Chapter 21, Winning
Chapter 21, "Winning"
Words: ~4,100
A/N: Let me be honest here: I couldn't find a way to write this chapter that didn't feel a little disappointing. There's nothing I hate more than ends being perfectly tied up, or redemption coming too cheaply, but still, to write a story of partial redemption, while sort of real (well, given all the things that aren't real here) wasn't satisfying. Nor does this chapter betray all of the deep sympathy I have for Zak. But I guess I'll just bottle all of that up for another story, one less convoluted than this one. Consider yourself forewarned.
"We watching the game or what?" his brother said, and Lee drew in his breath to hear Zak's voice slash straight across the years. It slashed, and then it echoed.
It echoed because he'd been here before.
When Kara had told him about what she'd seen, when she'd sunk into the maelstrom, he'd assumed it was a hallucination. A second chance with her mother-Leoben Conoy as her spiritual guide?
But here he was, and it felt very real.
He followed Zak's gaze to see himself coming through the door.
"Sorry I'm late," the younger Lee said. His voice sounded muffled. He looked grim. Standing beside Laura, Lee recognized this moment from the expression on his younger self's face. He had a surge of pity for the young man he'd been. He was so grim and resolute and, gods, why couldn't Zak see how scared he was? Did his brother notice anything outside of his own problems?
With the ease that followed years of discipline, Lee quashed that disloyal thought. He turned to look at Laura, shook his head. "Not this. I'm not watching this. Let's go."
"You don't get to choose what you need, Lee." Laura tucked a hand in his arm. "You remember this, then?"
His breath came through his clenched teeth. "Yes."
"You were stationed at Delphi that whole spring and summer. You'd met Kara six months before." Her voice got sterner, and he winced. "You'd been having an affair for five of them."
He looked at her a long moment, watched his younger self shrug off a jacket, go to the fridge to get a cold beer. And accepted the inevitable. "Yeah. I was going to tell him. I was about to ship out, and I'd decided I didn't care what Kara said. I couldn't…" Lee ran a hand along his jaw, remembering the feeling of Kara's fist connecting with it when he'd told her he was going to confess everything to Zak. The younger man in front of him could feel it as more than a memory. "I thought I couldn't live with it anymore. And that when it came out, Kara would have to live with it…"
"That's not how it happened."
"I overestimated myself."
"You underestimated your brother." He made to step away from her, from the whole ugly scene, but she grabbed his arm. "Come on, now, Major. And pay attention, this time."
It wasn't riveting. For a long while, the two brothers simply sat silently beside each other on the couch, sipping beer. The only sound they could hear was the soft voice of the announcer from the set in front of them. Lee could hardly breathe, the past was so thick, here: "The rookie, Sam Anders, takes the court for the Bucs. Anders is one of four on his last two excursions…" the announcer intoned.
Neither brother seemed engrossed in the game. Lee kept glancing up at the wall over the set; Zak kept picking up his beer and reading the label as though it contained some kind of secret.
Lee steeled himself when he saw the young Lee set his shoulders. "Zak," he said, "we need to talk."
From this angle, Lee saw Zak's grimace, but when Zak turned to his younger self, his expression was all earnestness. "Yeah. We do." His little brother looked down at the sofa. "You know, don't you?"
"I… what?"
"About Kara." Zak scowled. "That she's cheating on me." He tossed back the rest of the bottle. He seemed oddly nervous. "You're down at the flight school all the time. You must have seen something-just tell me."
"Gods. Yes, she's…" Lee cleared a throat choked up with fateful fear, and-then let Zak cut him off.
"You must have seen something! Come on, think about it. I'm going crazy, man, like-like I keep thinking I can smell other people on her. Crazy stuff."
"Look." Lee gripped his knees to still his hands, and, watching himself, saw Zak's eyes flicker there, and quickly away. "If she's cheating on you, it's…"
"There's evidence, too. I never know where she is, and when I ask, she fobs me off with the vaguest frakking answers. And she's different in bed, too. I mean, she still can't get enough of me, but it's like, less fun than it used to be-"
"Gods damn..." Lee's knuckles were white. "I mean… if you're right," he finished lamely.
"And the other thing is that she cries-can you even imagine, Kara crying-afterward, you know? I'm not supposed to notice because she makes some dirty joke or tells me that she's doing it because it just means too much, but…" Zak leaned forward now, as if something had just occurred to him. "Do you think she could be… pregnant?"
The young Lee actually shuddered at that, and watching, Lee was thinking, gods, how does he not see me? How does he not notice that he's torturing me?
But Zak did notice, if only out of the corner of his eye. "Look, I know you're not exactly her biggest fan."
"That's not true-"
"I just… I'm in love with her, Lee." Zak's voice became almost pleading. "It's not like with Maggie, you know, where it was just about the sex." Zak flung himself backwards. "I didn't even care when Maggie fell for you at War College. It made the ending easier, you know?" The younger Lee grimaced guiltily at that what a strain Maggie's pursuit of him had put on his relationship with his brother. "But Kara… I don't know what I'd do without her. It's like she makes me believe I can be the person that I'm supposed to be."
"She pretty much is the person who Dad wants you to be," Lee said quietly.
Zak rolled his shoulders around uncomfortably. "Not this again. It's not like that."
"Isn't it?" Lee shook his head. "You're fooling yourself. You don't love Kara. She's not your type."
"What the frak would you know about my type?" Zak laughed. "Last I checked, yourtaste ran to brainy-but-sweet civilians who bore you to tears. Gods, Lee, the librarian-"
"She's an archivist." One Lee had been trying to use her to pry himself away from his brother's girlfriend.
"She's a joke. Just another way of rebelling against the old man." He shook his head. "You think I've got issues? Find someone stronger than Mom was, Lee. You're too much like Dad not to."
Lee surged to his feet, at that. "I'm pretty godsdamned sick of that line, Zak."
"I'm pretty godsdamned sick of your moral high ground, Lee." Zak got up, too. "You're the same, all three of you. You, Dad, and Kara. It's why I can't just frakking ask Kara if she frakking cheating on me. If she isn't, she'll never in a thousand years forgive me for suggesting it."
"And if she is?"
"Then she'll admit it. 'So what if I am?' she'll say. Blunt and brutal, like the fact that it's the truth will stop it from killing me. Adama-brand morality. No wonder you… you can't stand her." He reached down to pick up the bottle, realized it was empty, set it down too hard, hard enough that it broke the glass coaster beneath it.
"Always something broken," Laura Roslin murmured, and Lee closed his eyes, next to her.
"You don't get it. She's in my blood, now, Lee. She's in everything. She's poison, like too much ambrosia and I can't frakking get enough."
"Poison. For gods' sake, listen to your-"
"I keep having the same thought over and over. I want to ask her to marry me because just asking-it's like baiting a bull, Lee. Like the cliff diving we used to do when we were little. Just the idea of it makes me feel more alive."
And here was a sentence that Lee would be trying to recall for years. He'd known there was something wrong with what Zak had said, known his brother hadn't said, I want to marry her, she makes me feel alive. But here-then-it had slipped straight underneath the roaring in his ears, and hidden in the next wave.
The young Lee's chest was heaving, and it took him a long moment to command words. "Marriage. You can't ask her to marry you. You think she's cheating on you," he said flatly.
Watching, Lee wanted to choke the man he'd been with his own hands and demand that he just tell Zak the godsdamned truth, brutal and blunt or no. She's cheating on you. With me. We were meant for each other. She pities you. She loves the person you think she is. "You can't even ask her if she is because she terrifies you-"
"No. Listen to me, Lee. Really listen to me." Zak waited until his older brother got control of his scowl and his posture of disbelief and met his eyes. "I'm telling you right now: I'm going to marry her. Back off."
"You should wait until she says yes, champ." Lee had turned, trying to seem dismissive, struggling to control his gut. "And ask her a few other questions while you're at it."
There was a long silence after Lee came the closest he ever would to telling his brother the truth. The two brothers watched each other warily. The older Lee and Laura Roslin were the only ones who heard the announcer on the set say, "…as Anders leads his team to a surprise victory…"
"I gotta go," the younger Lee said abruptly. "I just… I'll catch you in the morning for breakfast before I ship out?"
"Yeah, man. Yeah. OK. Thanks for… you know, thanks."
And the young Lee left. And what might have been a moment of truth became forever, always, a moment of lies.
It was the last time he'd seen his brother, face-to-face.
Lee turned to the woman-the apparition-beside him. "He didn't show up, you know. He asked Kara to marry him that night. She said yes. They celebrated-got drunk, probably. Overslept."
He'd waited at the diner for about an hour. Waited for the acute torture that meals with his lover and his brother had been for months. When they hadn't shown, he'd guessed what had happened.
"Oh, Lee," Laura's voice was exasperated. "Do you still not see?"
"Frak, yes, I get it. I was a coward. You didn't have to stage this little time traveling morality play to show me, either. I should have told him the truth, but I… I couldn't tell if it would hurt more to tell him or not to tell him. So I didn't decide. I walked away." He shook his head. "It took New Caprica-all that time on the Pegasus, by myself-but I get it, trust me. I'm not a coward anymore."
Laura shook her head impatiently, waving that aside. That was the least of Lee's troubles, and he was right, he wasn't a coward anymore. "You're so upset that Zak didn't see you, Lee." Laura's smile was wry, and the glow coming from the back of her eyes, faint. "But you still don't see him, do you? You won't let yourself." She grabbed his shoulders, and held his eyes. "He knew, Lee. Can't you see that?"
"Knew…?" Lee shook his head. "Knew about me and Kara? There's no way. You heard him just now-he thought I hated her. Wanted me to tell him if I saw something down at the…" He trailed off, thinking about how carefully his brother had been watching him, how out of step with his words that care had been. "Frak," he whispered.
"He was desperate. He was losing her, and he knew it. Knew that she felt as unsafe with you as he felt with her. And yes, he was angry at you, Lee. Very angry."
Lee threw an arm across his stomach, bent over, as rage pounded at his temples.
Thank the gods, he was thinking.
"You made yourself see him as a victim because it made you feel like you had control, and like your relationship with Kara had mattered. If he was the victim, that meant that on some level you'd won. But he fought back, Lee. And, in fact, he won."
Lee shook his head. That was still wrong, he had to remind himself that that was wrong. "No. He died."
"He died. And she called. And you didn't let yourself go to her. For years." Laura smiled faintly. "He won, Lee. You've been angry at him ever since, and when he died, you buried that anger under a mountain of guilt. Now you have to forgive him for winning. You can do it by forgiving her, for failing you. Just like you finally forgave yourself, for betraying him."
"I wanted to kill him, you know," Lee breathed. "After," he waved his hand at the empty couch in front of them "all that. I imagined him getting into accidents, dying a hundred ways."
Laura nodded. "You were seething with it. But then he died, and so you had to get mad at someone else."
He looked at her, almost in wonder. "Yes."
In that instant, as Lee realized how angry he'd been with Zak, he loved his brother as hadn't in nearly a decade. He walked over to the coffee table and picked up the broken coaster. "Frak you, Zak." He shook his head, and sat down for a minute where his brother had been sitting, before the whole world dissolved again.
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When Lee stood up, Zak was dead, and he was in a jail, walking down its long, grey-brown hallway. The smell matched his memory, but everything else was wrong. Somehow the universe had narrowed to be only the size he needed it to be. That night, the jail had been teeming with drunks and addicts and petty criminals. Tonight, somehow all the cells were empty. Except one.
Kara Thrace looked at him miserably from behind the bars. "I didn't think you'd come," she whispered.
Truth be told, he almost hadn't-on this, the night before Zak's funeral. He'd been home on bereavement leave for forty-eight of the ninety-six hours he'd been granted. When he'd gotten to Delphi two nights before, he'd driven straight to her apartment-the apartment she'd shared with Zak. And sat outside, in a truck he'd borrowed from a friend who worked for government ops planetside.
The light in her window had gone out a little before sunup, and that had been like a sign from the gods. He'd driven away.
Two nights later, the call had come from the warden that one Kara Thrace had been arrested on public indecency for frakking a stranger behind a bar. She'd asked to be released into his custody. He'd almost put down the phone.
But instead, he'd come down here, and taken in the sight of her in a drunken heap on the bench. And she'd said, "I didn't think you'd come," and he'd said, "forget that I did," and snapped at her to follow him, and put her straight into a cab outside the jail. He'd paid the fare, told her to call someone else next time she was in clink. He'd seen her the next morning at the funeral, and hadn't said a word, just looked at her over Zak's casket and known that it would be that way forever, now. In staying with his brother until he'd died, she'd trapped their betrayal in amber and made it their crown jewel. Zak would never forgive them.
He hadn't seen her again until he'd walked into the brig on Galactica.
But now he was here again. It seemed different, now. He saw it differently. So he opened the jail cell-it was unlocked, and that couldn't be right, either, could it?-and stepped inside, sank down beside her. "Of course I came."
"I thought you hated me. For staying with him. But I didn't-Lee, you have to know that I told him the truth…" She took in a shaky breath, pressed her trembling lips together until she was back in control. "He just didn't care. He said… he said he loved me anyway and that he needed me and you didn't. I loved him so damned much, Lee. I couldn't leave, and I couldn't-I couldn't fail him, gods, I should have failed him…"
Lee sighed, and with the breath pouring out of his lungs came all the understanding it had taken so long to win. "He should have studied harder. He should have been assigned a different Viper. The run should have started two hours earlier. My father shouldn't have pressured him. I shouldn't have pressured him. It's not your fault, Kara. Not just yours." This, they'd done before. Gods willing, there'd be time now to do it again, a thousand times if they had to.
She gritted her teeth against the tears-his fierce Kara, always at war with her feelings, whichever way they were pulling her. He thought for a moment that there was a wisdom there that he couldn't remember seeing in her, back then. Back now. They'd been so young, before the Cylon attack. "I thought-tonight… I thought you hated me," she said again, more insistently this time.
"I did." He leaned into her hair. "I thought you hated me, too."
"I did."
He pulled her against him harder as her shoulders started to shake, even though he knew she was laughing. With Kara, it was best to hang on tight regardless of the momentary changes in weather, because it was always hurricane season.
"Listen, Kara. I know you loved Zak. I should have told you before. You don't have to choose, not with me. I love the bastard, too. You can love us both."
She sighed. "I never thought you'd…" She took a breath. "Easy to say now that he's…" She trailed off. "Lee."
He was wondering how long he'd get to stay with her, here, in this terrible idyll. His father had said that he and Kara carried their pain between them like a heavy sofa, and there was nowhere to put it down. The universe, he thought, had set him down on that sofa. But somewhere, he was plunging down into the eye of the maelstrom. So how long could this last?
"I'm here," he said evenly. "I'm not going anywhere until we-until we forgive each other."
"No-Gods. Lee." She clutched his arm so hard he knew he'd have bruises. "What is Laura Roslin doing here?"
His spine turned to ice. How did she, at this moment two years before the Cylon holocaust, even know that name? How did she see Laura at all?
He spun, saw Laura standing outside the cell-and Leoben Conoy, looming behind her. "And Conoy. What the…" Now he reached for her hands, pried them from his biceps and pressed them between his. "Kara. How do you know who Laura Roslin is?"
"How do you know who Leoben Conoy is, Lee?" And now she was laughing again, but it was half-hysterical. "Gods. It's really you, isn't it? Not the you that you were, I mean-the you that you are. I mean-"
"I know what you mean, Kara. Just-quickly!-have you been to Earth? When did you leave there?"
"I left when-when that man blew the Horn, on top of the temple. I was following Leoben across the sky. Minutes ago, I think."
They'd both been sent back here, to this moment, in this space between life and death. Whose life? Whose death?
Lee didn't take his eyes off of Laura Roslin and Leoben Conoy, but his eyes did brighten. "I found you," he whispered. "I knew I would find you." He turned back to her as Conoy reached for the jail cell's door. "Kara-listen. This is very important." He gripped her hands, one in each of his. "Whatever happens, don't let go."
She looked in his eyes, saw the expression that said, that's an order, Lieutenant, and the expression that said, dear gods, please, and nodded. "Roger that," she murmured.
Was it just Lee or was it getting hotter, in here? But then that made sense, he thought absently.
Somewhere, he suspected, somehow, Kara's Viper was about to explode. It couldn't withstand the pressure his Raptor could.
"It's time to go, Kara," Leoben said quietly. "Your destiny demands it."
"He's right, Lee," Laura Roslin concurred firmly. "You're finally ready to let her go."
Lee didn't look away from Kara's face. There was a smile threatening to break out on her lips, and he ran a tongue along his teeth to quell the part of him that wanted to laugh out loud at the sight of it. "Make us," she said easily, and squeezed Lee's hands more tightly. He nodded, and spoke succinctly: "Frak destiny."
The heat grew to what should have been an unbearable level. The air was thick with sweat. It was horrifying, actually, to see Conoy sweating so hard, water soaking his shirt and beading all over his face, dripping off of his chin.
In her corner, Laura Roslin was the only one unaffected, perfectly cool, watching Lee and Kara's death grips on each other hands with what looked like approval. "You'll probably change the pattern, Lee. It's a bit dangerous. A lot of points of time converge, here. Reality's a little thinner to accommodate it." Her lips barely moved around the words.
"He knows that!" Leoben all but yelled it. "But you know what she's like. What she does!" He reached to dive for them, to rip Kara away. "Damn you, Daniel! What did you see that I can't?"
But just as his body was about to make contact, the jail, and everyone in it, disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared.
I'm proud of you, Lee, he heard Laura's voice as a whisper in his ears. Tell your father…
But then her voice faded away, and Lee opened his eyes.
He was back in his Raptor. The Raptor was screaming downward, on a few klicks from the face of the planet whose atmosphere they'd just hit. As they cleared it, he could see through the window a flaming capsule that he realized was Kara's Viper.
But Kara was still gripping his hands.
"I got it, I got it!" she jerked away and grabbed for the nav stick, even as they were both falling forward, plastered to the control panel. "This is gonna be a rough one, Apollo. Hang on the best you can."
Once she pulled the Raptor so it was level, Lee threw himself toward the ECO controls and scanned the surroundings. "Incoming. Cylon Raider at… oh-two-one karom three-eight-two." He squinted, tried to think, but the change in pressure had been so enormous, his head felt light. "Unless that's… hold fire, Starbuck. That'll be… Daniel."
"Gods," she muttered. "You know where we are?"
"Ten cubits says Cylon Earth," Lee said flatly. "You know when we are?"
"My guess is about two minutes after you saw my Viper explode, a year and a half ago."
"Mine, too." Lee waited a beat. "You lost two months of time around here somewhere, Lieutenant. I'm pretty sure we just found them."
A moment passed, and Kara, her brows furrowed as she lowered the Viper slowly to the planet's surface. "Well. Everything except the fact that we're about to be stranded in the past on an irradiated hellhole of a planet steps away from where I once found my own corpse is really starting to go my way."
Lee tossed his head back and laughed, at that. Kara couldn't remember the last time she'd heard him laugh that way. An involuntary smile fractured her grimace, at the sound of it.
"Did you really fly into the frakking maelstrom for me?" Kara's tone was conversational, as though she weren't even surprised, and for some reason that made Lee feel more confident than he ever had.
"Yeah, well. Thought if you were heading straight into Hades, it might be fun to fly your wing."
"We've gotta get you a job, Apollo." She bit her lip, looked like she might say more, but the crackle of the wireless cut her off.
"Starbuck, Apollo, this is Leoben, do you copy?" His voice boomed into the Raptor, sounding frantic. "I'm in the Raider. Have you seen Daniel?"
Kara grabbed the radio. "Starbuck here. Who the hell is Daniel?"
"C'mon," Lee interjected quietly, "he's your brother."
She rolled her eyes. "I figured that much out."
Through the window, Conoy was lowering his Heavy Raider to the ground near them. "Have you seen him? Is he hurt? Where is he? God damn it! This can't all be for nothing!"
With the Raptor's telescopic lens to his eyes, that was when Lee saw the body burning in the skeleton of Kara's Raptor.
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