Beautiful in Her Armour 12/?
BSG Fic: Beautiful in Her Armour
Summary: Where do we go from here?
Rated: K
Spoilers: up 'til Revelations
Disclaimer: Not mine, just borrowing. They belong to Ron Moore and co. and most especially to MM, EJO and the rest of the crew, who breathe life into them.
Sorry for the delay in posting, Xmas and New Years celebrations ran a bit longer and wilder than expected, heh. That said, best wishes to every one and on with the show!
She doesn't even feel her body crash to the ground in utter exhaustion, is only dimly aware of the confusion and fear of her companions as they attempt to still her tremors. They have no idea what just happened, only saw her writhing in agony on the floor and she has no strength left to communicate with them. She is too drained, too weary to even shift away from the bloody puddle she lands in as she plunges from her trip among the stars straight into an all too familiar dreamscape.
This time, she sees herself not in her blue suit but in the pantsuit she is wearing right now, straight black wig in place, her glasses planted firmly on the bridge of her nose. The others are there too, all dressed as they are, down to their military fatigues and the cuts and bruises adorning their faces. They rush down the stairs, Sharon and herself, and move to join Caprica and Baltar even as Caprica bends over and picks up Hera, places the little girl in Baltar’s arms. Together they step forward, the five of them, through the double doors into the concert hall. Halfway down the steps they turn in unison and this time she sees and is not surprised at what she finds.
The truth of the Opera House, finally revealed; and of course, it's a truth that has been staring her in the face all along.
She is not so shocked, not as upset as she would have been. Her sojourn amid the stars prepared her for what she sees, their long trek across the heavens was just a precursor to this, if not for everything that happened, she would never have been able to accept it, but accept it she does; it’s not as if she has a choice, really.
This, too, seems to be her fate, her destiny.
Far off, she hears D'Anna scream. "No!" She can feel Saul and Galen and Sam and Tory, smile their welcome.
She doesn't flinch when she casts her gaze upwards towards the five figures on the balcony and finds her own face staring back at her.
She looks much like she did before the cancer came back and staked its claim on her the second time, strong and healthy, vibrant and alive, figure curvaceous in all the right places, as it should be, long hair cascading down her back. Even though the truth of what she is is looking her right in the face, she's still human enough to feel a twinge of envy and regret for that lost treasure. It quickly fades as she gazes upon Tory, Saul, Sam and Galen, all limned in light and her between them, towering over them. She's magnificent, standing tall and proud, resplendent in white, light eddying from her limbs, streaming from her fingers, shining from her eyes; so beautiful, though she would never have said that of herself in any other context.
Strange, how she can stand there and look upon herself and see the face of the enemy and not feel any different. She’s imagined this possibility in her darker moments, dreamt of it sometimes, and always there had been a profound shift, a sickening jolt as the Universe tilted on its axis, a moment as violent as a heart attack, where realization hits her just before her programming kicks in and she loses all sense of herself.
She thinks she should feel different like that, but she doesn’t.
Of the four behind her, only Hera appears to see what she sees, she giggles happily in Baltar's arms. Caprica and Sharon look at the other four, recognition in their eyes, but the moment they set their sight on the figure in the middle, their gaze becomes dazed and confused. Baltar doesn’t even look at the Five. Laura senses he’s scared to see himself there, scared not to. Instead, he throws her an anxious look. "What is it?" he asks, "what do you see? Is it me? Am I the Final One?"
She shakes her head, takes a step closer to the Five on the balcony, another step and suddenly she's up there with them. Sam and Galen touch her right shoulder, Tory and Saul her left. Their touch is infinitely soft, filled with love. The figure in front of her, the one that's her and yet not her, reaches out. Her smile is beatific, her entire figure streams and swirls as light flows around her in an endless pattern. When her palm touches Laura's forehead, when those luminous fingers brush her eyelids closed, knowledge explodes like truth in her head and she knows, she knows, and it is agony and it is ecstasy.
With the touch of her own hand illuminating her mind, past and future are unlocked, attacking her in a whirlwind of fractured sounds and images too jumbled to make sense off and Laura can do nothing but scream with it and her scream contains the very paradox of her existence as it rises to the rafters, sweeps up to scour the heavens, shatter the very fabric of life.
Like a film unspooling in her head, the images coalesce and she sees how humanity lived peacefully on Kobol, having run from devastating conflict, they had made it their new home, as they had done countless times before, stretching back in time to the very creation of the Universe, when they first dragged themselves from the primordial ooze and taught themselves to walk upright. No Gods had dreamt them up, no God had had a hand in creating them, only a big bang, uncaring eons of evolution and happenstance and then, suddenly, people; loving and hating and procreating, fighting amongst themselves, creating music, art, building a society, making war, creating destruction.
There were no Gods, no God, just people, some good, some bad, some indifferent; and some like unto Gods, rising above themselves and setting a shining example, or doing terrible wrongs.
As they had done countless times before, on scores of planets, mankind thrived on Kobol, until, arrogant in their own supremacy, they sought to create life in their own image, and in doing so created the First and Final Five.
It is with no surprise whatsoever that she recognizes the scientist who created them.
Gaius Baltar.
Angry beyond the telling of it, Laura whirls around, points an accusing finger at the scientist standing behind her, the thorn in her side. “It was him?” she asks incredulously, furiously as Baltar takes an uncertain step backwards, cringes under the force of her wrath.
Her revenant just smiles, unruffled by Laura’s ardent glare. “No, one of his forefathers. He sought to create perfection when he created us. First Saul, then Galen and Sam and Tory. He infused them with knowledge and strength and free will, made them healthier, more intelligent, stronger and faster than their human counterparts.
“As part of an experiment, he let the Four out into the world and they lived and breathed among the humans without humanity ever being aware they moved among them. Each time they died, their consciousness, their essential make up, was resurrected in a newborn body, not the fully grown, ageless bodies the Seven favored before you blew the Hub. They instead were raised by human parents, grew old, died and lived again, indistinguishable from humans.”
Saul speaks up for the first time, his voice full of bile and rage, but with an undercurrent of compassion like she’s never heard before. “But somewhere he frakked up. The cycle of being born, living then dying of old age, without threat or challenge, made us weak, weaker than we should have been, and so frakking Baltar’s progenitor went back to the drawing board and in his final act of genius - or madness - he created you, the Final One, and when he did, he placed a fatal flaw in you; your cancer.”
And Laura sees her past lives. Sees how sometimes she lived to grow old, without the cancer rearing its ugly head, how sometimes her life was cut short, the cancer taking her after a short, brutal fight, how at other times she’d had to fight a long, agonizing battle, like now, before succumbing to the ravages of the disease. And sometimes, sometimes, the cancer was vanquished, disappeared altogether.
Her revenant speaks, her face lit from within by a surety Laura envies and a joyfulness she doesn’t understand. “This is the paradox. The cancer in you is the flaw that makes you perfect.”
The realization that the thing that has threatened her existence - that has eaten away at her soul as it ravaged her body - was a conscious act, that it was given to her, almost makes her choke with the horror of it. "You speak of the Cancer as though it were a gift," Laura spits out; enraged she turns away from the five luminous figures before her.
A hand on her arm stays her. It’s a perfect duplicate of her own, down to the tracery of veins on the back and the small scar at the base of her thumb from when she cut it chopping vegetables in the kitchen back in her apartment on Caprica years ago.
“It is not.” The voice too is a perfect copy of her own. “But life is a gift. A gift which cannot be appreciated to its fullest extent until that life is threatened. Just as there is no good without evil, no joy without sorrow, no pleasure without pain, there is no life without the uncertainty of death. The flaw at your center made you perfect.”
Tory speaks then, her face, her very posture harkens back to the young woman who stepped up to take Billy’s place right after he died, cocky, no nonsense Tory. Despite her own turmoil, Laura grieves for the woman she became.
“We Five lived among the humans,” Tory says, “taking spouses, mingling among them, creating a Thirteenth Tribe. But in time and against our will, we became like Gods in the eyes of our people. The Thirteenth Tribe separated itself from the Twelve, flourished, became ever more powerful. Fearful their sovereignty would be challenged, humanity sought to destroy that which they had created. As before, they were brought to the brink of extinction by their own folly. Kobol having been decimated in the battle, humanity fled to the stars, settling on the Twelve Colonies, while we, the Thirteenth Tribe, wandered the universe until we found Earth.”
She stops there, steps back and hangs her head in defeat.
“What happened here?” Laura commands, even though she’s already seen glimpses of it in the jumble of images trying to sort itself out in her head. “Tell me!”
Her revenant cocks her head, appraising her, a gesture so reminiscent of her own mannerisms it makes Laura’s head spin. “There we settled and while our offspring thrived and multiplied upon the Earth, we Five remained apart, content to watch over our progeny from afar, parents letting go of their young as they must, happy to see them prosper. The Thirteenth Tribe lived in harmony for centuries while we watched, wanting nothing more than for our children to forget their conflicted origins - forget us - and just be, in peace. And just when our long vigilance had been rewarded, when the Five had all but been forgotten and the knowledge of who we were had slipped into folklore and myth, something came crashing down to earth from the heavens to change all that.”
Caught in the grip of perilous truths and staggering intuitions, Laura sees the trail of fire across the heavens as Starbuck comes hurtling down to Earth at breakneck speed. “Kara Thrace in her Viper,” she says.
Sam nods solemnly and takes up the narrative, his face scrunched into a wistful frown as he speaks about his wife. “She arrived through a wormhole, from her present to ours, and her arrival caused dissent among the Thirteenth Tribe. Even as Galen rebuilt her Viper and we arranged for her to rejoin the fleet, political and religious strife divided the planet. Some saw Kara as the harbinger of the apocalypse; others saw her as a beacon of hope, an Angel sent by the Gods, a messenger of the one God. Before long, war broke out between the various factions and Earth was reduced to a nuclear wasteland and what was left of the Thirteenth Tribe once again took to the heavens; following directions pieced together from our own travels so many centuries ago, they set out to find a new home.”
“Why didn’t you go with them?” The use of the second person plural is deliberate, even with all that’s been revealed to her, she is not yet prepared to claim her place amongst them, might never be. Even though she accepts what she is, she doesn’t feel any different, she still feels human.
Though she’d directed her question at her own revenant, it’s Galen who answers. He steps forward, the sadness he carries with him wherever he goes bleeds through in his voice but his face is clear and strong. “We Five decided to stay behind, fearful that the conflict Kara described between the fleet and our Cylon cousins who so relentlessly pursued them, would follow the Thirteenth Tribe to their new refuge and destroy what was left of our progeny.
“We determined instead that we would search out our erstwhile brothers and attempt to change things. We arrived on Caprica some eight years before the first Cylon war. On the Twelve Colonies too, history was about to repeat itself, the first step towards creating life had been taken, in the form of the Cylon Centurions, and they were about to rebel. A war was fought and narrowly won by the humans and all we could do was watch the Cylon Centurions take to the stars in defeat, knowing that they would return in humanoid form to wreak even more havoc.”
Laura sees it all pay out just as Galen described, can feel the conflicting needs that had pulled the Five of them in different directions. They felt for the enslaved Centurions and the Seven that were to come, their cousins, understood their thirst for revenge, but they could not condone what they were about to do. Meanwhile, their life on the Colonies meant a re-immersion in human society, that which they sprang from. After centuries of aloofness they reveled in it, the simple pleasures of life, even as their hearts bled with the knowledge of what was to come. None more so than Laura’s, who knew the pain of a life cut short, who’d seen her own past and future reflected in the fate of her human mother. Yet, in the end, their loyalty was to their own tribe and they positioned themselves so that they would be able to prevent the two warring factions from reaching Earth while their war still raged. At the same time, they would fight to prevent from happening that which their cousins desired most, the annihilation of the human race.
They tried unsuccessfully to convince Colonial Society of the danger they were in. That having failed, they watched and they waited, aware of their own strengths and limitations; they knew they would never be able to take on the entire Cylon army. Instead, when the attack was imminent, they were strategically placed to preserve humanity and in order to avoid giving themselves away, they switched themselves off, gave themselves over to their human identities.
And now here they all were at the culmination of that journey, the moment of truth
"Are you ready?" her revenant asks, her voice swirling like a melody between them.
"Yes," Laura breathes. "Yes I am." Her voice is sure even though she feels her body, utterly drained can feel herself fading. She stands before her own avatar on the balcony of the Opera House of her dreams, while her physical self lies curled on its side on the cold, stone floor of the ruins the Opera House became. She can feel the blood drip from her hand to the floor beneath her, can hear the tiny splash as it splatters on the ground, even as she stands here, tall and upright; the dichotomy is making her dizzy. “Tell me who I am."
"You know who you are, you know what you are."
And she does, she has already accepted it. "Cylon. I'm the last."
"The Last and the First, but that is not all that you are."
"The Dying Leader?"
"Ah yes, that too."
Unsure if she can bear to ask further questions and have her worst suspicions confirmed, she asks anyway. "What else?"
"You know, deep within yourself, you've always known."
A cluster of images comes to the forefront, arises out of the swirling jumble in her head, but she can’t quite grasp their meaning, or maybe she doesn’t dare to. It’s strange, how she can still be afraid of certain truths even with everything that’s been revealed to her. "I can't,” she all but pleads. “It's too much… I need you to tell me."
"You led the Five to the Colonies but died before you reached the new homeland of the Twelve Tribes. You woke again in a new body, a human body, born into the Roslin family. Think, Laura." And she remembers. She remembers how the Five of them arrived on Caprica, Saul, a strapping young lad, was quickly drafted into the service. Tory, Sam and Galen, frail in their old age, set out to build a resurrection facility, but it was already too late for her. Before they reached Caprica, she died, and with no vessel of their own making, out of necessity and need, she took the next step in their evolution and somehow found a way to resurrect in the body of a human baby, poured her essence into the empty vessel as it waited to be born, as it waited for a soul to reincarnate in her.
She almost staggers to her knees then, the weight of what she did, what she became, almost too great to bear. “I pirated this body? Assumed this form when some other soul, waiting among the stars, should by rights have inhabited it?”
“Maybe. But then again, maybe this vessel was waiting for you to inhabit it.”
She shies away from it, it’s too much to comprehend, too much to contemplate, the moral and philosophical implications larger than she can deal with right now, when she’s on the brink of learning her true purpose. Moving on to the practical repercussions of her actions, she turns towards her own revenant again. "So I’m a hybrid, part Cylon and part human, like Hera?"
"Yes and no. Hera may be the shape of things to come, but you are the bridge, Laura, the bridge to the future. The thing that will make it possible for Hera to fulfill her role, without hate or prejudice dogging her every step. You will pave the way; you carry within you the best of both races, a perfect fusion of Cylon and Human, beloved by both."
She snorts, it’s a sound born from equal parts laughter and bitterness. "Don't be so sure about that. I led humanity here, to the Promised Land, and it turned out to be a hellhole.” She gestures around and an image of her body, curled up on the floor of the ruined Opera House, manifests itself, Baltar and Caprica, Sharon and Hera crowded around her still form. She points at Cranach and his party, standing over them with their guns pointing down at her still form. "People are angry."
"That signifies nothing. What about the Admiral? The people will follow his lead."
“Bill.” His name feels good on her lips, even if the thought of him breaks her heart. His best friend turned out to be a Cylon and it nearly broke him. She herself had been the only one, their love for each other the only thing, that had been able to pull him back from the edge. What will this do to him, how will he cope when the person that breaks him is the one person able to heal him?
"You love him still, yes? What about him, will his feelings for you change once he learns who you really are?"
"I don't know." But as soon as she speaks the words, she knows them for the lie they are, she does know, she knows him, knows that he’s given his heart to her long ago. It has been hers to keep, hers to safeguard, ever since and nothing is ever going to change that. "No. That's not true. I do know and the answer is no, he'll still feel the same."
"Then there's hope."
She’s had enough of that word, the lie it represents, to last her a lifetime, several lifetimes "Where is the hope in that, we have no time, I’m still dying.”
"Perhaps."
She thinks back to Cottle's words, his uncharacteristic words of hope, his own crotchety brand of encouragement but her brief flare of optimism is quickly extinguished as she feels the weight, the weariness of her physical body. She is growing weaker with every passing moment; if the Cancer won't kill her, the Chamalla surely will.
Still, she’s close to the answer, she can feel it. Even if she doesn’t live to see her purpose fulfilled - what purpose? something inside her scoffs, programming is more like it - there are people around her who can carry what she learns out into the fleet, can see this, whatever this is, through if she can’t. She’ll tell Caprica and Sharon, Baltar even, she’s sure that somehow, Sam and Galen, Saul and Tory are listening in, have heard everything that has been said.
It will be enough.
She straightens to her full height, understands and accepts all of it for maybe the first time, the manifold parts of the puzzle of who she is, falling into place one by one. President and Prophet, a Teacher always, the Dying Leader, last of the Final Five, First among her People, Laura Roslin.
"Tell me how to break the cycle, prevent this from happening again, tell me where the Thirteenth Tribe went," she commands.
"Not yet.” Her voice, so full of love, of laughter now. “What happened here happened on Kobol, a multitude of other planets besides. The folly of man, the cycle of time, death and rebirth, what happened before, will happen again and again and again, until you get it right."
"And when will that be?"
"Perhaps sooner than you think." Her revenant says, a luminous smile lights up her face like a sudden sunrise and then her glowing figure bends forward, places a soft kiss on her forehead and like a switch has been flicked, she suddenly knows, she knows everything, knows how very, very wrong she was in her assumptions earlier. There is no destiny, there is no fate and she is certainly not some hapless victim of her own programming, like Boomer, shooting her beloved Old Man.
She, Laura Roslin, engineered this; she recognized the pattern, saw what was to come and sought to change that outcome.
Knowing the humans and Cylons would converge on this planet, locked in mortal combat, she and the other Four set up this trigger, set certain cues into place to prompt them into becoming self aware when the time came; the Ionian Nebula, her visions, Earth itself, so that the next step to the promised land, the location of the Thirteenth Tribe, would only be revealed when the war was over and their peoples united. When the truth, finally revealed, would prompt unity instead of dissent, when they all deserved to be saved.
With that final revelation, she slips back into her own body, the human shell that encases her. It is weary beyond measure and she thinks what bitter irony it would be if after all this, maybe she indeed won’t have enough time left to accomplish her final task, the one thing neither the Four nor Caprica, Sharon, Baltar or Hera can do for her.
She awakens to the sound of gunshots and confusion. It takes her ages to roll her failing body onto her back, longer still to focus her eyes. People are milling about around her, she thinks she sees Hera looking at her from across the expanse but her sight is too blurry to be sure. More gunshots and a body lands in the periphery of her vision, she blinks and recognizes Cranach; his lifeless stare feels like a reproach. Reaching out with her good arm, even though it feels like lead and even the small movement is torture, she rests her hand on his forehead, closes his eyes.
Close by, she hears a familiar voice, barking orders and she struggles to get up off the floor, wanting to see that beloved face, fearing, at the same time, to see the expression in his eyes change from joy to revulsion. The world spins away from her with the effort of pushing herself upright and she closes her eyes tightly against the nauseating feeling. Her mind is still reeling from what she’s learned, but the goal is in sight and she wills herself to find the calm at the center of the storm. She’s so close, but she knows there are hurdles yet to overcome, and none as difficult as the one she is about to face.
When she finally deems it safe to open her eyes again, everything has gone quiet; dust swirls as it settles, made luminous as it dances in the flickering light of the pyres still burning brightly along the perimeter of the Opera House. Far off, she can hear the sound of crickets though she thinks that maybe that’s just her imagination.
The snick of a safety catch as it’s disengaged is all too real, though. It sounds like a sudden gunshot in the silence; she recognizes it from the time Kara held her at gunpoint. Laura follows the sound, looks up to find herself staring straight into Bill's stern blue gaze and the barrel of his gun where it is pointed right between her eyes.