A/N: This chapter took four months and half of one of those really big bottles of yellow tail merlot. (Edited sober, I promise.) Thanks to everyone who kicked me to update (read: Rachel) and everyone who reviewed and hasn't given up on this story. I haven't but it's a bit of an emotional roller coaster to write. I really understand why Hemingway said "write drunk, edit sober," now. (And writing an honor's thesis in history isn't really helping the issue. But I will never, ever, abandon this fic. No matter how long it's been between updates.)

Also kudos to whoever catches the ASoIaF reference.

Additionally, there is now a prequel to Down the Sky. Due to it's rating (MA) it is available on my AO3 account, which is also under the name simplyprologue. The title is Shatter My Heart, and while not required to understand the plot going forward, is still a good thing to read for full context of Laura's POV sections, especially going forward.

UA: Thank you again so much for your lovely reviews. You have no idea how much it means to me that you've stuck with this wild AU.

k1227: I'm glad you took a chance on this crazy thing of mine. I'm so glad Birdie comes off as real. Writing a story with so many OCs is always a bit... chance-y, and I'm glad Birdie, especially, reads well. And I'm super glad that Saul and Laura come off well too! They're kind of tons of fun to write together.

CHAPTER FOUR: THE GIRL AND BOY ON FIRE

Her dreams are filled of fire. She fears flame. It makes her shudder and gasp and yet here she crawls through it, hands and feet singing, her clothes burning away from her flesh. Please, she thinks. Please, someone help me. I need help.

She cannot scream, here on her hands and knees through a forest of flames. She keeps going of course, and does not look back. Oh how she wants to. She wants to look back, to the place where she was Ella and she was safe and loved and held, where her hair was brushed and braided, and the temptation is much too great, of a time where she was safe and loved and Momma held her and braided her hair—

Momma, she cries, but Momma's hair is flame red like her own used to be, when she was very, very little and Momma is aflame and so is Uncle Saul and the house with the red door, and everything is red, and terrible, and red.

She screams, until screams are hoarse and keeps crawling, her fingers blackened and charred.

Please, she yells. Please, somebody. Anybody.

It hurts, oh Lords above it hurts, the fire and she knows she came here willingly.

Please, she cries. I'm just a kid!

The stars have fallen, and the sun has gone away, and she sobs as the Galactica falls and falls and falls and she hears screaming and someone roars jump and she sobs harder, trying to get to her feet.

Help me! she screams. Please, help me! Save me, please!

A pair of unseen hands helps her to her feet; her father's dog tags reappear in her fist. A voice she does not yet know yells to her run!

She looks forward, and sees Eleanor, and a face she does not recognize, before the flames close in, swirling around her, swallowing her whole, burning her alive...

Birdie jerks awake, heart thrumming wildly in her chest. Tamping the flats of her fingers over her mouth, she eases out of bed. Padding over to the window, she sees the sun just beginning to break over the wall. She fists her hands-not burning, you're not burning-into the sides of her soft sleep shirt, before running her index and fore fingers along the smooth, red skin marking her brands.

It's over.

"Shower," she mumbles. "I need a shower."

Her skin is damp, her night clothes clinging to her skin, her hair plastered to her forehead.

"Gods frakking dammit," she mutters, stripping as she walks into the bathroom. "Frakking nightmares aren't gonna do us any good in the arena. Frak."

Will enters the dining room to see Birdie already at the table, drinking her coffee (black, one sugar) and slowly piling rolls into her mouth.

"How'd you sleep?"

She smiles weakly. "You know me. I sleep jus' fine on a damp floor."

He shakes his head slightly, walking over to the sideboard to see more food in one place than he's ever seen in his life. Wrinkling his nose distastefully, he softly says, "That wasn't an answer, Birdie."

"I'll be fine," she answers blandly over the rim of her coffee cup.

"I know you'll be fine. You'll always... are going to be fine. That's not what worries me." He decides on eggs, and bacon. Bread and jam. Coffee. He takes his with cream, because he works as the baker's apprentice and is used to it. Birdie, he knows, is far too pragmatic (tries far too hard to be Aunt Laura) to use cream and sugar. But he'll take his comforts where he can get them. He keeps his tone even, and sits down beside her. "But you're not fine, right now, which is the issue."

He lets her simmer with her thoughts. There's no use in pushing her, because she'll push right back and then she won't talk at all. Will eats, listening to the clink of her spoon as she stirs her coffee, watches her watch it circle and swirl.

"It's... strange," she says, when she finally begins. "That, in a few weeks, we're going to be dead. Hunted down. Or starved or... whatever. But right now, we're the safest we've ever been in our entire lives. It's not... its that, that makes me feel..."

"Worse?" he asks, when it becomes apparent that she's floundering for a word. He doesn't look at her yet. She must of had a nightmare, he thinks. He's known Birdie his entire life. They shared a cradle, a childhood, and many mornings.

"I'm not used to sleeping in the same place for several nights in a row. Or... having to." She forms her words delicately, with care. She usually does, he thinks, but her voice is pitched lower than usual, and he thinks for a moment that if he closed his eyes, he might mistake her for her mother. "You know I haven't had a bed of my own in... awhile. It's jarring. To have people knowing where I sleep. But also for them to know that... and that they won't..."

She trails off again, fingers tensed on her spoon.

"Hurt you?"

She hisses out a breath. "Something like that." She pauses, furrowing her brow. "I miss my dog."

Will chuckles. "You like that mutt more than you like most people."

Snorting, she answers with a dry, crooked smile, eyes cast down into her coffee, poised just before her lips. "Husker doesn't ask me questions."

Will grins at his plate. "Husker growls at anyone who comes within five feet of you."

She takes a long drought of coffee. "He doesn't growl at you or Nick. Or any of the Tyrols. Or Doc. Or-"

"He just growls at anyone who dares to come onto his block that he doesn't know," Will interrupts through a mouthful of eggs. "Remember that time he almost bit whatshisface's hand off for trying to hold yours?"

Birdie squints. "The Tauros boy? Alex? We were like, thirteen." She sighs, putting down her mug again. "They'll take care of him, right? Make sure he has food? I mean he doesn't need much, 'cause he hunts for himself and everythin', but when the weather's shit someone needs to let 'im inside..."

"My Ma'll do it. Or Rosie and Billy. They love him. And Doc, no matter how much he bitches about him-Husker pretty much lives under his porch."

His mind turns to his Ma, and wonders what she'll do when he's gone.

He thinks she might not survive him by long.

Birdie clears her throat next him, and he knows its a subtle threat to tell her what's on his mind or she'll wrangle it out of him otherwise. She enjoys giving people orders, even though they may not be recognized as such.

"I'm just worried about my Ma, is all." Setting his fork down on his plate, he takes a deep breath. He looks after her. Or likes to think that he does. Keeps her from doing anything that will get her killed. He thinks that maybe if Birdie wins, she'll hold on. But he... he doesn't want to have to go back to 12 without his best friend. He won't be able to face any of them, if he survives her. If... Eleanor Adama dies so that he can live.

He volunteered to go into the arena with her for a reason.

They came into this world near-on together. He'll be damned if they don't go into the games together.

If she dies, he better be on the ground before her.

And then what? His Ma'll go on some suicide mission, taking out as many cylons as she can before she...

"I'm sure she'll..." Birdie begins, before shaking her head, cutting off her own train of thought.

Will snorts.

"Yeah," she finishes shortly, voice oddly high. She bites at her upper lip, worrying it between her teeth. She looks young, Will thinks, without her scars. They made her look... maybe not old, really, but tired. Combative, with the claw marks on her face and the scar left over from when she split the delicate skin at the corner of her eye. Her hair is glossy, not lanky and unwashed, her skin clear and unblemished. She looks like an airbrushed version of herself.

She looks like maybe what Eleanor Adama would have had a chance to be, Will thinks, if the cylons hadn't come back. If she had been the spoiled child of the president and the Admiral, a military brat in cushy quarters, pretty clothes, well-kempt and untouched by cruelty.

He wonders if that girl would have been his friend.

Probably, he thinks. He'd be a different William Anders as well. Maybe that William Anders, who has a mother and a father and serves as... a viper pilot, maybe, instead of a baker's apprentice and with maybe more than one pair of falling-apart shoes and nothing but some dirt and an old bow to his name would be a good friend for the clean and shiny Eleanor Adama.

Would they still be friends with Nicky? Would Birdie be in love with Nicky? Would Anie have been born? Probably not... Uncle Galen's first wife wouldn't have been...

Still, he thinks. No use in navel-gazing.

She's Birdie. He's Will. They live in District 12. They are going to fight in the Hunger Games.

They hear a sound coming from the hall, and both freeze.

Gaius finds the two kids sitting quietly at the table, hunched over their breakfasts, exchanging furtive, familiar looks.

He's never had tributes who were... friends, before.

Although if he remembers correctly, Laura Roslin's daughter and Kara Thrace's son are more than... friends, despite what Caprica found out about the girl being entangled with the union leader's son. Their birthdays are only two weeks apart, which makes sense if he thinks back to the beginning of the occupation. Although, he thinks, pausing and looking at the girl, they didn't know that Laura Roslin was pregnant until she was almost into her third trimester.

He remembers the rioting, though, a few days after Eleanor was born, when Cavil had decided it was a good idea to separate a tired and sore Laura Roslin from her days-old child and detain her without charge. Gods, but he thought they were going to burn Colonial One from the inside out. They hadn't thought that Laura Roslin held so much power over the people, let alone her mewling bastard daughter.

It's strange.

The mewling bastard daughter.

"Good morning," the boy hazards cautiously.

"Morning," Gaius answers distantly. "Caprica will be along in a few moments."

"Okay..."

The girl sets her cup on the table.

She probably hates him, right?

"So we start training today?" she asks warily.

He looks at the pair of them. They're matching. He thinks that was probably Ellen and the Eight's doing-the maroon tunics, black pants, black boots. The girl's hair is in a loose braid, and when she lifts an impatient eyebrow at him, she is Laura Roslin reincarnate.

But with... the Admiral's coloring.

And maybe a bit of his jawline-.

The boy is all his mother, though, he thinks...

"Ah..." He starts, shaking his head to clear it. "W-what did you say?"

She's giving him the oddest look, but does at least repeat herself. "We're starting training, today, right?" She seems carefully controlled today, the heady anger from yesterday gone for now. Or maybe, he thinks, looking her fingers laced through the handle of the cup, her coffee hasn't quite reached her mental processes yet. He examines her through the lenses of her parents, like a specimen under a microscope. He knew the girl existed, of course, but never had the chance to study the progeny of Roslin and Adama up close before.

Gaius thinks it's interesting that the name she took was Adama, not Roslin, for the mother who raised her.

"Yes," he answers. "You're both due down in the training center. At ten. Promptly."

Her coloring is the Admiral's though. And her build, and the measured gaze she gives him as she traces the rim of her coffee cup. It's tempered, by hunger and dark, dismal poverty and suffering, but it is still like she has been carved from some innate bedrock of politic and war. A minor goddess, almost, power coiled in her compact frame, ready to strike. Childlike, but not at all. Mercurial... like her mother.

Strange child.

(Not a child? She is seventeen and yet ripe with cynicism and glower, eyes deadened unless flashing with rage.)

(Strange, at least.)

He jumps, when he notices that Caprica has slunk in behind him, when both of the children's gazes fall onto her instead of him.

"So," she says, glaring at him until he shrinks away to the food table to serve himself. "Down to business. Training. First off, if you like, we'll coach you separately. Decide now."

They both look genuinely confused.

"Why would you coach us separately?" the Anders boy asks.

"Say if you had a skill," Caprica says, sitting down at the table where he had intended to. "That you don't want the other to know about."

Eleanor snorts indelicately. "He doesn't have any secret skills. Secret from me, anyway." She casts a sidelong glance at Anders, and sobers. "And I don't have any from him."

They look at each other for a moment, barely any time at all.

"Together," they say, in unison.

The girls looks at him long after the boy's eyes drift back to his breakfast. Slowly, she brings her fork to her mouth when the boy speaks. "Why would you train us separately, anyway?"

"Say if you had a secret skill you might not want the other to know about," Caprica says.

Will snorts. "I don't have any secret skills. At least not from her. Least not from her."

Eleanor smiles at her food. "Will and I..." She pauses around a mouthful of eggs. "Will and I have been hunting together since we were nine. He uh, he knows my other..."

"Bastard isn't the only b-word that goes well with Birdie," Will says with a smirk. "Birdie the Brave, Birdie the Brawler, Birdie the Bitc-."

"We can hunt." Eleanor cuts him off with a grin. "Bow and arrow. Hatchet. I'm fast, and light on my feet. I'm handy with a knife. Handier than him."

"I can do traps. Wrestling. Bow and arrow, too."

Not useless, then, Gaius thinks. His tributes are always feeble, or hungry. Or feeble from hunger. Or just too skinny. Strength is strength, but it never means much in the arena if you don't have the weight to throw around with it. And hunting in District 12 is restricted, by permit only. He knows that others get by, but with bows and arrows nearly impossible to come by and permits for the select few and few of wealth, he never thought... Kara Thrace, though. They always did say that the Admiral didn't leave his people behind unarmed, and Kara Thrace (and Roslin) knew their way around.

Anthea Tyrol, the girl from last year-he remembers who she is, of course, and knows it was hardly an accident that two Tyrols were drawn two years in a row. But Anthea, she didn't even fight at all. She went through training as hard and dedicated as possible, like... Eleanor (Birdie? What a strange nickname.) and William are now, but after her one-on-one with President Cavil, she... gave up. He-he and Caprica-saw the footage that didn't make it to the broadcast or any of the replays, of her death, the first night in the arena. She just gave up. Pretended to be asleep, and let-not even a career-slit her throat.

Why?

He screams before it registers-the girl has thrust one of the serving knives between his fingers and is back in her chair before he looks up at her, eyes wide and wild.

"That," Caprica drawls, a slow grin slinking across her lips as the fire dims in Eleanor's eyes," is mahogany."

"He," the girl answers, and Gaius notices for the first time a glint of auburn in her hair, "is our mentor. So he shouldn't be ignoring us."

"She has a point, Gaius." Without so much as an askance gaze, Caprica reaches over and wrenches the knife from the table, and hands it back to Eleanor. "What else can you do with this?"

She curls her fingers around the handle, a cascade of tiny fingertips and delicately manicured nails against the gleaming silver, before she tests out the density, the weight of it in her palm.

"Where?" she asks, pushing back her seat from the table.

Caprica gestures to the long swath of wallpapered wall, obverse a wall of long, gleaming windows.

Eleanor traces her lower lip with her tongue, before fluidly, more fluidly than he thinks he's seen anyone move in a long time, and her body picks up a sudden but... eloquent, speed; her arm rolls with the throw, the knife leaving her hand and spiraling towards the wall, lodging itself parallel to the floor in the exact center of an elaborate spiral pattern. It happens quicker than he would have thought, and then the boy stands, handing her two more serving knives. She adjusts them in her grip, heaving them in unison, each hitting the wall inches on either side of the first.

"Very good." Caprica's smile is feline, but proud. She claps slowly, crossing one leg over the other. "Isn't that right, Gaius?"

He opens his mouth, closes it, and opens it again before answering. "Right." He smiles, and it's small. "And what-what about you, William? What can you do?"

"He came in second in the district wrestling competition last year," Eleanor cuts in, shifting her weight to stand with her feet a shoulder width apart. She's a bit bow-legged, Gaius notes. "Only after Alexander Tauros, who's more than a foot taller than 'im. Will's the baker's apprentice. You should see the stuff he has to be able to lift and move. And he can hunt, like we already said." Her voice grows fierce, and protective. "I know we don't look like much to you fancy Capitol people, but we can fight."

"Birdie can climb trees. Higher and faster than anyone I know." Birdie(?) looks at him, a puzzled expression on her face. "What?" the boy says with a laughing shrug. "You'll be up in the trees picking off people with a bow and arrow. And she's a surgeon's apprentice, so she's got those skills."

She rolls her eyes. "Will can make a weapon out of almost anything. I've seen him make his own spears in the woods before. And he's got a good eye for camouflage, and he's got the patience of a god. I'll be too small for hand-to-hand combat, but he can stand his ground with most of the other tributes. I've seen them. He's their size, or bigger."

He remembers Samuel Anders being a tall man, and an athlete, of course. His son...

"Yeah, I'll fight them. Because I'll have to." The boy rolls his eyes. "You're the fastest runner, long and short distance, in the district. When the Careers get the better weapons and I can't outrun them, I'll be frakked."

"So I'll get the weapons, in the Cornucopia-."

"Aren't you both getting a bit ahead of yourselves?" Caprica's smile doesn't falter, but Gaius can tell she's bemused, from the way tiny lines appear at the corner of her eyes, in the divot between her brows. "Only one of you can win. This partnership, while... touching, truly, won't serve you very long in the Arena. Sponsors, yes... after all, they're already calling you two the girl and boy on fire... but in the end, if you get to the end, it can only be one."

Artemis and Apollo. The broadcasters, the sponsors, they were lapping it up, indeed. The smiling and enigmatic Eleanor Adama was already a... not a darling, but a definite object of interest. And the boy who volunteered to go with her, was a topic of lesser discussion himself. He'll be relegated to sidekick. He almost wishes she had gone with Roslin-Adama, though. It would have sounded so patrician, very capitoline.

Is that how he should play her though? Sympathetic to the cylon cause. The daughter, paying for the sins of her parents. Dutifully... obediently. A mimic, of the proper fashions and proper ways and proper... beliefs. But what to make of the boy, then? His mother is no quiet and tasteful rebel.

Pliant.

They should be pliant, and dutiful.

Gaius can see, though, from the way she stands, from the way she threw the knives, from the fire waiting behind her eyes, twisting and smelting into iron-she will not be pliant. Not in her core. She has good manner, he can see. An easy smile. She can speak well, eat with poise. Laugh. She'll play the game, yes, take her assigned role, but at her heart, at her mettle-.

Eleanor Adama is very dangerous.

They get the recon on the location of this year's Arena fairly quickly.

"Starbuck's flying the blackbird to scope out how much monitoring we get. Actively, that is. We can handle what they throw at us, but with the little bird in the games, any sort of activity on our ends is gonna make them raise their hackles."

Laura spreads the print outs over the chart table, letting Felix overlay them with the maps.

"Right," she answers, watching as the former lieutenant lines up latitudes and longitudes. "Do we know anything, preliminarily?"

"Arena's close to home this year. It's a helpful coincidence. Although, any attention on it's gonna be noticed right away and there'll be little delay between the toasters dispatching forces and them gettin' to the ground," Saul replies.

"They've closed down their bases on most of the planet, though," Laura muses. "Have they consolidated or liquidated?"

"Or lost," Felix supplies.

"Or lost," they echo, very well remembering other circumstances and conditions of their exile. Lost, in the thousands, at least, since their last attempt at anything like revolution. And here they sat, across the sea. The bay, really, on an area she and Bill had named the Northern Neck. Isolated, heavily wooded, a good stretch of land high on a hill, good to hold. They had almost built an airfield, before the rebel cylons had been eliminated and the rebels punished for collusion and treason.

Not a loss, she can imagine Bill telling her. It had been a retreat, on the cylon's terms. And a few of her own.

"Which base are they using for the games?" Laura asks.

"The one along the 22nd parallel," Saul reads off a report. "So nearer to the city than to us. Makes sense. Starbuck and Chief report that the carrier is secure. We get the air field ready to go and they can fill it."

"How many birds do we have in our possession?"

"As many as we have pilots." Saul chortles, reaching for his hipflask. "As much good that'll do, since most of 'em haven't been in the air for goin' on twenty years, but we'll take what we can get."

"Air strikes would be limited to the Capitol and District One."

"And we're not doing that until after the kids leave the Capitol," Felix adds on. "As much as I'd like to head off the games, it's not gonna happen. And I'm not dropping a bomb on my daughter." His eyes flicker up from the maps, to Laura, inclining his head towards her slightly. "Or yours."

"Or Starbuck's," she says pointedly. "Or any of the others'."

"No, just them prissy Capitol kids," Saul says gruffly. "Now where the frak is the Arena, Gaeta. Is it where we thought?"

When it first started getting bad, with Baltar, Bill had had given them the arms to stage a coup. And in case of the worst... three warheads. Non-nuclear, but... and the military tech to launch them, remotely.

(Laura swallows hard, swallows it all down. Three warheads. Could three warheads have saved his life? Saved Ella's childhood? Saved them all? She remembers how he took her hand, that night, the first time she saw him in a month, with Baltar disallowing him from shore leave. How they spent the night in the raptor, together, in a nest of blankets, whispering to each other in candlelight after spending the day burying the missiles. He took her hand and shut the door behind them, laid her down, and she can still remember the weight of him between her thighs.

And before the morning light they flew back beyond the far edges of the tent city, and he was gone, with a press of his lips to her sore knuckles and the promise of her return to the presidency, her legs sore from the night's exertions.

And that was the last.)

She bought Ella's life with one of those missiles.

(They didn't know what the effects of Hera's blood was going to be, back then. They had been careless, and reckless, all hurried and urgent passion, love made in the shadows, love whispered where Baltar's spies couldn't hear. Only now, with all these years gone by... how could they have known?)

Bought her daughter's life, bought her daughter's way out of the Games. Bought their little... hideaway on the Neck, bought exile over death.

They had given the cylons the locations of two of the missiles.

And the third, if Felix was correct...

"Shit."

"What?" Her voice is sharp.

"It's not where we thought. It's not outside the Arena."

"Then what?"

Felix rechecks his coordinates, before pointing to the point marking the burial site of the third undisturbed missile. Laura moves to stand over his shoulder, lips tightening. "

"It's inside the Arena."

"Frak." Laura eyes Saul when he takes a swig from the flash. For all the times she's trusted him with Ella's life... "So what the frak do you propose we do now, Madame President?"

"I'm guessing no one has any suggestions on how we could... break in, do they?" she asks, straightening her shoulders, almost prim, even in tattered pants and a ratty sweater. Smiling grimly, she paces away from the table.

"And there's no chance the cylons know it's there, right?" Felix asks, sitting down with a heavy thud and a heavy exhalation of breath.

"No," Saul says.

"Unless you know where it is, it's almost impossible to find," Laura says. She was there when it was buried, in the recesses of a small cave, it's tiny entrance obscured by foliage. It was nowhere notable. A few hundred yards from the closest water source, and someone would have to know to look for the cave to find it. There'd be little reason just stumble upon it... unless they were hiding, or running for their lives.

But even still, nearly twenty years with exposure to water and the elements, would it work?

Probably not.

"Who else knows about it?" Felix asks.

Laura looks at Saul, deferring to him.

"Ah..." He shifts his weight off his bad leg, pulling up a folding chair to the table and sitting on it. "Chief, Anders, Cally, Foster, Cottle. Starbuck."

"Any chance Starbuck got the recon back before the Reaping? Pieced it together?"

"And told her son?" Laura finishes, tone doubtful. "She'd have no need before the Reaping, and I doubt she'd go spouting that information in a government building. We have to think of a way to get into the Arena. They're-they're only guarding it so people can't get out, correct? And the cylons do go in and out during the games, to collect the-the bodies." She falters for only a moment, lacing her fingers at her waist.

(She knows what they're calling Ella. The Girl on Fire, Artemis incarnate. But no, her little girl was named for another fire. She was named for the dawn, curling up over the horizon at the end of a five-day night. For the girl who, squalling, pulled her out the fugue she was in after the Galactica was shot, burning and screaming, out of the sky. She had laid in bed for months, stomach swelling, tear tracks drying on her cheeks. Hope, so quickly vanished. Maybe it would have been kinder, if it had dwindled, if Bill hadn't returned. Maybe then she could choose to believe that they had moved on. That somewhere, out there, the man she loved, the father of her child, was alive. That he could still come back.

Eleanor Aurora, named for the dawn, with a shock of red hair on her tiny head and Bill's serious, calm, gaze.

She's just a child. Her baby. Even if it's been six years since she sent her running.)

"We don't have anyone on the inside anymore, Laura," Saul pronounces, looking, for once, his age.

(He had held her hand, had been the first person to hold her daughter. If, twenty years ago, someone told her that her closest friend and ally would be Colonel Saul Tigh, she would have laughed at them.)

"Ellen."

Saul snorts. "Okay."

"Even if, Laura," Gaeta says. "How would we get in contact with her?"

(Eleanor Aurora. She had named her for the day, not the night.)

"We can't," Saul says derisively. "It's a useless discussion. We'll get the vipers, use this as our launch point. Get as many of our people as out as possible. Do what we can with the rest."

"Pleasant."

He snorts again. "War ain't pleasant, lady." Dryly, he laughs. "Gods, I swear sometimes you're still a naive little schoolteacher."

"Really, Saul?" Her eyes narrow, and she flattens her hands out on the table. How many rounds in detention. How many rounds in front of Cavil. The questions, first. And then drugs, while she was strapped down to a table. Threats, against her child. Bile at the back of her throat as they broke her fingers, one by one. Screaming. Don't answer. Don't give anything up. Don't breathe. Don't move.

The first time they took her, Ella was only a few days old. She was still bleeding, from the birth, muscles sore, her thighs and belly in shreds as they ripped her baby from her arms, dragged her out of Cottle's makeshift clinic.

Of course, they couldn't take her while she was still pregnant.

He squirms.

They held her for twenty-four hours. By the time they dumped her back at the clinic, Saul Tigh had nicknamed her daughter Birdie, and the name was sticking.

Gods frakking dammit, Saul.

"You have a shadow," Will murmurs. Birdie fights the instinct to tense, scanning quickly to her periphery. "She's the one from District Eleven. Ah... Genevieve McClellan."

Birdie nods, going back to tying her knot. "Her father was one of my father's pilots."

"How'd she wind up in Eleven, then?"

Birdie tries to send him a look that says that he should already know the answer to this question. "Her father was a suicide bomber. But her mother... people worked to make sure she wasn't at the bottom of the heap, for what her father did."

Will looks at her with an eyebrow raised.

"It was the right thing to do," she whispers back, indignant.

He lifted his hands off his knot, flexing his fingers and raising his eyebrows in something like retreat. "I know. I know it was."

Birdie sighs, looking back to get a better look at the twelve year old. "She's tiny. Maybe what, eighty pounds soaking wet? She's no bigger than Rosie."

"Yeah," he comments dryly. "That may be the point."

"I got that."

"Did you?"

"Shut up." Her glare cuts through his roguish grin. "She's little, Will."

"But look at her." He gestures with his chin. "She's a good climber."

Birdie rolls her eyes. "I thought we had a discussion this morning at breakfast that climbing and being small wasn't gonna get any of us very far against the Careers."

"Birdie," he hisses. "We don't have the time, or the-the whatever, to take anyone else on, let alone a little girl. Didn't you volunteer to take the place of one of those? Who you love and promised to come back for?"

She appraises Will cooly. "Genevieve is a child. And I doubt she was reaped by sheer luck. Look at her odds."

"Sometimes it happens."

She tightens her smile, standing as the trainers hail them to stop for lunch. Wiping her hands on her leggings, she moves to walk in front of him. So what? So what if she'd be... dead weight? Wasn't she, for most of her life? Does that make Genevieve's lift less valuable? Less worth saving?

Eat lunch, she thinks. Stop being angry, it isn't going to help you. Don't be angry at Will. He's being smart. Weren't you just telling him that you had to be smart?

Still...

Will grabs her shoulder.

"I'm sorry," he says. "I'm sorry, but we can't."

"Why not?" she asks, voice low. "The Careers have their alliance. We can't we?"

Will laughs, almost dragging her to a table. "Because they're well-trained. They get the sponsors. They know what they're doing. We don't."

"We could," she says. They could. Genevieve. Wilhemina Gaeta. Laurel Venner. All familiar names. All kids with parents who were in the Resistance. They could pull it off, she thinks. It doesn't matter that they're poor, or younger, or unskilled. Strength in numbers. Genevieve is so small, with her little blonde braids. Amandla, too, Birdie thinks. Amandla Laird.

"How?"

Birdie takes a breath, looking around, spreading her fingers out on top of the table, looking at the Careers, eating and laughing and joking. "We eat together."

"They don't trust us."

"Genevieve is little. She won't think not to trust us."

"Her mentor will have told her not to."

"She was following us, earlier."

"Spying."

"Still..." Birdie muses, fingers toying with the end of her braid. "We should work at the same station as her, in the afternoon. She's our best bet. Gods, Will, what could it hurt? She's just a little kid, you said so yourself."

He sighs, shaking his head, before looking at her with his devils-may-care smile. "You're going to be the death of us, you know?"

She just laughs.

Laura Roslin wakes up from her nightmare with a jerk and a silent gasp. Fire. Always the fire. She dreamt of a crying baby in a basket, of the house with the red door, oh heaven and of Hades.

The first day of training was over, and she barely restrained herself from drinking as the talking heads debated Ella's odds, placing her between a triumphalist two to one and a deprecating twenty to one... Gods.

She dreams of Ella, dead, laid out like a sacrificial virgin on a gurgling stream of flames and ash. No. She was supposed to be the sacrifice. It was supposed to be her life, never her daughter's. She had insured that.

"Gods, sweetheart," she mutters. She wasn't supposed to volunteer.

She just wants to hold her, like she used to be able to.

(Laura Roslin just wants to cry, but she can't. Not yet. No, she'll save her baby, and her people, first. She can't afford to cry, not yet.)

She turns over in her bed, kicking off the covers.

She dreams the Galactica, burning in the sky, Bill, tags dangling in his fist before dropping them into her palm, closing her fingers around them, the golden sun breaking over Starbuck's viper, and the stars falling, as they all burn.

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