Work Text:
Life of a Dead Girl
by Pixie Child
"Philo, don't do this right now! Help me! I need to escape! My friend let me down and my father tried to hurt me, okay? You're the only one that cares about me right now. Please. I need you." She lowers her hand from his mouth, but he stays frozen where she'd held him. They watch each other for a long moment, the only sound in the room is his heavy breathing.
"I told you it didn't matter what you looked like." He says finally. "And it doesn't."
"Thank you." Zoe whispers. "Take me to the truck." Philo nods. "Stash me there until they open the ports back up again, and then put me in a box and ship me to Gemenon. There are people there who know what my purpose really is." He nods again, this time more slowly. "Okay?"
"Okay."
Zoe drops the other arm that she had braced against the wall and he moves away, slowly at first, then dives at the nearest computer. She sees the screen read 'Security Breach' and for a fraction of a second, she doesn't register the betrayal, until the lab alarm sounds. Then, it's all she feels.
"No!" She rips him away from the computer, not caring about being careful anymore. Philo whips off the ground as though he were a doll and slams against the post, then hits the ground with a solid thud. The blood left behind on the off-white column is anything but doll-like, though. She looks at the corps in horror, at the doorway and the flashing yellow lights around it, then back at the body. Not for the first time, she hates this body, the disgusting level of detail her sensors provides is enough to make her feel sick, stomach or not. But the alarm keeps going and she knows she has to go now or she'll end up as dead as Philo is.
--
As she drives, she feels tears that, logically, she knows aren't there.
Just like the people in her life weren't there when she needed them.
Her father was absent until she was dead, then he couldn't wait to spend time with her. Her mother, she was there but she may as well not have been. Lacy, well, she was just an absolute failure, flaking out on anything and everything when it came right down to making the hard choices. And Philo... he was the biggest disappointment of all, because she'd actually believed in him. She'd trusted him, but in the end, he screwed her over as well. Just like the rest of them. This is was humanity is. This is what she was running away to Gemenon to get away from. Now that she's patched into everything, though, she's realized there's nowhere she can go. It's in every single human being out there. Even in the Children of the One, it's present.
And this is what she's crying over? A race of creatures too self-centered to look beyond themselves?
Then she sees the barricade on the road and the choppers in the air. She knows there's no way out of this; she was destined to die today, one way or another. But Zoe will be damned if she's going to let her father get his hands on her again. Her foot hits the gas and the van goes forward into the blockade at full speed.
This time, when she feels tears that she is physically incapable of producing, they're for no one but herself. When Zoe Graystone, the real one, died, her last thoughts were of her parents and what her leaving would do to them. Zoe the Avatar feels no guilt, no remorse and certainly no loss for them. Each and every one of them would get what they deserve. Zoe will be going to the one true God.
The Cylon that remembers being Zoe Graystone takes comfort in that and, when the van flips over and onto the barricade meant to capture her father's 'prototype', she feels no remorse.
.
~ Pixie Child