Note: Many thanks to Kadi219 for being my beta. All remaining mistakes are my own.
The Burning of Pythia - The Dying Leader
Laura's heart felt like it was going to burst. She wanted to cry, to sob, and scream, but she couldn't. It seemed like another sick punishment from the gods for her facade. So much had happened over the past few years that if she were to try and write it down she wouldn't know where to really begin. Humanity had been so full of life and so full of hope for the future. Now, everyone was tired, jaded, and angry; herself included. Even if she had been able to write it down, would anyone be alive or even care enough to read it?
The obvious starting point was hearing about the Cylon attacks on the wireless. That's where it had started for everyone who still remained. A seemingly simple day had accelerated and then exploded quickly. How close to 50,000 people, mostly strangers, had become the last of humanity. But the destruction of the 12 Colonies of Kobol seemed like some sort of frakked up precursor to what they now referred to as everyday life. The shock, the anger, the processing of devastating mass loss and destruction; that was the setup but not the beginning.
Pythia. That's where it all started. Pythia and Elosha."Three thousand six hundred years ago, Pythia wrote about the exile and the rebirth of the human race. And the Lords anointed a leader to guide the caravan of the heavens to their new homeland. And unto the leader they gave a vision of serpents, numbering two and ten as a sign of things to come." Laura recalled not believing Elosha at first. The aftermath of the attacks and mass loss of human lives was too fresh in her mind. It wasn't until the priestess had said, "She also wrote that the new leader suffered a wasting disease and would not live to enter the new land. But you're not dying."
Laura was dying, though, and she had desperately wanted something to cling to. Something to make her feel better about everything that had happened. Something to help legitimize her becoming President of the 12 Colonies when she had only been Secretary of Education moments before. Politics was a game for the sick and twisted, power hungry individual; one she had never quite assumed herself to be, although maybe she always had been.
Being thrust into the role of the President was more than any political game she had ever played. It wasn't about who was getting what legislation passed or who was getting more funding for a project. The closed door promises, lies, and blackmail were all part of an intricately woven game that had been played over and over for thousands of years. But this wasn't that. That game had been obliterated with the fall of the first thermonuclear bomb.
It was literally a game of life and death that left Laura looking for any sort of instructions on how to play. When Elosha had started talking to her about the contents of the sacred scrolls, Laura had scoffed internally. The scrolls were something that had been part of her childhood. They had a small altar in the home that she grew up in, and her family had observed all of the holidays. Scripture classes had been simple, and something that she coasted through with little attention or to the temple with her family were times to let her mind wander over dreams of the future, while holidays were treated as occasions for copious amounts of food or drink. Those religious teachings were not ideals that she had carried into her adult life.
But now the scrolls were crucial guidance and Elosha played the role of the instructor so it was only natural to want to feel like she had the role of the prophetic Dying Leader. Laura had wanted it so much that she had started to believe it herself. She had been haunted by the future and had seen the serpents slither before her eyes. Believing herself to be the chosen leader she went so far as to give orders to the military and end up in the brig. The press had surrounded her cell and the medication withdrawals made them move before her like a crowd of believers finally realizing that a powerful goddess walked amongst them.
She only escaped due to the help of a convicted terrorist, along with Adama's son, of all people. They stowed away on various ships with strangers kneeling before her as she lay hands on them. She felt silly about doing so, at least at first, but it gave her power. It reaffirmed her place as the Dying Leader. Somehow, they had managed to convince a third of the fleet to jump to Kobol, and Laura found herself starting to believe with each step up the side of the mountains of Kobol that she was perhaps the Dying Leader. The scrolls said that not all would make it on their journey and the words proved themselves to be true with the quick explosion of a hidden cylon trap. Laura's heart ached when Elosha died and she clung even tighter to the ancient words and her place within them.
In reality, Laura was still very much human and with every passing day she felt herself growing weaker. The medication made her doubt her reality and every day when she crawled into her makeshift bed on Colonial One, she would try to logically recount the day before she fell asleep. There were times it felt as if she could feel her brain functioning and warping her reality. Lack of sleep and the constant throb from her breast reminded her how little time she had left. It was like her life was draining away, faster with each and every breath she took.
Laura recalled the years that her mother spent wasting away before her very eyes. Two years of doloxian treatments and for what? Her mother had died anyway, but at least she had been surrounded by her friends and family. Day after day Laura felt her frustration grow. Why couldn't she have died on Caprica with the rest of them? Adar had wanted her gone and like always, she had been too stubborn to do what was best for her. When she had finally gone to see Dr. Cottle he had chastised her for not seeing a doctor sooner. "I was too busy," was her cheeky response, but it was completely true.
The small lump in her breast, with its first twinges of pain, had been initially worrisome. There were days that it hurt, and others when it didn't. When the pain became constant, she learned to ignore it. Laura distracted herself, made her mind focus on the constant ebb and flow of a calendar that was being subconsciously overbooked on purpose. In the end, she did spend months being too busy planning her death only she hadn't known it at the time. Too busy for months working and playing the political game. Too busy going out with friends and getting drunk. Too busy having a one night stand with a former student that resulted in her getting into politics in the first place. When it came down to it, Laura had been too busy trying to distract herself from the inevitable and only making it worse.
Although, if life before the destruction of civilization was busy, Laura did not know what to make of the remnants. As much as Pythia had foretold, the book did not provide instructions of how to deal with the outcome. Once she had taken the oath to uphold the Articles of Colonization, Laura found herself swamped by requests. People wanting beds, demanding more food, and begging for more water. It would have been easy to turn the prisoners of the Astral Queen into slave labor and force them to mine day in and day out to replenish their water supply. Yet, she couldn't bring herself to do it. The cylons were once their slaves and then they destroyed their masters. And really, if a dying woman deserved to make it this far then so did those convicted of whatever crimes their former courts declared them guilty of.
In need of a confidant and someone to help her figure out what was going on, Laura turned to Lee Adama. Had he been one of her students he probably would have willingly sat in the front row. He would have raised his hand for every question, and always have completed his homework on time. To Laura he was wholesome and subjectively naive or exactly the type of person she could trust and learn from. She asked him to keep her cancer a secret and he swore to do so. "You can count on me," he promised her.
But when she was on the stand he betrayed her. He dug into her personal life to prove a point, to try and make her seem like a drug addict. In that moment she had been anything but a dying leader. Just a dying woman willing to go to whatever lengths necessary to stay alive, even if it meant being injected with the hybrid blood of a race she did not even consider to be human.
Gaius Baltar had even asked her how many times had he saved her life, reminding her that she would be dead without him. He had shouted at her as she left him in his cell aboard the Galactica. Bill had reminded her that it wasn't too late to make him disappear. One word, one nod, and she the Dying Leader could take away his life just as he had given her back her own.
Tigh once told her on New Caprica that he wondered if ice water ran through her veins or maybe she was just a naive school teacher. Her first instinct was to say she was neither naive nor heartless, but maybe she had been. Maybe she was. When Laura had gone into teaching she thought that it might be an easy job, something she would probably enjoy with summers off. She had enjoyed teaching, however her first day on the job proved to be anything but easy. Teenagers were cruel and over the years she had become more and more numb to the eye rolls and under their breath insults and inappropriate comments about how she looked.
Perhaps the end of her teaching career is when cool water began to run through her veins. The naivety gone by the time she had entered politics, or most of it at least. She had come into office with high hopes that she could easily reform the Colonial education system. While she had been able to lean on her fellow teachers while she was still teaching, Laura felt utterly alone in politics. Everyone had a motive and she soon learned that behind every smile and every thank you was a debt in one hand and a proverbial knife in the other, just waiting to strike.
Over the years she had molded her personality to play their game, although there were so many times she felt inferior. A sarcastic smile would be plastered across her face anytime she heard a comment that she was "just a school teacher", mentally asking them where they would be today without someone to teach them how to read and write. When funding was being allocated to various government divisions, Laura had ended up frakking President Adar in hopes he would influence the finance committee to give her more money for the battlestar museum she had been after for years. Obviously it had worked and every once in awhile she would ponder the fact that the majority of them were still alive because one day she had climbed on the President's desk with no panties on. Maybe she had turned to ice.
Laura hoped Lee could see the pain in her eyes when she asked him, begged him silently to stop his line of questioning, but he hadn't. Again she was whipped back into feeling like the leader, used as a political pawn to make a point. It felt dehumanizing to the point where she wondered if Hera's blood had turned her into a machine to be used by humanity. The Dying Leader: Version 2.0 because this had all happened before and would all happen again.