hallucinates

Prompt: Underneath by Hanson, Baltar vs. Adama (any)
Requested By: Jess (anekanta )
Characters: Gaius Baltar and Bill Adama (and Head!Six)
Timeline:  I don't know, season 2-ish?  or something. 

Sitting all alone in this place,
Even though we're here face to face,
There is nothing gone but there's something wrong..

Can't you see, that I'm stuck here, underneath-
And you're making it hard to breathe
Take a look around and tell me what you see,
You'll find me--
Underneath

For the first time, Gaius Baltar found himself wishing that Bill Adama would just call him out already.

Just say "I know you've got a Cylon in your head."

Just say something, rather than force him to guess how much the Admiral knew, or suspected.

Adama stepped closer, invading his personal space, and Gaius bristled and gulped, as his eyes darted between Adama's fiercely dark gaze, and the wall ahead.  The old man's jaw was jutted out into a perfect square, and his eyes looked prepared to bulge out of their sockets.

"You did what?" Adama hissed, and Baltar's eyes fluttered open and shut reflexively as tiny flecks of spittle hit his cheek.

"S-sir, the requests I made were all for the purpose of authenticating my test results, comparing psy-psychologcal backgrounds and medical charts to..." Baltar stammered, attempting to maintain some sort of professional dignity.  Adama was less than impressed, as evidenced by the vein throbbing in his forehead, in time with Baltar's stutters.

"Doctor," the Admiral cut him off, with gritted teeth, managing, as always, to call Gaius by his title in a way that stripped away all the usually associeated respect from the word.  "I was under the impression that it was green means fine, red means Cylon.  So what you need military records for is a mystery to me.  And I don't care for mysteries onboard my ship."

"I... I understand that, sir," Gaius countered weakly, "but I thought perhaps examining the psychological profiles of those suspected to be ..."

"Are you a doctor of psychiatry, Doctor Baltar?" Adama demanded, turning his back on Gaius, and moving to his desk where he slipped the cork off a bottle of ambrosia, a little too hard, a little too angrily.  Gaius wasn't quite so flustered yet that he failed to notice Adama didn't look inclined to share.

"No," Gaius was forced to admit. "Not as... such, but..."

"Then how do you intend to make the call of who passes the bar of psychologically fit to carry out their duties onboard this ship?" Adama went on, his intensity mounting, in direct correlation to Baltar's blood pressure, as he poured a glass.  "If anything, Doctor, I've heard disturbing reports about your own mental health, or its apparent decline ." 

Baltar didn't really answer, instead gaping somewhat like a fish, desperately hoping that the words, the excuses, that he needed would just be slipped into his ear, as they so often were.   She was like a crutch for him, so often, in situations like these.

He hated himself for it, right now.

It really hadn't been his business snooping through those files, and there wasn't a damn thing he'd learned from them anyways, but she'd insisted, and all but gone over them with a finetooth comb.  And now here he was, taking the blame for her dirty work.  Once, just once, he'd love to see her taking the heat.  But unfortunately, even if that were possible, it would only serve to implicate him as well, and he couldn't have that.

And Adama continued on coldly, blissfully ignorant of Gaius' own internal purgatory. 

Or was he?

"People tell me strange things about you, Doctor," he said, fixing him with a cruelly blunt stare.  "Any truth to them?"

"Truth to... to what, sir?" Gaius asked, playing dumb, though it always came off with a hint of arrogance.

"They say you talk to yourself.  Or you act like you see things.  Or you stick your nose places it doesn't belong," he said, grinding out the last one just to make his point, as he rounded out his little list by throwing back a drink.  "So which is it, Doc?" he asked, smacking his lips against the bitter sting.  "Are you still mentally stable, or is this place getting to you?  Snapping that big brain of yours?"

"I don't see how talking to oneself is a crime, sir," he said, the model of innocence, except that he couldn't hold the Admiral's gaze for long.  It said only one thing:  I don't believe a damn word you're saying.

He knows, he knows, somehow he knows, Gaius chanted in his head, fighting the urge to just vanish entirely into the recesses of his mind, seeking refuge in Six's arms.  He knows, and he's about to tell me that they've known all along.

A strange sense of almost giddy anticipation flooded through him, fighting against the dread and the denial.

It was almost over. 

There was relief in that.

And then arms slipped about his waist, and a breath coolled his ear, and the chills and the dread won out.

"It's far from over, Gaius," she promised.  

And even though she was there with him again and he didn't have to face the Admiral alone?  Knowing that she was right, and that Adama didn't know, and that this would all go on and on, with no one the wiser...

Honestly, Gaius felt trapped in his own skin, and more lonely than ever.