Fic: Someone Else's Life
You know, it just gets weirder every time I delve back into the world of
BSG. Or maybe it's just my brain.
Fandom: BSG
Title: Someone Else's Life
Character: Dualla
Pairing: Dualla/Gaeta
Rating: Relatively graphic sexual descriptions. Some language.
Word Count: 4747
AN: Set around the time of "Flight of the Phoenix". A sequel to
Were It Not That I Have Bad Dreams
“Hey! Dualla! Dee!”
“Kara, hey.” In the doorway of the briefing room, she smiles
warmly at the two women. “Kat.” It’s hard to keep the
same level of friendliness in her face and voice for the second Viper pilot,
but she manages. Politeness is key, the lubrication of civilization, as her
History professor had liked to say. “Don’t’ tell me you
got pulled off duty too?”
“Pulled out my rack, is more like it,” Kat says dourly and scratches
idly at her forearm. She looks a little better than before her breakdown,
but she’s still twitchy and irritable, the last ugly dregs of stim
withdrawal. Dee would like to feel sorrier for her, but she doesn’t.
She feels guilty about not feeling worse, though.
“Do you know what’s going on?” Kara asks. She must have
been down on the hangar deck with Tyrol, tinkering with his special project;
she’s got grease under her nails, streaked on her forearms and clothes
and she stinks of a wiring blow. Trust Starbuck not to have changed.
Dee shakes her head. “No. I think I got the same orders as you: report
to the briefing room. Neither Tigh or the Old Man wanted to look me in the
eye, though, so I’m guessing it’s not good.”
“But look,” Kat flips a hand in the direction of the others in
the room. “It’s all women. Only women. What kind of
bad news only affects the women?”
Kara grins. “Maybe there’s been some kind of horrible tampon
shortage, and they want to break the news to us all together to save us the
embarrassment in front of the men.”
”Kara!” Dee hits the pilot in the shoulder, mildly scandalized.
“No, I’m serious!” Kara insists. “They could put
a bunch of civilians to work knitting new ones out of plastic drink bottles
or something. You know, for the war effort. Increase morale, keep ‘em
productive and everything. It could work.”
“I will certainly take that under advisement, Lieutenant Thrace.”
It’s not the first time Dee’s compared President Laura Roslin
to her grandma’s cat Nibby. Dee thinks of Roslin-as-Nibby, hiding
behind her grandma’s trashcan, lying in wait for the other cat, Phoebus,
ready for the pounce. She hides a smile as Kara and Kat straighten and Kara
offers a strangled, “Madam President.”
Behind the President’s shoulder, Dee glimpses Billy. Her ever present
shadow, she thinks, and wonders why the thought should annoy her so.
He tries to catch her eye, smiling his nervous smile. She floats him one
back, then averts her face quickly. “Are you here for the briefing,
Madam President?” Dee asks, both to spare Starbuck and from her own
curiousity.
“Actually, I’m leading it.” Roslin offers one of her characteristic
tight smiles—the one that could mean anything and probably means nothing—and
goes to the front of the room.
They find seats quickly. Dee slips in between Cally and Kara, and Cally
offers up a smile only slightly tense at the edges. She hasn’t been
sleeping well, Dee knows. None of them are. Most sleep shifts, someone
wakes her, crying either asleep or awake. Couple of times, she’s
woken herself, thrashing and whimpering in a voice she hardly recognizes
as her own.
“Thank you all for coming,” President Roslin says, pitching her
voice to carry across the assorted conversation. At the sound, they quiet
and still. Roslin has a way of making it sound like her words are for each
of them individually, a warmth that, while calculated, is nonetheless genuine.
“Not like we had much of a choice,” Kara mutters, and Dee hushes
her.
“I realize this is a very strange time for us all,” Roslin continues,
folding her hands together in front of her, the schoolteacher in her. “We
are…adrift from everything that we knew, and heading towards a future
that seems anything but secure.
“I understand your fear. I do. Because they are my fears too. But
I believe in our future. I have to, because I believe humanity is more than
a footnote on the pages of history. But for us to have a future, we must
begin to look to it.”
Roslin’s eyes skate over them. It interests Dee’; to watch the
aura Roslin creates, that makes them each feel she’s looking at
them individually. It’s a good trick, and no less impressive
for knowing it’s only that. Or maybe it’s not. More than a
few are whispering Roslin’s a prophet in the flesh, including a few
Dee’d be willing to bet have only seen the inside of a shrine at feast
days.
“This is a new world we enter,” Roslin continues. “A new
game. It’s foolish of us to think the rules will be the same as those
we leave behind. I know many of you were on your way out of the Fleet, on
to other things, other lives. Now that’s all gone. Our responsibilities
and our choices have changed. And I know that’s frightening. I know
that we are not only scared, we are confused, and we are angry.
“I think it’s important to point out at this time that you
do still have choices, even if they weren’t the ones you would
make before. While we may exist under wartime conditions, our end goal here
is not war. Our goal here is to survive, and rebuild. So please
understand—this is not a totalitarian regime. We are not forcing you
to do anything.”
Dee glances at the faces around her and wonders if she’s the only one
who hears an implied ‘yet ’ in that statement. For the
most part, everyone looks blank, and tired, the circuits burnt for thinking
too far ahead or really, at all.
Choices. What are her choices, really? She thinks of the Old Man,
bleeding and shot to pieces across his own war table, on his own bridge,
by one he considered his own. She thinks of Helo, shunned and ridiculed,
leaving the break room in silence every off-shift with his dessert in hand.
She thinks of Billy, handsome and young and sweet, but still a politician,
still Roslin’s man. She thinks of Lee, so tightly wound, a shining
star wobbling unsteadily on his axis. Are these choices, concrete and distinct,
or are they only things that happen?
The thought itself is a little disorienting, increasing the sense of unreality
that’s been growing slowly over her like a second skin. She’s
always believed in the power and responsibility of Choice, more strongly
than even her belief in the Lords. Now her faith is shaken, and she doesn’t
know with what she can fill that gap.
“Babies,” Kara says suddenly, loud enough that Dee isn’t
the only one to jump. “She’s talking about frakking babies
.”
The look on Kara’s face seems disproportionately revolted to Dee’s
mind, but it’s not as if the topic’s ever come up between them.
She has no idea what Kara’s thought on the subject are. Or her own,
for that matter. It truly has never come up.
“Indeed I am,” Roslin agrees without rancor and with another
of those taut meaningless smiles. “Thank you again, Lieutenant Thrace.”
“Don’t mention it,” Kara mutters, and there’s a rumble
of nervous laughter among the assembled women.
Dee understands it, feels it herself. Pregnancy is the great taboo, the
worst fear of a woman who is also a soldier. The Fleet dispenses contraceptives
amply and without comment, but there always lurks the suspicion that this
time they will not work; that some confluence of stars, or medication, or
pure ill luck will negate them and that the early morning throw up is more
than simply battle nerves. Sometimes, even abstinence isn’t enough
to banish those fears, irrational though they may be. The decision to not
talk about it is unspoken, but universal. No one wants to jinx a friend
any more than she herself wants to be jinxed.
For Roslin to bring it up now, in front of everyone, seems…scandalous.
Dangerous, like they’re tempting fate. Which is, quite possibly,
Roslin’s intention.
“Here are the facts. Seventy percent of the Fleet is male, and two-thirds
are between the ages of thirty and sixty-five. Eleven percent of the female
population is either too young or too old to reproduce. At this time, we
have no data about the reproductive capabilities of that segment
of the population that’s at least statistically able-bodied.”
Roslin sweeps off her glasses, and pinches the bridge of her nose tiredly
before replacing them.
“Our first order of business to ensure continuity of species has
to be to determine the size of the gene pool we have to work with. To this
end, we are requesting everyone in the Fleet have fertility testing,
military and civilian alike.” There’s a rumble of discontent
among the assembled. Roslin holds up her hand. “We are not asking
you to have babies,” Roslin interjects. “But please understand
that of the nineteen percent of women who are reproductively capable, the
largest number of single, healthy females comes from Galactica itself. This
is not an order. As I said, you won’t be forced to do anything. But
we are asking you to consider, at least, the possibility.
“I have spoken with Commander Adama. Fertility testing will be mandatory
for all enlisted personnel and officers.” Another eruption, louder
this time. Roslin pitches her voice louder to cut over them. “Anything
beyond that will be at the discretion of the person involved. For those
personnel who decide to procreate, special dispensation and modified duty
will be arranged with no loss of status or benefits. If you have no desire
to be a parent to the resulting child, adoptive parents can be arranged with
or without visitation rights. If you cannot bring yourself to contemplate
pregnancy, a contribution of viable genetic material will be accepted, with
our thanks.”
The room is in chaos now, voices jabbering without sense. Dee finds herself
silent; oddly heavy and immobile, as if someone’s turned the grav adjust
too high, pinning her to her chair.
“Eggs,” Kara mutters. For a change, she’s not the loudest
voice in the room, but something smokes and quakes in her voice, something
hidden and probably dangerous. “No matter what frakking side of the
fence I’m on, they want my frakking eggs! What the hell?”
Billy must have been standing just outside the briefing room door. At the
rise in noise, he comes rushing in, straight for Roslin, who’s fallen
silent herself, standing slightly bent with one hand on the lectern. He
touches her arm, hesitant, and Roslin raises her head to smile warmly at
him. Reassured, his head then turns to seek her out, a question in his look.
She can’t even make herself smile this time. It’s not jealousy.
She thinks, more than anything, it’s the absence of any feeling at
all. There’s no choice to make here. Instead, she gets up, threads
her way to the end of the aisle, and leaves.
The end of the meeting marks the end of her shift. She walks out of the
briefing room with no idea of where she’s going or what to do next.
Like a blind person, she puts one hand out and touches the bulkhead. It’s
warm, thrumming with the subcutaneous murmur of the engines; the heartbeat
that moves her world.
She does this more and more lately. Finding her way by touch alone, across
metal smooth, rough or textured; cold out by the skin, hotter towards the
core. Her flesh feels unsubstantial, but Galactica is always real, concrete
and undeniable.
“The rules have changed,” Roslin said; but what does she offer
to put in their place? Dee likes rules; even when they have to be
broken, they give you a boundary and a reference point back. Unlike people,
they’re unequivocal. You always know where you stand.
She doesn’t know where she stands any more.
She likes Billy. He’s a good man; but when she’s with him she’s
aware of an uneasy weighing of pro and con, moments when his earnestness
annoys her beyond measure, and times that she just wants to punch that goofy
smile off his face. She likes him, but it’s just too early to envision
forever with him, and babies…
She’s not ready for babies.
This is not my life, she thinks, as hallways drift past unseen,
marked only by texture.
Suddenly, she hears a noise, and she stops.
Crew dorms.
She cocks her head, listens, and it comes again. A person’s noise,
pained and quiet. She looks around. A few curtains are shut on the bunks;
otherwise the dorm is empty. Fallout from Roslin, she guesses; usually there
are at least a few people on downtime, chatting, changing, having a quick
smoke or wank.
She takes another couple steps and sees him.
Tigh had kicked Gaeta from the CIC halfway through the last shift. She didn’t
know how long he’d been working before the XO had ordered him out—duty-shifts
blend together into a long gray welter of tense shoulders and rapid fire commands—but
he looked bad. The sleep rings around his eyes are deepening into bruises.
He moves as fast and competently as ever, but when he thinks no one’s
looking, his hands shake. She can’t remember the last time she’s
seen him sleeping.
She’s not even sure she can legitimately call this sleeping. The curtains
on his bunk are still drawn back and he’s curled into a fetal ball
on top of the covers. Dee stands over him, her own shoulders aching in sympathy
at the sight of him twisted into such a tiny vulnerable ball, unimaginable
without actually being seen. He hasn’t even changed out of his uniform;
the seams strain over the width of his shoulders and back. In his sleep
he whimpers again, a sickened, stifled noise that hurts just to hear.
This might be why she sits abruptly on the bunk’s edge and unlaces
her boots.
Her grandma always said she was too softhearted, especially for the Fleet.
She’s proven her grandma wrong in that respect, but there’s
still this, this tender, aching part that can’t stand to see someone
in so much pain.
In her stocking feet, she draws the curtain and stretches out next to him,
spooning against his back. She curls one arm over his side and pillows her
head on the other. “Shh,” she whispers into his ear. “
Shhh. It’s okay, Felix. It’s okay. I’m here. Shhhh.”
It’s nothing she would have done before. Even the use of his given
name, after so many shifts of ‘Mr. Gaeta’, ‘Officer
Dualla’ feels odd. This would never happen when things were normal,
when she was normal; Anastasia Dualla, Petty Officer 2nd Class, pragmatic
and no-nonsense. A girl—woman—who stands on her own two feet,
and walks, and talks, and does her duty without the sneaking, clamoring suspicion
of This is not my life.
This is not my life , she thinks and rests her cheek against the flat
plane of his scapula. He’s shaking Through his uniform, he’s
hot. Under her hand, his heart beats and trembles, a galloping stutter.
“Shhh. Hush, Felix. It’s okay. I’m here. I’m
here.”
Whether it’s the sound of her voice, or the proximity of her body,
Gaeta lets out a noise like a quiet sob and stills, unknotting a little from
his fetal ball. She tangles her feet with his, keeps up the soft murmur
of reassurance; meaningless words, snippets of cradlesongs, lullabies. With
the fingers of the arm not wrapped around him, she combs through his hair.
It’s softer than she would think, if she ever thought about what his
hair felt like in the first place. It’s coarse, thick.
She concentrates on it’s texture. On the quiet rhythm of their shared
breath (in-out, in-out), on the thrum of his heart under her palm. She blocks
out her worry about what’s happening in the CIC without her, the strange
meeting with President Roslin, the awareness of the comings and goings from
the dorm. She closes her eyes, and lets herself…drift.
“An…Anastasia?” Gaeta’s voice stumbles over her
given name, softening the esses. She doesn’t know how much time has
passed, if any time has passed. His hand covers hers, fingers interlacing
with hers over his pectoral. “Dee?”
“Felix,” she answers calmly, as if waking with your crewmate
wrapped around you is the most natural, normal occurrence.
“You… I…”
“You were dreaming,” she cuts him off, her voice gentle.
A shiver runs through him like current, his breath catches and his arm tightens
over hers. “Oh.” His voice is very small, shaken and afraid.
She can’t reconcile it with Mr. Gaeta. She can’t reconcile
it with Senior Officer of the Watch.
“It’s okay.”
Silence falls between them again, a blanket that doesn’t itch. In
her arms, he’s shivering again.
This is not my life, she thinks, as she turns his head and presses
her lips against his.
His mouth opens a little—in shock, or maybe to speak—and she
lets her tongue slide into him. Under their joined hands, his heart speeds
up. He tastes a little like coffee, but mostly like himself, a taste she
thinks she should have known before now, but didn’t. If someone blindfolded
her and put this taste on her tongue, she thinks she would always know it
as his.
His tongue rises, tangles briefly with hers, then hesitates, uncertain.
Abruptly, he tears himself away. “Are you real?” Again there’s
that uncertainty in his voice that cuts her, so unlike anything she likes
to think about him. His eyes are wild, reminding her—of all people—of
Dr. Baltar.
It’s a strange enough question, dovetailing so closely into her own
feelings that she doesn’t know what to answer. So that’s what
she says. “I don’t know.”
Felix blinks, and suddenly, he looks again like no one but himself. “Forget
that,” he says. “Never mind. I’m sorry.”
She shakes her head. “Don’t be sorry, Felix. Shut up.”
She closes the distance between them again and envelops those soft, bitten
lips with her own. Felix shifts again to lie flat on his back. His fingers
skim light over her cheek then tangle in her hair, pulling her down into
him with a force and desperation both unexpected and unexpectedly hot.
Something in her groin flutters and aches and then she knows where this is
going. She feels slightly stupid for not knowing before; she is the
aggressor here. But she can neither reach backward or project forward; there
is only present perfect, a moment with nothing before or behind. There’s
no calculation, no uneasy weigh and re-weigh of the pros and cons. And somehow,
that’s okay.
She untangles her fingers from his to bunch his shirt and tug it free of
his waistband. She wants to know the secrets of this skin, so often hidden.
Her fingers are cold and he flinches, but his grip on the back of her head
tightens and his other grabs her shoulder. She touches smooth muscled belly,
traces his flattened navel. His stomach flutters against her, sensitive.
His teeth bite down on her lip. She likes it. She slides her fingers up
to explore the line of pectoral, pushing his shirt ahead of her; she slides
down to the thin line of kinky hair just above his pants.
Here, she hesitates.
It’s been a long time since she’s had sex.
That was Wentworth, first man, first love; he of the brown puppy-dog eyes
and cloud-like kisses. A lot like Billy, now that she thought of it. A very
long time. She’s not sure she remembers how this all goes. Still,
with the way his mouth and tongue move, the way his body feels against hers,
the way her pelvis seems to have dissolved into hot sugar water…she’s
willing to give it the old academy try.
She thumbs open the button of his trousers and slips beneath that waistband
and that of his shorts. His hair crinkles ticklish against her palm and
then she encounters skin, velvet soft and delicate. Fingertips slide, questing,
inquisitive, over him; head, ridge, shaft, into the soft plunder of his balls.
Felix’s tongue stabs helplessly deeper and he moans, needy, against
her lips. She smiles. Maybe she hasn’t forgotten after all.
Felix’s fingers leave her to fumble with his zipper. Given room to
maneuver, she pushes his shorts away and grips more firmly, stroking slow
and firm. He arches into her hand, hips leaving the thin mattress, while
his mouth blurts frantic into hers.
She definitely forgot this. He feels good. So frakking good , fever
hot and hard, desperate with want; just holding him isn’t enough.
She pulls back and sits on her heels, ripping at her jacket clasps with the
hand unoccupied. Felix helps, his fingers cleverer than hers.
She shrugs the jacket off her shoulders and free arm while he unbuttons
her fatigues, parting the lapels over the moon-whiteness of her bra. He
traces her collar bones, then cups the curves of her breasts, thumbs sliding
over taut nipples and a line of heat traces from her burning throat down
her torso to lie heavy and searing in her belly and nethers. She switches
hands without losing a stroke, shaking jacket and blouse of her other arm
while Felix attacks her trouser button and zipper.
She crawls and slithers to straddle his thighs, leaning in to press her teeth
against his throat. Sticky with pre-cum, preoccupied with the placket on
her pants, he arches up hard, breath strangling in his throat. Roughly,
he shoves a hand down her pants and panties, hooking to sink two fingers
deep inside. Now it’s her turn to gasp, digging into his shoulder
with her short fingernails unable to think or move or do anything for endless
moments of pure feeling.
He strokes her, a place that isn’t her heart, but nonetheless that’s
been empty too long, and she’s conscious that there are tears gemming
her lashes, cold as space. Not sadness, his fingers are too skillful for
that, but something else, something that’s been leashed and pushed
down and put away until now, this moment that has no past, future or conscience.
“Yes,” Felix whispers against her ear. His voice isn’t
that of the little lost boy or Lieutenant Gaeta; if anything he sounds like
he did on that ridiculous documentary. Relaxed. Replete. Somehow lazy;
the voice of the jungle cat on his shoulder. Now she knows why he has it,
why it’s there, his hidden face. If not for this, this moment, she
might never have known. “Come for me, Ana. Save me from my dreams
and come for me.”
She’s never been Ana before, but from his mouth, she likes it.
“You like it, don’t you? Yes? Come on. Come for me, Ana.
Come for me. Please.”
It’s the ‘please’ that does it.
She has to let go of him, too caught in her own pleasure to trust her hands.
Instead she holds onto the hard muscle of his biceps, riding his hand, riding
the wave, head flung back and her teeth shut hard on the possibility of noise
even though she wants to scream as he thrusts and thrusts and thrusts
until she comes apart on top of him, falling into him and biting down until
she tastes blood. His free arm goes around her and holds her—tighter
than she’s ever been held before—even though she must be hurting
him.
“Yes,” he breathes again. “Yes.”
Where normally this would be the end, where she fades into sleep, it’s
not. Not only because she’s flown solo, as the saying goes, conscious
of his unsatisfied erection against her belly, but because the awareness
of it rekindles the desire to touch, to taste, to have. While his fingers
are undeniably talented, she wants more.
She licks the blood from his neck. Later she might be horrified, but later
is later. Right now, she likes the taste, copper-sweet, likes the feeling
of her tongue against the grooves in his flesh. With her hands, she grabs
either side of his shirt and rips , in a scatter of buttons. To random
facts like how he takes his coffee, or that he prefers Jade Kadir cigarettes,
she adds that his nipples are unbelievably sensitive, that his ribs are ticklish,
but he likes it. She adds the unbelievably smooth skin in the hollows of
his hips, she adds the smell of him there, like dirty cream, and the
faintly bitter taste of his leakage.
Felix clutches at her wrist as she tongues him, fingers still damp. His
other hand dances over her hair, not grabbing, not shoving, but nearly paralyzed
with the desire to. He lifts and falls, lifts and falls, helpless to lie
still. She looks up and his eyes are open, watching her.
“Please,” he mouths again, not aloud, and then it’s
a race to see who can get out of their pants faster.
Her panties tangle on one ankle, and she decides she doesn’t care,
rising awkwardly to straddle him again. It hurts when she mounts him. But
not in a bad way; it’s the pain of tightness, disuse, of emptiness
now filled. Felix starts to cry out, and she puts her hand over his mouth,
chewing her own lip to shreds in the effort to not scream.
It’s Felix’s turn to bite, his teeth sinking into the fleshy
part of her palm. She doesn’t mind. She’s crying again, her
eyes blurry. She doesn’t mind that either. They’re not dark
tears, tears that hurt, snagging on the broken, clotted corners. She doesn’t
even know how to describe these tears. Ones that wash clean. That’s
how she feels, in this endless, nameless moment, frakking Gaeta and herself
to senselessness: clean. Clean and free. Lords of Kobol, free
.
She falls and he rises, meeting somewhere in the middle to touch over and
over and over again deep within those hidden places until he bucks and releases
inside her, and she can finally let go and follow, crying still.
Afterwards, Felix kisses the tears from her skin. “You should sleep,”
he whispers.
“Not tired,” she murmurs back, and it’s true. This is
the least tired she’s felt in weeks, though she suspects there’ll
be a crash later. Still, she plans to enjoy it while it lasts. “But
what about you?” She touches his face lightly then lets her hand drop,
hesitant of the proprieties now that it’s over and she can remember
all the reasons that this was a monumentally stupid thing to do. Though,
not, she supposes, if President Roslin has her way. “You look exhausted.”
The shadow of something crosses his eyes, dark and painful. He hesitates,
on the verge of not answering, and she reaches up again to smooth his hair.
It’s messy. She doesn’t think she’s ever seen him less
than immaculately put together. It’s an interesting change. “I
don’t want to sleep,” he admits finally, his voice pinched and
small.
“Why not?”
She can’t call the bitter, rue expression on his face a smile, but
there’s no other word for it, either. “Because I might dream.”
Dee recognizes she’s not particularly eloquent. She’s well suited
to her job, the kind of blunt, terse manner that’s so necessary to
military and wartime communication, and so inadequate in the infinitely more
complicated realms of interpersonal relations. It’s the reason she’s
so slow with her words outside the CIC, trying to the best of her ability
to make sure they say what she really means. This—what she and Gaeta
have done—is simple, and whatever she says to him needs to be equally
simple because there’s too much room here for retreat and regret, and
she doesn’t really want to do either.
“Turn over,” she says, and he does, presenting her again with
the long, smooth line of his back. Again, she fits herself against him,
interested by how effortless it is. One arm over his waist, palm flat against
his heart. One hand tangled in his hair, combing. “Sleep,”
she tells him. “It’s okay. I’m right here. If you dream…”
she lays her head against his shoulder, kisses his bare salty skin. “You
can dream about me. I’ll chase the bad dreams away.”
Felix laughs, soundless, communicated only by bone through the skin. Something,
some hidden tension goes out of him, leaving him boneless in her arms.
“It’s a new world,” Roslin said. And, “You
still have choices.”
She does.
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