Yesterday of Freedom
by ALC Punk!

When hungry, she eats energy, drives suns insane and absorbs the resultant explosions.

In the beginning, she knows her name was Jean Grey. Other names occasionally return to her. Scott, Henry, Bobby, Warren, Charles... But they are distant, nothing but remnants of a life she hasn't lived for a very long time.

At one time, she gloried in the destruction of others, in the pain of the dying, in the vengeance that could course through what passes for blood. She traveled from system to system, absorbing the lives of hundreds of thousands of millions of people. Races she could have known had she bothered to look. And even the great Shi'Ar Imperium could do little to dissuade her. She left them in ruins, tatters of what they once were before traveling elsewhere.

Now, she finds it a pastime no longer worthy of much. She is weary of this life, exhausted with lust and anger, rage and hatred. There seems to be nothing left but travel on an endless road of nothing. Until the day she's skirting a system of planets with more life than she's touched in a long time.

Flitting through these colonies, she rediscovers the joy in life.

The people on them laugh, cry, scream, hate, fight, rage, make love, war, peace and death. Every color of the rainbow, shades she's been missing. It fascinates her and she finds herself almost consumed, moving swiftly from colony to colony, person to person until she feels her knowledge has expanded a thousand-fold.

Feeling obscurely at peace, she takes human form. She settles down in a remote little village and grows flowers and eats the sunlight when she needs to.

She dances in the rain and laughs with children and falls for a man with a craggy face and a pilot's flare. They marry, and she's surprised at the familiarity of the ceremony even as she's disturbed by her ability to forget herself.

For years, she lives, content in his love. She gives him two sons. Both bright boys, though Zak is happier than Lee. Lee takes after his father, delighting in brooding when he needn't. In pushing himself to be the best, to top his father. A father who is frequently not there. A father she begins to distance herself from. There are unquiet threads running through the universe again. Rumblings that her senses tell her could bring destruction to civilizations.

There was war. Now there is peace.

Zak adores his brother, tries to be him in any way possible.

When Lee enters the Academy, she realizes that she is entrenched in a bitter dispute that will never end. William Adama doesn't forgive betrayal any more than a human should.

She wants to tell him she's sorry that he is just another man.

Her sons bear witness to the divorce, each torn in their own ways. She feels too much of their pain, as time passes, and begins to build herself a wall. A wall against feeling, a wall that will protect her.

It's nothing she hasn't built before, she thinks, as she puts it up block by block. Frame by frame, molecules that she hasn't manipulated for nearly twenty years. She builds it thick, as solid as Scott Summers on a warm day in spring.

A wall that inevitably fails the day Zak Adama goes up in a ball of flame, his soul reclaimed by the universe as restitution for the deaths of trillions.

The funeral is a pastiche of images she knows she's supposed to remember, but she misses them.

Except for Kara Thrace, standing there, holding William's hand.

'Are you Kara Thrace?'

It's so easy to touch the young woman's mind, to slide in and worm the knowledge from it. To leave behind broken pathways which will never heal until the woman eventually self-destructs. Mad with a grief that she has earned.

Mrs. William Adama drifts into obscurity.

She occasionally still hears from her son, Lee. Knows that he's made Captain. Feels proud of him, and tries to always remember to tell him so.

The days turn; two years pass, the Galactica is turned into a museum piece--decommissioned like a useless toy.

And then her unquiet threads become reality. It starts small. So small, she almost misses it. Market square, and a young mother crying as she holds her broken child.

The image follows her into nightmares and she wakes to a cold sweat, and the world around her atomizing.

Bombs fall, trillions die, and this time not by her hand.

The Phoenix bursts free its constraints, streaks into the sky above Caprica, and begins to destroy in return. The Cylons have little chance against a creature that simply tells the universe how to exist. Their toy ships fall to pieces in her grasp, and one by one, each model of Cylon is destroyed until there is only one left.

We can show you the true God they tell her as she begins to pull them apart. We will show you, and He will love you. You must accept His love. God gives and God takes away.

They crumble to nothing in her hands, in her mind until there is nothing left of the Cylons but the bitter taste of ashes in Jean Grey's mouth.

God loves you, Jean.

No he doesn't.

It's so very easy to find the remnants of the Colonies, to shuttle people and ships together into a fleet that seems unable to comprehend its losses.

She strokes through their minds, tangling in their fears. So easy to add them to the list, she thinks, as Caprica begins unwinding into dust behind them. It takes only thought to propel the ships into the unknown, the occupants terrified and unable to understand.

It shocks her for a moment to find that they are among the survivors. And almost, almost, she resolves into human form and walks the decks of the Galactica.

But her time has passed.

Mrs. William Adama is dead. And so is her civilization, unless Jean Grey can remember where to go.

Her distraction costs her. The Shi'Ar Imperium has been waiting through the centuries for the entity known as the Phoenix. To find her and make her answer fo the crimes against the people of D'Bari, against others. A hundred planets that were destroyed in her quest for energy and power. They have built themselves back up from scrap, from the dregs with one goal in life, one driving need.

The destruction of the Phoenix.

The cruiser blindsides her, surprise leaving her vulnerable as the weapon coalesces inside of her, sucking everything into a bottomless pit.

Everything that belongs to her begins to disintegrate, emotions, memories, places and dates, names, times, lovers, children, the people she first mind-read when she discovered the Colonies, all begin to dissolve. There is barely anything left of her when the Galactica challenges the Shi'Ar, demanding to know who they are.

Barely enough, but she survives, falling and falling to land on the deck of a ship she's never been on.

There is no notice of her appearance. She shimmers slightly, wrapping appropriate clothing around herself and melting into the shadows as marines rush past to duty stations.

Control, she thinks as she blindly reaches into one of them and accesses the location.

It takes her little time to get there, and she ignores the guards on duty, the bluster of William Adama, and relieves him of the microphone.

Her words are precise.

"This is Jean Grey. You cannot have them."

Shi'Ar pours down the speakers, clouded with static, and she can feel the dwindling connection to who she had been stretching. She understands what they say. The strain of maintaining her existence is almost unbearable. "I understand that you came for the Phoenix." She laughs, bitterly, "And you've almost succeeded."

Of course they would find her, now. All that flagrant use of power to destroy the Cylons had given them her location. She might as well have called them on a personal line.

More Shi'Ar comes with static, and she knows she's crying. "Please, Majestrix Xallandera, leave the humans to live, to survive."

The response makes her tears less bitter, and she says, "Thank you, Majestrix." Complete annihilation in exchange for the lives of the people she loves. There are worse ways to go. The energy sink the weapon started tugs at her again.

She ignores it for the moment, reaching past, searching for the mind she touched two years before. Touched and twisted. And now regrets, knowing that past sins eventually must be absolved in far cleaner ways.

There. A careful smoothing, a coercion to heal over time, and then she leaves one final, parting gift to the young blonde woman who destroyed her son.

"Caroline!" William's hands are grasping her arms, turning her, and he looks so surprised.

"It's all right," she tells him, hands cupping his face before she leans in and gently kisses him. "They don't want you. Kara Thrace knows where you need to go." The tears feel like a curtain of rain as she begins to fall apart, entropy catching up with her. "I love--"

-f-

Ahem. Yes. The Adama boys are now Summers-by-proxy! OMG. Because Adama is a Space Pirate. Yes. Although, I suppose this makes them Nate and Rachel... Erm. Anyway. And yes. The Cylons are dead by Phoenix. Hee. That was the joke, actually. Which then required Reason. And Reason was Adama.

*firm nod*

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© 2005 ALC Punk!