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Sleep was once so easy. The gentle glow of starlight from the lake, muted breathing and warmth from the other half of the bed, and the sloshing of water against the rocks below were all now haunting echoes in the mind of the Six, who now was bathed in a harsh red glare. Her bed was by no means spare, but would always lack the one element she had come to appreciate more than any other.
"Forget about him, sister." The Three's advice had come mere moments after the Six' resurrection, and she had done her best to internalize it. But, in her projections, the face of Gaius Baltar would always seem to be just around the corner, out of sight but far from out of mind. So she resolved to stop projecting - forcing herself to live in the cold reality of the situation: Gaius Baltar was dead and she was living in a universe without him.
She started projecting again when she heard he was alive (from an Eight, of all things). And it's also when she realized that she couldn't remember his face.
It wasn't that he was entirely gone from her memory, just certain bits. His eyes, sharp and alive, remained intact. But she found that things like the exact curve of his chin had faded away into an approximate. Now her mind had to guess, details eroding from her memory the more time went on.
So she went to the datastream. She pulled memories from her sister Sixes who had, in their turn, pulled memories from her. Small things like the way his breath deepened in the middle of the night, or the way the sun fell across his back as it rose in the morning. But they were always damp, these memories - they never felt like her own. They were loaned books, belonging to a friend of a friend of a friend. When she sniffed at the pages, they were not her sheets on the bed, but somebody else's.
"The rain in Spain makes the full moon wane, solder the third contact to the beta-five brane..." The Hybrid, as was noted to her by the Twos, was a fountainhead of wisdom. But Caprica Six, as she had come to be known, felt that the Hybrid's wisdom was too esoteric for her. Nevertheless, she found herself spending hours next to the Hybrid, listening to the seemingly mindless technobabble and garbled maintenance logs.
Luckily, her prayers to see Gaius again were answered on New Caprica, but it wasn't the same. This was not the same man, nor the same love, that she had had on Caprica. This man resented her very existence, despite claiming to love her. He was short-tempered and fidgety, a mere tracing of the man she had come to love. Her search for memories, then, became less one of remembering forgotten details, and more one of finding lost happiness.
When she heard that the Three called D'Anna was dying on purpose, she was intrigued. Briefly, she was jealous that she hadn't thought of it herself - direct access to the datastream, all for the price of a minute of discomfort, seemed a paltry exchange for the potential benefits.
"I want to die with you next time," she said, finding D'Anna as she resurrected.
"Why?"
"I'm looking for somebody."
D'Anna smiled. "Me, too."
The first time they died together, they both accidentally flushed themselves out of an airlock. It would have been awkward to explain, had anyone asked, but they resurrected side by side with nobody there to interrogate them. As the interface pushed her back into her body from the stream, she scrabbled for memories blindly. Anything that smelled like Gaius, or sounded like him, or even looked like his house, she latched onto and brought with her. But, as she opened her eyes and saw light streaming through a canopy of trees, the memories curdled. She saw Gaius sleeping with another woman, eyeing up anyone who caught his eye while they were in public (wearing the glasses like it would help him get away with it). Her lip curled in disgust, and she vowed to never think of Gaius Baltar again.
She died again on her own, and she wasn't sure whether it was an accident or not. On her way out of the resurrection tub, surrounded by other Sixes and a smirking Three, she could think only of Gaius. She had pulled in a memory, an old one, of Gaius looking at her like he did at all the others, and she hated herself for enjoying it. She hated her body for reacting to the memory, now fresh in her mind, in a way that validated it.
Gaius rushed in, then, as she was dressing, but she couldn't even bring herself to look at him.
"Go away, Gaius." And she wished that the pride she felt at seeing the hurt on his face didn't hurt her as much as the bad memories. But she couldn't stop herself from wanting to hurt him. At consensus later that same cycle, she suggested that Baltar be tortured for information. Some of the other Sixes were shocked, but she shared a knowing glance with a few.
It was only once the torture had begun that she realized that she could never stop loving Gaius, and only once it was over that she felt that he could very well stop loving her. She saw the change in Gaius and D'Anna the moment they walked out together. Gaius held up the pretense, but even when they made love, Six felt like the other two only acknowledged her physically. She may as well not even have been there.
She took the opportunity to help Athena escape with Hera, almost out of spite. She felt that she no longer belonged among the Cylons, so she chose the only option which she felt would allow her to breathe some meaning and purpose back into her life - defend the baby. Protect the child. Keep mother and daughter together. Although part of her was honest enough to admit that it was a petty move; she ran into the arms of her enemies simply because she couldn't bear to see Gaius love another woman.
But then there was Saul Tigh. This man whom she had feared and loathed for so long had looked at her with fear in his eyes. Fear, and an unmistakable note of an emotion which Caprica was afraid to name. An emotion which, over time, she felt herself begin to mirror. Inexplicably, she found herself in love with this representative of all she had been told she should detest.
At first, she thought that the uncomfortable feeling in the pit of her stomach was simply a physical manifestation of her mixed feelings about Saul Tigh. But then, while puking into her slop bucket in the brig, she knew the truth.
She knew, of course, that it was a theoretical possibility; Athena and Helo had yielded Hera, after all, but no other coupling had managed to bear fruit. She, like many other Cylons, had come to believe that children were only possible through a bond of true and immutable love. For one hideous moment, she felt guilt - a stab of it, right through her middle - over the reversal of roles. The time when she detested Gaius for loving another woman was still fresh in her mind. But all of it was absolved as she realized that there is room in her heart to love more than one person, and that that was as God intended. She resolved to embrace her love for Saul then, as fully as she could.
She tried to tell herself that things could go on as usual when Ellen returned. But she could feel Saul chill toward her - he felt guilty about her. The life within her faded, and she felt herself fading along with it. Liam was her last connection with Saul, and when he died, so did any of Saul's love for her that he had kept from Ellen. And, rather than revering her creators, the fabled Final Five, she found herself resenting their existence. Forgiveness was not at the top of her priority list, even though a part of her acknowledged that it wasn't truly anyone's fault - Ellen played her part, but Saul never truly loved her for her; he loved her for the parts of Ellen he could see in her.
The next time she saw Gaius, he was acting. She could spot his lying face from across the Twelve Colonies, and he had it on firmly. He had gathered a flock of humans, and was turning their eyes to God, or so they all said. But she knew. She could see in his eyes, in the way his eyes wandered over the women in his congregation. He was lost and confused, and so was clinging to the only thing he knew. The power, then, was not something that he wanted, but all he knew how to wield in the face of his enemies. She found herself turning her nose up in disdain over it - the whole situation; Gaius, his pandering, and the adoring flock of mostly women who seemed to be perfectly willing to throw their lives over the cliff of his cowardice.
Seeing Gaius Baltar holding a rifle was not a sight that she would have ever expected. It looked wrong, somehow, and she couldn't shake the feeling that it was another ruse. But he found the courage to pull the trigger, and while he did not look like he wanted to be there, she sensed that he knew he needed to be there.
And then they were in the operahouse together, as her shared visions had portended. She and Gaius, protecting the child, shepherding their peoples onward unto the shape of things to come. She was proud of him, then, which was something she had lacked in the past. She had loved him, certainly, but she was not proud of him. She was proud of how she had used him, she was proud of her accomplishments surrounding him, and she was proud of his intellect, but she was not proud of him as a person until that very moment. It was the final piece that slotted in and completed the circuit, and she loved him again. She felt it burning inside of her; a pure, cleansing fire.
It was with this same pride and fire with which she stepped out of the Raptor onto their new home. "Earth," everyone else was calling it, mostly as a joke. But she thought it fitting - the name of the world which humanity had sought as its original new beginning had become a fresh start for all of them.
She could feel the weight of all that had happened lift off of Gaius' soul the moment they set out to find their new place on this world. But it allowed the full weight of all that he had lost to take its place on his shoulders.
"You know, I know about farming."
"I know," she replied.