Current mood:	sleepy
Entry tags:	fic_2005, fic_bsg

Ficlet: "Lights A Candle" (Battlestar Galactica)
For butterflykiki's "Common People" challenge. I dunno if it makes sense. Written on the plane, among the screams of the child-beasts.


He lights a candle.

The first was lit with shaking hands, when the announcement came over the ship's systems, the terrible word that life as he had known it- as everyone had known it- life as it was defined- was over. And if the definition of life was gone, then this was not life; but when he placed his hand in the candle's flame he found that he was not, in fact, entirely numb, and therefore this was also not death. It was somewhere in between. Stasis, limbo.

He lights a candle for the dead.

Five days of fleeing the Cylons, jumping every 33 minutes. He touches match to wick at precisely the same time each night, and the cycle is such that he can let it burn for exactly five minutes before he blows it out, lies down, closes his eyes, and braces himself for the horror.

He lights a candle for the slaughtered peace.

Time is divided now- there is a distinct Before and After. He was a student, in the Before, in life. Someone on the ship noticed this, at some point in their trip from Virgon to the university on Geminon, on this five-hour flight that would now last forever. They saw something that marked him as a scholar, and after the blissful twenty-four hours where all anyone did was sleep, they came and found him.

He lights a candle for all the teaching left undone, the words unsaid, the books unwritten.

She was an old woman, and her heart hadn't been able to bear the strain of so many FTL jumps in rapid succession. Sad, but just one more body in the rubble. No more remarkable than a broken pencil, in the Before. No tears were shed as the captain gestured around the dead woman's cabin and told him that her baggage locker in the hold was the same. Books. A goddamn private library's worth of books. He was an educated kid. Could he figure out something to do with them?

He lights a candle for what survived.

He spends days, eventually weeks, down there in that storage locker, cataloging. He makes lists, endless lists, and soon the rest of the ship's complement is used to finding a pale kid with bloodshot eyes knocking on their doors at all hours, begging for scrap paper, a good pen that doesn't leak, and books. Can they spare any books?

He lights a candle for kindness.

The water riots begin, and he hardly notices. He doesn't need much water, or food. His exertions are solely mental, building his catalogue, his canon, his record of what remains. He coaxes the comm officer into putting a call out through the fleet, and some people answer. More books arrive, if they're unwanted; others simply send lists of the titles they hold. Commander Adama himself responds, though the honor of this leaves him cold. He writes everything down, fingers tracing lovingly over the ink.

He lights a candle for memory.

It was only chance that he had even the one case of candles. He studies their numbers carefully, counts and recounts and does the math. They won't last. They must be rationed. He shifts to lighting one only every third night, and still restricts the burning to five minutes at a time. The brave little flame is just as bright in scarcity.

He lights a candle for hope.

The great catalogue is completed among the chaos of Tom Zareck's call for elections. He neither votes nor cares. Politics are a remnant of life, of the Before. They're meaningless echoes here in limbo.

He lights a candle for resolution.

He knows the location and title of every book in the fleet. He has half of them within reach of his hands. The first librarian of the new order. Perhaps no one will come seeking knowledge; perhaps some will. He doesn't try to predict; he doesn't care. He didn't do it for them, anyway- these are his walls of ink and paper, built with his time and will. He knows what's there, and that's enough.

He lights a candle for the future.