Her Cloudy Trophies (The ‘Go Not to Lethe’ Remix), by munditia
Title: Her Cloudy Trophies (The ‘Go Not to Lethe’ Remix)
Author: munditia aka having_written
Summary: Dee prays because Earth is the one belief she refuses to let go.
Characters / Pairing: Dee, Dee/Lee (with implied Lee/Kara)
Rating: PG-13 (or maybe a light R)
Warnings: Nothing worse than in canon.
Word Count: > 6,500
Original Story: Thy Vigils Keep by queenofthorns
Author’s Notes:
1) Since I’m unable to keep any deadlines and this was a beyond-the-last-minute job, I didn’t have time to get a beta-reader. Feel free to start looking for mistakes. I’ll give virtual cookies to everyone who finds them. Good hunting.
2) I also broke the No. 1 Remix Rule, "Do NOT change the plot." I plead poetic licence and claim that it’s still a remix very much in line with the original story.
3) And I borrowed huge chunks from the original. So, if you read a passage you do like, it was probably written by the wonderful queenofthorns first. ;) There’s also one line I blatantly stole from Pat Barker’s sublime novel The Ghost Road, and the title was nicked from John Keats’ Ode on Melancholy.
***
"We’re proud of you, Ana- Anastasia," her mother says. Ana isn’t used to her parents’ stiff formality yet. Not that she would want to get used to it, considering the circumstances.
"You did good at the funeral service. And thanks for taking care of Alex while we went to the burial," her father says. "Rina’s mom would’ve been proud of you, too."
Ana stands back, arms folded under her breasts to hide her trembling hands, mouth strained into a thin smile. She doesn’t feel any pride in herself or pity for Rina, neither grief nor rage, just a strange, light-headed numbness. Only on Sagitarron, her best friend’s mother can leave for work at seven, bitch about her government employers on the monorail at five to eight and be blown to pieces in her office at twenty past nine.
She knows she should say something to her parents: Her mother’s cheerful advice - ‘no cloud without a silver lining, sweetie’ - was abruptly silenced that bomb, and her father hasn’t made a single school-teacher remark about ‘growing pains’ and ‘the impossibility of sheltering your kids forever’. Not knowing what to say, and wishing she could have joined an expensive class trip to the Fleet Academy and she’d be on Picon right now, and feeling guilty for this wish, Ana longs to break the awkward silence.
It is her mother who speaks first.
“Be loyal, be faithful, be strong, and honour the gods,” she whispers, “and you’ll be safe.” She envelops Ana in a tight hug, the scent of lilies - funeral flowers - mixing with her perfume. She’s crying, but Ana is painfully aware of her own dry eyes.
"Oh, mom!" she says as she steps back from the embrace, and her father gently asks her to look after her brother.
She finds Alex in the living room, at the altar enshrining the household gods, fumbling with a box of matches.
"Alex, what are you doing?" she shrieks and grabs a lit match before he’ll accidentally set the carpet on fire.
"I want to burn a sacrifice," he declares, with the undaunted optimism of a child too young to comprehend. "I’ll ask the Lords to send some lightning and kill that Zarek guy. Or maybe with Vipers ‘cause they’re, dunno, cooler."
Ana almost laughs. She has explained to him that prayers don’t work that way, but he’s five and he doesn’t understand. He is a little boy who believes in deities and heroes; in the wrath of the gods and the triumph of their chosen people; in sifting the ruins for salvation and empires rising out of ash.
She believes in survival. It’s time to leave Ana behind and become Anastasia.
***
The hangar deck, where fleet burials are held, smells of corroded metal and tylium fumes, but Dee is breathing in the scent of lilies: traces of perfume clinging to her skin, heady and funereal.
Adama’s speech is washing over her: She barely registers the meaning - something about humanity’s need to stand united instead of shedding blood in civil strife - since she is not looking for comfort in hackneyed phrases. It’s the stilted formality of his tone, so unlike his paternal gruffness, that worries her. He is burying a boy while his son is fighting for his life, and Dee watches Zeus crumble before her eyes.
The President, too, has lost the serene smile Dee was accustomed to. No longer a benign mother goddess, Laura Roslin looks like an ageing woman wrecked by illness. Dee wonders, not for the first time, if Billy replaced a family Laura had lost and if she will record the death of her not-son herself, shaky fingers smudged by whiteboard marker.
As the mourners bow their heads in the prayer to Apollo and Artemis, Dee idly plays with Billy’s ring in her folded hands. Like her friend Rina, one girl among billions to burn with the Colonies, Billy will never get married - not to her, and not to anyone else.
He will never see Earth.
The survivors keep dying, one by one, and Earth is far away. Dee hopes for Apollo’s strong arm to shield their journey, for Artemis’ true aim to show them the way.
She prays because Earth is the one belief she refuses to let go.
***
Dee can’t believe Lee is her senior in both rank and age. Maybe it’s the hospital bed that makes him seem small and pale; maybe it’s the way his eyes light up, surprised and grateful like a child’s, when she enters sickbay to sit by his side and share the ship’s juiciest gossip.
As long as she is with him, she forgets about the curious urge to hurt herself a little, scratch her skin, bite down on her palm hard enough to draw blood, pull her hair until her scalp burns - any pain that eases the numbness.
She feels more alive when she is around Lee. She has to because it was her responsibility to bring him back from the brink of death. He pays back her dutiful care with soft caresses, and Dee is looking forward to the day when he is well enough to make love to her. ‘Make love’, not ‘frak’ in the nearest storage locker, whatever her shipmates might get up to.
Afterwards, when they rest in each other’s arms in the officers’ quarters, Lee runs his fingers through her curls and smiles.
"I love you," she whispers, and he closes his bright eyes.
They will never - Dee hopes and prays - they will never hurt each other.
***
The new-found planet rises on the horizon, looming over the Pegasus observation deck.
"Our new home," Lee says, half disappointed and half hopeful, but Dee can’t bring herself to call it New Caprica, let alone ‘home’.
Home, that’s curfew hour in Tawa City and the pungent smell of burdock tea from the drugstore round the corner; begging the anti-SFM police forces for candy and listening to peace prayer chants from the Temple of Eirene. Home, that’s the promise of Earth, blue oceans wrapped in cloudy day.
New Caprica isn’t home, Dee thinks. She wishes that Gaeta - her friend Felix, of all people - hadn’t been idealistic (or stupid) enough to call Roslin a fraud, when she was merely a desperate woman trying to bring them home.
"Dee?" Lee says. She looks up, startled, realizing he’s just asked her if she could have imagined Roslin’s appalling violation of democratic principles.
"What do you think?" she retorts. "Why do you think that I …?" She stops. Her secret is safe for now, if she doesn’t start yelling it across the deck.
"That you what?" Lee asks sharply. "That you wish she’d succeeded? This plan … this betrayal … it’s something I could never agree with, and I’m glad my father couldn’t either. The President was going to throw our civilization to the winds."
"Our civilization is gone," Dee says, biting back a laugh. "Didn’t the Cylons send you the memo?"
"It’s not gone as long as there’s someone to honour it … to uphold its laws … to fix things."
"No!" Dee notices that her acerbic whispers are giving way to cynical snickers and shouting. She wants to raise her voice, yell at Lee, get him to understand, to see that President Roslin was right and this was the only choice.
And then she thinks how they haven’t seen eye to eye before - when he stood up for Tom Zarek, that mother-frakking son of a bitch - and she starts to laugh.
Lee watches her, puzzled. "What’s so funny?"
"Nothing," Dee says. "It’s just…"
She is laughing as much out of relief that she didn’t spill her secret, even though their plan didn’t work; that Lee is still with her although she could have lost him for good; that she has someone to share their new home with, even if she hates it already, and she can’t explain all that.
"C’mon, Lee," she sighs. "It’s over and done with. Justice has been served, and we have a planet to settle. Let’s go and celebrate."
"Do you wish Roslin had stolen the election?" Lee asks her later on, his head buried in the crook of her neck.
"No," she lies. "Of course not. I just figured…"
Dee’s voice trails off, and she clears her throat to continue with false cheer: "If that’s your idea of sexy pillow talk, Adama, I’ll go looking for some strapping, apolitical marine guards."
He grins. "I’m sorry. Maybe I just don’t know you as well as I thought I did."
She kisses the top of his head and runs her hands down his back. "Oh, I’m full of surprises," she says.
***
After she officially transfers to Pegasus and moves into the Commander’s quarters, she has more time to spend with Lee.
His hair is a bit longer than regulation because, as the second highest-ranking officer in the fleet, he can’t spare half an hour for a decent hair-cut. Anyway, it would be a miracle if a barber or a hair-stylist had happened to survive the destruction of the Colonies. He declines her offer to cut his hair herself. When she tells him she used to practice with her best friend - Rina, who went to cosmetologist school, Rina, who would never get married - he flees from their shared bed-room in mock retreat. Their laughter eases the tightness in her chest.
The tips of his ears redden when he is embarrassed.
He puts his chin into his hand when he’s sitting over paperwork in the small hours of the morning again, as if this could keep him from falling asleep at his desk after a sixteen-hour shift.
The muscles in his throat are smooth when he tosses his head back in the throes of orgasm, and when he gets aroused, his voice sounds deeper and he talks a little faster.
She tells herself that she is happy. It’s natural and lovely to settle down as a couple and discover such intimate details. Sometimes, however, she notices these things because she thinks that, one day, she may not see him again and she wants to remember. Just in case. And then the numbness returns.
Some day, in CIC, he looks up when she is watching him. Lee smiles at her, loving and wistful, and something jolts in her chest.
I’m happy, she tells herself. It’s nothing.
***
Dee has checked the duty roster for the donut runs at least six times. The new settlement dirtside will soon receive equipment for filtering tap-water and installing a primitive public bath in the tent city. After that, it’s time to plan flight schedules and food rations for the ground-breaking ceremony. Unfortunately, Felix’ excitement about his job as presidential adviser means that she can’t give in to the temptation to have a chemical toilet dropped over Baltar’s head.
Every time she skims the lists of cargo and personnel, Dee lingers briefly on page three, line 28: ‘Captain Kara Thrace’, it says, ‘honourable discharge pending. Request to join construction crew with Samuel T. Anders, civilian.’
"Dee." Lee stands in the hatch to her office. He smiles, and she’s caught.
"You should take a break," he says as he takes in her hunched back, unkempt hair, and red-rimmed eyes. He walks up to her, putting his hands on her shoulders, and she quickly turns the staff file over to page four. His breath is warm on her neck, and a little uneven, and she flushes with heat.
"I’m all dishevelled and sweaty and worn out," she half-protests when he tries to kiss her.
"I like you that way," Lee says, with a slow grin, and they walk to their quarters together. She laughs, remembering the time when he was recovering from his gunshot wound, and she couldn’t wait to get rid of Cottle and Ishay, longing for the pretend privacy of a curtained bunk.
The lights are dimmed in the bedroom, and for a few moments, she can’t really see his face. She wonders if he can see her, if he ever imagines someone else in here; that the head on his chest is lighter and the shoulders are broader and there are splatters of engine grease on the arms…
It’s nothing, she thinks. It means nothing.
"I love you," Lee whispers, and she kisses him long and hard enough until they both gasp for air.
It’s nothing. I made my choice. We made our choice. I’m happy.
Those words are on her mind a lot these days, even - especially - on the cloudy afternoon when she marries Lee Adama on a planet she’ll never call home. She can’t think of a best friend in the fleet - her friends burned to ash with Sagitarron and Picon - so she asks Cally to be her bridesmaid and Felix to give her away.
The party’s a little subdued. It’s her own mood, partly, and partly because Starbuck isn't here to raise hell. Well, that’s fine with her. The Old Man - whom she can’t quite think of as father-in-law - has brought enough decent fire-whiskey to see the world though a pleasant haze, and the Chief’s fixed the loudspeakers from the groundbreaking ceremony. They are playing a slow dance, a soft, romantic folk-tune in an overly sentimental arrangement, but there aren’t many music chips left to choose from.
Dee puts her head on Lee’s - her husband’s - shoulder and closes her eyes so she won’t scrutinize his face too closely.
He murmurs something she doesn’t catch.
"I’m sorry," she says. "I didn’t hear you."
"I’m so glad to have you," he says, a little louder, and she can’t reply past the lump in her throat. She rests her forehead on his shoulder so he can’t see her tears.
"Are you happy?" he asks, sounding both serious and sincere.
Happiness is selusive, but she will grasp it and hold it tight, if only for a little while.
"I think so," she tells him, and if he considers it an odd answer, for their wedding, he doesn’t say a word.
***
She’s a communications officer, and talking is a skill Dee should have honed to perfection. Every time she thinks Lee might talk to her, though, she is left listening to the white noise in her mind instead.
The Pegasus is drifting round and round New Caprica, adrift in its inexorable orbit. There are no Cylons to fight, perhaps a weekly supply run or two, and pointless CAPs to organize day after day. Even she, who didn’t plan to become a commanding officer any time soon, can cope with the duties of an XO now, and she clings to her daily tasks like to the faintest of threads.
It’s not fair that her husband is shutting her out in his own lack of purpose. It’s not fair that Dee is losing the person she loves most. It’s not fair that her hopes are dying. And yet, beneath the rising panic, the spreading numbness, there’s the occasional whisper from Lee in the dark. Ragged breaths, and nothing but, "I’m sorry", but it’s a start, she thinks.
More people settle dirtside, and she misses them. Dreams die every day, and she mourns them. She’s gotten used to it because she has to.
***
She walks past the Commander’s quarters every ten minutes, on the off chance that the marine guard may have gone to take a leak and she’ll find the courage to confront Lee alone.
And then what, Dee? What will they talk about? The weather, in deep space? Why he’s holing himself up in his bedroom whenever he can leave CIC? That she doesn’t know - knows exactly - what’s going on in his head?
That they’re both torn between making a heroic return to New Caprica and keeping the rest of the survivors - so few now, so very few - safe? That she shouldn’t even be here because she’s supposed to be on duty?
Should she talk to someone else about her troubles, Dee wonders? Who? The Old Man - but what can she tell him? It’s not the sort of thing you can just blurt out, and besides, he knows already.
Your son just happens to be barely functioning anymore. I guess he’s convinced we abandoned thousands of people to die, and I thought you might wanna know. Oh, and I can’t even blame him because there’re less than 5,000 souls left, and there’s no Earth in sight.
Is that what she will say? She gives an undignified snort. As the marine throws her a curious glance, she turns on her heel and goes back to CIC.
When she gets to see her husband at last, after her double shift is over, Lee’s uniform jacket is undone, his tanks rumpled, his eyes are bloodshot, and he looks as tired as she feels. Soon, there won’t be an ounce of strength or faith or loyalty left in her. She wishes they could share their burdens and carry the weight together.
"I love you," Lee whispers when she crawls into his arms.
She falls asleep almost immediately, the dreamless sleep of exhaustion, where she doesn’t have to wonder how to save those who cannot - will not - be saved.
***
After New Caprica, there are more pictures on the memorial wall than ever, and Dee starts visiting the pictures more often. She used to see them every day - her mom, her dad and Alex, smiling in the fake temple ruin of a tacky historical theme park in Argentum Bay, the only family holiday they were able to afford on her father’s meager salary.
In the past two years, the sharp pain has settled into an ever-present dull ache, and she seldom comes here, although she asked Roslin for a photo from Billy’s CV and put it next to her family’s. On seeing all these new faces, however, faces she might have been vaguely familiar with, freshly formed families torn apart, she feels the first stabs of agony again.
Usually, she doesn’t talk to anyone when she’s around here. She simply stands there, muttering rote prayer after prayer. But the gods are weak and cruel and distant: They keep dying with the faithful, over and over again, and they won’t grant forgiveness or protection.
Occasionally, Dee catches a glimpse of Felix leaving when she arrives. He’s always radiating bitterness. Double agent or no, she wonders whether he blames himself for believing in Baltar in the first place.
She has never seen Lee here before. Frankly, she’s kind of glad about it. If Gaeta radiates bitterness, Lee burns with a cold hatred she’d like to avoid. Sometimes, he is livid with anger at the Cylons for the atrocities of the Occupation; sometimes, she thinks he’s furious at himself for abandoning the settlers. She knows the feeling: She was his XO after all.
It’s almost funny that the one occasion when she’s not really looking for her husband is the one time she finds herself alone with him. He has come off the first patrol after Kat died, and he looks like hell and smells like tylium and burnt metal and foul algae drying in the sun.
"Is everything all right, Lee?" she asks, and then she wishes she’d said something different, something better and smarter so he won’t lie to her.
"Why wouldn’t it be?"
He tenses and Dee lays a hand on his arm. She can feel his pulse pounding through his wrist, feel the bloody scabs on his bruised knuckles when she wraps her fingers around his. She thinks of the boxing match and pulls her hand away, pretending to flex it.
"Kat’s dead," she says, nodding at the picture in front of them.
He sighs. "Yeah," he says hollowly, and she wants to believe that his withdrawn mood is due to losing another pilot from his squad, not to keeping secrets from his wife. Whatever she thought she saw in the ring was maybe never there at all.
Maybe.
She draws a deep breath to ask a brutally honest question, to argue, to keep him talking, but "Major Adama, report to CIC," the loudspeaker squawks, and Dee’s lost her moment.
"Sorry," he says.
She watches him walk away, and her eyes blur with tears.
***
If truth be told, Dee doesn’t really like playing triad. But Lee has started going to the games in the rec room again; she can watch him and pretend she is only interested in the company, in spending some time with her husband, in his cards and his bets.
He used to smile more, she thinks. Or maybe it’s just that she didn't wait for each one before. She doesn’t know if his shoulders are tense and his looks furtive because she wants them to. Because … Because why, Dee? Because you would like to think he’s feeling guilty? Because you want to believe he still needs you for something?
For a few moments, when everyone else is talking, he looks off into the distance, and she thinks she can see him ashen-faced and lifeless in Cottle’s care. She rubs her eyes to banish this image of him, hurting, nearly dying. When she looks again, he’s just himself again, a little quiet and tired and nervous. Maybe she is only imagining it all.
Starbuck sometimes joins them. She comes from setting up the Raptor runs to the planet, smelling of swamp and sweat and exhaust fumes, and Dee wrinkles her nose to detect the traitorous smell of sex underneath. She should stop watching Lee when Kara is there. She wonders what would happen if he dropped the cowardly pretense, if he just leaned across the table, held Starbuck’s face in his hands and kissed her. The thought of the shock on all their faces, of the triumphant smile on her own, makes her giggle, a shrill laugh that turns into a cough. She remembers that it’s Lee sitting next to her, handing her his glass when the coughing won’t stop, and then she wants to cry.
Lee folds. "Rack time," he says. He pulls his winnings towards him - some cigarettes from New Caprica’s tobacco fields, a couple of protein bars that mercifully won’t taste of algae, and half a bottle of shower gel.
"Apollo," Helo says, "you gotta give me a chance to win that shower gel back. My wife’s already complaining that I stink of seaweed."
Lee raises an eyebrow, and Dee feels his arm tense around her shoulders at the mention of Sharon.
"Don’t play the game if you don’t want to lose, Helo," he replies, and Starbuck throws him an inscrutable look.
"Come on, Apollo," Helo pleads. "My last bottle of shower gel ever. Standard-issue soap’s just not the same."
Lee grins. "Only ‘cause it’s you," he says. "And because it smells of frakking peach blossoms anyway."
Among the general burst of laughter, Lee steers Dee out of the room while simultaneously tossing the plastic bottle back at Helo’s head. A small smile tugs at the corner of Dee’s mouth. This time, her giggle is full of genuine mirth.
That night, after Lee has fallen asleep hogging the blanket and snoring softly, Dee smoothes back his hair and gets up to pray to the goddesses she doesn’t believe in. She asks Aphrodite for love and Athena for wisdom and Hera for a happy marriage.
The gods don’t answer.
***
Lee is walking slowly, like someone who's lost and trying to find his way in a strange place, so it’s not hard to follow him. Until her heel catches in the floor grid and breaks, and she says "frak!" under her breath because she owns only two pairs of non-regulation shoes.
She’s trying to work the heel out of the floor and wedging it in tighter, so she doesn’t realize he has stopped and turned around until he asks, "Is everything all right?" She looks up, and then it’s his turn to be surprised.
"Dee… What …? Oh …" He crouches beside her and between them, they manage to work her shoe - what’s left of it - loose.
They stand up, and Dee tries to think of something to say, but all that pops into her head are things like How drunk are you?, which is silly, or We need to talk, which is self-evident. The longer they stand here, the more awkward this gets.
"Thanks," she says finally.
Lee says. "This is kinda stupid, but … I thought I’d lost my wedding ring, and then I found it again." He proudly wriggles his fingers in front of her face, wearing the inane grin of someone who has had more than one glass too many, and she resists the urge to slap him for wearing the ring and breaking the vows.
"I’m sorry," he says, and his face crumples. "I’m really sorry."
She moves closer to him until she can breathe in alcohol and shaving cream and his familiar scent. "Why?" she asks with a frown.
At least he’s still standing here, even if he’s searching in vain for an answer. Some stranger who isn’t really Dee says, "Lee, I do need to talk to you." And then she feels her face flush, but she pulls herself together and goes on.
"I …" She takes a deep breath. "A few weeks ago," she says, “I started noticing … things. With Kara.”
This is harder than she’d ever imagined, and she has imagined this conversation a hundred times.
"I’m a comms officer, Lee. Noticing things is what I do. I already told you that this marriage is over if you want to walk out. But please stop pretending this hasn’t been going on for a while."
"Oh." He turns his head away and closes his eyes for a moment. In the dim lighting of the corridor, his skin has a gray-greenish tinge, and his eyes seem hollow and dark. He looks like a dead man or a ghost wearing Lee’s face, and Dee shivers. Today, even the living are only ghosts in the making.
"So tell me," he says, swallowing dryly, his Adam’s apple bopping up and down, "do you think we can fix this?"
"No," Dee says, but then she thinks of the Ionian Nebula adorning the walls of an abandoned temple. The gods have finally spoken. "Yes." She puts a hand to his cheek and dares to hope. "Maybe."
Dreams have their own logic, and yet she is still a little surprised when he hugs her fiercely and promises to have a proper conversation once he’s sobered up. It feels very real, though, when he kisses her back.
***
After he left for his next shift, when she is off to the head for a shower, Dee decides this won’t happen again. His semen is trickling down her thigh, and she aches pleasantly; but she doesn’t want to sleep with a broken man who only embraces the woman in his arms to banish another woman’s ghost. Ironically enough, she has never felt such a sense of betrayal before.
She scrubs off every trace of him and smells like herself as she hits the pillows. She wants to forget about Lee for a few hours, but she dreams of him. How blue his eyes are, how strong he is, and how ungentle. They don’t make love any more, they frak, and she doesn’t know whether she’s disappointed or relieved.
When she wakes up she doesn't know what was dream and what was memory. Then she sees her panties and bra rolled up in a tight ball on the floor, and she blushes.
It's all right, she thinks. It happened once, but it won't happen again. It'll be all right.
She will get through this. Somehow.
***
This isn’t a dream anymore. It’s not a fairytale. It’s a choice she has to make, and she knows which choice is the right one and which is wrong. Be loyal, be faithful, be strong. Honor the gods, and you’ll be safe.
It’s Lee who lost his honour first, she tells herself, and this helps her ignore everything the Perseus Village Academy taught her about the Holy Scrolls and the sanctity of marriage. When she announces that she is going to file for divorce, she almost takes pity on him. Dee hasn’t felt so light-hearted in a long time. The giddiness of survival replaces the numbness that won’t disappear.
***
Felix and she are throwing a private party when Dee’s divorce papers are on their way and her soon-to-be ex-husband is visiting a dead woman in the brig. Nothing is particularly funny, not with a collaborator going scot-free and hundreds of crew-members dying, but it’s good to be laughing all the same. Even if it’s weird because it’s Felix and her shaking with near-hysterical laughter as they dowb shot after shot of vile rotgut.
"To justice," her friend declares, a bit too melodramatically, and this sets off another bout of laughter. Dee is chortling so much that she snorts some of liquor out of her nose, like an over-excited kid with a can of soda.
This happened to Alex once, she remembers with sudden clarity, when he turned seven, and he was coughing root beer all over his brand-new (and expensive) Picon Panthers shirt. Her brother wanted to get another one, but Mom and Dad kept putting it off. If he still cheered for the Panthers when he was ten, they promised, Rina’s dad would ask one of his colleagues about reduced tickets. Alex died four months before his ninth birthday.
Tears are welling up in her eyes, and she curses herself for being such a maudlin drunk. She half-listens to Gaeta rambling on about a corrupt system that rewards wrong-doers undeserving of forgiveness. She wanted to make an argument about that, too, something about abstract idealism and gut-wrenching despair. All she can think of, though, is one of her mother’s folksy proverbs:
‘Make your bed, and lie in it,’ she told her daughter, ‘you’ll have to own up to what you’ve done. But if you are faithful and loyal and strong and honor the gods, you will be safe.’ There’s a moral to that story somewhere, Dee supposes, since treason has bought Baltar freedom and all the blood they’ve spilled hasn’t swayed the Lords to show them Earth. Of course, her mother is no longer here to argue.
***
Even though Lee’s nomination for the Quorum of Twelve isn’t all that funny, either, Dee still erupts in mirthless laughter when she hears about it. Now that they aren’t married anymore, she does wish him well, but the thought of him working with Tom Zarek makes her stomach churn.
He’s made his bed, and he’s gotta lie in it, her mother’s voice whispers in the back of her head. And it’s none of my business, Dee adds, I just have to take care of myself.
So she has a genuine smile to spare every time she runs into Lee on the rare occasions when he comes over from Colonial One to visit the Admiral. It’s easy to recognize when he arrives directly from a meeting with President Roslin. He’s wrapped in a chamalla-scented cloud of sickness and death.
Once, she watches Lee politely offer Roslin his arm to get out of the shuttle, as though the fallout at the trial had never happened. The President must be desperate if she accepts his assistance so gratefully, and her frailty frightens Dee. Under the fear, however, there is a secret well-spring of childish hopes and dreams. If the leader is dying, the promised land cannot be far.
Perhaps it is this heady mixture of hope and fear that leads to Dee ending up in a storage locker with her recently divorced husband.
"Anastasia," Lee whispers, her dogtags jangling in his hand. "I’ve always liked that name." She briefly wonders whether he knows its original meaning in ancient Sagitarran.
Her distraction lasts only until he pulls her tank tops over her head and she has stripped off his dress shirt. She licks the hollow of his shoulder blade before he bends down to suck her breast, and for an instant she remembers how gentle he was when they slept together for the first time, how carefully he touched her on their wedding night. She grins into his neck, ignoring the memories, and fumbles with the zipper on his pants.
She urges him to frak her against the dusty shelves, her dogtags digging into her left breast, over her heart, and she relishes the discomfort, the pleasure-pain from the cold metal mashed between their heated bodies, from the cross-tied bars bruising her back.
"Open your eyes," she whispers, and he does, staring into her face, watching her, seeing her.
In the end, she closes hers.
Afterwards, he kisses her forehead and runs his fingers gingerly over the mark on her breast. "I’m sorry," Lee says. "I don’t want you to get hurt."
She smiles at him over her shoulder as she turns to leave.
"You know me, Lee," she says in farewell. "I’m not that easily damaged. I won’t break."
***
The signals come unexpectedly, like Dradis signs, but there are rules to this game, even if they are never spoken.
She will nod at him in passing when he emerges from his father’s quarters, and he’ll be waiting for her in the storage locker five minutes later. They run into each other on the hangar deck, and she’ll casually pat his arm, and he understands.
It’s always a bit awkward, and Dee wonders if anybody suspects that she hides in a closet to frak her ex-husband senseless. They don’t have to respect the frat regs anymore; out of habit, though, she makes sure that the hatches are locked behind her and that the floor and shelves stay clean. Can her shipmates tell by the way she’s walking afterwards? Can they smell the stickiness on her thighs and the sharp sweat soaking her tanks? Do they glance at her face, relaxed for a few precious minutes, and think, yeah, that’s definitely a freshly-frakked glow?
Most of the time, however, she couldn’t care less about anyone’s opinions. She doesn’t even know what Lee thinks about their strange affair, and she doesn’t really want to. She only knows that these quick fraks in the dark help her stop worrying. In the darkness, there are no dying leaders; no lost comrades returning from the dead; no missing friends on hopeless missions; no civvy kids worked to death on mining ships.
There’s just sharp piercing pleasure that makes her feel alive.
***
One day, when he forgets herself and moans too loudly, she presses her hand over his mouth. She bucks her hips against his, and he bites down on her fingers as he comes. When they are getting dressed in the half-light, she sees blood stains smearing her white sports bra. Red droplets are running down her thumb, and she sees the marks of his teeth all over its base.
"Oh gods, Dee!" He presses her hand between his and starts digging for a handkerchief in his suit. "I’m so sorry."
She flashes him a cold smile, cold and blinding. "Don’t be. It’s nothing to feel sorry for."
***
After that, Lee slowly picks up on the various ways he can make her come. He thrusts into her harder and harder, bites into her neck or wraps her curls so tightly around his fingers that he nearly rips them out.
She can see that he hates himself for this, that he doesn’t want to hurt her again.
And yet, he waits for her in that storage locker, even when Kara Thrace returns from the Demetrius, with a crippled Felix and a basestar full of Cylons in tow.
She hates that she needs him to stop the numbness from spreading through her body, from reaching her head and her heart. She’s not quite sure if she enjoys frakking him anymore, but she knows she can’t give it up.
Sometimes, when she scrubs herself raw in the shower, she doesn’t bother to hide the scratches and bruises and bite-marks. The other officers are giving her funny looks, but she’s too tired to care.
I need this. This helps me stay alive.
***
Dee swears she can trace the progress of Roslin’s illness simply by the way Lee smells. His skins reeks of sickbay: anti-septic and stale urine and the sickly, festering stench of bedsores.
She keeps burying her nose in his hair as he pounds into her, keeps crying soundlessly for Laura Roslin as she clenches around him, keeps waiting for the gods to guide them all into the promised land.
***
She can’t decide whether the prophecies were wrong or right because they did find Earth, but Roslin is still alive. On the Raptor down to the planet, Dee dreams of lilies, white chalices swaying in the breeze, funeral wreaths forgotten as she breathes in her mother’s favorite scent.
***
She leaves her quarters to go out for drinks and dinner, a nice normal evening, just like she used to have before the world ended. Again and again.
Lee seems genuinely happy to see her and honestly grateful that she accepts his courteous gestures and occasional touches.
After dinner, he takes her hand and closes it around a tiny chocolate bar, whispering, "You’d better be not allergic to peanuts. This must be the last piece of chocolate in the universe." She laughs, and his tenderness nearly gets the better of her. There is so much she would like to tell him.
I’m missing my family more with each passing minute. Hera may be half-Cylon, but she likes scribbling with crayons on furniture, just like Alex when he was a toddler. There’s a sidearm waiting for me in my locker.
"Are you happy?" she asks him instead.
A foolish question, considering the circumstances, but he answers it anyway. "I still want to be." His voice is gentle.
Her eyes are fixed at the cheap fairy lights behind him, but she’s looking at something else, at the boyish face of her little brother, who believes in sifting the ruins for salvation.
She doesn’t even believe in survival now.
"What about you, Ana?" he asks. Silently, he takes her face into his hands, as if to kiss her. "Do you think you could be happy?"
"Yes," she says and presses a kiss to his palm. "I am happy."
What she means is, I am sorry.
***
She hopes that none of her friends will find her body. She doesn’t want to deal them this blow, not after Earth, the third (and last) home they have lost.
Third time’s the charm. A shiver runs down her spine.
Maybe if they had been better people, stronger, braver, more loyal, the gods would have loved them. They wouldn’t have listened to false prophets; they wouldn’t have suffered in vain; they wouldn’t cling to deluded hopes for a future that no one would live to see.
Or maybe her mother’s calendar mottos and her father’s pep talks got it all wrong. Ana smiles fondly, indulgently, at their foolishness; at Rina’s silly excitement over her wedding; at Alex’ childish beliefs.
When she takes a deep breath, it’s not gun oil she smells. She savours the perfume she traded for her remaining underwear: flowers - lilies - maybe gardenias, or burdock blossoms in spring.
She lets the voices outside the door wash over her and braces herself for her hand on the trigger. This, at last, is the day when she doesn’t come back.
Author: munditia aka having_written
Summary: Dee prays because Earth is the one belief she refuses to let go.
Characters / Pairing: Dee, Dee/Lee (with implied Lee/Kara)
Rating: PG-13 (or maybe a light R)
Warnings: Nothing worse than in canon.
Word Count: > 6,500
Original Story: Thy Vigils Keep by queenofthorns
Author’s Notes:
1) Since I’m unable to keep any deadlines and this was a beyond-the-last-minute job, I didn’t have time to get a beta-reader. Feel free to start looking for mistakes. I’ll give virtual cookies to everyone who finds them. Good hunting.
2) I also broke the No. 1 Remix Rule, "Do NOT change the plot." I plead poetic licence and claim that it’s still a remix very much in line with the original story.
3) And I borrowed huge chunks from the original. So, if you read a passage you do like, it was probably written by the wonderful queenofthorns first. ;) There’s also one line I blatantly stole from Pat Barker’s sublime novel The Ghost Road, and the title was nicked from John Keats’ Ode on Melancholy.
***
"We’re proud of you, Ana- Anastasia," her mother says. Ana isn’t used to her parents’ stiff formality yet. Not that she would want to get used to it, considering the circumstances.
"You did good at the funeral service. And thanks for taking care of Alex while we went to the burial," her father says. "Rina’s mom would’ve been proud of you, too."
Ana stands back, arms folded under her breasts to hide her trembling hands, mouth strained into a thin smile. She doesn’t feel any pride in herself or pity for Rina, neither grief nor rage, just a strange, light-headed numbness. Only on Sagitarron, her best friend’s mother can leave for work at seven, bitch about her government employers on the monorail at five to eight and be blown to pieces in her office at twenty past nine.
She knows she should say something to her parents: Her mother’s cheerful advice - ‘no cloud without a silver lining, sweetie’ - was abruptly silenced that bomb, and her father hasn’t made a single school-teacher remark about ‘growing pains’ and ‘the impossibility of sheltering your kids forever’. Not knowing what to say, and wishing she could have joined an expensive class trip to the Fleet Academy and she’d be on Picon right now, and feeling guilty for this wish, Ana longs to break the awkward silence.
It is her mother who speaks first.
“Be loyal, be faithful, be strong, and honour the gods,” she whispers, “and you’ll be safe.” She envelops Ana in a tight hug, the scent of lilies - funeral flowers - mixing with her perfume. She’s crying, but Ana is painfully aware of her own dry eyes.
"Oh, mom!" she says as she steps back from the embrace, and her father gently asks her to look after her brother.
She finds Alex in the living room, at the altar enshrining the household gods, fumbling with a box of matches.
"Alex, what are you doing?" she shrieks and grabs a lit match before he’ll accidentally set the carpet on fire.
"I want to burn a sacrifice," he declares, with the undaunted optimism of a child too young to comprehend. "I’ll ask the Lords to send some lightning and kill that Zarek guy. Or maybe with Vipers ‘cause they’re, dunno, cooler."
Ana almost laughs. She has explained to him that prayers don’t work that way, but he’s five and he doesn’t understand. He is a little boy who believes in deities and heroes; in the wrath of the gods and the triumph of their chosen people; in sifting the ruins for salvation and empires rising out of ash.
She believes in survival. It’s time to leave Ana behind and become Anastasia.
***
The hangar deck, where fleet burials are held, smells of corroded metal and tylium fumes, but Dee is breathing in the scent of lilies: traces of perfume clinging to her skin, heady and funereal.
Adama’s speech is washing over her: She barely registers the meaning - something about humanity’s need to stand united instead of shedding blood in civil strife - since she is not looking for comfort in hackneyed phrases. It’s the stilted formality of his tone, so unlike his paternal gruffness, that worries her. He is burying a boy while his son is fighting for his life, and Dee watches Zeus crumble before her eyes.
The President, too, has lost the serene smile Dee was accustomed to. No longer a benign mother goddess, Laura Roslin looks like an ageing woman wrecked by illness. Dee wonders, not for the first time, if Billy replaced a family Laura had lost and if she will record the death of her not-son herself, shaky fingers smudged by whiteboard marker.
As the mourners bow their heads in the prayer to Apollo and Artemis, Dee idly plays with Billy’s ring in her folded hands. Like her friend Rina, one girl among billions to burn with the Colonies, Billy will never get married - not to her, and not to anyone else.
He will never see Earth.
The survivors keep dying, one by one, and Earth is far away. Dee hopes for Apollo’s strong arm to shield their journey, for Artemis’ true aim to show them the way.
She prays because Earth is the one belief she refuses to let go.
***
Dee can’t believe Lee is her senior in both rank and age. Maybe it’s the hospital bed that makes him seem small and pale; maybe it’s the way his eyes light up, surprised and grateful like a child’s, when she enters sickbay to sit by his side and share the ship’s juiciest gossip.
As long as she is with him, she forgets about the curious urge to hurt herself a little, scratch her skin, bite down on her palm hard enough to draw blood, pull her hair until her scalp burns - any pain that eases the numbness.
She feels more alive when she is around Lee. She has to because it was her responsibility to bring him back from the brink of death. He pays back her dutiful care with soft caresses, and Dee is looking forward to the day when he is well enough to make love to her. ‘Make love’, not ‘frak’ in the nearest storage locker, whatever her shipmates might get up to.
Afterwards, when they rest in each other’s arms in the officers’ quarters, Lee runs his fingers through her curls and smiles.
"I love you," she whispers, and he closes his bright eyes.
They will never - Dee hopes and prays - they will never hurt each other.
***
The new-found planet rises on the horizon, looming over the Pegasus observation deck.
"Our new home," Lee says, half disappointed and half hopeful, but Dee can’t bring herself to call it New Caprica, let alone ‘home’.
Home, that’s curfew hour in Tawa City and the pungent smell of burdock tea from the drugstore round the corner; begging the anti-SFM police forces for candy and listening to peace prayer chants from the Temple of Eirene. Home, that’s the promise of Earth, blue oceans wrapped in cloudy day.
New Caprica isn’t home, Dee thinks. She wishes that Gaeta - her friend Felix, of all people - hadn’t been idealistic (or stupid) enough to call Roslin a fraud, when she was merely a desperate woman trying to bring them home.
"Dee?" Lee says. She looks up, startled, realizing he’s just asked her if she could have imagined Roslin’s appalling violation of democratic principles.
"What do you think?" she retorts. "Why do you think that I …?" She stops. Her secret is safe for now, if she doesn’t start yelling it across the deck.
"That you what?" Lee asks sharply. "That you wish she’d succeeded? This plan … this betrayal … it’s something I could never agree with, and I’m glad my father couldn’t either. The President was going to throw our civilization to the winds."
"Our civilization is gone," Dee says, biting back a laugh. "Didn’t the Cylons send you the memo?"
"It’s not gone as long as there’s someone to honour it … to uphold its laws … to fix things."
"No!" Dee notices that her acerbic whispers are giving way to cynical snickers and shouting. She wants to raise her voice, yell at Lee, get him to understand, to see that President Roslin was right and this was the only choice.
And then she thinks how they haven’t seen eye to eye before - when he stood up for Tom Zarek, that mother-frakking son of a bitch - and she starts to laugh.
Lee watches her, puzzled. "What’s so funny?"
"Nothing," Dee says. "It’s just…"
She is laughing as much out of relief that she didn’t spill her secret, even though their plan didn’t work; that Lee is still with her although she could have lost him for good; that she has someone to share their new home with, even if she hates it already, and she can’t explain all that.
"C’mon, Lee," she sighs. "It’s over and done with. Justice has been served, and we have a planet to settle. Let’s go and celebrate."
"Do you wish Roslin had stolen the election?" Lee asks her later on, his head buried in the crook of her neck.
"No," she lies. "Of course not. I just figured…"
Dee’s voice trails off, and she clears her throat to continue with false cheer: "If that’s your idea of sexy pillow talk, Adama, I’ll go looking for some strapping, apolitical marine guards."
He grins. "I’m sorry. Maybe I just don’t know you as well as I thought I did."
She kisses the top of his head and runs her hands down his back. "Oh, I’m full of surprises," she says.
***
After she officially transfers to Pegasus and moves into the Commander’s quarters, she has more time to spend with Lee.
His hair is a bit longer than regulation because, as the second highest-ranking officer in the fleet, he can’t spare half an hour for a decent hair-cut. Anyway, it would be a miracle if a barber or a hair-stylist had happened to survive the destruction of the Colonies. He declines her offer to cut his hair herself. When she tells him she used to practice with her best friend - Rina, who went to cosmetologist school, Rina, who would never get married - he flees from their shared bed-room in mock retreat. Their laughter eases the tightness in her chest.
The tips of his ears redden when he is embarrassed.
He puts his chin into his hand when he’s sitting over paperwork in the small hours of the morning again, as if this could keep him from falling asleep at his desk after a sixteen-hour shift.
The muscles in his throat are smooth when he tosses his head back in the throes of orgasm, and when he gets aroused, his voice sounds deeper and he talks a little faster.
She tells herself that she is happy. It’s natural and lovely to settle down as a couple and discover such intimate details. Sometimes, however, she notices these things because she thinks that, one day, she may not see him again and she wants to remember. Just in case. And then the numbness returns.
Some day, in CIC, he looks up when she is watching him. Lee smiles at her, loving and wistful, and something jolts in her chest.
I’m happy, she tells herself. It’s nothing.
***
Dee has checked the duty roster for the donut runs at least six times. The new settlement dirtside will soon receive equipment for filtering tap-water and installing a primitive public bath in the tent city. After that, it’s time to plan flight schedules and food rations for the ground-breaking ceremony. Unfortunately, Felix’ excitement about his job as presidential adviser means that she can’t give in to the temptation to have a chemical toilet dropped over Baltar’s head.
Every time she skims the lists of cargo and personnel, Dee lingers briefly on page three, line 28: ‘Captain Kara Thrace’, it says, ‘honourable discharge pending. Request to join construction crew with Samuel T. Anders, civilian.’
"Dee." Lee stands in the hatch to her office. He smiles, and she’s caught.
"You should take a break," he says as he takes in her hunched back, unkempt hair, and red-rimmed eyes. He walks up to her, putting his hands on her shoulders, and she quickly turns the staff file over to page four. His breath is warm on her neck, and a little uneven, and she flushes with heat.
"I’m all dishevelled and sweaty and worn out," she half-protests when he tries to kiss her.
"I like you that way," Lee says, with a slow grin, and they walk to their quarters together. She laughs, remembering the time when he was recovering from his gunshot wound, and she couldn’t wait to get rid of Cottle and Ishay, longing for the pretend privacy of a curtained bunk.
The lights are dimmed in the bedroom, and for a few moments, she can’t really see his face. She wonders if he can see her, if he ever imagines someone else in here; that the head on his chest is lighter and the shoulders are broader and there are splatters of engine grease on the arms…
It’s nothing, she thinks. It means nothing.
"I love you," Lee whispers, and she kisses him long and hard enough until they both gasp for air.
It’s nothing. I made my choice. We made our choice. I’m happy.
Those words are on her mind a lot these days, even - especially - on the cloudy afternoon when she marries Lee Adama on a planet she’ll never call home. She can’t think of a best friend in the fleet - her friends burned to ash with Sagitarron and Picon - so she asks Cally to be her bridesmaid and Felix to give her away.
The party’s a little subdued. It’s her own mood, partly, and partly because Starbuck isn't here to raise hell. Well, that’s fine with her. The Old Man - whom she can’t quite think of as father-in-law - has brought enough decent fire-whiskey to see the world though a pleasant haze, and the Chief’s fixed the loudspeakers from the groundbreaking ceremony. They are playing a slow dance, a soft, romantic folk-tune in an overly sentimental arrangement, but there aren’t many music chips left to choose from.
Dee puts her head on Lee’s - her husband’s - shoulder and closes her eyes so she won’t scrutinize his face too closely.
He murmurs something she doesn’t catch.
"I’m sorry," she says. "I didn’t hear you."
"I’m so glad to have you," he says, a little louder, and she can’t reply past the lump in her throat. She rests her forehead on his shoulder so he can’t see her tears.
"Are you happy?" he asks, sounding both serious and sincere.
Happiness is selusive, but she will grasp it and hold it tight, if only for a little while.
"I think so," she tells him, and if he considers it an odd answer, for their wedding, he doesn’t say a word.
***
She’s a communications officer, and talking is a skill Dee should have honed to perfection. Every time she thinks Lee might talk to her, though, she is left listening to the white noise in her mind instead.
The Pegasus is drifting round and round New Caprica, adrift in its inexorable orbit. There are no Cylons to fight, perhaps a weekly supply run or two, and pointless CAPs to organize day after day. Even she, who didn’t plan to become a commanding officer any time soon, can cope with the duties of an XO now, and she clings to her daily tasks like to the faintest of threads.
It’s not fair that her husband is shutting her out in his own lack of purpose. It’s not fair that Dee is losing the person she loves most. It’s not fair that her hopes are dying. And yet, beneath the rising panic, the spreading numbness, there’s the occasional whisper from Lee in the dark. Ragged breaths, and nothing but, "I’m sorry", but it’s a start, she thinks.
More people settle dirtside, and she misses them. Dreams die every day, and she mourns them. She’s gotten used to it because she has to.
***
She walks past the Commander’s quarters every ten minutes, on the off chance that the marine guard may have gone to take a leak and she’ll find the courage to confront Lee alone.
And then what, Dee? What will they talk about? The weather, in deep space? Why he’s holing himself up in his bedroom whenever he can leave CIC? That she doesn’t know - knows exactly - what’s going on in his head?
That they’re both torn between making a heroic return to New Caprica and keeping the rest of the survivors - so few now, so very few - safe? That she shouldn’t even be here because she’s supposed to be on duty?
Should she talk to someone else about her troubles, Dee wonders? Who? The Old Man - but what can she tell him? It’s not the sort of thing you can just blurt out, and besides, he knows already.
Your son just happens to be barely functioning anymore. I guess he’s convinced we abandoned thousands of people to die, and I thought you might wanna know. Oh, and I can’t even blame him because there’re less than 5,000 souls left, and there’s no Earth in sight.
Is that what she will say? She gives an undignified snort. As the marine throws her a curious glance, she turns on her heel and goes back to CIC.
When she gets to see her husband at last, after her double shift is over, Lee’s uniform jacket is undone, his tanks rumpled, his eyes are bloodshot, and he looks as tired as she feels. Soon, there won’t be an ounce of strength or faith or loyalty left in her. She wishes they could share their burdens and carry the weight together.
"I love you," Lee whispers when she crawls into his arms.
She falls asleep almost immediately, the dreamless sleep of exhaustion, where she doesn’t have to wonder how to save those who cannot - will not - be saved.
***
After New Caprica, there are more pictures on the memorial wall than ever, and Dee starts visiting the pictures more often. She used to see them every day - her mom, her dad and Alex, smiling in the fake temple ruin of a tacky historical theme park in Argentum Bay, the only family holiday they were able to afford on her father’s meager salary.
In the past two years, the sharp pain has settled into an ever-present dull ache, and she seldom comes here, although she asked Roslin for a photo from Billy’s CV and put it next to her family’s. On seeing all these new faces, however, faces she might have been vaguely familiar with, freshly formed families torn apart, she feels the first stabs of agony again.
Usually, she doesn’t talk to anyone when she’s around here. She simply stands there, muttering rote prayer after prayer. But the gods are weak and cruel and distant: They keep dying with the faithful, over and over again, and they won’t grant forgiveness or protection.
Occasionally, Dee catches a glimpse of Felix leaving when she arrives. He’s always radiating bitterness. Double agent or no, she wonders whether he blames himself for believing in Baltar in the first place.
She has never seen Lee here before. Frankly, she’s kind of glad about it. If Gaeta radiates bitterness, Lee burns with a cold hatred she’d like to avoid. Sometimes, he is livid with anger at the Cylons for the atrocities of the Occupation; sometimes, she thinks he’s furious at himself for abandoning the settlers. She knows the feeling: She was his XO after all.
It’s almost funny that the one occasion when she’s not really looking for her husband is the one time she finds herself alone with him. He has come off the first patrol after Kat died, and he looks like hell and smells like tylium and burnt metal and foul algae drying in the sun.
"Is everything all right, Lee?" she asks, and then she wishes she’d said something different, something better and smarter so he won’t lie to her.
"Why wouldn’t it be?"
He tenses and Dee lays a hand on his arm. She can feel his pulse pounding through his wrist, feel the bloody scabs on his bruised knuckles when she wraps her fingers around his. She thinks of the boxing match and pulls her hand away, pretending to flex it.
"Kat’s dead," she says, nodding at the picture in front of them.
He sighs. "Yeah," he says hollowly, and she wants to believe that his withdrawn mood is due to losing another pilot from his squad, not to keeping secrets from his wife. Whatever she thought she saw in the ring was maybe never there at all.
Maybe.
She draws a deep breath to ask a brutally honest question, to argue, to keep him talking, but "Major Adama, report to CIC," the loudspeaker squawks, and Dee’s lost her moment.
"Sorry," he says.
She watches him walk away, and her eyes blur with tears.
***
If truth be told, Dee doesn’t really like playing triad. But Lee has started going to the games in the rec room again; she can watch him and pretend she is only interested in the company, in spending some time with her husband, in his cards and his bets.
He used to smile more, she thinks. Or maybe it’s just that she didn't wait for each one before. She doesn’t know if his shoulders are tense and his looks furtive because she wants them to. Because … Because why, Dee? Because you would like to think he’s feeling guilty? Because you want to believe he still needs you for something?
For a few moments, when everyone else is talking, he looks off into the distance, and she thinks she can see him ashen-faced and lifeless in Cottle’s care. She rubs her eyes to banish this image of him, hurting, nearly dying. When she looks again, he’s just himself again, a little quiet and tired and nervous. Maybe she is only imagining it all.
Starbuck sometimes joins them. She comes from setting up the Raptor runs to the planet, smelling of swamp and sweat and exhaust fumes, and Dee wrinkles her nose to detect the traitorous smell of sex underneath. She should stop watching Lee when Kara is there. She wonders what would happen if he dropped the cowardly pretense, if he just leaned across the table, held Starbuck’s face in his hands and kissed her. The thought of the shock on all their faces, of the triumphant smile on her own, makes her giggle, a shrill laugh that turns into a cough. She remembers that it’s Lee sitting next to her, handing her his glass when the coughing won’t stop, and then she wants to cry.
Lee folds. "Rack time," he says. He pulls his winnings towards him - some cigarettes from New Caprica’s tobacco fields, a couple of protein bars that mercifully won’t taste of algae, and half a bottle of shower gel.
"Apollo," Helo says, "you gotta give me a chance to win that shower gel back. My wife’s already complaining that I stink of seaweed."
Lee raises an eyebrow, and Dee feels his arm tense around her shoulders at the mention of Sharon.
"Don’t play the game if you don’t want to lose, Helo," he replies, and Starbuck throws him an inscrutable look.
"Come on, Apollo," Helo pleads. "My last bottle of shower gel ever. Standard-issue soap’s just not the same."
Lee grins. "Only ‘cause it’s you," he says. "And because it smells of frakking peach blossoms anyway."
Among the general burst of laughter, Lee steers Dee out of the room while simultaneously tossing the plastic bottle back at Helo’s head. A small smile tugs at the corner of Dee’s mouth. This time, her giggle is full of genuine mirth.
That night, after Lee has fallen asleep hogging the blanket and snoring softly, Dee smoothes back his hair and gets up to pray to the goddesses she doesn’t believe in. She asks Aphrodite for love and Athena for wisdom and Hera for a happy marriage.
The gods don’t answer.
***
Lee is walking slowly, like someone who's lost and trying to find his way in a strange place, so it’s not hard to follow him. Until her heel catches in the floor grid and breaks, and she says "frak!" under her breath because she owns only two pairs of non-regulation shoes.
She’s trying to work the heel out of the floor and wedging it in tighter, so she doesn’t realize he has stopped and turned around until he asks, "Is everything all right?" She looks up, and then it’s his turn to be surprised.
"Dee… What …? Oh …" He crouches beside her and between them, they manage to work her shoe - what’s left of it - loose.
They stand up, and Dee tries to think of something to say, but all that pops into her head are things like How drunk are you?, which is silly, or We need to talk, which is self-evident. The longer they stand here, the more awkward this gets.
"Thanks," she says finally.
Lee says. "This is kinda stupid, but … I thought I’d lost my wedding ring, and then I found it again." He proudly wriggles his fingers in front of her face, wearing the inane grin of someone who has had more than one glass too many, and she resists the urge to slap him for wearing the ring and breaking the vows.
"I’m sorry," he says, and his face crumples. "I’m really sorry."
She moves closer to him until she can breathe in alcohol and shaving cream and his familiar scent. "Why?" she asks with a frown.
At least he’s still standing here, even if he’s searching in vain for an answer. Some stranger who isn’t really Dee says, "Lee, I do need to talk to you." And then she feels her face flush, but she pulls herself together and goes on.
"I …" She takes a deep breath. "A few weeks ago," she says, “I started noticing … things. With Kara.”
This is harder than she’d ever imagined, and she has imagined this conversation a hundred times.
"I’m a comms officer, Lee. Noticing things is what I do. I already told you that this marriage is over if you want to walk out. But please stop pretending this hasn’t been going on for a while."
"Oh." He turns his head away and closes his eyes for a moment. In the dim lighting of the corridor, his skin has a gray-greenish tinge, and his eyes seem hollow and dark. He looks like a dead man or a ghost wearing Lee’s face, and Dee shivers. Today, even the living are only ghosts in the making.
"So tell me," he says, swallowing dryly, his Adam’s apple bopping up and down, "do you think we can fix this?"
"No," Dee says, but then she thinks of the Ionian Nebula adorning the walls of an abandoned temple. The gods have finally spoken. "Yes." She puts a hand to his cheek and dares to hope. "Maybe."
Dreams have their own logic, and yet she is still a little surprised when he hugs her fiercely and promises to have a proper conversation once he’s sobered up. It feels very real, though, when he kisses her back.
***
After he left for his next shift, when she is off to the head for a shower, Dee decides this won’t happen again. His semen is trickling down her thigh, and she aches pleasantly; but she doesn’t want to sleep with a broken man who only embraces the woman in his arms to banish another woman’s ghost. Ironically enough, she has never felt such a sense of betrayal before.
She scrubs off every trace of him and smells like herself as she hits the pillows. She wants to forget about Lee for a few hours, but she dreams of him. How blue his eyes are, how strong he is, and how ungentle. They don’t make love any more, they frak, and she doesn’t know whether she’s disappointed or relieved.
When she wakes up she doesn't know what was dream and what was memory. Then she sees her panties and bra rolled up in a tight ball on the floor, and she blushes.
It's all right, she thinks. It happened once, but it won't happen again. It'll be all right.
She will get through this. Somehow.
***
This isn’t a dream anymore. It’s not a fairytale. It’s a choice she has to make, and she knows which choice is the right one and which is wrong. Be loyal, be faithful, be strong. Honor the gods, and you’ll be safe.
It’s Lee who lost his honour first, she tells herself, and this helps her ignore everything the Perseus Village Academy taught her about the Holy Scrolls and the sanctity of marriage. When she announces that she is going to file for divorce, she almost takes pity on him. Dee hasn’t felt so light-hearted in a long time. The giddiness of survival replaces the numbness that won’t disappear.
***
Felix and she are throwing a private party when Dee’s divorce papers are on their way and her soon-to-be ex-husband is visiting a dead woman in the brig. Nothing is particularly funny, not with a collaborator going scot-free and hundreds of crew-members dying, but it’s good to be laughing all the same. Even if it’s weird because it’s Felix and her shaking with near-hysterical laughter as they dowb shot after shot of vile rotgut.
"To justice," her friend declares, a bit too melodramatically, and this sets off another bout of laughter. Dee is chortling so much that she snorts some of liquor out of her nose, like an over-excited kid with a can of soda.
This happened to Alex once, she remembers with sudden clarity, when he turned seven, and he was coughing root beer all over his brand-new (and expensive) Picon Panthers shirt. Her brother wanted to get another one, but Mom and Dad kept putting it off. If he still cheered for the Panthers when he was ten, they promised, Rina’s dad would ask one of his colleagues about reduced tickets. Alex died four months before his ninth birthday.
Tears are welling up in her eyes, and she curses herself for being such a maudlin drunk. She half-listens to Gaeta rambling on about a corrupt system that rewards wrong-doers undeserving of forgiveness. She wanted to make an argument about that, too, something about abstract idealism and gut-wrenching despair. All she can think of, though, is one of her mother’s folksy proverbs:
‘Make your bed, and lie in it,’ she told her daughter, ‘you’ll have to own up to what you’ve done. But if you are faithful and loyal and strong and honor the gods, you will be safe.’ There’s a moral to that story somewhere, Dee supposes, since treason has bought Baltar freedom and all the blood they’ve spilled hasn’t swayed the Lords to show them Earth. Of course, her mother is no longer here to argue.
***
Even though Lee’s nomination for the Quorum of Twelve isn’t all that funny, either, Dee still erupts in mirthless laughter when she hears about it. Now that they aren’t married anymore, she does wish him well, but the thought of him working with Tom Zarek makes her stomach churn.
He’s made his bed, and he’s gotta lie in it, her mother’s voice whispers in the back of her head. And it’s none of my business, Dee adds, I just have to take care of myself.
So she has a genuine smile to spare every time she runs into Lee on the rare occasions when he comes over from Colonial One to visit the Admiral. It’s easy to recognize when he arrives directly from a meeting with President Roslin. He’s wrapped in a chamalla-scented cloud of sickness and death.
Once, she watches Lee politely offer Roslin his arm to get out of the shuttle, as though the fallout at the trial had never happened. The President must be desperate if she accepts his assistance so gratefully, and her frailty frightens Dee. Under the fear, however, there is a secret well-spring of childish hopes and dreams. If the leader is dying, the promised land cannot be far.
Perhaps it is this heady mixture of hope and fear that leads to Dee ending up in a storage locker with her recently divorced husband.
"Anastasia," Lee whispers, her dogtags jangling in his hand. "I’ve always liked that name." She briefly wonders whether he knows its original meaning in ancient Sagitarran.
Her distraction lasts only until he pulls her tank tops over her head and she has stripped off his dress shirt. She licks the hollow of his shoulder blade before he bends down to suck her breast, and for an instant she remembers how gentle he was when they slept together for the first time, how carefully he touched her on their wedding night. She grins into his neck, ignoring the memories, and fumbles with the zipper on his pants.
She urges him to frak her against the dusty shelves, her dogtags digging into her left breast, over her heart, and she relishes the discomfort, the pleasure-pain from the cold metal mashed between their heated bodies, from the cross-tied bars bruising her back.
"Open your eyes," she whispers, and he does, staring into her face, watching her, seeing her.
In the end, she closes hers.
Afterwards, he kisses her forehead and runs his fingers gingerly over the mark on her breast. "I’m sorry," Lee says. "I don’t want you to get hurt."
She smiles at him over her shoulder as she turns to leave.
"You know me, Lee," she says in farewell. "I’m not that easily damaged. I won’t break."
***
The signals come unexpectedly, like Dradis signs, but there are rules to this game, even if they are never spoken.
She will nod at him in passing when he emerges from his father’s quarters, and he’ll be waiting for her in the storage locker five minutes later. They run into each other on the hangar deck, and she’ll casually pat his arm, and he understands.
It’s always a bit awkward, and Dee wonders if anybody suspects that she hides in a closet to frak her ex-husband senseless. They don’t have to respect the frat regs anymore; out of habit, though, she makes sure that the hatches are locked behind her and that the floor and shelves stay clean. Can her shipmates tell by the way she’s walking afterwards? Can they smell the stickiness on her thighs and the sharp sweat soaking her tanks? Do they glance at her face, relaxed for a few precious minutes, and think, yeah, that’s definitely a freshly-frakked glow?
Most of the time, however, she couldn’t care less about anyone’s opinions. She doesn’t even know what Lee thinks about their strange affair, and she doesn’t really want to. She only knows that these quick fraks in the dark help her stop worrying. In the darkness, there are no dying leaders; no lost comrades returning from the dead; no missing friends on hopeless missions; no civvy kids worked to death on mining ships.
There’s just sharp piercing pleasure that makes her feel alive.
***
One day, when he forgets herself and moans too loudly, she presses her hand over his mouth. She bucks her hips against his, and he bites down on her fingers as he comes. When they are getting dressed in the half-light, she sees blood stains smearing her white sports bra. Red droplets are running down her thumb, and she sees the marks of his teeth all over its base.
"Oh gods, Dee!" He presses her hand between his and starts digging for a handkerchief in his suit. "I’m so sorry."
She flashes him a cold smile, cold and blinding. "Don’t be. It’s nothing to feel sorry for."
***
After that, Lee slowly picks up on the various ways he can make her come. He thrusts into her harder and harder, bites into her neck or wraps her curls so tightly around his fingers that he nearly rips them out.
She can see that he hates himself for this, that he doesn’t want to hurt her again.
And yet, he waits for her in that storage locker, even when Kara Thrace returns from the Demetrius, with a crippled Felix and a basestar full of Cylons in tow.
She hates that she needs him to stop the numbness from spreading through her body, from reaching her head and her heart. She’s not quite sure if she enjoys frakking him anymore, but she knows she can’t give it up.
Sometimes, when she scrubs herself raw in the shower, she doesn’t bother to hide the scratches and bruises and bite-marks. The other officers are giving her funny looks, but she’s too tired to care.
I need this. This helps me stay alive.
***
Dee swears she can trace the progress of Roslin’s illness simply by the way Lee smells. His skins reeks of sickbay: anti-septic and stale urine and the sickly, festering stench of bedsores.
She keeps burying her nose in his hair as he pounds into her, keeps crying soundlessly for Laura Roslin as she clenches around him, keeps waiting for the gods to guide them all into the promised land.
***
She can’t decide whether the prophecies were wrong or right because they did find Earth, but Roslin is still alive. On the Raptor down to the planet, Dee dreams of lilies, white chalices swaying in the breeze, funeral wreaths forgotten as she breathes in her mother’s favorite scent.
***
She leaves her quarters to go out for drinks and dinner, a nice normal evening, just like she used to have before the world ended. Again and again.
Lee seems genuinely happy to see her and honestly grateful that she accepts his courteous gestures and occasional touches.
After dinner, he takes her hand and closes it around a tiny chocolate bar, whispering, "You’d better be not allergic to peanuts. This must be the last piece of chocolate in the universe." She laughs, and his tenderness nearly gets the better of her. There is so much she would like to tell him.
I’m missing my family more with each passing minute. Hera may be half-Cylon, but she likes scribbling with crayons on furniture, just like Alex when he was a toddler. There’s a sidearm waiting for me in my locker.
"Are you happy?" she asks him instead.
A foolish question, considering the circumstances, but he answers it anyway. "I still want to be." His voice is gentle.
Her eyes are fixed at the cheap fairy lights behind him, but she’s looking at something else, at the boyish face of her little brother, who believes in sifting the ruins for salvation.
She doesn’t even believe in survival now.
"What about you, Ana?" he asks. Silently, he takes her face into his hands, as if to kiss her. "Do you think you could be happy?"
"Yes," she says and presses a kiss to his palm. "I am happy."
What she means is, I am sorry.
***
She hopes that none of her friends will find her body. She doesn’t want to deal them this blow, not after Earth, the third (and last) home they have lost.
Third time’s the charm. A shiver runs down her spine.
Maybe if they had been better people, stronger, braver, more loyal, the gods would have loved them. They wouldn’t have listened to false prophets; they wouldn’t have suffered in vain; they wouldn’t cling to deluded hopes for a future that no one would live to see.
Or maybe her mother’s calendar mottos and her father’s pep talks got it all wrong. Ana smiles fondly, indulgently, at their foolishness; at Rina’s silly excitement over her wedding; at Alex’ childish beliefs.
When she takes a deep breath, it’s not gun oil she smells. She savours the perfume she traded for her remaining underwear: flowers - lilies - maybe gardenias, or burdock blossoms in spring.
She lets the voices outside the door wash over her and braces herself for her hand on the trigger. This, at last, is the day when she doesn’t come back.