A/N: I just wanted to thank everyone who read or showed interest in the prologue! it means so much to me that people are actually interested in this fic. It's something I've had in my head since watching Unfinished Business for the first time years ago, but I never thought anyone else would care about it! I'm hoping to do updates every Tuesday and Thursday through the rest of the summer. We'll see if I can keep up! :)

Tawnyleaf: How true! Mash together all of the post-apocolyptic universes! And honestly, the Hunger Games really just sounds like something the cylons would have done if they had been able to hold New Caprica for any real length of time. Thanks for reviewing!

ChrisCHH: Thanks! Yeah, it's hard to get your sea-legs with just the prologue. A lot of world building to be done, here. Hopefully I've fleshed it out more in chapter one. And no worries, you'll find out about what happened to Laura and Bill. ;) Even though they're gone, they are quite present in Birdie's mind pretty constantly.


CHAPTER ONE: BIRDIE THE BASTARD


She wakes up on one of the hard clinic beds, Doc Cottle prodding at her with his cane. "Girl," he says. "Up. Patient. One of the Tyrol boys."

"Which one?" she yawns, the stubborn ligaments in her back protesting when she unfurls from her tightly-wound ball of skin and wool blankets, clenching her hands and her toes, trying to work feeling back into them.

"The one named after your father." He prods her again. "Now up, young lady. If I can still get out of bed, so can you."

Birdie swats at him, slipping on her deerskin shoes and pulling herself to her feet. "Too many…" she mutters. "What'd he do this time?"

"Frak if I know," he mutters back, pulling a hand-wrapped cigarette from his coat pocket and lighting it, smiling when Birdie fans the smoke away from her face and wrinkles her nose at him in disdain. "But he split his lip. Needs stitches."

"Waking me up to do stitches," she replies airly. "Gettin' old, Uncle Jack."

He grumbles, his cane marking heavy steps as he follows her slowly to the front of the dilapidated, but free-standing, house that District Twelve used as their sole source of medical care. "If I wasn't arthritic I'd whip you, girl."

"My momma would come back from the dead to smite you," Birdie titters, stretching her arms out above her head. "Laura Roslin, red-headed demon, just screeching at 'cha, chasing you to hades."

Cottle barks a laugh. "I was never afraid of your mother. Now go earn your keep, little bird. Not the morning for fussing."

"Saul Tigh then, missing eye and all."

"Go. I should kick you out." She can almost hear his smile. "All the sass I have to put up with. Frakking red-headed women and your godsdamned attitudes."

Birdie laughs, opening the sorry-looking door to the front room and smiles at the young boy sitting on the stool they had set up next to the cleaning supplies. Young Billy Tyrol is swinging his legs; a guilty grin springs up on his face when he sees her.

The clinic is a pre-fab, one of the original houses in District Twelve; not one of the newer, but more crudely made apartments or row houses built out of clay brick into the border walls. It has four rooms—the front, which was for out-patients, and the back, which was for overnights and storage, the washroom, and the basement lab they used for surgeries and experiments

The front room is set up simply, one of the long walls lined with shelves filled with jars of natural remedies and salves, and hidden deeper in the drawers were the antibiotics and antivirals and antiseptics that were routinely smuggled in by Aunt Kara's underground.

"You'll never get rid of me," she answers back under her breath, voice lilting and amused. "Never, ever, ever."

"Insolent child," he grumbles. "I should send you back to the home."

"But you won't," she replies in the same breathy, sing-song lilt, snapping plastic gloves onto her small, spidery hands. "You love me…"

There is a mini-fridge powered by the extra generator, filled with their small supply of blood (Birdie makes a mental note to cajole Uncle Galen into rounding up more people to donate after the reaping), and a table set up in a corner laid out with basic first aid supplies, flanked by two stools, one of which Billy Tyrol is currently sitting on.

"Billy!" she scolds him. "Today of all days, when your momma already has enough to worry about! You know better."

"Sorry," he answers sheepishly through a mouth-full of blood.

She sighs, and dabs at the gash with a cotton-ball soaked with alcohol, holding his chin in her hand as he tries to squirm away from her. "How'd he do it, Nicky?"

"Mouthed off to a Three," Nicky Tyrol replies, looking out the window that opened out onto the crowded street; more crowded than usually expected at ten in the morning. More frantic, more frenetic. "You know how that goes."

She hums in reply, the vague touch memory of D'anna Biers' nails scraping flesh away from her face tingling down her cheek.

"Billy, you know better," she says with another sigh. Little boys like Billy—sweet, young, average—can avoid the cylons' attention. She could never, will never. She doesn't have a name—she'd be dangerous with a name, so they took it from her and then cast her down in the name of bastard—but they all know who she is. "She could have killed you, had she wanted to. You got off easy."

It was true. The cylons had done more to children because of less.

He pales, shrinking down. His eyes widen when Birdie sifts through her supplies and pulls out an old, but clean, surgical needle. "You'll need three or four, depending on how many I can get in there, kid."

"Will it hurt?" the small boy asks.

Birdie smirks, threading the nylon suture through the head of the needle holder. "Who were you named after, kiddo?"

"The Admiral," he answers mindlessly, quickly. "Your Dad."

"Right," Birdie says, nodding at Nicky, who comes from behind to pin Billy's shoulders against his torso. She lifts Billy's chin in her hand again, not even needing to lean down to do so. "And do you think he'd shrink away from stitches from a battle wound?"

Billy shakes his head guilelessly.

"Right," Birdie replies before tightening her lips into a smile. "I'm going to numb you first though." She turns away from him. "Doc! Where the hell you'd go to?"

"Out here!" His voice, followed by the faint smell of smoke, wafts through the window from the small porch attached to the front of the clinic. "No need to yell."

"Sorry Doc!" she replies in a tone that does not imply much of a sense of apology. "Did you finish up the—"

"Didn't get to put it on its shelf, but—"

Birdie pivots, hand reaching out to snatch a shining glass jar filled with a thick white paste. "—you put it on the counter. Got it. Thanks Doc!"

"Hurry up!" he barks. They can hear him pound the end of his cane onto the porch's floorboards. "Can't be late!"

"Yeah…" Birdie purses her lips, applying the paste to Billy's lip. When she speaks, she addresses Nicky. "How's Rosie?"

Nicky huffs a short laugh. It does not sound amused, just tired. "Woke up crying. Neither Ma nor Isis can calm her down. Pa neither."

"And how are you?" she asks meaningfully, eyes steady on her patient.

"Fine," Nicky answers, looking away, fingers drumming lightly on his brother's shoulders.

Birdie's lips tighten even further, deep lines appearing around her mouth. Nimbly, she picks up the needle again, and grasps the boy's chin even tighter. "Don't move," she tells him. He wriggles when she first pierces the delicate skin surrounding his mouth, her pale green eyes focused intently on her tiny, neat sutures. It takes her less than a minute to finish and then dab at the wound again with piece of cotton.

Blindly, she reaches to her side for the lid of a heavily scratched glass canister, lifts it, and extracts a piece of sugar candy. She smiles wryly, handing it to the boy. "Tell your momma that it's to be kept moist, and that I'll take out the stitches in a week. Now wait outside, I gotta talk to Nicky."

Billy nods complacently, sticking the candy in his mouth and padding onto the porch. Birdie waits until she can hear him engage Cottle before pinning Nicky with her gaze.

"How many?" she asks forcibly.

He coughs, avoiding her gaze. "Don't worry about it."

"Nicholas."

He licks his lips, and for a moment all Birdie can hear is the rush of people outside, the squeak of Cottle's rocking chair on the porch, idle chatter, the whisper of their curtains dancing on the breeze. Such a beautiful day for a death sentence, Birdie thinks, casting her eyes to the floor.

There are seven members of the Tyrol family—Galen and Maya, Isis, Nicky, Roslin, William, and Stephanie. And with not enough food and money to go around, and with Isis and Nicky being the only ones grown and Uncle Galen unable to work…

Nicky sighs and leans forward, brushing a lock of brown hair away from Birdie's face. She trembles. So many people lost. So many of her people gone. Her parents people, who protected and raised and clothed and sheltered her and for what? So that they could walk to the slaughter while the odds remained in her favor? Her eyes cast to the floor. She knows she must look so horrible.

"How late were you out?"

She'll let him avoid the question for a bit.

"I got back before the sun was up." Another call in the night, another night of avoiding the guards and breaking curfew to find someone injured, someone dying. Another night up to her elbows in blood. "He lived, by the way." She scuffs at the floor with the sole of her shoe. "GSW to the right flank. Cylon, of course. Guy was um…" she looks out the window.

"Yeah," Nicky mutters with a nod. "So he'll be fine?"

"Hopefully." She pauses, and then turns to wrap up the suturing thread and clean the needle with rubbing alcohol. "I'll have to keep an eye on him. He's at home. Too dangerous to bring him here."

She puts the implements back into their neat row. Her fingers hesitate over the lip of the table, tapping the peeling white paint thoughtfully.

"So," she says, turning. "How many?"

"Will has twenty. And you could figure it out if you wanted. You're the one with the photographic memory."

Birdie rolls her eyes. "I'm too tired, Nicholas. And I don't care about Will."

Nicky gasps theatrically. "I'm telling."

"I already knew how many tesserae Will had taken," she tells him, leaning back against the table. The room is so full of light, she thinks. Such a nice day. But nature stoops to grieve with no man or woman. That is a privilege reserved for the gods alone. "Because Will's a good friend and tells me these things without me having to ask, and doesn't brush it off like it isn't a thing. I just. Please. I want to hear it from you."

Nick clacks his teeth together, systematically cracks his knuckles. Birdie watches him with something like desperation in here eyes.

"Forty-seven," he says finally, like the words have been painfully extracted from his mouth.

She gasps. "Forty-seven. Lords of Kobol, Nick! Why wouldn't you let—"

He shrugs nonchalantly. "It is what it is. We should be grateful you only have five."

"Be grateful!" she explodes, rubbing her pale, sallow face with her hands, muscles tense with aggravation. "Yes, be grateful, Nick. I wish people would take me off the frakking pedestal. The war is over."

He laughs, the tone of it tinged with dark humor. "Don't tell my Dad that. Or Aunt Kara. Or the whole lot of 'em. If protecting you makes them feel good about themselves, let 'em. You're important, Birdie."

"No I'm not," she whimpers. "I'm just like everybody else."

"Except you're not."

She growls. "They were people, Nick. Just like you and me. Just people, except they went and got themselves killed for what they believed in and everybody went an' turned 'em into gods. Created 'em bigger than Zeus and Hera. But they were people, and I'm just a person too. And just because I'm their kid—"

"Miracle baby," Nicky comments dryly.

"Shut the frak up!"

"You two alright?" Cottle yells, genuine concern diluted with sarcasm. He appears in the open doorway into the clinic, watching the two of them warily.

Birdie tunnels a hand through her dark, greasy hair, frame rigid with frustration. "Jus' fine, Doc."

"You'd better get going," he tells Nicky. "You too, young lady. Get going."

"I'm not ready," she huffs tiredly, scrubbing her face with her hands. "Look at me."

"Then get to the Tyrols, girl," Cottle tells her, and not unkindly. "You need a bath. And a dress. And shoes. And something to fix that hair of yours. None of those things you'll find here. So get."

"What's wrong with my hair?" she grumbles fondly, pouting at him. Nick, beside her, reaches his hand up and tugs at the ends of it. Swatting back at him, she turns to go out onto the porch. "I'll be back later."

"Don't say that," Cottle wheazes.

She rolls her eyes. "I only have a five in one thousand, two hundred, and twenty-three chance in not being back later."

"Don't tell me the odds, girl," he says, pointing the tip of his cane at her. He turns to Nick, jabbing his cane in his direction. "You get her there on time, would you? No trouble."

"Promise." Nick tosses off a sharp salute, ushering a muttering—I can take care of myself, thanks—Birdie out of the clinic and onto the porch. "Billy—les' go."

Birdie flits down the few steps leading from the porch to the road, whistling through her teeth. "Husker!"

Landing on the gravel-lined street, Birdie turns back to see her mutt lope out from under the clinic's porch, the long ligaments of his hound-like limbs rippling under his dulled russet-hued coat. Nicky sighs.

"The dog stays."

Husker pads over to Billy, licking his cheek and emitting one low, loud woof, before trotting over to his mistress and butting her hand with his head. Birdie rolls her eyes at Nicky. "The dog comes." She kneels to the mutt's level, raking her nails over the sensitive skin behind his long, floppy ears, giggling when he licks her face. "That's a good boy. You're coming with mommy, right? Mommy wouldn't leave you behind. Auntie Maya loves you. Good boy."

"You're sick."

She snorts, getting to her feet and brushing her hands off on her soft black suede leggings. "You're just jealous."

"Gonna give me a kiss?" Nick wraps his arms around her waist, pulling her towards him, frowning when the dog steps between them.

Birdie dances out of his grasp, wrinkling her nose at him, Husker circling her feet. "Later, boyfriend. Aren't we gonna be late?"


An hour later, she sits at the Tyrol's dinner table with a mug of coffee—or what has come to pass as coffee—sitting in her hand as Aunt Maya brushes out her damp hair. Uncle Galen sits across her from her, fumbling with a clock that he's trying to repair. Birdie watches as the pads of fingers slip over the wires, as he slips the nail on his thumb and twists his wrist to loosen a screw. Memorizing. Taking it in. Birdie likes to know how things work. She likes to learn. To be useful, when she can. And she can never, ever, forget.

"What do you want me to do with it, honey?" Aunt Maya asks, scratching Husker's back with her bare foot. The dog is curled up on Birdie's feet under the table, panting. He licks at Birdie's toes as if he can feel the tension in her muscles. Maya rubs at Birdie's shoulders, sensing her nervousness. "I could braid it."

Birdie nods. "That'd be nice."

She remembers back to when she was small, back before she had to worry about tesserae and tiny slips of paper with her name—her real name—on them, and odds, and the hunger games. Back when she lived with Momma, who would brush out her long, wavy hair as it dried. Momma, who couldn't always keep her with her, at the house with the red door, but who always protected her and always tried to keep her unruly, frizzy hair braided and neat.

"You get any good game lately?" Uncle Galen asks her, trying to make conversation. He's on-edge. Guilty. Working himself up for the long walk to the square. "Isis said you almost got a deer the other day?"

Birdie nods, and licks her lips. "It was close. Been catching squirrel and hare recently. More than enough to get by. I've been tracking a bear, too. Gonna need some help to bring it down."

Laura Roslin, Birdie thinks. The name sounds nice and familiar on her tongue. She likes the shape of the L in Laura, the sli in Roslin. Warm. Comforting. She feels close to her on the reaping days. Close to both of them, on the day where she almost feels like she could reach out and touch it, like it was a tangible thing for her to hold.

My father was William Adama. My mother was Laura Roslin. They were unmarried at the time of my birth. I was to be Eleanor, not Birdie, called bastard.

The bastard's oath.

The only way for a bastard to throw off the catena was by being reaped or volunteering to be a tribute. The bastard would act as a tribute as a trueborn child, with full privileges. A week, at most, usually, before they were killed in the games, unless they were careers. Most careers were the bastards of high-ranking government officials, or the otherwise wealthy who could afford to send their begotten children to the academies for training.

And at the bottom of the stage, at the microphone, it was what they said. The bastard's oath, to swear who their parents were, what their name would have been.

It was what she would say, where she reaped. Cast of the chain of her bastard's name and number, claim her parents. They would test her DNA. The penalty would be death if she lied. and not a quick one. Birdie always wondered if they would allow her to claim her parents, or if they would falsify the DNA test to keep her silent.

It is, after all, because of her existence that bastards exist. The names Roslin and Adama are still strong, and if the other districts knew that Laura Roslin had had the Admiral's child… so they institutionalized bastardry. Used it against parents to keep them in line. Used it against the children to keep them down. Created the brand to destroy any chance they might have.

Catena.

She thinks they would have to let her compete, or else District 12 would be in revolt.

She wonders what it would be like, to live as Eleanor Adama, for even that short amount of time. To be the child of the Admiral and the President. How would the cylons play that to their advantage? Or would they just have her killed right off the bat, in the bloodbath?

So many… so many dead. Uncle Galen's first wife had been executed, with so many others, before Birdie was even born.

Aunt Maya's fingers are rougher than her mother's, she thinks, distantly hearing Momma's airy alto as she told Birdie—Ella, she was always Ella to Momma—stories about life on Caprica and about Daddy and her older brother Lee. Told her stories as she tugged and pulled her hair into shape. But it never hurt when she did it. Just her and Momma, in their tiny little house. When she could shut the door and pretend that the world just went away.

"Birdie?" a small voice peeps from the doorway into the girls' bedroom.

She smiles softly and reaches out one arm. A small black-haired girl ducks under it—Roslin Tyrol, all of twelve. Her first reaping day. Birdie didn't have her mother for her first reaping, she remembers. Laura Roslin had been arrested and summarily executed by the time she was twelve. How pale and shaking she had been, clinging onto to Kara Anders and later, Isis, before being foisted into the group of twelves at the back of the square.

"I heard you were nervous," Birdie murmurs into Rosie's hair.

Uncle Galen looks up from his project, briefly, casting his eyes to his middle child. His hands shake, and he flattens them to the table to calm them. Birdie can feel Aunt Maya shifting her weight behind her, the dilapidated floorboard squeaking in protest.

Rosie tucks her face into Birdie's cotton tunic, nodding. Her slender fingers dart out and pluck at the chain around Birdie's neck, before pulling the entire thing out of the neckline of her shirt and rubbing the etched gold metal tags between her thumb and first two fingers.

Birdie chuckles softly. "You have nothing to worry about, little Rose. Your name's only in there once."

"It's not me," she whimpers. "Nicky."

Birdie sighs. So does Maya. Galen staggers to his feet, and with the help of his walker, leaves the room as quickly as possible. Rosie buries her face deeper into Birdie's collarbone, tugging at the chain almost painfully hard, causing it to cut into the skin at the nape of her neck.

"What do they say?" Rosie whispers, almost playfully, but still with a pervading sense of sadness. She encloses her hands over the pendants.

Birdie closes her eyes. "W. Adama. Serial 204971."

She can feel Aunt Maya wrap the braid at the base of her skull, and then pin it in place. Her hands drift down the sides her neck, and rest softly on her shoulders. As Birdie opens her eyes again, Aunt Maya drops a kiss on the crown of her head, and then walks away.

"I'll get you one of Isis' dresses," she tells Birdie faintly. "You can borrow a pair of my shoes."

Birdie inhales sharply, impulsively raising a hand to her father's dog tags and pulling them up and over her head. The plain, unadorned chain hangs in her hand for a moment, the tags gleaming softly in the natural light. She knows every scratch, every etch. It's palpable, and indescribable, how they feel against her chest, or in the palm of her hand. These were once his. These are all of him.

She cannot put words to it, but when she folds them tightly in her palms, and can feel the rounded corners bite into her skin, the metal growing hot, the feeling of her pulse beating around them she feels… like there is a sun bursting inside her, in its angry death throes. In its birth. White and hot. It is in her blood, and it sings. Whatever it is.

Birdie carries her father with her, always.

I was to be Eleanor, an Adama.

"Would you like to wear them today?" she asks Rosie. "For good luck?"

"You don't believe in luck," Rosie mumbles. Nevertheless, she enfolds her hands over the tag and rotates them to face her again. "Only the odds."

Birdie barks a laugh.

"Sometimes we just take what we can get, and say thank you, little girl." Birdie wraps her hand around the back of Rosie's head, and brings the girl's forehead to her own, and hums. "Take them. You and me, we've got good odds. But Nicky needs some luck. And you're his sister so they'll work better on you than me."

"But you're his girlfriend," Rosie whispers, brown eyes crossing, trying to look Birdie in the face.

Birdie sticks out her tongue, and screws up her face. "But you're his sister. So take these." She opens Rosie's palm and drops the tags carefully into it before curling the twelve-year-old's fingers around them. "Wear 'em under your dress. And then after the Reaping, give 'em back. We're gonna see each other after. None of us are goin' to the Games. That's a promise."

Maya's feet introduce her back into the room. Birdie and Roslin separate; Birdie turns in her seat to see the faint, ghost-like smile on Aunt Maya's face when she lifts a red, flowing skirt and white blouse in her arms.


"You look very beautiful," Rosie says, clutching Birdie and Nick's hands as they walk into square.

"You do," Nicky agrees, before letting go of Rosie's hand. He kisses his sister on her forehead, lingering for a moment—his fingers brush over the dog tags she tucked under her much-too-large dress, thoughtfully, almost, and then looks at Birdie, meaningfully—and then staggers away to his side of the aisle, to the very front with the rest of the eighteen-year-olds, where he is shortly joined by Will Anders.

Will. Another one with too many tesserae in the pot, but not nearly as many as Nicky. Will, who she shared a crib with, shared a secret language with as children. Her brother in arms. Her brother in everything but blood. Nicky and Will, her two people.

We entered this world together, he told her once, back when they called each Artemis and Apollo and taught each other to hunt and use the bow and arrow. Back when they were small. Back when her Momma was alive, and times weren't good but at least weren't so bad. She's barely a week older than him. Like twins, really. We entered this world together. We'll leave it together, too.

Birdie watches them, blinking owlishly, breathing calm. It is an immaculate day in District Twelve. In all over of their sorry 35 square miles of New Caprica that the city proper was settled on. She will be fine. She always is. She is Birdie the bastard. She wears two brands. She watched her mother scream in terror, scream at her to flee into the woods. She watched her mother die. She's never broken. She's be interrogated and tortured and did not break. She will be fine.

Birdie knows how to survive; she killed the girl, Ella, long ago.

Birdie hunts and runs and hides. She sneaks between shadows during the night, knows all the tunnels and passageways and every inch of the first wood like the back of her hand.

(She cannot forget, can never forget. Her brain chemistry does not allow it.)

"Come on," Birdie says faintly, the words delicate in her mouth. She watches Rosie say goodbye to her family, get picked up by Isis, and cuddled by her mother. Kiss Steph, who is even smaller than her, on the cheek. Watches her wrap her arms delicately around her broken father. Uncle Galen and Nicky regard each other tersely. A nod. A handshake. Taking a faltering step forward, Birdie leads Rosie to the rest of the twelve-year-old girls in the back. "I'll see you soon. For the tags. Keep 'em safe for me, now. No playin' around."

She brushes the girl's hair out of her eyes, straightens the bow at the waist of her dress. Rosie's eyes water, and she clutches at Birdie's forearms.

Birdie takes another measured breath, before reaching to remove Rosie's hands. Steeling herself, she places the girl's much smaller hands onto her father's dog tags.

W. Adama. Serial 204971.

She carries her father with her, always. He can never leave her. The people who have left her can never truly leave her. She carries them with her. She lets them live on. It is what she owes. It is her duty to them.

"I've got to go now, kid," she murmurs, eyes above Roslin's dark head. The child bears her mother's name. Kinship. Something like it. Something heady, when Birdie has no blood and no name. Just a serial number of her own and the bastard's brand.

As she walks towards the front of the square, she watches. Her eyes meet briefly with Auntie Kara, who gives her a nod. Doc Cottle, leaning heavily on his walking stick next to Uncle Galen, barely able to stand, and Aunt Maya and Isis, who is frowning. Standing in a clump of seventeens, she takes in her surroundings, watching the bookies filter through the crowds. Watches one exchange money with Doc.

Birdie wonders what odds the bookies are giving her this year. Will the cylons rig the games to pick her, now that she's on her own? Or wouldn't they have killed her from the start, when she was twelve?

She focuses her stare on the temporary stage set up in front of the Justice Building as the roped-off portion of the square gets more and more filled. The muscles surrounding her mouth twitch involuntarily, and Birdie sighs deeply and holds her elbows, breathing out her anxiety. She feels like her mother, in the long red skirt and clean white blouse, hair cordoned back against her head She looks like her too.

The eyes, some people say. That she has Laura Roslin's eyes, especially her stare. Or her jaw. Sometimes her cheekbones. Or her hands, of all things. Her voice, more rarely, but from people who knew what Laura Roslin sounded like outside of her presidential persona.

The stage was a small set-up, unlike the stages in Districts One or Two. Timber from the tree-line. Two glass balls, one for the girls and one for the boys, a podium with a microphone, and three chairs.

Two of the three chairs are filled by a Doral, the acting mayor, and the Six they call Caprica, who is punished for some crime yet unknown to the populace by being forced to act as the escort to New Caprica's poorest district.

Just as the clock atop the Justice Building strikes noon, the Doral stands and steps up the podium and begins to read. It is the same as is read every year—the story of the oppression of the cylons, the mistreatment of them at mankind's hands. The failed rebellion, how they fled. And then came back, for justice. How they chased humanity to this mudball—although the Doral didn't used quite the same terminology—and conquered man once and for all. How New Caprica rose over the failed Baltar regime and helped, humanity. Made them survive. Built the circular walls of the city, and placed the Capitol in the center and another set of smooth, circular walls, before dividing humanity into twelve castes.

How the civilization of New Caprica, where cylons and humans could live in peace and prosperity, arose out of the ashes with the capitol, ringed by her twelve children, just like Kobol and the twelve colonies. Birdie flinches when he gets to the part of how Galactica fell out of the sky, and was brought down in flames. How the great Admiral Adama, the symbol of the colonies' hubris, was torn down so humanity could start anew.

But the colonists and mankind still had to pay the price for their sins and oppression. And so the Hunger Games were born. And the tesserae. And the catena, and the brands. Humanity would pay for its decadence and lechery. The children would bear the sins of their mothers and fathers, and every year, each district would offer up two tributes, a boy and a girl, between the ages of twelve and eighteen in a ceremony called the Reaping.

The twenty-four tributes would be imprisoned in a great arena somewhere else on the planet, an arena that could be anything from a vast desert wasteland to an arctic tundra.

And then over the course of a few weeks, they would fight to the death.

To make it humiliating to the lower castes, the cylons would pit the wealthier districts, the favorite few, against the poor, hungry masses. They allow for the careers. Require each district to make the Games into a spectacle, and shower the victor and the victor's districts with food and wealth.

(The victors are almost always careers. The careers are almost always victors.)

While the tributes battle each other, the colonists battle starvation and watch the decadently rich from the Capitol on the screens set up in town square.

"It is a time for repentance and a time for thanks," intones the mayor. If District Twelve had had any victors in the past seventeen years, the mayor would have read their names. But they had none. Instead he introduced District Twelve's mentor by other means: Gaius Baltar, who is bug-eyed and trips up the stairs before coltishly making his way to his seat accompanied by the silent glares the people he failed.

Anger coils tightly in Birdie's veins, like cautious prey ready to fight back.

A look of abject distress flits across the Doral's face—this is being televised across the districts and he knows that he is making a fool of himself to the cylons he answers to in the Capitol. They'll always be the laughingstock of New Caprica. The dirty, the poor, the hardened. The hungry.

Good. They deserve it, she thinks venomously, her face not betraying an emotion. Baltar searches the crowd from his seat like he does every year—until he finds her, pales, and looks away. Gaius frakkin' Baltar deserves it.

Eager to move on, Doral calls Caprica Six to the podium.

Cheery as ever, the Six sashays to the podium and gives her signature, "Happy Hunger Games. And may the odds be ever in your favor."

Birdie turns back and through the crowd she can see Rosie, and Nick and Will. She turns back to the podium, and fights the instinct lift her hand to her throat, to rub at the chain that usually lays there.

There are over a thousand slips, she thinks, the world narrowing to one point—the glass bowl filled with one thousand, two hundred, and twenty-three tiny slips of paper. She feels so close to them, in this moment every year. Tangible, it's almost tangible. Her death is almost tangible. The battle, the fight. Like them. Die like they dead. Go out fighting. Like a martyr. Mean something to the people.

(Be good, be smart, be brave, be strong.)

But her mother had wanted her to live, so painfully she had. Does. Dreams of an ocean and of an end.

(Eleanor, I love you so much.)

Caprica smiles, and it is somehow both malicious and somewhat sad.

"Ladies first."

(Stay alive. Now, run!)

The crowd holds a collective breath, a shuddering, pale thing. Hoping, despairing. Unlike in District One, there is no bold career to step forward and volunteer. This is not a ceremony—it is a death sentence and they will all have to walk willingly.

Birdie can look at no one.

And then—a blur.

"Roslin Tyrol," the Six had announced primly, and Birdie remembers the world growing fuzzy as Rosie, all of eighty pounds and twelve years old and a shaking, pale thing in her older sister's dress. The peacekeepers went for her and she cried out.

Some unnamable force propels Birdie towards the middle, her hands wringing in her tattered dress, eyes on the Tyrol siblings, all five of them, on Rosie's tears and Nicky's crazed eyes. On their sisters clutching to their mother.

No one to volunteer for her, not with Isis over the reaping age.

Gods, Birdie thinks. She wouldn't even make it out of the Cornucopia. I could. I'm fast. I couldone slip, one slip in over a thousand.

Duty is in her blood.

She's just a little girl. She was named after my mother. I helped raise her. She's Nicky's little sister, she's Aunt Maya's daughter, she's my—

The peacekeepers reach for her, to push her back into line as she steps out into the aisle, her small, quick feet carried swiftly by her trim, cleanly muscled legs. She knows how to hunt. Knows where to cut to kill. She could—she could

It feels like the time she almost drowned, kicking and screaming in lake as she was pulled under by the current. It feels like that moment in Detention, when they suffocated her for information, that moment when her lungs burned and nothing made sense and she had forgotten what air was, that moment before they let her breathe again. That pain, that single-minded, burning pain.

One slip in over a thousand.

The odds had always been against them.

"I volunteer!" she gasps. "I volunteer as tribute!"

Her feet carry her to the stage, the gravel squelching under her scuffed shoes. In a daze, mechanically, driven by instinct more than anything else. A bastard is no longer a bastard after they are reaped. Their father does not have to name them.

They can name their father.

She pauses at the end of the aisle and then, eyes on the widely-smiling Six, walks to her one chance out. She'll name her father. William Adama, she says in her head like mantra, wonders how it will feel, rolling off her tongue. And then they all will know.

My father was William Adama. My mother was Laura Roslin. They were unmarried at the time of my birth. I was to be Eleanor, not Birdie, called bastard.

And then it will all begin.

There is a moment of confusion on the stage. District Twelve has never had a volunteer before. And Birdie is not exactly following the protocol.

"Lovely," says the Caprica Six with a circumspect grin that fails to reach her eyes. "But I believe that there's a small matter of introducing the reaping winner, and then asking for volunteers—"

"What does it matter?" says the mayor, disgruntled and tired. He looks at Birdie with a flash of faint recognition. Like he should recognize her, but doesn't. A look washes over Caprica's face that says the same. And then they both look at each other, and blanch in panic.

Baltar clears his throat. "Let her come forward," he says, in a surprisingly strong voice. He holds his arm out to her.

Birdie flinches, hearing Roslin scream hysterically for her through the din, before hitting her with her solid little body, wrapping her arms around her like a vice.

"No, you can't!" she screams. "You can't!"

"Roslin Tyrol, let go," Birdie tells her harshly, trying to shuck the girl from her midsection. She cannot look weak. Not if she's to be the tribute. She cannot be weak. She cannot cry, and she wants to cry. But she will walk bravely to her death, and spare the girl. She can be like her mother. She can. She was Laura's little girl before and she can be it again. "I said let go."

She feels someone lift the girl from her back, and turns around to see little Rosie thrashing and kicking in Nicky's arms. Will grabs her and pulls Birdie into a hug, before returning with Nicky to go back to their lines.

"Up you go, Little Bird," Will says with a cock-sure tone.

Birdie stares at him.

"No, Will—I know what you're—"

He gives her a push.

Birdie turns, a horrified look on her face, and begins her walk to the stage. With stiffened fingers, she rolls up her left sleeve to reveal her brands, which she will have to present to the mayor and to the Six.

"Bravo," says the Six. She gives her a knowing stare, and a forced smile. There's a hint of truth in it, Birdie thinks. And fear. "That's the spirit of the Games. What's your name?" she asks, pulling Birdie to the microphone.

She swallows hard, eye searching hard for someone she knows to be long-gone.

"My father was William Adama. My mother was Laura Roslin. They were unmarried at the time of my birth. I was to be Eleanor, not Birdie, called bastard."


No one is surprised when, minutes later, William Thrace Anders volunteers to enter the arena at her side.

No one applauds.

They raise three fingers to the sky in silent salute, and the two of them, born together and raised together, are ushered in the Justice Building in order to say their goodbyes.

Elsewhere on New Caprica, a revolution begins to stir.


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