Fic: The Harbinger
Title: The Harbinger
Author: amaliak
Fandom: CROSSOVER! Battlestar Galactica / X-Men: First Class
DISCLAIMER: I don’t own any of these characters and they were used for the purposes of entertainment only since I don’t make money of this junk. Don’t sue, please.
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: For the BSG finale and the XM:FC movie. So...all of it.
Pairing: Erik/Kara, w/ implied Kara/Lee, and Charles is mostly disapproving.
Summary: A new mutant has “landed” in Xavior Manor, just as the team is training for their first mission for the CIA. Her abilities might be more than even she understands.
Author’s Notes: This was made pretty much exclusively for pali167. Enjoy, my love. Sorry, this has no beta, I tried to catch the grammar errors as much as I could, but I kinda just wanted this OUT THERE already. I will fix it later. nazkey, feel free to hit me with the grammar stick. I probably deserve it.
Sometimes, he hated himself when he kissed her.
Not because he didn’t want to (Lord knows he wanted to because she was really good at it and because sometimes she would laugh in a way that promised of danger and fun and he really needed fun). It was because he knew that ultimately, he was using her.
It had been his plan from the very beginning.
“Time traveller,” Charles had said, as a way of best explaining her sudden appearance on the manor grounds, bearing military-issue tags of a non existent entity and fresh prehistoric plant life ground into her boots. Charles had said that of what he’d seen of her memories, it was the only thing that made sense.
She had laughed when they’d presented the notion, something that stopped as soon as she realized that mutants were indeed a reality and that it was very possible she was one of them.
Erik knew from that day that she would be crucial to his plans.
She had paced the manor for a while at first, like a caged animal, watching the others train for the mission that would come ahead. She was a war veteran, someone who’s been on the front lines of a war he didn’t know about, but she had been willing to offer a hand for them, showing Erik that aside from her abilities she had a gift of strategy and quickness of mind that he appreciated.
Erik had let himself flirt with her, finding her clear eyes and barely concealed rage intriguing (he ignored Charles’ quiet disapproval). She responded in kind, far more aggressively than he had been used to, in dark hidden away places or in either one of their rooms. He almost felt guilty at how much he was enjoying it. Remorse wasn’t something that he was accustomed to feeling. Thankfully, it was fleeting.
She was skeptical of Charles’ assessment of her abilities since she’d never been able to consciously use them, but still allowed for him to try to help her find her way to them.
“I still think it’s bullshit,” she had told him one night, glaring at the ceiling above them. She had lately taking to staying with him and he didn’t exactly mind.
“Which part?” he asked, propping himself up on an elbow to face her.
“Take your pick,” she answered flatly.
Carefully, he moved the chain around neck, shuffling her four talismen back and forth as he’d seen her physically do a dozen times before. She snatched the metal pieces out of the air, turning to glare at him briefly for the breach of personal space (which he found amusing, given their current situation).
“You’re a mutant, Kara,” he said quietly. “With a power that could potentially change everything.”
She rolled her eyes and drew her attention back to the ceiling, her hand fisted around her tags, moving up and down with the rhythm of her breathing as it rested against her bare chest. “A lot of good that did anyone,” she mumbled quietly, almost to herself.
This was his opportunity. “You can be of help now,” he said carefully.
She frowned but said nothing.
“The world is about to change, Kara. They are about to find out that mutants live among them and that we are the next step in evolution.”
She looked at him then, her gaze unreadable, face pale, but her gaze was direct and scrutinizing, looking for something. “What do you think is going to happen?”
“War,” he answered simply.
She didn’t reply.
****
“It isn’t right , what you’re doing to her,” Charles finally spoke up one evening, as he contemplated his next move on the chess board. Erik calmly avoided his gaze, focusing on the color of the scotch in his hand instead.
“She doesn’t deserve that,” Charles went on, moving his rook a space forward. “She’s been through more than you know.”
“I know what it means to be at war, Charles,” Erik replied dryly, setting down his glass and pretending not to see Chalres struggle to contain his immediate response, moving his bishop on the board.
“It’s more than that,” Charles said at length, leaning forward in his seat, resting his arms on his knees. “What exactly do you expect to get out of this, Erik? She can’t use her abilities. Hasn’t been able to use them more than twice in her life.”
“She didn’t even realize she was a mutant, Charles. She’ll get there,” Erik replied, sincerely believing this to be the case.
“Her head is in the wrong place,” Charles mused, more to himself this time. “She’s lost far more than any of us. More than even you.”
White knight to black bishop.
“She wants to find rest, Erik and you’re not letting her,” Charles concluded.
“You of all people know that we need to stick together, Charles, she can’t be alone. Safer here with people who don’t try to cage her like they caged me,” Erik responded, his anger slowly rising.
Charles sensed it. He leaned back and gazed at him calmly. Eventually, Erik met his eyes. It was taking a lot out of Charles to not slip into his mind, to force him out of this current path. Deep down, Erik appreciated the gesture.
“You should know, where she came from, that place in the future where there's planets... There weren’t any mutants. None. Only machines, things created by humans,” Charles said carefully.
Erik considered this information. “What does that mean?” he asked at length, advancing his black knight just before Charles’ queen.
“I don’t know,” came the quiet answer.
***
He found her in the gym, her fists connecting frantically at a swinging punching bag, sweat matting her hair to her forehead.
“Not in the mood right now, Erik,” she spat, not even giving him a second glance as she continued her assault.
He didn’t reply, moving instead to the far wall, watching her move until she finally acknowledged his presence, her breathing heavy as she yanked off the boxing gloves and tossed them aside. He approached her slowly, handing her a towel which she used to wipe her face.
“I’m not stupid, you know,” she told him, her eyes holding his in the fluorescent light. “I’m not going to pretend that I don’t know that you want something from me.”
She threw down the towel on the bench and went about removing the tape from her knuckles. “What do you want?”
No need for pretenses, then. He was relieved and strangely sad.
“Being a mutant is unique, it’s special,” told her. “But your gift. The gift to be able to manipulate time....Kara, do you realize what you can do with that?” He stepped closer to her now, close enough to feel the heat radiating off her body. “Do you understand that you could change the world?” Did she really understand? This woman standing before him...she could be his savior. She might even be the one to save his life before it was really lost. Some day, she could go back and even prevent everything that had happened to him at the hands people like Shaw.
She was looking at him intently, her face unreadable, but there were tell-tale tears gathering in the corner of her eyes. “Kara Thrace is the harbinger of death.”
He frowned as she looked away from him, biting her lips before speaking again. “For a long long time, I thought that fighting was all I knew how to do, it was the only thing that kept me moving forward.” She met his eyes again. “But ever since I was young, I was...” she swallowed thickly. “Prepared for something else. Something supposedly greater. A...destiny.”
He could read in her eyes just exactly what kinda of preparation that had been and felt a surge of anger coloring the edges of his mind.
“Do you know what this is?” she held up her dogtag chain for him to see, pulling on the silver ring so that he could see it. “My fiancee gave me this before I put him in a plane that would go up in a ball of fire. This,” she shifted to the fragmented bullet that was also hanging on the chain. “This is the bullet that they pulled out of my husband’s brain. It wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t stopped to collect more ammo from the dead. And the only reason the only other man I’ve ever loved is alive is because I left.” She paused here, a bitter laugh escaping her lips. “Although I guess, he’s dead now, seeing as all that was a millennium ago.” Mementos of lives lost. Briefly, he thought of all the tattoos that marred her skin, and what loss they represented.
“I thought it was over,” she went on, the words flowing faster and faster now. “That I had seen everything, done everything, that I was done with my destiny. I died, Erik. I burned my own body on a dead planet where I had lead everyone to...”
Her words caught in her throat and he saw the tears slip from beneath her lashes as she looked away. He didn’t touch her.
She managed to compose herself, her voice now laced with steel. “And even after all that, I was still somehow in the world and everyone around me just kept on dying. Then I finally got it. I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t be around. Because while I could manage to maybe save the few people that I still cared about, if I stuck around, I would bring nothing but death.”
She met his eyes again, sorrow coming off her in waves that he didn’t need to have Charles’ powers to feel. “I just want it to be over. To just be left alone. Because I can’t save anyone. All I can do is bring death.” Finally, she brought up her hand to his chest, laying it carefully over his heart. He covered it with his own.
“I want peace. And it’s not what you want.”
************
They avoided each other for a few days, Kara having completely disappeared from everyone’s notice for a while. It was obvious that for what they needed to do, she didn’t want to be a part of it.
He didn’t like it, but he understood.
Which is why when she reappeared unannounced at his door one evening, he made no comment, simply kissed her as if he’d missed her. She didn’t question whether or not he had.
****
He sensed when she had gotten up out of bed, sliding over the sheets so as not to wake him (he hadn’t really been asleep) and hurriedly pulling on her clothes and slipping from the room. He waited for a beat before following her downstairs.
The wooden floors of the house gave her away as she paused her restless wandering as she laid her eyes on something inside the parlor. He watched as she padded across the rug in the dark, gingerly coming to sit at the bench of the piano.
“I thought you were asleep,” she said quietly, evidencing that his presence was known, so he moved towards her (unable to keep away, something in the back of his mind noted gravely), sitting just beside her on the piano bench.
She slowly lifted the lid on the piano, running her fingers over the keys, and anyone would have thought she was lost in thought. But with the moonlight pouring in through the far window, he saw the look of intense terror. It made him sit up a little straighter, but he just continued to watch as she almost hesitantly pushed down on the of the ivory keys, the muted note sounding dull in the room. Her hand held the note long after the sound had gone before she took a shaky breath.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” she said, so low he almost didn’t hear her.
“What are you doing?” he asked, his own voice a quiet whisper meant only for her.
“The last time that I...when I did this, I...” her eyes met his in the darkness. “I brought them with me to Earth..”
Now it was his turn to hold his breath.
“The song, my father’s song,” she went on, spilling her secrets at his feet, “I heard it in my head, I saw the notes, everything...It’s what did it.”
She looked back at the piano, her fingers hovering over the keys.
He knew exactly what this meant. Kara was going to try to trigger her powers again.
He shifted closer to her, placing a hand on her lower back. It was the best he could do for encouragement.
She placed her fingers carefully over the keys, evidently not used to playing at all. Her moments were slow and clumsily and the tune she was playing was barely coming through. She re-started it, but stopped almost immediately.
“I can’t, Erik, I can’t,” she blurted out, her hand reaching out to seize his shirt. “I never end up back in the same place. I don’t know what to do. I wouldn’t know how to come back, I don’t know where I’m going to end up.”
He gathered her shaking form to his chest, for once thinking more about her than himself. He whispered into her hair soothingly until he felt that she had calmed. “What did you mean you don’t know where you’ll end up?”
“I mean, I don’t know. The only times it's happened I was just...looking for somewhere to get away...I just wanted to get away,” she spoke into his chest. “That’s the only thing I wanted, I just wanted to let go and disappear.”
He kept running a soothing hand through her hair, considering this information. It was dangerous, what they were playing with. If her abilities took her away to somewhere outside of her conscious control, if they didn’t find a way to get her to control it, even just a little...they would lose her in the vacuum of both time and space.
He would lose her.
Just as he was realizing this, she pulled away from him and looked back at the piano, placing her hands over the keys once again. Before he knew what he was doing he’d grabbed her hands in his, holding them fast.
“Don’t,” he said and she looked at him, the moonlight showing her features to be surprised. “Just...stay.”
She took a minute to realize what he was asking of her. The moment stood, suspended as the clock in the room ticked in a glaring reminder of time moving forward.
Then she was kissing him, with a frantic rush that had her climbing right into his lap, had him pulling her possessively against him. Her hands were pulling at his night clothes, her intentions made clear to be carried out right on this piano bench that was likely not to hold their weight under strain.
The sound of the piano keys being loudly upset by him pushing her back into them showed the need to move into more private quarters and not wake the whole house.
Later, he held her against him, feeling her deep breathing across the bare skin of his chest, sated and relaxed. He wondered at just why he’d stopped her, why the thought of having her simply disappear didn’t sit right with him.
Why, if she couldn’t use her powers, did he want her to stay?
****
He had been busy unlocking his own abilities, and then...the call to move finally came. They knew where Shaw would be.
The conversation with Charles had left him feeling exhausted, but sure of his course of action. This was going to end tomorrow, the quest that he’d been on as soon as he’d been freed from those camps. It was all going to be over.
“Will you be coming with us?” he’d asked her, tracing the skin on her shoulder softly with his teeth.
The hand she had buried in his hair tightened a bit. “Are you asking me to?”
He propped himself up on his arms, face hovering over hers. She looked different tonight, something in the storm of her emotions had calmed considerably.
“I told you, I’m a fighter. It’s the only thing that I do well,” she went on.
“But it’s not what you want,” he deduced.
“That wasn’t the question,” she replied, shifting beneath him in a way that she knew would distract him. She grinned cheekily at him.
He ducked down to nip at her skin, a chastisement for trying to derail the conversation. “I’m not going to ask you do anything, Kara.”
Her smile faded. “I know.”
****
She pulled him out of bed early the next morning to go for a run around the grounds, work off the nerves before the mission.
The calm he’d sensed in her was still there, guiding her in a way he’d never seen in her before. The stopped just short of the house, cathing their breath in the gardens where the birds were just waking up.
“I want to fly, Erik,” she said suddenly, turning her face up to the sky. “I used to fly amongst the stars and there’s nothing like it. I’d never thought I’d miss it so frakking much.”
“You will again,” he told her, unsure where this was going. Talking about her former life had been something that they weren’t in the habit of doing.
“Maybe,” she was saying, bringing her eyes to meet his. He could see that there were tears forming and something in his gut told him that something was not right.
“Starbuck, the scourge of the cylon, frakked up problem maverick of the Fleet,” she continued, an almost wistful smile on her face. “Because that’s who I am, Erik. That’s my destiny. Fight em until we can’t. Be the harbinger of death.”
She took a step back, closing her eyes and taking deep breath. The sad smile still graced her lips as she opened her eyes to meet his again.
“That’s who I’m always going to be,” she said. “And I’m not going to fight it anymore.”
He held his breath.
“I’m letting it go.”
And she was gone.
*******
THE END
Author: amaliak
Fandom: CROSSOVER! Battlestar Galactica / X-Men: First Class
DISCLAIMER: I don’t own any of these characters and they were used for the purposes of entertainment only since I don’t make money of this junk. Don’t sue, please.
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: For the BSG finale and the XM:FC movie. So...all of it.
Pairing: Erik/Kara, w/ implied Kara/Lee, and Charles is mostly disapproving.
Summary: A new mutant has “landed” in Xavior Manor, just as the team is training for their first mission for the CIA. Her abilities might be more than even she understands.
Author’s Notes: This was made pretty much exclusively for pali167. Enjoy, my love. Sorry, this has no beta, I tried to catch the grammar errors as much as I could, but I kinda just wanted this OUT THERE already. I will fix it later. nazkey, feel free to hit me with the grammar stick. I probably deserve it.
Sometimes, he hated himself when he kissed her.
Not because he didn’t want to (Lord knows he wanted to because she was really good at it and because sometimes she would laugh in a way that promised of danger and fun and he really needed fun). It was because he knew that ultimately, he was using her.
It had been his plan from the very beginning.
“Time traveller,” Charles had said, as a way of best explaining her sudden appearance on the manor grounds, bearing military-issue tags of a non existent entity and fresh prehistoric plant life ground into her boots. Charles had said that of what he’d seen of her memories, it was the only thing that made sense.
She had laughed when they’d presented the notion, something that stopped as soon as she realized that mutants were indeed a reality and that it was very possible she was one of them.
Erik knew from that day that she would be crucial to his plans.
She had paced the manor for a while at first, like a caged animal, watching the others train for the mission that would come ahead. She was a war veteran, someone who’s been on the front lines of a war he didn’t know about, but she had been willing to offer a hand for them, showing Erik that aside from her abilities she had a gift of strategy and quickness of mind that he appreciated.
Erik had let himself flirt with her, finding her clear eyes and barely concealed rage intriguing (he ignored Charles’ quiet disapproval). She responded in kind, far more aggressively than he had been used to, in dark hidden away places or in either one of their rooms. He almost felt guilty at how much he was enjoying it. Remorse wasn’t something that he was accustomed to feeling. Thankfully, it was fleeting.
She was skeptical of Charles’ assessment of her abilities since she’d never been able to consciously use them, but still allowed for him to try to help her find her way to them.
“I still think it’s bullshit,” she had told him one night, glaring at the ceiling above them. She had lately taking to staying with him and he didn’t exactly mind.
“Which part?” he asked, propping himself up on an elbow to face her.
“Take your pick,” she answered flatly.
Carefully, he moved the chain around neck, shuffling her four talismen back and forth as he’d seen her physically do a dozen times before. She snatched the metal pieces out of the air, turning to glare at him briefly for the breach of personal space (which he found amusing, given their current situation).
“You’re a mutant, Kara,” he said quietly. “With a power that could potentially change everything.”
She rolled her eyes and drew her attention back to the ceiling, her hand fisted around her tags, moving up and down with the rhythm of her breathing as it rested against her bare chest. “A lot of good that did anyone,” she mumbled quietly, almost to herself.
This was his opportunity. “You can be of help now,” he said carefully.
She frowned but said nothing.
“The world is about to change, Kara. They are about to find out that mutants live among them and that we are the next step in evolution.”
She looked at him then, her gaze unreadable, face pale, but her gaze was direct and scrutinizing, looking for something. “What do you think is going to happen?”
“War,” he answered simply.
She didn’t reply.
****
“It isn’t right , what you’re doing to her,” Charles finally spoke up one evening, as he contemplated his next move on the chess board. Erik calmly avoided his gaze, focusing on the color of the scotch in his hand instead.
“She doesn’t deserve that,” Charles went on, moving his rook a space forward. “She’s been through more than you know.”
“I know what it means to be at war, Charles,” Erik replied dryly, setting down his glass and pretending not to see Chalres struggle to contain his immediate response, moving his bishop on the board.
“It’s more than that,” Charles said at length, leaning forward in his seat, resting his arms on his knees. “What exactly do you expect to get out of this, Erik? She can’t use her abilities. Hasn’t been able to use them more than twice in her life.”
“She didn’t even realize she was a mutant, Charles. She’ll get there,” Erik replied, sincerely believing this to be the case.
“Her head is in the wrong place,” Charles mused, more to himself this time. “She’s lost far more than any of us. More than even you.”
White knight to black bishop.
“She wants to find rest, Erik and you’re not letting her,” Charles concluded.
“You of all people know that we need to stick together, Charles, she can’t be alone. Safer here with people who don’t try to cage her like they caged me,” Erik responded, his anger slowly rising.
Charles sensed it. He leaned back and gazed at him calmly. Eventually, Erik met his eyes. It was taking a lot out of Charles to not slip into his mind, to force him out of this current path. Deep down, Erik appreciated the gesture.
“You should know, where she came from, that place in the future where there's planets... There weren’t any mutants. None. Only machines, things created by humans,” Charles said carefully.
Erik considered this information. “What does that mean?” he asked at length, advancing his black knight just before Charles’ queen.
“I don’t know,” came the quiet answer.
***
He found her in the gym, her fists connecting frantically at a swinging punching bag, sweat matting her hair to her forehead.
“Not in the mood right now, Erik,” she spat, not even giving him a second glance as she continued her assault.
He didn’t reply, moving instead to the far wall, watching her move until she finally acknowledged his presence, her breathing heavy as she yanked off the boxing gloves and tossed them aside. He approached her slowly, handing her a towel which she used to wipe her face.
“I’m not stupid, you know,” she told him, her eyes holding his in the fluorescent light. “I’m not going to pretend that I don’t know that you want something from me.”
She threw down the towel on the bench and went about removing the tape from her knuckles. “What do you want?”
No need for pretenses, then. He was relieved and strangely sad.
“Being a mutant is unique, it’s special,” told her. “But your gift. The gift to be able to manipulate time....Kara, do you realize what you can do with that?” He stepped closer to her now, close enough to feel the heat radiating off her body. “Do you understand that you could change the world?” Did she really understand? This woman standing before him...she could be his savior. She might even be the one to save his life before it was really lost. Some day, she could go back and even prevent everything that had happened to him at the hands people like Shaw.
She was looking at him intently, her face unreadable, but there were tell-tale tears gathering in the corner of her eyes. “Kara Thrace is the harbinger of death.”
He frowned as she looked away from him, biting her lips before speaking again. “For a long long time, I thought that fighting was all I knew how to do, it was the only thing that kept me moving forward.” She met his eyes again. “But ever since I was young, I was...” she swallowed thickly. “Prepared for something else. Something supposedly greater. A...destiny.”
He could read in her eyes just exactly what kinda of preparation that had been and felt a surge of anger coloring the edges of his mind.
“Do you know what this is?” she held up her dogtag chain for him to see, pulling on the silver ring so that he could see it. “My fiancee gave me this before I put him in a plane that would go up in a ball of fire. This,” she shifted to the fragmented bullet that was also hanging on the chain. “This is the bullet that they pulled out of my husband’s brain. It wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t stopped to collect more ammo from the dead. And the only reason the only other man I’ve ever loved is alive is because I left.” She paused here, a bitter laugh escaping her lips. “Although I guess, he’s dead now, seeing as all that was a millennium ago.” Mementos of lives lost. Briefly, he thought of all the tattoos that marred her skin, and what loss they represented.
“I thought it was over,” she went on, the words flowing faster and faster now. “That I had seen everything, done everything, that I was done with my destiny. I died, Erik. I burned my own body on a dead planet where I had lead everyone to...”
Her words caught in her throat and he saw the tears slip from beneath her lashes as she looked away. He didn’t touch her.
She managed to compose herself, her voice now laced with steel. “And even after all that, I was still somehow in the world and everyone around me just kept on dying. Then I finally got it. I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t be around. Because while I could manage to maybe save the few people that I still cared about, if I stuck around, I would bring nothing but death.”
She met his eyes again, sorrow coming off her in waves that he didn’t need to have Charles’ powers to feel. “I just want it to be over. To just be left alone. Because I can’t save anyone. All I can do is bring death.” Finally, she brought up her hand to his chest, laying it carefully over his heart. He covered it with his own.
“I want peace. And it’s not what you want.”
************
They avoided each other for a few days, Kara having completely disappeared from everyone’s notice for a while. It was obvious that for what they needed to do, she didn’t want to be a part of it.
He didn’t like it, but he understood.
Which is why when she reappeared unannounced at his door one evening, he made no comment, simply kissed her as if he’d missed her. She didn’t question whether or not he had.
****
He sensed when she had gotten up out of bed, sliding over the sheets so as not to wake him (he hadn’t really been asleep) and hurriedly pulling on her clothes and slipping from the room. He waited for a beat before following her downstairs.
The wooden floors of the house gave her away as she paused her restless wandering as she laid her eyes on something inside the parlor. He watched as she padded across the rug in the dark, gingerly coming to sit at the bench of the piano.
“I thought you were asleep,” she said quietly, evidencing that his presence was known, so he moved towards her (unable to keep away, something in the back of his mind noted gravely), sitting just beside her on the piano bench.
She slowly lifted the lid on the piano, running her fingers over the keys, and anyone would have thought she was lost in thought. But with the moonlight pouring in through the far window, he saw the look of intense terror. It made him sit up a little straighter, but he just continued to watch as she almost hesitantly pushed down on the of the ivory keys, the muted note sounding dull in the room. Her hand held the note long after the sound had gone before she took a shaky breath.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” she said, so low he almost didn’t hear her.
“What are you doing?” he asked, his own voice a quiet whisper meant only for her.
“The last time that I...when I did this, I...” her eyes met his in the darkness. “I brought them with me to Earth..”
Now it was his turn to hold his breath.
“The song, my father’s song,” she went on, spilling her secrets at his feet, “I heard it in my head, I saw the notes, everything...It’s what did it.”
She looked back at the piano, her fingers hovering over the keys.
He knew exactly what this meant. Kara was going to try to trigger her powers again.
He shifted closer to her, placing a hand on her lower back. It was the best he could do for encouragement.
She placed her fingers carefully over the keys, evidently not used to playing at all. Her moments were slow and clumsily and the tune she was playing was barely coming through. She re-started it, but stopped almost immediately.
“I can’t, Erik, I can’t,” she blurted out, her hand reaching out to seize his shirt. “I never end up back in the same place. I don’t know what to do. I wouldn’t know how to come back, I don’t know where I’m going to end up.”
He gathered her shaking form to his chest, for once thinking more about her than himself. He whispered into her hair soothingly until he felt that she had calmed. “What did you mean you don’t know where you’ll end up?”
“I mean, I don’t know. The only times it's happened I was just...looking for somewhere to get away...I just wanted to get away,” she spoke into his chest. “That’s the only thing I wanted, I just wanted to let go and disappear.”
He kept running a soothing hand through her hair, considering this information. It was dangerous, what they were playing with. If her abilities took her away to somewhere outside of her conscious control, if they didn’t find a way to get her to control it, even just a little...they would lose her in the vacuum of both time and space.
He would lose her.
Just as he was realizing this, she pulled away from him and looked back at the piano, placing her hands over the keys once again. Before he knew what he was doing he’d grabbed her hands in his, holding them fast.
“Don’t,” he said and she looked at him, the moonlight showing her features to be surprised. “Just...stay.”
She took a minute to realize what he was asking of her. The moment stood, suspended as the clock in the room ticked in a glaring reminder of time moving forward.
Then she was kissing him, with a frantic rush that had her climbing right into his lap, had him pulling her possessively against him. Her hands were pulling at his night clothes, her intentions made clear to be carried out right on this piano bench that was likely not to hold their weight under strain.
The sound of the piano keys being loudly upset by him pushing her back into them showed the need to move into more private quarters and not wake the whole house.
Later, he held her against him, feeling her deep breathing across the bare skin of his chest, sated and relaxed. He wondered at just why he’d stopped her, why the thought of having her simply disappear didn’t sit right with him.
Why, if she couldn’t use her powers, did he want her to stay?
****
He had been busy unlocking his own abilities, and then...the call to move finally came. They knew where Shaw would be.
The conversation with Charles had left him feeling exhausted, but sure of his course of action. This was going to end tomorrow, the quest that he’d been on as soon as he’d been freed from those camps. It was all going to be over.
“Will you be coming with us?” he’d asked her, tracing the skin on her shoulder softly with his teeth.
The hand she had buried in his hair tightened a bit. “Are you asking me to?”
He propped himself up on his arms, face hovering over hers. She looked different tonight, something in the storm of her emotions had calmed considerably.
“I told you, I’m a fighter. It’s the only thing that I do well,” she went on.
“But it’s not what you want,” he deduced.
“That wasn’t the question,” she replied, shifting beneath him in a way that she knew would distract him. She grinned cheekily at him.
He ducked down to nip at her skin, a chastisement for trying to derail the conversation. “I’m not going to ask you do anything, Kara.”
Her smile faded. “I know.”
****
She pulled him out of bed early the next morning to go for a run around the grounds, work off the nerves before the mission.
The calm he’d sensed in her was still there, guiding her in a way he’d never seen in her before. The stopped just short of the house, cathing their breath in the gardens where the birds were just waking up.
“I want to fly, Erik,” she said suddenly, turning her face up to the sky. “I used to fly amongst the stars and there’s nothing like it. I’d never thought I’d miss it so frakking much.”
“You will again,” he told her, unsure where this was going. Talking about her former life had been something that they weren’t in the habit of doing.
“Maybe,” she was saying, bringing her eyes to meet his. He could see that there were tears forming and something in his gut told him that something was not right.
“Starbuck, the scourge of the cylon, frakked up problem maverick of the Fleet,” she continued, an almost wistful smile on her face. “Because that’s who I am, Erik. That’s my destiny. Fight em until we can’t. Be the harbinger of death.”
She took a step back, closing her eyes and taking deep breath. The sad smile still graced her lips as she opened her eyes to meet his again.
“That’s who I’m always going to be,” she said. “And I’m not going to fight it anymore.”
He held his breath.
“I’m letting it go.”
And she was gone.
*******
THE END