Ashes to ashes
I'll soon run out of creative ways to avoid grading those semester papers. It's just, the visual pattern of 'Sometimes a Great Notion', really got to me. Colorless meekness of the demolished Earth resonated too perfectly with the overall emotional slant of episode, with subdued suffering Lee underwent. So this is a bit of an impressionistic take on Lee Adama's initial reaction to the tragedy of Dee's demise.
Set, for the most part, before and through the morgue scene (short of the Admiral making an entrance).
Rating T
Disclaimer: None of the characters, plot-points, inherent to the show, belong to me.
Dust to dust
Their home, sought after through loss and hurt, and rage, and fierce belief in salvation, was in ashes. Gray and black, in various permutations, coating the ground and sky alike, blurring the horizon into a barren canvas. Ashes, covering their boots and hands, and faces, and minds, obscuring familiar shapes with gossamer shadows. The color of shuttered dreams. Green was a long forsaken streak within the frigid palette of wasteland. Green was the color of her eyes, oozing glimmering promise through ashen desolation. Seeping confidence into meek whirlpool of despair, engulfing them all. The color of his hope.
A Quorum aide was hesitant whether to proceed with awaiting instructions or just make himself sparse. President Roslin out of reach on Galactica, the dispatch like that should've, probably, been relegated to the interim President, at least. Captain Thrace reported the loss of Colonial transmitter signal from the planet. Mr. Adama, however, had yet to indicate any acknowledgement of the news, or even awareness of an extra presence in the office. Frozen in place, he was clutching the back of a chair, knuckles so white with strain the clerk caught himself wondering if they might pop. The phone receiver was swaying limply on the cord, over the table edge.
- Mr. Adama, would you like some water? Should I call a medic? Mr. Adama?
Ashes. Ashes descended a thick curtain over his eyes, paving the shards of reality crashing to scorched ruins all over him, for the second time in a row, that day. A distant rasp, hardly registered as his own voice, stifled and hoarse from inhaling ash, dancing a frenzied flurry around him, requested a shuttle to Galactica.
***
He scanned over contorted strange faces aligned to meet him on the hangar deck, recognition eluding immediate grasp. For a stranger he was himself, in an alien world. A world without her.
Ashen were the lights at the morgue, as he made his way through the doors, movement oddly foreign to his limbs, every step an effort through flotsam and jetsam of faith, crumbling to dust beneath his feet. A beacon of ashen pallor - Gaeta's face, maimed by a grimace of condemning torment - halting him en route to her chamber, for a moment.
Black. The color of the gun, handed over to him. Still loaded, but for a single charge. The one to have snatched away his ultimate prerogative - to kiss her good-night. The metal felt solid and cold beneath his skin. Standard-issue side-arm had always been a tad too heavy for her hand. Not that she'd ever admitted that much.
- Let me take this, son. You can come inside and see her.
Cottle's grumble scratched close by his ear, as his hands were relieved of the weapon. It took him a still while to regard remnants of ash, printed deep into his palms, before resuming motion.
He wouldn't see her face. Wouldn't lift the cover off her immobile form, if only for fear of setting the pile of suffocating ashes afloat, burring him whole right where he stood. He could barely find it in him to reach for a touch, lest he'd end up with a handful of vanishing dust.
***
The media gang was uncharacteristically subdued that time. Weary gazes shifting alternately between him and his father, as a make-believe plan to keep going, to resume search of a habitable world was recounted. Half-hearted inquiries transcribing collective apprehensions, every once in a while: where to, from now? what for? The last question to round up the press-conference rang a hollow toll through semi-implied accusation:
- Mr. Adama, is it true that one of the officers on Galactica committed suicide over Earth?
The silence was long enough for his father to commence a menacing approach towards the reporter, hissing a warning rumble. The voice he finally summoned from a chilly void of his detachment, stopped the Admiral short of decking the unfortunate intruder, words tasting like ash, dusty and stale, on his lips:
- My wife. Lt. Anastasia Dualla was my wife…
Ashes. Mute flakes snowing quietly over translucent memories. The color of his future.