Four (BSG, Kara/Leoben)
Hi Mith. I know this is almost a week after your birthday.
um.
sorry. But here it is.
Four. ~2,150 words.
"We start over. Five times now."
BSG, Kara/Leoben. R.
Spoilers through the first episode of Season Three.
i. the chair
There’s a real ceiling over Kara’s head when she opens her eyes. She rolls over, buries her face in the pillow, and bites down on it to keep from screaming, bites down until her jaw hurts and she tastes something coppery mixed in with her saliva and the cloth. But she doesn’t scream. She hears someone rummaging through the dishes in the kitchen, and she’s not going to let him hear her like this.
She’s going to kill him today.
There aren’t any knives in the apartment. He says he loves her but he’s not stupid.
(“I know you,” he said. He’s wrong. He’s lying.)
There are two chairs at the dining table. She can break one of them over his head. He’s stronger than she is, but his bones are still-she hates to use the word human. She can still crack his skull if she uses enough blunt force. She can fill up the sink and shove his head under the water until he drowns. He might even like that.
“Breakfast is ready, Kara,” he calls.
She stumbles out of the door, still half-drunk on sleep. Her mouth feels like it’s been stuffed with cotton balls.
“Is it morning?” she asks. Light shines through the curtains, but light’s been pouring into the apartment since she came here, whenever that was. She can’t look at it directly. It makes her vision swim.
“Morning.” He sets a white plastic plate on the table. He’s made her eggs. Kara claps her hands over her stomach to keep it from growling. She hasn’t had eggs in two years, not since Adama took her to that restaurant on Caprica for her birthday. “Morning is a matter of personal time. I’ve found no clear delineation between morning and afternoon. The sun rolls across the sky; at its apex, some people will point to it and say, ‘Ah. Afternoon.’ But identifying when it’s directly overhead-that depends on where you’re standing. And in space, when so many stars traverse the darkness around you…what light do you point to then?” He shrugs and closes his eyes. “But I’d like to think it’s morning now. Early morning, when the first pink rays of dawn break over the trees.”
Kara grips the back of the chair. She’s still strong enough to pick up a frakking chair. She has to be.
“Won’t you sit?” he asks her.
“No thanks.” She lifts the chair with her back, not her legs, but the important thing is that she’s swinging it at him with all her might. He raises his palms in front of his face, his fingers spread wide, but he’s not quick enough to catch it; one of the legs whacks him hard across the temple and he spins to the side, sags, flows to the ground in a heap. One of his hands gropes around on the tabletop, and then it slides to the floor, too.
Kara vaults over his body and sprints up the steps. He’s locked the screen door; she braces her foot on the doorframe and yanks on the handle until her arms scream at her to stop. Just once more, she thinks. This time she hears something buckle, and the handle hurtles towards her chest. She staggers back and sticks her head through the door.
Bars. Big metal bars in a neat row right in front of her. Frak. Oh gods. Oh frak. Where is he keeping her, he’s got her penned up in this-in this place like she’s his pet and everything inside her contracts and twists and-
She screams.
ii. the cup
Kara hasn’t been at the helm of a Viper in months. She doubts her body could take the strain now. Stabbing pains shoot through her back for a while after she kills Leoben for the first time; when she lies down, she can feel the knots bunching up in her muscles. They fade after a while. She doesn’t know how long it takes. He never tells her what day it is, what time it is, how long it’s been.
“Time is not a halting march of minutes and hours,” he says. “Time flows in patterns too subtle for those crude measurements to detect. Things don’t take days, months, years. They take as long as they need to.”
“Before?” she asks.
“Before the inevitable,” he says. “Before the dam breaks, and what must happen can no longer be held back.”
She doesn’t have any weights, but she can still do resistance exercises. Crunches. Push-ups. Squat-thrusts. She works her way up to forty repetitions of each in sets of five. By the end, her lungs are burning and she’s drenched in sweat, but at least she doesn’t have the energy to think.
She hangs her pillow from a loose nail in the center of the doorway framing her bedroom and uses it as a punching bag. It has too much give to be really effective, but it’s better than nothing. She tries wadding up the pillow in its case to make it firmer, and that works, sort of.
She jogs in circles around the apartment until she’s too dizzy to see straight. With every lap, the walls seem to close in tighter until she’s running in tight tiny circles like a bug in a box, skittering across the floor for no reason other than the fact that it’s better to move than it is to sit and stare at nothing all day and all night.
She’s going crazy. She’s going absofrakkinglutely crazy. Do crazy people usually know they’re going nuts?
Gods, she almost looks forward to talking to him because she knows he’s not a hallucination. She wants to throw up when he touches her-or that’s what she tells herself, that’s what she has to believe-but at least his hands are solid, they’re real, and it’s so frakked-up to think of a Cylon being real but there you have it.
There’s a china mug sitting in the kitchen cabinet, all the way on the top shelf. A yellow cartoon bird is stenciled on the side. Beaky’s Big Boy Beaker, it says. She wonders where it came from, which smoldering wreck of a city he pulled it out of, and why. Kara smashes the mug against the counter and scoops most of the china slivers into the trash can. She keeps one tucked in her fist. It’s sharp; the edges remind her of sandpaper when they scratch against her palm.
“Hello, Kara,” he says later.
She doesn’t say anything.
“I can’t get you weights,” he says. “But if you wanted, I could give you an exercise strap. You’d have to promise not to try to kill me with it. I’ve seen you in here, Kara. You need to work yourself to the bone, don’t you? Exercise triggers the release of endorphins, but you-you aren’t happy, are you?”
“You blew up my home, took over my new home, took me away from my husband, and locked me up,” she says. “Why the hell would I be happy?”
“It goes deeper than that,” he says. “There’s a hole yawning inside you, Kara. There always has been. And there’s no bandage large enough to patch it up, no light strong enough to brighten it. Everything inside you withers and dies and falls into it, and there’s no return. No escape.”
“Shut up!” she screams, driving the china shard through his eye again and again and again. His hand closes around her wrist, but he’s not even trying to hold her back this time. A shudder rips through her. Her hand’s sticky, sticky and warm and coated with something thick and sluggish. “Shut up shut up shut up shut up.”
At least he stops talking. For now.
iii. the statue
He brings her books sometimes. One day (or night), he hands her a copy of the scrolls of Pythia.
“I thought you didn’t believe in the gods,” she says.
“They’re a face of the One God,” he says. “A guise He wears when He reveals himself to you. He has many masks, for to look at his face is to know eternity, and your minds, your tiny reservoirs of knowledge-they’re not equipped to handle it. They’d overflow.”
“Or maybe you toasters only see one side of the gods,” she replies. “They won’t reveal all of themselves to you because you’re not their creation. You’re a mistake. An abomination.”
His grip around her wrist is tight, tight enough to cut off the circulation to her hand. “It’s possible,” he says, “possible I’m unworthy of the full truth. But I see more of His plan than you can. And I know what He wants of you, Kara. If He has to talk to you through these idols-” He gestures to her figurines of Artemis and Athena. “Then He’ll do it until you’re ready to listen to the words behind the words. Until you’re ready to see beyond the masks.”
She shakes her head. His breath is hot against her lips. So close. She squeezes her eyes shut. She knows what he wants. She won’t. She can’t. She’s not that crazy. Yet. “Don’t make me,” she says, and it sounds like she’s whimpering, but this is what she’s become, he’s taken everything away and he’s going to take even more from her before he’s done. Bile floods her mouth.
He grips her shoulders. His palms are soaked; she feels the sweat from them bleed through her shirt. “No,” he says evenly. He doesn’t say anything else, just holds her there.
She clutches the statue of Athena, rubs her thumb over its face. Athena’s features are almost worn away by now; there are tiny pits and bumps in the wood, but no eyes, no ears, no nose.
The base is still sharp enough. She doesn’t have much range of motion in her arm like this, but it’s enough, enough to send blood trickling from his temple when she strikes him there. He flinches and lets go of her for just long enough for her to slip free; she hammers at that spot again and again, her lips set in a grim line. His head’s a counterweight bag and she’s practicing her punches. That’s how she has to think of it. A dark red stain spreads across Athena’s feet.
iv. the sink
She sleeps.
She wakes up.
When he cooks for her, she eats. He pinches her nose until she has to open her mouth to breathe, then he shoves food down her throat. He won’t use a feeding tube.
And that’s it. That’s her life.
Sometimes she doesn’t even leave her bed-she just stares at the ceiling for however long it takes. She doesn’t know what she expects to find up there. An answer, maybe. Nothing comes.
She wants a drink. She really wants a frakking drink.
She can’t remember the last time she bothered to change her clothes, or brush her teeth, or comb her hair. Leoben doesn’t say anything about it, and Kara doesn’t feel like going out of her way to impress him.
She stops up the sink, turns on the faucet, and lets the water flow until the basin’s full to brimming. Even then she doesn’t bother to turn it off. She braces her hands on either side of the sink and watches the water drip down the counter and form puddles on the floor. She pulls her hair back with one hand, holds her breath, and dunks her head in, sinks her face below the water until she feels the cold start to kick in, start to wake her up a little, but it doesn’t. She just feels wet. Wet and soggy. She’d cry, but she’s soaked enough, and it’s too much work to get any wetter than she already is.
“Kara.”
She turns around slowly. Leoben cups her face in his hands. “You’re starting to see, aren’t you?”
She blinks. Chews on her lower lip. Can’t look at him.
“You know what I want you to say,” he continues. “You know what has to be done.”
She’s quiet.
“Are you ready?” he whispers in her ear. Like a lover.
She closes her eyes. Opens them again.
He bends down until their lips almost touch-and she seizes the back of his neck and pulls him closer, then pivots to the side and keeps tugging him down, down until his head is submerged in the sink and her hands are bearing down on the back of his neck, keeping him there as he twitches. He’s dying subtly, not jerking under her hands but just trembling there, trembling like the fat drops of water poised at the edge of the counter.
There’s no blood this time, just the sound of the faucet running.
Kara walks over to the couch and sits down, resting her head in her hands. Waiting for him to come back.
um.
sorry. But here it is.
Four. ~2,150 words.
"We start over. Five times now."
BSG, Kara/Leoben. R.
Spoilers through the first episode of Season Three.
i. the chair
There’s a real ceiling over Kara’s head when she opens her eyes. She rolls over, buries her face in the pillow, and bites down on it to keep from screaming, bites down until her jaw hurts and she tastes something coppery mixed in with her saliva and the cloth. But she doesn’t scream. She hears someone rummaging through the dishes in the kitchen, and she’s not going to let him hear her like this.
She’s going to kill him today.
There aren’t any knives in the apartment. He says he loves her but he’s not stupid.
(“I know you,” he said. He’s wrong. He’s lying.)
There are two chairs at the dining table. She can break one of them over his head. He’s stronger than she is, but his bones are still-she hates to use the word human. She can still crack his skull if she uses enough blunt force. She can fill up the sink and shove his head under the water until he drowns. He might even like that.
“Breakfast is ready, Kara,” he calls.
She stumbles out of the door, still half-drunk on sleep. Her mouth feels like it’s been stuffed with cotton balls.
“Is it morning?” she asks. Light shines through the curtains, but light’s been pouring into the apartment since she came here, whenever that was. She can’t look at it directly. It makes her vision swim.
“Morning.” He sets a white plastic plate on the table. He’s made her eggs. Kara claps her hands over her stomach to keep it from growling. She hasn’t had eggs in two years, not since Adama took her to that restaurant on Caprica for her birthday. “Morning is a matter of personal time. I’ve found no clear delineation between morning and afternoon. The sun rolls across the sky; at its apex, some people will point to it and say, ‘Ah. Afternoon.’ But identifying when it’s directly overhead-that depends on where you’re standing. And in space, when so many stars traverse the darkness around you…what light do you point to then?” He shrugs and closes his eyes. “But I’d like to think it’s morning now. Early morning, when the first pink rays of dawn break over the trees.”
Kara grips the back of the chair. She’s still strong enough to pick up a frakking chair. She has to be.
“Won’t you sit?” he asks her.
“No thanks.” She lifts the chair with her back, not her legs, but the important thing is that she’s swinging it at him with all her might. He raises his palms in front of his face, his fingers spread wide, but he’s not quick enough to catch it; one of the legs whacks him hard across the temple and he spins to the side, sags, flows to the ground in a heap. One of his hands gropes around on the tabletop, and then it slides to the floor, too.
Kara vaults over his body and sprints up the steps. He’s locked the screen door; she braces her foot on the doorframe and yanks on the handle until her arms scream at her to stop. Just once more, she thinks. This time she hears something buckle, and the handle hurtles towards her chest. She staggers back and sticks her head through the door.
Bars. Big metal bars in a neat row right in front of her. Frak. Oh gods. Oh frak. Where is he keeping her, he’s got her penned up in this-in this place like she’s his pet and everything inside her contracts and twists and-
She screams.
ii. the cup
Kara hasn’t been at the helm of a Viper in months. She doubts her body could take the strain now. Stabbing pains shoot through her back for a while after she kills Leoben for the first time; when she lies down, she can feel the knots bunching up in her muscles. They fade after a while. She doesn’t know how long it takes. He never tells her what day it is, what time it is, how long it’s been.
“Time is not a halting march of minutes and hours,” he says. “Time flows in patterns too subtle for those crude measurements to detect. Things don’t take days, months, years. They take as long as they need to.”
“Before?” she asks.
“Before the inevitable,” he says. “Before the dam breaks, and what must happen can no longer be held back.”
She doesn’t have any weights, but she can still do resistance exercises. Crunches. Push-ups. Squat-thrusts. She works her way up to forty repetitions of each in sets of five. By the end, her lungs are burning and she’s drenched in sweat, but at least she doesn’t have the energy to think.
She hangs her pillow from a loose nail in the center of the doorway framing her bedroom and uses it as a punching bag. It has too much give to be really effective, but it’s better than nothing. She tries wadding up the pillow in its case to make it firmer, and that works, sort of.
She jogs in circles around the apartment until she’s too dizzy to see straight. With every lap, the walls seem to close in tighter until she’s running in tight tiny circles like a bug in a box, skittering across the floor for no reason other than the fact that it’s better to move than it is to sit and stare at nothing all day and all night.
She’s going crazy. She’s going absofrakkinglutely crazy. Do crazy people usually know they’re going nuts?
Gods, she almost looks forward to talking to him because she knows he’s not a hallucination. She wants to throw up when he touches her-or that’s what she tells herself, that’s what she has to believe-but at least his hands are solid, they’re real, and it’s so frakked-up to think of a Cylon being real but there you have it.
There’s a china mug sitting in the kitchen cabinet, all the way on the top shelf. A yellow cartoon bird is stenciled on the side. Beaky’s Big Boy Beaker, it says. She wonders where it came from, which smoldering wreck of a city he pulled it out of, and why. Kara smashes the mug against the counter and scoops most of the china slivers into the trash can. She keeps one tucked in her fist. It’s sharp; the edges remind her of sandpaper when they scratch against her palm.
“Hello, Kara,” he says later.
She doesn’t say anything.
“I can’t get you weights,” he says. “But if you wanted, I could give you an exercise strap. You’d have to promise not to try to kill me with it. I’ve seen you in here, Kara. You need to work yourself to the bone, don’t you? Exercise triggers the release of endorphins, but you-you aren’t happy, are you?”
“You blew up my home, took over my new home, took me away from my husband, and locked me up,” she says. “Why the hell would I be happy?”
“It goes deeper than that,” he says. “There’s a hole yawning inside you, Kara. There always has been. And there’s no bandage large enough to patch it up, no light strong enough to brighten it. Everything inside you withers and dies and falls into it, and there’s no return. No escape.”
“Shut up!” she screams, driving the china shard through his eye again and again and again. His hand closes around her wrist, but he’s not even trying to hold her back this time. A shudder rips through her. Her hand’s sticky, sticky and warm and coated with something thick and sluggish. “Shut up shut up shut up shut up.”
At least he stops talking. For now.
iii. the statue
He brings her books sometimes. One day (or night), he hands her a copy of the scrolls of Pythia.
“I thought you didn’t believe in the gods,” she says.
“They’re a face of the One God,” he says. “A guise He wears when He reveals himself to you. He has many masks, for to look at his face is to know eternity, and your minds, your tiny reservoirs of knowledge-they’re not equipped to handle it. They’d overflow.”
“Or maybe you toasters only see one side of the gods,” she replies. “They won’t reveal all of themselves to you because you’re not their creation. You’re a mistake. An abomination.”
His grip around her wrist is tight, tight enough to cut off the circulation to her hand. “It’s possible,” he says, “possible I’m unworthy of the full truth. But I see more of His plan than you can. And I know what He wants of you, Kara. If He has to talk to you through these idols-” He gestures to her figurines of Artemis and Athena. “Then He’ll do it until you’re ready to listen to the words behind the words. Until you’re ready to see beyond the masks.”
She shakes her head. His breath is hot against her lips. So close. She squeezes her eyes shut. She knows what he wants. She won’t. She can’t. She’s not that crazy. Yet. “Don’t make me,” she says, and it sounds like she’s whimpering, but this is what she’s become, he’s taken everything away and he’s going to take even more from her before he’s done. Bile floods her mouth.
He grips her shoulders. His palms are soaked; she feels the sweat from them bleed through her shirt. “No,” he says evenly. He doesn’t say anything else, just holds her there.
She clutches the statue of Athena, rubs her thumb over its face. Athena’s features are almost worn away by now; there are tiny pits and bumps in the wood, but no eyes, no ears, no nose.
The base is still sharp enough. She doesn’t have much range of motion in her arm like this, but it’s enough, enough to send blood trickling from his temple when she strikes him there. He flinches and lets go of her for just long enough for her to slip free; she hammers at that spot again and again, her lips set in a grim line. His head’s a counterweight bag and she’s practicing her punches. That’s how she has to think of it. A dark red stain spreads across Athena’s feet.
iv. the sink
She sleeps.
She wakes up.
When he cooks for her, she eats. He pinches her nose until she has to open her mouth to breathe, then he shoves food down her throat. He won’t use a feeding tube.
And that’s it. That’s her life.
Sometimes she doesn’t even leave her bed-she just stares at the ceiling for however long it takes. She doesn’t know what she expects to find up there. An answer, maybe. Nothing comes.
She wants a drink. She really wants a frakking drink.
She can’t remember the last time she bothered to change her clothes, or brush her teeth, or comb her hair. Leoben doesn’t say anything about it, and Kara doesn’t feel like going out of her way to impress him.
She stops up the sink, turns on the faucet, and lets the water flow until the basin’s full to brimming. Even then she doesn’t bother to turn it off. She braces her hands on either side of the sink and watches the water drip down the counter and form puddles on the floor. She pulls her hair back with one hand, holds her breath, and dunks her head in, sinks her face below the water until she feels the cold start to kick in, start to wake her up a little, but it doesn’t. She just feels wet. Wet and soggy. She’d cry, but she’s soaked enough, and it’s too much work to get any wetter than she already is.
“Kara.”
She turns around slowly. Leoben cups her face in his hands. “You’re starting to see, aren’t you?”
She blinks. Chews on her lower lip. Can’t look at him.
“You know what I want you to say,” he continues. “You know what has to be done.”
She’s quiet.
“Are you ready?” he whispers in her ear. Like a lover.
She closes her eyes. Opens them again.
He bends down until their lips almost touch-and she seizes the back of his neck and pulls him closer, then pivots to the side and keeps tugging him down, down until his head is submerged in the sink and her hands are bearing down on the back of his neck, keeping him there as he twitches. He’s dying subtly, not jerking under her hands but just trembling there, trembling like the fat drops of water poised at the edge of the counter.
There’s no blood this time, just the sound of the faucet running.
Kara walks over to the couch and sits down, resting her head in her hands. Waiting for him to come back.