Eos (PG-13)
Title: Eos
Author:
lurker2209
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Through S3 and Razor.
Summary: “Sometimes you have to leave people behind…”
Word count: 2000
Written for:
marenfic
Prompt: Season 4 spec, Kara and Lee in hiding in the fleet in close quarters because Roslin and Adama think she's a cylon. Maybe she is, maybe she's not- up to you. No alterna-ship bashing.
Beta’d by:
artemis_90 Thanks so much!
Disclaimer: I don’t own them!
“Each of us plays a role; each time a different role. Maybe the last time I was the interrogator and you were the prisoner.” -Leoben
“Kara Thrace is a Cylon.”
This wasn’t happening. This was not supposed to happen. What the frack were the Gods thinking, sending me back across the Styx if I was going to be tortured and thrown out of an airlock? I wasn’t a Cylon. I knew that with every fiber of my being. I didn’t know how I knew, but I did, just as clearly as I knew the path to Earth.
My certainty didn’t mean a thing to Cottle’s tests. I looked from the President to the Old Man, who refused to meet my eyes.
My conviction wasn’t enough for them either.
The Admiral walked out of the room. I knew I wouldn’t see him again. The President would come watch once they’ve decided they’d dragged every bit of useful information from me. She might have to be carried in, but she would come.
The marines in the cell were people I’d never known. Beside them was a bucket of water. Of course.
For the first few days I was Starbuck. I fought, and I refused to scream. I cursed and fired whatever witty insults I could think of. I landed a few decent punches and one good kick to a marine who foolishly left himself open right where it hurts.
Then I realized it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter if I was strong; it didn’t matter if they never broke me. What mattered, what I was here for, was getting the Fleet to Earth. Would the Gods give me a another chance if the fleet refused to believe me now? Was there some way I could explain it, so that when the Old Man or Roslin or someone came to their senses, they’d be able to follow the directions I’d left? The torture didn’t matter. It was almost as if it were happening to someone else. I just had to hold on until I found a way to get the Fleet to Earth.
“Every man has to decide for themselves which side they are on.” -Commander Adama
They left me alone in my cell, a brief reprieve from questions and choking, sometime on the fifth day, or maybe the sixth. I was half-unconscious and half somewhere else inside my head, as I slowly figured out that Lee was actually here, talking to me, for the first time since I’d been dragged from the hangar deck. We were already halfway off the ship.
“Wait, you can’t…. I have to…” I protested, not finding the words as he pushed me into a crate and covered me with scrapped viper parts.
“For Gods’ sakes, Kara, shut up!”
I obeyed, but only because I desperately needed to pass out.
When Lee finally rescued me from the dark, heavy prison of a crate, we were on some unfamiliar ship.
“This isn’t Galactica,” I said.
“No, Galactica’s not safe for you,” Lee said, as if he was speaking to a child. Some things didn’t change.
“But I have to be on Galactica. I have to take the Fleet to Earth,” I was panicking.
“How are you going to do that, Kara, if you’re dead?” Lee said, his hands gripping my upper arms. He was close, closer to me than anyone had been since I’d died. The hospital staff and the marines had been aloof, touching me only when necessary.
“Do you think I’m a Cylon?”
He paused, my heart sunk. If Lee didn’t believe me, it was hopeless.
“Does it matter?” he finally said.
“Are you crazy? Of course it matters. I’m not a cylon. I’m not a traitor. I would never betray the Fleet!”
“I know,” he was bafflingly calm, and suddenly my justified outburst seemed silly. “That’s why it doesn’t matter.” He pulled me into my arms, kissed my forehead. For a moment I wanted to scream at him in frustration, but then I gave in and rested my head on his shoulder. Maybe it didn’t matter.
“Life here began out there.” -The Sacred Scrolls
The Ouranos was a tiny deep space scientific research vessel long since abandoned by all but two if its inhabitants. Only the dedicated Dr. Telamon clung to the idea that solving the mysteries of cosmology still mattered. His teen-aged daughter Calypso kept the ship flying.
“So, where is Earth, dear?” He said that afternoon as I ate my first full meal of algae in days. He seemed genuinely curious, as if he was asking about some perfectly ordinary suburb of Delphi.
“I can’t just point it out on a map,” I reached for one of the many charts that cluttered this tiny space that served as galley, office, and rec room. “But I know how to get there. We need to jump to this system, with the three gas giants,” I found it, pointing for Telamon. It was only two jumps from our present position. “And then jump to the exact center of this triangle formed by three stars.” They were on a larger, less detailed map. “And then we pass a bluish nebula shaped like a leaf and go around a cluster of these… weird stars.” I was already off the charts.
“Weird stars?” He still seemed curious, not laughing me out of the room, so I tried to explain.
“Well, it’s almost like a virus. One of them was strange somehow, and it …infected the rest.”
“A quark star.” He interrupted. “ And to think they refused my tenure on the grounds of my odd little theory-that a neutron star could decay into mere quarks.”
“So it makes sense?” I had no idea what he was saying. At the Academy I’d skipped most of Astrophysics 384,and borrowed Helo’s notes to cram for the final.
“More that than, dear, it will prove me right. Fools in the Department never saw the brilliance. Maybe these long range spectroscopy data…” He was beyond me, lost in a world of numbers and wounded pride. I sat there, staring at the charts, reciting the list of landmarks and directions I’d known from the moment I’d woken in that viper. I was so used to it all not making sense, I almost felt a little betrayed.
“You know the President says that we're saving humanity for a bright, shiny future. On Earth.” -Starbuck
I wandered into the tiny cabin I shared with Lee, more of a little closet with two tiny bunks than a room. Didn’t expect to see the day when pilots’ quarters on Galactica seemed spacious.
Lee was lying on his back on the bunk, reading some massive ancient book. I plucked it from his surprised fingers and read the title.
“Habeas Corpus. Isn’t it a little bit late for that, Apollo?”
“Give me that.” He reached for the book. I held it away from him.
“What are you doing with law books anyways, Apollo?”
“It’s Lee.”
“What?” I didn’t get it.
“It’s not Apollo. I quit, resigned, gave it all up. It’s just Lee.”
“Wow. I guess I missed another few catastrophes.” Call me crazy, but I guess I just kinda expected that nothing had changed. Actually, I wasn’t even sure how long I’d been gone.
“I helped get Baltar acquitted.” Lee admitted.
“Because you believed he was innocent?” I asked.
“Because he wasn’t the only one who was guilty. He was just the scapegoat.”
That was Lee for you. There was always a scapegoat. Someone who got punched around and beat up for everyone else’s troubles. Leave it to Lee snatch the people’s sacrifice off the altar. As a child, he’d once told me, he could never see the justice of spilling some poor bull’s blood to please Zeus. He insisted on Zarek’s elections, he put a gun to Tigh’s head, he got Baltar acquitted, and now he’d rescued me from Galactica. But the Gods were unyielding, they made him pay for that offense every time.
“Telamon thinks I’m on to something with these weird stars. Got a bunch of telescopes and things pointing at them. We could take that to the President. Prove me right about Earth.” Was it too late to go back, to save him?
Lee looked up at me, took the book from my hands and set it on a shelf. “Kara, the President signed an order for your execution just an hour before I got you out of there.”
“She won’t do it if she thinks I can find Earth. This scientist believes me.”
“Kara, I believe you. I believed you from the moment I saw you in that viper, and I’m not going to let you waltz back there and get yourself killed. I won’t let that happen. Not again.”
He leaned back on the bunk, closed his eyes. “If you have to leave, then go.”
I watched him for a minute, standing still, to see if he would open his eyes. He didn’t. Once, as a child, my mother had taken me to see the rites of Neptune in the massive temple that dominated the ocean city of Gliese on Aquaria. No matter what the priest did, the fires wouldn’t light. Skeptics said it was just too windy, but my mother went home and put in a transfer to the Aerelon desert outpost on Teegarden. Sometimes, she told me, the Gods rejected the sacrifice.
I sat on the bed, then I straddled him, leaning over.
“I don’t have to leave.”
“You sure?” His hands came to my hips, holding me loosely, but his eyes stayed shut.
“Yes.”
“You’re not leaving?”
“No.” I whispered before my lips met his. Not this time. Not ever again.
“… there’ll be other times, times when we have to take lives to save lives. Maybe even leave people behind so the rest of us can make it.” -Starbuck
The alarms woke me from a deep sleep, scrambling to disentangle myself from Lee and find clothes. We pushed into the tiny cockpit.
“Cylons.” Calypso said. “Fleet’s preparing to jump.”
“I just need five more minutes with the mass spectrometer, dear,” Dr. Telamon’s voice sounded from the intercom.
“We don’t have five minutes, Daddy. Stow the instruments before we get left behind.”
Lee and I exchanged a look, both feeling useless and out of place. We were meant to be flying now, not standing around waiting for others to spin up the FTL.
“What are the coordinates?” I asked. Calypso handed me a copy.
“Are they headed in the right direction?” Lee asked.
“No, further and further away.” I crumpled the paper in frustration.
“What if you told us how to jump to Earth?” the girl asked.
“You can’t make it to Earth in one jump,” I said.
“I know, but we’re equipped at least six months in deep space. We could find Daddy’s stars, and then Earth,” her face lit up with the excitement.
“I couldn’t. I couldn’t leave the Fleet.”
“We could come back. They’d have to believe all of us!”
“Or we could leave those data collection satellites in orbit and encode directions to follow,” Telamon said from the lab. “We’ve got plenty of those in the hold.” I couldn’t believe he was buying into this.
I looked at Lee. It was a crazy idea. Leave the whole fleet to take this tiny ship to Earth. Was this what the Gods sent me back for?
“How long do you think we can hide here, Kara? A few weeks, a few months? Not long enough. They’re not ready. Someday, they will be. They’ll find the beacons and follow us, or we’ll find them.”
So even Lee was going along with it. Maybe he was right. Maybe this was all I could do.
“Earth must be beautiful, Kara.”
“It is.”
“Show us.”
I sat down, imputed the coordinates for the first jump. I looked from the girl, Calypso, to the speaker where her father announced that all the instruments were stowed for the jump, and then finally to Lee.
I pulled the lever.