Chapter Text
You know, I've always had this dream.
Ella. Your name is Ella.
The General has always called me Seven. Number Seven, second to last. Jesse calls me by my name, but it always sounds hollow.
Never forget your name.
The other children don’t have names. Well, except for Judah, who even knew the Dame that birthed him. We had thought his sire was long gone, and Judah did a damn good job of never telling me his name until I met the prick.
Dame. Sire. Nobler words for Studs and Mares, that's all. Gender didn't matter for Recombinants, the shrinks decided what you are as the need arises. For Judah, it doesn't matter anyway; he'd gotten his mare's genes. I am female, unless the time comes for another generation and they decide to make me a stud. It could happen; I’m strong and able -- more so than many of my squad mates.
Dame. Sire. Maybe I prefer the stately titles because I don't want to think of my own progenitors as animals bred for gene stock. Maybe I want to think of them like knights of earthly legend, like Lancelot and King Arthur. Swords and armor and white horses, that sort of shit. Makes me sound like a knight or a princess in my own right.
They loved you very much .
You know, I've always had this dream. It starts with a feeling of overwhelming warmth, like a cup of hot coffee poured right into my chest and I can't get enough of it. I drown myself in it, both hands on the cup as I try to fill…something. I don't know what it is, all I know is that something is empty somewhere, and empty things must be filled. Then, I find razor blades in the bottom of the cup. Cold and burning like liquid nitrogen.
Oh if they could see you now.
Heartbreak. It's heartbreak. The pain of loss and the quiet sob of a soldier that knows he can't go on.
I drink the razor blades too, and suddenly the blood on my tongue isn't mine.
Then, I'm lying between two corpses.
This is when I start crying, every single night since I was born. From the half-choked mewling of an infant to the ugly blubbering of a little girl, I sob when I am asleep and everyone knows it.
I'm lying between Arthur and Lancelot, the latter already stiffening in the cold clutches of a violent death. The blood on his chest is coagulated, reeking. Clear, tacky fluid dribbles from the base of his skull, sheared-off nerve endings weeping like willows as his spinal column spills forth its bounty. His eyes are terrified, bloodshot, lips pale and parted with the last remnants of an agonized scream. Somehow I remember him screaming, writhing on the ground while a woman holds an unraveling braid of hair and torn myelin like Perseus wielding the gorgon's head.
It's burned into my memories, a hot iron to the hide of my psyche.
Then, the warmth returns in part. I'm warm on one side, freezing cold on the other, my very first cradle split between a corpse and a used-up soldier on his way out.
I feel my Dame die. He knows he can't take care of me, not without his mate. His brain is calling it quits and the heart patters as it fails and I can feel it . He's connected to me, my tiny little queue tangled into his nervous system as it had been in the womb that was forced onto him through hormones and stimulants.
"I love you, babygirl. And your daddy loves you too. Be good. Be strong. Atta girl. Love you. I love…."
I always wake up then. I always wipe the snot and tears off my face, then rise for morning drills. Every night since I was born I relive my dame's dying memory.
But today is different.
It's a tree, gnarled and glittering with orange and red needles that sprout from the knobby branches like tufts of hair. It's skirted by sand and weathered stone, an old arboreal woman in a wasteland of dust and color.
I hold up the end of my queue, feeling the ghost of my dame's dying act trail across every feathery dendrite. The wide-eyed woman beside me does the same, tattooed muscle twitching as spastically as the rest of her. Aunt Zee nods to me, wetting her lips as if to reassure herself.
My heart pounds and my mouth goes dry at the edge of a precipice, but I square my jaw and jump.