A/N: I'm so sorry this took nearly forever. Hopefully it's worth it, and hopefully the next chapter won't take nearly as long as this one. What was supposed to be an easy semester turned out to be absolutely crazy. Also apologies because apparently 's page breaks are being very fickle? Should I start using something else to mark POV changes?
filmyfurry: I hear ya on the OC thing-it's why I was so hesitant to write this!
Tawnyleaf: No matter how long it takes me to update (hemhem) please know I'd never abandon this. Because, A. I love it too much, and B. I've got five people constantly nagging me about it on tumblr. ;) And thanks for catching my typos. Hopefully I went through this one better than the last chapter.
Rococoms: Thanks! Every time I look at my summary I just think "Emily why would anyone want to read this it's insane" but thanks for taking a chance on me!
murphycat: Spoilers, sweetie! ;)
UA: Thank you so much! And yup, forever writing this!
CHAPTER THREE: THE CHILDREN OF LESSER GODS
Birdie bites the barest insides of her cheek as Helena, a woman with tightly-coiled hair and shimmery gold eyeshadow, yanks a strip of fabric away from her leg. "Sorry!" she pipes in her affected Capitol speech. "Almost done, almost done. You're just so hairy!"
She wonders why these people speak in such a high pitch, so softly; she has to strain to hear her at all. So opposite the shouted voices of District Twelve, the melting pot of accents, from the most proper Caprican to a Tauron twang, even the strange amalgation of pronunciations and affects that her peers have picked up. (Birdie realizes, of course, that she sounds nothing like her mother, or Aunt Kara, or the others. None of them do.)
Helena makes what Birdie supposes is intended to be a sympathetic face. "Good news, though. This is supposed to be the last one. Ready?"
This is no worse than the other things. Birdie sucks the fleshy inside of her cheek between her molars, clenching one of her hands in the other, nodding. The final swathe of leg hair is uprooted in a painful jerk, and all Birdie can think is, I'm not a savage.
She's been in the Remake Center for more than three hours without meeting her stylist, who apparently holds no notions of meeting her until Helena and the other members of the female tribute prep team have addressed all the obvious problems (the skin on Birdie's face and hands still tingles strangely from the cream they applied, tsking over her scars, oblivious to her protests about keeping them) of washing and scrubbing down a girl who, twelve hours previous, had trudged through the sewer system in the middle of the night to get to a gunshot victim.
"You've done very well," says another member of her prep team, Jupiter, who looks more primped and polished than Helena. "If there's one thing that puts a damper on the day, it's a whiner! They call it torture, but what else is beauty?"
She smiles weakly, but as surely as she can manage.
Torture, then?
(Yes, she has endured quite a bit without flinching.)
"Let's grease her down."
Helena and a second woman, Violetta, a tall wiry figure with dark red nails and slicked hair, clinically rub her down with a thick paste, soothing away the sting of the waxing and the plucking and the burning ointment for the scars.
(They left the brands, though. Of course they left the brands.)
Pulling her from the table, they strip her of the thin robe she has been permitted to wear on and off, circling her warily, tweezers poised.
Birdie realizes that this kind of examination should perturb her on some level, but has already decided to live outside these moments; made this decision long ago on the concrete floor of the detention center, a One and a Three standing over her with gloved hands. They had rent their hands over her skin; wrought broken capillaries and fingers, and she returned to live only with the scars to remind her of what she endured.
She blinks carefully. Returning slowly. She wonders if they would notice even if it was with a jarring snap.
She realizes the three have stepped back to examine their work. "Excellent!" Jupiter exclaims. "A beauty, now. Such a beauty."
Birdie curls her lips into a practiced smile (thinks of her mother, her mother's smile, her mother's eyes, the way her mother would pitch her voice.) "Thank you," she says sweetly, with more than a hint of the Twelver accent. "We don't have mucha cause or use for beauty in District Twelve."
Simple.
Be smart, Eleanor.
"Of course you don't, you poor darling!" says Violetta, clasping her hands together in some display of pseudo-commiseration. "But now you do. And we're going to make sure you look the part every inch."
"Don't you worry," Helena chimes in kindly. Birdie cannot help but feel a twinge of… something, for them; however she tries to tamp it down. "By the time our stylist is done with you, you're going to be absolutely gorgeous! By the gods your parents may have been… unfortunate, but those genetics, together! Your eyes! And your hair! And your skin, after a good scrubbing, isn't too bad either. Tans are in this season."
"And your pores!" Violetta adds in, encouraging her. Birdie fists her hands into her robe. "They're so tiny. And you don't look too much like either your parents, so that's fine. You're a sight better than last year's girl. By Zeus she was pitiful."
Whatever goodwill Birdie held towards them is, at that moment, lost. Last year's girl. Last year's girl had a name. She had a name and a family. Brothers and sisters. Friends. And a future.
"Let's call in your stylist."
They dart out of the room, chirping and excited. Birdie reminds herself again and again that they're total idiots. Complete idiots. Tries to work out their ages. They must have been barely school age when the colonies fell. They are trying to help me, Birdie reminds herself. I do not want their help, but I need it all the same. You do not need them hating you.
Birdie tugs the waist of her robe around her tightly. Far from self-conscious; she feels strangely cold, the kind of cold that presumes the autumn frost, the insidious kind that creeps and slithers into people's chests, forewarning the hacking coughs and blue lips, red-coated palms, and funeral pyres instead of loamy graves. It's the dead kind of cold that comes from missing someone.
It is then that she allows herself to think of Will, and how he fares. He's much more easy-going than her. Friendlier. Like a puppy, she thinks sardonically. He spent his childhood tempering her and Nick. (Although, Birdie thinks, they had not always been this way. The kingdom of childhood makes even New Caprica easier to palate.)
It is then that she allows herself to think of Nick, prays to Artemis above that he and Uncle Galen have not torn into each other yet. Body broken, Uncle Galen is still a knuckledragger, she thinks. And Nick, with his quick-rising temper. But Isis, the calming waters in the family. The Tyrols, she thinks, and sighs.
The Tyrols. Aunt Kara. Doc Cottle. Jean Barolay. Erin Matthias. Seelix. The small, dwindling family her mother had carved out for them.
Her mother, Hera above.
(Birdie thinks of Saturday mornings in the prayer tent, her mother's crooked fingers wrapped around her child's, helping her light the candles for the Mother and the Father. How much had been taken from them. How much, Birdie wonders, was left to take. What, perhaps, she can take back. What can she hold in her hands. What can she hold in her heart, or on her tongue, or the tongues of strangers.)
I sing of golden-throned Hera. Queen of Immortals is she.
She thinks of the clothes that the prep team had stripped from her. Her father's tags. Gone forever, she supposes, like so much else before them. One less thing to clench in her fist. Should she have tried to hold on? Should she have fought, instead of sinking?
A melancholy presses down on her small, able frame.
The door opens, and something small and fragile inside of her collapses, like a dying a star.
(In the end, it is always Eleanor, the child, who remains.)
Anie had been such a fierce girl. Sixteen, and fearless, with twenty-two slips in the ball, and eyes that dared anyone who would think to volunteer for her to defy her wrath. It's how Nick prefers to remember her, rather than as the girl who was easily overpowered during the first night by a group of frakking careers, before getting her throat slit open for the whole frakking world to see.
And now Birdie. Ella.
She has never told him that she loves him. He knows she does, has seen it in the blatant panic in her eyes. Loving Rosie, loving Stephie, loving Will, loving aunts and uncles, that's simple for her. And he understands it, he does. Investing in someone as a—a spouse, a partner. It's a different kind of binding and Birdie only knows the ways it can go bad. And he can't fault her for that. Families, they fall apart. And he knows she could never bear to leave a child behind without its mother.
He loves it about her.
He levers the axe down again and again and frakking again, chopping up enough wood for the entire block to last the night. The place where they grew up, slowly emptying and filling with ghosts.
Eight houses that spill out onto the gravel street—the faintest sound of it squelching under their homebound shoes reverberating in the space between his shoulders. The clinic, and Doc's house, on the left. The old Tigh place, which Erin and her family took up. And then theirs. On the right, the Anders, and then what had been the Clellans, before Seelix. Jean Barolay and her family.
And on the end, the empty plot where the house with the red door once stood.
Red, for promiscuity. For the motherfrakking godsdamned brand.
Aunt Laura had been a good woman. A good leader. Nick doesn't remember too much about her—she was kind, but sad, with gentle, crippled hands. She never minded helping him with his arithmetic.
He likes to think that Birdie got all the best of her.
(He remembers his father throwing himself into the flames alongside the Colonel, trying to stopper the Centurions and Peacekeepers from entering the house, keeping them from going after Birdie, flying away into the night. He remembers trying to go in after him, Jean's arms tight around his shoulders, yelling no. His mother's terrified shrieks. His father's body, broken by dawn. The Colonel, executed alongside Aunt Laura.)
He tries not to remember, swinging the axe again and again and again, until his palms crack open and bleed. He lifts his face from his task, realizing, finally, the tears dripping down his face, his running nose. Swiping at his face with the back of his hand, his eyes find Birdie's dog, panting on the back stoop, panting at him expectantly.
"Good boy," he chokes to him. "Momma'll be back home soon."
(He does not remember his real mother, has nothing but her service portrait to remember her by. His father's words about the woman named Cally are few and far between, and Maya has raised him like nothing but her own flesh and blood.)
Again. And again. And again.
He's eighteen frakking years old. He's made it out of his last Reaping. He is going to attend this meeting of his father's tonight. And he is going to fight.
Every breath is a heave with the axe.
He's a man.
He remembers the look on Anie's face. On Birdie's. Soldiers, all. They were raised by soldiers in a warzone. It's his time.
Startling at the hand on his shoulder, he gives a small yelp. Turns, to see Isis smiling sadly at him, gauze in her hands. She always looks at him like she holds a beautiful secret behind her back, like she's always waiting to pull out the shiny treasure from under her shirt and show it to him.
"Come along," she whispers. "You're bleeding."
He nods dumbly, following her to the clinic.
"You bitch!" By the grace of Caprica's viselike grip, Eleanor's hands do not wrap themselves around Ellen Tigh's throat, despite her best intentions. "You frakking traitor bitch!"
Gaius realizes he should have expected this—the girl has clearly inherited Roslin's stunning ability to hold a grudge and Adama's charming preponderance to brute force. As the Peacekeepers wrestle her back into submission, he wonders if those traits could be molded into something like victorhood.
He's happy she looks something more human now, Ellen Tigh's styling team having tamed the girl's hair and stripped most of her body of her scars, now just faded bronze marks against her dark olive skin.
"Miss Adama," Caprica says, the anger in her voice barely constrained by her indomitable will. "This is your stylist. If I recall correctly, you are already acquainted. And if you do not act as you should, you will find yourself suffering for your actions."
Eleanor's face quickly shutters, blanking out, hands falling limply to her side as Caprica's hand slides up to the back of her neck, nails biting into the delicate skin below her chin. "You will be polite. And charming. And whatever else I tell you to be."
Caprica smiles. "Now, go."
The girl follows Ellen Tigh dumbly into the styling chamber.
Strange creature, Gaius thinks. And getting stranger by the minute.
"Tell me Gaius," Caprica says, voice alight with her unique sense of muted wonder. "Will they even let her leave the Cornucopia?"
"W-what do you mean?" Her pull, like gravity, pulls him along behind her as she walks down the corridor.
"Can't you see her?"
"Well, of course I can see her; she's right in front of my face." He pauses. "Our faces."
"A little hope is a miraculous thing, Gaius," she tells him, sure. "Do you really think they had the Admiral's DNA waiting on file somewhere?"
"They hardly would have had to test her DNA. Her face is in every government database and—besides, who else would have fathered Laura Roslin's child?" They step into the elevator, rocketing away to the penthouse suite. They both catch the location of the cameras with practiced ease. "At least we have a fighter. The boy, I know little about."
She snorts. "You slept with his mother."
His face wrinkles indecently. "Nineteen years ago."
"Kara Thrace was a fighter."
"Laura Roslin wasn't and look how the girl turned out." The door opens, and he shrinks, letting her exit first. "It isn't all—all genetics."
"Is it all nurture then?"
"No," Gaius stammers, striding awkwardly to the sidebar, fixing himself a drink.
"Nature?" She sidles up beside him.
"No."
"Humans," she chides laughingly. "Such impossibly complex creatures. Contradictions and redundancies so inherent in your natures."
"Do you even give a good frakking godsdamned about them?" They've had this conversation, and its many iterations and permutations before. Cylon escort, human mentor. And child soldiers. "Is it a good frakking laugh then? Watch them go off and kill each other, while you can resurrect after getting slaughtered like a stuck pig! Different kids every year, but you all just stay the same!"
"Don't," she hisses, and much like Eleanor had gone to before, her hand encloses around his neck, slamming up against the wall. "Don't."
He slumps against her iron grip. "I won't," he concedes, easily defeated. Yes, Gaius Baltar is just that, middle aged and not quite balding, greasy dark hair curling over his shoulders, belly swollen with alcohol and years.
Laura Roslin, he thinks sincerely, shaken, should have stolen that election.
Who was it who told him she planned to, all those years ago? He suspects his old Vice President, before the cylons starved him to death on the Settlement.
Well, starved or worked. Tom Zarek had never been a fan of hard labor.
Well, he didn't like working with children just to send them off to their deaths, but he did what he had to. To stay alive. Even suffering the hard faces of those whose lives he signed away, eighteen years ago.
Still, he wonders faintly. He had always heard that Laura Roslin went down fighting.
"Just give me moment, all right?" Ellen asks, surreptitiously wiping a tear from her hard, smooth face. Birdie watches the woman she once considered family with a removed sense of amazement. She moves cautiously around her robed body, hands folded behind her back. Birdie cannot move, not after what Ellen told her. "Who did your hair?"
"Maya. Maya Tyrol." she answers as if speaking to a dream.
"It's beautiful, really. Almost in perfect balance with your profile. She always had very clever fingers for that sort of thing, though," Ellen answers back, almost defensive. This is not the woman that Birdie remembers. This is not Uncle Saul's shrewd and callous wife. "You look… you look a lot like her. I thought, for some reason, that you would look like him. Or like your..."
"You're new, aren't you?" Birdie asks, just as cautious, tentatively cutting her off.
Ellen smiles breakingly. "I used to… I used to do District Two, years ago. You were still small. But… but they contacted me a few hours ago."
Birdie nods.
"What for?"
What are you being punished for? Ellen shakes her head, almost imperceptibly. Not being punished, being watched. And why not put the two people you're watching the closest together?
Ellen looks at her strangely then, before announcing in a tone of voice that Birdie remembers clearly, "You're much too skinny. No one will like you if you look emaciated. Come. We'll chat while we eat. While you eat."
She follows (Aunt, echoes lonesome in the space between her ears) Ellen through a door into a sitting room. Two red couches face off over a low, gleaming table. Three walls are blank, shining navy, and the fourth is glass, spilling out over the city. Birdie's eyes are drawn to the skyline, the fading sun setting over District One. It's not crowded like Twelve—one is all sloping grassy plains and large manor houses, brick streets and luxurious stores.
Ellen directs her to sit (with her eyes, glassy and now, Birdie can see in the light, red-rimmed) to sit on one of the couches. Pressing a button on the side of the table, she sits back, allowing the top of the table to split. From below rises a second tabletop, laden with hot, steaming foods.
Birdie then realizes that she has not eaten a thing all day.
She thinks of Anie again, thinks of how closely she might be tracing her footsteps.
She looks down at the meal, its braised meat and creamy sauces, green vegetables and golden, steamy bread, the finely-churned butter. The hunger crisis is not a lie, not a cylon-fabricated punishment, Birdie knows. Her mother knew it too. New Caprica was never stable enough to support long-term human residence, and they are going on nineteen years now of colonization now.
(Birdie eats the unattractive grain of the tesserae, whatever meat she can hunt under the Peacekeeper's noses and without garnering the attention of the Centurions. The citizens of District Twelve can hunt, but not without an expensive license and government approval. Many, instead, have learned to bypass the system.)
(Bows don't make nearly as much noise as hunting rifles.)
She looks up and sees Ellen's eyes trained on her own. "How despicable I—we, must seem to you."
She hesitates.
"The stories, whatever they told you about me after I left Saul, and all of you, behind. They're probably true."
Birdie feels naked, vulnerably so for the first time since arriving in the Capitol.
Ellen Tigh has known her all her life.
Is this a ploy? Is Ellen Tigh trying to buy her sympathy the way she frakked her way out of District Twelve?
"No matter," she says brusquely. "So, Eleanor." Birdie, she wants to correct her. Her mother is dead. Her mother gave her the name Eleanor. The name died alongside her mother. But to defeat this, she must take up the mantle of Eleanor again, with whatever memories of her mother's airy alto it will bring. "About your costume for the opening ceremony. My… partner, Sharon, is young William's stylist. And as I'm sure you know, dear, it's custom to reflect the flavor of the district in the costumes of the tributes."
For the opening ceremonies, the tributes are to be costumed in something that suggests their district's patron god and goddess. It's a farce, of course, a mockery of the Lords of Kobol by the cylons who believe so ardently in their One True God. (Birdie wonders if Ellen has taken up their God, as well, if not just Cavil's bed.)
District One, Zeus and Hera. District Two, Aphrodite and Ares. So on and so forth… and District Twelve, the gods she and Will took up as children, the hunters, the twins—Apollo and Artemis.
(I had a brother they called Apollo. Birdie brushes the thought away, makes it become errant. I had two brothers.)
"So I'll be in a chiton?" Birdie asks. Their costumes always pale in comparison to the shimmering gold fabrics from District One, the elaborate silks and jewels of District Two.
"Not… quite." A smile, ever so familiar, slithers onto her surgically-tightened face. "You see, Sharon and I think that the plain white cotton thing is very overdone. No one would remember you two in that, darling. And we're both supposed to make you two unforgettable."
She knows that smile.
Ellen Tigh had been married to her godfather, after all. She slept nights on their floor in a nest of blankets. Sat on her lap. Helped her make dinner. Fell prey to her manipulations.
"So rather than focusing on Artemis and Apollo themselves, we're going to focus on what they represent. The sun and the moon. The light, and the Phaesporia. The light bringer. The moon."
Birdie would like to point out that, factually, that's not true, but she doesn't have the… well, something, to interrupt. She feels eight-years-old again, pinned under Ellen's permeating stare.
"No…" she murmurs, a bit dazed.
"You're not afraid of fire, are you, Eleanor?"
"Ellen Tigh!" a disbelieving voice carries through the tunnel. "Ellen frakking Tigh?"
"Sound like I'm lying to you, missy?" A cane taps along the flagstone floor, a light bobbing along as the two figures exit out of the shadows and into the bunker. "They brought her outta retirement for this one."
"I'd love to see how that reunion went down. Love to hear how Tigh's gonna react to that." Kara chuckles, eyes half-manic. "And who's Will got?"
"Boomer."
"Oh you have got to frakking kidding me!" Kara hisses, slamming the door behind them. Cottle hobbles to the console, lowering his body into the chair. "This was a set-up."
Cottle laughs dryly. "Of course it is. Now would you shut up? We have a call to make, so scramble the signal. Isis and Nick are waiting upstairs, and those two have frakking noses like terriers when it comes to stumbling on things they shouldn't."
Rolling her eyes, Kara sits down and puts her fingers to the worn circuit boards.
"It's not real flame, of course, just a little synthetic fire that we've come up with along the way," Boomer explains. Will nods along gamely, although not entirely convinced that he won't be reduced to Tauron barbeque by the time they reach the center of the coliseum.
That would really just make all the advice his mother gave him completely useless.
He looks to Birdie, standing silently beside him in a simple, yet elegant, glittering navy chiton that falls to just above her knees, speckled with shiny bits of silver that fill with light when shea turns just so. Will has never seen her look so… polished, he thinks, might be the right word, her skin all one texture and color and shiny, lacquered with some sort of silvery luminescent powder. The strappy sandals winding up her calves are silver as well, as well as the delicate quiver slung at her waist. An innocuous navy cape, draped elegantly across her broad shoulders and down her back, hangs on the whim of two silver clasps shaped like crescent moons.
Her face is relatively clear of make-up, which leaves him strangely relieved. Her hair has been brushed into neat curls bound back in a miasma of tiny, intricate braids cascading down her back, a silver-glossed laurel resting lightly on her head.
"I want the audience to recognize her," Ellen says fondly. "Eleanor, the girl who was on fire."
It crosses Will's mind that they are probably not dealing with sane people.
He stands in something looking quite the opposite. Not in construction, but in color scheme. Where his best friend is in navy and silver, he is in white and gold. Apollo, the golden boy, the sun god. (Even your coloring, Sharon had commented on his pale looks and Birdie's dark features. Will had swallowed nervously, remembering that it had been this particularly model who had put two rounds in his namesake's chest.)
They are whisked down the stairs into the basement of the Remake Center, where they are shuffled into another fancy-looking car. Minutes pass by in silence, both entranced by the tall,s sleek Capitol buildings. Settled next to Birdie, stoic as always, he leans down to whisper to her. "So what d'you think? 'Bout the fire?"
"You rip off my cape and I'll rip off yours," she replies through (whitened) gritted teeth. "I know I promised Caprica or whatever the frak her name is to—don't look at me like that, dumbass, I'll tell you later if we don' fry—to do exactly what they said, but I don't think she considered that we'd get blown up before the games even began."
"Where are those two, anyway?" Will asks, voice low and steady, like it is when hunting. "Aren't they supposed to make sure we're good an' safe until they're ready for us to die?"
"Dunno." Birdie shrugs. "Dunno abou' those two in general."
Their eyes (blue and green, every shade of blue a shade of green) lock, and both snort before Birdie dissolves in giggles. Will rolls his eyes at her as the car comes to a stop and her shoulders continue to shake.
"Come along," Will says, dragging her out of the car and into another cavernous basement, pulling her onto his arm. "Come along, Birdeline."
She wrinkles her nose. "No."
"You actually don't have a choice."
She goes to make a witty retort, before the concrete walls shake. Air raid, Will thinks, freezing, clutching Birdie tighter.
"No, asshole," she snaps, tugging him along with her to follow Ellen and Sharon. She points up with a manicured finger. "The crowd. The arena. We're under it." She seems shaken though. She blinks at him, and then at the ground. "No heroics, all right? Just promise me. No heroics. You hear me, golden boy?"
He nods, looking only ahead. "Got it."
They follow Ellen and Sharon to a wide open staircase, and towards the roaring crowd.
He smiles tremulously at her. "Here we go."
They huddle in their sparsely-furnished compound, around their sparsely-used television set. Can't get a signal this far out anyway. She can't figure for the life of her why Saul negotiated for a frakking television set of all things.
"Can the generator even support this?" Felix asks, connecting and reconnecting wires.
"Well, we're gonna find out," Saul growls back, sitting heavily next to her. "Now calm the frak down there isn't anything else we can do but wait." He turns to her. "You gonna be okay?"
"Shut up."
"You're not gonna do that thing where you puke when you're nervous about her, are you? Because that got real old real fast. I'll get you a bucket, though."
"I'll hit you over the head with a bucket," she mutters, tunneling her fingers through her hair.
Saul takes one of her hands in between his, gnarled old fingers threading through impossibly-young, but pained, ones. Oh, if only she'd known the consequences of taking the hybrid blood. Not that she had a choice in the matter. But still… experimental treatment indeed. Cottle had been right to be wary.
Felix reconnects something in a way that must have been just right, the screen coming to life with fizzles and cracks of dancing static. He limps away from the screen, examining it precisely. The static clears, and he hobbles over to their comm station.
"We've got it. Try and transmit audio through, now." A muffled voice responds through the other, and seconds later, they have sound. Laura smiles up at Felix, her expression worn and thin and grey. He returns it. "Got it. Over and out."
"How is it being handled over on their side?" Saul asks, eye widening. She looks at him. He's wondering if they would kill Ellen to get to the children. Even now, after all she's done and hasn't done, and time…
Felix drops heavily into the chair at the comm. "Meeting tonight after the ceremony. Starbuck will get back into contact with us after that. They want to do a flyover with the few vipers they've salvaged over the years, do some recon on whether or not the cylons are really monitoring us anymore."
"And after—" Like magnetism or something stronger, she feels herself being pulled back into the position of leader. She is always going to be pulled there, she thinks. Even now. Especially now. She stops, the commentators giving way to the feed inside the coliseum in the center of the city.
Their signal is grainy, but strong.
Six years. She hasn't laid eyes on her child in almost six years. Left, gave up everything, so that Ella could live. Made certain she would live.
Oh, how she was Bill's daughter.
The opening music begins, and swells, and the camera pans to reveal the thousands of people in the stands, before slowly making its way to focus on the massive doors that the tributes on their chariots will circle out from. District One rides out first, in their silver and gold and peacock plumes, their horses costumed with large, white, feathered wings. Laura can hear the crowd roaring over the music, knows District One is always the favorite—she doesn't care, can't care. District Two follows, and each one after that, faster and faster.
Her heart pounds. Has she ever known a fear like this? This fear and this love? Saul grips her hand tighter as Felix's daughter exits the gate with her partner. Mina, tall and lithe with bronzed skin and blonde hair.
Seven, Eight, Nine.
She grits her teeth painfully, the nerves in her jaw going numb.
My child.
She is so intensely proud of her, but so, so afraid. Has been captivated by this fear since the moment the Galactica crashed and burned out of the sky. Without hope, how could she protect this child? And Ella has proved herself to be so strong and so brave, so much of her and so much of Bill, this tiny mewling infant who had been born as the first wisps of dawn crossed the first morning of the long night.
Ella became her hope.
Ten. Eleven.
And then—
They gasp, alarmed, before realizing with the crowd's roar—
She is—
Oh Gods, she thinks, before realizing that she had in fact breathed it aloud. The music pounds, the cheers of the crowd growing as Ella and Will (she feels guilty for not thinking of him more, sooner, for he is her godson and—but—) make their way through the arena, the camera focusing on her daughter's eyes, green and every shade of intense and serious as Bill's, chin lifted high. Defiant. Her child is still defiant.
There is a flicker of hope inside her, that perhaps now they can get sponsors, besides what that Twelve will be able to send them. They will have more time. (More time for them to figure how to break them out, because Laura Roslin will tear down walls and entire cities and civilizations to save her daughter's life. Ella is not going to die. She will not allow it. All they need is…)
A chance.
Eleanor will have a chance.
Saul presses his handkerchief into her hand, and Laura realizes how hard she is crying, lifting her hand to tamp down on it.
She watches Will turn to look at her girl, Ella catching his gaze; they smile, link hands, and raise them above their hands. Partners in the cradle, and partners in the games. The crowing commentators seem stunned, Laura Roslin thinks proudly, the blue-silver and gold flames growing together and starbusting out towards the night, feeding off the other.
Eleanor! the crowd screams, throwing roses at her little girl's feet.
"Now see that?" the man, some brainless Capitol crony, shouts breathlessly. "I love that! Two young people, lifting their hands up saying I'm proud of being from District Twelve! We will not be overlooked! Now I love that!"
"Well," the other cuts in, "people are definitely going to be paying attention to them now!"
The first one laughs joyously. "William Anders and Eleanor Adama, the boy and girl on fire!"
Eleanor Adama.
For the first time six years, Laura Roslin hopes.
The raucous cheer in the main room of the Tyrol home dies the moment the camera cuts to Cavil. President Cavil, whichever has deigned to speak at the night's events. The national anthem plays, some bastardized notion of the original colonial anthem. The music ends with a ringing flourish, all camera poised on the One in charge.
Maya hushes Stephie in her arms; her grumbling cries the only sound in the room full of ex-military and rebels.
"Welcome," Cavil says with a charming smile. It echoes, the acoustics of the stadium built for resonance. "Welcome. Tributes, we welcome you. And we salute you, as you will go where no cylon can go. We salute your courage and your sacrifice."
As custom, the camera pans to each chariot. It lingers, they notice with tentative joy, on their kids. Hope.
It is a year too late for Anie, Isis muses sadly. But she would not mind too much. Her sister Anthea Tyrol had been raised in the tradition of self-sacrifice, just like the rest of them. They had broken father's body, and then his spirit. Again, and again.
"And we wish you," Cavil continues, holding his hands out to the crowd, "a Happy Hunger Games! And may the odds be ever in your favor."
The more the sun sets, Isis notices, the harder it is to take one's eyes off the boy and girl on fire. Good, she thinks. It must get dark.
Birdie nearly sleeps through dinner, her energy all but drained after the thrill of the ceremony. She craves sleep, padding into the bedroom of the penthouse suite. Her brain can barely process the luxury, the excess, as her hands numbly sort through the clothes in the dresser for something soft to sleep in.
Baltar and Caprica had acted so strangely at dinner, displaying a perverse form of giddiness.
She shakes her head. Not tonight.
In the morning.
She can sleep, her body tells her. Somehow, she feels safe, her lesser brain telling her to shut down. How long has she been awake? She had barely slept for two hours before Cottle prodded her awake to sew Billy's lip. Had that really only been that morning? Already, a clean line had demarcated her (shortly-ending, dwindling) life. The concept of before seemed so hazy. So far away. Stitching Billy's lip seemed to coincide with watching her mother's face in the window as she looked back—once, only once—before sprinting towards the woods.
It all ran together.
(She dimly realizes she's also drunk.)
(She does the unforgiving math a realizes she's had a few glasses of wine on nearly forty hours without sleep.)
She looks up from the dresser, bleary-eyed.
Her scars are gone. And her acne. And her frizz. The lines around her eyes. Her freckles. The cluster of moles around base of her left ear.
Birdie wonders if her mother ever looked into the mirror on Colonial One and didn't recognize what she saw. She wonders if her mother would be proud of her, or angry that she volunteered so that another Tyrol girl wouldn't have to die in the games. If she would be proud that she became a surgeon. If she would… just be proud.
Something hits her then, a sudden burst of adrenaline sparking her awake, her hand flying up to slap against her naked chest.
Her father's dog tags (are probably in Ellen's possession.)
Her minds slowly drags her back into the day, what Ellen had said.
I thought, for some reason, that you would look like him.
Does she, at all? She knows… she has seen pictures, of him, from his service record. Her mother had a few of the two of them together, from the year before the cylons came. But those were lost in the fire. Would she even recognize the man if she saw him? She's the… Admiral's daughter yes, but always Laura's little girl, first and foremost. Hers was the hand that held hers. The arms around her frame. The voice in her ear.
She has his name. Took it, for herself. (But her mother gave that to her, too.)
(She wonders what he sounded like.)
Be smart, Eleanor.
"Be smart," she tells herself, voice thick with sleep. She focuses her eyes harder on the mirror, imagines her cheekbones harder, her face thinner, hair redder. "Be smart. Be brave. Be strong." She pitches her voice lower, tries again. Lifts her chin. Stares herself down. Her mother's voice was more… it came from below. Tries again, nearly gets it.
She sighs, eyes slipping closed.
Collapses into bed.
Dreams do not come to her that night.
But the visions do not stay away.
Her mind fills of images of Galactica in the sky, her father standing with his tags in his fist, the golden sun breaking over a silver viper, the stars falling as they all burn.
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