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beccatoriaYes, I am still refusing to acknowledge the existence of the finale. And yet, somehow I seem to have managed to produce a Caprica-centric post-finale story. It had no beta, so all mistakes or poor choices are completely mine. The point of this story is catharsis; somehow turning the stuff I hated into something I could love, so probably the story deserves better than an unbeta'd dump onto my LJ. But equally, I'm done with it now, and combing through it might have done me more harm than good. So.
Title: The name of this story is your name.
Word Count: Approx. 6,000
Spoilers: Daybreak II and the entirety of human history.
Disclaimer: Not mine! Making no money!
Summary: What if Caprica didn't actually die. Ever.
The name of this story is your name.
You are in the limousine with Doctor Baltar. He tells you, “You can call me Gaius, actually, if you want.” It is an awkward segue. He wants to know your name.
You don't have one. You kiss him.
*
You realise after eight months that the native population will not take to agriculture; are not interested in complex tools; sit constantly at the edges of the Colonial campfires to listen to their music, but make none of their own.
It's the absence of language. Language precipitates art. Language is abstract. It's ritual and religion.
Gaius is a scientist. He knows the evolutionary track of his own ancestors. Seasons pass but you don't press him to admit it. You have never been cruel.
“It's a frakking sickle,” he says. “I can't even teach them it's a frakking sickle.”
You pull him close and think about a time when names meant nothing to you either.
*
You don't know who first spoke your name, but it's D'Anna that gives it to you. Like a gift. Like a nuclear armageddon especially for you.
You hate it. You look at the centurions planting trees in the memorial park, and understand that you are not the first being to hate your name, but that it is, irrevocably, yours.
*
You name her Julia, and you refuse to do it until she is in your arms because that lesson's name was Liam.
Gaius says he hates it. “It's depressing.”
“If it weren't for her grandfather, Gaius,” you say. “We wouldn't have any of this.”
“Right. A farmer's name for a farmer's daughter,” he mutters. “How perfectly poetic.”
He wants a cigarette and a pressed suit. He wants to teach his daughter about mathematics and literature and art. You look at her blonde hair and beautiful lips and wonder how many generations until there isn't even a farm. You wonder if she will be able to hold her own if she has to keep up with the aboriginal runners. You wonder if she'll be a good aim with a spear. If she'll be light enough they make her climb to the highest branches looking for fruit.
Gaius thinks you named her for a farmer.
You think of Julius. An awkward link between worlds.
*
“Caprica! Caprica Six!”
He catches your arm.
The first time he uses your name, you are too numb to hear it. You have been abandoned, so many times now.
He is trying to give you a gift. But you think, once again, he is asking for one.
“I have no desire to join your harem,” you tell him.
You leave.
*
You name him Felix.
Gaius says he hates it. “It's depressing. But I suppose I should be used to you naming our children after bad memories.”
“It means, 'lucky',” you tell him.
He looks around your home. The rough wood. The hole in the roof over a fire pit. Five clay pots, a grass mattress, and his daughter playing in the light of the doorway. She has a ball he made from animal hide and a long bone to hit it with.
Gaius carved wooden blocks and chipped out each letter of the alphabet. He mutters, sometimes, when he sees her staring at them, about the lack of context. No road signs, no paper, ten books in the entire settlement.
You feel such pride when he is like this; bitter about his children's future. You never knew you'd see him love so much. He talks about educational theory. The constant, implicit grief that Julia will never escape this small-town farm because there is not another place in the world for her to go. Let alone another planet.
Caprica.
It's your name.
“Lucky,” Gaius says, closing his eyes. “Yeah, of course he is.”
*
Hera Agathon dies at seventeen. She dies as her first and only daughter is born. She never named her.
You hold Athena bodily against the wall so that she does not collapse. Her screaming is low and primitive. Like the sounds you have heard the natives make when they bury their dead.
*
Hera's daughter does not die young. She marries young; your grandson. Felix's son, of course. Julia never had any children.
Julia was just like Gaius; there wasn't enough to learn. She went north with a local tribe to study their customs and make an inventory of their proto-linguistic capabilities.
When spring arrived, and the tribe passed through the settlement again, Julia did not return. The humans put their hands against your arms; a dozen of them, circling you like sheepskin.
They have no name for where Julia has gone, but you recognise that noise; that low, keening sorrow.
Your daughter is dead.
Athena's daughter is dead.
Your grandchildren marry young and have more children than they know what to do with. Two of them die in infancy; a third before he turns eight.
You ask Athena, “How long will these bodies last?”
Athena looks at her smooth hands, flips them over and says, “I don't know.”
*
You are a Cylon. Ellen Tigh tries to explain it to you, before she dies, coughing in the smoke of the campfire; weak as Laura Roslin was at the end.
“The Five,” she says. “We were born. We grow old. We die. The replacement bodies we made for our own resurrection were just clones. When we made you, we had to start from scratch. Your cells never stop replenishing themselves. I thought I was doing you a favour.”
She laughs.
You look at her and don't know whether she is your mother.
You say, “You named all the others. John and Leoben and D'Anna and Simon and Aaron and Daniel and Sharon. Why didn't you name me?”
Ellen coughs in the smoke. “You asked us not to,” she says.
You understand that.
*
Your body lasts longer than Gaius'. Than Helo's or Lee Adama's. Than the bodies of your children and your grandchildren and their grandchildren.
Your settlement is a fixture in the bowl of the savannah. You are a geographical feature in the migrations of the wildlife and the nomadic humans.
They start bringing their dead to bury in your cemetery.
You walk with Athena to the top of a peak. Below you see your huts, and fields. Increasingly, you do not farm. You watch your young people run out, like the aboriginals, to hunt and gather. They keep going further and further. Sometimes, they do not come back for weeks.
One day, they will not come back at all.
“I don't remember,” Athena says. “Which ones are mine. How many of them are my children?”
“By now,” you say. “I think they all are.”
“It kinda makes it creepy when they try to hit on you,” she says.
“They don't know what we are,” you say. “Not really. We don't die.”
You do die. You die all the time, from disease, from injury, from famine.
“Psyche,” Sharon says. “She was my great-granddaughter. We never taught her to read. First time we never even tried.”
“John,” you say. John was beautiful. He looked like Gaius. He was smart and remembered every poisonous herb within two-hundred kilometres. When you told him the sun was a star, that it was burning gas, he stared at you, awe-struck, and believed it.
John was illiterate. You realise, you don't regret that. There was nothing to write on, anyway.
John died four hundred years ago.
*
Gaius is saying, “You know, I know about farming.”
“Hey,” you say. “I know.”
You kiss him, because he is crying. You say, “I know you do.”
*
“I'm a farmer,” you say.
“Gramma, the crops fail,” Laura is your... You would need to count through the generations and you are worried you would not remember all their names. “If people were meant to be farmers, the locals'd do it. I know stuff was different, when you were in space. But farming's just not for Earth.”
You are not really a farmer. Neither was Gaius. But he got up every day and tried to make it work and you were so proud of him. You always wanted to be proud of him. Every day, you could remember, it wasn't missing any more.
“Gramma,” Laura says. “We need to move with the herds.”
So you do.
*
The first one to peel off is Leoben. One of him. You are walking. You have been walking for days. Quietly, casually, eating fruit from the trees, spearing small mammals. Gillies, everyone calls them. A made-up name, because when you first landed on this planet, before the raptors began to rust, a child found one and said it reminded him of Gilly. His dead rabbit.
Sharon might remember this. Leoben might. But no one else.
Leoben peels from the pack, and starts walking west, into the sunset.
You follow him, quick-stepping to catch up. “Where are you going?”
“I don't know,” he says.
“You'll die out there on your own.”
“Maybe,” he smiles.
You walk with him a dozen paces.
He stops. He turns to you; puts his hands on your shoulders. You realise, this is the Leoben you almost loved, for a decade, ten decades after Gaius. The only man for a continent you did not see grow from a child. Your brother.
He kisses you. You don't mind. You love him, you always have. By now, you wonder, in this vast space, who doesn't own a piece of your heart? Love was always your problem. You were not built to be alone.
“What is the first article of faith?” he asks.
“That this is not all that we are.”
Gently, Leoben turns you so that you are looking back to your people. A long line of fur-pelted, dirty, beautiful children.
“This is not all that we are,” he says.
“But they're ours.”
“They're swimming past us in the stream, Six. A part of us is always on the shore.”
You let him go. It has been more than a lifetime since someone called you Six. You had forgotten that it was your name, too, once.
He walks away, to a simplicity you envy.
*
You stay longer than most. Slowly, the other Cylon leave, just like Leoben.
You don't understand why, until the day comes you do it for yourself.
*
You do not speak for ten thousand years.
You don't stay with any group for long. Not more than six or seven generations. They have something close to language, and with that comes religion.
If you stay too long, they will want a name for God, and they will believe it's yours.
When you speak again, when you find your people – you can tell because they have bows and arrows, because they have words, because they stop and stare at you like you are something out of a myth, and you must be; there are no Cylon left with them – you discover you no longer share a language.
You do not stay.
*
You were built to be immortal, but you were not built to be alone.
You have lists. You repeat them so that you do not forget anything important. Your name. Your husband's name. The names of your children and grandchildren. The worlds you destroyed. The times you died. Your siblings. Your parents; and the reasons they are not your parents. The easiest way to kill a wild cat. The best kind of trap for Gillies. Gillies are named Gillies because Gilly was a dead rabbit. Some fish are also poisonous.
You remember, you were happiest on a farm, even though you knew you had no future. None at all. Except this.
Time dies.
You do not know how old you are.
Gaius is standing under a tree in a pinstriped suit, deep red shirt, with plastic sunglasses. You have not seen plastic in millennia.
He says, “You look charming, darling.”
You are wearing a hide poncho to your knees; for warmth more than modesty. Everything is colder than it was. Your hair is long now. It's dirty and matted. It does not occur to you to be self-conscious: Gaius is the one who looks alien and frightening.
You start crying, because seeing him, you realise you had forgotten what he looked like.
“There there,” he says, walking toward you. He pulls a handkerchief from his breast pocket. It's red like his shirt. He wipes away your tears, and some of the mud.
“Why are you here?” you ask.
“Because you're crying.”
“Is this part of God's plan?”
He takes your hand and doesn't answer.
Time is dead. You don't know if it's days or weeks or years later that you remember what he said, an epoch ago.
“You said my life would be uneventful.”
He says, “It has been.”
He is right. He has been your only event for an uncountable number of years.
“Why are you here?”
“You wanted me.”
You did.
*
It is when you are living by the ocean that you go insane.
You say, “Isn't company supposed to save me?”
He says, “No.”
He has a point. Alone, there was nothing to be. No one called your name, and perhaps you didn't have one. Just a memory of what it was, once.
Caprica. You went mad there too.
You reach out, and Gaius hands you a martini.
You are laughing and frakking and completely drunk when a knot of humans – not your children – wander onto the shore.
You frak most of them too.
The boy under you is feral, but so are you. You are drunk on ambrosia that hasn't existed in millennia, holding both his wrists against the beach-shingle. He tries to move his arms. You don't let him. He grins. You grin back.
His wrist snaps. He screams. You frak him anyway.
Smoking a cigarillo as he watches you, Gaius says, “To know the face of God is to know madness.”
That's a relief, you think.
*
You understand what you are doing is wrong, somehow. Unfair. Exploitative is the word Gaius uses as he wanders through the sleeping hordes of your followers.
“I don't ask them to do anything,” you tell him. “I don't ask them to stay. They just do.”
“Eventually, you'll have to break up your little empire, or you'll start a war.”
You shrug.
“No, not a war, a massacre. You have thousands of people here. That's a larger force than anything else on the planet.”
“Then maybe I really will start an empire,” you say.
You kick a human until he wakes up.
“What's my name?” you ask him.
He says something, in that half-language they almost have.
You punch him.
“God,” he says. Like you taught him.
You kiss him. Gaius rolls his eyes. The human has his hands all over you; he is backing you to a tree. You let him.
You yell, “To know the face of God is to know madness!” You yell it as he wanders away in that suit, that suit nothing ever sticks to. Because he's not really a part of this world, and God but you wish you weren't either.
He takes off his sunglasses and folds them carefully into his breast pocket as the human ruts against you.
“But God isn't madness, darling. God is love. God is more love than you can handle while you're sane.” He looks around. “I don't know where the love is, here.”
You close your eyes. The treebark is rough against your back.
You don't see Gaius again, not until you are sane. And that is a very long time indeed.
*
You don't stop your horde from killing the other tribes they come across. It seems to be an early form of religious warfare. Convert or die.
You almost stop them when they meet a tribe of your people. But the two groups are barely distinguishable these days.
Their weapons are better, their strategy is better. They take out four times their own number.
You've never joined the fighting before. There is blood all over your body. You can taste it in your mouth. It's not yours. You try to remember who you killed. Which side. You aren't sure.
Perhaps you are trying to die.
The name of that sin is Gina.
*
You are a god. Your enemies begin to avoid you on the battlefield. Your people begin to avoid you in your camp. They bow, offer up food and hide and stone spears. You scream at them.
The only boy – a man by every reckoning but yours – who will stand up to you dies of an infected wound, that you try and try and try to heal, but can't.
You cry.
Half a year later, you wonder what to name his daughter. A dark-haired scrap of life that you love so much you are glad you are not sane.
In the end, you name her nothing at all. It seems an unnecessary and an unfair burden. You call her, “my love,” for the rest of her life, and you kill anyone who looks at her in a way you dislike.
*
Eventually, you lose half your followers in a plague. A few generations later, famine and freezing weather as you try to cross a mountain range reduces their numbers to barely a few hundred.
They disperse.
You disperse.
You remember that it got very cold, there, for a while.
There are new animals with thick, shaggy coats. So you kill some and steal them.
Clothes are easy to make. But shoes, no, those are deceptively difficult.
You are alone again.
You head north, into the coldest places.
“Still trying to die?” Gaius asks.
He is waiting for you in the last frost-free valley before you head into ice-country.
You take his cigarette.
“Suicide is a sin.”
*
You have lists. Your children, your husband, the worlds you destroyed. Gillies. It was a rabbit. You remember the farm.
When you find the paintings on the wall – fifteen people huddled around a cave-fire, drawing with charcoal – you nearly cry. The relief. To hear them talking to each other, even in a language you don't understand.
You pick up a burnt piece of wood. You draw Caprica, you draw it on fire. You draw yourself and your sisters. You draw the death of the Hub. You cannot draw Liam; you remember he died before he was ever born, but you can draw your own sorrow, and you do. You draw Julia who died young and Felix who didn't. You draw the girl you loved more than the world, and you draw all the people who treated her as a goddess because your vengeance was legend.
You draw Gaius.
You draw the farm.
They understand none of it, but they will. You will teach them.
*
Farming, you discover, isn't any fun without Gaius.
Or perhaps it's that you were never really farmers, just actors who hoped the crops didn't die and didn't turn out poisonous, and that the hunters would come back with enough food to make up for it.
It's not like you arrived on the planet with a store of seeds. You never really managed to find plants entirely suited to agriculture. Watching a nation learn to cultivate cuttings and domesticate wild herds is as slow as the passing ice-age.
You have neighbours now. People who understand what you tell them and who tell you things right back. An actual community.
You forget all the important things. The name of the Fleet's flagship. The name of the harbinger of death. The name of the dying leader. Athena. You almost forgot Athena once.
But Gaius remembers everything. Sometimes, though, you're sure he chooses not to tell you.
*
You marry often. More for security and status in the hundred gendered cultures you live through than love, although you love them all, one way or another. Their faces blur together. Young men, old men, a few women and deities and once or twice a sacred animal.
You choose not to have children. You know which herbs are good for that; you spent a thousand years as wise-woman and doctor to a settlement on a tidal island. You do not know why they accepted you as an angel when every other settlement before and after cast you out as a demon. But you know how to choose against a child, and you come close to learning how to break your spouse's heart with that news without breaking a piece of your own.
Once, it would have been an unthinkable, blasphemous decision.
But you are not part of this world; if you had a baby you would drown in it.
“There's nothing in this world that didn't start the day you threw your ships into the sun,” Gaius tells you, the day you realise either luck or skill has failed you and you will be adding another name to your list.
It's a boy. You let his father name him (you don't remember which one his father was at all). He chooses Ardi and immediately you wish you hadn't abdicated your veto. But you were worried you might name him Gaius.
You try to do better by him. His father dies when he is still a child, so you teach him a trade. Metalworking. You remember things you didn't know you had stored in your mind. Things about alloys and smelting and craftsmanship.
Ardi learns to project as easily as Hera Agathon. More easily than he breathes. You share factories with him; the intricate jewellery in the River Walk market in Caprica City; space ships and supernovas. His siblings. Gaius. Your husband and the angel.
One day, you come back to your thatched hut and find your son wearing his plastic sunglasses in a perfect replica of Saul Tigh's quarters.
You cry.
Ardi apologises; he holds you.
You have drowned him in your world. So much easier to remember when a reason is standing in front of you.
You should let go, but you can't. You stay too long and they learn you are a devil and they almost kill you both.
It's not the first or last time you will be left for dead. You are determined it is the only time it will happen to Ardi.
You travel. In every town – as your assumed identities change from mother-and-son to siblings to daughter-and-father, to grandfather – you try to convince him to stay, to start his own life.
He throws up a wide, beautiful projection in response – full of possibility and delusion.
In every village you teach the blacksmiths new tricks. Technology you never should have taught him, and never meant to. But he is your son. You love him. It breaks your heart that he will never escape these small farming towns because there is nowhere else in the world for him to go.
He is the first person in a hundred thousand years to know your true name and what it means. Caprica.
You taught him uninvented and magical things, and you try very hard not to remember that as you watch the proliferation of weaponry and metallurgical innovation that follow in the millennia after his death.
*
There is no particular reason you choose to travel back to the continent you settled. You have been everywhere else, multiple times, but you never went back there; not after you left it for the first time.
Gaius assures you that you have found the site of your farm. He pulls out a pocket satellite-navigation device that you know couldn't work if it were real because there are no satellites.
It looks nothing like your home.
You travel north, but before you leave the continent you find one of the new stretches of civilisation: a culture capable of sustaining cities and buildings higher than a single story, with the patience to map the stars and use the intelligence God granted to learn not all answers begin and end with Him.
The Queen of Upper Egypt is Sharon Agathon.
You touch her face because you feel too much to speak. You thought you were the last. Between you, you are responsible for everything on this Earth.
The King's guards find you tangled in the bedsheets and each other and you are sentenced to death. You are in the courtyard for your execution before the King grants a pardon to his Queen. Sharon puts her head over yours on the block, and instead of death, you are sent into slavery.
Sharon Agathon has always inspired blind love and boundless forgiveness. You are not sure how she manages it, even though you have always been too full of both.
She presses a kiss to your cheek as they lead you away in shackles. “I'll come for you,” she says.
You wait decades. She doesn't.
Eventually you learn she disappeared. You hope she was fleeing an untimely death rather than the victim of one.
More than a hundred thousand years. You had her back for less than a day. By any measure, her part in your life, any part of your life other than the endless, futile stretch of farming and walking and warring between a succession of pre-industrial tribes, is insignificant.
You claim allegiance to the tiniest scrap of your genesis, and still have the temerity, when granted one more moment, to cry, in desperation, for more time.
More time.
One more day. With Gaius. With Liam. With Julia. With Felix. With your love. With Ardi. With Saul Tigh. With D'Anna. With Boomer. With Athena. With Laura Roslin. With Kara Thrace. On the farm. On Galactica. On New Caprica. On Caprica. In the Colony before you were sent to Caprica. In your tank before you woke up; before you were even Six.
Gaius is saying the names for you now. The people and places and times, because you have forgotten them.
Every name brings back a scar and a memory, and you cry and say, “Yes. That too. Yes.”
Just one more moment before it has to end.
*
In Greece, you get sick. Nearly nothing makes you sick, but the streets are full of bodies. It's so bad they wall up your section of the city. Days later, you are the only one left standing. You smash the double-barred iron door open with your hands because you are not human.
The humans watch you walk out of a city of corpses through an impossible door. They mistake you for one of their gods.
You are still delirious; you correct them. You tell them there is one God, they just know Him in many forms. Gaius always said, the names didn't matter anyway. The twelve Lords of Kobol, the One True God.
Zeus, you tell them. And Aphrodite. Poseidon. Hermes.
Athena; you tell them all about Athena. You are still waiting for her to come for you. Athena had everything figured out, what side she was on and what war she was fighting. You wish you had ever had that clarity, that wisdom.
Hera. By now she is everyone's mother. You loved Hera so much.
In the Opera House – staring up at your forebears - the titans of your history; they gave you everything you wanted – the way parents should – and then took it all away. Your son, he died. None of them seemed to care.
You understand it's half the fever, but you curse them, and scream that you're glad they died because their time was over. They murdered each other and their children and that's no way to be. All parents have to die.
You talk about Apollo. It was all his fault. He loved the sun so much, he dedicated all your ships to it, and sent your father with them.
Aurora, you tell them, came back from the dead among the stars, and maybe she returned to them.
They try to understand, and ask you, pointing to patterns that don't really exist, after the sun sets, “Is that her?”
They have it all backwards, but you are too tired to correct them.
Later, they seem too attached to your stories to listen to your retractions.
You didn't mean to start a religion.
You are careful not to do it again.
*
When Judaism explodes into your own religion; the love of God from the lips of a human boy you know the Romans will kill for opposing your accidental gods, the sense of nostalgia is overpowering.
You wear an ichthys.
You listen to one of his apostles speak.
It is Leoben.
You stay, afterwards, to speak to him. You want to know if this religion was his mistake, or if he did it on purpose.
He shrugs, and will only answer, “It's the truth.”
You nod.
Leoben says, “If you want, I can take you to him. You'll see.”
Gaius takes off his sunglasses and slips them into his pocket.
“No,” you say.
“You've lost your faith,” Leoben says.
“No,” you say.
They watch you, your brother and Gaius. You are peeling away from the tribe; walking into the sunset. Leoben will not understand until the day comes that he must do it for himself.
The courtyard is full of your beautiful, conflicted, converted children.
“For children to achieve their full potential,” you say. “Parents have to die.”
Or leave.
“This isn't our religion.”
You pray for them. For your brother and for the boy the Romans want dead. You ask God to spare them an early death.
God answers, as slow and insistent as your own response; “No.”
*
There are empires that rise and fall. You miss the indoor plumbing. The religion that is almost yours twists into something reductive and frightened. They kill men for claiming the sun is not the thing that moves – that it does not worship Earth; that Earth owes it everything (and it does; it ate the ships that might have taken their ancestors away or kept them sane.) They kill women because they know too much and because witches are convenient scapegoats for bad weather and poor crops.
Your memory is so vast it comes back to you in fragments and emotions. You cannot remember a timeline of events, but you think about your first children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and you know the flavour of regression.
It tastes like iron in your throat. It feels like salt in your eyes.
You go to Asia because at least things there are not going backwards.
You watch them invent gunpowder. The fireworks are beautiful, but the gunshot wound is painful, and you have to talk a teenager through your own surgery. You are lucky Gaius understands more about battlefield medicine than you do.
“Or perhaps,” he tells you. “I'm just remembering the things that you've forgotten again.”
You are lying on a blood-soaked, unsterilised pallet.
“Why do you stay with me?” you ask him. “My role in this ended. So long ago. Why are you still here?”
Gaius is silent for two dozen beats of your weak heart. He does not look at you when he answers. “If you survive to see all of this happen again, I might have to leave you. There might be things I need to do.”
“But now?”
“I love you,” he says. It is cold and almost joyless. “I love you. So where else would I be?”
He puts on his glasses and leaves the hut. You do not see him again until you are healed, and he does not mention the conversation, so you don't either.
You do not think he is Gaius Baltar. But angel or not, you do not know who else he could be.
*
You build your own boat and nearly drown before reaching the smallest, islanded continent. If civilisation is going to collapse, you at least remember how to do it properly.
You slide into this life so easily you forget, sometimes, you ever left it. You wonder if it was a projection; if you never recovered from that day you lost your mind.
You join the first tribe you find wandering along the shore.
Under the stars, with nothing but your clothes, a belt of stone tools and a quiver of spears, you learn all their stories. Every story is sacred. Every story is a place. You travel from story to story.
It is simple and you know how to pass time this way.
Eventually white men arrive. Some time after that they introduce you to a rabbit.
There was something important about rabbits.
It was a name on your list – on your list of things you aren't allowed to forget.
Not even Gaius can remember it.
It's lost to everything on Earth.
You know it's time to leave.
You still remember the names of your children. You remember a farm. You remember the story of Caprica; you remember the name of that story is your name.
If you stay, you might forget that too.
*
You like your life as a pirate.
You are not as fond of your life among cowboys.
You are in New York during the Great Depression, and just as hungry as everyone else.
When the first nuclear warhead is detonated, Gaius kisses you and says he has to leave.
“Wait,” you say.
He does.
“When?” you ask. “How long do I have?”
He looks uncertain. He puts his hand to your cheek. “If I took you back to Caprica, to the day we met, what would you change?”
It is a long time before you answer. It's the only truth you have. “Nothing.”
“Billions died.”
You nod.
“Do you still think that was God's will?”
You shrug. “You're the angel, Gaius. If it wasn't His will, why didn't you tell me?”
“That's an old game,” he snaps. “And one your husband indulged in too frequently. Forgiveness isn't the same as absolution. Only children throw the blame at their parents because no one told them it was wrong.”
You laugh.
“I know what I did, Gaius. Billions died. I wish they hadn't. I wish a lot of things. But wishes and what-ifs, that's another game for children. No one gets a clean slate.”
This whole damn planet is proof of that.
He smiles a very tight and very tiny smile. “I have to go.”
“And what are you going to do?” you ask.
But he doesn't answer. You are alone, on the day the world has started ending.
*
“So what's your name?” he asks.
He is young. Good-looking with dark hair and great teeth. You are in a café. He wants to buy you a drink, get your number; you aren't interested.
“Thanks, but I'm meeting a friend,” you lie.
He sits down anyway. “Must be a lousy friend to leave you waiting,” he grins. “What if I keep you company until he gets here. Come on, it's just a name. Mine's Jason.”
He holds out his hand. You take the path of least resistance. You steal a name from a passing waitress, because the only real name you have means too much, now, to speak out loud.
“Tricia,” you say.
“Nice to meet you, Tricia,” Jason says. “You from here?”
“No,” you say.
“Then where's home?”
You could lie. But perhaps this truth is manageable. “A farm,” you say. “I'm just a farm girl.”
He launches into some explanation of his own background; something he thinks is witty and charming. Abruptly, you grab your purse. “I have to go,” you say, and leave the table.
You reach the end of the street.
You see Gaius. You knew, one day, he would come back.
You say, “I was wondering when you'd get here.”
Title: The name of this story is your name.
Word Count: Approx. 6,000
Spoilers: Daybreak II and the entirety of human history.
Disclaimer: Not mine! Making no money!
Summary: What if Caprica didn't actually die. Ever.
The name of this story is your name.
You are in the limousine with Doctor Baltar. He tells you, “You can call me Gaius, actually, if you want.” It is an awkward segue. He wants to know your name.
You don't have one. You kiss him.
*
You realise after eight months that the native population will not take to agriculture; are not interested in complex tools; sit constantly at the edges of the Colonial campfires to listen to their music, but make none of their own.
It's the absence of language. Language precipitates art. Language is abstract. It's ritual and religion.
Gaius is a scientist. He knows the evolutionary track of his own ancestors. Seasons pass but you don't press him to admit it. You have never been cruel.
“It's a frakking sickle,” he says. “I can't even teach them it's a frakking sickle.”
You pull him close and think about a time when names meant nothing to you either.
*
You don't know who first spoke your name, but it's D'Anna that gives it to you. Like a gift. Like a nuclear armageddon especially for you.
You hate it. You look at the centurions planting trees in the memorial park, and understand that you are not the first being to hate your name, but that it is, irrevocably, yours.
*
You name her Julia, and you refuse to do it until she is in your arms because that lesson's name was Liam.
Gaius says he hates it. “It's depressing.”
“If it weren't for her grandfather, Gaius,” you say. “We wouldn't have any of this.”
“Right. A farmer's name for a farmer's daughter,” he mutters. “How perfectly poetic.”
He wants a cigarette and a pressed suit. He wants to teach his daughter about mathematics and literature and art. You look at her blonde hair and beautiful lips and wonder how many generations until there isn't even a farm. You wonder if she will be able to hold her own if she has to keep up with the aboriginal runners. You wonder if she'll be a good aim with a spear. If she'll be light enough they make her climb to the highest branches looking for fruit.
Gaius thinks you named her for a farmer.
You think of Julius. An awkward link between worlds.
*
“Caprica! Caprica Six!”
He catches your arm.
The first time he uses your name, you are too numb to hear it. You have been abandoned, so many times now.
He is trying to give you a gift. But you think, once again, he is asking for one.
“I have no desire to join your harem,” you tell him.
You leave.
*
You name him Felix.
Gaius says he hates it. “It's depressing. But I suppose I should be used to you naming our children after bad memories.”
“It means, 'lucky',” you tell him.
He looks around your home. The rough wood. The hole in the roof over a fire pit. Five clay pots, a grass mattress, and his daughter playing in the light of the doorway. She has a ball he made from animal hide and a long bone to hit it with.
Gaius carved wooden blocks and chipped out each letter of the alphabet. He mutters, sometimes, when he sees her staring at them, about the lack of context. No road signs, no paper, ten books in the entire settlement.
You feel such pride when he is like this; bitter about his children's future. You never knew you'd see him love so much. He talks about educational theory. The constant, implicit grief that Julia will never escape this small-town farm because there is not another place in the world for her to go. Let alone another planet.
Caprica.
It's your name.
“Lucky,” Gaius says, closing his eyes. “Yeah, of course he is.”
*
Hera Agathon dies at seventeen. She dies as her first and only daughter is born. She never named her.
You hold Athena bodily against the wall so that she does not collapse. Her screaming is low and primitive. Like the sounds you have heard the natives make when they bury their dead.
*
Hera's daughter does not die young. She marries young; your grandson. Felix's son, of course. Julia never had any children.
Julia was just like Gaius; there wasn't enough to learn. She went north with a local tribe to study their customs and make an inventory of their proto-linguistic capabilities.
When spring arrived, and the tribe passed through the settlement again, Julia did not return. The humans put their hands against your arms; a dozen of them, circling you like sheepskin.
They have no name for where Julia has gone, but you recognise that noise; that low, keening sorrow.
Your daughter is dead.
Athena's daughter is dead.
Your grandchildren marry young and have more children than they know what to do with. Two of them die in infancy; a third before he turns eight.
You ask Athena, “How long will these bodies last?”
Athena looks at her smooth hands, flips them over and says, “I don't know.”
*
You are a Cylon. Ellen Tigh tries to explain it to you, before she dies, coughing in the smoke of the campfire; weak as Laura Roslin was at the end.
“The Five,” she says. “We were born. We grow old. We die. The replacement bodies we made for our own resurrection were just clones. When we made you, we had to start from scratch. Your cells never stop replenishing themselves. I thought I was doing you a favour.”
She laughs.
You look at her and don't know whether she is your mother.
You say, “You named all the others. John and Leoben and D'Anna and Simon and Aaron and Daniel and Sharon. Why didn't you name me?”
Ellen coughs in the smoke. “You asked us not to,” she says.
You understand that.
*
Your body lasts longer than Gaius'. Than Helo's or Lee Adama's. Than the bodies of your children and your grandchildren and their grandchildren.
Your settlement is a fixture in the bowl of the savannah. You are a geographical feature in the migrations of the wildlife and the nomadic humans.
They start bringing their dead to bury in your cemetery.
You walk with Athena to the top of a peak. Below you see your huts, and fields. Increasingly, you do not farm. You watch your young people run out, like the aboriginals, to hunt and gather. They keep going further and further. Sometimes, they do not come back for weeks.
One day, they will not come back at all.
“I don't remember,” Athena says. “Which ones are mine. How many of them are my children?”
“By now,” you say. “I think they all are.”
“It kinda makes it creepy when they try to hit on you,” she says.
“They don't know what we are,” you say. “Not really. We don't die.”
You do die. You die all the time, from disease, from injury, from famine.
“Psyche,” Sharon says. “She was my great-granddaughter. We never taught her to read. First time we never even tried.”
“John,” you say. John was beautiful. He looked like Gaius. He was smart and remembered every poisonous herb within two-hundred kilometres. When you told him the sun was a star, that it was burning gas, he stared at you, awe-struck, and believed it.
John was illiterate. You realise, you don't regret that. There was nothing to write on, anyway.
John died four hundred years ago.
*
Gaius is saying, “You know, I know about farming.”
“Hey,” you say. “I know.”
You kiss him, because he is crying. You say, “I know you do.”
*
“I'm a farmer,” you say.
“Gramma, the crops fail,” Laura is your... You would need to count through the generations and you are worried you would not remember all their names. “If people were meant to be farmers, the locals'd do it. I know stuff was different, when you were in space. But farming's just not for Earth.”
You are not really a farmer. Neither was Gaius. But he got up every day and tried to make it work and you were so proud of him. You always wanted to be proud of him. Every day, you could remember, it wasn't missing any more.
“Gramma,” Laura says. “We need to move with the herds.”
So you do.
*
The first one to peel off is Leoben. One of him. You are walking. You have been walking for days. Quietly, casually, eating fruit from the trees, spearing small mammals. Gillies, everyone calls them. A made-up name, because when you first landed on this planet, before the raptors began to rust, a child found one and said it reminded him of Gilly. His dead rabbit.
Sharon might remember this. Leoben might. But no one else.
Leoben peels from the pack, and starts walking west, into the sunset.
You follow him, quick-stepping to catch up. “Where are you going?”
“I don't know,” he says.
“You'll die out there on your own.”
“Maybe,” he smiles.
You walk with him a dozen paces.
He stops. He turns to you; puts his hands on your shoulders. You realise, this is the Leoben you almost loved, for a decade, ten decades after Gaius. The only man for a continent you did not see grow from a child. Your brother.
He kisses you. You don't mind. You love him, you always have. By now, you wonder, in this vast space, who doesn't own a piece of your heart? Love was always your problem. You were not built to be alone.
“What is the first article of faith?” he asks.
“That this is not all that we are.”
Gently, Leoben turns you so that you are looking back to your people. A long line of fur-pelted, dirty, beautiful children.
“This is not all that we are,” he says.
“But they're ours.”
“They're swimming past us in the stream, Six. A part of us is always on the shore.”
You let him go. It has been more than a lifetime since someone called you Six. You had forgotten that it was your name, too, once.
He walks away, to a simplicity you envy.
*
You stay longer than most. Slowly, the other Cylon leave, just like Leoben.
You don't understand why, until the day comes you do it for yourself.
*
You do not speak for ten thousand years.
You don't stay with any group for long. Not more than six or seven generations. They have something close to language, and with that comes religion.
If you stay too long, they will want a name for God, and they will believe it's yours.
When you speak again, when you find your people – you can tell because they have bows and arrows, because they have words, because they stop and stare at you like you are something out of a myth, and you must be; there are no Cylon left with them – you discover you no longer share a language.
You do not stay.
*
You were built to be immortal, but you were not built to be alone.
You have lists. You repeat them so that you do not forget anything important. Your name. Your husband's name. The names of your children and grandchildren. The worlds you destroyed. The times you died. Your siblings. Your parents; and the reasons they are not your parents. The easiest way to kill a wild cat. The best kind of trap for Gillies. Gillies are named Gillies because Gilly was a dead rabbit. Some fish are also poisonous.
You remember, you were happiest on a farm, even though you knew you had no future. None at all. Except this.
Time dies.
You do not know how old you are.
Gaius is standing under a tree in a pinstriped suit, deep red shirt, with plastic sunglasses. You have not seen plastic in millennia.
He says, “You look charming, darling.”
You are wearing a hide poncho to your knees; for warmth more than modesty. Everything is colder than it was. Your hair is long now. It's dirty and matted. It does not occur to you to be self-conscious: Gaius is the one who looks alien and frightening.
You start crying, because seeing him, you realise you had forgotten what he looked like.
“There there,” he says, walking toward you. He pulls a handkerchief from his breast pocket. It's red like his shirt. He wipes away your tears, and some of the mud.
“Why are you here?” you ask.
“Because you're crying.”
“Is this part of God's plan?”
He takes your hand and doesn't answer.
Time is dead. You don't know if it's days or weeks or years later that you remember what he said, an epoch ago.
“You said my life would be uneventful.”
He says, “It has been.”
He is right. He has been your only event for an uncountable number of years.
“Why are you here?”
“You wanted me.”
You did.
*
It is when you are living by the ocean that you go insane.
You say, “Isn't company supposed to save me?”
He says, “No.”
He has a point. Alone, there was nothing to be. No one called your name, and perhaps you didn't have one. Just a memory of what it was, once.
Caprica. You went mad there too.
You reach out, and Gaius hands you a martini.
You are laughing and frakking and completely drunk when a knot of humans – not your children – wander onto the shore.
You frak most of them too.
The boy under you is feral, but so are you. You are drunk on ambrosia that hasn't existed in millennia, holding both his wrists against the beach-shingle. He tries to move his arms. You don't let him. He grins. You grin back.
His wrist snaps. He screams. You frak him anyway.
Smoking a cigarillo as he watches you, Gaius says, “To know the face of God is to know madness.”
That's a relief, you think.
*
You understand what you are doing is wrong, somehow. Unfair. Exploitative is the word Gaius uses as he wanders through the sleeping hordes of your followers.
“I don't ask them to do anything,” you tell him. “I don't ask them to stay. They just do.”
“Eventually, you'll have to break up your little empire, or you'll start a war.”
You shrug.
“No, not a war, a massacre. You have thousands of people here. That's a larger force than anything else on the planet.”
“Then maybe I really will start an empire,” you say.
You kick a human until he wakes up.
“What's my name?” you ask him.
He says something, in that half-language they almost have.
You punch him.
“God,” he says. Like you taught him.
You kiss him. Gaius rolls his eyes. The human has his hands all over you; he is backing you to a tree. You let him.
You yell, “To know the face of God is to know madness!” You yell it as he wanders away in that suit, that suit nothing ever sticks to. Because he's not really a part of this world, and God but you wish you weren't either.
He takes off his sunglasses and folds them carefully into his breast pocket as the human ruts against you.
“But God isn't madness, darling. God is love. God is more love than you can handle while you're sane.” He looks around. “I don't know where the love is, here.”
You close your eyes. The treebark is rough against your back.
You don't see Gaius again, not until you are sane. And that is a very long time indeed.
*
You don't stop your horde from killing the other tribes they come across. It seems to be an early form of religious warfare. Convert or die.
You almost stop them when they meet a tribe of your people. But the two groups are barely distinguishable these days.
Their weapons are better, their strategy is better. They take out four times their own number.
You've never joined the fighting before. There is blood all over your body. You can taste it in your mouth. It's not yours. You try to remember who you killed. Which side. You aren't sure.
Perhaps you are trying to die.
The name of that sin is Gina.
*
You are a god. Your enemies begin to avoid you on the battlefield. Your people begin to avoid you in your camp. They bow, offer up food and hide and stone spears. You scream at them.
The only boy – a man by every reckoning but yours – who will stand up to you dies of an infected wound, that you try and try and try to heal, but can't.
You cry.
Half a year later, you wonder what to name his daughter. A dark-haired scrap of life that you love so much you are glad you are not sane.
In the end, you name her nothing at all. It seems an unnecessary and an unfair burden. You call her, “my love,” for the rest of her life, and you kill anyone who looks at her in a way you dislike.
*
Eventually, you lose half your followers in a plague. A few generations later, famine and freezing weather as you try to cross a mountain range reduces their numbers to barely a few hundred.
They disperse.
You disperse.
You remember that it got very cold, there, for a while.
There are new animals with thick, shaggy coats. So you kill some and steal them.
Clothes are easy to make. But shoes, no, those are deceptively difficult.
You are alone again.
You head north, into the coldest places.
“Still trying to die?” Gaius asks.
He is waiting for you in the last frost-free valley before you head into ice-country.
You take his cigarette.
“Suicide is a sin.”
*
You have lists. Your children, your husband, the worlds you destroyed. Gillies. It was a rabbit. You remember the farm.
When you find the paintings on the wall – fifteen people huddled around a cave-fire, drawing with charcoal – you nearly cry. The relief. To hear them talking to each other, even in a language you don't understand.
You pick up a burnt piece of wood. You draw Caprica, you draw it on fire. You draw yourself and your sisters. You draw the death of the Hub. You cannot draw Liam; you remember he died before he was ever born, but you can draw your own sorrow, and you do. You draw Julia who died young and Felix who didn't. You draw the girl you loved more than the world, and you draw all the people who treated her as a goddess because your vengeance was legend.
You draw Gaius.
You draw the farm.
They understand none of it, but they will. You will teach them.
*
Farming, you discover, isn't any fun without Gaius.
Or perhaps it's that you were never really farmers, just actors who hoped the crops didn't die and didn't turn out poisonous, and that the hunters would come back with enough food to make up for it.
It's not like you arrived on the planet with a store of seeds. You never really managed to find plants entirely suited to agriculture. Watching a nation learn to cultivate cuttings and domesticate wild herds is as slow as the passing ice-age.
You have neighbours now. People who understand what you tell them and who tell you things right back. An actual community.
You forget all the important things. The name of the Fleet's flagship. The name of the harbinger of death. The name of the dying leader. Athena. You almost forgot Athena once.
But Gaius remembers everything. Sometimes, though, you're sure he chooses not to tell you.
*
You marry often. More for security and status in the hundred gendered cultures you live through than love, although you love them all, one way or another. Their faces blur together. Young men, old men, a few women and deities and once or twice a sacred animal.
You choose not to have children. You know which herbs are good for that; you spent a thousand years as wise-woman and doctor to a settlement on a tidal island. You do not know why they accepted you as an angel when every other settlement before and after cast you out as a demon. But you know how to choose against a child, and you come close to learning how to break your spouse's heart with that news without breaking a piece of your own.
Once, it would have been an unthinkable, blasphemous decision.
But you are not part of this world; if you had a baby you would drown in it.
“There's nothing in this world that didn't start the day you threw your ships into the sun,” Gaius tells you, the day you realise either luck or skill has failed you and you will be adding another name to your list.
It's a boy. You let his father name him (you don't remember which one his father was at all). He chooses Ardi and immediately you wish you hadn't abdicated your veto. But you were worried you might name him Gaius.
You try to do better by him. His father dies when he is still a child, so you teach him a trade. Metalworking. You remember things you didn't know you had stored in your mind. Things about alloys and smelting and craftsmanship.
Ardi learns to project as easily as Hera Agathon. More easily than he breathes. You share factories with him; the intricate jewellery in the River Walk market in Caprica City; space ships and supernovas. His siblings. Gaius. Your husband and the angel.
One day, you come back to your thatched hut and find your son wearing his plastic sunglasses in a perfect replica of Saul Tigh's quarters.
You cry.
Ardi apologises; he holds you.
You have drowned him in your world. So much easier to remember when a reason is standing in front of you.
You should let go, but you can't. You stay too long and they learn you are a devil and they almost kill you both.
It's not the first or last time you will be left for dead. You are determined it is the only time it will happen to Ardi.
You travel. In every town – as your assumed identities change from mother-and-son to siblings to daughter-and-father, to grandfather – you try to convince him to stay, to start his own life.
He throws up a wide, beautiful projection in response – full of possibility and delusion.
In every village you teach the blacksmiths new tricks. Technology you never should have taught him, and never meant to. But he is your son. You love him. It breaks your heart that he will never escape these small farming towns because there is nowhere else in the world for him to go.
He is the first person in a hundred thousand years to know your true name and what it means. Caprica.
You taught him uninvented and magical things, and you try very hard not to remember that as you watch the proliferation of weaponry and metallurgical innovation that follow in the millennia after his death.
*
There is no particular reason you choose to travel back to the continent you settled. You have been everywhere else, multiple times, but you never went back there; not after you left it for the first time.
Gaius assures you that you have found the site of your farm. He pulls out a pocket satellite-navigation device that you know couldn't work if it were real because there are no satellites.
It looks nothing like your home.
You travel north, but before you leave the continent you find one of the new stretches of civilisation: a culture capable of sustaining cities and buildings higher than a single story, with the patience to map the stars and use the intelligence God granted to learn not all answers begin and end with Him.
The Queen of Upper Egypt is Sharon Agathon.
You touch her face because you feel too much to speak. You thought you were the last. Between you, you are responsible for everything on this Earth.
The King's guards find you tangled in the bedsheets and each other and you are sentenced to death. You are in the courtyard for your execution before the King grants a pardon to his Queen. Sharon puts her head over yours on the block, and instead of death, you are sent into slavery.
Sharon Agathon has always inspired blind love and boundless forgiveness. You are not sure how she manages it, even though you have always been too full of both.
She presses a kiss to your cheek as they lead you away in shackles. “I'll come for you,” she says.
You wait decades. She doesn't.
Eventually you learn she disappeared. You hope she was fleeing an untimely death rather than the victim of one.
More than a hundred thousand years. You had her back for less than a day. By any measure, her part in your life, any part of your life other than the endless, futile stretch of farming and walking and warring between a succession of pre-industrial tribes, is insignificant.
You claim allegiance to the tiniest scrap of your genesis, and still have the temerity, when granted one more moment, to cry, in desperation, for more time.
More time.
One more day. With Gaius. With Liam. With Julia. With Felix. With your love. With Ardi. With Saul Tigh. With D'Anna. With Boomer. With Athena. With Laura Roslin. With Kara Thrace. On the farm. On Galactica. On New Caprica. On Caprica. In the Colony before you were sent to Caprica. In your tank before you woke up; before you were even Six.
Gaius is saying the names for you now. The people and places and times, because you have forgotten them.
Every name brings back a scar and a memory, and you cry and say, “Yes. That too. Yes.”
Just one more moment before it has to end.
*
In Greece, you get sick. Nearly nothing makes you sick, but the streets are full of bodies. It's so bad they wall up your section of the city. Days later, you are the only one left standing. You smash the double-barred iron door open with your hands because you are not human.
The humans watch you walk out of a city of corpses through an impossible door. They mistake you for one of their gods.
You are still delirious; you correct them. You tell them there is one God, they just know Him in many forms. Gaius always said, the names didn't matter anyway. The twelve Lords of Kobol, the One True God.
Zeus, you tell them. And Aphrodite. Poseidon. Hermes.
Athena; you tell them all about Athena. You are still waiting for her to come for you. Athena had everything figured out, what side she was on and what war she was fighting. You wish you had ever had that clarity, that wisdom.
Hera. By now she is everyone's mother. You loved Hera so much.
In the Opera House – staring up at your forebears - the titans of your history; they gave you everything you wanted – the way parents should – and then took it all away. Your son, he died. None of them seemed to care.
You understand it's half the fever, but you curse them, and scream that you're glad they died because their time was over. They murdered each other and their children and that's no way to be. All parents have to die.
You talk about Apollo. It was all his fault. He loved the sun so much, he dedicated all your ships to it, and sent your father with them.
Aurora, you tell them, came back from the dead among the stars, and maybe she returned to them.
They try to understand, and ask you, pointing to patterns that don't really exist, after the sun sets, “Is that her?”
They have it all backwards, but you are too tired to correct them.
Later, they seem too attached to your stories to listen to your retractions.
You didn't mean to start a religion.
You are careful not to do it again.
*
When Judaism explodes into your own religion; the love of God from the lips of a human boy you know the Romans will kill for opposing your accidental gods, the sense of nostalgia is overpowering.
You wear an ichthys.
You listen to one of his apostles speak.
It is Leoben.
You stay, afterwards, to speak to him. You want to know if this religion was his mistake, or if he did it on purpose.
He shrugs, and will only answer, “It's the truth.”
You nod.
Leoben says, “If you want, I can take you to him. You'll see.”
Gaius takes off his sunglasses and slips them into his pocket.
“No,” you say.
“You've lost your faith,” Leoben says.
“No,” you say.
They watch you, your brother and Gaius. You are peeling away from the tribe; walking into the sunset. Leoben will not understand until the day comes that he must do it for himself.
The courtyard is full of your beautiful, conflicted, converted children.
“For children to achieve their full potential,” you say. “Parents have to die.”
Or leave.
“This isn't our religion.”
You pray for them. For your brother and for the boy the Romans want dead. You ask God to spare them an early death.
God answers, as slow and insistent as your own response; “No.”
*
There are empires that rise and fall. You miss the indoor plumbing. The religion that is almost yours twists into something reductive and frightened. They kill men for claiming the sun is not the thing that moves – that it does not worship Earth; that Earth owes it everything (and it does; it ate the ships that might have taken their ancestors away or kept them sane.) They kill women because they know too much and because witches are convenient scapegoats for bad weather and poor crops.
Your memory is so vast it comes back to you in fragments and emotions. You cannot remember a timeline of events, but you think about your first children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and you know the flavour of regression.
It tastes like iron in your throat. It feels like salt in your eyes.
You go to Asia because at least things there are not going backwards.
You watch them invent gunpowder. The fireworks are beautiful, but the gunshot wound is painful, and you have to talk a teenager through your own surgery. You are lucky Gaius understands more about battlefield medicine than you do.
“Or perhaps,” he tells you. “I'm just remembering the things that you've forgotten again.”
You are lying on a blood-soaked, unsterilised pallet.
“Why do you stay with me?” you ask him. “My role in this ended. So long ago. Why are you still here?”
Gaius is silent for two dozen beats of your weak heart. He does not look at you when he answers. “If you survive to see all of this happen again, I might have to leave you. There might be things I need to do.”
“But now?”
“I love you,” he says. It is cold and almost joyless. “I love you. So where else would I be?”
He puts on his glasses and leaves the hut. You do not see him again until you are healed, and he does not mention the conversation, so you don't either.
You do not think he is Gaius Baltar. But angel or not, you do not know who else he could be.
*
You build your own boat and nearly drown before reaching the smallest, islanded continent. If civilisation is going to collapse, you at least remember how to do it properly.
You slide into this life so easily you forget, sometimes, you ever left it. You wonder if it was a projection; if you never recovered from that day you lost your mind.
You join the first tribe you find wandering along the shore.
Under the stars, with nothing but your clothes, a belt of stone tools and a quiver of spears, you learn all their stories. Every story is sacred. Every story is a place. You travel from story to story.
It is simple and you know how to pass time this way.
Eventually white men arrive. Some time after that they introduce you to a rabbit.
There was something important about rabbits.
It was a name on your list – on your list of things you aren't allowed to forget.
Not even Gaius can remember it.
It's lost to everything on Earth.
You know it's time to leave.
You still remember the names of your children. You remember a farm. You remember the story of Caprica; you remember the name of that story is your name.
If you stay, you might forget that too.
*
You like your life as a pirate.
You are not as fond of your life among cowboys.
You are in New York during the Great Depression, and just as hungry as everyone else.
When the first nuclear warhead is detonated, Gaius kisses you and says he has to leave.
“Wait,” you say.
He does.
“When?” you ask. “How long do I have?”
He looks uncertain. He puts his hand to your cheek. “If I took you back to Caprica, to the day we met, what would you change?”
It is a long time before you answer. It's the only truth you have. “Nothing.”
“Billions died.”
You nod.
“Do you still think that was God's will?”
You shrug. “You're the angel, Gaius. If it wasn't His will, why didn't you tell me?”
“That's an old game,” he snaps. “And one your husband indulged in too frequently. Forgiveness isn't the same as absolution. Only children throw the blame at their parents because no one told them it was wrong.”
You laugh.
“I know what I did, Gaius. Billions died. I wish they hadn't. I wish a lot of things. But wishes and what-ifs, that's another game for children. No one gets a clean slate.”
This whole damn planet is proof of that.
He smiles a very tight and very tiny smile. “I have to go.”
“And what are you going to do?” you ask.
But he doesn't answer. You are alone, on the day the world has started ending.
*
“So what's your name?” he asks.
He is young. Good-looking with dark hair and great teeth. You are in a café. He wants to buy you a drink, get your number; you aren't interested.
“Thanks, but I'm meeting a friend,” you lie.
He sits down anyway. “Must be a lousy friend to leave you waiting,” he grins. “What if I keep you company until he gets here. Come on, it's just a name. Mine's Jason.”
He holds out his hand. You take the path of least resistance. You steal a name from a passing waitress, because the only real name you have means too much, now, to speak out loud.
“Tricia,” you say.
“Nice to meet you, Tricia,” Jason says. “You from here?”
“No,” you say.
“Then where's home?”
You could lie. But perhaps this truth is manageable. “A farm,” you say. “I'm just a farm girl.”
He launches into some explanation of his own background; something he thinks is witty and charming. Abruptly, you grab your purse. “I have to go,” you say, and leave the table.
You reach the end of the street.
You see Gaius. You knew, one day, he would come back.
You say, “I was wondering when you'd get here.”
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Date: 2009-04-13 04:39 pm (UTC)