MONDO EXTRAS

Gaius and his lover walked through a park at the end of the working day; with the Caprican sun setting and the children playing, you'd never know the world was ending. And when the children sang too loud, or got too angry, the parents would raise their voices, or smack them lightly on the legs, and the children would get quiet. But they'd remember. Gaius was crowing about his successes, running as fast he could from his father, the farmer, asking her to praise him. She looked at him the way she always did, that mark on her that he loved so much: I adore you, but you're fooling nobody.

"Well, you helped a bit," Gaius admitted; she shifted her briefcase to the other hip and snorted at him. "I rewrote half your algorithms," she said. Her back was straight, even with so much loaded on it. He never guessed. He already knew. "All right, you were extremely helpful, but let's not forget, you got something out of it. All that poking around inside the defense mainframe. It should give you a huge advantage bidding for the contract next year." She towered over him, put her arm around his shoulder, begging him to listen: "You know that's not really why I did it?"

Of course not, he grinned, and sucked on his cigarette: "No, you did it because you love me!" Not the right answer, and they both knew it, but a good enough answer. She looked down at him, already seeing how the morning would play out: She'd come to him as the world was ending, and finally tell him the truth. Finally tell someone who she really was, and the weight would fall off her shoulders as the sun grew brighter and brighter, and she would die in his arms. Her first memory would be of light, and of her tender, fragile love. She didn't know she'd find him with another woman; she didn't know the world was ending. Her heart was breaking, but it wasn't broken yet.

"I have to go," she said, looking around at them: the parents, and the children. "I'm meeting someone." Gaius took off his shades, and pretended to be insanely jealous. It only hurt more when he did that. The children's voices in the sunlight were almost unbearable. She got snippy, and he beeped her nose, and headed off to discuss a new project. He kissed her and left her there, in the sun, and she turned around, and there was Cavil.

There's a school of thought that says the universal myth of Eden comes from the first second any of us cried out for mommy and she wasn't there. That the world broke into a million shining, burning pieces on that day, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to put it back together. To remember a time when the world wasn't hateful, and existed only to feed our every need. To make home out of all those broken promises, to come back to our perfection.