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Chapter or Story 
Chapter or Story
Disclaimer: The characters Miss Parker, Sydney, Jarod, Broots etc.and the fictional Centre, are all property of MTM, TNT and NBC Productions and used without permission. I'm not making any money out of this and no infringement is intended.
Author’s note: We hold these truths to be self-evident: Michael is a male god, Ryan is so, so gorgeous it’s painful (no I’m not a cradle robber. I’m a healthy sixteen-year-old girl thanx ever so much), and Jarod is damn fine for forty-two (which is not only my lucky number and Fox Mulder’s apartment number but the answer to THE question of life, the universe, and everything). That said, I must admit that not only am I mildly hormonal this evening, but I am the cruelest, most beastly bitch of a writer living. I am so enjoying my angst these days I’m sure there must be some dangerous physiological issues at work here. As it happens I am stalling, not at all looking forward to bleeding poor J-dog yet again, but I suppose I must. Oh, and for those of you kiddies who are in anyway concerned about how I came up with the number 42, here’s the math. Jarod was stolen in 1963. According to Mr. Reins he was four when he built the empire state building, which we know he did around thirty six hours after coming to the Centre. Four from 63 is 59. 2001, minus 1959, equals 42 and bing bang boom, Jarod is the answer to the overall question of life, the universe, and everything. Oh yeah, I so rule. Then again, when J first laid eyes on J2 he said the clone was him twenty years younger, and Broots later stated J2 was 14, which is only thirty four give or take plus three years its been since Donaterase…oh hell, I don’t care. On with the insanity.
Precious Blood
Part VII: Parade of the Slave Children
Matrea Nara
It hurt to move. When he opened his eyes the light slashed down on them with a savage, merciless intensity, so he had to slam them shut again and groan in pain. He felt her lay her hand on his arm, though she didn’t say anything, and he drew his strength from her. He knew he could not stay this way for long. He had to heal, had to be strong or the sky would fall and who would remain to brace it?
He used to tell the children they could be anything they wanted to be. Most parents did he knew, but when he said it he meant it, in the most literal sense. Even Ryker, who was only sub-power like his mother, was possessor of an uncommonly brilliant mind, though he had a maternally inherited quick temper. Arin and Luke were unparalleled, intellects so keen, minds so agile he sometimes wondered if they rivaled his own. They would have to, because the Centre was willing to kill him to get to them. He wondered where they were now, if they blamed him, if he would ever see them again. He wondered if he would die here, if it mattered whether or not he did.
But most of all he wondered why he was still alive. Why hadn’t they shot him in the head and been done with it? That was twice now they had bloodied him, shot him, beaten and tortured him. The agony coursing through him cut to every cell in his body. His blood boiled in his veins, his heart shuttered with every beat, a herd of elephants battled in his brain. Death then would have been a blessing, a heavenly release. Death then would have convinced him of the heretofore-unsubstantiated existence of God.
What was worse, he knew that every pain in him was visited ten fold on the twins, who had a psychic link to each other (and somehow to him) that would have delighted Sydney to no end. He wished he could be there with them, wished he could purge the emphatic pain from them, knew he could not. It hurt so badly! He tasted the blood in his mouth, saw it swimming behind his eyelids, felt it in every part of him. All the world was blood. He would die in it, die with the smell of it in his nostrils, the feel of it on his skin. Damn death! He would not die in blood. He would not let them die tasting his.
><
It hurt to move.
Curled up in the corner of her transparent cell she shivered and whimpered and wept, coated with a cold sweat and fevered. She thought of her brothers, of her father, of the mother she had never met. She thought of the Centre and of Lyle and all the other men she would kill when she got out of this place, and how sweet it would be. She thought of Lucian, barely alive across the room from her, his pulse weak, his breathing shallow, his soul hovering between the lands of the living and the dead.
It wasn’t enough. She needed something to fire her blood, purge the pain from her in favor of some indomitable emotion. Love failed, rage failed, fear was never an option…so what was left to her?
Desperation? No. That was what they wanted, she knew. That was why they were trying to kill her father, that and because they no longer had need of him when they had within their grasp three prime pretenders, who to add icing to the proverbial cake were younger and would therefore last quite a bit longer besides. Not desperation. Annoyance? Regret? Hate? Oh yeah, hate might do it. But the Centre had taught her to hate, and after her father had found her she had refused to succumb to the emotion they had so deeply ingrained in her and her brothers. Then her father had told her of Uncle Kyle and how they’d done the same to him and to Arin’s own mother, to a lesser extent…and that sonofabitch, Uncle Lyle, who seriously needed to eat shit and die…
It hurt to think.
Arin curled tighter around her center, feeling her brother’s hazy presence in her mind, longing for Daddy and the safety he would bring.
><
It hurt to see him like this.
Sitting at his side, she struggled to recall any time in their extensive past together she had seen him so helpless. There was that plane crash incident…but she hadn’t really been there to see him them. Angelo had snuck her through the air vents a few times to watch Jarod’s SIMs, and there had been times then when she had though he was so vulnerable she had almost cried for him. She knew now he hadn’t been, not really, but the memories stayed with her all the same.
She remembered how lost he had seemed when she held her gun on him over Thomas’s grave, but that had not been like this. Then, it had been an emotional vulnerability, an utter desolation. In retrospect she knew it was an agony brought about by his grief for his first, and because Miss Parker held a gun on him, was so violent and accusatory towards him. She found it impossible to believe he had actually feared for his life, because he himself had removed the firing pin from her pistol, but what had pained him so grievously was the mere fact that she was angry enough with him she had pulled the gun on him in the first, that she had irrationally blamed him, and that she was suffering as much as she had been. Miss Parker, like so many others, tended to lash out at those closest to her in the times of her greatest sorrow, but he could not know that. At least she had aimed away from him before she pulled the trigger.
But not even the pain she had seen in him then, the hopeless, feeble helplessness that came from emotionally heartache for one (she thought) he loved, could compare to the way he was now. Battered, broken, near death, his pulse was weak and his breathing shallow. He shivered incessantly, filmed by a cold sweat and fevered, mumbled from time to time in his restless coma-like sleep. She touched him, kept in constant contact with him, let him know she was there. She hoped he knew, hoped he drew some measure of strength from her nearness, as she had always drawn strength from him. Even that day in the cemetery, she had felt his loss when he had gone.
She began to speak to him, in hushed tones, of the children they had been and all they had become. She whispered close to his ear, taking in the scent of him as she told him the well-known stories that chronicled their lives together. Starting from the day Sydney had first introduced them, as part of SIM of course, and moving upward, she reminisced to herself as well as to him. The day her mother died, Angelo and Faith, the bunnies, the hurricane, the strip search in Vegas, Dover, Bartlet, the day he’d saved her father’s life, the cabin on the lake where Jarod, Angelo, and Parker had saved a child at such great cost, Fenigore and the Red Files, Kyle and Major Charles, her mother and the secrets Jarod had helped her find, Tommy…she spoke of all these and more with her hand resting on his chest, feeling it rise and fall.
“You can’t leave me Jarod,” she murmured, fighting the tears in her head and the break in her voice. “Not like this. We’re not finished yet. The story’s not over yet.” And it wasn’t. They still had so much left to do.
><
Mulder and Scully sat together, watching them, listening. Though neither would say it they were reminded much of each other, of so much undone and unspoken, of the fear that came with the threat that perhaps it never would be. For the two of them, so close and so comforted by that closeness, seeing two others who had long been denied that most basic solace at risk of losing it all before they even truly attained it was heartbreaking.
Scully knew it was worse for Mulder than it was for her. He was such a compassionate soul, with the most limitless capacity to love she had ever encountered, with the exception of maybe, maybe, Jarod. His instinctual drive to protect, to save the world was not so different from Jarod’s. He wanted to help these two, to make the pains of their world go away like he had wanted to do for Scully so many times. But he couldn’t, and he knew it, and it ate him up inside. She stayed close to him, shoulders touching, letting him know she was close. Her heart broke for him, and for the boy, for Arin and Luke and their hapless parents.
Mulder would not back away from this, would not turn his back on these people and she could never ask him to. She would stay with him. Even when he had demanded she leave him to his own, for her own good or because he hated the restrictions her rationalizations placed on him, she kept to his side ninety nine point nine percent of the time. At this point she did not feel comfortable anywhere else, trusted no one else, but at the same time did not trust him to his own devises. He was a strong man, a brilliant, emotional, capable man, with one of the deepest, most open minds she had ever encountered, but when his passions got the better of him he could do some very rash and dangerous things. What he was planning now, what she could see him contemplating as he watched them, was one of those things. She wasn’t go to stop him, but she wouldn’t leave him either, so all that was left was to grab tight and hand on for the ride.
He shifted beside her, looking down at her, and their eyes met. A thousand words passed between them without a single utterance. Each knew what Mulder intended, knew how Scully would react, knew she would not stop him despite her protestations, so there was no point saying any of it. Scully loved those eyes, was a captive of them, knew them better than anyone else, the depths and tones of them. She could see a world behind her partner’s eyes. One day they would be the death of her.
><
Maggie Scully watched them all with a mother’s sorrow in her heart. Jarod, Miss Parker, Fox, Dana, and the boy Ryker, were all examples of a deep emotion she knew she would never understand. They were all slaves in their own right, had been all their lives, knew nothing but the slavery that bound them, each to the other.
Jarod had been a slave in the literal sense, exploited, sheltered from the world and the life he might have had. That slavery had forever branded him, marked his every word, thought, and action. No matter what he said she knew he would always be held by that place, bound in an irreparable way. He would never be truly free, could not bring himself to disappear, knew it and hated them for it. His captivity had forged of his soul a pure, mighty essence, a force for contention, a thing of beauty, but it was not his own. He devoted his life to others instead of to himself, even after being freed from that prison, and no matter what happened within the next few days she knew he would continue to do so.
Miss Parker appeared to Maggie to be a slave to some of the same demons Jarod was, a woman who had seen much in her life and lacked a sufficient emotional outlet, who could never liver her life free of her commitment to others. She had bottled up so much of herself within, though Jarod seemed to bring at least some of it out of her. From what Maggie had heard from Dana and based upon her own observations, Miss Parker, too, had been literally enslaved. She was bonded to that place, to a sense of duty and family honorable in its intentions, but not in its truth. She hunted Jarod, a man she obviously had deep feelings for. She let the Centre get away with unspeakable atrocities, blows directed at her and those she loved, and never raised a hand in counteroffensive. She loved, but would not allow herself to succumb to it for fear of the pain it would cause. Her fear was as sure a chain as one of steel, as was her duty, and the ingrained commitment to the place that had been her cage, and only refuge in many respects, her entire life. It was her escape from herself, from all she wasn’t, from all she would never be allowed to be, and it was her forced retreat from all the weaknesses that lent humanity to her troubled soul.
Fox was slave to his dreams, his ideas, his passions, he love. He was a slave of her daughter in more ways that even Dana seemed to know, a slave to his work and his enemies and to little green men. He was a slave to his need to make the wrong right, to find the truth, punish the guilty. Where once she had seen him as a little boy buried in little boy fantasies, she knew now that he saw the world in a light few people ever did, had been a part of something vast and dangerous since the time of his father. He was a pawn, a player in some vast game she did not pretend to understand. He would go to the end of the earth for his truth, for his quest, for his partner. He was a slave to all of these, but it was for the most part a self-imposed bondage. She knew that if he chose to he could walk away from it all, leave the game to play out without him. But is own sense of duty would never allow it, and neither would Dana. They both knew too much to step out now without consequences. What the great secret was she knew not, but feared it as she feared this dark man she had come to see as a son of sorts.
Dana, her own daughter, was more a slave to Fox William Mulder than she knew. She would do anything for him, would die for him, but would not allow herself to love him. She was a slave to her science, to her logic, to the quest. She was a slave to God and her family (though not so much now), and over time she had become slave to the same fevered passions Mulder had. As the years had gone by she had seen them grow more together, taking on traits of each other, developing a trust and love she sometimes envied. Dana would never leave him, never turn away, would hotly debate him but in the end, deny him nothing. Dana was a slave to Fox Mulder and, through him, to everything he was bound to…but she didn’t appear to mind.
And poor Ryker. Ryker and his siblings had shared their father’s fate, chained by their parentage, by their gifts, by their passions just like their parents were. Everything Jarod had had to contend with in his life and many of the things Parker had were a part of them. They, like their parents, had seen hell spit up its worst and lived to tell it, to thrive on the strength adversity had bred in them.
All of these, she knew, would walk through hell for each other and not even hesitate at the gate. It was a collection of fire-hardened wills she would not want to cross, a parade of slave children, to draw the eye and still the heart. Her heart bled for them, adding her sorrow to that which they would spill before this thing was done. She, so much less than they with her normal upbringing, her normal life, would lend to them the only support she had to offer. She would give them a mother’s love, and pray it would be enough to see them through what lay ahead.
Author’s note: We hold these truths to be self-evident: Michael is a male god, Ryan is so, so gorgeous it’s painful (no I’m not a cradle robber. I’m a healthy sixteen-year-old girl thanx ever so much), and Jarod is damn fine for forty-two (which is not only my lucky number and Fox Mulder’s apartment number but the answer to THE question of life, the universe, and everything). That said, I must admit that not only am I mildly hormonal this evening, but I am the cruelest, most beastly bitch of a writer living. I am so enjoying my angst these days I’m sure there must be some dangerous physiological issues at work here. As it happens I am stalling, not at all looking forward to bleeding poor J-dog yet again, but I suppose I must. Oh, and for those of you kiddies who are in anyway concerned about how I came up with the number 42, here’s the math. Jarod was stolen in 1963. According to Mr. Reins he was four when he built the empire state building, which we know he did around thirty six hours after coming to the Centre. Four from 63 is 59. 2001, minus 1959, equals 42 and bing bang boom, Jarod is the answer to the overall question of life, the universe, and everything. Oh yeah, I so rule. Then again, when J first laid eyes on J2 he said the clone was him twenty years younger, and Broots later stated J2 was 14, which is only thirty four give or take plus three years its been since Donaterase…oh hell, I don’t care. On with the insanity.
Precious Blood
Part VII: Parade of the Slave Children
Matrea Nara
It hurt to move. When he opened his eyes the light slashed down on them with a savage, merciless intensity, so he had to slam them shut again and groan in pain. He felt her lay her hand on his arm, though she didn’t say anything, and he drew his strength from her. He knew he could not stay this way for long. He had to heal, had to be strong or the sky would fall and who would remain to brace it?
He used to tell the children they could be anything they wanted to be. Most parents did he knew, but when he said it he meant it, in the most literal sense. Even Ryker, who was only sub-power like his mother, was possessor of an uncommonly brilliant mind, though he had a maternally inherited quick temper. Arin and Luke were unparalleled, intellects so keen, minds so agile he sometimes wondered if they rivaled his own. They would have to, because the Centre was willing to kill him to get to them. He wondered where they were now, if they blamed him, if he would ever see them again. He wondered if he would die here, if it mattered whether or not he did.
But most of all he wondered why he was still alive. Why hadn’t they shot him in the head and been done with it? That was twice now they had bloodied him, shot him, beaten and tortured him. The agony coursing through him cut to every cell in his body. His blood boiled in his veins, his heart shuttered with every beat, a herd of elephants battled in his brain. Death then would have been a blessing, a heavenly release. Death then would have convinced him of the heretofore-unsubstantiated existence of God.
What was worse, he knew that every pain in him was visited ten fold on the twins, who had a psychic link to each other (and somehow to him) that would have delighted Sydney to no end. He wished he could be there with them, wished he could purge the emphatic pain from them, knew he could not. It hurt so badly! He tasted the blood in his mouth, saw it swimming behind his eyelids, felt it in every part of him. All the world was blood. He would die in it, die with the smell of it in his nostrils, the feel of it on his skin. Damn death! He would not die in blood. He would not let them die tasting his.
><
It hurt to move.
Curled up in the corner of her transparent cell she shivered and whimpered and wept, coated with a cold sweat and fevered. She thought of her brothers, of her father, of the mother she had never met. She thought of the Centre and of Lyle and all the other men she would kill when she got out of this place, and how sweet it would be. She thought of Lucian, barely alive across the room from her, his pulse weak, his breathing shallow, his soul hovering between the lands of the living and the dead.
It wasn’t enough. She needed something to fire her blood, purge the pain from her in favor of some indomitable emotion. Love failed, rage failed, fear was never an option…so what was left to her?
Desperation? No. That was what they wanted, she knew. That was why they were trying to kill her father, that and because they no longer had need of him when they had within their grasp three prime pretenders, who to add icing to the proverbial cake were younger and would therefore last quite a bit longer besides. Not desperation. Annoyance? Regret? Hate? Oh yeah, hate might do it. But the Centre had taught her to hate, and after her father had found her she had refused to succumb to the emotion they had so deeply ingrained in her and her brothers. Then her father had told her of Uncle Kyle and how they’d done the same to him and to Arin’s own mother, to a lesser extent…and that sonofabitch, Uncle Lyle, who seriously needed to eat shit and die…
It hurt to think.
Arin curled tighter around her center, feeling her brother’s hazy presence in her mind, longing for Daddy and the safety he would bring.
><
It hurt to see him like this.
Sitting at his side, she struggled to recall any time in their extensive past together she had seen him so helpless. There was that plane crash incident…but she hadn’t really been there to see him them. Angelo had snuck her through the air vents a few times to watch Jarod’s SIMs, and there had been times then when she had though he was so vulnerable she had almost cried for him. She knew now he hadn’t been, not really, but the memories stayed with her all the same.
She remembered how lost he had seemed when she held her gun on him over Thomas’s grave, but that had not been like this. Then, it had been an emotional vulnerability, an utter desolation. In retrospect she knew it was an agony brought about by his grief for his first, and because Miss Parker held a gun on him, was so violent and accusatory towards him. She found it impossible to believe he had actually feared for his life, because he himself had removed the firing pin from her pistol, but what had pained him so grievously was the mere fact that she was angry enough with him she had pulled the gun on him in the first, that she had irrationally blamed him, and that she was suffering as much as she had been. Miss Parker, like so many others, tended to lash out at those closest to her in the times of her greatest sorrow, but he could not know that. At least she had aimed away from him before she pulled the trigger.
But not even the pain she had seen in him then, the hopeless, feeble helplessness that came from emotionally heartache for one (she thought) he loved, could compare to the way he was now. Battered, broken, near death, his pulse was weak and his breathing shallow. He shivered incessantly, filmed by a cold sweat and fevered, mumbled from time to time in his restless coma-like sleep. She touched him, kept in constant contact with him, let him know she was there. She hoped he knew, hoped he drew some measure of strength from her nearness, as she had always drawn strength from him. Even that day in the cemetery, she had felt his loss when he had gone.
She began to speak to him, in hushed tones, of the children they had been and all they had become. She whispered close to his ear, taking in the scent of him as she told him the well-known stories that chronicled their lives together. Starting from the day Sydney had first introduced them, as part of SIM of course, and moving upward, she reminisced to herself as well as to him. The day her mother died, Angelo and Faith, the bunnies, the hurricane, the strip search in Vegas, Dover, Bartlet, the day he’d saved her father’s life, the cabin on the lake where Jarod, Angelo, and Parker had saved a child at such great cost, Fenigore and the Red Files, Kyle and Major Charles, her mother and the secrets Jarod had helped her find, Tommy…she spoke of all these and more with her hand resting on his chest, feeling it rise and fall.
“You can’t leave me Jarod,” she murmured, fighting the tears in her head and the break in her voice. “Not like this. We’re not finished yet. The story’s not over yet.” And it wasn’t. They still had so much left to do.
><
Mulder and Scully sat together, watching them, listening. Though neither would say it they were reminded much of each other, of so much undone and unspoken, of the fear that came with the threat that perhaps it never would be. For the two of them, so close and so comforted by that closeness, seeing two others who had long been denied that most basic solace at risk of losing it all before they even truly attained it was heartbreaking.
Scully knew it was worse for Mulder than it was for her. He was such a compassionate soul, with the most limitless capacity to love she had ever encountered, with the exception of maybe, maybe, Jarod. His instinctual drive to protect, to save the world was not so different from Jarod’s. He wanted to help these two, to make the pains of their world go away like he had wanted to do for Scully so many times. But he couldn’t, and he knew it, and it ate him up inside. She stayed close to him, shoulders touching, letting him know she was close. Her heart broke for him, and for the boy, for Arin and Luke and their hapless parents.
Mulder would not back away from this, would not turn his back on these people and she could never ask him to. She would stay with him. Even when he had demanded she leave him to his own, for her own good or because he hated the restrictions her rationalizations placed on him, she kept to his side ninety nine point nine percent of the time. At this point she did not feel comfortable anywhere else, trusted no one else, but at the same time did not trust him to his own devises. He was a strong man, a brilliant, emotional, capable man, with one of the deepest, most open minds she had ever encountered, but when his passions got the better of him he could do some very rash and dangerous things. What he was planning now, what she could see him contemplating as he watched them, was one of those things. She wasn’t go to stop him, but she wouldn’t leave him either, so all that was left was to grab tight and hand on for the ride.
He shifted beside her, looking down at her, and their eyes met. A thousand words passed between them without a single utterance. Each knew what Mulder intended, knew how Scully would react, knew she would not stop him despite her protestations, so there was no point saying any of it. Scully loved those eyes, was a captive of them, knew them better than anyone else, the depths and tones of them. She could see a world behind her partner’s eyes. One day they would be the death of her.
><
Maggie Scully watched them all with a mother’s sorrow in her heart. Jarod, Miss Parker, Fox, Dana, and the boy Ryker, were all examples of a deep emotion she knew she would never understand. They were all slaves in their own right, had been all their lives, knew nothing but the slavery that bound them, each to the other.
Jarod had been a slave in the literal sense, exploited, sheltered from the world and the life he might have had. That slavery had forever branded him, marked his every word, thought, and action. No matter what he said she knew he would always be held by that place, bound in an irreparable way. He would never be truly free, could not bring himself to disappear, knew it and hated them for it. His captivity had forged of his soul a pure, mighty essence, a force for contention, a thing of beauty, but it was not his own. He devoted his life to others instead of to himself, even after being freed from that prison, and no matter what happened within the next few days she knew he would continue to do so.
Miss Parker appeared to Maggie to be a slave to some of the same demons Jarod was, a woman who had seen much in her life and lacked a sufficient emotional outlet, who could never liver her life free of her commitment to others. She had bottled up so much of herself within, though Jarod seemed to bring at least some of it out of her. From what Maggie had heard from Dana and based upon her own observations, Miss Parker, too, had been literally enslaved. She was bonded to that place, to a sense of duty and family honorable in its intentions, but not in its truth. She hunted Jarod, a man she obviously had deep feelings for. She let the Centre get away with unspeakable atrocities, blows directed at her and those she loved, and never raised a hand in counteroffensive. She loved, but would not allow herself to succumb to it for fear of the pain it would cause. Her fear was as sure a chain as one of steel, as was her duty, and the ingrained commitment to the place that had been her cage, and only refuge in many respects, her entire life. It was her escape from herself, from all she wasn’t, from all she would never be allowed to be, and it was her forced retreat from all the weaknesses that lent humanity to her troubled soul.
Fox was slave to his dreams, his ideas, his passions, he love. He was a slave of her daughter in more ways that even Dana seemed to know, a slave to his work and his enemies and to little green men. He was a slave to his need to make the wrong right, to find the truth, punish the guilty. Where once she had seen him as a little boy buried in little boy fantasies, she knew now that he saw the world in a light few people ever did, had been a part of something vast and dangerous since the time of his father. He was a pawn, a player in some vast game she did not pretend to understand. He would go to the end of the earth for his truth, for his quest, for his partner. He was a slave to all of these, but it was for the most part a self-imposed bondage. She knew that if he chose to he could walk away from it all, leave the game to play out without him. But is own sense of duty would never allow it, and neither would Dana. They both knew too much to step out now without consequences. What the great secret was she knew not, but feared it as she feared this dark man she had come to see as a son of sorts.
Dana, her own daughter, was more a slave to Fox William Mulder than she knew. She would do anything for him, would die for him, but would not allow herself to love him. She was a slave to her science, to her logic, to the quest. She was a slave to God and her family (though not so much now), and over time she had become slave to the same fevered passions Mulder had. As the years had gone by she had seen them grow more together, taking on traits of each other, developing a trust and love she sometimes envied. Dana would never leave him, never turn away, would hotly debate him but in the end, deny him nothing. Dana was a slave to Fox Mulder and, through him, to everything he was bound to…but she didn’t appear to mind.
And poor Ryker. Ryker and his siblings had shared their father’s fate, chained by their parentage, by their gifts, by their passions just like their parents were. Everything Jarod had had to contend with in his life and many of the things Parker had were a part of them. They, like their parents, had seen hell spit up its worst and lived to tell it, to thrive on the strength adversity had bred in them.
All of these, she knew, would walk through hell for each other and not even hesitate at the gate. It was a collection of fire-hardened wills she would not want to cross, a parade of slave children, to draw the eye and still the heart. Her heart bled for them, adding her sorrow to that which they would spill before this thing was done. She, so much less than they with her normal upbringing, her normal life, would lend to them the only support she had to offer. She would give them a mother’s love, and pray it would be enough to see them through what lay ahead.
