AN: This is my Thelma and Louise Do Outer Space fic. It was…interesting. I am not sure exactly how much we know about Cally, so I have taken a few liberties with her back story.
Spoilers: Er…vaguely for the end of season two. And random speculation for The Natural Course of What Happens When You Are Pregnant.
Rating: Teen
Disclaimer: Oh, so not mine.
Summary: “Don’t worry my dear one. There will be girls in dental school.”
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Her mother used to end each letter with “Don’t worry, my dear one. There will be girls in dental school.” when she was in basic training. This continued all throughout her service with the Colonial Fleet, as she scrimped and saved credits for her tuition, until the Fleet and everything it stood for and protected was annihilated and dentists meant nothing to a Commander who needed all the mechanics he could find.
There were girls in basic training, but there weren’t very many, and none of them were in her regiment. She had grown up in a house with six brothers and an indeterminate number of itinerant cousins, so sharing a room, rack and toilet with multitudes of rambunctious males was nothing new, but she’d hoped for something…more.
She wasn’t exactly sure what it was about teeth. She knew that they fascinated her and that she wanted to be able to fix them, but she didn’t know exactly why. She liked to practice on the engines. Her small fingers could reach wires and manipulate couplings that the others couldn’t reach without taking the engine apart, and her time at fixing things was always faster than her yearmates’.
She would imagine sometimes that the engine was a mouth and that her patient was in a chair before her and she was fixing his teeth so that he would be able to eat hard foods again. This became harder after the Cylons attacked, and harder still after she learned that they looked like people and had mouths with teeth and, presumably, teeth related problems. She obsessed over it, wondering if they had programming to ensure proper dental hygiene or if they just had special alloys in their teeth. She shot Boomer anyway, and in the days in the brig that followed, she didn’t think of teeth once.
There is no dentist available to reconstruct her jaw, and it heals a little bit crooked. She doesn’t offer the Doc any advice on the subject. He is crotchety enough without her input and talking is difficult enough without having to shout him down. It has been a while since she’s read any of those text books; late in her rack after a shift, and they were all outdated anyway. She’s not sure if her idea of dentistry would work anyway.
She has a tiny under-bite now, but she doesn’t mind because he sees it every time he looks at her and feels it every time he kisses her and it makes him remember. She’s not vindictive, and she has long since forgiven him, but she is still glad, in a very private way, that he will never forget the price she paid for him.
When the baby screams at night and she picks him up to soothe him, her mouth feels old. The damp on New Caprica makes her ill-healed jaw ache, and the way that her husband holds her in his sleep puts pressure on it in exactly the wrong places. There isn’t a lot she can do about this. The bed isn’t large enough for both of them and the baby, so they have moved their extra blanket into the makeshift crib and they have only each other for warmth.
She misses Galactica at times like this. When her real life is nothing like what she’d hoped her real life would be. She knew she wouldn’t stay in the Fleet forever, she’d just expected to have something…more to go to when she left it.
The baby screams and she cannot figure out what is wrong with him. He is dry and he has eaten all she has to give him and he has her own blanket wrapped securely around him, so he cannot be cold. She holds her hand in front of his face, waving her fingers to distract him, and he follows her index finger with his eyes. She moves it closer, and he tries to suck on it. She knows immediately what has happened.
The baby has cut his first tooth.
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fin
AN: Er…on the scale of “fics that ended up in places other than where I’d planned”, this one might be a 7. I hope it worked for you!
gravitynotincluded, July 2006