MONDO EXTRAS

"I only knew Admiral Cain for a short time, so what I have to say about her will be short. She faced things. She looked them right in the eye and she didn't flinch. That's something that we do a lot around here: we second-guess, we worry. When I think about what she went through after the attack -- all alone, one ship, no help, no hope -- she didn't give up. She didn't worry. She didn't second-guess. She acted. She did what she thought needed to be done, and the Pegasus survived. Might be hard to admit, or hard to hear, but I think that we were safer with her than we are without." -- Captain Kara "Starbuck" Thrace, Serial #462753. Razor. Forgiven. Harbinger of the Apocalypse, when all the veils are taken away, and everything becomes what it always was.

"Our first responsibility is to the survival of humanity." -- President Laura Roslin, as quoted by Lee Adama, Civilian. Forgiven. Forgiven.

You're born, you live and you die. When you're born, you get a name, a secret true name that nobody else knows. You spend that lifetime learning it, the angles and curves of it; you learn to inhabit it, you learn who you are. You become acquainted with its delicacy, its beauty, the lapidary outline of a soul. And sometimes, when things are bad, fate asks you to put that name away, somewhere safe, locked up tight, so that it will stay clean. Behind a door in a room you never knew about. There are no do-overs. No second chances to make things right if you frak them up the first time. You make your choices and you live with them, and in the end, you are those choices. And if you believe your name is gone forever, that your hands are too dirty to retrieve it, you could fool yourself that it's gone forever. That you've given it away and damned yourself. I don't agree. Innocent is not the same as not guilty, and fixed is not the same as unbroken. The day everything gets so terribly awesome that you can rest forever, without a single rough patch coming on the road: that's a long wait. Best to take your chance when you can, to reclaim the light inside what you are, and what you've proven capable of becoming. To make the long walk back, from the altar to the temple. Better to find the best ending possible; to hit the end of line and skip down to the next, to straddle that salt, that end of line, like poetry. Better to hear the angel, begging you to step across: into the new shape, into the story to come. Again, again, again.

You're born, you live and you die. This is a gift.