no_thief | (no subject)

Felix's whole face, on the other hand, is lit up.

"See?" he says as he pushes the glass-plate door shut. They're standing on a small patio, bright flowering trees shading it from either side; it's humid and smells like damp earth, or a recent rainfall.

(If you squint, you can also see faded lines that look like floor plans sketched over the patio tiles. Felix's flirtation with wanting to be an architect, brief as it might have been, was...rather enthusiastic.)

She turns slowly in a half-circle, and stops when she first gets a look at the room beyond the door they just came through.

"This is where you live?"

"Yeah."

It's a one-level house that isn't terribly large, but the way it's designed -- with lots of windows, lots of light-colored wood, and rooms that seem to flow into one another -- gives it a nice illusion of space.

"Me and my parents, but they're still at work."

It looks -- it looks different from any room she's ever seen, in ways that she can't quite put into words.

"They're laborers?"

Felix scrunches up his face, the visual equivalent of saying ehn. "Not really. Dad's a professor and Mom's a journalist."

And that -- that gets a longer look, and a blink.

"They're scholars?"

He can't help it: his shoulders hunch a little, and he jams his hands into his pants pockets. It hasn't been that long since the incident with the guards.

"That doesn't make them bad people," he mumbles, a trifle defensive.

"--no," Kaya says quickly, "no, I didn't mean --"

She swallows hard.

"My papa was a scholar too."

"...Oh."

Felix's head comes up. He takes his hands out of his pockets, and, unsure of what to say, rubs one of them over his hair.

"I'm sorry," he says, still quiet. "It's stupid, it's just stuff the guards were saying when -- "

A low, distant rumble cuts him off.

Her head comes up, and she looks out through the windows -- and her brow furrows in bewilderment.

"No clouds," she says. "...was that thunder?"

Felix offers a tiny smile. "Nope," he says. "It happens all the time here. You'll want to see it, it's a -- "

The whole time he's been talking, the sound's been building, no longer so low or so distant anymore. Right before he can tell her what it is, the noise peaks, and --

Whoosh.

The branches of the taller trees ripple a bit as a Colonial Raptor passes overhead.

Kaya gasps, and flinches back involuntarily -- but her eyes are wide with something else in addition to the flash of fear, and she doesn't back away.

"What was that?"

"It's a Raptor." He can't help but grin. "They're part of the Colonial Fleet, they're, um -- "

Ordinarily, here is where he'd spout off a long list of facts about both the Fleet and Raptors themselves. In the interest of simplifying it for Kaya, though, Felix restrains himself. "They're a type of machine they use to fly between planets and other ships that're up in orbit. We're really close to Fleet Headquarters, so they come through here a lot."

Usually not quite that close, though. The Raptor crossed about a hundred feet up; Felix is more used to that number being significantly higher.

She steps forward; unconsciously, she reaches out and touches the windowglass with the tips of her fingers.

"A machine that flies," she breathes, in wonder and disbelief. "How does it do that?"

"Um -- "

Okay. He was good the first time. There's only so long Felix can keep his natural impulses in check.

So what follows is an earnest -- and, to Kaya, entirely incomprehensible -- flood of information about the basics of Raptor flight. It's going to segue into spaceflight soon enough if she doesn't stop him.

She's listening, and trying to understand, and her face is increasingly blank.

When he pauses for breath, she says "And you said they ... fly between planets?"

He corrected her before, when she said stars.

"Yeah," he says with a nod. "Raptors're mostly for flying to other ships, like battlestars, but they can go planet to planet if they want. And we've got different kinds of ships that just do nothing but planet-to-planet stuff."

The word battlestar makes her shiver, for some reason.

"And they're not magic. Like your, your book."

Felix, by now, no longer gets that small, irritated flare -- the one that felt a little like being caught in a miscommunication and a little more like being talked down to -- that he used to get when he heard the word magic. "Right. There's no magic here. It's all technology."

A beat. The tiny smile, this time, is a little mischievous.

"We could catch the bus down to Fleet Headquarters if you wanna see them up close," he suggests.

Another faintly blank look. "Bus?"

"...I'll explain on the way there."

(That faint dryness to his voice will become very, very well-honed in another seventeen years.)

It's not too far a walk to the bus stop -- five minutes, maybe, and less to put them level with the roadway. Cars and people alike bustle past; Felix makes sure to keep pace with Kaya, uncertain how she'll react to everything.

The cars were terrifying at first; now she sees that they're enclosed carts, that's all, with people inside them. And somehow moving with no horses, and faster than any horse could run -- but she can accept that. The empty cars standing still at the side of the road are unnerving, until she realizes that they won't go without people in them.

The people don't all wear the same kind of clothes that Felix does -- but they're all the same kind of strange, and she's slowly getting used to them, especially after all the kinds of people she's seen at Milliways. They're looking askance at her clothes, though, or maybe she's imagining that.

Picon's a comfortably middle-class colony: not the hub of prestige that marks Caprica, but not a poor and disenfranchised planet like Aerilon, either. Kaya's ragged clothes are just out of place enough to garner a second look; it's the sort of second look that's followed by a shrug and prompt dismissal, though.

Felix doesn't notice any of that for at least a minute. When he finally does, he steps a little closer to Kaya, as if to say, It's okay -- both to her and to the people on the street.

"We're gonna turn left up here," he says as he takes a break from his explanation. Felix points to the corner just ahead.

She nods.

"Everybody's so rich here," she mutters uneasily, just barely above a whisper.

"We're -- "

He intends to finish that sentence with not that rich, but it's cut off by another rising thought: you are to somebody like Kaya.

Confronted with the embarrassment of something he's never thought about before, Felix falls silent, hands finding his pockets again.