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Earth is horrible. Everybody deals with this in different ways, but the major one is Dualla blowing her brains out after a last lovely date with Apollo. It's probably the worst thing that's ever happened on this show, which is saying a hell of a lot. Additional props to Weddle & Thompson, who master an elliptical, time-hopping script Michael Taylor could be proud of, and manage not to explain every single second to us while it's happening. Awesome. So, you're asking: besides Dee, who else is suicidal? Everybody. Just everybody. You know how this show works.
After Adama decides to go looking for a hospitable planet that doesn't totally suck, Three's all, "Leave me here in the radiation and horrible shit like Ajax so I can just feel sorry for myself and then die." Laura Roslin literally burns the prophecies of Pythia a page at a time, whilst crying. Admiral Adama takes Dee's death especially hard, of course, and tries to get Colonel Tigh to kill him for about twenty minutes before finally just pointing a gun at his own head. I don't know why more people don't watch this show. It's so fun.
Meanwhile, Kara finds her blown-up Viper and her total dead body, which she incinerates in a very Bergman way, because what else are you going to do but bury her? The funniest part about that is how it's so weird even Leoben is like, "Girl, I am out of here." Also while down on nuked Earth -- which happened about 2000 years ago -- the Final Four come to some conclusions: namely, that they were there during the nuclear blast. This is because -- we learn after some amateur archaeology -- everybody on Earth was Cylon, not human. Chief was at the Farmer's Market when it hit; Sam played the guitar. And Saul was searching desperately for his wife: Ellen Tigh, the final Cylon.
Which is fine, because Saul Tigh is like the one person on this show who deserves a break, and their love is for real et cetera, but also because: no matter who it was, I was hoping they'd just tell us right away so people would find something new to talk about. I guess I should have been more specific about that wish, because "OMG Anastasia Dualla just blew her fucking brains out" is not really the topic I would have chosen. Stay tuned for week when Hera gets started mainlining heroin and FOX News; Boomer spends six hours at the DMV; and Lee, Kara, the rest of the Cylons, and the cast of the entire Stargate franchise commit cascading ritual suicide in a Broadway salute to Busby Berkeley.
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!Vice Admiral James Bond Stockdale died in 2005. He served on the Ticonderoga in the Gulf of Tonkin, and was shot down over Viet Nam in 1965. He was the highest-ranking naval officer to be held as a POW, and was Ross Perot's VP candidate in 1992. Interesting guy. Afraid they'd videotape him and show the world a well-treated and valued prisoner, he beat himself with a stool. He cut himself with a razor; he did what had to be done. He limped for the rest of his life.
In the camp, he invented new ways for his men to resist torture, sent coded messages to his wife, invented new ways to break through isolation and communicate with each other. New ways to stay alive. The men cleaning the courtyard, during a period of enforced silence, swept the ground in the syncopated rhythm he'd taught them, silently and defiantly spelling out to him inside the walls: "We love you. We love you. We love you."
James C. Collins is a business management writer who's written several management books, including Built To Last and Good To Great. (I'm indebted to forum poster GaryV for bringing him up, because it's so perfectly appropriate, and better stated than anything any of us could say, because Stockdale accomplished something impossible, and lived to tell us how.) Prepping to interview him, Collins read the Vice Admiral's own record of his time at the Hanoi Hilton:
As I moved through the book, I found myself getting depressed. It just seemed so bleak -- the uncertainty of his fate, the brutality of his captors, and so forth. And then, it dawned on me: "Here I am sitting in my warm and comfortable office, looking out over the beautiful Stanford campus on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. I'm getting depressed reading this, and I know the end of the story! I know that he gets out, reunites with his family, becomes a national hero, and gets to spend the later years of his life studying philosophy on this same beautiful campus. If it feels depressing for me, how on earth did he deal with it when he was actually there and did not know the end of the story?"
"I never lost faith in the end of the story," was Stockdale's answer. "I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade."
Collins asked him, "Who didn't make it out?" and Stockdale replied immediately: "Oh, that's easy. The optimists... They were the ones who said, 'We're going to be out by Christmas.' And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they'd say, 'We're going to be out by Easter.' And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart."
"This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end -- which you can never afford to lose -- with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be."
That's the Stockdale Paradox: How do you hope just enough to stay alive, without wanting so much that your heart breaks when you hit the rough patches? When you realize rough patches are all we ever have? How can you keep yourself from taking your heart and putting it somewhere safe, in the gauzy soft tissue-ad future, wishing and hoping and praying that the pain will end, and life will go back to being mere survival and contentment? How to take the localized hope that you'll realize your goal, and pull it so wide across the rest of time that you can hope beyond the dashing of your hope? How do you do that without ripping it?
How can you possibly have enough strength to hold onto your faith in the face of evidence that your faith is meaningless and always was? How do you hate just enough to stay alive, but love just enough to be human in the end? How to walk the edge of the razor without becoming one; to burn off your loss without burning off your soul in the process? When they take away even the idea of completion, commencement, the lie of meaning, the black stone and the white; when you're looking at the negative space where the future used to be, how do you remember how to stay alive? What do you do when you can't get out?
Previously on Battlestar Galactica, Anastasia Dualla tells us, a girl and a boy fell in love. It was a complicated kind of love, as it always is: she was in love with his family, with the idea of home, with the idea of being part of something larger. She made a life of bending broken hopes back into shape, so they could fly. She told the Admiral to find his son, to bring the Fleet and family back together on Kobol. She told his son a hundred times to believe, in himself and in the Fleet and in the possibility of home. She needed so desperately to believe, to put her gorgeous revolutionary spirit into action, that she stole the election for the President, tried to trade New Caprica for Earth, tried to keep running. Most of all, she wanted to believe in him. And he was in love with that, and with crawling away from a particularly twisted piece of wreckage of his own; love is why we build bars.
When he disappointed her, it was because he lost his nerve and backed down from the fight, from her angle. He wanted to trade the momentary and organic politic of hope for something solid and timeless, to create new systems of law and judiciary that could let even Gaius Baltar go free for his scapegoat crimes. Her revolution couldn't handle that, and she left him. She came from Sagittaron, a staging ground for terrorists and pacifists, and was neither: just a girl who didn't believe in peace anymore, and broke her father's heart. Who followed her dream into the sky, into the stars, and became the voice of home. Who kept us on a steady path. Who held the dreams of an entire race in her hands, in her body, every single day, and never backed down from it; whose voice unceasingly called out to her pilots and sung them home again, all night and all day.
"We love you. We love you. We love you."
I: The Watchmaker
This is the last thing Saul Tigh will do on Earth, before the wave hits: walk out into the ocean, the billion years of ocean, perpetual motion, uncaring and eternal. He will walk out where everything is grey and the black stones on the black beach reflect nothing, because there is no sun. No dawn's light, no fresh breeze, no Temple of Aurora: just sand, and sea, and stormclouds gathering. And he will look out at the ruined world, forgotten monuments, two thousand years of destroyed culture. His legs will ache; he won't notice the icy water clutching at his feet, calling him forward, singing him on and on into the deep. He will keep walking, out into the tides, and the world will end.
Gaius stands in the ruins of the Temple, alone with his thoughts. Finally alone. Sam watches the water rushing over the stones, rubbing off the hard edges and angles into smooth blankness. Anastasia Dualla kneels, holding water in her hands. Lee is barely standing, hot angry tears in his eyes, fragments shored up against a crumbling wall. Laura pulls one tender shoot from the ground, a spiky flower: nothing beautiful about it, only fierce life, spiny leaves reaching desperately for a sun it's never seen. She can barely hear Helo's report: all over the planet, there are no signs of life. D'Anna approaches, confirming these findings; Laura stares at her ugly blossom and thinks of nothing at all.
Kara searches for the beacon that brought them here, the weak signal from beyond the storm, wondering how long they have until the signal dies forever. Leoben nods, behind her. "It was probably on for a long time," he says, blank of feeling. They wander away as they always do, alone and together; they wander away, Leoben following, as they always do.
Gaius Baltar remembers science, the hard joy and truth of simple facts. "Low-level radiation. Definitely in the water and the food chain. Put word out not to eat or drink anything down here." Tory stares at this new man; at the landing site Helo reports these findings too: this world ended 2,000 years ago. Bill Adama takes off his glasses, and Laura Roslin speaks in a tired, dark voice: "It's perfect. We traded one nuked civilization for another." Bill hustles them away, back to the ship.
Anastasia finds a watch in the sand: Who made it? Who left it here, without anyone to attend to it? Who would build something of such crystalline, intricate beauty, and then just walk away? What kind of watchmaker would do that? What sort of creator deserts His creation in the moment of its destruction? And nearby: a child's set of jacks, a rubber ball half-buried in the sand. So many children's games are about creating order out of chaos: can you gather them all, find a place for them all, before time runs out? Can you bring them home, into your hands, keep them safe before the ball drops again? She picks them up one by one, holding them in her palm like children do. She can't hold them all. She begins to weep.
On the Raptor it gets the best of her, and she begins to shake. What if the rough spots are all we have left? Cally knew; Galen knew too, when he told the President they must plan for a future, forever running, a nation in the sky. What do you do, where do you go when you can't get out? She gave up so many things to get here, shaved off parts of herself and took risks and gave up ethical ground, compromised herself, gave her new family strength at every turn. How much is left?
"Just don't give up. Just don't give up. Don't fall apart," she says, trying to give herself the pep talk that always saves the world. Calling herself home. She can't hold them all. Helo speaks softly to her, from the pilot's seat, calming her down with that voice he uses; she stares at her reflection in the Raptor windscreen and adds his strength to hers. She goes quiet. She goes dark. She holds it together. She can't hold it all.
II: Every Question Asked
When the Raptor doors open, they're all standing there: deck crew, pilots. Waiting, with the look of a people who cannot take one more failure. Who have watched everyone they know die, slowly and softly, quickly and painfully, to get us to this place. They are children in this moment, the surviving orphans, waiting for their President to speak. To somehow call them all home again, tell them it's a joke, remind them of their mandate. It is all around them.
Laura opens her mouth to speak. And again. There is nothing. She is silent; she's a singer who's forgotten all of her songs. She shakes her head at them all, begging them to understand, to share in this pain and to mourn with her; to riot or scream or fall down on their knees: anything but this hope, this fear, this love. She watches the lights go out of them. She's the woman who stands between her people and the darkness, but the darkness is finally here. Seelix and Figurski trade worried looks, shared history; still she does not speak.
"Get me out of here," Laura says quietly to Bill, and so he does. They step down from the Raptor's wing, dressed in flak jackets like the rest of us, and it's when her feet touch the ground that the questions begin. The throng presses in at her, begging her for answers. She hears them slicing stories into her heart, burning disappointment and her shame, but they don't intend it that way: it's a sign that they trust her that they're hounding her at all. Every question asked is a chance for her to save them, to take it back, to take them higher. They're saying, "Is there anything? Is there anything? Anything at all?" but what they mean is, "We love you. We love you. We love you." What they mean is, "So say we all." It tastes like ashes in her mouth.
She holds onto Lee, the golden son, Apollo, the place she put her heart when the world was too much to bear: the son of her idealism, her belief in truth and fairness and democracy. She made him carry it for her, while she did what had to be done. It nearly killed them both. And now she clings to him, lost in the hangar deck, walking blindly in one direction and another. She knows that he is strong enough to carry her; she was the one who burned him until he was strong enough. And now he speaks for her, promising they'll find out everything in good time. This story will make sense, in good time; in good time, they'll find another Lie.
Kara and Leoben, searching blindly again through the forest, lost again, following a signal again. Stalking through the tall bleached grass, dead against a steel sky, cracking painfully beneath their feet blade by blade by blade. She finds the beacon, a twisted engine of a thing trailing wires and destruction. "It's Colonial. It's standard on all aircraft, part of our inertial nav system..." He's not listening; he already knows. Leoben always knows. He finds a piece of twisted, wrecked metal, the side panel of a Viper, sheared off in wind and fire, and calls out the number painted on the side. She knows before he says it, but once he says it, it becomes real: she drops the beacon and stands perfectly still for just one moment before walking toward him, getting scared.
Kara Thrace is attracted to questions, to unsolvable things, to unbreakable objects. She opens doors with her hands, and when those are taken away she uses her feet. She killed him every night in the dollhouse, not because she hoped for anything better but because it was the only thing she knew she had to do: fight until she couldn't anymore. And every night he returned, to tell her of her destiny. She hates the words as she says them: the warped panel, the numbers on it, are the double of her own. They are standing in the wreckage of her Viper. They are standing in the center of a death.
III: Just Another Day
The Tyrols knew about the rough spots, but the Agathons know the solution: they race around their quarters, laughing, picking Hera up and tossing her in the air, putting her down again, chasing each other around the table. Anastasia knocks on their hatch, and comes in smiling, laughing as they play with their daughter. "Raptor's down!" Athena shouts, and Hera shrieks appreciatively; Helo thanks Anastasia for coming. Thanks her for caring for Hera in the center of the rough spot.
Anastasia laughs, a jerking sound, a loving sound. There is no need to thank her, for taking the time to remember innocence, to play with Hera at the end of the world. Athena promises they'll be back soon, and the Agathons leave. Once outside, I'm sure their smiles fade. This is therapy. Helo saw Anastasia on the Raptor, saw how close she came to the hard deck. This is therapy for everyone. "You have no idea what's happened, do you?" Anastasia says, resting her face against Hera's, holding her tight. She flies the food toward Hera's mouth like a Viper, luxuriating in the silence. "Huh? Today is just another day," she says. There is jealousy in it.
It was years ago, now, the first time she met Billy Keikeya. She was nineteen years old, standing in her bra, getting ready for the decommissioning; he blundered into the head by mistake, a bumbling, beautiful young functionary. "In or out?" she said. The first thing she ever said to him, the first thing we ever heard her say. "In or out?" It's hard to remember that Anastasia now, the one who could fall in love with a glance, who could turn the Fleet upside down and let the President go free. It's hard to remember her back then, that smile. She was beautiful then, as she is beautiful now. She had no frakkin' idea what was ahead of her. It was just another day.
On the surface, Galen Tyrol hears something once again, and heads off like he always does; he passes a Cylon science team digging in the dirt. A Six calls to an Eight, scraping dirt from an object with her perfect hands: it's the face of a Cylon toaster, but it's nothing we've ever seen. Not a Centurion, not even a Guardian. It looks meaner, somehow. In a meeting with the human scientists and leaders, somewhere warmer, the Six reports they've been found all over the surface. Among the bones.
"So the Thirteenth Tribe settled here," Laura conjectures, "And created their own Cylons." Lee bitterly suggests that this is an "all happened before" situation, that these toasters rose up, and killed their masters. Gaius nods: that's what they thought too. Until they tested the bones themselves. "250 skeletons so far," the Six says. "From four different sites on the planet. Using our protocols..." Gaius interrupts: "The results are conclusive." Bill asks what they're getting at, but it's Saul Tigh that speaks.
"They're not human. They're Cylon." Bill asks, but it's not a question, if he means all of them. He does. Bill's confused; Laura stares at them all. "The Thirteenth Tribe were Cylon," Gaius says aloud, and the fugue breaks; Laura's hands rush to her mouth like a rising tide. "The Thirteenth Tribe, the tribe of Cylons, came to this planet and called it Earth," Saul says. And with every word, Laura gets sicker.
The ancients, they got a lot of things wrong: the body of a people is not the same as the body of its leader. But the soul and the spirit might be, she's thinking, as much as she can think at all. She tore the Fleet in half, for a dream; for the hallucinations brought on by drug abuse, she ripped apart the most basic rights and sacred laws of her nation. For the half-mad scrawling of a mystery witch. She's thinking:
"...Then I dug into the stump and pulled rocks from the ground until my fingers bled. I collected seeds from the few fruits the island offered, and planted them in long, straight furrows, like the ranks of soldiers. When I finished, I looked at what I had done. I did not see a garden. I saw a scar."
Later, Lee chases her down the corridor, demanding she step up to the plate; incapable of understanding just how deeply she's been wounded. How she's walked in the knowledge that her actions were justified by spiritual mandate, how every question and demand and accusation were nothing so much as gadflies, temptations from doubt, how she never needed to question Earth or Pythia because she knew -- like Antigone, like Kara on the Demetrius -- that her received wisdom would eventually out. He can't know her shame, because he can't conceive of a faith that strong. How so easily, disproved, it turns to arrogance and self-hatred. To murder in the name of righteousness, built on nothing but irradiated sand. How she burned down her cabin in the name of a better dream.
"Madame President, what do we do about the Quorum?" She stares at him; she cannot form words. "You need to talk to them. We need to tell them something." Bill can't even meet her eyes, and she walks away without responding. "It should come from their President..." Lee says, falling into futility and silence, and Bill goes steely. "Carry the ball." He leaves, ignoring Saul in the corridor begging him to stop. "There's a lot of things I gotta explain," he says, but the Admiral is deaf to him.
Galen sees a Hiroshima shadow on a wall, ivy grown up around it. A man, two thousand years ago, stood in just this spot as the world turned white. He looks around himself, standing at the wall, and the ivy, and the shadow, and reaches out.
It was a Farmer's Market, rich with color, alive with smells and laughter, happy people sharing in a sunny day. He wore glasses, and a sports jacket, and thought about his afternoon. After the market, after picking up some fruit, he would head home and take off his shoes, read the paper. An avocado. The voices all around him were delighted, organic strawberries, fresh pineapple, ripe and sweet for the hungry and the leisurely; there are tiger lilies and bright red carnations. Set against the endless grey present, they are shocking. But it only lasted a moment, before the brightest light of all burned him where he stood, casting a shadow to last forever. A monument to one beautiful, bright day, before the world ended.
IV: Who Will Rise Again
"If my Viper's splattered all over this planet, then who flew it here? And what the hell did I fly back to Galactica?" More pieces. "Maybe it's better off not knowing," Leoben says, for the first time in his existence unsure, afraid of the unknown, feeling the cloud of unknowing bearing down, hounding him. He was like Laura, wasn't he? Animated by faith, lucky and satisfied watching the pieces of the future come together in perfect symmetry. Destroying what he loved, in order to bring about the destiny he knew was coming: just like Laura. All the coincidences and hopes and half-remembered truths coming true right before his eyes, how could he not believe? How could he not die for that, again and again, just waiting for the world to right itself? Look at what happens, when the guides lose their way. Look at him now.
"You're always telling me to face the truth, and not run from it. Why the sudden change of heart?" Leoben doesn't want to say it, hates the words as they come out: "I've got a feeling... You might not like what you find." Kara wonders who he's speaking to, really; he just stares at her.
Lee stands in the Galactica briefing room, lost and afraid, exhausted with responsibility and the unbelievable burden before him: to tell the Quorum, the twelve representatives of all humanity, that their dreams are dead below them. The last time he stood in this room, it was a carousel of memory: the fights, the laughter, the many hits he took to become a man. Now it is silent.
"There you are," Anastasia says, having found him more quickly than anyone else ever could. "The Raptor's ready to take you back to Colonial One, what are you doing in here?" Thinking. Just thinking. "About all the pilots who sat in those seats," he says quietly, as she watches his face. "Gave their lives for a dream, of a new beginning on Earth. I don't want their sacrifice to be meaningless." It won't be. Anastasia, literally translated, means "She who will rise again." It's a gift she gives these men, her chosen men, so regularly and so deftly that they never really notice she's doing it. It's part of her revolution, when she does it: to root out the doubt that is their inheritance, to remind them that dreams are responsibilities, that the future is waiting to be sung into existence. To remind them to rise, again.
She says tenderly that he's wearing the same look he was wearing when Bill left Pegasus with the Fleet above New Caprica, to save humanity or die trying. When his father forced him to grow up, become a man, lose his softness, turn away from his rabid idealism and consider his imperative. When his father decided to be a hero, and left Lee to be the shepherd. Lee's amazed she knows him so well, which can only make her laugh at this point. Of course she does. He breathes, and remembers her. History fills the room, as he breathes. A whole year, in the sky, alone with each other. She was his XO and he was the Commander. They allow themselves to remember the good times: It was their only real year together. It ended badly.
"I remember what you told me: We had to keep the human race going. And you did." Lee shakes his head; this part, he remembers, and corrects her: "No, we did. I couldn't have done it without you, Dee." Anastasia looks him right in the eye, and sells him a new lie. Something so big you wouldn't think to question it, left out on the mantelpiece where nobody will notice: "You will this time, too." What she means is, "You will, this time."
He allows himself to cry, to speak his fear: what to do now, that Laura is slipping and Bill's crumbling after her, now that the Quorum is his trouble, his responsibility. He makes a joke so dumb it could only be a Lee Adama Original: "Good news is real estate prices are low." She smiles tenderly; she always liked his bad jokes best. "Truth is, there is no happy way to spin this thing," he says, and she raises her voice a bit, to knock him out of Lawyer Lee and back into the Lee that is required now. The Lee who's too busy loving, and trying, and searching, to do anything as lazy as spinning the truth.
"So don't. Tell them the truth. That's what people need to hear, and you're the one they need to hear it from." Their song begins to play, Anastasia remembers how it felt to be an Adama, once upon a time: she fixes his tie, his lapels. She brushes him off and calls him home. She picks up the pieces, shining so brightly; she knows she can hold them all before the ball drops again: "If anybody can give them a reason to go on it's you. Apollo." He is amazed by her again, he sees her for the first time in a very long time. Maybe ever. She nods at his shy smile, and he walks away, strong enough to go back home. When he's not looking at her, her smile fades a bit. At the door he asks her to join him for a drink, and she steps closer to accept: "It's a date."
Kara searches blindly through the wasteland, as usual; he pulls at her and she rips herself out of his grip, as usual, trying to get a glimpse at the wreckage. Trying to find herself. She gets closer, breaks into a run; she finds a torn and ruined cockpit lying on its side in a clearing, and pulls and shoves at it. Leoben stands, far back, eyes closed, trying desperately to realign the universe, to bring all the pieces back together and make sense of this, before the ball drops again.
"Help me, Godsdamn it!" Leoben opens his eyes, and approaches slowly, quaking with fear. They move in concert, still, flipping it over in tandem without even a glance at each other; inside the Viper's broken cockpit is a pilot, head lolling, faceplate broken, uniform and helmet burnt black. Destiny sings as she reaches out to touch the thing, forcing her hand toward it, turning the body's head just enough to catch a glimpse of the flaxen hair inside. She vomits, and he stands very still, eyes closed again, terrified by futility, nonsense, the derangement of the universe as it whirls and crashes all around him.
Kara jerks the dogtags off the body's neck, quickly and firmly; they share the chain with Zak's ring. Leoben looks over her shoulder at the bloodstained tags, and her name etched on them, and jerks back. His confusion and pain become abject fear. "If you've got an explanation for this, now's the time," she says, her heart breaking. This isn't just her prophecy she's disproving, but his, too. Of all the mucky, disparate parts of their relationship, the one she accepted first was his knowledge: this isn't just her destiny, but theirs together. Who painted the sky? Who hands you a broken watch and promises to help you fix it, then throws up his hands like this? Who can you complain to, when even the guides have lost their maps?
She stares at him angrily, seething at his lack of an answer. He is broken, and sad, and smaller than he's ever been. His absolute certainty has drained out, bled out; his face is turning green. "I was wrong. About Earth." Kara nods, finally strong enough to tell him prophecies he doesn't know. "Your Hybrid told me something. Said that I was the harbinger of death. That I would lead us all to our end." Leoben jerks, hushed and stumbling, back and away from this truth. She's replaced the cloud of unknowing with a maelstrom. "She told you that?" Kara asks him if it's true, but he has already begun to run. Not from what she is, or what she is become, but from the fact of her, the fact that they're sitting in the center of a death he didn't even know about. He's gone. She's screaming at no one, face twisting. "Is it true? If that's me lying there, then what am I? What am I? What am I?"
On the beach, the universe is tuning up as Sam wanders, pulled along by music; he follows himself to a guitar's neck, half-buried in the sand, and their song begins to play again. Sam stares around, holding it faithfully, grinning excitedly. A piece of the past. Earth is broken, burnt and used, but the Final Five haven't even had this much home since the Nebula. Every answered question, every memory, is more beautiful than it is sad, because it means some kind of continuity. A firm place to stand, finally, no matter how ugly or tired it is. He sings softly, words of the song he'd forgotten. The hour is getting late. He drops the neck, and runs off excitedly to tell the others. To share even this strange piece of home, and what it means.
Galen rests in a niche against the wall where he died. He looks peaceful, that funny peace he brings when things are at their darkest. Sam asks if he's remembering, and Galen nearly smiles. "Yeah. I used to live here." Sam nods, and turns to include Tory as she approaches. "Me too. That song that switched us on? I played it. For a woman I loved." Tory remembers, her voice still sad. "You played it for all of us." Galen points at the shadow on the wall: "That was me."
"We died in a holocaust," Galen says, and Sam's still twitching with excitement. "Then why are we still alive? That happened 2,000 years ago." Tory touches Galen's shadow while Sam jumps around. "How did we get to the Colonies? Come to think that we were human? 2,000 years is a long time to forget..." Galen looks at the sky, lost to memory; Tory looks at the ground, close to Sam but not touching. They are all alone, together.
V: Four Funerals
Laura lights the Scrolls of Pythia one page at a time, with a fireplace lighter. She turns the pages, looking at them for the last time, back to front, lighting them as she goes. She is sitting on the floor, sitting where she dropped when she got home and grabbed the book that killed her. Bill enters their quarters without knocking, because it is his home, too. "We gotta do something. Morale is going down the toilet... What are you doing?"
Burning off what doesn't work anymore. "Pythian prophecy?" he asks, and sits down by her side. This is a world ending; this is another wall falling down. "Cottle told me that you didn't show up for your doloxan treatment," he says gingerly, and she admits it's true. "Do you want to tell me why?" She keeps turning pages: "I didn't feel like it." Bill urges her back, trying to hold all the pieces at once: "You're gonna reschedule..." She quietly tells him he's wrong; she's preoccupied and barely there. "Laura, you need your treatments," he says, almost begging; she assures him that she doesn't but she won't meet his eyes.
"What are you doing?" he whispers. "You're just gonna... lie down and quit? You're the one who made me believe in this..." The worst thing he could have said. Her worst hubris, out loud, piercing her heart. She is ashamed; she turns back the tide. "You shouldn't have listened to me. When the Cylons first attacked, you should've held your ground and kept fighting. Because I was wrong. I was wrong about everything." She watches the pages burn; in her mind she sees them burning. "And all those people who listened... And they trusted me, and they followed me, all those people..." She nods to herself, agreeing with a litany that's been repeating itself in her heart since Earthfall: "They're dead." He reaches for her, terrified, and she pushes him away.
"Don't. Stop. Stop." Even weeping, she can't look at him; she will fall apart. "Don't touch me." She begs him to leave, voice cracking, and his heart breaks. She keeps lighting pages as he stands to go, unable to help, unable to see his way past this, to help her to the thing, too caught up in his love and her pain to do anything but what she says.
She turns the pages, back from the end to the beginning. From the Temple to the Altar she turns them, burning them one by one. Weeping, watching dreams die one by one, like the stars going out. "Burn," she sobs, tears lit by fire, on the floor of their quarters where she fell, when she couldn't walk anymore. "Burn."
Kara is black against a darkening blue sky, a shadow on a wall, carrying a tarp for a winding sheet, to wrap the body of a girl. She lifts it against the faltering horizon, fluttering; she bears huge timbers across the landscape to build a pyre. When it is done, she places the body on top. That burned and burning girl. She sits at the fireside, and breathes it in like morning light, like a fresh breeze. The only possible response to that girl she hated once so much, whose destiny led her to the place between life and death; the only possible response to her own beloved, holy, wise strong self: a fire. A funeral.
Down the corridor they come, after their date, giddy and excited, remembering their love, their time together; drunk on ambrosia and shared history. Anastasia begs him to tell her again, and he demurs only a bit before she demands it: "I want to remember every word." This is therapy, but it's also what she wants. What she wants for him and for herself intersect here, for the last time and probably the first, and she's heard it now enough times to know parts of it by heart, laughing, on fire with his rhetoric, with the revolution in him she's finally set alight. It's a song about the thing, after the unthinkable thing. It's a song about being brave and strong and alive enough to find out what happens . Where do you go when you can't get out? Turn into something else. If you can bear it. If you can do the impossible at the end of line, and step across the enjambment to the line, step through the door the angel beckons towards, you turn into something else. This is the man she's made of him:
"Ladies and gentlemen, we now have a choice. We can either view this as a catastrophe or an opportunity. I, Lee Adama, ex-acting President, former Commander of the obliterated Battlestar Pegasus -- Apollo to my friends -- I choose the latter. We're no longer enslaved by the ramblings of Pythia. No longer pecking at the breadcrumbs of the Thirteenth Tribe. We are now free to go where we want to go, and be who we want to be."
You could almost believe it for a moment; the way it goes around and around: Glorious in awakening, struggling with the knowledge of our true selves, the pain of that revelation bringing true clarity; amidst confusion, he finds her again and again: the way forward, once impenetrable, yet inevitable. All of us in shadow, clawing for the light, hungry for the redemption that only ever comes in the howl of terrible suffering. And now they join again, in the Promised Land, gathered on the wings of an angel: Not an end, but a beginning.
They laugh; she's so proud of him. This is the man she always wished he was; the man she would have liked to marry. He has finally become that man, idealism tempered by structure and the hard and fast rules, the facts on the ground. His willingness to throw off the shackles of the past and the authority she's always hated, the way he can poke fun at Pythia when she's guided every moment, the way he can look into the negative space where certainty once was and see that as a gift. His instinctive knowledge that apocalypse means "unveiling"; that it's just another word for change too big to swallow yet. Don't spin it, she told him, and so he didn't: just told the truth, a truth of blinding brightness, less hope than faith, less optimism than certainty and belief in the strength of his hands and his back, and those of his people. How he is grateful for the loss of prophecy, because he puts his faith, and his love, in people. His people.
Lee touches Anastasia's hair, without even thinking about it. There are stars in their eyes, remembering less the things that never were than the beauty that they had, for the first time. He smiles, intimately. "I think I managed to stall a full-scale panic, but I've got no idea what to do ." She knows he will. She is grateful, happy, peaceful, coquettish; she thanks him for a good day. She is grateful and at peace, and happy for one good day. They look into each other's eyes, and she hesitates only a moment before she kisses him, passionately. Hungry to touch him, tonight, now that the world is ending, to remember every hair and pore and inch of him. She always loved being an Adama best. That's what she feels like tonight.
Anastasia grins and backs away, smiling at him one last time from the hatch of her quarters. He has tears in his eyes as she goes, and a little bit of hope. He wanders away when she is gone, floating on a cloud. Inside, Felix settles a watchcap over his missing leg, as a makeshift pad for his artificial leg. Anastasia enters humming to herself, putting away her things, dreamy and unfocused, memories like perfume, dancing in the air. Holding onto the pieces of it.
She quirks a smile at Felix: "What?" He gives her a look. "You're glowing." She's big-sister coy, little-sister delighted: "Am I?" He grunts, standing. "All I can think of is that waste of a planet..." but she cuts him off easily, grinning. "Felix, please. I just want to hang on to this feeling for as long as I can." He's brusque, jealous of the feeling, but he's always adored her. The voice of home, and its nervous system. All the parts of them that have gone missing, but he's still grateful they have each other. There are no guarantees in the Fleet, not even in the best of times: who knew you could find such a good friend, in the midst of all that chaos? It's rare no matter when or who or where you are, isn't it? Someone with so many of the qualities you respect? They gossiped about the higher-ups, and planned their mutinies, shared private revolutions. He'd tell her jokes, and she'd laugh at them; she'd tell him her dreams and he'd sigh.
Felix stands behind her, finally relenting. He points at a picture pinned to the inside door of her locker: a little girl on a bicycle, staring into the future. "Look at that," he says, connecting her to the little girl. "Little Ana's got her smile back!" Finally. A long time coming, that. She looks like Hera, that little girl. She looks like Anastasia, tonight more than she has in a long time. "Sometimes I don't even remember that's me. It's so long ago." Anastasia looks at the little girl in the photograph, drinks her in, in love with her. "She has no frakkin' idea what's ahead of her."
What would you keep in your locker? The dogtags of the men you've loved and lost, certainly, and photographs of your dead relatives; records of achievements, sentimental notes from friends and lovers. All the things too precious to take with you but too important to store elsewhere. All the things you need to look at every single day in order to remain yourself. Anastasia keeps this picture hanging in her locker, and has for years: this little girl, innocent and full of hope. This is her heart, locked somewhere the world will never find it. This is how we stay clean.
"Yeah, none of us do," Felix grumbles, and takes up his crutch, and walks away toward the hatch. She takes off her necklace and opens it up: a locket, with mother and father inside. Her humming grows louder as he leaves, to fill the empty spaces; she watches him go in her mirror as she hums. Anastasia watches Felix close the hatch door behind him, and breathes in the perfume of a perfect day; she removes her wedding ring and hangs it on a hook in the locker door, arranging objects: A wedding ring, from the man she loves most. A mother and a father. And a little girl, who had no idea and never will, who stayed safe and clean and innocent through all the days and years of pain that brought us here. A mirror, eyes still lit with the joyful, dreamy light of one perfect day. A portrait of a life, all the things to look at, to remind you of yourself in your best moments. Daughter, wife, Adama, happy, beloved and home. These are the last things Anastasia Dualla ever sees.
Felix and Seelix hear the gunshot, out in the corridor; he rushes on his stick back toward his quarters but he's moving slowly, and she gets there first. She's cradling the body of his closest friend as he rounds the corner and through the hatch; she is covered in blood, screaming, babbling, and he's assuring her that it will be alright, they just need a medic, even though he knows it is a lie; even though he can see her eyes in the pool of blood, and how they've gone quiet and empty, but they keeps screaming out. Trying to gather the pieces in their hands. To call her back home.
"Don't leave us yet. We love you. We love you. We love you."
VI: Heart To Heart
Lee touches her shroud, on the slab in the morgue, arranging some small piece of disorder. He summons strength from somewhere and touches her hand softly at first, afraid. He is in shock. He let himself believe something for a moment. When the morgue hatch opens, he doesn't look up. Bill enters, and approaches, and stands silently with him for a moment, looking down. This was a family. This was a father, and a son, and a beautiful wise daughter. A husband-and-wife team that, along with Bill and Helo, commanded the Fleet that freed New Caprica and began the Second Exodus.
This was a woman constantly pulled between her innocence and what war demands, never fighting, always searching for the balance. On the Algae Planet she dropped her anger the second she saw her husband's lover was injured, and saved her life without hesitation and more than a little humor. This was the woman that mended the Fleet over Kobol with the strength of her hands, and her soft voice, reminding Bill to love his son, to bring his family back together, to bring Laura and her children home; she brought Laura and Bill together, down in that tent on a rainy day, over books and shared apology. This is a woman so in love with the idea of the Adamas that she created them out of clay, and made them into men. Who made her revolutionary dreams come true, by leading them into light, and because she wouldn't have it any other way. Never thanked, seldom remembered; cheated on and frakked with and shuffled between ships, but there it is. She called these men home, over and over, until there was home enough to call them to. And then she left.
"She kissed me goodnight forty-five minutes ago, and there was joy in her eyes. So tell me, why would she do this?" A son to his father; but this isn't his father right now. Bill hisses, "I don't frakkin' know," and wavers on his feet. That's when you see the bottle. He laughs and offers it to Lee, long past gone, and Lee is defiant in his refusal. Bill shrugs and takes another drink, but his wavering gaze and the fire just beneath the surface remind Lee of too many other things: parents, lovers who drank to kill pain and ended up just spreading it around. He leaves, walking past Felix in the corridor outside, who stares hatefully at nothing, then watches Lee go. His heart is broken.
"The system is broken," she told Lee once, a thousand times. "That is not a system that deserves to be defended. It deserves to be taken apart and put back together again." Nothing she was ever secretive about believing; she did her best to break it, again and again and again, every time praying they'd get it right. She was Sagittaron. She believed in a better world, in a thousand brighter futures. It was the most beautiful thing about her. She could see them, it's how she inspired so much good in so many of them. Her revolution took the shape of choice, the memory that you always have a choice. Of saying No to every status quo until it was the right one, until they arrived in the better world she was singing into being. She watched those futures shaved away, burnt off, rubbed smooth by time into blank nothingness, until there was nothing left. There wasn't a future she could stand to be in, among the possibilities she could see. There weren't any choices left that she could bear. So she took the only reins she could, and said no. One final revolution.
Alone, Bill looks down at her. All these daughters. Kat, Kara more times than you can name, but never Dee. Never Dualla, who stood at his side in the CIC all day and all night, and met him at his quarters each morning. Who watched him build his model ship, his perfect family, and told him when the pieces needed adjusting. Who gently nudged him back on course when he needed it; whose clear gaze and level head made her the best advisor of his inner circle, when he needed it most. Who loved his son when he could not.
"What did you do?" he asks, nearly sick. He drops to his elbows on her slab, unable to stand, and leans his head against the shroud, kissing her softly. "I let you down," he says. One last confession to the girl who could take it, take it all and keep calling him back home, who held all his pieces together. The girl who conspired with him to become a family, who married his son and sealed it with a kiss. "I let everybody down." It's an apology to her, that nobody but Bill will ever hear. He kisses his daughter goodbye.
Laura's down, and Dee is dead, and Athena's never around, and Kara's planetside. Who else is there? Who else do you look to, every single day, in order to remain yourself? Who is left of his family to remind him who he is? Outside the morgue there's a Marine standing guard; the Admiral shakes him down for his gun, almost as an afterthought; at the man's hesitation he starts to scream.
Bill takes off down the corridor with the gun in hand, through scenes of violence and depression; entropy and colony collapse. Epic, nearly grand, like a stage musical or an opera: a man punches another man across the corridor and into abandoned crates; people holding their heads, locked in private torments; people sitting on the floor weeping. Nobody looking at anybody else, nobody standing together; everybody falling, apart. He storms past them all, taking no heed; it's only the match to what's inside him, now. It's not a loss of morale, it's the end of the world. One of Baltar's women tends to a victim, speaking softly, outside the hatch of the Executive Officer's cabin.
Saul Tigh takes a drink at his desk. There's a tortured photograph on the table, eight-cornered, folded and unfolded a thousand times: Saul and his wife Ellen. It started with thinking about Dualla, and Lee, and the pointless deaths that happen to us in catastrophes. About how Ellen's death gained him nothing, but had to happen. It led to wondering whether Ellen really knew, after all, what she was asking for when he killed her, that last night on New Caprica. What was she thinking, as she lay against him ebbing, getting sleepier and sleepier. Whether it would ever stop hurting as badly as it has since that day. Bill's fists pound against the hatch, and he opens it quickly, gratefully. Bill pushes his way into Saul's quarters, raging with purpose; from a locker he pulls a gun and another bottle of liquor. "I think we should have that little heart-to-heart you've been pining for," Bill spits, and tosses everything on the table, throwing down the gun. "Siddown, Cylon."
Saul speaks easily, quietly. Unnerved by this reversal. "Looks like you've got a head start on me, Bill..." Bill tells him to shut the fuck up and follow orders, splashing booze all over the table as he pours. One glass comes sliding at Saul's lap, quick as a shot, and he grabs it, looking up. He is unsure how to proceed. "Bill, I am so sorry that I didn't have the guts to tell you when I first found out..." Bill screams. "Frak you!" he growls, and then starts laughing. "You got no guts, you're a frakkin' machine." Saul realizes he's never met this man before in his life. He's afraid, and sad, and doesn't want to take this further.
"Is that how it worked? They program you to be my friend?" Bill's face is so sad and torn for a moment, as Saul shakes his head, bewildered. "Emulate all the qualities I respect?" Bill laughs. "Tell me jokes and I'd laugh at them..." Saul realizes this is bigger than them; that he was just the first straw or the last, and that he doesn't have the wherewithal to fix this other than by jumping in, so he responds. "Bill... I was your friend because I chose to be. I wanted to be." You had all the qualities I respect. That's what love is.
Bill smashes glass against the table, and picks up the photograph, of Saul with his Ellen. If anything, that will do it. "Ah, Ellen. Yeah, you know, Ellen was smarter than I gave her credit for..." Saul warns him not to go there, praying we come back from this. "Smarter than me. She knew from the beginning that there was something wrong with you!" Saul's confused, pulled in, not ready for the strike when it comes: "That's why she went around frakkin' half the Colonial Fleet, searching out, trying to find a man who had real blood in his main vein!" He laughs, over Saul's barking orders to shut up, stop it, halt before he goes too far. "She came on to me once," Bill chuckles. "Like a dog in heat. I could smell, I could smell it." Saul puts the gun to Bill's head, pleading with him to stop. "She smelled so good... Go on, do it!" he suddenly screams, shocking Saul. "Do it, do it!" Saul growls, deep in his throat, terrified of what will happen, unable to look away, to make it stop.
"Or I will," Bill grunts, holding a gun to his own head, pleading for death. "Go on, go on. Do it. Go on!" Saul cocks his head at Bill finally, and then drops his gun: "Oh my Gods, that's why you came here. To do this. You haven't got the frakkin' guts to do it yourself." He ejects the magazine, relieved and disgusted, and Bill sits very still with the gun still to his temple. "I'm sorry, Bill. This is one time I can't help you." Bill crumples, so sad and disappointed. He can't do it, either. Hope is what kills. He puts the gun down slowly, down to gravity more than intention, and reaches for the bottle again. "I think we've both had enough," Saul says, pulling the bottle out of Bill's hands, and Bill shrugs and takes a long drink from the glass instead. Saul watches him drink, and the room rights itself. The equilibrium is restored. Bill tells him a story, as he often does when he can't say his feelings out loud.
"Did I ever tell you about my summers with my uncle when I was a kid? Foxes would attack his henhouse all the time. Really pissed him off. He'd wake me up, we'd go with his hounds at night up into the hills looking for the fox. When the dogs smelled the scent, they'd go crazy. The pack would become a team, force the fox... Toward the river."
Saul plays his part, and asks what the foxes would do then. "Half would turn and fight." Cain, the altar, the Lie of War. "The other half would try to swim across." Adama, the Temple, the Lie of Earth. "But my uncle told me about a few that... they'd swim halfway out, turn with the current, and ride it all the way out to sea. Fishermen would find them a mile offshore. Just swimming." Saul nods. "Because they wanted to drown." Or maybe they were just tired, Bill says, and sighs. Nobody but Lee knew what that felt like, until today; not even Lee remembers that great notion now, what it costs and how it feels. The world ending all around you, and you just drift, peaceful.
The last thing Saul Tigh will do on Earth is walk out, into the billion years of ocean, where everything is grey. He will look out at the ruined world, and his legs will ache. He will be too tired to notice the water clutching at him, and he will keep walking, out into the tides, and the world will end again. But not like this.
Saul speaks so softly: "Well, Godsdamn it, Bill. We can't swim out to sea. I am the XO of this ship, you are the Commanding Officer. How is putting a bullet in your head gonna help Dee? It sure as frak isn't gonna help all the others who are thinking about doing the same Godsdamned thing. And what are they gonna do without the old man here to lead them?" He quickly empties the other gun, in case Bill's not done acting insane, but Bill just laughs, almost silently: "Lead them where, Saul?"
VII: FRAK EARTH
39,651 souls in the Fleet. A few hours ago there were 39,651 survivors. All alone in Colonial One, Lee stands before the whiteboard, too lonely to stand straight, and wipes away the 1 with his finger, and wipes one shocked tear from his eye. Kara enters behind him, in her flightsuit, shaken enough that she took the shuttle straight here. Leoben's down, and Laura doesn't love her anymore; Helo's never the same with her anymore, after Demetrius, Felix is still unsteady on his crutches. Who else is there? Who else do you look to, every single day, in order to remain yourself? Who is left of her family to remind her who she is? Who calls her body back to itself whenever she looks at him? She says his name softly.
"I hear you lost the signal," he says absently. "You couldn't find the source." That's the official story, for now. Shiny new Viper and the crazy crusade of the Demetrius were mostly forgiven, when she turned out to be right, although now that's debatable and she's burned up a lot of even that tenuous goodwill. She saved the Final Four, but their stock is pretty low right now, too. Giving up proof that she did die, in the Maelstrom? That she's something new and terrifying, the harbinger of the Apocalypse? Not yet. Only Lee would understand, because only Lee ever understands. And he was there, he saw her die, screaming her name into the storm as she plunged into the light. There's nobody left to talk to.
"Yeah..." she stumbles, unsure to explain but desperate to unburden herself. This is the sort of weird, bad crazy stuff that she could always count on Leoben to help her deal with, and now he's even more scared of her than the humans are. But Lee's always accepted the darkest, strangest parts of her. Maybe he can talk her down from this one. She doesn't get too far before she notices the pain, the grim pattern of his face, the way he's holding something in so that he doesn't fall apart. She forgets her problems entirely, for a moment.
"You look like hell. What's going on?" Lee nods, spaced out and vague. "Oh... Dee." Kara leans forward, ever so slightly, adrenaline starting up: "What about Dee?" He explains that she shot herself, and Kara rocks back on her heels. "I don't... I don't understand." Lee nods. "No. Neither do I. You know? I'm trying to come up with a neat answer but... Um, truth is I'll never know. Because it's too frakkin' late." She watches his face, slowly breaking apart. She won't tell him. Not today. She won't tell him how she died, too.
The Admiral walks through a ruined ship, people on the floor against the bulkhead, shooting up for all we know, FRAK EARTH scrawled across a wall uncomfortably close to CIC. They huddle together as though it's freezing; they're trying desperately to be whole. To hold the pieces together. He meets Saul outside the bridge and they enter together; the bridge crew straightens up, worried and exhausted, wondering what he'll do, what he's going to say.
Bill tells Hoshi to take Dualla's place at comms; he shares a look with Felix before he goes. "Mr. Gaeta. Find me the closest G, F or K-class star system." Felix nearly smiles, for the first time. Just the sound of it, like the future waking up. "Mr. Hoshi, get the Cylon Baseship on the horn, see if our new allies want to come along for the ride." Hoshi nods, after a moment, and Bill breathes while Felix begins the search.
"Men and women of the Fleet, this is the Admiral." On the deck they look up, up, listening to his voice, starving for something. "The discoveries of the past few days have been painful for all of us." Saul watches him speak, watches his back go straighter as he summons up a new Lie, that is no lie at all.
"As you know, we cannot stay on Earth." Lee goes through a box of his wife's personal effects, the arrangement of objects. The jacks, sparkling clean; the picture of her as a child; perhaps a soma braid he can keep with him forever. "But this is not a new challenge. The Thirteen Tribes of Kobol stood exactly on the same spot that we are right now. They experienced dreadful losses."
"Their planet was a graveyard." Kara stands at the head of the Briefing Room, looking out at her pilots. "They needed a home. So they set out in the void of deep space with nothing but their ships and their guts." She holds the other Kara's dogtags tightly in her hands, still bloody. "And the Thirteen succeeded."
Gaius listens, among his followers: "They weren't supermen. They were ordinary people like us." Laura lies curled around her tender green shoot, on the floor where she fell, done with hating and with burning, for now. "What they can accomplish, we can accomplish." I hope she will get up again.
"We will find a new home. This is a promise I intend to keep."
VIII: Sometimes A Great Notion
Earth. Saul Tigh orders the exploration squads to pack it up; the Fleet will be leaving in fifteen minutes. He spots D'Anna and joins her. "You'd better get back to your ship," he says, trying to be as gentle and kind as he imagines she would want him to be. "The Fleet is about to jump." D'Anna shakes her head. "No, I'm not going. You know, all this is just gonna happen again and again and again." She's always said it; she used it to justify New Caprica, and she's meant it other ways since then. She knows better than anyone. She's the only person that's died more times than Kara Thrace. "So I'm getting off this merry-go-round."
He sits down heavily, by her side, and thinks about the foxes. About this woman who wanted him to be God, to lead her to the Promised Land. To explain why she was the Chosen One. He owes her something he can't ever repay. D'Anna has earned her name; she is a beautiful, singular entity. She is the ocean that feeds the stream that feeds the ocean. The last time they woke her, she carried with her the mind and memory of every Three that ever could have been. She is a wonder, mortal now, beautiful and strong. But she's always known the cost. She was her own Pythia to her own Laura Roslin, Leoben to Gaius. She glimpsed wonders in the place between life and death, and eventually saw the shape of things. That's an Apocalypse even prophets shouldn't have to bear. She's earned her End of Line.
"I'm gonna die here with the bones of my ancestors." Bitterly: "And it beats the hell out of being out there with Cavil." Cavil, who was right after all. Who looked into space, into the future, into the eyes of the Final Five, and knew they were nothing. A cold dark universe, ones and zeroes; a watch left in the sand with no one left to wind it. "Gonna die in the cold and the dark when Cavil catches up with us." Saul tries, talking up the old man and the new home, and she sighs. He's not getting it; he doesn't understand the great notion, even now. Even after he's torn out his own heart, and killed it, for love of a nation that doesn't include him. Yet. "Don't you ever want to stop fighting it, Colonel? Hmm? Don't you just want to stop all of this?" Saul wonders. "And just ride the tide out to sea..."
The last thing Saul Tigh does, on Earth, is to walk out there. Into the ocean, that perpetual motion machine that goes around and around. Where we all come from and where we all will go, pulled by the moon and settled by gravity, making the world go around. Ruined monuments and forgotten buildings litter her. His legs ache in the gloomy dusk, and the water pulls at his feet, beckoning him on. He doesn't feel the cold. The waves crash over his shoes, and he walks further out still, toward broken monuments and someone else's forgotten history. He puts his hands into the water, staring down into a memory. His eyes go wide; he can feel it coming. He reaches suddenly down, into the water and comes up with something. Warped and ripped metal, from a cataclysm long ago. It wakes in him.
Saul Tigh rushed through the chaos, past mailbox cubbies and the rubble of a preliminary strike, searching desperately for his wife, Ellen. She called out his name, and he finally heard her, and found her by her voice. She was calling him home. She lay under a pile of concrete and rebar, and shuddered, terrified. "I'll get you out!" he shouted. Trying to hold the pieces together.
Saul projects, shoving cascades of water to the side, searching for her in the eddies and the thrashing water, soaked to the skin, caught in memory.
There was a white flash, something far away. He labored over her, losing hope but desperate to save her, and she finally touched his face. She was calm, and beautiful, and she knew how far the thrashing would get him. Imagine the eyes of something infinitely loving, that's seen just enough of the future to know that the better world is coming. That eventually we will go home. She was joyful, even as she bled out beneath the stones.
"Saul... It's okay. It's okay, everything's in place. We'll be reborn... Again. Together."
Ellen nodded, begging him to understand; such was her peace and calm that he believed her, and smiled. And the world turned white, and ended. Again.
Saul splashes around in it, overjoyed, soaked and in love. In the falling darkness, under a cold sun and a toxic cloud full of rain, on a hard black beach, the world comes back to life. Their love burned too hot to end that way. It burns too hot to end at all. For 2,000 years and for 2,000 more they will be reborn, and burn, together. She is the Fifth. He will find her again.
Every catastrophe is opportunity. Sounds glib, but anything true sounds glib unless you have the patience to read the whole story from start to finish. Every prophecy is a lie, if you have the misfortune of living here with the rest of us instead of watching from the wings. But to break free from all that received wisdom, to remember for just one second that you have choices, to remember that it's okay to just leave the watch where it is, that's a gift. It's an apocalypse, but that's just everything changing. It's meant to hurt.
When the world ends, when they take away the black stone, and the white, and you're left looking at the blank space where they were, what's left is a moment -- its duration past measurement by science, its qualities inaccessible by memory, once it's passed -- to spend in the Opera House, between five stars, in Elysium. That is a moment, terrifying and exhilarating, wonderful and terrible, in which you are struck by the lightning of singularity, enelysion. At the end of the line, for a moment you are completely free. To paint the sky, to go where you want to go, to be who you want to be. You are given the option to turn into something else, and step across into the shape of what comes :
"I never lost faith in the end of the story. I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade."
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