Unpleasant Reality
By Jewels

Disclaimer: Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict are copyright Tribune Entertainment Company and the show is produced by Roddenberry/Kirshner Productions.

I never thought I would find space boring. After all, ever since I was just a little girl, I'd stare out of my window late at night when my parents thought I'd gone to sleep, looking up at the stars and imaging myself as an intrepidd space explorer, the likes of which you only ever saw on TV.

I suppose flying made me feel a little closer to that goal, and when I became a shuttle pilot, the stars seemed closer than ever. I'll admit it, I was envious of Paul when I found out he was in the astronaut program. He had the chance to do something I never thought I would. But before I knew what was happening, I was suddenly making trips to the Taelon mothership, further afield than I'd imagine I'd go. Through all of that, everything I had to do for the resistance, I don't think I quite lost than sense of wonder at what I could see.

Until now.

For a while, I managed to keep myself entertained. I conjured up mental images of the most painful and slow deaths I could inflict on Sandoval if I ever got my hands on him. Most of these little fantasys were very gory, and very satisfying in some way. Inevitably, though, my imagination managed to exhaust itself along that line, and I got bored again for a very simple reason.

Space is black.

That's it. Space is black, and it has little white dots all over the place. Once you've lived with that for... however long I've been out here, the sense of wonder goes out the nearest window. Even the rippling effects of Interdimensional can't disguise the dullness of it all.

Sleeping, I've found, is a good way to pass the time. The hours just tend to blur together and vanish when you're asleep. I've slep a lot since being sent on this godforsaken journey. I swear, I'll never complain about insomnia ever again.

I tend to have dreamless sleeps. Maybe the boredom is creeping into my subconscious, and the dreams, when they come, can vary from the pleasant, to the not-so-pleasant. Last night was one of the former.

Understand that I use the term 'night' very loosely. I've lost track of the time completely, so whenever I sleep, it's night, and whenever I'm awake, it's day. Simple.

I was back home, on Earth, and everyone was there. My dad, like he was before the whole brain-swapping thing, my mom, and my brother were there. And my friends, Liam, Augur, even William Boone. We were all happy, laughing, smiling together, there were no Taelons, no Jaridians, no resistance to pull me one way into what 'needed' to be done. Sandoval wasn't there either, I would have hated to ruin the perfect picture by covering the landscape in guts and gore.

For the first time in a long while, I was happy.

And then I woke up.

It wasn't the first dream I'd had like that, but even so, I couldn't help but cry my eyes out when I woke up, and found the unpleasant reality staring me in the face, almost taunting me. 'This is what you want, what you'd love, but you can't have it.'

My dad's dead. My brother's dead. Sandoval did *something* to me. And Will Boone is dead.

I keep crying.

-Fini