"Oh, for Christ's sake!" Kaylee stared at her insane roommate in exasperation. "You know that's impossible!"
But Bella didn't answer. She was already unbuttoning the dead man's uniform shirt and reaching for his dog tags.
Wait. Uniform shirt? Kaylee took a closer look. The body's navy-blue uniform did look a lot like the uniforms the Colonial Fleet wore in Battlestar Galactica, she conceded silently. But she certainly wasn't going to tell Bella that!
In that moment, Bella found what she was looking for. She came up clutching an octagonal piece of metal that still hung on a chain from the man's neck. "See?" she demanded triumphantly, even though her eyes threatened to spill over.
Kaylee looked. Sure enough, etched into the metal were the words F. Gaeta. Kaylee felt her heart seize up with the kind of creeped-out horror she normally got from movies like Paranormal Activity. What the hell was going on here?
Meanwhile, Bella tucked the dog tags gently back into their place and re-buttoned Gaeta's shirt. As she pulled her hands away, her eyes traveled up and down the length of the body. His uniform was undamaged.
"Looks like they put him in a fresh uniform before they buried him," she said in a tiny, tremulous voice. "At least they showed him that much respect." She burst into tears.
Beside her, Kaylee let out an exasperated sigh. "Oh, for the love of God, Bella! You're crying your eyes out over a man who died before your great-great-great-grandparents were even born."
Bella raised her head and turned blurry eyes on her roommate. "You'd be freaking out if this were Harry Potter, so shut up." She dropped her head again.
"Okay. Fair point." Kaylee put her arm around her friend's shoulders. She didn't understand how Bella could have invested so much emotional energy in a supposedly fictional character, but this had to be hard for her. Kaylee closed her eyes and swallowed against a sudden rise of bile in her throat. Even she couldn't stare at a frozen but rapidly thawing body lying in a coffin.
Eventually, Bella's sobs began to subside. She didn't know how long she'd been kneeling there, her arms on the edge of the coffin, her forehead propped on her arms. She had to make sure Gaeta got a proper burial. A headstone. Flowers to decorate the grave. She wasn't sure how, since she didn't have the money to buy a burial plot. But she had to do something, she knew, because no one else would. She raised her head again to stare into the still and silent face which was, by some God-given miracle, undamaged.
Rattle. Rattle, snuff. Snuff.
Unbelievably, Gaeta's nostrils flared. His lips twitched. And then his chest began to rise and fall in the rhythm of normal respiration.
If hearts could really leap, Bella's would have hit its head on the moon. Unspeakable hope rose in her chest. "Oh, my God," she whispered. Tears once again streamed down her face, but this time they were tears of joy. "He's breathing!"
Kaylee jumped back. "That's impossible!" she blurted in a tone of baffled incredulity.
"Lots of impossible things have been happening lately," Bella replied. "Remember the miniature ysalamiri we saw in the yard a couple weeks ago?"
"That was not an ysalamiri. It was a lizard with a birth defect."
"Yesterday, I would've been inclined to believe you. Now, I'm not so sure." Bella reached back into the coffin and wrapped her hand around Gaeta's wrist, searching for a pulse. She didn't find anything at first, and adjusted her grip. Wait, there it was… and getting steadily stronger!
"He has a pulse!" she exulted. She transitioned from taking his pulse to holding his hand. She stared hard at his face, straining to see the tiniest flicker of movement.
Bella waited. It couldn't have been more than a few minutes, but it felt like an eternity. Then, finally, Gaeta's head wobbled slightly from side to side and his eyes fluttered open.
Bella's tear-streaked face broke into a wide grin. "Welcome back, gorgeous," she said softly.
