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It wasn't hard to get away. She made an excuse to Bel about looking to trade the complimentary peanuts packets she had collected for cigarettes and booze and slipped away from the pack of reporters there to cover the new President's visit.
They wouldn't miss her. What would she report but the same thing everyone else did? The world had ended merely days ago but already the press were back to being herded around like sheep.
Freddie was right.
She knew her way to wall. That had been an earlier stop, and many of the other journalists and hangers on that arrived on Galactica had placed pictures of lost loved ones. There wasn't really any hope of anyone actually being reunited anymore. If anything, it had become a memorial.
She had hung back then, light a cigarette and tried not to think of the photograph in her pocket.
The day the Cylons destroyed everything was the day being lonely had become being lucky. Nearly everyone had lost someone: Freddie his father, Bel her mother. But not her. Lix Storm had no one before and was now the last person in line to be pitied, which was exactly how she liked it.
And even if she wanted to, how could she explain. I had a daughter. I gave her up. But she found me.
I was on my way to see her.
She nodded at the Marine guard as she passed and found herself alone in the corridor confronted with thousands of dead faces. Some were laughing, others looked pensive, a few children pulled faces. Most smiled.
She had spent her youth trying to capture something on film that was profound. Those candid everyday shots said more than anything she had ever managed say.
She looks through all the faces – so many of they young men and women. She wondered if they were the partners of the military officers aboard Galactica. So many of them themselves young.
Then she stopped. Because one of the faces she recognised.
Sofia.
Her daughter is there on the wall smiling at her from her high school graduation photograph. The very same picture she had sent Lix. The picture Lix had in her pocket. Except this one was perfectly pinned in place.
“She contacted me as well.”
Lix turned and he was there.
It had been nearly twenty years and in between everything had ended and nearly everyone she had ever met had died, and yet he was there. What were the odds?
We're all just playthings to the gods she remembered him saying hazy drunken night long ago, right before she had kissed him on the lips and then they had fraked into the early hours of the morning.
They were young then.
“I saw your name on the lists,” he said. “I heard you were in the fleet.”
“The Triton,” she replied. “Relocating to the Adriatic.”
“With Lyon and Rowley?” he asked.
“Yes. We've worked together in the past, I like them and they asked,” she said. “And they're right,” she added for good measure.
“They do have a point,” he said.
“Yes.”
A long silence followed and he looked around at the walls and down at his feet. Anywhere but at her.
“I was on my way to see you,” he finally said, looking up straight into her eyes and breaking the silence.
His admission took her by surprise. She searches for some kind of witty retort, something she would say to anybody else, because he has to be like everybody else to her. She needs him to be an old colleague or someone she once knew.
She needed to look at him and not feel any attachment or turmoil. Because she knew that's what he was looking for. He was staring into her eyes and looking for any sign that would give him hope and she's damn well not going to give it to him. Why should he have any from her when she has none herself.
“Well,” she said, finally. “I wouldn't have been there – obviously, or I wouldn't be here” She crossed her arms. “So you can put down your continued existence down to not calling ahead.”
“If I called you would just have told me to stay away,” he replied. “I'd prefer to think I owed my continued existence to you.” He then turned away and focused on the wall.
At his reply she feels a stab of rage. How he could have the gall to stand there, to talk about them and their daughter after so many years and after he left.
“This must be paradise for you, so many things to straighten,” she said.
He looked back at her with a flash of anger in his expression. “I think that was uncalled for,” he said, his voice as calm as ever.
“Yes,” she admitted. It was mean and petty. But then she thought his presence was uncalled for. She wanted to be alone in her grief and his presence was a rude interruption.
But when she reached out and put moved the picture of Sophia to make it slightly askew, it was not an act of pettiness - although the assumed he would see it as one. That she needed to do. Sophia was her daughter as well and Randall had pinned her photograph too straight for her liking.
That would be her mark on the memorial, she decided.
She then walked past him and did not look back.