PHD #272: Dreams and Omens
Dreams and Omens
Summary: Cidra and Quinn talk of omens long past, and the dreams that haunt them.
Date: 25 Nov 2041 AE
Related Logs: Right Foot Forward; After the Hunt; Men and Machines
Players:
Cidra Quinn 
Pilot Berths - Naval Deck - Battlestar Cerberus
The battlestar's pilots call this place home. Bunks line the walls with grey curtains to cover their sleeping areas. Lockers sit between each pair of bunks and a round metal table sits in the center, furnished with simple but comfortable steel chairs. A hatch at the rear of the room leads to a communal head.
Post-Holocaust Day: #272

Cidra has recently gotten off duty, showered, and changed into her sweats. And she's actually spending her downtime in the berths. Wonder of wonders. There was a point about a month back where she wasn't sleeping in her bunk *at all*. She's been making a point to be visibly *there* for at least a few nights a week these past few weeks, but she still disappears to her office, the chapel or…gods know where some nights. And she doesn't spend much downtime here when not sleeping, showering or changing. Yet, here she is. Sitting at the table in the center of the room, sipping on a cup of tea, squinting down at what looks like a map laid out in front of her.

Quinn's been asleep in her bunk pretty much since Cidra arrived in the berths, but that's never a long time state for her, her bladder about the size of a pea and her back railing against every motion she makes. So, a few minutes later, the curtain to her bunk is drug open and Maggie Quinn shifts her too cumbersome frame up into sitting. Then legs down. Feet on the floor. Three, two, one… she's standing! Success. Drowsy green eyes blink in Cidra's direction and she gives a half asleep grunt as she waddles off to the head, red hair sticking in every direction but straight. She's not long before she comes waddling back into the room, wearing a pair of big-marine sized sweat pants and old tanks. None of her own clothing is really in rotation any more…"Stranger…" She huskily mutters towards her boss.

Cidra's cloudy blue eyes tick up to Quinn at the greeting. And they are cloudy at the moment. Perhaps from whatever's in her tea. She looks quite tired, but that's her usual state lately. An inclination of her head, and faintest of smiles, is offered to the redhead. "Jugs. Not so strange, I do hope." It's something in the nature of a joke, ruefully stated.

Quinn tilts her head, looking almost as cloudy eyed as Cidra, but not quite. And she's been asleep for the last two hours and change. Instead of retiring back to her bunk, she sways in the direction of the chair across from Cidra and pulls it out. Getting down is interesting, a balancing act of her non-existent center of gravity, but she manages. "Toast. You…okay? And don't bullshit me by saying yes."

Cidra looks Quinn up and down, in that mild way she has of looking at things at times. Always hard to read her expression precisely, though at present tiredly curious registers. "How much longer?" From the way her gaze briefly rests on Maggie's belly, her due date is likely the import of the query. As for Quinn's question, it does not receive an immediate answer. She takes another sip of her tea, as if mulling it. "I am…having difficulty sleeping."

Quinn rubs one hand tiredly across her freckled face, sighing…"Full term? Six more weeks… So, another week or two and.." She shrugs. At her age, under these circumstances? Any time after that, truth be told. Maggie's doing her best not to sound scared, but there's defintiely a ton of tension behind that answer. Things were getting Very Real, very quickly. She doesn't address it again, concerned eyes flickering across Cidra's face in turn…"I can tell. You look worse than I feel…" Maggie allows silence to linger there, a quiet invitation for Cidra to speak.

That last earns a soft snort from Cidra. It's grimly amused. "Flattery shall get you nowhere, Jugs." Another gulp of tea. "This helps a bit. Doctor Adair gave it to me. The herb used to make is supposedly a pre-cursor of sorts to valium. It works…middlingly." She sounds as if she wishes it were stronger. A nod and "Ah" as Quinn lays out her approaching due date. "Have you thought of names?"

Quinn shakes her head slowly, "No… honestly not." It seems it's a night for quiet, raw honesty. Some nights are like that. "…Truth be told… I didn't think I'd make it this far." A horrible thing to say, but an honest one. She sighs slowly, her hand dropping from her face to rub across her belly. "Something… things… on your mind that you can't sleep? Dreams?… Anything?" It's a comfortably good tennis match of a conversation, it seems. No one gets to be too awkward or bare too long.

"Dreams…yes…" Cidra pauses a moment. Downing more of her drink. In gulps again now that it's cool enough not to burn her tongue. "Have you ever…had a dream you cannot shake, Maggie? I have had the same one…well. I had it the first time after Leonis." So many months ago. "In…part. Then not again for months and months. And then, after I returned to the ship, after we left Sagittaron…I had it again. And again, and again, night after night." She exhales. "This helps a bit. Other things…help a bit more. But they do not banish it completely. Well. You have made it." She pauses, thoughtful. "My mother was convinced I would be a boy. I was my family's firstborn. She said I had the…feel of a son. My father did want to name me for his own father. Cidnor." Slight smirk. "They did not quite get what they did want."

The comment about the dreams haunts Maggie's eyes a touch more. She understands strangely well. She doesn't comment about the pregnancy again, not for now at least. She stares down at the table, silently thoughtful for a few moments before she finally decides to go forward with words. "At the big ceremony before we started the war games… before everything happened… I saw something in the back of the room. Someone… a man, and his horse. Castor… Pollux wasn't there. Castor, and his horse… a warning. There was death in their eyes. I hadn't seen him in years… but my grandmother saw him. An Oracle… they called her. My sister wanted to get the visions, she pretended… all growing up. But I'd see them… when the harvest was going to be bad. Before my brother died… I know when he comes, or his brother… there is no good to come." She knows what it is to be haunted. She swallows back quietly. "…What's your dream?"

Cidra listens to Maggie in complete silence. Drinking down to the dregs of her tea, then just holding the tin cup in her hands. There's an intensity to her silence, though. Blue eyes seeking to meet the other woman's. There's a searching quality to her gaze. As if she were sifting, grasping, for answers in all of that. She does not answer the question about her dream. Instead, she asks one of her own. A note in her voice that contains a searching quality. And comes out in but a tentative whisper. "Then…do you believe in the omens, Margaret?"

Maggie's expression is a better answer than any words she'll give. A sad, slightly scared, but mostly resigned flicker of emotion cuts through her muddy green eyes. A believer who wishes she wasn't. A woman who knows they're all puppets to the gods and simply doesn't understand how or why. Or what she can do about it. She doesn't speak for several long moments, but finally she gives a quiet rasp in Cidra's direction. "I wish I didn't." But she does. She cannot deny proof, the sort of proof that's been with her her whole life.

"It is…funny that you speak of the games," Cidra says softly. Clearly not 'ha ha funny,' from her muted and searching, and sad, tone. "I think the night after them often. It was…it should have been the pinnacle of me. The Navy had been my life for ten years. I wedded myself to it when my husband died. My Daedrek. My Sunstroke. And that night…I flew at the lead of Fleet of fine pilots as CAG of the Fleet's newest battlestar. I, a seminary drop-out from Gemenon who as a girl never thought she would touch the stars she watched as the owls flew. And we flew *so* beautiful, Maggie. My gods, we were glorious. We were victorious so wonderfully. We were perfect." There is fierce pride in her voice, but there's a catch in it as if she's near tears as well. "I had gotten all I had worked for. All I had wanted. Convinced myself I wanted. And yet all I could think was, 'He is not here. And I am alone.' And I thought of the omens…the omens were dark, Maggie. Despite the glory of that moment…the omens were so dark…"

"I know… the priestess saw it… I saw it…" Maggie laughs, bitterly, for just a moment. "I told Clive. He… didn't believe me…" She shook her head. Another relationship soured and gone. Another bit of lost history. "… What are your dreams, Cidra?" She rarely, if ever, has used the woman's first name. But this isn't a conversation about work. It goes far beyond that. Maggie sits forward, just a bit closer. She doesn't reach for the woman yet, but she's there, so near Cidra's space… sharing the same air, the same breaths.

Cidra still does not answer the question about her dream. It's hard to tell if it's evasion or just that her thoughts are elsewhere now. Far in the past. Her blue eyes are certainly faraway. "Ibrahim and I spoke of it that night…the auspices. I have attended ceremonies since I was but a babe at my mother's breast. I have never seen them so dark and so foreboding as they were when this ship was launched. I could not get them off my mind. But I did not speak of it with anyone else. I was…afraid to say it aloud. Ibrahim…he was not a man of the Faiths. He said to me…" A pause, and swallow, and she looks down at her empty cup. There are dregs left in it, but she reads nothing in the leaves. "…'The thing about omens is, they are everywhere, if you look for them.' I think he was wrong, though. I still believe. I believe more now than I did then. There *are* omens everywhere, Maggie." That belief clearly brings her no comfort, though. In fact, she sounds chilled by it.

Quinn nods slowly. "There are." Her fingertips drop again, rubbing across her stomach, thoughtful and distant for several heartbeats. Not that her child was special, or an omen, or anything but strange luck… but she carried a merry be gotten, she could never forget that either. A sardonic smile cut across her lips for a heartbeat…"And if we look at every one of them, that is the path to madness…"

"Madness…yes…" Cidra clears her throat in what almost sounds like a chuckle. Though it's a laugh completely lacking in humor, save for the black kind. "I have never had the gift of Sight. Neither did my mother. She was a priestess of Hera but her mind was never…touched. Nor was mine. I can perform the rituals perfectly, down to each word and habit, but the gods still do not reveal themselves to me. Perhaps I do not want them to. If they are trying to tell me something in these last weeks, I fear to imagine what it is."

Quinn hasn't ever called hers a gift. She hasn't even really said that she could See. She just told the story… what she has seen. It's enough, too much, really. She rubs absently at her stomach, eyes now focused on the other woman's. "Not imagining it is driving you mad too, Cidra…" Maggie voices quietly, a hint deeper concern behind her husky tone.

Cidra's eyes meet Quinn's for a beat, then drop to her cup again. The CAG is usually all about eye contact, but it's given fleetingly tonight. "Perhaps it is at that…" she concurs, tone so soft it's barely audible. Her cup is set down with a soft clink of tin meeting metal table, and she stands. Rather abruptly. Running her fingers through her ruddy dark hair. "I will umm…go to chapel. It helps me…think. Even if the gods do not speak to me. I can think there."

Quinn leans back, reaching over to the table and pushing herself into standing. "Do you wish company, Cidra?" Maggie offers gently. It'd been too long since she had been herself anyway. She doesn't push any more about the dreams, even if she's as curious as she is worried. She just offers a silent bit of company, a partnership in this little bit of madness.

Cidra half shakes her head, but the gesture of refusal is not actually finished. "Come if you like. I may sleep there tonight. I do not dream…so much…there." She goes to dig around in her bunk to grab her prayer beads. They're rarely far from her person. Well-worn beads of olive wood, a crude charm carved to resemble an owl strung on them.

Quinn nods slowly, "I'll come… " She doesn't add anything else. Actions speak far louder than words. So, quietly, she moves for the hatch with Cidra and takes the familiar, if neglect by herself, path towards the chapel. Her hand hovers near the base of the woman's back the whole way there, touching very faintly on occasion. A guardian angel of sorts, if just for tonight.

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