Scars that Words have Carved 9/9
Title: Scars that Words Have Carved
Fandom: BSG/Buffyverse
Chapter: 9/9
Words: ~5750
Pairings: Lee/Kara, Kara/Faith, Faith/Kat
Rating: PG-13 - NC-17 (PG-13 this chapter)
Setting: S2.5-S4.0
Summary: And yet, somehow, despite everything, she was still standing.
Beta'd by the wonderful, amazing taragel who really helped me get through this stupid thing.
Previous Chapters Here
Ten Months later…
“Major Adama?”
Lee turned to see Dee walking up alongside him; there was a piece of paper in her hand and he got the feeling he knew exactly what this was about. “Let me guess, Caroline Davies?” he asked, taking the paper from him.
“Fifth message in two weeks,” she replied.
Lee rubbed at his temple. Frak. He didn’t have time to deal with this right now, didn’t have time to deal with some mystery person from the Pyxis who kept trying to get in touch with him. What he had to deal with was the fact that someone kept trying to blow up Baltar’s lawyers and, with the trial two weeks away, he didn’t have much time for anything else. “You know what?” He folded the paper in half. “I’ll meet with her. She can say whatever the frak it is she wants to say and then she’ll leave me alone.”
“Good.” She pointed to the folded paper in her hands. “Because that says she’s coming on a civilian transport to Galactica today.”
Lee shook his head. “Alright, I’ll meet her at the hangar deck. I just need a few minutes.”
Dee gave him a solemn nod and headed back towards CIC, leaving Lee to continue to his intended destination. He walked along the corridor, making a few more turns, before he finally came to a stop. He sucked in a deep breath as he walked past the rows of photographs until he came to the spot where he’d stood so many times before, and pulled the photograph out of his pocket.
Lee looked up at the spot on the wall where a photograph of Kat was pinned just to the left of where Slayer’s dogtags hung. This was the spot, Kara’d told him once. This was where she wanted to be. He’d tried to put the photograph up before, but he simply seemed to lack the willpower to put the picture on the wall, leave her there as one photograph among thousands, and walk away.
Putting it up meant he no could no longer put it off, push it to the back of his mind, and he’d finally have to come to terms with the fact that she was gone-Kara was gone-and he hadn’t been able to do a damned thing about it.
The first days after the exodus had been bad. Even after they’d moved back into the bunkroom (following Lee’s reinstatement as CAG), he could still hear her across the room-tossing, turning, whimpering in her sleep, waking in starts, and disappearing out into the corridor. One night, he’d followed her. When he caught up to her, she’d spun around, striking him hard in the jaw. Her eyes had been wide, panicked, and she’d just shaken out her hand, asked him what the hell he was doing following her like that. He’d asked her about the nightmares and she’d told him to stop watching her while she slept because it was frakking creepy.
He didn’t mention it again, but he still watched and listened. Lee thought after a while the dreams had stopped; but maybe she’d just gotten better at hiding them. The days seemed to be better. She’d resumed flying CAP but there was no chatter, no flashy hot-shot tricks anymore. She stepped up as flight instructor again, but she was harder on the nuggets, yelled more than she used to (which had always been a considerable amount), but Lee didn’t question her methods. On occasion, he’d find her in the gym, beating the punching bag until her knuckles bled. He’d foolishly chalked that up to the stress they were all under-mood swings, outbursts, he assumed it was nothing more than what they were all feeling, heightened with Starbuck’s usual hot-blooded nature.
Lee had known bits of what had happened to her planetside from debriefings-she’d worked for the resistance and about two months into the occupation she’d been taken from the marketplace and held prisoner for another two months. That was all he knew. Sometimes, when they’d been alone together in his office, he’d ask her what happened, but she never gave him more than that. He’d pushed her for a little while, but she pushed right back. Eventually he’d stopped asking, favoring being with her to arguing with her in the limited free time they could snatch.
Hindsight was a real bitch. Now, he realized that was the biggest mistake of all. Maybe if he’d just pushed her a little more, made her open up to him, even been a superior asshole and ordered her to see a shrink, she could’ve gotten some help.
Maybe she wouldn’t have ignored his hails and flown into that frakking storm,
Maybe she wouldn’t have left him.
He stared down at the photograph in his hand; Kara’s face was completely lit up with laughter and a smile that went all the way to her eyes. She looked happy in a way he hadn’t seen her in months, happy in a way he’d never see her again. Lee felt his stomach churn at the thought. It was a selfish one. He wanted to believe she could be happy wherever she was now but Lee had never believed in the Gods. Kara had said she’d see him on the other side. He hadn’t had time to tell her that he didn’t think there was one. He hadn’t had time to tell her anything important. Lee shut his eyes tight, holding the picture to his chest.
“So are you gonna stand there all day or are you gonna put it up?” A voice, an all-too-familiar drawl, jolted Lee out of his thoughts. He turned to see a dead woman staring at him from a few feet away. She wore tattered-looking civilian clothing, and her hair was stringy and unwashed under a cap pulled low. But when she raised her head, Faith Lehane’s face stared at him, looking exactly the way Lee remembered. He felt his jaw go slack.
“I was wondering when you were gonna start answering my messages, but finally I figured it’d just be easier if I came over myself.” She stepped forward, surveying the wall. Her eyes fell onto the photograph of Louanne Katraine and she frowned. “Kat too?” There was a little break in her voice. “Gods, can’t believe I didn’t hear about that.”
He stared hard, the pieces finally clicking into place. “Caroline Davies?”
“Good looking and smart. You haven’t changed, Apollo.”
“You have,” he frowned. “Considering the fact that you were declared dead.”
“Assumptions make you an ass outta me… or something like that.” She laughed. He didn’t. Her smile dropped and she gave a nod of her head down the corridor, tugging her cap down once again. “Look, I’ll explain, okay? Got some place we can talk? You know, private? Had a hell of a time sneaking around the marines, tryin’ not to get recognized.”
He looked her up and down. There were supposed to be twelve cylon models and only seven were known; it was enough to give anyone pause. “Give me one good reason I shouldn’t shove you out an airlock right now,” he said, voice low and cold, and Faith’s eyes narrowed at the obvious implications. “You said yourself, you didn’t want anyone recognizing you.”
“‘Cause I’m a frakking deserter, Apollo!” she snapped. “If I was a cylon I wouldn’t’ve bothered going through the trouble of announcing my presence. You think I’d be here if I was a cylon?”
“Then why the hell are you here, Lehane?” he asked, folding his arms over his chest.
“Look, I heard about K, alright? Someone like Starbuck dies, the entire frakking fleet hears about it.” She shoved her hands into her pocket. “I just… figured it sucks for me, and it probably sucks worse for you, ‘cause you and K were…a thing and… frak, maybe this was a stupid idea.”
Lee watched the way her shoulders slumped. That was something he didn’t recognize from before-Slayer had been all swagger and talking big and showing off with a bravado to rival Starbuck’s, and now here she was looking about as lost as he felt. He shook his head, pocketing the photo again. “Follow me.”
---
“Huh. See you got demoted,” Faith said, striding into the CAG’s office. “What did you frak up?” Faith remembered the only time she and Apollo were alone here. Ten minutes of him screaming at her for nicking Starbuck’s bird with friendly fire is kind of a sick memory now. She looks back, watching him close the hatch behind them.
No sooner had the hatch clicked shut, than he started with the questions. “Alright, you said you had explanations. Start explaining.”
Faith spread her arms wide open. “Where do you want me to start?”
His arms folded over his chest again, leveling a hard look at her. “Let’s start with how you’re here. Last I heard, Tigh sent you off on a suicide mission.”
Heaving a sigh, she plopped down, taking a seat on his desk. Faith pulled off her cap and raked a hand through her hair, fingers getting caught in a couple of knots along the way. “Okay, right.” Her gaze fixed on the floor. “So, Tigh found out that I was… doin’ vigilante work, killing New Cap cops at night.” She glanced up at Lee, but his expression hadn’t changed. She suddenly felt wave of guilt wash through her, imagining Kara looking at her with the same wary disapproval. “Guess he was pretty pissed about losin’ his eye or something and he wanted to take it out on the prez.”
“I got that part. Skip ahead to how you lived.”
“Right…so, I got there, missed the shot-missed twelve shots…and bam, outta nowhere, one of the cylons took me out at the knees and the other was sayin’ all this shit about having me taken to the basestar because I’d be useful.” Lee’s gaze had softened somewhat, but she just stared past him at the wall. “I figured, that I had that comin’ to me… like my own personal hell, only worse because I wasn’t actually dead.” She let out a bitter laugh. “Whatever they were gonna do to me, I deserved it ‘cause I was a homicidal psycho.”
“So the cylons kept you prisoner?” He pushed past her, circling to the other side of the desk and digging through a drawer.
She shook her head, her mouth a grim line.“They were gonna. They were dragging me off when bam, outta nowhere I hear gunshots, and the two skinjobs that were carrying me off just dropped. I didn’t see who did it, I just started running and didn’t stop. I-”
“Gaeta,” Lee said, looking down at a folder he’d dug up. “When we were… looking into your disappearance, Gaeta came forward as the last one who saw you alive. He says he saw you being dragged off, shot the cylons, then went to…confront the president. But no one else could confirm your whereabouts after that. It was assumed you were left behind.”
Faith raised an eyebrow and fought back a laugh. “Gaeta? Gaeta saved me? Didn’t know he had it in him… ‘specially after I pistolwhipped him.”
“You missed some excitement. A few weeks ago he stabbed Baltar in the neck with a pen.”
“Huh.” She gave a little nod of appreciation. “Good for him.”
Lee pulled out a chair, sitting down and looking up at her. “Slippery weasel lived though.”
She laughed. “I swear that guy’s like a cat or something, but he’s gotta be runnin’ out of lives soon.”
That got a chuckle out of Lee as well; he looked down at the file and then back at her. “Your story checks out. But… where were you? Kara… she didn’t want to stop looking but when the census was done…” The tiny smile she’d gotten out of him was gone, his voice dropping as he continued. “…she didn’t take it well.”
“Well like I said, I started runnin’ and I ended up in a crush of people getting herded onto the ships to get the frak out of there. I ended up on the Pyxis, took the name of someone in the resistance who’d died and lucked out that nobody there knew her.” Faith pushed herself to her feet, looking down at Lee. “Got any more questions or is the interrogation portion of this reunion over?”
Lee got up again, rummaging through another part of his desk. When he stood again, he had a bottle of ambrosia and two glasses. “Just one more,” he said, filling each glass half way with alcohol, and setting them down on the desk. “Tell me about the resistance… about Kara, what happened to her down there.”
“She didn’t tell you?” Faith said, taking one of the glasses.
“You know how much she loved to share,” he said.
She tipped her head back, emptying the glass of it’s liquid in one long swallow. “Where to start… she was the brains of it all. Really was the one to get things going, all fight ‘em ‘til we can’t and all that.” Faith remembered how it felt at the time, the desire to fight purely for the sake of bloodshed, wanting to feel necks snapping beneath her hands. She wanted to kill, ‘cause she had nothing else.
“K didn’t know about my… extracurriculars She woulda shut me down right away. Kept acting like my frakking babysitter most of the time, like I couldn’t take care of myself or something. After the first bombing we pulled off… gave me a big lecture about how bein’ out after curfew was gonna get you killed…” she shook her head, a parody of a grin bitterly twisted her lips, “and then the next morning the skinjobs got her in broad daylight. After a while,” she lowered her head, swallowed hard, “people just figured she was dead.”
Lee was looking at her like he was expecting more, expecting answers, but Faith didn’t have anything else to give him and shrugged. He stared down into his glass.
Unsure of what else to do, Faith reached for the bottle, filling her glass again. “To K, one hell of a fighter.” She looked down into her glass. The words weren’t enough; Kara didn’t just fight the cylons, she fought for the people she cared about. She’d fought for Faith, never gave up on her, even when she’d given up on herself. “And one hell of a friend.” She reached out, tapped the edge of her glass to his and they both tossed their drinks back.
Faith grinned a bit as Lee took the bottle from her and poured another round. “To Kara,” he said, raising his glass. He looked like it hurt too much to think too hard. He sounded so blank when he said, “There’ll never be anyone like her again.”
“I’ll drink to that,” she replied, downing her shot. Almost gleeful this time, as she started to feel the warm buzz of booze in her blood, she poured yet another. “Here’s to K, who’d be really frakking pissed that we’re drinking without her.”
It went back and forth like that for a little while, emptying the bottle shot by shot with stories and toasts until Lee choked a bit downing a shot. “Okay, I think that’s enough.” He coughed, wiping a drop of ambrosia that dribble down his chin and set his glass aside.
Faith glanced at the bottle, which still had a few drinks worth left in it. “Come on, we gotta finish what we started here.” She swirled the contents around for show before pouring two more drinks and shoving the glass back into his hand. “Your turn, let’s hear another one.”
He heaved a sigh. “Alright.”
“And make it a good one this time.”
Lee glared at her and cleared his throat, holding up his glass. “To Kara,” he started. He cleared his throat again. He sucked in a breath and shook his head. “Kara…”
Faith watched the glass slip from his hand, shattering against the metal. His hands were shaking violently, and it didn’t sound like he was breathing too good. Frak. She set her glass down on the desk just in time to catch Lee before he fell to the floor. “Too much too fast, huh?”
He muttered something so soft and so strangled that she couldn’t make out what he said. “You’re gonna have to speak up, Apollo.” Faith hooked her arm around his shoulders and helped him over to the couch-had to keep from falling on the broken glass and cutting the shit out of himself. He landed heavily on the cushions.
He shook his head, a short sobbing sound slipping out as he said, “She’s gone. She’s really gone.”
Faith frowned. Frak. Comfort wasn’t exactly her thing. She was in way over her head here. “Yeah, she is.” The words struck something in her. Faith had never been one to get sentimental about death. Hell, they hadn’t called her slayer for nothing. You did your time and when it was up…well, that was it. But she’d never had anyone like Kara die on her. Starbuck was the only person who’d never given up on Faith. Frak, she’d even got herself stuck on New Caprica because of some stupid idea that she could save Faith from herself or something. And now she was gone, and there wasn’t a single frakking person alive who thought she wasn’t a total waste of space.
But one look at Apollo’s face and she knew that her grief couldn’t touch whatever shit he was going through. Apollo looked like hell, just … frakking broken. Gods, the idiot looked like he’d actually been in love with her.
Well, there was nothing she could say that was going to make things better for him. He was just going to have to get over it. Kara was dead and nothing was gonna change that. There were no words that were gonna magically make this better, but Faith could think of a few things she could do to keep his mind off things-for a little while.
She bent down, straddling him as he slumped on the couch. She caught his head between her hands and tugged his face up towards her. His eyes went wide just as her mouth came crashing down on his.
---
It took Lee about thirty seconds longer than it should for his brain to catch up. Faith’s hands were already pulling at the buttons on his uniform and her hips were grinding purposefully into his, but he managed to grab a hold of her shoulders and push her back. “What are you doing?”
She looked down at him, lips curving into a frown as she shrugged. “Just trying to make you feel better.”
Lee blinked hard as Faith moved in again. This time he was able to hold her off. “No Faith, just stop.”
“What?” she snapped, sitting back a bit. “I bet you haven’t gotten laid since K. I just figured I’d do you a favor.”
Of course, he thought. Of course Faith would consider doing something like this helpful. He sat up and he could feel that old headache he used to get whenever she was around starting to build. “Look, I love Kara and she is gone. I have to live the rest of my frakking life knowing that if I hadn’t been so frakking blind to what was really going on with her maybe I could have saved her.” The words tore out of him with a choked off sob of relief at finally being able to say them to someone. “And you think this is gonna make me feel better?”
Faith’s expression darkened as she shoved herself to her feet. “You know what? Frak this,” she said, turning and glancing around the room, bewildered.
“Are you frakking kidding me? You came here to get laid and since you can’t get what you want you’re just going to disappear again?”
“That’s the plan.”
“Frak,” he hissed as he got to his feet. “You haven’t changed at all.”
She shoved him aside searching in the couch cushions now, not looking at him at all. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“So why don’t you enlighten me?” He swayed a little bit, the booze making his actions a little too hard to control, but he placed himself in front of the desk. “What are you doing here? It’s been months and there was a blanket pardon issued, Faith! For everything that happened down there on New Caprica. But no, you stayed hidden away… why?”
Faith was studying the floor. “‘Cause I’m dangerous. Okay?”
“You’re not ‘dangerous’, Faith,” he sneered, shaking his head. “You’re pathetic.”
That got her attention. She spun towards him, jaw slightly slack. She did have a slightly dangerous glint in her eye and he knew he probably should have stopped there. He didn’t. “What do you think Kara would say if she saw you like this-”
Faith stepped in, glowering, growling, “Don’t you dare-”
“She believed in you! On top of whatever else happened to her on that frakking mudball, she blamed herself for leaving you behind and it was driving her nuts.” He poked an angry finger at her, steady now as the dizziness was replaced by full-blown anger, a fire burning in his gut. Faith stood motionless as he continued. “Maybe if you hadn’t run off, made her think it was her fault you were gone, maybe she’d still be alive.”
Faith recoiled from the words, as though they had been a physical blow. Teeth gritted, she stared up at him, eyes wide and shaking her head. “What the hell do you want from me, Apollo?”
He took a breath, trying to get control of himself. He kept his voice low and even when he spoke again. “I don’t want anything from you. But Kara wouldn’t have wanted you to just go running off.” Lee turned, grabbing Faith’s hat off the desk and throwing it back to her. Maybe now that she was actually listening to him, she could do some good. He looked at her with cool appraisal, challenge in his gaze. “We’ve lost some of our best pilots.”
She arched an eyebrow at him, twisting her hat between her hands. “You want me to re-up?” She paused, but he didn’t respond. “Anyone knows I’m here, I’m gonna get court-martialed for desertion.”
Lee simply turned and walked towards the hatch. He pulled it open and stood aside, looking back at her. “You think you’ve changed? Prove it.”
---
Faith spent a month in the brig. She’d thought she’d be facing a year in confinement and a dishonorable discharge, but the Admiral only charged her with desertion for a period of less than three days. Later, she found out that Apollo had pointed out that she’d only been gone for thirty-six hours at the time the cylons arrived at New Caprica, prolonging her absence from the fleet. There were other, bigger, court cases at the time and the Fleet needed its pilots. Adama decided to overlook the months after New Caprica and Faith got off easy.
Her first stop after she’d been released was the memorial wall. As Faith took her dogtags off their place between the photographs of Kat and Kara, she made a promise. She wasn’t sure if it was to them, or to herself, but it didn’t much matter. Faith was sticking around. She’d do better this time, try to be a model soldier even if it killed her. There was some irony in that, but she didn’t dwell on it. She needed to report for duty.
The fleet hadn’t exactly welcomed her back with open arms, but they did take her back. The racks were possibly even more uncomfortable than she remembered, but having a real shower again wasn’t exactly something she was turning her nose up at. She was about as welcome at the triad table as she had been when she first transferred, so not much new there. Helo, who’d been one of her regular visitors in hack, had taken up sparring with her again and there were some times when she was sure that was the only thing keeping her sane. Faith noticed more missing faces than she wanted to admit, but there were old, familiar ones now from Pegasus, too.
Things were different now and they just kept on changing. The week she got out of the brig, Apollo’d stepped down from the service and Helo’d stepped up as CAG. Gaius Baltar, who’d managed to dodge her bullets, also dodged a death sentence from the court-thanks to Apollo actually. She’d heard some of his big speech. He hadn’t mentioned Kara by name, but Faith heard it anyway when he talked about them all being guilty, one way or another.
Of course, the biggest change came right after that. After the trial and the jump to the Ionian nebula and the weird ass power outage that followed, dradis picked up a cylon fleet. Faith didn’t get out into the fight until the second wave of vipers launched, but the fight wasn’t the strange part. The strange part was the viper that shouldn’t have been out there. For a minute, Faith was sure she’d been seeing things.
Back on the hangar deck, everyone crowded around the viper-Starbuck’s viper-watching a dead woman grinning as she climbed out of the cockpit. Faith didn’t know how she knew it, but she did. It was K, it was. Turns out she wasn’t the only one who knew it. Faith felt someone shove past her and watched as Lee ran forward, arms wrapping around Kara and crushing her to his chest.
Faith folded her arms across her stomach, feeling a like a voyeur and not in the good way.
And then the marines showed up.
---
The scriptures called a return from beyond the grave a miracle, but coming back from the dead hadn’t exactly endeared Kara to a lot of people.
She sat alone in an unused meeting room, trying to piece together what bits of information she could to plan a beginning route for when she took over the Demetrius. It was actually a welcome change from the constant suspicion and accusations, the rooms falling silent whenever she walked through a doorway.
Could be worse, she thought. Even though she’d been adamant to all who asked that she’d been gone for six hours and had no way to account for the time difference, it was only half the truth. It really had only felt like a few hours, but what had actually happened to her-well, it sounded like textbook insanity, and she just couldn’t frak this up, not now.
Kara shoved herself to her feet, fingers rubbing at her temples as she paced the room. Those things had said they would help her, but clearly they had a strange definition of help. She tried to remember the information, the clues they’d given her, but it all felt hazy now.
She remembered what happened before perfectly, remembered her downward spiral that ended in a bad dream-a dream about the man who wore Leoben’s face, the thing that had held her captive for weeks on end, who told her she was special, that she had a destiny. She remembered that dream so vividly because it had given her a way out of the trainwreck everything had become.
She remembered the flash of heat as her viper exploded around her.
*~*~*
“Your death has been a mistake.”
“A cosmic error, if you would.”
These two… things-gold and blue, dressed in a manner that the Lords of Kobol have often been depicted-have been trying to explain to her that a couple of higher powers looking the wrong way at the wrong time had led to a SNAFU in the ongoing battle between good and evil.
“Think you can run that by me again?” she snaps.
“You are a champion, Kara Thrace, a physical agent for the Powers that Be.”
Great. More talk of destiny. Exactly what she needs right now.
“Which unfortunately makes you a likely target for the forces of evil-those who would send the universe into chaos and darkness. You were visited by one such force.”
“The force, perhaps, is more accurate. The oldest evil known to exist. The First.”
“The First? Couldn’t come up with a better name?”
“The First is incorporeal and cannot physically alter the world. It can only act through manipulation, convincing others to do its work for it, taking the form of those who have passed away-at least once.”
“And its grand evil scheme was getting me to kill myself?” she asks, eyebrow raised. “I think that it was in serious need of a new hobby.”
“You hold the key to finding Earth, Kara Thrace. Removing you from the physical realm will prevent the human race from reaching its new home. Without you, the scales tip in the favor of chaos.”
In one instant, everything becomes clear. Exactly what she needs to do. Frakking destiny crap. “Put me back.”
The pair regard her warily; the man shakes his head. “What’s done is done.”
She fights back the urge to hit them. Hitting a god, or god-like being, or whatever the hell they are, isn’t going to do her much good right now. Cursing works though. “Frak that! You said yourselves that this shouldn’t have happened, I shouldn’t be dead. So fix it! Send me back! You’re so frakking concerned with the battle of good and evil then let me go back and fix it.”
They look at each other, conferring in silence. The woman turns back to her. “Very well. On one condition…”
*~*~*
The sound of the hatch creaking open jerked Kara out of her thoughts. Arms folded over her chest, Faith sauntered into the room, regarding her with a smile she might even call warm. She’d known Faith was alive, had gotten the whole story from Lee when he came to visit her in the brig. Still, she hadn’t seen her yet, hadn’t seen her since New Caprica. Watching her step through that hatch, a tumble of emotions welled up inside of her-relief and rage being the two top contenders at the moment. But she couldn’t settle on one to say anything.
It was Faith who finally broke the silence. “So, I heard you tried to kill the president.” She stepped towards Kara.
“Yeah,” Kara said, her arms crossing her chest in a similar pose. “Not my smartest move.”
“Join the club.” Faith shrugged, letting out a bittersweet laugh, her arms falling to her sides. “But hey, look at you now. Got your own ship and everything.”
“It’s a sewage treatment ship. I think it’s more of a punishment than anything else.” Kara grinned at the way Faith’s nose wrinkled, her lips twisting, and her cheeks looking a bit green.
“Nah. I figure if they really wanted to punish you they’d’ve sent me too. Two birds. One stone.” Faith dug her hands into her pockets. “Demotion to ensign, restriction of limits, oh,” her face lit up with a laugh, “and my new best friends are the dirty dishes in the mess. Could be worse though, if it wasn’t for your boytoy, I’d be stuck in the brig for another year.”
“Shame,” Kara said, fighting a grin. “I could’ve used the company.”
The corner of Faith’s lips quirked upwards in the obnoxious smirk Kara’d seen her wear so many times. “Did you just say you wanted my company, K? ‘Cause I seem to remember a couple months in a cave where you acted like havin’ me around was some divine punishment the gods had cooked up for you.”
Kara looked at the woman standing across from her and tried to see the Lieutenant Lehane who’d barged into her life with booze theft and fistfights, the Slayer with her we-got-no-future-so-frak-it-all mindset, that had perpetually driven her up one bulkhead and down the other. She wasn’t there anymore. What Kara saw was a woman who’d taken childhood refuge in imaginary friends, who masked her scars with tattoos, who drank and fought and frakked her pain away, who flew like she had a deathwish because she did, who’d tried to make herself disappear. And yet, somehow, despite everything, she was still standing.
Kara just smiled. “Yeah, well… you kept things interesting.” Silence reigned for a moment, before Kara remembered that she actually had work to get done. “Look, I’m actually kinda busy right now. So… uh…”
Faith waved it off. “Yeah. Later.”
Faith headed for the hatch and Kara headed back to her seat. She seat down, clicking her pen open and waiting for the sound of the hatch opening and shutting. She never heard it. She looked back to see Faith walking towards her again.
Faith walked up to the table, looking down at the papers. “So… you’re off to find Earth?”
“That’s the plan.”
Faith was silent as her gaze flicked over the charts and maps. “I tried to volunteer for the mission, you know, but apparently I’m too much of a liability.”
Kara arched an eyebrow. “I thought you didn’t believe in Earth.”
Faith tilted her head to look at Kara, her hands braced on the table in front of her. “Well, you never gave up on me. Figured the least I could do is return the favor.”
Kara looked at her, for once rendered completely speechless. She opened her mouth, ready to reel out some snappy Who are you and what did you do with Faith Lehane? comeback. But she didn’t. Instead, she just said, “Thank you.”
A look passed between them, then Faith let out a soft laugh. “Don’t go getting all sentimental on me, here, K. Just telling you the truth.” She stood straight. “Okay, I’ll let you get to it.”
Kara watched Faith as she turned and headed for the hatch. The metal screeched as she spun the wheel and the hinges whined open. Before the girl left, she turned back to look at her. “Kara.”
“Yeah?”
“You find Earth, and we are gonna celebrate.” She winked and disappeared out into the hall, words echoing over her shoulder. “I’m pretty sure you owe me a drink.”
---END---