polychromatic | everyone would love to be kara thrace, myself included, but i'll always be dee

Battlestar Galactica
my words will be your guiding light
Anastasia "Dee" Dualla
Written for a multifandom women comment ficathon
Posted here.
Prompt: battlestar galactica, kara thrace + helena cain or anastasia dualla, women who don't need saving
489 words

Sometimes Dee looks at her childhood photo, tracing the shy smile and innocence of a girl that had only ever been Anastasia Dualla. She had been the very picture of a perfect Sagittaron daughter, obedient, demurring, never speaking out of turn. But while everyone around her faced the world with open palms, Anastasia found that one of hers was always curled into a fist. She started to question, to expect, to demand better. Better, when her young cousin's face was twisted into a bitter grimace because his family refused the tetanus vaccine. Better, when her friends left school to work from sunrise to twilight, their bright and hopeful minds dimming to a flicker of resignation in order to feed their families. Better, when Tom Zarek decided he should be able to speak for her by taking the lives of innocents to make a point.

Even though her resolve was steady, her hands were not when she enlisted in the Colonial Fleet Reserve. She can even muster a smile at her documents now, her shaky signature mismatched against the steel in her eyes.

She becomes Dee, an object to protect, this petite Sagittaron girl with the doe eyes nestled away in the safety of the CIC during combat. The pilots grow to love the voice that tells them to come home; come home and be safe, rest your weary heads for another day, you're alive, you're alive and while they fight for everyone, they fight for her especially, her voice, those words. No one realizes that Dualla is the one that does the saving. She coordinates the fleet. Every time a ship safely makes a jump, it's because of her. Fifty-thousand lives in her hands and she pulls them all home with her voice, her words. When the fleet fractures, it is she who ultimately brings them together again, her voice, her words.

But there's also her combat training - imperfect but serviceable, enough that she can't help but think that Billy might still be alive if he had remembered her for more than her smile and her kisses. Her talent in avionics, which gives the Blackbird her bearings and voice and Kara Thrace her life, ultimately all for the sake of Lee Adama. There's her calm and reason, her dependability, taken for granted by so many as she guides them all like the constellations in the sky.

And when she sleeps, she dreams that they'll all reach Earth; her voice, her words guiding them - finally - to safety.