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Finding the ruins of Earth shattered them all. Even the Cylons. Cold and heartless as they are, even they looked upon the devastation with shock and disbelief—and heartbreak— if such a thing was possible.
They all lost in the end. Flags had been waved, nukes disarmed, and guns lowered from temples, and all for what? The empty promise of a lifeless husk.
What a joke, Dee thought. A cruel, cruel prank played by the Gods, on a universe of fools.
The hope of finding the lost thirteenth colony had sustained Dualla through the long, terrifying retreat from the irradiated Twelve Colonies. From Sagittaron—from her home and her family who died in the Cylons opening attack. Or, at least Dualla hoped they all perished early on because Kara told them what the Cylon had done—were still doing—to surviving colonialists they found and captured. Dee would not wish so terrible a fate on anyone.
The Cylons had destroyed everything and left her—every surviving man, woman, and child in the fleet—with nothing and no one to return to. Then their relentless pursuit of what remained of humanity across the stars soon drained all peace and joy from her soul like they were water passing through pebbles scattered along an ancient shore.
And when hope finally abandoned her after the Olympic Carrier, the Astral Queen—and Gods—Boomer, Dee's peace, her everything, became Galactica. The Old Man. Her place in CIC... Lee.
Then the promise of a new home, of Earth, became the Dream. The ray of light that shined brightest to guide them all out of the vast darkness the Cylons had driven them deeper and deeper into. A new world that would offer them all new lives, and a real future. A place where Dee might become alive again.
Instead, they found a barren wasteland of scorched rock and an even more uncertain future.
Alone, Dualla walked on upon a ball of lifeless dirt that was once a cradle full of life and inhaled stale, lukewarm air that smelled like pennies and half-life, and considered putting her service pistol to her temple and pulling the trigger. Dee didn't know if it was within her to endure endless chase, war, and sorrow. To run from machine monsters with chrome skin and false flesh until a nuke from a base star finally reduced Galactica to space dust. Oh, yes, there was supposed to be some tentative peace between the fleet and the rebel Cylons, but Dee knows she could never bring herself to ever trust it or want it after everything that's happened.
Yet, Dee longed to find a place to settle and have a family again. A place where she can finally be still and mourn the loved ones she'd lost, and someday learn to let go of her regrets. More than ever it seemed like a child's wish—and Dee hasn't been a child for a very long time.
She knelt and picked up a rock the size of her fist. It was charred and slagged and warmed by a dim sun. Until Dee grabbed it from the ground, the rock hadn't been seen or touched since the end of the world. A hundred years ago? A thousand? How many millennia passed since the Earth burned? However long ago it was, the gamma and neutron emissions from the nuclear fire that scarred the stone in her hand had almost entirely dissipated into background radiation, but not before poisoning everything left behind. Every grain of soil, every plant, and every drop of water.
A world no longer fit for the living—only the dead.
Dee gritted her teeth and snarled silently as she threw the rock away. Her impotent rage gave the rock height and distance until it landed and clattered against other scarred stones. Dee then walked back to the Raptor that brought her down to this long-dead, haunted place, and never set eyes on Earth again.
A month into her eight-year sentence, Dee began to feel comfortable inside her little box in the Brig. Unless she had a visitor, Dee had no one to talk to—leaving her little else to do except eat, exercise, read, or sleep.
To Dee, sleeping as much as she does, feels lazy and sinful. However, that doesn't stop her from taking full advantage of having no responsibilities. It's been years since she's been able to lay down and sleep when she wants, for as long as she wants. And Dee wants to—a lot.
Sometimes Lee comes to... Visit, might be the word to call it—and every time he leaves disappointed. Dualla knew what he wanted from her every time he stood outside her cage, and they had their quiet, stiff conversations when nothing was ever really said. Dee heard the wrath echoing at the bottom of Lee's throat—restrained only by the stinging platonic love he still felt for her.
But Dee couldn't give him what he wanted, and she felt a pang of remorse at how effortlessly she withheld it from him. Lee had been her husband for a time—and while she doesn't believe she ever made him happy, he'd once made her very happy when he tried so hard to pretend he loved her. Lee's professed love had felt so godsdamn good until Dee realized he was coasting on her until he found the place he really wanted to land. Still, to have him, even just a fraction of him was enough to put a smile on Dee's face. It didn't matter the rest belonged to someone else.
Dee wants to make Lee happy even now. She truly does. Lee's so convinced Dee did what she did because of him, he's probably sat at Kara's bedside and apologized enough for the both of them. If Dee could show contrition, even a little, it would ease his conscious.
But Dee will never be sorry about Kara. Never. She can't make herself pretend to be remorseful, not even to assuage Lee's misplaced guilt. She didn't hurt Thrace because of him—at least not entirely.
Lee was only a grain of sand dropped on the scales she used to judge Kara with.
When she wasn't sleeping, Dee spent most of her time reading books. She isn't allowed to have an E-Pad because those have wireless capabilities, and The Old Man is a long way from trusting her with tech more sophisticated than a spoon. Dee was one of the best-trained Communications officers in the fleet before the colonies fell, and she knew how to strip Galactica's Coms to the studs and put them back to order in five minutes. So that left paper books, which were rare these days, and no one would donate theirs to a prisoner. But Gaeta had the biggest individual collection of material books in the fleet and the Admiral let her have them after... After.
Felix's reading tastes were eclectic and quirky in a way the man rarely showed himself to be, and Dee only sometimes got a glimpse of those parts of him during downtime, back before the colonies fell. Hardly ever after.
Gaeta had a score of books about advanced physics and architecture Dee could barely muddle her way through. She'd read wetter technical manuals. Surprisingly, Gaeta also had books about their pantheon of gods—mostly think pieces, written by religious scholars. A few were folk tales, and parables, scribed by authors whose names were long forgotten. All the rest was fiction ranging from spy thrillers to murder mysteries.
Dee asked Gaeta on more than one occasion why he carried around stacks of pulp tour after tour, and he always answered he liked the feel of paper when he read. And how the sweet smell of their decay reminded him of home. It was such a saccharine sentiment from someone like Felix, and Dualla never quite believed him.
She knew him well enough by then to know his obsession with cutting-edge tech bordered on the fetishistic. He raved excitedly about whatever new gadget was about to hit the market and constantly worried about saving the scrip he needed to buy his current obsession. So, it never made sense to Dee Gaeta could appreciate the inefficiency of flipping through pages and pages of paper when a wafer-thin E-Pad can easily hold ten thousand times more books and fit easily in his bunk where space was at a premium.
Dee didn't learn why Felix kept books until the Cylons relentless pursuit of the fleet. He'd been as worn down as everyone else by then, and Dee caught him at an especially weak moment. Felix grew up poor, he said, so poor it was never sure they (Dee could never get him to tell her who 'they' were) would have power or running water any given day. But he could always read real books under the sun or by cheap candlelight.
In the glow of candlelight is how they found him.
Anders often wanders by to stare at her through the steel links with either daggers or tears in his sad, pretty eyes. He's the one who took Felix's leg, but Dee knows he did it for Kara. Men always seemed to go a long way out of their way to do things for Kara Thrace.
Dee doesn't blame Sam the way she blames Kara, not anymore. The days he spent listening to Felix sing his agony away had been torture enough. That it did torture him made him a better person than Dee. Sam felt remorse for what he took, but Dee—Dee would love to hear Kara sing until her voice was cracked raw and bloody ragged with pain. That would be a siren's song to Dualla's ears.
The Old Man never visits—not since the court-martial ended. He was angry. Dee had never seen him angrier.
It seemed like he wanted to punch her when she confessed what she'd done, then coldly revealed where she'd left Kara howling on the floor as blood spurted from the ruins of her kneecap. Instead of hitting her, Adama stripped Dualla of rank (a punch would have hurt less) and had her tossed in the Brig.
They put her in Athena's old cell. It was little more than a ten-by-ten dull, gray box before Felix's books were brought in and stacked in knee-high towers along the wall. Their dust jackets and cheap paperboard covers added much-appreciated vibrance. And the sweet, almond fragrance of their pulp made the sterile recycled air smell like Felix's ghost.
Dee was reading a book about astronavigation when a piece of paper fell from between its pages and landed on the chest of her jumpsuit. The sheet of paper was white and folded twice. Dee stared at it for a long time before she picked up the sharply folded sheet from between the valley of her breasts.
It didn't take a stretch of the imagination to guess why Felix ate a bullet. There was no need for an investigation. What they knew already added up: Trapped in a dead-end present and future. Crippled and beleaguered with phantom pains Felix never hid as well as he thought, and the ones responsible—half of them Cylons, and whatever Thrace is—handed less than a slap on the wrist because no one who mattered cared.
Dee knows how tough it is not to be treasured. To be unseen. To not be worth the effort, and keenly aware of it...
Billy must have known what that felt like too, Dee thought.
He's another regret she can't put down yet.
Dee unfolded the slip of pulp. Her slender, brown fingers moved with a surety Dee didn't want to have. She wanted her hands to shake. She wanted to be afraid of what she was going to find written in the note. But she can't be, and she isn't. Because what the neat script on the paper said is what she expected to find.
Just four words. Dee smiled, because of course. She expected that too.
When things got real Felix Gaeta never used ten words when half as many will do. A dyed-in-the-wool egghead, Felix didn't share a lot of traits with the Old Man except that one.
It's over. I'm done.
She refolded the note and tucked it back between the pages of the book.
Gaeta always did the right thing. Always knew what to do and how to do it, even with Tigh breathing hot, alcohol fumes down his neck, and the ever-present weight of the Old Man's expectations on his shoulders. Neither was easy, Dee knew.
Dee admired that about Felix. His competence and nimbleness of mind. The right stuff every officer wants their fellows to have when things inevitably go FUBAR.
Until she didn't. From the start, Dee knew if anyone would it'd be Felix who'd catch on to the fix. And hated him when he did.
Another regret—one Dee doesn't think she will ever put down.
Anastasia lay there, Gaeta's boring little book in her hands, and she couldn't help but wonder when she'll be done too.