BSG Fic: Come With Me (Kara/Laura, Laura/Maya, PG-13)
Title: Come With Me
Author: Maren
Pairing: Kara/Laura, with mentions of Laura/Maya
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Kara doesn't know what's real anymore. S3 Promo Spoilers but no spoilers after that-- this is all made up.
Author Notes: Title stolen from Pablo Neruda's Come With Me, I Said, And No One Knew which you can find at the end of the fic. Also, this is my first BSG fic and I don't have a BSG beta so I'd be happy to hear if I made any glaring mistakes.
***************
Come With Me
She’s in the prison built by Leoben and her own mind for six months. And yeah, sure, she’s military and she’s been trained on prisoner of war scenarios and torture and all of that other bullshit but no one trained her how to withstand watching your child live and laugh and frakking grow for six months and then leaving her behind when they finally come to rescue you.
*
She thinks of Galactica and Pegasus as them now, not us, and she knows that was the point and it nearly kills her.
*
Sam doesn’t get it. He’s sorry, of that much she can be sure because even if he hasn’t said it a hundred more times than she can stand to hear it, she can see it in every touch and glance. At least those are coming between longer intervals now; if she could be bothered to give a godsdamn she’d guess he got tired of her pushing him away with silence and fists but. . .
Well, she can’t be bothered.
*
It takes her nearly a month after her rescue to get approved for flight status, and then it’s only on Raptors. Too much times has passed, too many essential muscles have weakened, and even if she hadn’t been forced to play Susie-homemaker (during her capture, and maybe a little before) for so long she would have been hard-pressed to keep herself Viper ready as a civilian.
She lives in the gym between CAPs, ignores Helo’s attempts to strike up their old friendship, only opens her mouth to agree to hand-to-hand and to curse when she loses more than she should. She’s been at it for weeks when Kat challenges her to a bout in the ring and even though her muscles are screaming at her and she knows it’s a bad idea, she nods and straps on her gloves.
It’s an ugly fight, nothing gets pulled, and though she’s looking more like the old Starbuck than she has since she got back, Kat still has the advantage and she uses it.
A week later, the Admiral offers her the CAG position but she turns it down. He lets her.
*
Adama doesn’t let her out the next time, though, when he assigns her to the president. She clenches her jaw against the words that threaten to break free and send her straight to hack, and his lips quirk at the sight.
She has nothing against President Roslin. It’s just that it will be less time in the gym, less time flying, and those are the only two things keeping her breathing, keeping her mind off golden curls and a giggle too sweet to ever have come from her. That the assignment is also another reminder that she isn’t really essential to the fleet anymore, not a hotshot pilot or an officer with indispensable strategic skills, makes her skin itch that much more. She’s just a glorified Marine now.
Sometime in the past two years she’s stopped being Starbuck, in all the ways that matter.
*
“Madame President.” Her body is stiff and formal, her salute crisp and for that moment she’s the poster child of military precision.
“Captain Thrace, so nice to see you again.” The tone of Roslin’s voice is warm, welcoming, but her smile is cool and her eyes are searching.
She gets briefed on the day’s itinerary, tries to acclimate to the busy hum of activity that surrounds the president at all times. Sometimes Roslin asks her opinion on some matter facing the fleet, but mostly she finds herself standing to the side, watching the door and watching the aides and making damn sure there’s no threat to the woman who has somehow once again become humanity’s last best chance at survival.
The itch under her skin turns into a slow crawl. She bites back a hysterical laugh, because frak this is going to drive her completely insane and she thinks she’s probably the only one who would find that funny.
*
They settle into a routine. Meetings and press conferences, work sessions and visiting diplomats. The only time she gets to fly is when they make short trips to the other ships in the fleet.
The visits to Pegasus are bad, Dee’s pity-laced glances only slightly more tolerable than Lee not looking at her at all. Sometimes she wonders if he even sees her, if she’s invisible to him not because of what happened between them before but because Starbuck never really came back at all.
The visits to Galactica are the worst. There, she’s not invisible at all even when she wishes she could be. The looks on the old battlestar tend more towards confusion than pity, and she wants to scream, hit something, the one time they’re on board when the Cylons show up and the old man doesn’t even glance at her.
*
At night she sleeps in the president’s personal quarters, on a cot just outside her bedroom door, always on guard in case one of the unidentified Cylon models is on board. Now that she isn’t working her body to the point of collapse every day it’s harder to sleep so most nights she spends hours doing push-ups or just staring at the wall.
It’s an old, childhood habit. Pick a spot, don’t look away, count your breaths, and it doesn’t matter what’s going on inside or out.
She spent two days staring at the juncture of a spidery crack in her apartment wall after Zak died. Two minutes at a gouge in the wood above her bunk when the worlds ended (because that’s all the time she had). She isn’t sure how long she concentrated on the black smudge at the baseboard in her prison, trying to ignore the crying child that Leoben said was hers.
She thinks things would have been better if she’d never given up and looked away.
*
The sound of Roslin’s low moan wakes her up, and she’s in the president’s sleeping quarters scanning the shadowed interior in seconds.
There’s no one but the two of them and she’s just about to slip back out when Roslin moans again. It’s a name, and she thinks it belonged to that baby that Roslin seemed to have developed an affinity for back on New Caprica. The knowledge is like a prick of ice in her chest and she stills, hand on the knob.
Roslin gasps and her eyes fly open. In the dim blue cast by the night lights running around the floorboards of the room she can see the heave of the president’s chest under the thin fabric of her nightgown and it takes her a moment to realize that Roslin is looking at her. Their eyes meet, hold, and she isn’t sure how much time passes this way.
Eventually Roslin nods, a dismissal, and she backs out of the room, closing the door quietly behind her.
*
The next time it happens she hasn’t even gotten to sleep yet. She hesitates at the door, then lets herself in.
The president is sitting up in bed, drinking from a glass of water. She places it back on the nightstand and turns to the door, to the woman standing there.
She clears her throat. “Madame President. Just checking to make sure everything is okay, sir.” It’s her job, but she still feels uncomfortable, like she’s intruding.
Roslin raises an eyebrow. “Kara, it’s the middle of the night and you’re standing in my bedroom I think we can dispense with formalities. Please, call me Laura.”
She nods, then hesitates, unsure what she should do. Ros. . . Laura is still looking at her, expectantly, so instead of turning around and leaving she takes a step forward.
“Do you need me to get you anything?”
Laura cocks her head and a slight smile plays at the corners of her mouth. She pats the bed covers. “Come sit with me and keep me company for a bit.”
The distance from the door to the bed isn’t far but she walks it slowly, reluctantly. When she reaches the edge she glances at the covers and hesitates, glances up at Laura who meets her gaze with a bigger smile. Laura tips her head and Kara sighs, sits down at the end of the bed, on the very edge, and waits.
They sit in silence for what seems like an eternity, her nerves jangling because she knows what this is, has known from the moment that Adama told her she was being transferred to Colonial One that the president was going to try to make her talk about Leoben and. . . and. . .
Her spine stiffens. She won’t. She told them everything there was to tell during the initial debrief and if there’s anything else, well, it isn’t their frakking business.
“Do you ever have nightmares, Kara?”
The quiet question surprises her; it isn’t the one that she was expecting.
“Not in a long time,” she answers, and it’s true. Her demons haunt her when she’s awake.
Laura hmms and leans back against the headboard. Her eyes get a very far-away look and she crosses her arms just under her breasts. “I didn’t used to. Now it’s almost every night since the occupation.”
She isn’t sure how to respond so she just looks down at her hands, notices that she’s got them clenched so tightly together that her fingers are turning white and deliberately relaxes them. She takes a deep breath and looks up to find the pres. . . Laura looking into the space over Kara’s shoulder.
“Is Hera the baby from the school? The daughter of that other teacher. . .” She trails off, partly because she can’t remember the woman’s name but also because she can’t quite believe she asked.
“Maya,” Laura fills in, and there’s this sound in her voice that Kara recognizes well.
Grief.
She wants to ask if they made it back to the fleet but the answer seems obvious. She inches her fingers across the bed, grasps Laura’s hand with her own and squeezes instead.
*
This, too, becomes a routine. Meetings and diplomatic envoys and Madame President during the day. Nightmares and companionable silences and Laura during the night.
*
One night it’s a different name, the teacher instead of the baby, and Laura is crying when Kara lets herself into the bedroom.
She doesn’t hesitate, goes straight to the bed and sits down and gathers Laura into her arms. They stay like that until Laura’s sobs slow, then stop, and it’s not until she feels Laura turn her head off her shoulder and into the hair brushing her neck that Kara realizes the way they are pressed chest to chest.
She lets her hands fall from Laura’s back and inches away, a little uncomfortable with the way she’s thinking of the president all of a sudden, but a hand catches her face, forces her to look and when her eyes meet Laura’s they are wet and intent.
Her heart is beating a staccato in her chest, fast and out of control and it feels right for the first time in almost a year. Laura just keeps looking at her, searching her face for something, and she must see whatever it is because her free hand picks up one of Kara’s and moves it to rest on her left breast. She can feel her warmth through the thin nightgown, the nipple growing against her palm, the softness covering a heart that is beating almost as rapidly as her own.
“We can’t. . .” she protests, weakly.
Laura’s eyes narrow, slightly, and she drops the hand that holds Kara’s over her breast. “I’m not your mother, Kara. Everyone in this damn fleet seems to think I’m their mother. I’m no one’s mother.”
Me either she thinks but she doesn’t say it because she heard the grief in Laura’s voice again and if she says anything right now it will multiply and drown them both. Instead she leans forward and brushes her lips across Laura’s, feather light, because she’s never confused Laura with her mother.
It’s Laura who deepens the kiss, with a needy kind of moan that sounds strange coming from this dignified woman’s throat. It sparks in Kara’s womb, spreads through her fast like the wildfires that used to burn through Sagitaron every spring and she presses Laura back into the rumpled sheets of the bed.
When Laura comes she keens, low and long, flushed chest and quivering thighs making her the most beautiful thing Kara has seen in a long time. She keeps her eyes wide open when it’s her turn to come.
*
Admiral Adama makes a visit to Colonial One to meet with the president and Kara excuses herself along with the aides to give them some privacy.
They’re holed up for a long time and when the Admiral finally leaves he looks on the verge of being pissed. He gives Kara a searching, slightly mournful look on his way back to his raptor, opens his mouth like he’s going to say something but in the end he simply swallows and claps her on the shoulder.
A lump forms in her throat. She misses him.
Later that night she’s lying in bed with Laura, tracing circles on her stomach, when Laura broaches the visit.
“Bill sent you to me to see if perhaps I could break through to you. I don’t believe he’s very happy with my progress.” She turns her head to look at Kara and Kara feels the panic rise, burn up her throat and onto her tongue. Her fingers still as she puts on her best triad face.
“I doubt this is what he had in mind.”
A smile ghosts over Laura’s lips and Kara can’t stop herself from kissing it away.
That it also puts an end to the subject is hardly incidental.
*
She knows she can’t avoid this forever. Laura will bide her time, but Kara knows that in the end, there’s no escape.
*
She watches as the president erases the final digit on the whiteboard, watches as her marker hovers for a beat before she adds a number to the population count.
One of the aides is grinning, saying something about sending over a gift to the new mother from the president and Kara knows it’s a good thing but she can’t stop the nausea that rises through her like a tidal wave.
She mumbles an excuse, barely makes it to the bathroom before losing the contents of her stomach.
*
She’s lying on her side in the bed, fully clothed, almost lost in a spot on the wall.
“Do you believe the child was real?”
Kara’s head whips around. Laura is looking at her calmly, determinedly, and Kara knows there is no more escape.
She looked real, she sounded real, she felt real.
But that’s not what Laura asked so Kara doesn’t say any of it. Instead, she says, “I don’t know.” Because what Laura asked is what she believes and Kara doesn’t know what she believes anymore.
Laura takes her hand and tells her about Maya and Hera, from the beginning all the way until she watched the Doral model kill Maya and take Hera.
Kara tells her about the child who looked just like her, about the way the little girl screamed and cried when Leoben pulled her away and out of Kara’s sight as the sounds of gunfire and rescue came closer and closer. Tells her how Doc Cottle found the chip implanted in her brain and how she doesn’t know what was real and what the Cylons wanted her to believe.
They don’t make love, just hold each other until the clock signals the beginning of another day, and Kara thinks that maybe she won’t go crazy after all.
*
The next morning the president erases the number again, adds two more. The aide looks confused, asks where she should send the presidential gifts.
President Roslin just smiles and tells her there haven’t been any new births, just a miscalculation.
*
She asks if she can have a moment alone with the president. Roslin nods and gestures for the others to leave.
“I think it’s time I go back.” Her fingers scrabble at the wool of her dress blues but her voice is steady and for that she’s glad.
The president gives her an appraising look, then nods. “Yes, I believe you’re right.”
Her tone is neutral but Kara flinches a little, hurries to explain. “It’s not that I don’t. . . you, this, have meant so much. . .”
Roslin interrupts with a gentle smile. “Kara. It’s okay. You mean a lot to me as well but this isn’t where you belong. It never has been.”
And Kara wants to argue, because for the first time in a long time she doesn’t feel empty and lonely and she’s sure that’s because she’s been exactly where the gods meant for her to be. But there’s a look on the president’s face, a Laura look, telling her that disagreeing will only make this more painful so she doesn’t.
“Thank you, for everything,” she says instead.
Laura stands and sheds the presidential persona, wraps her arms around Kara and holds her tight.
*
She gets reassigned to the Galactica. Finds her way back to the gym and makes up for lost time.
And it’s strange, because everything seems to go faster and in weeks she’s returned to Viper status. This time when the Admiral tells her he wants her back in the CAG position, she accepts, and when Kat glares at her from the back row during her first briefing, Starbuck shoots her a cocky grin.
If there are times when she still thinks about that little girl, times when she wonders if she’s real and still out there with the toasters, she doesn’t let on.
She’s back, and Starbuck is good at a lot of things but she’s a frakking master of repression.
*
If there are times when she’s alone in her bunk, fingers twisting under her briefs, Laura’s name on her breath, well, Kara’s a master of repressing that too.
~~End
Come with me, I said, and no one knew
where, or how my pain throbbed,
no carnations or barcaroles for me,
only a wound that love had opened.
I said it again: Come with me, as if I were dying,
and no one saw the moon that bled in my mouth
or the blood that rose into the silence.
O Love, now we can forget the star that has such thorns!
That is why when I heard your voice repeat
Come with me, it was as if you had let loose
the grief, the love, the fury of a cork-trapped wine
the geysers flooding from deep in its vault:
in my mouth I felt the taste of fire again,
of blood and carnations, of rock and scald.
- Pablo Neruda
ETA: stealing of Pablo Neruda sort of stolen from voleuse, which I realized last night as I was rereading some of my favorite Kara/Lee.
Author: Maren
Pairing: Kara/Laura, with mentions of Laura/Maya
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Kara doesn't know what's real anymore. S3 Promo Spoilers but no spoilers after that-- this is all made up.
Author Notes: Title stolen from Pablo Neruda's Come With Me, I Said, And No One Knew which you can find at the end of the fic. Also, this is my first BSG fic and I don't have a BSG beta so I'd be happy to hear if I made any glaring mistakes.
***************
Come With Me
She’s in the prison built by Leoben and her own mind for six months. And yeah, sure, she’s military and she’s been trained on prisoner of war scenarios and torture and all of that other bullshit but no one trained her how to withstand watching your child live and laugh and frakking grow for six months and then leaving her behind when they finally come to rescue you.
*
She thinks of Galactica and Pegasus as them now, not us, and she knows that was the point and it nearly kills her.
*
Sam doesn’t get it. He’s sorry, of that much she can be sure because even if he hasn’t said it a hundred more times than she can stand to hear it, she can see it in every touch and glance. At least those are coming between longer intervals now; if she could be bothered to give a godsdamn she’d guess he got tired of her pushing him away with silence and fists but. . .
Well, she can’t be bothered.
*
It takes her nearly a month after her rescue to get approved for flight status, and then it’s only on Raptors. Too much times has passed, too many essential muscles have weakened, and even if she hadn’t been forced to play Susie-homemaker (during her capture, and maybe a little before) for so long she would have been hard-pressed to keep herself Viper ready as a civilian.
She lives in the gym between CAPs, ignores Helo’s attempts to strike up their old friendship, only opens her mouth to agree to hand-to-hand and to curse when she loses more than she should. She’s been at it for weeks when Kat challenges her to a bout in the ring and even though her muscles are screaming at her and she knows it’s a bad idea, she nods and straps on her gloves.
It’s an ugly fight, nothing gets pulled, and though she’s looking more like the old Starbuck than she has since she got back, Kat still has the advantage and she uses it.
A week later, the Admiral offers her the CAG position but she turns it down. He lets her.
*
Adama doesn’t let her out the next time, though, when he assigns her to the president. She clenches her jaw against the words that threaten to break free and send her straight to hack, and his lips quirk at the sight.
She has nothing against President Roslin. It’s just that it will be less time in the gym, less time flying, and those are the only two things keeping her breathing, keeping her mind off golden curls and a giggle too sweet to ever have come from her. That the assignment is also another reminder that she isn’t really essential to the fleet anymore, not a hotshot pilot or an officer with indispensable strategic skills, makes her skin itch that much more. She’s just a glorified Marine now.
Sometime in the past two years she’s stopped being Starbuck, in all the ways that matter.
*
“Madame President.” Her body is stiff and formal, her salute crisp and for that moment she’s the poster child of military precision.
“Captain Thrace, so nice to see you again.” The tone of Roslin’s voice is warm, welcoming, but her smile is cool and her eyes are searching.
She gets briefed on the day’s itinerary, tries to acclimate to the busy hum of activity that surrounds the president at all times. Sometimes Roslin asks her opinion on some matter facing the fleet, but mostly she finds herself standing to the side, watching the door and watching the aides and making damn sure there’s no threat to the woman who has somehow once again become humanity’s last best chance at survival.
The itch under her skin turns into a slow crawl. She bites back a hysterical laugh, because frak this is going to drive her completely insane and she thinks she’s probably the only one who would find that funny.
*
They settle into a routine. Meetings and press conferences, work sessions and visiting diplomats. The only time she gets to fly is when they make short trips to the other ships in the fleet.
The visits to Pegasus are bad, Dee’s pity-laced glances only slightly more tolerable than Lee not looking at her at all. Sometimes she wonders if he even sees her, if she’s invisible to him not because of what happened between them before but because Starbuck never really came back at all.
The visits to Galactica are the worst. There, she’s not invisible at all even when she wishes she could be. The looks on the old battlestar tend more towards confusion than pity, and she wants to scream, hit something, the one time they’re on board when the Cylons show up and the old man doesn’t even glance at her.
*
At night she sleeps in the president’s personal quarters, on a cot just outside her bedroom door, always on guard in case one of the unidentified Cylon models is on board. Now that she isn’t working her body to the point of collapse every day it’s harder to sleep so most nights she spends hours doing push-ups or just staring at the wall.
It’s an old, childhood habit. Pick a spot, don’t look away, count your breaths, and it doesn’t matter what’s going on inside or out.
She spent two days staring at the juncture of a spidery crack in her apartment wall after Zak died. Two minutes at a gouge in the wood above her bunk when the worlds ended (because that’s all the time she had). She isn’t sure how long she concentrated on the black smudge at the baseboard in her prison, trying to ignore the crying child that Leoben said was hers.
She thinks things would have been better if she’d never given up and looked away.
*
The sound of Roslin’s low moan wakes her up, and she’s in the president’s sleeping quarters scanning the shadowed interior in seconds.
There’s no one but the two of them and she’s just about to slip back out when Roslin moans again. It’s a name, and she thinks it belonged to that baby that Roslin seemed to have developed an affinity for back on New Caprica. The knowledge is like a prick of ice in her chest and she stills, hand on the knob.
Roslin gasps and her eyes fly open. In the dim blue cast by the night lights running around the floorboards of the room she can see the heave of the president’s chest under the thin fabric of her nightgown and it takes her a moment to realize that Roslin is looking at her. Their eyes meet, hold, and she isn’t sure how much time passes this way.
Eventually Roslin nods, a dismissal, and she backs out of the room, closing the door quietly behind her.
*
The next time it happens she hasn’t even gotten to sleep yet. She hesitates at the door, then lets herself in.
The president is sitting up in bed, drinking from a glass of water. She places it back on the nightstand and turns to the door, to the woman standing there.
She clears her throat. “Madame President. Just checking to make sure everything is okay, sir.” It’s her job, but she still feels uncomfortable, like she’s intruding.
Roslin raises an eyebrow. “Kara, it’s the middle of the night and you’re standing in my bedroom I think we can dispense with formalities. Please, call me Laura.”
She nods, then hesitates, unsure what she should do. Ros. . . Laura is still looking at her, expectantly, so instead of turning around and leaving she takes a step forward.
“Do you need me to get you anything?”
Laura cocks her head and a slight smile plays at the corners of her mouth. She pats the bed covers. “Come sit with me and keep me company for a bit.”
The distance from the door to the bed isn’t far but she walks it slowly, reluctantly. When she reaches the edge she glances at the covers and hesitates, glances up at Laura who meets her gaze with a bigger smile. Laura tips her head and Kara sighs, sits down at the end of the bed, on the very edge, and waits.
They sit in silence for what seems like an eternity, her nerves jangling because she knows what this is, has known from the moment that Adama told her she was being transferred to Colonial One that the president was going to try to make her talk about Leoben and. . . and. . .
Her spine stiffens. She won’t. She told them everything there was to tell during the initial debrief and if there’s anything else, well, it isn’t their frakking business.
“Do you ever have nightmares, Kara?”
The quiet question surprises her; it isn’t the one that she was expecting.
“Not in a long time,” she answers, and it’s true. Her demons haunt her when she’s awake.
Laura hmms and leans back against the headboard. Her eyes get a very far-away look and she crosses her arms just under her breasts. “I didn’t used to. Now it’s almost every night since the occupation.”
She isn’t sure how to respond so she just looks down at her hands, notices that she’s got them clenched so tightly together that her fingers are turning white and deliberately relaxes them. She takes a deep breath and looks up to find the pres. . . Laura looking into the space over Kara’s shoulder.
“Is Hera the baby from the school? The daughter of that other teacher. . .” She trails off, partly because she can’t remember the woman’s name but also because she can’t quite believe she asked.
“Maya,” Laura fills in, and there’s this sound in her voice that Kara recognizes well.
Grief.
She wants to ask if they made it back to the fleet but the answer seems obvious. She inches her fingers across the bed, grasps Laura’s hand with her own and squeezes instead.
*
This, too, becomes a routine. Meetings and diplomatic envoys and Madame President during the day. Nightmares and companionable silences and Laura during the night.
*
One night it’s a different name, the teacher instead of the baby, and Laura is crying when Kara lets herself into the bedroom.
She doesn’t hesitate, goes straight to the bed and sits down and gathers Laura into her arms. They stay like that until Laura’s sobs slow, then stop, and it’s not until she feels Laura turn her head off her shoulder and into the hair brushing her neck that Kara realizes the way they are pressed chest to chest.
She lets her hands fall from Laura’s back and inches away, a little uncomfortable with the way she’s thinking of the president all of a sudden, but a hand catches her face, forces her to look and when her eyes meet Laura’s they are wet and intent.
Her heart is beating a staccato in her chest, fast and out of control and it feels right for the first time in almost a year. Laura just keeps looking at her, searching her face for something, and she must see whatever it is because her free hand picks up one of Kara’s and moves it to rest on her left breast. She can feel her warmth through the thin nightgown, the nipple growing against her palm, the softness covering a heart that is beating almost as rapidly as her own.
“We can’t. . .” she protests, weakly.
Laura’s eyes narrow, slightly, and she drops the hand that holds Kara’s over her breast. “I’m not your mother, Kara. Everyone in this damn fleet seems to think I’m their mother. I’m no one’s mother.”
Me either she thinks but she doesn’t say it because she heard the grief in Laura’s voice again and if she says anything right now it will multiply and drown them both. Instead she leans forward and brushes her lips across Laura’s, feather light, because she’s never confused Laura with her mother.
It’s Laura who deepens the kiss, with a needy kind of moan that sounds strange coming from this dignified woman’s throat. It sparks in Kara’s womb, spreads through her fast like the wildfires that used to burn through Sagitaron every spring and she presses Laura back into the rumpled sheets of the bed.
When Laura comes she keens, low and long, flushed chest and quivering thighs making her the most beautiful thing Kara has seen in a long time. She keeps her eyes wide open when it’s her turn to come.
*
Admiral Adama makes a visit to Colonial One to meet with the president and Kara excuses herself along with the aides to give them some privacy.
They’re holed up for a long time and when the Admiral finally leaves he looks on the verge of being pissed. He gives Kara a searching, slightly mournful look on his way back to his raptor, opens his mouth like he’s going to say something but in the end he simply swallows and claps her on the shoulder.
A lump forms in her throat. She misses him.
Later that night she’s lying in bed with Laura, tracing circles on her stomach, when Laura broaches the visit.
“Bill sent you to me to see if perhaps I could break through to you. I don’t believe he’s very happy with my progress.” She turns her head to look at Kara and Kara feels the panic rise, burn up her throat and onto her tongue. Her fingers still as she puts on her best triad face.
“I doubt this is what he had in mind.”
A smile ghosts over Laura’s lips and Kara can’t stop herself from kissing it away.
That it also puts an end to the subject is hardly incidental.
*
She knows she can’t avoid this forever. Laura will bide her time, but Kara knows that in the end, there’s no escape.
*
She watches as the president erases the final digit on the whiteboard, watches as her marker hovers for a beat before she adds a number to the population count.
One of the aides is grinning, saying something about sending over a gift to the new mother from the president and Kara knows it’s a good thing but she can’t stop the nausea that rises through her like a tidal wave.
She mumbles an excuse, barely makes it to the bathroom before losing the contents of her stomach.
*
She’s lying on her side in the bed, fully clothed, almost lost in a spot on the wall.
“Do you believe the child was real?”
Kara’s head whips around. Laura is looking at her calmly, determinedly, and Kara knows there is no more escape.
She looked real, she sounded real, she felt real.
But that’s not what Laura asked so Kara doesn’t say any of it. Instead, she says, “I don’t know.” Because what Laura asked is what she believes and Kara doesn’t know what she believes anymore.
Laura takes her hand and tells her about Maya and Hera, from the beginning all the way until she watched the Doral model kill Maya and take Hera.
Kara tells her about the child who looked just like her, about the way the little girl screamed and cried when Leoben pulled her away and out of Kara’s sight as the sounds of gunfire and rescue came closer and closer. Tells her how Doc Cottle found the chip implanted in her brain and how she doesn’t know what was real and what the Cylons wanted her to believe.
They don’t make love, just hold each other until the clock signals the beginning of another day, and Kara thinks that maybe she won’t go crazy after all.
*
The next morning the president erases the number again, adds two more. The aide looks confused, asks where she should send the presidential gifts.
President Roslin just smiles and tells her there haven’t been any new births, just a miscalculation.
*
She asks if she can have a moment alone with the president. Roslin nods and gestures for the others to leave.
“I think it’s time I go back.” Her fingers scrabble at the wool of her dress blues but her voice is steady and for that she’s glad.
The president gives her an appraising look, then nods. “Yes, I believe you’re right.”
Her tone is neutral but Kara flinches a little, hurries to explain. “It’s not that I don’t. . . you, this, have meant so much. . .”
Roslin interrupts with a gentle smile. “Kara. It’s okay. You mean a lot to me as well but this isn’t where you belong. It never has been.”
And Kara wants to argue, because for the first time in a long time she doesn’t feel empty and lonely and she’s sure that’s because she’s been exactly where the gods meant for her to be. But there’s a look on the president’s face, a Laura look, telling her that disagreeing will only make this more painful so she doesn’t.
“Thank you, for everything,” she says instead.
Laura stands and sheds the presidential persona, wraps her arms around Kara and holds her tight.
*
She gets reassigned to the Galactica. Finds her way back to the gym and makes up for lost time.
And it’s strange, because everything seems to go faster and in weeks she’s returned to Viper status. This time when the Admiral tells her he wants her back in the CAG position, she accepts, and when Kat glares at her from the back row during her first briefing, Starbuck shoots her a cocky grin.
If there are times when she still thinks about that little girl, times when she wonders if she’s real and still out there with the toasters, she doesn’t let on.
She’s back, and Starbuck is good at a lot of things but she’s a frakking master of repression.
*
If there are times when she’s alone in her bunk, fingers twisting under her briefs, Laura’s name on her breath, well, Kara’s a master of repressing that too.
~~End
Come with me, I said, and no one knew
where, or how my pain throbbed,
no carnations or barcaroles for me,
only a wound that love had opened.
I said it again: Come with me, as if I were dying,
and no one saw the moon that bled in my mouth
or the blood that rose into the silence.
O Love, now we can forget the star that has such thorns!
That is why when I heard your voice repeat
Come with me, it was as if you had let loose
the grief, the love, the fury of a cork-trapped wine
the geysers flooding from deep in its vault:
in my mouth I felt the taste of fire again,
of blood and carnations, of rock and scald.
- Pablo Neruda
ETA: stealing of Pablo Neruda sort of stolen from voleuse, which I realized last night as I was rereading some of my favorite Kara/Lee.