I was in the bath room, alone for once, naked with my wash-water ration and soap and towel when the announcement of the emergency jump came. Great. The last time we jumped I got puke up my sinuses because I thought, wrongly as it turned out, that I could hold it in. I can only get clean once a week and I just got clean!
And I puked. Oh, well, at least I was near a toilet this time, leaving my clean body none the worse for wear. I'm bleeding right now, for the first time since the world ended, and my body appears to be making up for all that lost time. This is a really bad time for me to be on bath rations but what can you do? There's only so much water. We're lucky we get the gallon a week of reclaimed water (little better than disinfected gray water) to wash in at all.
It hurts when I think how much I used to love showers. And, obsessive artist me, I usually found better things to do than bathe, anyway, so I never got around to it until the stink could be seen. So then I would spend... oh, it seemed like days in the shower, with the body scrub and soap that smelled like fruit blossoms and the warm spray of water, washing my hair (it's been a while since I've done that), my feet and every part in between. I closed my eyes, remembering the loving attention I'd get from Geb after cleaning up. He'd just get me all dirty again...
No use thinking about that, now. I put on my dirty clothes (we can choose: clean body or clean clothes, there's not enough water for both) and went back to the space I shared with Jackie and Joe. Jackie was sitting up, wild-eyed. There were worse things than waking up in the middle of an FTL jump but I didn't want to know what they were. At least she could keep her rations down.
"What the hell?" she said. "The Cylons again?"
"What else would we be making an emergency jump for." I scrounged around for my stash of crackers, swiped from the Colonial Day buffet tables on Cloud Nine. They would hold me until lunch... and if they didn't well, it was just too damn bad, wasn't it?
"This will never end!" she wailed, and dived back under the blanket. Joe slept on without a murmur.
I didn't respond. We'd survived jumping every half hour for five days. The fleet had lost only one ship and it had to be destroyed because the Cylons put a nuke aboard. So Captain Zaria had told me once, presumably in confidence. (She was pretty hammered at the time.) We'd survived and we would keep on surviving, so long as we had Galactica to protect us. So Zaria said. So say we all, but I had heard murmurings, rumors of political unrest, that loudmouth Marsh Bagot yapping... We're washing our faces in gray water and barely have enough to eat, I think there are larger issues than who holds a seat on the Quorum!
Sometimes I wonder that Galactica doesn't just cut and run and leave us all behind rather than taking Cylon fire and losing troops for these silly people, for us.
Sometimes I wonder if we're worth it. And sometimes I wonder if there's a reason it's taking so long to get to the Promised Land.
0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0
There's a rumor going around that Galactica didn't make that emergency jump with the rest of the fleet. No one knows if they were destroyed or... Maybe the gods heard what I said about us being worth it.
The gods certainly picked a fine time to start listening to me.