BSG fic: All the People We Need to Love and Hate (Sam, Kara/Sam, PG-13)
Title: All The People We Need to Love and Hate
Character/Pairing: Sam, Kara/Sam (Sharon, Helo, Natalie)
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Begins at the end of "Faith" and turns around the question of why Sam was so kind to that dying Eight. Spoilers for "Revelations" (4.10). 4000 words.
Note: Written before having seen any of season 4.5, so it doesn't become canon-complaint. It might've, though. :) And I'm probably stretching the timeline a bit between "Faith" and "Revelations."
Also note: Title from the song quoted at the outset of the story.
All The People We Need to Love and Hate
"Everybody makes the same mistakes."
~ "Same Blood," The Academy Is…
" She's looking past us. I've seen that look many times, but never in the eyes of a Cylon."
~ Sharon Agathon ("Faith")
"It's okay," Sam feels his voice say. "I'm with you."
He doesn't actually mean to say it, even if he does mean it; but closing her eyes in death-that, he means.
Watching the Eight die clarifies something for Sam. Or solidifies it, maybe-because it's not all that clear, just real and sharp enough to make him feel a panic spring up in his chest, wild and kicking his heartbeat against his ribs. Except it doesn't, not for long. He's been smoothing down that panic for so many days it just dissolves away.
Still, it must be clarity, because he doesn't feel numb like he should, like he always does now. Even on the day he knew he was a Cylon, when the truth cut suddenly against his life, it was like a sweet, smooth blade. He didn't feel it; he only felt everything drain out. But he feels this: warm and heavy, and something in him is ready.
He's halfway down this foreign corridor when it occurs to him that he might very well be going somewhere to do something he won't want to or else won't remember. Every day now, any day. When he darts into a bathroom and throws up, a Six is behind him, curious eyes, deep heart of dark pity, her calm body set against that blank pulse of red light behind her. He's felt just that blank for too long, something on a constant simmer of anger and danger, but heartbeat on autopilot and heart cold as a stone.
That's the only thing he can figure out he feels as they rush back to the Demetrius with Kara: he's been cool and calm and afraid for too long, and now he's done.
*
Kara never liked being on the bottom before during sex, not unless she rolled him on top of her herself. Now, it's always a little like he's forcing her, at least until she really lets herself go. He throws her on her back in the bunk, and he can't tell if it's fun like pyramid used to be or serious like pyramid used to be. A sharp elbow in the solar plexus, a quick, distracting suck at his throat; a seductive smile, a hard knee in the back.
So it seems a little like an attack for a while, but once he feels the tension shake out of her, she submits, as much as she's able. She opens her legs and closes her eyes and he doesn't let himself think about why.
One day they're lying in someone's bunk, sweating and breathing hard, limbs tangled and not speaking, and he hears himself say:
"If you didn't have something in your head you were so godsdamn desperate to avoid, would you frak me at all?"
"It doesn't help," she says automatically, without a thought about his feelings, probably without even thinking she should be thinking about them. "Feels good, but doesn't help."
He really expects that once she starts thinking, she'll crawl over him and flee, but she doesn't.
So he says, "I'm frakking you to avoid something in my head, too."
"Good," she says firmly. Then she chuckles a little. "Thinking was never your strong suit."
She's probably smiling, so he smiles, too. When he goes to get up a moment later, her fingers curl around his forearm to pull him back.
"Sleep, idiot," she says. "Before you drop somewhere."
*
He used to dream a lot about Sharon. He hardly knows which one. He always thinks it's Helo's wife, but he's more than a little afraid it's the real one, the original one. When he would wake up sure it was her, the similarities between them made him a little twitchy. He hates the way dreams can frak you up, when you remember things that didn't happen as if they were real memories, and you feel them in your body and soul like they happened.
It's never anything all that frakked up, though; no bloodshed or sex anything weird. He's had dreams of playing pyramid with a number three and there was one wet dream about frakking a six, but he's never had any kind of meaningful physical contact with Sharon in his dreams, just a lot of talk.
A Sharon, an Eight. They're in a tent on New Caprica, where he must've killed dozens like her. He's always too tired to get up and leave, and what she says always makes way more sense than it should. Luckily, he never used to remember what she said that had him nodding his head and feeling some warm sense of acceptance mingled with apprehension spreading under his ribs.
He's only dreamed it once since he found out what he was, but he finally woke up remembering.
You can fix all this, bring us all together, she said.
In the dream, he believed it, but he woke up in a cold sweat, wondering if she had always been saying that; wondering, too, if some part of him actually must believe it could be true, or even possible.
*
He thinks it would be easier if they knew what he was. Easier for him, anyway: he could look people in the eye and deal with what he needed to deal with and not have to spend his every breath in an agony of waiting.
He thinks he's been waiting just as much as they are-for some new switch to flip. He watches Sharon more closely now than he ever did, and that makes it easier to wait. He never doubts her for a moment, not anymore. He used to, but the trust came, and it came before his own revelation. He just understands better what it means now, the good and the bad. And he is what she is, or he could be.
But watching her also reminds him of the thing that makes this so much harder: the person she was meant to be but wasn't, quite. The one who didn't know. The one they will always and forever suspect of not being in possession of her own mind and body and will. (The one they suspect even worse of, that she knew precisely what she was doing when she put a bullet in the old man.)
The one who they couldn't live with.
*
After he gets back into his clothes one night, after he's frakked Kara into the thin mattress of her bunk, he stops at the door of the bunk room. She's already half dressed and pulling her boots back on.
He says, "Do you scare you?"
"What?"
And now he's a little scared. His hands shake, but he's already started this thing; doesn't profit him to show weakness with her by backing down. He figured that out a long damn time ago.
"Do you ever scare you?" he repeats.
She wrinkles her nose. It would be an eye roll if she weren't squirrelly and exhausted. Hell, if she were the same Kara she was before she "died," it might be a fight, depending on how defensive and Starbuck she was feeling. As it is, though, her voice is still as warm and thick and self-deprecating as ever.
"Sure, Sammy."
"I'm serious, Kara."
She narrows her eyes. "Just because I'm a what? A frakking nutcase? That doesn't mean I don't know exactly what I'm doing."
Like when you cold cocked me when I got in your way?
Or like when you let me frak you so hard you scream?
"You didn't answer my question," he says.
"Well, yeah."
At least she admits she's crazy, when they talk about it. There are other things they don't talk about at all, like whether she might be a Cylon. Plenty of other people have suggested it, but not him. That's strange, of course, because it might make this a hell of a lot easier if they were the same.
If any of them were the same.
*
Sharon doesn't ask him why he wants to know about Boomer. She also doesn't tell him anything very useful.
"She must've known, on some level," she says. "But she didn't know what it was. Back then, you didn't even know such a thing was possible."
"But she couldn't have stopped it."
"If she had known, maybe. But that's the point-she didn't. Because she wasn't her own. She was a tool."
"So were you."
She frowns at him in a hot, irritated way she might not have just a few months before. She seems to behave more like a human--more like what he's ever heard of the real Sharon Valerii--every day. Of course, the real Sharon was also a Cylon.
Sharon says, "Sure, I didn't know what it meant to be my own person, not at first, but I knew what I was. And I changed."
"How?"
"Time?" She shrugs.
Natalie is more straight-forward when he goes to see her in holding: "For all we're machines and we like to think we're in control, we're not. We don't know why we do what we do or how to stop it."
"That sounds…"
"Terrifying? It is. Especially since it's why we used to be so afraid of you."
For a moment, it's like she can see into him. "Me?"
"Humanity."
"Used to?" he says quickly.
"We have other reasons now."
She looks like any given Six he killed on planets named for the constellation of Capricorn, except for her brown hair and how he thinks of her as Natalie. Somehow, a name makes all the difference.
"Why are you here, Sam?" she asks him. For a second, he thinks she must know who he really is, but then he sees that she's looking at him like she always looks at humans: with an equal mixture of suspicion and curiosity.
Sam ignores her question and continues: "Don't you think that Six knew exactly what she was doing when she killed my friend?"
She raises an eyebrow, but her expression is not unkind. "Did your friend know what she was doing when she killed her?"
*
"Did she have a name?" he asks the Hybrid.
He doesn't know why he comes here unless it's the same reason he sometimes tunes into Baltar's wireless broadcasts. He doesn't know why it matters anyway. The Eight is dead and gone. For good. Like he will be, eventually.
The Hybrid intones, resonant, but Sam can't make himself focus on her fragmented meaningless meaning. He stops listening, but he stays. Most of him is afraid she'll know him for who and what he really is. Part of him is afraid she won't, that no one ever will, that it will never makes sense-what he is, who he is.
*
Kara has only told him she loves him a handful of times, and always when she thought she should. It would be depressing if she didn't have a hundred other ways to tell him, ways that mean more because they're not orchestrated for some kind of effect.
Sometimes, he wonders why he deserves it, the gestures that speak of things he never thought he'd have: her kiss on the back of his neck, her unselfconscious smiles, her taking his work detail when he was too exhausted or sick to do it, her inviting him to share her tent and her life, her coming back to Caprica for him.
But there were other ways what they had didn't look a damn thing like he had ever thought love would or should: her handing over the last swallow of liquor in a bottle, her frakking him angry until they burned it all out of them, her asking her brother-lover-enemy for medicine to save his life, her pushing him away when she thought she wasn't strong enough anymore after Leoben.
But, still, she always told him somehow-as long as he was stubborn enough to stay close, to hear the way it whispered out of her, a mute wave of longing as an undercurrent to just about everything she ever said to him; or to the times she didn't say anything at all.
*
In his head, he calls the Eight that died Artemis. She looked like an Artemis, he reasons. And she needs a name.
He scans the faces of the remnant of the Cylons when he sees them in groups and he's surprised at how they all look differentiated. They didn't before, and he doesn't think it's just that he's changed. They've changed, too-names and clothes and habits and maybe even hearts. Too much time in contact with humans. He's not sure if it's good or bad.
The look on their faces, it used to be something like submission; and if he wasn't really paying attention now, maybe it would still seem like that, like they're the greater good, a piece of the puzzle, a dispensable tool. But they were never dispensable, really, just so immortal they gave no thought to laying everything down for a while, if they had to. Like the best of his resistance fighters, really, he thinks with a shiver. Except the Cylons come back-but scarred, of course, like that Six who killed Jean.
He decides he will call that one Persephone. It doesn't fit, he knows, but once he thinks of the name, it sticks. Maybe that's good. Maybe the point is that it all doesn't mean something profound; it just is, and you live with it. There's no reason for any of them to be here, but they are here, and that matters.
He doesn't see submission anymore when he looks into their eyes as they fan out behind Natalie. Their look is one of desperation, mad clinging to whatever this is, whether it makes sense or not. What the frak else would explain they choose to walk alongside the remnant of the human race?
*
He's never given much thought to whether he calls her Kara or Starbuck. It's not as if it doesn't matter, of course, it's just that it's quite easy to tell which name to call her, which version of herself she's trying to be.
Starbuck, mostly. And that's fine. He loves Starbuck with something so fierce it sort of scares him. He loves Kara, too. They're really not that different. It's only a matter of perception, of seeing. Of seeing past.
It's not like she ever gives you permission to call her Kara or anything. You just do, when you realize Kara is what you get when you look her in the eye, even when she's looking back at you like she will only ever be the most rebellious pilot to ever take to the air.
*
This clarity he got when Artemis died, and all that came after-it's all tucked away, like the piece of metal he buried in a leg that is now gone, somewhere in his brain in the dark rooms he doesn't enter too often. But he finds himself standing bewildered in the middle of them sometimes without knowing how or why.
Like how one night Karl finds him half asleep in a corridor, coming off an epic drunk. He wonders with nauseating horror if Gaeta can even for a few minutes drink away being crippled. Because Sam can only think about it himself for minutes at a time before he finds himself overwhelmed.
"Why didn't she want to touch her?" Sam says as he tries to keep his boots from tangling with Karl's. It replays over and over in his mind, that moment where Sharon recoiled and he didn't. He never recoils, does he? (Not even from Kara, not even now.)
"C'mon, Anders. Let's get you back to-"
"Helo, why didn't she want to touch her?"
"What, now? Who?"
"Your wife. The Eight. Who died. On the base ship with the hybrid. Sharon wouldn't…"
Karl frowns at him but it doesn't last. He has the quickest mask of anyone he's ever seen, when he can manage it.
"Karl."
"She chose not to be that."
"Not to be what?"
"That. How should I know, man? You think being married to a Cylon means I have a godsdamn clue what it all means?"
"Shouldn't somebody?"
Karl chuckles darkly. "Yeah. You tell me if you find them, okay?"
Gaeta, he thinks. Maybe Felix Gaeta.
*
"I don't know why I reached out and touched that toaster when she was dying," he mumbles into Kara's neck. He'd like to say he wasn't thinking when he said it, but he was. Is.
It's just that he doesn't do this. They've never poured out their concerns to each other. They've taken them out on each other, doled out punishment until they were both exhausted and bruised, but they don't talk about this shit, not even in the open, vulnerable moments after they frak.
He can't say it out loud, can't say, I am a Cylon, too, so he adds, "But I want to think I did it on purpose."
"Okay," she says. "Whatever floats your boat."
"Did you ever love me?"
"What?" She jerks, then she begins to pull herself up. "What the hell, Sammy? I-"
"Whatever that words mean to you, did you?"
"Yeah," she says, grimacing at him. "What the frak?"
"Because we survived Caprica together?"
"No."
"You don't think it's because we went through some kind of…trauma, and it frakked with our brains?"
"Of course it did. But it's not like… And hey, look-our brains are still frakked, aren't they?"
He lies there quiet, breathing as evenly as he can. She flops over onto her back and sighs.
"You know," she mutters, "you weren't the only warm body on Caprica, you asshole. Isn't there something to be said for…?"
"Do you still?"
"What?"
"Love me."
"Gods," she murmurs.
"Kara?"
"I don't know. I don't know anything."
"But you keep holding me here."
"I don't know what else to do sometimes," she says quietly, then she rolls herself off the bunk and begins pulling on her clothes.
*
When Kara finds out he's a Cylon, she kind of blinks at him. He can't tell if it's a shock too big to process or simply that last thing dropping into a slot in her sanity, the missing gear that lets the whole thing turn again, like it always did, now that the months of haunted searching are over and there's nothing to do but finally begin coping.
Of course, it's also putting something else in motion, but at least she has clarity about that.
You are a better person than I am, Sam, because if I found out that you were a Cylon, I would put a bullet between your eyes.
For days he feels kind of like he did in that stairwell on Caprica, when the other Sharon and the Caprica six and the three fought between them about whether he would live or die.
Later, when they're down on the planet she tore her soul apart to find-and it's just as dark and uninhabitable as he sometimes imagines her heart to be, when he's feeling unkind-she's never far away from him. Every time he looks at her, she's looking back, then she's looking away.
*
His hair still smells of sulfur and death and salt and he's wearing a shirt that should be on a Doral when she finds him, deep in the bowls of a base ship designed for so many more people than it currently holds.
"I hate you," she says, pausing inside the threshold and looking at the ground. "I really, really hate you, and I hate this."
"I know." Her eyes cut him, and he's too tired for this right now, even though his adrenaline is pumping, readying him for a fight. He snaps, "But I've been hating it and me a lot longer than you have, so frakking get in line."
She doesn't leave then, but she doesn't come closer either. A smile works at the corner of her mouth, but she doesn’t let it out. She smiles defensively when she's nervous. She laughs, sometimes, when she's terrified. Then again, sometimes she laughs when she's absolutely confident.
Finally, she says, "What's your number?"
"My number?"
"Your Cylon number. Which are you?"
"I don't know. It doesn't matter. I'm just me. Just one person. As far as I know, when I'm gone, I'm gone."
"So I can still call you Sam, then?"
He waits, unable to do more than nod. He waits immobile for her to move toward him, even if she's finally come to do what she promised, send him wherever Cylons go when there isn't any body to come back to.
"I don't know why I'm here," she says, and she slides down the wall until she's sitting, staring. "But if you're still Sam, I'm here."
"I'm still Sam."
She breathes in big gulps, but with her head down he can't tell if she's laughing or crying or just breathing.
*
He assumes everything will fracture into pieces again once they find earth and realize it will never be earth. With nothing to build on, to circle around, to anchor with, they'll splinter and scatter.
But they don't. There's no where else to go, nothing else in the universe but them.
Of course, that was always true.
*
It's a long time before she touches him again. He can wait. He has no other choice, really.
She finally crawls onto his bed one night a few long days later. She sits beside his feet on this wide, soft, alien bed in the base ship, her legs crossed and her hands in her lap, and she's worrying her bottom lip with her teeth. He grabs one of her hands, and she stops.
"So," she says, "I've been doing a lot of drinking."
"And this is different from normal?" he says.
"Let me talk," she says with a small, twinkling smile.
He voice feels rough from disuse. "Yes, ma'am."
"I thought it would help with the not thinking, but it only made it worse. Go figure." She rolls her eyes at herself, looking self-deprecating and sheepish. "So now I'm thinking about how I've been frakking a Cylon since-"
"I didn't know. Not until-"
"I get that, you jackass. Frakking listen to me. I've been frakking a Cylon who hated Cylons. I hate Cylons, and I've been frakking a Cylon-hating Cylon, so, honestly, frak, what does it matter anymore?"
"What?"
"Why I married you: I was freaked the hell out, so I went out and got myself permanently tied to somebody, in the eyes of the gods and everything. And it was a Cylon. It was you. And now my latest epiphany-thank you, synthetic Cylon ambrosia-is that what worked once will probably work again."
"Did we ever work?"
"That's not the question. The question is, did anything else ever work better?"
"Before the attacks or after?"
"This is after. That's the point."
"Yeah."
She lays down beside him. She doesn't tuck herself up against his side, but then again, she rarely did before. But her hand is still in his, and he doesn't let go.
~
Character/Pairing: Sam, Kara/Sam (Sharon, Helo, Natalie)
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Begins at the end of "Faith" and turns around the question of why Sam was so kind to that dying Eight. Spoilers for "Revelations" (4.10). 4000 words.
Note: Written before having seen any of season 4.5, so it doesn't become canon-complaint. It might've, though. :) And I'm probably stretching the timeline a bit between "Faith" and "Revelations."
Also note: Title from the song quoted at the outset of the story.
All The People We Need to Love and Hate
"Everybody makes the same mistakes."
~ "Same Blood," The Academy Is…
" She's looking past us. I've seen that look many times, but never in the eyes of a Cylon."
~ Sharon Agathon ("Faith")
"It's okay," Sam feels his voice say. "I'm with you."
He doesn't actually mean to say it, even if he does mean it; but closing her eyes in death-that, he means.
Watching the Eight die clarifies something for Sam. Or solidifies it, maybe-because it's not all that clear, just real and sharp enough to make him feel a panic spring up in his chest, wild and kicking his heartbeat against his ribs. Except it doesn't, not for long. He's been smoothing down that panic for so many days it just dissolves away.
Still, it must be clarity, because he doesn't feel numb like he should, like he always does now. Even on the day he knew he was a Cylon, when the truth cut suddenly against his life, it was like a sweet, smooth blade. He didn't feel it; he only felt everything drain out. But he feels this: warm and heavy, and something in him is ready.
He's halfway down this foreign corridor when it occurs to him that he might very well be going somewhere to do something he won't want to or else won't remember. Every day now, any day. When he darts into a bathroom and throws up, a Six is behind him, curious eyes, deep heart of dark pity, her calm body set against that blank pulse of red light behind her. He's felt just that blank for too long, something on a constant simmer of anger and danger, but heartbeat on autopilot and heart cold as a stone.
That's the only thing he can figure out he feels as they rush back to the Demetrius with Kara: he's been cool and calm and afraid for too long, and now he's done.
*
Kara never liked being on the bottom before during sex, not unless she rolled him on top of her herself. Now, it's always a little like he's forcing her, at least until she really lets herself go. He throws her on her back in the bunk, and he can't tell if it's fun like pyramid used to be or serious like pyramid used to be. A sharp elbow in the solar plexus, a quick, distracting suck at his throat; a seductive smile, a hard knee in the back.
So it seems a little like an attack for a while, but once he feels the tension shake out of her, she submits, as much as she's able. She opens her legs and closes her eyes and he doesn't let himself think about why.
One day they're lying in someone's bunk, sweating and breathing hard, limbs tangled and not speaking, and he hears himself say:
"If you didn't have something in your head you were so godsdamn desperate to avoid, would you frak me at all?"
"It doesn't help," she says automatically, without a thought about his feelings, probably without even thinking she should be thinking about them. "Feels good, but doesn't help."
He really expects that once she starts thinking, she'll crawl over him and flee, but she doesn't.
So he says, "I'm frakking you to avoid something in my head, too."
"Good," she says firmly. Then she chuckles a little. "Thinking was never your strong suit."
She's probably smiling, so he smiles, too. When he goes to get up a moment later, her fingers curl around his forearm to pull him back.
"Sleep, idiot," she says. "Before you drop somewhere."
*
He used to dream a lot about Sharon. He hardly knows which one. He always thinks it's Helo's wife, but he's more than a little afraid it's the real one, the original one. When he would wake up sure it was her, the similarities between them made him a little twitchy. He hates the way dreams can frak you up, when you remember things that didn't happen as if they were real memories, and you feel them in your body and soul like they happened.
It's never anything all that frakked up, though; no bloodshed or sex anything weird. He's had dreams of playing pyramid with a number three and there was one wet dream about frakking a six, but he's never had any kind of meaningful physical contact with Sharon in his dreams, just a lot of talk.
A Sharon, an Eight. They're in a tent on New Caprica, where he must've killed dozens like her. He's always too tired to get up and leave, and what she says always makes way more sense than it should. Luckily, he never used to remember what she said that had him nodding his head and feeling some warm sense of acceptance mingled with apprehension spreading under his ribs.
He's only dreamed it once since he found out what he was, but he finally woke up remembering.
You can fix all this, bring us all together, she said.
In the dream, he believed it, but he woke up in a cold sweat, wondering if she had always been saying that; wondering, too, if some part of him actually must believe it could be true, or even possible.
*
He thinks it would be easier if they knew what he was. Easier for him, anyway: he could look people in the eye and deal with what he needed to deal with and not have to spend his every breath in an agony of waiting.
He thinks he's been waiting just as much as they are-for some new switch to flip. He watches Sharon more closely now than he ever did, and that makes it easier to wait. He never doubts her for a moment, not anymore. He used to, but the trust came, and it came before his own revelation. He just understands better what it means now, the good and the bad. And he is what she is, or he could be.
But watching her also reminds him of the thing that makes this so much harder: the person she was meant to be but wasn't, quite. The one who didn't know. The one they will always and forever suspect of not being in possession of her own mind and body and will. (The one they suspect even worse of, that she knew precisely what she was doing when she put a bullet in the old man.)
The one who they couldn't live with.
*
After he gets back into his clothes one night, after he's frakked Kara into the thin mattress of her bunk, he stops at the door of the bunk room. She's already half dressed and pulling her boots back on.
He says, "Do you scare you?"
"What?"
And now he's a little scared. His hands shake, but he's already started this thing; doesn't profit him to show weakness with her by backing down. He figured that out a long damn time ago.
"Do you ever scare you?" he repeats.
She wrinkles her nose. It would be an eye roll if she weren't squirrelly and exhausted. Hell, if she were the same Kara she was before she "died," it might be a fight, depending on how defensive and Starbuck she was feeling. As it is, though, her voice is still as warm and thick and self-deprecating as ever.
"Sure, Sammy."
"I'm serious, Kara."
She narrows her eyes. "Just because I'm a what? A frakking nutcase? That doesn't mean I don't know exactly what I'm doing."
Like when you cold cocked me when I got in your way?
Or like when you let me frak you so hard you scream?
"You didn't answer my question," he says.
"Well, yeah."
At least she admits she's crazy, when they talk about it. There are other things they don't talk about at all, like whether she might be a Cylon. Plenty of other people have suggested it, but not him. That's strange, of course, because it might make this a hell of a lot easier if they were the same.
If any of them were the same.
*
Sharon doesn't ask him why he wants to know about Boomer. She also doesn't tell him anything very useful.
"She must've known, on some level," she says. "But she didn't know what it was. Back then, you didn't even know such a thing was possible."
"But she couldn't have stopped it."
"If she had known, maybe. But that's the point-she didn't. Because she wasn't her own. She was a tool."
"So were you."
She frowns at him in a hot, irritated way she might not have just a few months before. She seems to behave more like a human--more like what he's ever heard of the real Sharon Valerii--every day. Of course, the real Sharon was also a Cylon.
Sharon says, "Sure, I didn't know what it meant to be my own person, not at first, but I knew what I was. And I changed."
"How?"
"Time?" She shrugs.
Natalie is more straight-forward when he goes to see her in holding: "For all we're machines and we like to think we're in control, we're not. We don't know why we do what we do or how to stop it."
"That sounds…"
"Terrifying? It is. Especially since it's why we used to be so afraid of you."
For a moment, it's like she can see into him. "Me?"
"Humanity."
"Used to?" he says quickly.
"We have other reasons now."
She looks like any given Six he killed on planets named for the constellation of Capricorn, except for her brown hair and how he thinks of her as Natalie. Somehow, a name makes all the difference.
"Why are you here, Sam?" she asks him. For a second, he thinks she must know who he really is, but then he sees that she's looking at him like she always looks at humans: with an equal mixture of suspicion and curiosity.
Sam ignores her question and continues: "Don't you think that Six knew exactly what she was doing when she killed my friend?"
She raises an eyebrow, but her expression is not unkind. "Did your friend know what she was doing when she killed her?"
*
"Did she have a name?" he asks the Hybrid.
He doesn't know why he comes here unless it's the same reason he sometimes tunes into Baltar's wireless broadcasts. He doesn't know why it matters anyway. The Eight is dead and gone. For good. Like he will be, eventually.
The Hybrid intones, resonant, but Sam can't make himself focus on her fragmented meaningless meaning. He stops listening, but he stays. Most of him is afraid she'll know him for who and what he really is. Part of him is afraid she won't, that no one ever will, that it will never makes sense-what he is, who he is.
*
Kara has only told him she loves him a handful of times, and always when she thought she should. It would be depressing if she didn't have a hundred other ways to tell him, ways that mean more because they're not orchestrated for some kind of effect.
Sometimes, he wonders why he deserves it, the gestures that speak of things he never thought he'd have: her kiss on the back of his neck, her unselfconscious smiles, her taking his work detail when he was too exhausted or sick to do it, her inviting him to share her tent and her life, her coming back to Caprica for him.
But there were other ways what they had didn't look a damn thing like he had ever thought love would or should: her handing over the last swallow of liquor in a bottle, her frakking him angry until they burned it all out of them, her asking her brother-lover-enemy for medicine to save his life, her pushing him away when she thought she wasn't strong enough anymore after Leoben.
But, still, she always told him somehow-as long as he was stubborn enough to stay close, to hear the way it whispered out of her, a mute wave of longing as an undercurrent to just about everything she ever said to him; or to the times she didn't say anything at all.
*
In his head, he calls the Eight that died Artemis. She looked like an Artemis, he reasons. And she needs a name.
He scans the faces of the remnant of the Cylons when he sees them in groups and he's surprised at how they all look differentiated. They didn't before, and he doesn't think it's just that he's changed. They've changed, too-names and clothes and habits and maybe even hearts. Too much time in contact with humans. He's not sure if it's good or bad.
The look on their faces, it used to be something like submission; and if he wasn't really paying attention now, maybe it would still seem like that, like they're the greater good, a piece of the puzzle, a dispensable tool. But they were never dispensable, really, just so immortal they gave no thought to laying everything down for a while, if they had to. Like the best of his resistance fighters, really, he thinks with a shiver. Except the Cylons come back-but scarred, of course, like that Six who killed Jean.
He decides he will call that one Persephone. It doesn't fit, he knows, but once he thinks of the name, it sticks. Maybe that's good. Maybe the point is that it all doesn't mean something profound; it just is, and you live with it. There's no reason for any of them to be here, but they are here, and that matters.
He doesn't see submission anymore when he looks into their eyes as they fan out behind Natalie. Their look is one of desperation, mad clinging to whatever this is, whether it makes sense or not. What the frak else would explain they choose to walk alongside the remnant of the human race?
*
He's never given much thought to whether he calls her Kara or Starbuck. It's not as if it doesn't matter, of course, it's just that it's quite easy to tell which name to call her, which version of herself she's trying to be.
Starbuck, mostly. And that's fine. He loves Starbuck with something so fierce it sort of scares him. He loves Kara, too. They're really not that different. It's only a matter of perception, of seeing. Of seeing past.
It's not like she ever gives you permission to call her Kara or anything. You just do, when you realize Kara is what you get when you look her in the eye, even when she's looking back at you like she will only ever be the most rebellious pilot to ever take to the air.
*
This clarity he got when Artemis died, and all that came after-it's all tucked away, like the piece of metal he buried in a leg that is now gone, somewhere in his brain in the dark rooms he doesn't enter too often. But he finds himself standing bewildered in the middle of them sometimes without knowing how or why.
Like how one night Karl finds him half asleep in a corridor, coming off an epic drunk. He wonders with nauseating horror if Gaeta can even for a few minutes drink away being crippled. Because Sam can only think about it himself for minutes at a time before he finds himself overwhelmed.
"Why didn't she want to touch her?" Sam says as he tries to keep his boots from tangling with Karl's. It replays over and over in his mind, that moment where Sharon recoiled and he didn't. He never recoils, does he? (Not even from Kara, not even now.)
"C'mon, Anders. Let's get you back to-"
"Helo, why didn't she want to touch her?"
"What, now? Who?"
"Your wife. The Eight. Who died. On the base ship with the hybrid. Sharon wouldn't…"
Karl frowns at him but it doesn't last. He has the quickest mask of anyone he's ever seen, when he can manage it.
"Karl."
"She chose not to be that."
"Not to be what?"
"That. How should I know, man? You think being married to a Cylon means I have a godsdamn clue what it all means?"
"Shouldn't somebody?"
Karl chuckles darkly. "Yeah. You tell me if you find them, okay?"
Gaeta, he thinks. Maybe Felix Gaeta.
*
"I don't know why I reached out and touched that toaster when she was dying," he mumbles into Kara's neck. He'd like to say he wasn't thinking when he said it, but he was. Is.
It's just that he doesn't do this. They've never poured out their concerns to each other. They've taken them out on each other, doled out punishment until they were both exhausted and bruised, but they don't talk about this shit, not even in the open, vulnerable moments after they frak.
He can't say it out loud, can't say, I am a Cylon, too, so he adds, "But I want to think I did it on purpose."
"Okay," she says. "Whatever floats your boat."
"Did you ever love me?"
"What?" She jerks, then she begins to pull herself up. "What the hell, Sammy? I-"
"Whatever that words mean to you, did you?"
"Yeah," she says, grimacing at him. "What the frak?"
"Because we survived Caprica together?"
"No."
"You don't think it's because we went through some kind of…trauma, and it frakked with our brains?"
"Of course it did. But it's not like… And hey, look-our brains are still frakked, aren't they?"
He lies there quiet, breathing as evenly as he can. She flops over onto her back and sighs.
"You know," she mutters, "you weren't the only warm body on Caprica, you asshole. Isn't there something to be said for…?"
"Do you still?"
"What?"
"Love me."
"Gods," she murmurs.
"Kara?"
"I don't know. I don't know anything."
"But you keep holding me here."
"I don't know what else to do sometimes," she says quietly, then she rolls herself off the bunk and begins pulling on her clothes.
*
When Kara finds out he's a Cylon, she kind of blinks at him. He can't tell if it's a shock too big to process or simply that last thing dropping into a slot in her sanity, the missing gear that lets the whole thing turn again, like it always did, now that the months of haunted searching are over and there's nothing to do but finally begin coping.
Of course, it's also putting something else in motion, but at least she has clarity about that.
You are a better person than I am, Sam, because if I found out that you were a Cylon, I would put a bullet between your eyes.
For days he feels kind of like he did in that stairwell on Caprica, when the other Sharon and the Caprica six and the three fought between them about whether he would live or die.
Later, when they're down on the planet she tore her soul apart to find-and it's just as dark and uninhabitable as he sometimes imagines her heart to be, when he's feeling unkind-she's never far away from him. Every time he looks at her, she's looking back, then she's looking away.
*
His hair still smells of sulfur and death and salt and he's wearing a shirt that should be on a Doral when she finds him, deep in the bowls of a base ship designed for so many more people than it currently holds.
"I hate you," she says, pausing inside the threshold and looking at the ground. "I really, really hate you, and I hate this."
"I know." Her eyes cut him, and he's too tired for this right now, even though his adrenaline is pumping, readying him for a fight. He snaps, "But I've been hating it and me a lot longer than you have, so frakking get in line."
She doesn't leave then, but she doesn't come closer either. A smile works at the corner of her mouth, but she doesn’t let it out. She smiles defensively when she's nervous. She laughs, sometimes, when she's terrified. Then again, sometimes she laughs when she's absolutely confident.
Finally, she says, "What's your number?"
"My number?"
"Your Cylon number. Which are you?"
"I don't know. It doesn't matter. I'm just me. Just one person. As far as I know, when I'm gone, I'm gone."
"So I can still call you Sam, then?"
He waits, unable to do more than nod. He waits immobile for her to move toward him, even if she's finally come to do what she promised, send him wherever Cylons go when there isn't any body to come back to.
"I don't know why I'm here," she says, and she slides down the wall until she's sitting, staring. "But if you're still Sam, I'm here."
"I'm still Sam."
She breathes in big gulps, but with her head down he can't tell if she's laughing or crying or just breathing.
*
He assumes everything will fracture into pieces again once they find earth and realize it will never be earth. With nothing to build on, to circle around, to anchor with, they'll splinter and scatter.
But they don't. There's no where else to go, nothing else in the universe but them.
Of course, that was always true.
*
It's a long time before she touches him again. He can wait. He has no other choice, really.
She finally crawls onto his bed one night a few long days later. She sits beside his feet on this wide, soft, alien bed in the base ship, her legs crossed and her hands in her lap, and she's worrying her bottom lip with her teeth. He grabs one of her hands, and she stops.
"So," she says, "I've been doing a lot of drinking."
"And this is different from normal?" he says.
"Let me talk," she says with a small, twinkling smile.
He voice feels rough from disuse. "Yes, ma'am."
"I thought it would help with the not thinking, but it only made it worse. Go figure." She rolls her eyes at herself, looking self-deprecating and sheepish. "So now I'm thinking about how I've been frakking a Cylon since-"
"I didn't know. Not until-"
"I get that, you jackass. Frakking listen to me. I've been frakking a Cylon who hated Cylons. I hate Cylons, and I've been frakking a Cylon-hating Cylon, so, honestly, frak, what does it matter anymore?"
"What?"
"Why I married you: I was freaked the hell out, so I went out and got myself permanently tied to somebody, in the eyes of the gods and everything. And it was a Cylon. It was you. And now my latest epiphany-thank you, synthetic Cylon ambrosia-is that what worked once will probably work again."
"Did we ever work?"
"That's not the question. The question is, did anything else ever work better?"
"Before the attacks or after?"
"This is after. That's the point."
"Yeah."
She lays down beside him. She doesn't tuck herself up against his side, but then again, she rarely did before. But her hand is still in his, and he doesn't let go.
~