Fic: Greece Sees Unmoved (BSG, PG-13)
Title: Greece Sees Unmoved
Author: Cakes (cidercupcakes)
Fandom: Battlestar Galactica
Rating: PG-13
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Kara/Six, Kara/Six/Leoben
Words: ~3000
Notes: I've had this in mind for over a week now, so of course I finally write and post it when it's half an hour from doubtless being horribly jossed, but whatevs. Title and summary from the poem "Helen", by H.D., the full text of which can be found here.
Disclaimer: Moore, R&D, Universal, etc.
Spoilers: Through "Crossroads II".
Summary: Greece sees unmoved/God's daughter, born of love
"Lee," she said, and started to laugh, because she was home and they could go to Earth, they could beat the Cylons there and everything was going to be okay, everything was going to be okay. She didn't even want to kiss Lee; for once she didn't want to frak things up. She just wanted to laugh.
Except no one else, she realized, was laughing, and Lee was staring at her and looking sicker than a nugget who'd just got out of the gyro.
"Captain Thrace," Lee said, and he sounded sick, too, "I think you need to come with me."
"What?" she said, and laughed a little bit again. "Lee, what's wrong?"
She heard whispers, now, and realized everyone looked sort of sick, and Chief looked away when she looked towards him.
"Please," Lee said. He moved closer to her, and whispered it, and then added, "the Marines are on their way, Kara, please, just come with me and make this easier for everyone."
"Make what easier?" Everyone was still staring, and she heard more whispers, and one of them sounded a lot like 'dead'. "It's only been -- Lee, come on, what are you doing?"
Which was when she realized that the reason he'd gotten so close to her was to pull out a gun and press it against her gut. "You were dead, Kara," he said. He wasn't screwing around, she could see it. Lee was never good at hiding it when he was about to lose it, and it's not like he'd know a good joke if it bit him on the ass. "And now you're not -- you just, you have to realize what this looks like. Please, just -- "
"You're kidding," she said, and started laughing again. "Oh my gods, Lee, come on, you're kidding." She looked around, trying to find someone who would start laughing, and instead, a group of Marines came running in with their guns drawn.
In the end, she went with them. There wasn't a whole lot else she could do at the moment, was there? And the poor bastards were so afraid of her that it seemed easier to go along with it until they got the whole thing straightened out.
"Oh, come on, no," she said, though, when she realized they were putting her in with the Six. "Look, I'll go along with this until you figure out what morons you're all being, but you can't seriously leave me alone with that. It'll kill me."
"No," Lee said, when Tigh didn't make any kind of snide comment about that solving everyone's problems. "It's the only place safe enough -- we'll keep Marines nearby. If she tries anything -- you'll be fine."
And they shut the doors on her, and left her alone with a Cylon in a cocktail dress.
Fan-frakking-tastic.
"Kendra tried to tell us something," the old man said. He hadn't even opened the door for her, wouldn't even just talk to her, not anymore. "Before she died. She tried to warn us about something -- 'I have to warn you about Kara Thrace', she said. Do you know what it might've been that she wanted to say?"
"Oh my gods," Starbuck answered. She almost started laughing again; she could feel her mouth curling up into a smile because she couldn't even frakking believe this. "You believe it, sir. You believe this, don't you?"
He just gazed at her, stony-faced, through the bulletproof glass and the grating, and finally he hung up.
"I don't know," she shouted, and then, even louder, "I don't know," until she was screaming. He stopped, briefly, which might've been something, but he didn't come back. He disappeared into the black -- it swallowed everything outside the cage.
She sank down against the wall, and closed her eyes, and kept them closed until she felt someone sitting down next to her, felt a careful hand on her shoulder. The touch was leaf-light, breeze-light. Gods, it was scared of her. That would've been great if she weren't stuck here with it.
"You're not frakking helping," she said.
A pause, and then the hand was gone, and the body next to her own too. "I'm sorry." Its voice was even. Kara realized how warm it had been in its absence.
"They call me Caprica," it said over a meal one day.
Kara just grunted.
"Leoben said you're called Starbuck," the thing continued, and Kara looked up and noticed that it was smiling pleasantly, like it thought they were just two girls stuck sharing a table at a crowded cafe in Caprica City, not a Cylon and someone who was having an unending frakking nightmare.
"Yeah, well, Leoben says a lot of things," Kara said. Deliberate, she looked back down at her roll.
It laughed. Which startled her enough to make her look up again. It was still grinning as she gaped at it. Like it thought they were sharing a joke or something. "Yes," it said, and laughed again, just a little chuckle, like maybe they really were sharing a joke or something. "Yes, he does. You should hear him when he's drunk."
"You can get drunk?" She asked it in spite of herself, her voice slow, every syllable careful and measured and if she'd ever been this careful as a pilot, the CAGs would've adored her.
"Oh, yes," it said, and smiled wide enough to show off its inhumanly -- well, obviously -- perfect teeth. "It takes a little more than it does for you, but we can definitely get drunk. He's ridiculous when he's had a few. We hate having him at parties, he's only funny for a little while."
She couldn't help it; she laughed too. The image of Leoben, drunk and making an ass of himself, was too frakking glorious not to enjoy. "He's probably one of those real maudlin drunks, right? Laughing about everything for about five minutes, and then he starts crying over how no one's ever gonna love him?"
"Not so much no one as you, actually," the Cylon said, smirking.
Kara snorted. "Okay, now I know you're pulling my leg."
"I'm not!" It seemed indignant, like if it had honor, Kara would've impugned it. "It's the most pathetic thing you've ever seen. The Eights -- Sharon," it specified, after she frowned, "they hate him; he corners her and starts asking her if you've ever mentioned him. At best. At worst, he asks about the times you two had racks in the same lounge -- "
"Oh my frakking gods," and she almost didn't care if it was making this all up anymore. "You're a worse liar than he is." But she was laughing, didn't really want to be, but she was.
"I'm not lying, I swear it. None of us can stand him."
"I'll be damned," Kara said, and decided that as soon as they let her have something, she was asking for a bottle of ambrosia. She chuckled again, struck by the gorgeous thought of Leoben alternately crying and throwing up, and tore off another piece of her roll. "I'll be gods-damned."
"But you are called Starbuck?" it asked, after a few moments.
Kara looked at her roll a little longer, and then looked back up. "Yeah," she said, because it seemed fair to toss it something, at this point. "Yeah. That's my call sign." She looked back down, and then added, quietly, "Was my call sign."
It was hard to tell how much time had passed. You couldn't see much of the guards, and the meals all ran together. They wouldn't give them things like forks or pens, nothing to scratch it into the doors with. Probably figured one of them would kill the other, and the way she saw it, if you were so sure she still thought of that thing as an enemy, that made her at least as much your ally as Boomer, right? But apparently they didn't see it that way.
"Kara," Lee said one day, "look, maybe we can build you another cell, or -- "
"Oh, frak off." She hung up the phone and turned her back, slumping against the grating. She heard him distantly, muffled by all the bulletproof glass, and finally she figured he must've given up. Story of their frakking lives.
It was Tigh, of all people, who finally took pity on her. He didn't look at her when he came in, something tucked away in his arm, and he didn't look at her when they backed her and Caprica against the wall and opened the door and he set the parcel down, and he didn't look at her when he left. She half expected it to be a bomb, if she didn't figure they wouldn't want to risk any other damage.
"Frak me," she said, and smiled at the jars. Distantly, the door slammed, Tigh disappearing from the darkness without and back into the life of the ship. She turned to Caprica, raising the jar. "Feel like a party?"
She started talking to herself when she was drunk, and Kara realized that somewhere along the way she'd started thinking of Caprica as 'she', like Athena, like she'd ended up thinking of Leoben as 'he' sometimes when she was the most sure she'd never get out of that gods-damned apartment. Not really talk, much, exactly, but she would giggle and blush and mumble something when she thought Kara couldn't see her doing it.
"Who are you talking to?" she finally asked, when things had started to go a little brighter at the edges.
"No one," she said, except she turned an even brighter red.
"Come on, you can tell me. Hello!" she shouted, and sing-songed, "Who's there?" She grabbed Caprica's wrist, checking it, and then looked behind her ear. "Is it some kind of Cylon listening thing? Because you should definitely use that to escape, if it is."
"It's not, I'm not," she said, and giggled again, looking off in the other direction.
"Gods, you're a lightweight," Kara said. "I thought you guys were supposed to be tougher than humans. And didn't you say it took you more to get drunk?"
"You're drunk too! It's probably poisoned," she whispered, her eyes going wide. "They want to get rid of us."
Kara thought about that for a minute, and then snorted. "Lee would probably do it," she said. "He hasn't got the guts to kill me like a man."
"I'd kill you like a man," Caprica said.
"I'd kill you like a man, too," Kara answered, and thought that was supposed to be a good thing, somehow, except she couldn't quite remember how. "This is really good stuff," she said, looking into the jar. "Chief taught his people well."
Caprica just nodded, and then there was a hand on Kara's, on the jar. She looked up, frowning at her, and Caprica smiled, and there was something kind of sweet about it, really, if you got past the part where she was a Cylon. Kara thought about that for a second, and then thought about something else, and started laughing again.
"What is it?" Caprica asked, as Kara took another swig.
"Turns out," Kara said, setting the booze down, "all you have to do to get me to frak a toaster is get me drunk enough. Too bad Leoben never thought of that one, huh?"
She was on the ground, then, in a matter of seconds. "Don't call me a toaster," Caprica said. There was danger in her voice, and Kara felt her own body stiffen, felt herself sober up in the time it took her heart to start pounding. She told herself to relax, and once she was sure Caprica had done the same, she snapped, throwing her off and pinning her in a second.
"Don't frakking tell me what to do," Kara said, and leaned down until her mouth was hairs above Caprica's. "I don't know if Leoben told you this or not, but I don't take orders from toasters."
She was pinned again, then, and Caprica didn't fall for the relaxing trick this time. She leaned down, even closer, and Kara couldn't help a shudder as she whispered, "Leoben says a lot of things."
Kara grinned, and lifted her head the little she needed to kiss her.
"I'm not a Cylon," she said when Athena finally came to see them. They let her come inside the cell, and Kara remembered the times she'd been on the other side of it, insisting that she be let in to see the thing that looked like one of her friends.
"I know," she said. "I'm trying, I promise. But my word...it only goes so far." She touched Kara's hand, and this time there weren't guns fixed on them for it. This time, Kara realized, it would've been her who warranted guns.
"What's going on out there?" It had come back to her, seeing someone else in the right clothes, not that ridiculous getup Caprica still wore. Most of the time she missed it a little less -- it didn't hurt quite so much, she'd gone without it for over a year, after all. Without the Fleet, without flying, without Lee or someone else giving her disapproving looks every day. But it hurt again.
"I can't tell you," she said, and had the grace to look ashamed. "I'm sorry."
"Yeah," Kara said, and settled back on her cot. "Me too."
She closed her eyes, and didn't open them until she heard Sharon leave. Caprica didn't come to her this time; she heard her sink into her own cot.
After awhile -- a lot of meals, they'd all run together at that point. She'd guess maybe a couple of weeks? Eventually, the door outside opened and there was a lot of noise. She realized that they were standing shoulder to shoulder only when they'd already stood up and faced the door. The Marines had guns pointed at them, and there were a lot of them, and suddenly Kara just knew.
"Someone else," she said, at the same time that Six said it, and they looked at each other.
"I'm not a Cylon," Kara whispered, but the door was already open and two Marines had swept in, guns ready.
"You two, against the wall," Tigh said from outside the door. She couldn't see his face. He'd seemed pretty careful about not looking at her since she'd been back, about sticking in the shadows, and gods knew there were plenty of those if you weren't in this frakking cage all night and all day.
They obeyed, though, because it's not like there was all that much else to do. They got one Marine apiece, got backed against separate walls, kept their hands in sight, and all Starbuck wanted to do was grab the gun and -- something, anything, that peace was gone, it had been gone since Galactica had found her and told her once again what a frak-up she was.
"Keep breathing," Six said softly, from across the cell. Kara wanted to put a fist through her face, the way she was talking, but then there was more noise and someone got shoved in and the Marines backed out and it was quiet again, just like that. For now.
He was unconscious, beaten up; he'd been found in the Fleet somewhere and gone through some vigilante justice before they turned him over, apparently. Kara was sorry for that for a second, she found, which scared her more than anything thus far had, even frakking a Cylon. Caprica went to him first, knelt beside him and helped him to one of the cots, fussed and clucked over him like a mother hen and glared at Starbuck until she retreated to a corner of the cell with the full jar Tigh had tossed her. She had to hand it to him, it took skill to throw things when you were blind in one eye and wouldn't even look at the person you threw them too. He should think about pyramid himself.
"Kara?" he asked, at last, when he woke up. He even smiled at her.
It wasn't him you dreamed, she told herself, it just looked like him. She didn't look at either of them.
When they finally broke open the last couple of jars, Leoben wasn't maudlin at all. He was quiet where Caprica opened up, laughing and loose and carelessly touching them both a thousand times over.
"You lied to me," she said.
Caprica laughed. "He's not weepy because now he's got you," she explained, and Kara wondered when she'd mentioned what she'd lied about, and thought that if she were less of a hopeless case, that might be something still worth getting worried over.
"He hasn't got jack," Kara said, and felt her lips curl into a grin against Caprica's. "And neither do you."
"No," Caprica agreed. Kara felt Leoben smile against the back of her neck, felt his arms between her and Caprica. She kissed her again -- maybe she hadn't stopped, really -- harder this time, and felt him sink down to the floor beside the cot. He was kneeling, she thought, though she barely even saw him, taken as she was with all the light and limbs that seemed to make up the woman-thing in her lap. Caprica broke the kiss, finally, panting. Leoben's fingers brushed the scar left from the Farm just then, and she stiffened.
"I'm sorry," he said. His voice was barely that, barely more than breath against her skin, warm and humid as the rest of the air around her. He stayed like that, kneeling, until Caprica kissed her throat and she let her legs slide apart and he moved down from the scar, down and over.
"Frak," she managed, and felt Caprica's forehead come to rest against her temple, heard her whispering something, and she found that it didn't matter what. It might have been anything -- it sounded like it could be a prayer -- her voice was low, soft, soothing. She held one of Kara's hands while the other found itself tangled in Leoben's hair.
The power went out and it was like something went through all of them.
"Come on," someone said, closing a hand on hers, and it took her shamefully long to realize that it was Sam. "We're getting you out of here."
"What about -- " she began, and realized that it didn't matter that she wasn't one of them anymore, especially if someone figured out that she was worried.
"Yeah," he said, and didn't say anything about her being a frakking traitor, let alone his ex. "Them, too."
Author: Cakes (cidercupcakes)
Fandom: Battlestar Galactica
Rating: PG-13
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Kara/Six, Kara/Six/Leoben
Words: ~3000
Notes: I've had this in mind for over a week now, so of course I finally write and post it when it's half an hour from doubtless being horribly jossed, but whatevs. Title and summary from the poem "Helen", by H.D., the full text of which can be found here.
Disclaimer: Moore, R&D, Universal, etc.
Spoilers: Through "Crossroads II".
Summary: Greece sees unmoved/God's daughter, born of love
"Lee," she said, and started to laugh, because she was home and they could go to Earth, they could beat the Cylons there and everything was going to be okay, everything was going to be okay. She didn't even want to kiss Lee; for once she didn't want to frak things up. She just wanted to laugh.
Except no one else, she realized, was laughing, and Lee was staring at her and looking sicker than a nugget who'd just got out of the gyro.
"Captain Thrace," Lee said, and he sounded sick, too, "I think you need to come with me."
"What?" she said, and laughed a little bit again. "Lee, what's wrong?"
She heard whispers, now, and realized everyone looked sort of sick, and Chief looked away when she looked towards him.
"Please," Lee said. He moved closer to her, and whispered it, and then added, "the Marines are on their way, Kara, please, just come with me and make this easier for everyone."
"Make what easier?" Everyone was still staring, and she heard more whispers, and one of them sounded a lot like 'dead'. "It's only been -- Lee, come on, what are you doing?"
Which was when she realized that the reason he'd gotten so close to her was to pull out a gun and press it against her gut. "You were dead, Kara," he said. He wasn't screwing around, she could see it. Lee was never good at hiding it when he was about to lose it, and it's not like he'd know a good joke if it bit him on the ass. "And now you're not -- you just, you have to realize what this looks like. Please, just -- "
"You're kidding," she said, and started laughing again. "Oh my gods, Lee, come on, you're kidding." She looked around, trying to find someone who would start laughing, and instead, a group of Marines came running in with their guns drawn.
In the end, she went with them. There wasn't a whole lot else she could do at the moment, was there? And the poor bastards were so afraid of her that it seemed easier to go along with it until they got the whole thing straightened out.
"Oh, come on, no," she said, though, when she realized they were putting her in with the Six. "Look, I'll go along with this until you figure out what morons you're all being, but you can't seriously leave me alone with that. It'll kill me."
"No," Lee said, when Tigh didn't make any kind of snide comment about that solving everyone's problems. "It's the only place safe enough -- we'll keep Marines nearby. If she tries anything -- you'll be fine."
And they shut the doors on her, and left her alone with a Cylon in a cocktail dress.
Fan-frakking-tastic.
"Kendra tried to tell us something," the old man said. He hadn't even opened the door for her, wouldn't even just talk to her, not anymore. "Before she died. She tried to warn us about something -- 'I have to warn you about Kara Thrace', she said. Do you know what it might've been that she wanted to say?"
"Oh my gods," Starbuck answered. She almost started laughing again; she could feel her mouth curling up into a smile because she couldn't even frakking believe this. "You believe it, sir. You believe this, don't you?"
He just gazed at her, stony-faced, through the bulletproof glass and the grating, and finally he hung up.
"I don't know," she shouted, and then, even louder, "I don't know," until she was screaming. He stopped, briefly, which might've been something, but he didn't come back. He disappeared into the black -- it swallowed everything outside the cage.
She sank down against the wall, and closed her eyes, and kept them closed until she felt someone sitting down next to her, felt a careful hand on her shoulder. The touch was leaf-light, breeze-light. Gods, it was scared of her. That would've been great if she weren't stuck here with it.
"You're not frakking helping," she said.
A pause, and then the hand was gone, and the body next to her own too. "I'm sorry." Its voice was even. Kara realized how warm it had been in its absence.
"They call me Caprica," it said over a meal one day.
Kara just grunted.
"Leoben said you're called Starbuck," the thing continued, and Kara looked up and noticed that it was smiling pleasantly, like it thought they were just two girls stuck sharing a table at a crowded cafe in Caprica City, not a Cylon and someone who was having an unending frakking nightmare.
"Yeah, well, Leoben says a lot of things," Kara said. Deliberate, she looked back down at her roll.
It laughed. Which startled her enough to make her look up again. It was still grinning as she gaped at it. Like it thought they were sharing a joke or something. "Yes," it said, and laughed again, just a little chuckle, like maybe they really were sharing a joke or something. "Yes, he does. You should hear him when he's drunk."
"You can get drunk?" She asked it in spite of herself, her voice slow, every syllable careful and measured and if she'd ever been this careful as a pilot, the CAGs would've adored her.
"Oh, yes," it said, and smiled wide enough to show off its inhumanly -- well, obviously -- perfect teeth. "It takes a little more than it does for you, but we can definitely get drunk. He's ridiculous when he's had a few. We hate having him at parties, he's only funny for a little while."
She couldn't help it; she laughed too. The image of Leoben, drunk and making an ass of himself, was too frakking glorious not to enjoy. "He's probably one of those real maudlin drunks, right? Laughing about everything for about five minutes, and then he starts crying over how no one's ever gonna love him?"
"Not so much no one as you, actually," the Cylon said, smirking.
Kara snorted. "Okay, now I know you're pulling my leg."
"I'm not!" It seemed indignant, like if it had honor, Kara would've impugned it. "It's the most pathetic thing you've ever seen. The Eights -- Sharon," it specified, after she frowned, "they hate him; he corners her and starts asking her if you've ever mentioned him. At best. At worst, he asks about the times you two had racks in the same lounge -- "
"Oh my frakking gods," and she almost didn't care if it was making this all up anymore. "You're a worse liar than he is." But she was laughing, didn't really want to be, but she was.
"I'm not lying, I swear it. None of us can stand him."
"I'll be damned," Kara said, and decided that as soon as they let her have something, she was asking for a bottle of ambrosia. She chuckled again, struck by the gorgeous thought of Leoben alternately crying and throwing up, and tore off another piece of her roll. "I'll be gods-damned."
"But you are called Starbuck?" it asked, after a few moments.
Kara looked at her roll a little longer, and then looked back up. "Yeah," she said, because it seemed fair to toss it something, at this point. "Yeah. That's my call sign." She looked back down, and then added, quietly, "Was my call sign."
It was hard to tell how much time had passed. You couldn't see much of the guards, and the meals all ran together. They wouldn't give them things like forks or pens, nothing to scratch it into the doors with. Probably figured one of them would kill the other, and the way she saw it, if you were so sure she still thought of that thing as an enemy, that made her at least as much your ally as Boomer, right? But apparently they didn't see it that way.
"Kara," Lee said one day, "look, maybe we can build you another cell, or -- "
"Oh, frak off." She hung up the phone and turned her back, slumping against the grating. She heard him distantly, muffled by all the bulletproof glass, and finally she figured he must've given up. Story of their frakking lives.
It was Tigh, of all people, who finally took pity on her. He didn't look at her when he came in, something tucked away in his arm, and he didn't look at her when they backed her and Caprica against the wall and opened the door and he set the parcel down, and he didn't look at her when he left. She half expected it to be a bomb, if she didn't figure they wouldn't want to risk any other damage.
"Frak me," she said, and smiled at the jars. Distantly, the door slammed, Tigh disappearing from the darkness without and back into the life of the ship. She turned to Caprica, raising the jar. "Feel like a party?"
She started talking to herself when she was drunk, and Kara realized that somewhere along the way she'd started thinking of Caprica as 'she', like Athena, like she'd ended up thinking of Leoben as 'he' sometimes when she was the most sure she'd never get out of that gods-damned apartment. Not really talk, much, exactly, but she would giggle and blush and mumble something when she thought Kara couldn't see her doing it.
"Who are you talking to?" she finally asked, when things had started to go a little brighter at the edges.
"No one," she said, except she turned an even brighter red.
"Come on, you can tell me. Hello!" she shouted, and sing-songed, "Who's there?" She grabbed Caprica's wrist, checking it, and then looked behind her ear. "Is it some kind of Cylon listening thing? Because you should definitely use that to escape, if it is."
"It's not, I'm not," she said, and giggled again, looking off in the other direction.
"Gods, you're a lightweight," Kara said. "I thought you guys were supposed to be tougher than humans. And didn't you say it took you more to get drunk?"
"You're drunk too! It's probably poisoned," she whispered, her eyes going wide. "They want to get rid of us."
Kara thought about that for a minute, and then snorted. "Lee would probably do it," she said. "He hasn't got the guts to kill me like a man."
"I'd kill you like a man," Caprica said.
"I'd kill you like a man, too," Kara answered, and thought that was supposed to be a good thing, somehow, except she couldn't quite remember how. "This is really good stuff," she said, looking into the jar. "Chief taught his people well."
Caprica just nodded, and then there was a hand on Kara's, on the jar. She looked up, frowning at her, and Caprica smiled, and there was something kind of sweet about it, really, if you got past the part where she was a Cylon. Kara thought about that for a second, and then thought about something else, and started laughing again.
"What is it?" Caprica asked, as Kara took another swig.
"Turns out," Kara said, setting the booze down, "all you have to do to get me to frak a toaster is get me drunk enough. Too bad Leoben never thought of that one, huh?"
She was on the ground, then, in a matter of seconds. "Don't call me a toaster," Caprica said. There was danger in her voice, and Kara felt her own body stiffen, felt herself sober up in the time it took her heart to start pounding. She told herself to relax, and once she was sure Caprica had done the same, she snapped, throwing her off and pinning her in a second.
"Don't frakking tell me what to do," Kara said, and leaned down until her mouth was hairs above Caprica's. "I don't know if Leoben told you this or not, but I don't take orders from toasters."
She was pinned again, then, and Caprica didn't fall for the relaxing trick this time. She leaned down, even closer, and Kara couldn't help a shudder as she whispered, "Leoben says a lot of things."
Kara grinned, and lifted her head the little she needed to kiss her.
"I'm not a Cylon," she said when Athena finally came to see them. They let her come inside the cell, and Kara remembered the times she'd been on the other side of it, insisting that she be let in to see the thing that looked like one of her friends.
"I know," she said. "I'm trying, I promise. But my word...it only goes so far." She touched Kara's hand, and this time there weren't guns fixed on them for it. This time, Kara realized, it would've been her who warranted guns.
"What's going on out there?" It had come back to her, seeing someone else in the right clothes, not that ridiculous getup Caprica still wore. Most of the time she missed it a little less -- it didn't hurt quite so much, she'd gone without it for over a year, after all. Without the Fleet, without flying, without Lee or someone else giving her disapproving looks every day. But it hurt again.
"I can't tell you," she said, and had the grace to look ashamed. "I'm sorry."
"Yeah," Kara said, and settled back on her cot. "Me too."
She closed her eyes, and didn't open them until she heard Sharon leave. Caprica didn't come to her this time; she heard her sink into her own cot.
After awhile -- a lot of meals, they'd all run together at that point. She'd guess maybe a couple of weeks? Eventually, the door outside opened and there was a lot of noise. She realized that they were standing shoulder to shoulder only when they'd already stood up and faced the door. The Marines had guns pointed at them, and there were a lot of them, and suddenly Kara just knew.
"Someone else," she said, at the same time that Six said it, and they looked at each other.
"I'm not a Cylon," Kara whispered, but the door was already open and two Marines had swept in, guns ready.
"You two, against the wall," Tigh said from outside the door. She couldn't see his face. He'd seemed pretty careful about not looking at her since she'd been back, about sticking in the shadows, and gods knew there were plenty of those if you weren't in this frakking cage all night and all day.
They obeyed, though, because it's not like there was all that much else to do. They got one Marine apiece, got backed against separate walls, kept their hands in sight, and all Starbuck wanted to do was grab the gun and -- something, anything, that peace was gone, it had been gone since Galactica had found her and told her once again what a frak-up she was.
"Keep breathing," Six said softly, from across the cell. Kara wanted to put a fist through her face, the way she was talking, but then there was more noise and someone got shoved in and the Marines backed out and it was quiet again, just like that. For now.
He was unconscious, beaten up; he'd been found in the Fleet somewhere and gone through some vigilante justice before they turned him over, apparently. Kara was sorry for that for a second, she found, which scared her more than anything thus far had, even frakking a Cylon. Caprica went to him first, knelt beside him and helped him to one of the cots, fussed and clucked over him like a mother hen and glared at Starbuck until she retreated to a corner of the cell with the full jar Tigh had tossed her. She had to hand it to him, it took skill to throw things when you were blind in one eye and wouldn't even look at the person you threw them too. He should think about pyramid himself.
"Kara?" he asked, at last, when he woke up. He even smiled at her.
It wasn't him you dreamed, she told herself, it just looked like him. She didn't look at either of them.
When they finally broke open the last couple of jars, Leoben wasn't maudlin at all. He was quiet where Caprica opened up, laughing and loose and carelessly touching them both a thousand times over.
"You lied to me," she said.
Caprica laughed. "He's not weepy because now he's got you," she explained, and Kara wondered when she'd mentioned what she'd lied about, and thought that if she were less of a hopeless case, that might be something still worth getting worried over.
"He hasn't got jack," Kara said, and felt her lips curl into a grin against Caprica's. "And neither do you."
"No," Caprica agreed. Kara felt Leoben smile against the back of her neck, felt his arms between her and Caprica. She kissed her again -- maybe she hadn't stopped, really -- harder this time, and felt him sink down to the floor beside the cot. He was kneeling, she thought, though she barely even saw him, taken as she was with all the light and limbs that seemed to make up the woman-thing in her lap. Caprica broke the kiss, finally, panting. Leoben's fingers brushed the scar left from the Farm just then, and she stiffened.
"I'm sorry," he said. His voice was barely that, barely more than breath against her skin, warm and humid as the rest of the air around her. He stayed like that, kneeling, until Caprica kissed her throat and she let her legs slide apart and he moved down from the scar, down and over.
"Frak," she managed, and felt Caprica's forehead come to rest against her temple, heard her whispering something, and she found that it didn't matter what. It might have been anything -- it sounded like it could be a prayer -- her voice was low, soft, soothing. She held one of Kara's hands while the other found itself tangled in Leoben's hair.
The power went out and it was like something went through all of them.
"Come on," someone said, closing a hand on hers, and it took her shamefully long to realize that it was Sam. "We're getting you out of here."
"What about -- " she began, and realized that it didn't matter that she wasn't one of them anymore, especially if someone figured out that she was worried.
"Yeah," he said, and didn't say anything about her being a frakking traitor, let alone his ex. "Them, too."