"Suppose a long time ago, it was... architecture. There was a year there where I scribbled floor plans on everything? Dining room table, patio tiles, rare books... Drove my parents crazy." Gaius asks how old he was. "I don't know, uh, eight, maybe? Nine?" Gaius is smoking, too; he can't take his eyes off the prisoner. "Tell you one thing, though, I had some pretty frakking amazing ideas. Restaurants shaped like food. Hmm? Top-heavy buildings... And stairways, every... Everything had to have a stairway..." Gaius smokes sadly, and puts out his cigarette. Felix pours him more ambrosia: "Spoils of war..." He smiles, happy in the final analysis, to be here, now. With Gaius. The only friend he has left. Gaius can barely drink. "When I was older, uh... Then it became medicine, and... Engineering, photography. I think I would've made a better architect than any of those, though. And then, I discovered science. And I ... Thought I was really, really good at it. Until I met you," he says graciously, obligingly, affectionately. Gaius tries to hold back tears.

Gaius leans forward, through the haze of smoke, and says his name, softly. Just once. "Don't," Felix nods. The intimacy is palpable. One more word and he'll break. "And please, no religion." Leaving aside the point that this moment here is all religion is really good for, what else can he give? He wants to do something we don't have a name for. It's something a Cylon could do, easy as thinking, but we do things differently on our side. How to connect, through all that history and salt and smoke, how to reach from one body to another and express that horrible, wonderful existence of someone else, that cuts through the loneliness that only humans know. This was Laura's lesson on the Hub; if Jake humanized Romo then this is all Laura's lesson for Gaius now. How to connect, how to just love somebody.

How to say that this man -- of all the men in the world the least likely to ever really understand another person's subjective personhood, whose mental health such as it is rests upon his narcissism, and keeps him sane -- has been invaded, and changed, through years of this intimacy. How to say this man, of all men, has been brought to turn an It into a Thou: to say without breaking, this man loves you. Knows you, dark and sharp, and shiny bright bits. Bears halls and corridors and doors inside, for you. Forever. How to say that, without touching, without even saying, when he won't let you. When he's fragile enough to shatter, how do you give him strength without taking strength away?