Alice In Fragments
i. Through the Looking Glass
Wake up in someone else's body.
Wake up, period. You took three times your normal dose, so it's a miracle that even happened.
Wake up, twenty years younger, with blonde hair, blue eyes, and long limbs that scream desirability. You never were so beautiful. Your eyes were too close together, your nose a little hooked, your carriage a little too stiff.
But this is the point: you are not perfectly beautiful and you know this. But that's the face that is staring at you in the mirror on the Galactica bridge. You're wearing your own clothes -- well, just a little different, but your own clothes if they were made for a long, lean blonde. Something has happened to you and now you're a beautiful young woman on a mission.
Maybe this is your dream. Maybe you are on Colonial One right now, dreaming that you are a blonde woman on Galactica with vital evidence against Gaius Baltar. Always knew he was a traitor. Slimy bastard.
Maybe this is just a dream, but you somehow doubt that.
Pretty. It's nice to be young and pretty again. When you demand to see Commander Adama, everyone is watching you and enjoying the view, and you enjoy being enjoyed.
Wake up. Wake up yourself, nauseous and tired and dying and feeling profoundly middle-aged. Wake up with a headache, a frakking lump in your breast, a kink in your neck, cold sweat wrinkling your shirt, and bad breath.
But at this point, you already can't tell the difference between sleeping and waking. One minute you're on the phone to Baltar, listening to him beg for help. The next you're Shelly again, and you're sitting with Adama, telling him how lonely you are.
After a moment of indecision, you try to kiss him. Because you are lonely, and you miss the feel of a body next to yours. And he is tremblingly close, and when you are Shelly, he does not smell of cheap cologne and something sour, the way Baltar does. The world is more vibrant and tangy in her body, and you feel the ache.
Then feel slammed back into your own, rapidly dying body. Aching for someone to touch you, to be heavy and warm and between your thighs. To stroke your hair and face and stomach while telling you just how much they want you.
This body. Your own, slowly rotting body. This body, this decaying nightmare you're barely keeping together with sheer force of will.
All you want to do is wake up.
ii. Wonderland
At first. At first, they seemed like the only good dreams in a world of hallucinations of sweaty-faced Cylons, Marines chasing her in dark woods, serpents coiling over her podium.
But after a while, Laura Roslin started to suspect they were not just dreams, though she had no accurate terminology for them.
Waking dreams. Dreams so real she can't tell if she's sleeping or if she's just hallucinating, because she's come out of them panting like she's been having as much sex as she's been dreaming.
Lee. Lee with his mouth against her ear, breathing on her, touching. Always touching, his hand on her hip, her foot sliding up the outside of his thigh.
"You're incredible."
"Age and experience," she purred in his ear, feeling deliciously naughty. Only a dream, after all. She didn't have to think of her dignity or the situation in dreams. He was pretty, she was willing, and there was nothing in the way here. "And a very inspiring lover. Captain Apollo."
"Madam President," he teased, and she pressed her lips against his upper arm. Nice arms. Well-developed, muscular, fit very well against his upper back. "You can use my name, you know."
"You have so many," she replied, as his stubble scraped against the bottom of her sternum. "And I rather like the notion of being made love to by a god."
He laughed, his hand resting flat against her thighs. "And here I thought all little girls dreamed of princes," Lee said, undoing her skirt and pulling it down.
"They do," she said with an arch smile as his breath fell warmly on her hip. "But I'm not a little girl, so I can dream larger than that."
"So you dream of me. Of us," he said.
"I dream of many things," she answered, pushing him down against his bunk and straddling him. Rack. He'd told her it was called his rack once. "But these are the dreams I actually enjoy having."
"Wake up," he said, but it wasn't Lee who was sweatily, memorably kissing every curve of her before pulling her down to him, each of his fingertips resting against one of her vertebra. Laura's eyes went dilated to realize it was Billy, and she wasn't asleep, and she was staring into space again. "Madam President, are you all right?"
"Daydreaming."
"You moaned. I was afraid you'd hurt yourself," Billy said. "You look flushed. Again. I think you need to talk to the Doc about this."
"I am fine," Laura said, shaking her head to try to dispel the absolute reality of the vision. She'd been so hot, and now it was freezing and it was hard to reconcile the difference. "Was there something?"
"Captain Apollo is here," Billy said. "You have an appointment."
"Oh, yes, of course," Laura said. "Send him in."
Billy scurried off, and Captain Adama walked in, smiling slightly. Quizzically. "Billy says you were a bit tired," he said.
"Spacing out," she said, with a guilty grin and a tiny shiver of pleasure to have him physically there. "It seems my preferred way to handle stress, with good old-fashioned dissociation."
"Daydreaming," Lee said, tilting his head. "I know the feeling. I've been having very intense dreams lately."
"I'm sorry," she said almost immediately.
"Don't be. They're not bad dreams," he said, before suddenly looking down at his feet. "Intense is all. Starbuck's calling me the perverted narcoleptic."
"Oh, dear," Laura said, feigning the slightest embarrassment. "Probably just stress."
Lee cleared his throat and chuckled, and when their eyes met, there was almost an acknowledgment that they were sharing the same dream. Impossible as that was.
"At least these are the dreams I enjoy having," he said, before shaking out of it. "Now, as for today's briefing..."
iii. Dream(there is only one way to get out of wonderland and that's to wake up!)house
Time is not fitting together very well and I think maybe maybe I just had this very conversation. Who was it blonde and I think
Time is not
I think I maybe was someone else once. When I was a girl, maybe I was you.
and I think that's a damn shame, because time is supposed to be a unidirectional flow, a universal yes, of course I had dreams. When I was a girl? I saw things. But then I stopped. They weren't fitting and Father wouldn't put up with my nonsense constant. He wasn't religious. This is not all that we are, he said, but it's as far as we'll ever see so stop telling lies and just be
Part of the River.
River, why does that sound familiar? I'll have this conversation eventually, maybe that's why.
Oh yes they were always very real, but it wasn't until I turned into Shelly Godfrey that I realized what I was doing. But I always was a precocious the signal keeps getting corrupted and sometimes I think we overlap. Like transparencies, so the dark matter in your brain intersects with child. My father the weaknesses in my brain because my human physiology was not meant to deal with constant temporal was always so proud of me; he wanted me to be better than a teacher.
Stress! And then he died and it was just my mother and me like your brother and you. I always wanted a big brother; Eliot was five years younger than me. He looked like you, Billy oh gods Billy did we already have this conversation? You have to find chamalla somewhere because the signal is fading in and out and if I'm not myself then when the Quorum comes they'll take Tigh's side and it's very important that I find my medicine timeline where I can be one way and not the other.
Did you know that time gets used up unevenly and sometimes it's only looking for a place to go? Makes sense, doesn't it? I could already make myself disappear and reappear because Shelly showed me what I can do with space/time and then I was with Captain Apollo and Billy, really, you have to make sure to talk to Cottle. River says that cracks in time are getting wider and if you don't help me I'll break them. I can already see what I could do, but I'm going to have to close that rift.
Do you think I could be it's like butterflies who flap their wings in Beijing on Earth-That-Was and cause hurricanes and you're the hurricane you for a little while, Billy? It wouldn't hurt. I'm good at it. Just until time fits together.
Did I ask already?
Just be just be Laura. That's what he wanted for me.
But I don't know where she fits into time anymore.
I have to wake up. Even though I don't know how. The prince's kiss didn't work though I tried so many times, and I can't take enough pills to stay out of my body for good.
I have to wake up.