Some Fall On You Like a Storm
Fandom: Battlestar Galactica
Rating: teen
Characters/Ships: Kara and Helo, background Kara/Zak
Summary: Kara can't outrun her guilt, but that's fine.
A/N: For
latentfunction. 290 words. Set pre-series.
After Zak dies, Kara goes from scary to really frakking scary. That's what Helo says. That's probably what a lot of people at the Caprica Flight School are saying, but he's the only one with the balls to say it to her face. This is just after she's given her students the dressing down of their stupid, careless young lives. So she's really not in the mood.
"Scary?" she snorts, reaching for another beer. "They don't know scary. You don't know scary."
"Neither do you, Kara," he tells her in that mild, reasonable tone that makes her wish she'd known him years ago, after her dad left and her mom started slamming doors on her fingers. It also makes her want to slug him, but she's still sober enough to recognize that as a bad idea. Not because he'll hit her back or walk coolly out of her life. He wouldn't do either. What he would do is give her this look - this patient, wounded look that she's only seen twice before, once after Commander Jonasson threw her in the brig, once after confessing to almost cheating on Zak - and she's just not in the mood.
What she is in the mood for, she decides, studying her beer bottle to avoid Helo's eyes, is flight. If she can just get in a Viper and take it high enough, fast enough…
Her guilt will chase her, she knows. Zak's ghost isn't going to let her escape that easily. And that's fine. It's what she deserves for not loving him enough, for letting his father and brother believe that his death isn't her fault.
Kara's comfortable enough with guilt. It's a familiar enemy, anyway. Absolution scares the hell out of her.
5/15/09