FANFIC POST: "Projections", one-shot (Battlestar Galactica)
Title: Projections
Author: Sara C. (flowrs4ophelia)
Characters & Pairings: Lee/Kara(/Zak) with a little Sharon/Tyrol, Gaius/Six, Adama, Helo/Sharon
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Some things do not need proof.
Beta reader: ninety6tears ty XD
Notes: Yup. I had to. As if I didn't know this was going to happen as soon as I told myself I was never going to try writing BSG because it was such a scary thought. LOL.
This series of vignettes I've been working on bit by bit for almost a couple months started out being completely Lee/Kara, then turned into a fic showing many different characters during one point in time, and then somehow just ended up being a kind of scattered collection of moments and flashbacks that jump all over the place in the BSG timeline and have a unifying theme. These scenes aren't even arranged completely chronologically because the fic just wouldn't cooperate when I tried to make it as effective that way. Hopefully it still works on some level. LOL.
P r o j e c t i o n s
I.
Of course Kara would be the one to try flying this thing. It's all Lee can think as the whole crew celebrates the commission of Tyrol's stealth fighter masterpiece. Sometimes it almost seems to him like she is so attached to the familiar, easy feeling of being in a Viper that she forgets she herself doesn't have wings and couldn't survive outside of one in space. And it's sometimes easy even for him to forget that she isn't invincible, just a human inside the hard, protective ship.
He doesn't forget that today.
Later after she's made a big fool out of him out there he wonders, fleetingly and only half-consciously, if you can possibly be in love with a person for the same reason that they would be completely unattainable. He and Kara sometimes seem to most easily show that they give a flying frak about each other when they are in the almost secret blackness of space and covered in the protection of helmets and cockpits.
II.
Thinking you're in love is what being in love is. This was what Adama told Tyrol after he lost Sharon. That's all it is.
It was not enough to make him stop wondering about all the questions that would keep haunting him until they were familiar shadows in his everyday life. Why is it so hard to let go of something that might as well have been based on conscious lies? How can he really still love what only ever existed in his own perception of someone?
Perhaps that is all anyone ever has of a person they love. Having nothing to hold onto but memories and a face to touch in a photograph when someone is gone. Never having any real proof of another's loyalty and faithfulness but not needing it.
Even if people pray to empty and nonexistent gods, the belief in them still gives them something to turn to. That's all they have, but for some it's enough.
III.
One of many things almost completely forgotten: a cool and still night in Caprica City years ago, Kara and Lee waiting outside a 24-hour diner they’d just come from while Zak was still inside using the bathroom.
She sighed, reaching back and pulling a band out of her hair and then shaking her head to toss her hair around with her eyes closed. Soft eyelashes resting on smooth skin above strong cheekbones, white arms reaching up to tie her hair more neatly back again as her shadowy, dark eyes gazed down. It all neatly came together in one brief glance he took in her direction when she moved. It was the first time he noticed she was beautiful.
She yawned and met eyes with him, breaking the silence with “I get to ride shotgun this time.”
He met this with a challenging grin, saying back, "Like hell."
When Zak came out, they kept tiredly arguing over it, not quite sounding like either of them even cared terribly much, until he told them to shut up and flip a coin over it or something.
IV.
Gaius Baltar is a rational man. He has never believed anything that is not a testable calculation. It was early in his youth that he decided scripture is nothing but fairy tales and started devouring all the scientific reading material he could get his hands on, studying anything real and concrete. The unspiritual explanation for such beauty in nature as electric storms, how a bomb is made, the chemical reactions in the brain that make one feel like they are in love.
When he first saw her, he never could have imagined she would end up challenging everything he had ever been sure about. He met the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, more like a fantasy than a real person. She made his dreams come true every time they were together, somehow always saying exactly what he wanted to hear, and he didn’t even have to try or pretend in order to impress her and make sure she would keep coming back.
He should have known all along that there was something she meant to take in return. There wasn’t anything quite logical about this prolongued affair he’d been swept into with a woman who still had never told him her name. But perhaps for the first time in his life, he wanted so much to believe something illogical. That she was all real and not just a seductive facade meant to be impossible to resist. And so he believed every word she said.
V.
Zak, Kara, and Lee used to go a cheap theatre in Delphi that showed old movies all night and sneak in a bottle of ambrosia. They always sat in the back row, far away from the few other people there in the theatre. It was always Kara sitting in between the two brothers, her legs curled up resting on the seat, where she could hit either one of them to get their attention.
They would pass the bottle and take drinks every time something happened in the movie. One drink for every explosion or gunshot, one for every use of the f-word, one for any time somebody dies, one for every scene in a car. They always ended up snorting and giggling so loud they would never have gotten away with it at a nicer theatre. For some undecided reason, this was something that none of them ever did with any of their other friends.
One time, just a month after Lee and Kara had first been introduced, Zak left to go get more popcorn and the atmosphere calmed down a little and felt very different with him gone, but not in an awkward way they couldn’t adjust to. Kara and Lee murmured to each other in the dark, talking about the high schools they went to and what they’d thought about doing with their lives before ending up at the academy.
“Ooh!” Kara then said in a much more hyper voice, pointing to the screen where two characters were now undressing and falling onto a bed together. “I see frakking! - Dammit, where is it?”
As she was looking around on the floor, Lee pointed to Zak’s chair, where the ambrosia bottle was sitting partially obscured under his jacket. It only felt a little strange at first for them to do the drink without him there; she took one and passed it to him, seeing his smirk in the dark where the colored light from the screen was accentuating certain features of his face that it seemed she had never noticed before, and then it was easy.
There was another time they went, when this had been a favorite thing for them to do for months, and near the end of the movie the film somehow became aligned wrong so the actors’ heads were all chopped off at the top. This made the three of them all crack up laughing, and then Kara got up and stood on top of her seat, facing the back.
“Hey, dumbass falling asleep up there!” she yelled, her speech wavering a little into a slur. “You need to fix the projector!”
Zak and Lee were both laughing hysterically, even as Lee was the one who reached up and grabbed her arm to quickly pull her back down from the chair before she got them into trouble. Zak, the youngest of the three of them and never the one to think of being careful like that, was the one whose lap she then collapsed sloppily into, now giggling with them.
Another time, when Kara and Zak had been engaged a few weeks, she fell asleep in her seat before the end of the movie. Zak and Lee let her be, talking to each other quietly and not paying any more attention to the rest of the movie than her.
She started leaning to one side as she slept, her head resting against Lee’s arm. They let her be. Then when the credits started rolling, they both leaned in close to her face and yelled her name at the same time to wake her up with a start. She bolted upright before she would have a chance to see where she’d ended up, sighed loudly and said, “Oh my gods, frak you guys.”
VI.
Love does not redeem the scourge that the human race is if they cannot even manage to let it save them. Not when they so often just end up hurting and destroying the ones who they love the most. They are ruled by a senseless, weak pattern of self-destruction.
This was what Sharon had always been told, at least, before she ever had the chance to observe any of them herself and had only the memories of some from another eight who might as well have been seeing them through a human’s eyes. And then she met one. Just one. After only a week of being with Helo, she really wasn’t sure what she knew about humans anymore.
Maybe he was not like the others, she thought. And that much easier to use because of that. “He’s a good man,” she told her sister and brother as they watched him from a rooftop, the words coming out so easily. “He always does the right thing.”
Later, she did what she did without knowing why, only that she couldn’t handle the alternative. She ran with him. Sometimes she was foolish enough to forget that she would never be able to tell him what he didn’t know. But most of the time she was sure of what he would do if he found out. And still she did what she did for him.
Then he figured it out. After struggling for too long to do it while staring at her face he made himself shoot her, and right afterwards his breath came out in weak, pained gasps as if he was the one who was injured. He came forward and looked down at her with the same conflict in his face she had been feeling the whole past few months, and she had never been able to care about him more than she did then.
VII.
At the funeral long ago, Kara and Bill stood together on one side and Lee with his mother stood on the other, with Zak in the casket dividing them. This was how it would be for two years.
A few weeks later, Lee just went completely silent when she told him she was taking an open position on the Galactica.
"He's going through a lot," she said to break the silence, easily reading his face.
"Yeah. Poor guy," he said with sarcasm that made her cringe a little.
She leaned across her couch to look at him a little closer, speaking quietly and carefully. "This isn’t fair. Isn’t it bad enough without him losing his other son, too?"
"That’s the choice he made, Kara," he said bitterly. "We were never his first priority before, and it’s too late now. Don't you get it? That's exactly why this kills him so much. Would he ever have even seen you that much once you were married if this hadn't happened?"
She shrugged carelessly. "I don't know. Maybe not."
"So why does he care so much about knowing you now? It’s not like you can give him some second chance to know his son better. You don't get second chances for these things. And that is why this kills him so much.”
It all just rang distantly in her ears like some kind of idiotic elevator music, meaning nothing to her. "What’s the matter with you?" she asked, still quiet. "Zak never even felt that way about him.”
"No, he didn't!" he said, his voice rising angrily. "This is what I've been trying to tell you! He didn't, and that's why he wanted so much for his father to just acknowledge him for something. That’s why he wanted so badly to get his wings. It was all because of him."
"Is that what you said to him at the funeral?" she asked, starting to look shocked and angry.
He went silent, not answering for a moment as he was taken aback by the way she was looking at him. He looked almost like she was making him feel bad for a second. Almost.
"Lee...I am going to the Galactica.” She stated it again as if he needed to hear it again to start accepting it. It already somehow sounded like it meant something different than it had minutes before.
He wouldn’t look at her face. “I’m sorry you can’t understand this,” he said with a faint trace of bitterness coming back into his voice.
“I do,” she said tiredly. “I get it, okay? But I’m asking you to let it go.”
He shook his head, staring at her with disbelief. “Let it go?”
“Come on, Lee,” she said, almost begging. “Zak wouldn’t want this and you know that. Please. He loved us. He wouldn’t want us to...Don’t make me have to make a choice here.”
The anger in his face matched hers then. “It looks like you’ve already done that.”
She crossed her arms, taking her eyes off him to stare straight forward. There was a murderous moment of silence before she said almost in a whisper, “Get out. I don’t want to frakking look at you anymore.”
And she meant it. She had never thought he looked anything like his brother, but at that time it was all she saw looking at him. She couldn’t get away from the whole nightmare any moment she was in his presence.
Maybe this was why they so easily separated, not even gradually drifting from each other like lots of friends do over time but loudly, painfully ripping apart at the tight seams. They were too used to it always being the three of them after all this time, never just the two of them. It would be too easy to feel his absence that much more deeply if they tried to maintain any kind of connection to each other.
But for a couple weeks after that she still maybe hoped for a while, foolishly and unconsciously, that he would stop being angry and she would hear from him again. To hell with him, she finally thought, and she took down a photo of the three of them she had taped up in her locker to fold one half over, leaving only her and Zak visible, and replaced it that way. Like a funeral, it somehow made it finally feel real. As she turned away after closing the locker, her breath came out sharp like a gasp for a second, a faint sting of something cut away.
VIII.
At the Colonial Day party he found her sitting at the bar all by herself like she was waiting for him, looking like some fairy godmother had taken a wand and done a hell of a number on her. She seemed to emit some kind of bright shine that drew him right there to where she was even as she was barely recognizable enough to catch his attention at first.
Maybe he saw something new then, a completely new shape in the spot she occupied, always there in the corner of his eye. She filled a hole in his life where Zak once was as much as she ever would be able to, but sometimes it was not that simple. Like when he looked at her now and did not see his brother at all but only a woman.
It was the first time he realized she was beautiful.
...Was it?
IX.
Caprica Six does not even know for a long, empty time that Gaius is still alive. But she sees him everywhere. She wonders sometimes if a human would think love is different for Cylons because they have the ability to project someone like this, even after they are lost.
Sharon is familiar with the name on the ID tag they find one of the resistance fighters wearing. "If she gave him this, he meant something to her," she says, looking at it with some wonder and surprise.
D'Anna tosses it away like it is nothing. Caprica picks it up from the ground and looks closely at it, running a finger across the engraved K. THRACE.
"You have it in your hand," he says close to her. "Hard, physical proof of one person's love for another."
It feels cold and hard, and so small. Small in the same way a human is fragile. It is nothing and it is everything.
"If only you felt so deeply about us," he adds.
"I do," she whispers to herself with deep, internal conviction. "I love you, Gaius."
That cynical raising of his eyebrow she is so used to seeing - "Where is the tangible proof?"
Typical of him. He was always so rational and reasonable, she thinks, the now-familiar pain resounding sharply in her all over again.
But it's a fair question, after all. She deceived and used him. She vitally contributed to the genocide of his race. Despite everything she had started to feel, she carried through with the plans that could have caused his death if he had not been unimaginably lucky. If she did all that, how can she love him?
She herself does not even know how she can logically explain it. She just knows she does.
X.
Lee finally learns from Helo what exactly happened to Kara on Caprica. The part she won't mention to him. Samuel T. Anders, he explains. Professional Pyramid player turned resistance fighter. Good guy. If he's even still alive, he adds somberly.
Lee knocks back a drink, something playing on his mind like an unreachable itch. It takes him thirty seconds to say anything.
"The C-Bucs?" he then asks, as if with confusion about the fact that anyone from that team could have survived on a Cylon-occupied planet for a week.
Helo's face tightens as he tries not to laugh. Because that was pretty much what she thought when they found them. And out of everything, that's all he has to say.
But in truth, something nags at him with a faint pang as if he's forgetting about something unspeakably important. It is not the first time, but he recognizes what it is a little more easily this time, and with it what was once something light and uplifting to first become half aware of - "Nice to see you too, Captain" - becomes a heavy, sinking feeling. He cannot keep himself so numb to it anymore. There is a new hole in his life that has nothing to do with Zak, one that has been growing so gradually like a cancer and starting out so small that he never became aware of it until it had already become threatening.
She is a figure always present in the corner of his eye, something he can always reach into a pocket and find right there. Kara has been his friend for a long time. A fiercely loyal and dependable one. She is like family. Daughter his father never had, almost sister-in-law, sister he never had. His friend.
It is not enough anymore. This is the first time he knows...
Or is it?
XI.
For the two years she and Lee were no longer in touch, Kara would see the folded photo of her and Zak in her locker every time she opened it and the visible half of the picture would always only remind her of what was missing, and then she always thought of Lee anyway.
Every day.
Then the day came that made everything before then feel almost like it had never been real. The unimportant parts, at least. She was on the floor buried in the wires of a Viper’s underbelly and trying not to let the knowledge that Lee was dead touch her too deep inside just yet while she still had work to do, and then his soft voice spoke above her.
“Hey.” It was just one word, but somehow it opened up the inside of herself where she wouldn’t let any thoughts of him enter just yet, and then it finally all sank in. Lee. She had thought he was gone. It knocked the breath out of her as she slowly turned her head to see his grinning face. The bastard.
And soon she was on her feet, head dizzy from being pulled up from the floor for a second, and they were staring at each other a little stupidly like neither of them could believe it. An hour before she had been touching his picture but now she didn’t notice that his hand kept holding onto hers for a long moment as their eyes were locked.
Zak was dead. That had happened. A lot of shit had happened that they still couldn’t change. But they were still alive. Both of them, out of just some miserable five-digit number of survivors of the entire human population. And right then that just seemed too good to be true and it was all that mattered anymore.
The end of the world was a second chance for a lot of them.
XII.
After Kendra Shaw’s funeral, Lee and Kara share a quiet drink in his quarters on the Pegasus. Everything between them is a little quiet lately, but it isn’t quite awkward because they both understand why.
“I think my dad is going to give her that commendation,” he suddenly says in a blank, unrevealing tone.
She looks up at him with some surprise, and then looks back away. “She was a good soldier,” she says simply, not needing to explain that it wasn’t as if she ever liked her.
“I know,” he said. “That’s all she was. I keep thinking about it for some reason. I could never be what she was. Because being an officer was all she had. She had nobody.”
Kara is just silent in thought for a while, and then Lee goes on, “That was kind of the way I used to think of my dad, you know. Because the people on his ship were all he had time for. And now...now he told me something. That the only thing that stops him from being just like Cain and being able to make decisions like she did is that he’s a father. Because he would have to face me the next day.”
She smiles slowly, her face faintly lighting up. “I guess he ended up being a family man after all.”
She remembers then. On just her first day on Galactica she caught on quickly to how everyone on the ship liked to call the commander “the old man.” It was like he was the whole crew’s father, greatly respected by everyone. Zeus in the flesh.
Still she felt a little nervous when she was called into his quarters. He looked up lazily from a book as she saluted and stood with her posture rigid, hands held behind her back.
“You requested to see me, Sir,” she said formally.
His brow lifted like he was a little taken aback. “Oh...Yeah. Sit down, won’t you?” he said casually.
“Sir?” she said a little awkwardly.
He smiled a little, in that way of his she was already a little used to which she never would have imagined the father Lee had always hated so much would smile at anyone. “You can call me Bill if you like. Come here and have a drink. I just wanted to welcome you again and wondered how you’ve been doing.”
Kara tried to look relaxed as she slowly took a seat in front of his desk. She didn’t know if she could handle this. If she got too comfortable around Zak’s father, surely he would start being able to see the guilt that must be showing in her eyes as transparently as it felt like it was. She didn’t know if she could stand it if he started approving of her so much.
But maybe he needed this, especially with Lee now refusing to make amends. She wondered if, after having two boys, he had ever wanted a daughter. If he could ever look at her and see that, that was what she was willing to be for him.
XIII.
Kara is as familiar to him as a sister, something that it seems has always been there in his life like a favorite room in the house he grew up in. For years he has known her loud and hysterical laugh, the way her eyes squint when she smiles, how her voice changes and she won't look anyone in the eye when something is wrong with her, every single angle and curve and color of her appearance in any light.
She is always there, always the same, always behaving like he is able to predict she will. Something rock-hard and solid he can always fall onto without the surface budging, hard woman of war bending him into shape when he gets too soft or loses focus, almost more like a reliable weapon than a trustworthy friend.
But he finds this was simply the easier way to see her, a safe perception allowing for no curiosity about what more there is to her. He never fully realized before what all there was under the invulnerability and coldness, or at least never allowed himself to think about it. He never imagined how all of her features he knows well enough to paint a perfect picture of her in his head would feel to the touch, surprisingly soft and warm, how her voice could sound small and defenseless speaking or gasping quietly right by his ear. It is a whole new world opening up for him, their loud laughter echoing through the night on New Caprica and making it finally feel for the first time in so long that anything is possible. Yes, it will be okay. The future ahead of them isn’t so bleak and hopeless after all.
To finally completely know her this way for only one night and then have it all immediately taken back away. It is the first thing he may never be able to forgive her for.
The future is one dark, inevitable downward spiral toward death and happiness anywhere with anyone is a frakking joke and their people are going to rot away on this rock if the Cylons don't show up and finish them off quicker. And if he tells Dee that she makes him happy then it’s not a lie because it’s all only relative anymore and he isn’t even sure what she expects that to mean.
XIV.
After two months of the occupation on New Caprica, white walls have become all Kara knows.
And usually unbreakable silence. The most maddening thing about Leoben when he is here is that no matter what she does, the bastard never gets angry or loses his endless patience, as if he is really willing to keep doing this forever until he's able to break her. And how much longer can this possibly still go on before she loses it?
She occupies herself when she is alone trying to remember and think about something else, anything. She does push-ups four times a day because reminding herself of being locked up in a brig is better than paying attention to the kind of prison she is in now. Lying on the couch and staring up at the ceiling, she mouths the words to the colonial anthem to make sure she can still say them all. She tries to imagine large open spaces for jogging in and the sounds of glasses clashing together in the rec room. Late nights she can recall on the ship, laughing hard until her body was sore and exhausted from it, feeling warm and filled with light like she was glowing green on the inside with ambrosia. The time the old man came to see her in sick bay and after he kissed her forehead she wouldn't let it show that she was close to tears. One night she stayed up late and dozed off in a seat in the ready room watching flight footage on the projector and woke up again just enough to be aware of Helo carrying her to her bunk and putting a blanket over her.
And one time in the rec room she remembers clumsily falling back against somebody while trying to move to let Jammer get through a crowd and somehow knowing before turning and looking that it was Lee she had run into, nobody else. Like she could feel him close, or had just unconsciously been able to identify the distinct sound of his breathing. She remembers this, only thinking about it very much now when she is willing to cling to anything from before to hang onto and keep from falling further into a dark void of mutilation of everything familiar to her.
But it's too hard. Too much. To remember some things...
She can't help but always go back to those memories even though it is like sitting down somewhere there was always a chair before and then falling because it's been taken away. She falls back into her old self that has a place in her life for the Galactica and the name Starbuck as easily and naturally as ever, like nothing has changed. The Starbuck who Lee and all those other officers who have been her family knew. And then she is always a little disoriented a moment to remember.
That morning and the way he looked at her. Kara Anders, just like he said. Right.
No, she has to tell herself before she lets certain thoughts about him grow too much. It's good that he is on the ship instead of here with them. She certainly can’t bring herself to regret that he isn't the one out there having to deal with toasters treating everyone like animals and worry about his missing wife. The very idea is as insane and ridiculous as it is strangely, distantly painful.
If only it wasn't still so natural for her to think of him. If only the distance between them and all the time that had passed made any difference now. She could feel him close and she can feel him far away.
Something else. Anything. She closes her eyes and blocks out the white walls and ceiling, seeing instead darkness. Space. Stars. Completely open and free space. She thinks of the feeling of being there, not running freely now but flying, floating and hovering. The controls under her fingers and stick in her hand in a tight, excited grip. Control...
Kara never thinks twice about how it is these things she takes comfort in remembering and places like a cockpit where she likes to imagine herself being again. At home. Images that allow her to block out the whole last year, everything in her life since they settled on this planet. Places that the face of her husband has never even been a part of. Her memories of him are not as secure and comforting, like a bed one is surprised to wake up in when they first take a moment to remember that they did not go to sleep in their own the night before.
It is too easy to go back to the other part of herself while she is locked up here separated from everything but herself, the one that she should know is lost or at least will never be what it once was. The memories play like films, perfectly captured and preserved in her mind even as they clearly show a long gone time. Beginning of reel. A time Lee was giving a briefing and she made a joke that got everyone in the ready room laughing until he ordered loudly, "Alright, that's enough," but then he couldn't keep a straight face the rest of the time and he and Kara eventually both started cracking up again.
Then that absence of ground again, remembering what she let get snatched out from under her. "Good luck. You're gonna need it."
End of reel.
XV.
The crystal-clear image of Kara dances in front of him tauntingly, motivation to attack but also a heating distraction, until Helo punches him so hard he spins and feels like he's never going to catch solid ground under him but has just vanished into space for a moment.
Then she appears again in front of him, one of the first things he sees when his vision stops moving, and it takes him a moment to realize he is not imagining her again and her face is really there where she is watching on the side of the ring.
"Come on," she whispers, quietly enough that she doesn't have to admit she heard herself say it. Even if she said nothing he would be able to see the command in her eyes. Get up.
Keep fighting.
In two minutes it will just seem like he imagined it.
XVI.
Kara's faith is the only stable thing in her life she always has. It is the only thing she’s always able to keep in order.
Even for Lee, she won't do anything that feels like a betrayal to that. She clings to it as securely as ever, needing it now more than ever as she’s balancing on a precipice not knowing where this is going, telling him she’ll do anything but divorce is the one thing she can’t do.
She never wonders if it’s all because gods, just like ghosts, are so much easier to keep a loyal relationship with than the one who has always been standing right next to her. Damnation or shaming some higher power may not be nearly as terrifying to her as the idea of having to be good enough for him, trying to let him put his faith in her without letting him down once again.
XVII.
For a while Sharon Agathon has had several scars on her body. One where Cottle had to operate on her to deliver their baby. A small, barely noticeable one on her lower back Helo noticed the first time they made love which she got from falling back against something sharp. And a faint one over her breastbone where he shot her. Every time he sees the scars in the dim light of their quarters, he remembers there are so many others out there with bodies identical to her but none of them have these.
It's strange how much harder it is to do the second time he has to shoot her. Maybe because he already knows what it feels like to hurt her.
When she returns from the base star with Hera, she no longer wears any of these scars. But Helo still knows exactly where all of them are underneath the new skin and won’t ever be able to forget. For such a long time they have both suffered a lot for love. When he carries his daughter in his arms at last and kisses her forehead, it has all been worth the price.
XVIII.
The oracle looks into Kara's eyes with tears streaming down her face, channeling the burdensome tragedy of all humanity. When she speaks Kara hears Leoben, too. "I know you."
"Kara Thrace, who hurts everyone she cares about," she says, and Kara remembers at once.
The night with Lee on New Caprica was the happiest she had ever been since the day the Cylons attacked, but she had taken too long to know that. She just woke up with him and wasn't taken aback by the feeling of the other body next to her, not remembering at first who it was. Until she opened her eyes and the first thing she noticed was his scar he had where she had shot him, and then she froze.
...Frak.
XIX.
"You'll see her every day," Tigh tells Tyrol after Cally throws herself out of an airlock. Flickering images assaulting him endlessly, his guilt manifesting everywhere.
"You'll see her again," Adama told him after Sharon died in his arms, leaving blood - real blood - all over his uniform. And her last words weakly telling him she loved him, with such real and heartbreaking conviction.
He did see her again, but not the way he could have expected. Even though he knew it was not his Sharon, that was all he could see. Even though he knew there was nothing rational about the feelings that made him about ready to kill Helo when they suddenly found themselves jealously throwing punches at each other over a machine.
Now it is years later and everything has changed, and after all the time he just tried to forget the happiest memories of his life that were all ruined in this war, now they have started to seem like the only parts of his life that were real. The memories of Sharon are so clear again, as if they all happened recently, the only memories he can be at all sure about now.
Sometimes he thinks he doesn’t understand anything he thought he did about himself and doesn’t know anything anymore except that he really loved that woman. He did. Even if someone else might think, if they knew everything, that he couldn’t have.
XX.
After fading out and leaving everything in the dark she comes blazing back into his life, somehow shining more brilliantly than ever before. The same but completely different, seeming to burn inside with illuminating purpose so fiercely that it can be seen in her face. But Kara easily smiles like her old self again only when he comes to see her in the brig, so naturally it’s as if nothing has changed.
He doesn't care that there are guards watching and maybe gods watching as he turns back around and kisses her. And kisses her. And kisses her. He ends with the last on her forehead and her face held in his hands and it feels like this has happened before, daughter friend sister lover. It does not even matter. She has been many different things to him and finally everything to him and no matter what the circumstances in which this kind of love exists between two people and no matter how imperfect it still is, surely the gods smile on this.
He hasn't agonized over deciding what to believe as much as others have. No matter what logical things he hears from his father or Roslin, he already knows there is only one way for him to go. If Kara is his enemy and he can't trust her then his entire world is pulled inside out and doing the right or necessary thing does not even matter and he doesn't know what they are fighting so desperately for anymore. Perhaps this is his only significant moment of faith in his entire life, the only time he has ever been forced to realize he can only accept that there is some kind of meaning and reason to all of this they go through. He can believe that her presence in front of him now, if never anything else, is a miracle. Because all along he knows it is not rational but his heart says calmly and surely, You are still the thing holding my world together, you are still you, because I am still me.
This is why it is so easy for him to say, "I believe you." And she already knows.
Some things do not need proof.
Fin.
Author: Sara C. (flowrs4ophelia)
Characters & Pairings: Lee/Kara(/Zak) with a little Sharon/Tyrol, Gaius/Six, Adama, Helo/Sharon
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Some things do not need proof.
Beta reader: ninety6tears ty XD
Notes: Yup. I had to. As if I didn't know this was going to happen as soon as I told myself I was never going to try writing BSG because it was such a scary thought. LOL.
This series of vignettes I've been working on bit by bit for almost a couple months started out being completely Lee/Kara, then turned into a fic showing many different characters during one point in time, and then somehow just ended up being a kind of scattered collection of moments and flashbacks that jump all over the place in the BSG timeline and have a unifying theme. These scenes aren't even arranged completely chronologically because the fic just wouldn't cooperate when I tried to make it as effective that way. Hopefully it still works on some level. LOL.
P r o j e c t i o n s
I.
Of course Kara would be the one to try flying this thing. It's all Lee can think as the whole crew celebrates the commission of Tyrol's stealth fighter masterpiece. Sometimes it almost seems to him like she is so attached to the familiar, easy feeling of being in a Viper that she forgets she herself doesn't have wings and couldn't survive outside of one in space. And it's sometimes easy even for him to forget that she isn't invincible, just a human inside the hard, protective ship.
He doesn't forget that today.
Later after she's made a big fool out of him out there he wonders, fleetingly and only half-consciously, if you can possibly be in love with a person for the same reason that they would be completely unattainable. He and Kara sometimes seem to most easily show that they give a flying frak about each other when they are in the almost secret blackness of space and covered in the protection of helmets and cockpits.
II.
Thinking you're in love is what being in love is. This was what Adama told Tyrol after he lost Sharon. That's all it is.
It was not enough to make him stop wondering about all the questions that would keep haunting him until they were familiar shadows in his everyday life. Why is it so hard to let go of something that might as well have been based on conscious lies? How can he really still love what only ever existed in his own perception of someone?
Perhaps that is all anyone ever has of a person they love. Having nothing to hold onto but memories and a face to touch in a photograph when someone is gone. Never having any real proof of another's loyalty and faithfulness but not needing it.
Even if people pray to empty and nonexistent gods, the belief in them still gives them something to turn to. That's all they have, but for some it's enough.
III.
One of many things almost completely forgotten: a cool and still night in Caprica City years ago, Kara and Lee waiting outside a 24-hour diner they’d just come from while Zak was still inside using the bathroom.
She sighed, reaching back and pulling a band out of her hair and then shaking her head to toss her hair around with her eyes closed. Soft eyelashes resting on smooth skin above strong cheekbones, white arms reaching up to tie her hair more neatly back again as her shadowy, dark eyes gazed down. It all neatly came together in one brief glance he took in her direction when she moved. It was the first time he noticed she was beautiful.
She yawned and met eyes with him, breaking the silence with “I get to ride shotgun this time.”
He met this with a challenging grin, saying back, "Like hell."
When Zak came out, they kept tiredly arguing over it, not quite sounding like either of them even cared terribly much, until he told them to shut up and flip a coin over it or something.
IV.
Gaius Baltar is a rational man. He has never believed anything that is not a testable calculation. It was early in his youth that he decided scripture is nothing but fairy tales and started devouring all the scientific reading material he could get his hands on, studying anything real and concrete. The unspiritual explanation for such beauty in nature as electric storms, how a bomb is made, the chemical reactions in the brain that make one feel like they are in love.
When he first saw her, he never could have imagined she would end up challenging everything he had ever been sure about. He met the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, more like a fantasy than a real person. She made his dreams come true every time they were together, somehow always saying exactly what he wanted to hear, and he didn’t even have to try or pretend in order to impress her and make sure she would keep coming back.
He should have known all along that there was something she meant to take in return. There wasn’t anything quite logical about this prolongued affair he’d been swept into with a woman who still had never told him her name. But perhaps for the first time in his life, he wanted so much to believe something illogical. That she was all real and not just a seductive facade meant to be impossible to resist. And so he believed every word she said.
V.
Zak, Kara, and Lee used to go a cheap theatre in Delphi that showed old movies all night and sneak in a bottle of ambrosia. They always sat in the back row, far away from the few other people there in the theatre. It was always Kara sitting in between the two brothers, her legs curled up resting on the seat, where she could hit either one of them to get their attention.
They would pass the bottle and take drinks every time something happened in the movie. One drink for every explosion or gunshot, one for every use of the f-word, one for any time somebody dies, one for every scene in a car. They always ended up snorting and giggling so loud they would never have gotten away with it at a nicer theatre. For some undecided reason, this was something that none of them ever did with any of their other friends.
One time, just a month after Lee and Kara had first been introduced, Zak left to go get more popcorn and the atmosphere calmed down a little and felt very different with him gone, but not in an awkward way they couldn’t adjust to. Kara and Lee murmured to each other in the dark, talking about the high schools they went to and what they’d thought about doing with their lives before ending up at the academy.
“Ooh!” Kara then said in a much more hyper voice, pointing to the screen where two characters were now undressing and falling onto a bed together. “I see frakking! - Dammit, where is it?”
As she was looking around on the floor, Lee pointed to Zak’s chair, where the ambrosia bottle was sitting partially obscured under his jacket. It only felt a little strange at first for them to do the drink without him there; she took one and passed it to him, seeing his smirk in the dark where the colored light from the screen was accentuating certain features of his face that it seemed she had never noticed before, and then it was easy.
There was another time they went, when this had been a favorite thing for them to do for months, and near the end of the movie the film somehow became aligned wrong so the actors’ heads were all chopped off at the top. This made the three of them all crack up laughing, and then Kara got up and stood on top of her seat, facing the back.
“Hey, dumbass falling asleep up there!” she yelled, her speech wavering a little into a slur. “You need to fix the projector!”
Zak and Lee were both laughing hysterically, even as Lee was the one who reached up and grabbed her arm to quickly pull her back down from the chair before she got them into trouble. Zak, the youngest of the three of them and never the one to think of being careful like that, was the one whose lap she then collapsed sloppily into, now giggling with them.
Another time, when Kara and Zak had been engaged a few weeks, she fell asleep in her seat before the end of the movie. Zak and Lee let her be, talking to each other quietly and not paying any more attention to the rest of the movie than her.
She started leaning to one side as she slept, her head resting against Lee’s arm. They let her be. Then when the credits started rolling, they both leaned in close to her face and yelled her name at the same time to wake her up with a start. She bolted upright before she would have a chance to see where she’d ended up, sighed loudly and said, “Oh my gods, frak you guys.”
VI.
Love does not redeem the scourge that the human race is if they cannot even manage to let it save them. Not when they so often just end up hurting and destroying the ones who they love the most. They are ruled by a senseless, weak pattern of self-destruction.
This was what Sharon had always been told, at least, before she ever had the chance to observe any of them herself and had only the memories of some from another eight who might as well have been seeing them through a human’s eyes. And then she met one. Just one. After only a week of being with Helo, she really wasn’t sure what she knew about humans anymore.
Maybe he was not like the others, she thought. And that much easier to use because of that. “He’s a good man,” she told her sister and brother as they watched him from a rooftop, the words coming out so easily. “He always does the right thing.”
Later, she did what she did without knowing why, only that she couldn’t handle the alternative. She ran with him. Sometimes she was foolish enough to forget that she would never be able to tell him what he didn’t know. But most of the time she was sure of what he would do if he found out. And still she did what she did for him.
Then he figured it out. After struggling for too long to do it while staring at her face he made himself shoot her, and right afterwards his breath came out in weak, pained gasps as if he was the one who was injured. He came forward and looked down at her with the same conflict in his face she had been feeling the whole past few months, and she had never been able to care about him more than she did then.
VII.
At the funeral long ago, Kara and Bill stood together on one side and Lee with his mother stood on the other, with Zak in the casket dividing them. This was how it would be for two years.
A few weeks later, Lee just went completely silent when she told him she was taking an open position on the Galactica.
"He's going through a lot," she said to break the silence, easily reading his face.
"Yeah. Poor guy," he said with sarcasm that made her cringe a little.
She leaned across her couch to look at him a little closer, speaking quietly and carefully. "This isn’t fair. Isn’t it bad enough without him losing his other son, too?"
"That’s the choice he made, Kara," he said bitterly. "We were never his first priority before, and it’s too late now. Don't you get it? That's exactly why this kills him so much. Would he ever have even seen you that much once you were married if this hadn't happened?"
She shrugged carelessly. "I don't know. Maybe not."
"So why does he care so much about knowing you now? It’s not like you can give him some second chance to know his son better. You don't get second chances for these things. And that is why this kills him so much.”
It all just rang distantly in her ears like some kind of idiotic elevator music, meaning nothing to her. "What’s the matter with you?" she asked, still quiet. "Zak never even felt that way about him.”
"No, he didn't!" he said, his voice rising angrily. "This is what I've been trying to tell you! He didn't, and that's why he wanted so much for his father to just acknowledge him for something. That’s why he wanted so badly to get his wings. It was all because of him."
"Is that what you said to him at the funeral?" she asked, starting to look shocked and angry.
He went silent, not answering for a moment as he was taken aback by the way she was looking at him. He looked almost like she was making him feel bad for a second. Almost.
"Lee...I am going to the Galactica.” She stated it again as if he needed to hear it again to start accepting it. It already somehow sounded like it meant something different than it had minutes before.
He wouldn’t look at her face. “I’m sorry you can’t understand this,” he said with a faint trace of bitterness coming back into his voice.
“I do,” she said tiredly. “I get it, okay? But I’m asking you to let it go.”
He shook his head, staring at her with disbelief. “Let it go?”
“Come on, Lee,” she said, almost begging. “Zak wouldn’t want this and you know that. Please. He loved us. He wouldn’t want us to...Don’t make me have to make a choice here.”
The anger in his face matched hers then. “It looks like you’ve already done that.”
She crossed her arms, taking her eyes off him to stare straight forward. There was a murderous moment of silence before she said almost in a whisper, “Get out. I don’t want to frakking look at you anymore.”
And she meant it. She had never thought he looked anything like his brother, but at that time it was all she saw looking at him. She couldn’t get away from the whole nightmare any moment she was in his presence.
Maybe this was why they so easily separated, not even gradually drifting from each other like lots of friends do over time but loudly, painfully ripping apart at the tight seams. They were too used to it always being the three of them after all this time, never just the two of them. It would be too easy to feel his absence that much more deeply if they tried to maintain any kind of connection to each other.
But for a couple weeks after that she still maybe hoped for a while, foolishly and unconsciously, that he would stop being angry and she would hear from him again. To hell with him, she finally thought, and she took down a photo of the three of them she had taped up in her locker to fold one half over, leaving only her and Zak visible, and replaced it that way. Like a funeral, it somehow made it finally feel real. As she turned away after closing the locker, her breath came out sharp like a gasp for a second, a faint sting of something cut away.
VIII.
At the Colonial Day party he found her sitting at the bar all by herself like she was waiting for him, looking like some fairy godmother had taken a wand and done a hell of a number on her. She seemed to emit some kind of bright shine that drew him right there to where she was even as she was barely recognizable enough to catch his attention at first.
Maybe he saw something new then, a completely new shape in the spot she occupied, always there in the corner of his eye. She filled a hole in his life where Zak once was as much as she ever would be able to, but sometimes it was not that simple. Like when he looked at her now and did not see his brother at all but only a woman.
It was the first time he realized she was beautiful.
...Was it?
IX.
Caprica Six does not even know for a long, empty time that Gaius is still alive. But she sees him everywhere. She wonders sometimes if a human would think love is different for Cylons because they have the ability to project someone like this, even after they are lost.
Sharon is familiar with the name on the ID tag they find one of the resistance fighters wearing. "If she gave him this, he meant something to her," she says, looking at it with some wonder and surprise.
D'Anna tosses it away like it is nothing. Caprica picks it up from the ground and looks closely at it, running a finger across the engraved K. THRACE.
"You have it in your hand," he says close to her. "Hard, physical proof of one person's love for another."
It feels cold and hard, and so small. Small in the same way a human is fragile. It is nothing and it is everything.
"If only you felt so deeply about us," he adds.
"I do," she whispers to herself with deep, internal conviction. "I love you, Gaius."
That cynical raising of his eyebrow she is so used to seeing - "Where is the tangible proof?"
Typical of him. He was always so rational and reasonable, she thinks, the now-familiar pain resounding sharply in her all over again.
But it's a fair question, after all. She deceived and used him. She vitally contributed to the genocide of his race. Despite everything she had started to feel, she carried through with the plans that could have caused his death if he had not been unimaginably lucky. If she did all that, how can she love him?
She herself does not even know how she can logically explain it. She just knows she does.
X.
Lee finally learns from Helo what exactly happened to Kara on Caprica. The part she won't mention to him. Samuel T. Anders, he explains. Professional Pyramid player turned resistance fighter. Good guy. If he's even still alive, he adds somberly.
Lee knocks back a drink, something playing on his mind like an unreachable itch. It takes him thirty seconds to say anything.
"The C-Bucs?" he then asks, as if with confusion about the fact that anyone from that team could have survived on a Cylon-occupied planet for a week.
Helo's face tightens as he tries not to laugh. Because that was pretty much what she thought when they found them. And out of everything, that's all he has to say.
But in truth, something nags at him with a faint pang as if he's forgetting about something unspeakably important. It is not the first time, but he recognizes what it is a little more easily this time, and with it what was once something light and uplifting to first become half aware of - "Nice to see you too, Captain" - becomes a heavy, sinking feeling. He cannot keep himself so numb to it anymore. There is a new hole in his life that has nothing to do with Zak, one that has been growing so gradually like a cancer and starting out so small that he never became aware of it until it had already become threatening.
She is a figure always present in the corner of his eye, something he can always reach into a pocket and find right there. Kara has been his friend for a long time. A fiercely loyal and dependable one. She is like family. Daughter his father never had, almost sister-in-law, sister he never had. His friend.
It is not enough anymore. This is the first time he knows...
Or is it?
XI.
For the two years she and Lee were no longer in touch, Kara would see the folded photo of her and Zak in her locker every time she opened it and the visible half of the picture would always only remind her of what was missing, and then she always thought of Lee anyway.
Every day.
Then the day came that made everything before then feel almost like it had never been real. The unimportant parts, at least. She was on the floor buried in the wires of a Viper’s underbelly and trying not to let the knowledge that Lee was dead touch her too deep inside just yet while she still had work to do, and then his soft voice spoke above her.
“Hey.” It was just one word, but somehow it opened up the inside of herself where she wouldn’t let any thoughts of him enter just yet, and then it finally all sank in. Lee. She had thought he was gone. It knocked the breath out of her as she slowly turned her head to see his grinning face. The bastard.
And soon she was on her feet, head dizzy from being pulled up from the floor for a second, and they were staring at each other a little stupidly like neither of them could believe it. An hour before she had been touching his picture but now she didn’t notice that his hand kept holding onto hers for a long moment as their eyes were locked.
Zak was dead. That had happened. A lot of shit had happened that they still couldn’t change. But they were still alive. Both of them, out of just some miserable five-digit number of survivors of the entire human population. And right then that just seemed too good to be true and it was all that mattered anymore.
The end of the world was a second chance for a lot of them.
XII.
After Kendra Shaw’s funeral, Lee and Kara share a quiet drink in his quarters on the Pegasus. Everything between them is a little quiet lately, but it isn’t quite awkward because they both understand why.
“I think my dad is going to give her that commendation,” he suddenly says in a blank, unrevealing tone.
She looks up at him with some surprise, and then looks back away. “She was a good soldier,” she says simply, not needing to explain that it wasn’t as if she ever liked her.
“I know,” he said. “That’s all she was. I keep thinking about it for some reason. I could never be what she was. Because being an officer was all she had. She had nobody.”
Kara is just silent in thought for a while, and then Lee goes on, “That was kind of the way I used to think of my dad, you know. Because the people on his ship were all he had time for. And now...now he told me something. That the only thing that stops him from being just like Cain and being able to make decisions like she did is that he’s a father. Because he would have to face me the next day.”
She smiles slowly, her face faintly lighting up. “I guess he ended up being a family man after all.”
She remembers then. On just her first day on Galactica she caught on quickly to how everyone on the ship liked to call the commander “the old man.” It was like he was the whole crew’s father, greatly respected by everyone. Zeus in the flesh.
Still she felt a little nervous when she was called into his quarters. He looked up lazily from a book as she saluted and stood with her posture rigid, hands held behind her back.
“You requested to see me, Sir,” she said formally.
His brow lifted like he was a little taken aback. “Oh...Yeah. Sit down, won’t you?” he said casually.
“Sir?” she said a little awkwardly.
He smiled a little, in that way of his she was already a little used to which she never would have imagined the father Lee had always hated so much would smile at anyone. “You can call me Bill if you like. Come here and have a drink. I just wanted to welcome you again and wondered how you’ve been doing.”
Kara tried to look relaxed as she slowly took a seat in front of his desk. She didn’t know if she could handle this. If she got too comfortable around Zak’s father, surely he would start being able to see the guilt that must be showing in her eyes as transparently as it felt like it was. She didn’t know if she could stand it if he started approving of her so much.
But maybe he needed this, especially with Lee now refusing to make amends. She wondered if, after having two boys, he had ever wanted a daughter. If he could ever look at her and see that, that was what she was willing to be for him.
XIII.
Kara is as familiar to him as a sister, something that it seems has always been there in his life like a favorite room in the house he grew up in. For years he has known her loud and hysterical laugh, the way her eyes squint when she smiles, how her voice changes and she won't look anyone in the eye when something is wrong with her, every single angle and curve and color of her appearance in any light.
She is always there, always the same, always behaving like he is able to predict she will. Something rock-hard and solid he can always fall onto without the surface budging, hard woman of war bending him into shape when he gets too soft or loses focus, almost more like a reliable weapon than a trustworthy friend.
But he finds this was simply the easier way to see her, a safe perception allowing for no curiosity about what more there is to her. He never fully realized before what all there was under the invulnerability and coldness, or at least never allowed himself to think about it. He never imagined how all of her features he knows well enough to paint a perfect picture of her in his head would feel to the touch, surprisingly soft and warm, how her voice could sound small and defenseless speaking or gasping quietly right by his ear. It is a whole new world opening up for him, their loud laughter echoing through the night on New Caprica and making it finally feel for the first time in so long that anything is possible. Yes, it will be okay. The future ahead of them isn’t so bleak and hopeless after all.
To finally completely know her this way for only one night and then have it all immediately taken back away. It is the first thing he may never be able to forgive her for.
The future is one dark, inevitable downward spiral toward death and happiness anywhere with anyone is a frakking joke and their people are going to rot away on this rock if the Cylons don't show up and finish them off quicker. And if he tells Dee that she makes him happy then it’s not a lie because it’s all only relative anymore and he isn’t even sure what she expects that to mean.
XIV.
After two months of the occupation on New Caprica, white walls have become all Kara knows.
And usually unbreakable silence. The most maddening thing about Leoben when he is here is that no matter what she does, the bastard never gets angry or loses his endless patience, as if he is really willing to keep doing this forever until he's able to break her. And how much longer can this possibly still go on before she loses it?
She occupies herself when she is alone trying to remember and think about something else, anything. She does push-ups four times a day because reminding herself of being locked up in a brig is better than paying attention to the kind of prison she is in now. Lying on the couch and staring up at the ceiling, she mouths the words to the colonial anthem to make sure she can still say them all. She tries to imagine large open spaces for jogging in and the sounds of glasses clashing together in the rec room. Late nights she can recall on the ship, laughing hard until her body was sore and exhausted from it, feeling warm and filled with light like she was glowing green on the inside with ambrosia. The time the old man came to see her in sick bay and after he kissed her forehead she wouldn't let it show that she was close to tears. One night she stayed up late and dozed off in a seat in the ready room watching flight footage on the projector and woke up again just enough to be aware of Helo carrying her to her bunk and putting a blanket over her.
And one time in the rec room she remembers clumsily falling back against somebody while trying to move to let Jammer get through a crowd and somehow knowing before turning and looking that it was Lee she had run into, nobody else. Like she could feel him close, or had just unconsciously been able to identify the distinct sound of his breathing. She remembers this, only thinking about it very much now when she is willing to cling to anything from before to hang onto and keep from falling further into a dark void of mutilation of everything familiar to her.
But it's too hard. Too much. To remember some things...
She can't help but always go back to those memories even though it is like sitting down somewhere there was always a chair before and then falling because it's been taken away. She falls back into her old self that has a place in her life for the Galactica and the name Starbuck as easily and naturally as ever, like nothing has changed. The Starbuck who Lee and all those other officers who have been her family knew. And then she is always a little disoriented a moment to remember.
That morning and the way he looked at her. Kara Anders, just like he said. Right.
No, she has to tell herself before she lets certain thoughts about him grow too much. It's good that he is on the ship instead of here with them. She certainly can’t bring herself to regret that he isn't the one out there having to deal with toasters treating everyone like animals and worry about his missing wife. The very idea is as insane and ridiculous as it is strangely, distantly painful.
If only it wasn't still so natural for her to think of him. If only the distance between them and all the time that had passed made any difference now. She could feel him close and she can feel him far away.
Something else. Anything. She closes her eyes and blocks out the white walls and ceiling, seeing instead darkness. Space. Stars. Completely open and free space. She thinks of the feeling of being there, not running freely now but flying, floating and hovering. The controls under her fingers and stick in her hand in a tight, excited grip. Control...
Kara never thinks twice about how it is these things she takes comfort in remembering and places like a cockpit where she likes to imagine herself being again. At home. Images that allow her to block out the whole last year, everything in her life since they settled on this planet. Places that the face of her husband has never even been a part of. Her memories of him are not as secure and comforting, like a bed one is surprised to wake up in when they first take a moment to remember that they did not go to sleep in their own the night before.
It is too easy to go back to the other part of herself while she is locked up here separated from everything but herself, the one that she should know is lost or at least will never be what it once was. The memories play like films, perfectly captured and preserved in her mind even as they clearly show a long gone time. Beginning of reel. A time Lee was giving a briefing and she made a joke that got everyone in the ready room laughing until he ordered loudly, "Alright, that's enough," but then he couldn't keep a straight face the rest of the time and he and Kara eventually both started cracking up again.
Then that absence of ground again, remembering what she let get snatched out from under her. "Good luck. You're gonna need it."
End of reel.
XV.
The crystal-clear image of Kara dances in front of him tauntingly, motivation to attack but also a heating distraction, until Helo punches him so hard he spins and feels like he's never going to catch solid ground under him but has just vanished into space for a moment.
Then she appears again in front of him, one of the first things he sees when his vision stops moving, and it takes him a moment to realize he is not imagining her again and her face is really there where she is watching on the side of the ring.
"Come on," she whispers, quietly enough that she doesn't have to admit she heard herself say it. Even if she said nothing he would be able to see the command in her eyes. Get up.
Keep fighting.
In two minutes it will just seem like he imagined it.
XVI.
Kara's faith is the only stable thing in her life she always has. It is the only thing she’s always able to keep in order.
Even for Lee, she won't do anything that feels like a betrayal to that. She clings to it as securely as ever, needing it now more than ever as she’s balancing on a precipice not knowing where this is going, telling him she’ll do anything but divorce is the one thing she can’t do.
She never wonders if it’s all because gods, just like ghosts, are so much easier to keep a loyal relationship with than the one who has always been standing right next to her. Damnation or shaming some higher power may not be nearly as terrifying to her as the idea of having to be good enough for him, trying to let him put his faith in her without letting him down once again.
XVII.
For a while Sharon Agathon has had several scars on her body. One where Cottle had to operate on her to deliver their baby. A small, barely noticeable one on her lower back Helo noticed the first time they made love which she got from falling back against something sharp. And a faint one over her breastbone where he shot her. Every time he sees the scars in the dim light of their quarters, he remembers there are so many others out there with bodies identical to her but none of them have these.
It's strange how much harder it is to do the second time he has to shoot her. Maybe because he already knows what it feels like to hurt her.
When she returns from the base star with Hera, she no longer wears any of these scars. But Helo still knows exactly where all of them are underneath the new skin and won’t ever be able to forget. For such a long time they have both suffered a lot for love. When he carries his daughter in his arms at last and kisses her forehead, it has all been worth the price.
XVIII.
The oracle looks into Kara's eyes with tears streaming down her face, channeling the burdensome tragedy of all humanity. When she speaks Kara hears Leoben, too. "I know you."
"Kara Thrace, who hurts everyone she cares about," she says, and Kara remembers at once.
The night with Lee on New Caprica was the happiest she had ever been since the day the Cylons attacked, but she had taken too long to know that. She just woke up with him and wasn't taken aback by the feeling of the other body next to her, not remembering at first who it was. Until she opened her eyes and the first thing she noticed was his scar he had where she had shot him, and then she froze.
...Frak.
XIX.
"You'll see her every day," Tigh tells Tyrol after Cally throws herself out of an airlock. Flickering images assaulting him endlessly, his guilt manifesting everywhere.
"You'll see her again," Adama told him after Sharon died in his arms, leaving blood - real blood - all over his uniform. And her last words weakly telling him she loved him, with such real and heartbreaking conviction.
He did see her again, but not the way he could have expected. Even though he knew it was not his Sharon, that was all he could see. Even though he knew there was nothing rational about the feelings that made him about ready to kill Helo when they suddenly found themselves jealously throwing punches at each other over a machine.
Now it is years later and everything has changed, and after all the time he just tried to forget the happiest memories of his life that were all ruined in this war, now they have started to seem like the only parts of his life that were real. The memories of Sharon are so clear again, as if they all happened recently, the only memories he can be at all sure about now.
Sometimes he thinks he doesn’t understand anything he thought he did about himself and doesn’t know anything anymore except that he really loved that woman. He did. Even if someone else might think, if they knew everything, that he couldn’t have.
XX.
After fading out and leaving everything in the dark she comes blazing back into his life, somehow shining more brilliantly than ever before. The same but completely different, seeming to burn inside with illuminating purpose so fiercely that it can be seen in her face. But Kara easily smiles like her old self again only when he comes to see her in the brig, so naturally it’s as if nothing has changed.
He doesn't care that there are guards watching and maybe gods watching as he turns back around and kisses her. And kisses her. And kisses her. He ends with the last on her forehead and her face held in his hands and it feels like this has happened before, daughter friend sister lover. It does not even matter. She has been many different things to him and finally everything to him and no matter what the circumstances in which this kind of love exists between two people and no matter how imperfect it still is, surely the gods smile on this.
He hasn't agonized over deciding what to believe as much as others have. No matter what logical things he hears from his father or Roslin, he already knows there is only one way for him to go. If Kara is his enemy and he can't trust her then his entire world is pulled inside out and doing the right or necessary thing does not even matter and he doesn't know what they are fighting so desperately for anymore. Perhaps this is his only significant moment of faith in his entire life, the only time he has ever been forced to realize he can only accept that there is some kind of meaning and reason to all of this they go through. He can believe that her presence in front of him now, if never anything else, is a miracle. Because all along he knows it is not rational but his heart says calmly and surely, You are still the thing holding my world together, you are still you, because I am still me.
This is why it is so easy for him to say, "I believe you." And she already knows.
Some things do not need proof.
Fin.