D5:: Roberta "Birdie" Lyons [WIP]

you burn everything you see
gold are your fingers, leaving traces everywhere you go

"You clean up nicely," her mother said the first time she saw her daughter in a dress made of silk with a little something glittering prettily around her neck. The way she said it, a buzz of dark humor in her throat, Birdie knew that it wasn't a compliment about how her hair looked when brushed smooth and gently curled. Those words had nothing to do with the dress, shoes, or jewelry. Her makeup didn't matter — not her red painted lips or artfully darkened lashes. Theodosia Alderose had raised her daughter to question society's rules and all ideas that were not explicitly Birdie's own, but suddenly she had walked into a soirée inside of a grand mansion situated in the middle of vast property owned by the child she had taught to value so many things beside things. It wasn't a hateful comment, but the surprise was as evident as the meaning: my precious girl, I never thought I'd live to see the day you were tamed.

It was all very nice indeed, this impossibly aspirational new life of the Lyons family. Another mother would never have glanced sideways at the fine china settings upon the table or the velvet draperies hung in every room. She wouldn't have counted the number of bedrooms with her eyebrows inching closer and closer to her hairline. She absolutely never would have sighed drearily upon learning that the door on her left led down to a wine cellar and the door on her right to a stained glass-walled solarium. All of this! All of this was her daughter's everyday life and yet Theo had expected so much more from her most unruly child, a girl who used to wear her savage independence the way other people wear leather jackets. The luxury of it all was somehow so disappointingly unimaginative.

In another lifetime Roberta Alderose might have commanded armies or pioneered space explorations to new and impossible worlds instead of squandering her tenacity on petty schemes for revolutions that never truly were. What change had she offered the world with her years of wasted efforts? A few pigs set loose from the slaughterhouse and given their freedom, only to be eaten by wolves in the woods? A laughable declaration of justice for a flock of sheep given haircuts that accomplished little more than a nation of orphans being told there were no coats that winter to prevent them from freezing in the snow? Such misguided idealism. For a woman who never knew fear until the day she carried her first child within her belly, she could have accomplished so much more... or anything at all. Just one thing. Just one. Sometimes she catches herself thinking back on her old life and wondering what any of it was for.

Inevitably one of her children immediately tears through the room, as if on cue, screeching and laughing at the top of their lungs, and all of Birdie's regrets fall away. What are a few ugly little stars in comparison to the constellations of freckles on Denali's cheeks? Or a flock dirty lambs to Rio's mischievous pranks, speckled with glitter and manic joy? The sound of sirens and blazing peacekeeper guns hunting down her oldest friends to the sound of the twins composing arias on the grand piano? Memories of witnessing bovine corpses strung up in a mile-long meat freezer in comparison to the sight of Seville situated in the library, studying medical textbooks with newly discovered purpose? Eighteen years with a son more innocent and less deserving of death or torture than any animal or person she has ever met? No, she regrets nothing. Not even when snippets of peacekeeper gossip come her way about the daughter of Birdie's oldest friend, ripped from the arms of her mother as a newborn and handed over to the community home as if being the child of convicted criminals were just the same as being orphaned. Not even then.

The donations Birdie Lyons has given to that community home over the past two decades tell a different story than the one she tells herself. Coincidence, she silently swears to her own heart, those were unrelated acts of generosity.

WIP