This is the never-to-be finished story where Kara was the first human-Cylon hybrid:
The nebula vibrates at a frequency that resonates in Kara's bones. It's her father's music, the song her wrote for her all those years ago. It's the music of the universe, and it's in her blood and her soul.
*
Kara puts on her headphones when her parents argue. She lies on her belly and colors in her coloring book, and listens to Daddy's music, the song he wrote just for her. She wants to be an artist, just like him. He always brings her presents when he comes home--coloring books and pencils and pastels that get all over her hands and leave stains on her clothes. Mom yells, but it's worth it because Daddy smiles at her and calls her his artistic genius.
She's special, but she's not special enough to make him stay. He leaves, and Mom goes from yelling sometimes to being angry all the time.
"You have a destiny," she says, over and over and over, until Kara believes her, even though she thinks she's crazy.
The first time Kara finally gets up the nerve to say, "Frak you," it gets her the back of the hairbrush across her face, a red welt that swells and stings for days.
Kara wears it like a badge.
Maybe she's crazy too.
*
It becomes a game, a challenge, to see how far she can push her mother, to see how far her mother will go. When she's twelve, Kara gets used to covering up black eyes and bruises, because now she has a teacher who actually notices, and she actually stops by once when Kara is out sick because her mother broke all the fingers in her right hand. After that, her mother finds ways of inflicting pain that don't leave visible marks. She starts relying on words, and at first Kara laughs them off, but she never stops hearing her mother's voice in her head, a litany of useless, frak-up, better than this that plays over and over while she's in school or on the pyramid court.
She's devastated when she blows out her knee and the doctor tells her she'll never play professionally, but there's a small part of her that feels triumphant for not fulfilling whatever ridiculously grandiose destiny her mother imagined for her.
*
Kara's fifteen the first time she has sex. She and Ariadne King zip their sleeping bags together and get each other off while Ariadne's parents are asleep in the other tent. Kara closes her eyes and sees colors explode behind them when she comes, pressing herself up into Ariadne’s small hand. She feels warm and comfortable and cared for, wrapped up in Ariadne’s arms.
When she's by herself, she tries to recreate the colors she saw then, the swirl of red, blue and yellow that feels like love. She sees it when she closes her eyes and listens to her father's music. She draws it in the margins of her notebooks, paints it on her wall in her first apartment, and on a sheet of posterboard she hangs in her rack at the Academy.
She doesn't see it when she's flying (not until later), but the feeling is the same, the sense of belonging she used to have on the court is even stronger in the cockpit. Maybe this is what her mother meant by destiny, because when Kara flies, it's like she's part of something bigger than herself, like the gods themselves have touched her.
She gets assigned to the Galactica after Zak dies, and disappointing the old man is far worse than disappointing her mother.
Then the Cylons attack and she survives. The Galactica survives.
Maybe she hasn't outrun destiny after all.
There was supposed to be a few more scenes - Leoben's obsession with her, the Farm (her being unwilling/unable to have kids necessitating the need for Hera), discovering her father was Daniel - all brought on by the notes of the music during the finale, but I just never managed to get it together.
*
This entry at DW:
http://musesfool.dreamwidth.org/709499.html.
![](http://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=musesfool&ditemid=709499)
people have commented there.