holiday maelstrom, the return
Nov. 22nd, 2011 10:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivendellroseI couldn't resist.
Fandom: BSG (2003)
Characters: Kara and Socrata Thrace
Timeline: Pre-series.
Warnings: For once, for a miracle, I can think of nothing to warn for! Except possibly dubious craft practices. I'm fairly sure one could make ornaments this way, but I've certainly never done it, and I'm sure it'd be trickier than I've indicated.
Note: For![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
deborah_judge. I didn't manage to get Leoben in there, but I managed to explain why Kara was making these ornaments... ♥
Kara had never much bothered with Mithras. As far as she was concerned, there was little about the late-comer-god that wasn’t handled equally well or better by Apollo, Artemis, Athena, or Dionysus, who were all perfectly good, ancient gods who deserved more of her respect and asked less in return. But the god of soldiers was one of her mother’s favorites, so while she was growing up, he was in the house whether she wanted him or not, and while the rest of whatever neighborhood they were living in celebrated Dionysus and the pouring of the wine into jars for drinking on Brumalia and the giving of gifts and reversal of roles of Saturnalia, the Thrace household added the birth of the invincible sun to the celebration.
Socrata Thrace always made a big deal of decorating for the holidays. It seemed pointless to Kara, since they were likely to be moving to another base in a few months anyway, but she went along with it. At least it made her mother happy. Candles everywhere - beeswax, the best kind, since her mother wasn’t going to give anything less to the gods - and wine on the table (and in Kara’s throat, as long as she could snag it without attracting her mother’s attention), and a tree, decorated with winking electric lights to celebrate the upside-down joy of Saturnalia. The outdoors brought inside.
When she was thirteen Kara spent a whole day making ornaments for the tree, to surprise her mother when she got home. Papier-mache, painted plaster, polymer clay... she tried everything. And made a mess at it, but that didn’t matter. She didn’t care. What mattered was making things - as long as she was letting loose this way, she didn’t have to think. It was like being on the Pyramid court.
The last set of ornaments, and the ones she was proudest of, were melted hot sugar poured into a low bowl lined with wax paper and mixed with food coloring as the sugar dried into sweet, brittle glass. She made thirteen, all in different designs - one with multicolored polka dots, one with wiggly little stripes, one with criss-crosses that turned into a blur as the sugar settled... and one with a series of concentric circles of various colors swirling together, blue, yellow, and red. When she made that one, something in the design made her feel like she was falling into it. It was weird, and sort of scary, but... good, somehow. Kara sipped a bit of snaffled wine and stared at the thing as it hung on the skimpy branches of the tree. Sunlight winked through it from the window as it turned slowly on its ribbon, and it looked as if the colors were swirling on their own, like a vortex or a storm.
She felt like she’d seen it somewhere before.
Then she heard her mother’s keys in the apartment door, and Kara forgot all about the weird yellow and red and blue vortex. For now, it was just a pretty reminder of holiday cheer and light for the future.
End
The holidays mentioned in this fic are never mentioned in BSG canon, of course, but I did the best I could in terms of finding stuff that would be plausible in the BSG-verse. Dies Natalis Solis Invicti (The Birthday of the Sun Invincible) is a Roman holiday celebrating Mithras, who is mentioned as being worshiped by the Sons of Mithras sometime in S4, if I recall correctly. Saturnalia is a Roman holiday of misrule and upturning of social convention in which low is high and high is low, and conveniently has a lot of the lights and gift-giving we associate with Christmas in the modern Western world. Brumalia is a Greek holiday with a Roman name (presumably we lost the Greek name at some point?), celebrating Dionysus and wine. We never hear Dionysus mentioned in BSG-verse, but I feel like the Greek pantheon would be sadly diminished without him... and that Kara probably likes him quite a bit, for a number of reasons.
Fandom: BSG (2003)
Characters: Kara and Socrata Thrace
Timeline: Pre-series.
Warnings: For once, for a miracle, I can think of nothing to warn for! Except possibly dubious craft practices. I'm fairly sure one could make ornaments this way, but I've certainly never done it, and I'm sure it'd be trickier than I've indicated.
Note: For
deborah_judge. I didn't manage to get Leoben in there, but I managed to explain why Kara was making these ornaments... ♥ Kara had never much bothered with Mithras. As far as she was concerned, there was little about the late-comer-god that wasn’t handled equally well or better by Apollo, Artemis, Athena, or Dionysus, who were all perfectly good, ancient gods who deserved more of her respect and asked less in return. But the god of soldiers was one of her mother’s favorites, so while she was growing up, he was in the house whether she wanted him or not, and while the rest of whatever neighborhood they were living in celebrated Dionysus and the pouring of the wine into jars for drinking on Brumalia and the giving of gifts and reversal of roles of Saturnalia, the Thrace household added the birth of the invincible sun to the celebration.
Socrata Thrace always made a big deal of decorating for the holidays. It seemed pointless to Kara, since they were likely to be moving to another base in a few months anyway, but she went along with it. At least it made her mother happy. Candles everywhere - beeswax, the best kind, since her mother wasn’t going to give anything less to the gods - and wine on the table (and in Kara’s throat, as long as she could snag it without attracting her mother’s attention), and a tree, decorated with winking electric lights to celebrate the upside-down joy of Saturnalia. The outdoors brought inside.
When she was thirteen Kara spent a whole day making ornaments for the tree, to surprise her mother when she got home. Papier-mache, painted plaster, polymer clay... she tried everything. And made a mess at it, but that didn’t matter. She didn’t care. What mattered was making things - as long as she was letting loose this way, she didn’t have to think. It was like being on the Pyramid court.
The last set of ornaments, and the ones she was proudest of, were melted hot sugar poured into a low bowl lined with wax paper and mixed with food coloring as the sugar dried into sweet, brittle glass. She made thirteen, all in different designs - one with multicolored polka dots, one with wiggly little stripes, one with criss-crosses that turned into a blur as the sugar settled... and one with a series of concentric circles of various colors swirling together, blue, yellow, and red. When she made that one, something in the design made her feel like she was falling into it. It was weird, and sort of scary, but... good, somehow. Kara sipped a bit of snaffled wine and stared at the thing as it hung on the skimpy branches of the tree. Sunlight winked through it from the window as it turned slowly on its ribbon, and it looked as if the colors were swirling on their own, like a vortex or a storm.
She felt like she’d seen it somewhere before.
Then she heard her mother’s keys in the apartment door, and Kara forgot all about the weird yellow and red and blue vortex. For now, it was just a pretty reminder of holiday cheer and light for the future.
End
The holidays mentioned in this fic are never mentioned in BSG canon, of course, but I did the best I could in terms of finding stuff that would be plausible in the BSG-verse. Dies Natalis Solis Invicti (The Birthday of the Sun Invincible) is a Roman holiday celebrating Mithras, who is mentioned as being worshiped by the Sons of Mithras sometime in S4, if I recall correctly. Saturnalia is a Roman holiday of misrule and upturning of social convention in which low is high and high is low, and conveniently has a lot of the lights and gift-giving we associate with Christmas in the modern Western world. Brumalia is a Greek holiday with a Roman name (presumably we lost the Greek name at some point?), celebrating Dionysus and wine. We never hear Dionysus mentioned in BSG-verse, but I feel like the Greek pantheon would be sadly diminished without him... and that Kara probably likes him quite a bit, for a number of reasons.
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no subject
Date: 2011-11-23 12:35 am (UTC)And, oh, Kara, that can't escape that mandala. Sigh.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-23 01:05 am (UTC)Nope, she can't. It's just gonna keep following her.... ;)