admiral Adama. When the dust cleared, he became the new President Baltar's Chief of Staff just in time to settle on the newly-discovered planet of New Caprica. Life on New Caprica turned out to be harsh and unforgiving, and Felix was dismayed by Gaius's libertine, undisciplined lifestyle as president and his neglect of his people. A lot of his job turned out to be acting as the go-between between Gaius and his increasingly frustrated people.

Then, after a year, the Cylons reappeared and took over.

And Gaius let them.

The occupation of New Caprica was devastating to the entire human population. As a member of the President's office, Felix was spared the poverty and abuse that most of the humans went through, but he was morally crushed by what was happening. He allowed himself to be seduced by a Cylon Eight, and he started giving her lists of human prisoners, with the promise that she would set them free. Instead, she had most of them executed, although she set a few token humans free to keep Felix in the dark about it. Meanwhile, deeply frustrated by his own collaborations, Felix also started secretly feeding information to the human resistance movement -- so secretly that not even they knew who their source was. This ultimately led to the humans successfully fleeing New Caprica. Felix nearly murdered Gaius in the escape, but was persuaded to give him one chance to redeem himself and deter the Cylons from setting off a nuke. Gaius went with the Cylons and Felix escaped to Galactica with the rest of humanity.

Unfortunately, the returned Gaeta found a more-than-chilly reception when he returned to Galactica. Since no one knew he had helped the resistance, everyone still saw him as Gaius's right hand man. He was tried for this crime by a secret circle (many of whom, ironically, would later turn out to be sleeper Cylons or Cylon sympathizers themselves) and nearly executed, until the circle realized that his claims to being the resistance's secret source were true. He was offered a full legal pardon under general amnesty and even allowed to reclaim his old job on Galactica, but it took a while before he was accepted by his peers again.

Gaeta's feelings towards Gaius continued to be contentious. When Gaius was arrested and brought to public trial for his crimes, Gaeta offered to interrogate him. However, after Gaius provoked Gaeta, including telling Gaeta that he knew about the Eight, Gaeta went mad and tried to kill Gaius with a pen. Later, on the witness stand, Gaeta lied about his knowledge of Gaius's involvement with the Cylons. Although he was never caught out, the false testimony did not stop Gaius from being surprisingly acquitted.

Gaeta continued to serve on Galactica without incident -- even starting a relationship with fellow crewman Louis Hoshi -- until he was picked for Kara Thrace's Earth-seeking mission. After a dangerously long time away from Galactica, Thrace decided to have her ship liaison with the Cylons. Her second in command, Karl Agathon, refused her orders and instead ordered Gaeta to jump back to Galactica. To prevent Gaeta from making the jump, Thrace's husband Sam Anders (himself a secret Cylon) shot him in the leg, badly wounding him. Although it was clear the wound would lead to the loss of the leg if not outright death, Gaeta's return to the fleet and medical salvation was delayed over fifteen hours by Thrace's mission to liaise with the Cylons. When the mission ended and he was finally brought back, he was on the verge of death, and his leg was amputated (with only local anesthetic, at his request -- he didn't want to wake up to it gone, he said). Soon after, Anders's identity as a Cylon became public, as well as the other members of the circle that had once nearly killed Gaeta for collaborating with the Cylons. With the help of these Cylons, the fleet found its way to Earth, only to discover that the place was a bombed-out ruin incapable of sustaining life. In the ensuing despair, Gaeta's best friend Dualla killed herself in the quarters they shared. The announcement immediately following her death, that the humans would ally with the Cylons as they left Earth looking for a new home, set off something in Gaeta, and he began to make plans to counter what he considered Adama and President Roslin's increasingly harmful overlording.

Not long after that, Gaeta discovered the truth about Sweet Eight when they became trapped together on a ship. After killing the rest of the crew to save oxygen, the Eight told him everything. He stabbed her to death and was about to kill himself as well when he was found by Louis and a pilot friend named Racetrack. Returning to Galactica, he promptly ended the relationship, preferring to keep Louis out of what he realized was inevitably coming.

When Adama and Roslin announced that the fleet would not only be joining forces with the Cylons but even giving the Cylons access to their ships, Felix Gaeta had had enough. He launched a full-scale mutiny in cohorts with political terrorist Tom Zarek -- even after a personal plea from Gaius to stop. However, when Zarek had the other heads of the civilian government brutally murdered, Gaeta quailed. He hadn't wanted bloodshed: only justice. He even attempted to hold a (one-sided) trial for William Adama, only to order the man's execution anyway. However, Adama escaped... and with Laura Roslin and the Cylons bearing down on him, and Galactica physically crippled by the opposition, Gaeta surrendered rather than see more lives taken in a useless last stand.

After one last meeting with Gaius, where the two seemed, to some degree, to reconcile, Gaeta was executed by firing squad. Immediately before his death, he noted that the phantom pain and irritation in his leg had finally stopped.

On the Barge, Gaeta tended to keep to himself. He greatly distrusted many of his Bargemates, in particular the Time Lords, due to a bad interaction with Narvin that exacerbated his paranoia and suspicion towards "superior" beings. He was very angry and resentful that the Admiral had yanked him back from a death he'd felt he'd essentially earned and didn't particularly want to work on graduating. However, he was also fanatically afraid of death tolling, to the point that when he nearly had his other leg cut off, he said he would have preferred to live that way (and did spend a month in a wheelchair healing) than "reset."

Meanwhile, Gaius was on the Barge, but a Gaius who had died in the initial Holocaust: he knew nothing of the events that had followed and didn't know Gaeta at all. Gaeta used this and Gaius's warden Sarah Connor to manipulate things until he eventually discovered the horrible truth: Gaius had aided the Cylons from the beginning. He immediately tried to murder Gaius and was stopped by Sarah, much to his fury. Gaius disappeared soon after that, and Gaeta disappeared not long after him.

Sample Journal Entry: (I hope it's okay to leave the samples the same as well!)

[Gaeta is standing in what looks like a dormitory, with several bunks along the wall -- though it is, of course, empty. His legs are cut off by the camera, but he's leaning heavily on a cane. He's staring at his other hand, turning it over and over, back and forth.]

I don't understand. How am I here? How is that possible? I'm no frakking Cylon... Besides, I don't think they let them come back like this. [He smiles, a little bitterly, and taps his cane against his leg with a hollow metallic sound.]

So what is it? The afterlife? Hades? "All of this will happen before, and all of it will happen again..." [He looks around at the bunks.] I'm not much of a believer, but it looks like Pythia was right.

Sample RP:

Felix switched off the communicator with a frown -- best not to leave something like that on and open, not with so many possible connections. He'd have to poke around inside and see if there was a way to keep it really, truly, off the network when it wanted it to be... or at least firewall the everloving frak out of it.

He limped over to his rack and sat himself down with some effort, setting his cane on the floor so he could ease his prosthesis off. His-- leg throbbed as the blood rushed back into it; not the way it used to ache, so much that it was hard to focus on anything else, but enough.

He kneaded it lightly, eyeing his surroundings. Well, here he was. Galactica, the home he'd loved and hated both. On the bright side, it seemed like Starbuck and that Cylon husband of hers were nowhere to be found, or Tigh, or Athena. But on the other hand, no Dee, no Louis, no Narcho... no anybody.

He sighed and pulled his metal leg back on, pushing himself back up. There had to be some tools, a computer, something, somewhere. Or, barring that, a really big bottle of ambrosia.
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