BSG Fic - Reparation, 1/?
Title: Reparation
Author: becisvolatile
Part: 1/?
Rating: NC-17 (in the near future)
Pairings/Characters: Lee/Kara, Bill, Roslin, Helo, Sharon, Cottle, Anders.
Word Count: 3918
Category: Novella
Genre: Romance, Angst, Action with Romance, Drama
Archiving: The Fallout Shelter, Apollo/Starbuck Fan Fic, Beyond Insane all others please ask
Warnings: Language, violence, sexual content (anticipated anyway)
Spoilers: Up to and including S3
Summary: “If there is anyone in this fleet that I thought would be able to tell if I’m a Cylon or not I would have put money on it being you.”
Author's Notes: So I’ve been holding this fic close to my chest for a month or two now, it’s quite developed and I felt it was time to push it out of the nest. It’s broken down into three sections: Engagement, Attrition and Reparation. They’ll be marked as they pass. For any interested, in terms of “reparation”, I am referring to both the theological concept of “God demanding satisfaction for the injuries which man had done Him” and the compensative actions after war. As always I’m insanely grateful for any feedback, speculation and (especially) concrit that you feel like sharing. And a big hand to Angylinni for the beta.
Engagement
Lee Adama’s sidearm was held so close to Kara’s face that if she blinked, her eyelashes would have skimmed it.
She had expected nothing less.
“I told you, it really is me,” she said gently, peripherally aware of the marines and crew forming at her front. It felt good to be back on Galactica, even under such circumstances. Lee’s hand shook and the gun brushed past her cheekbone.
“I watched Kara die, I saw her―” his voice broke a little as he readjusted his grip on his gun, a barely audible growl issuing from his throat.
“You saw my Viper go down, Lee.”
“Don’t call me that,” he hissed. “You frakkers took her out and now… you don’t get to call me that.”
Kara dropped her helmet on the hangar deck by her feet. The crowd jumped a little and the marines drew closer, closing around her in a semi-circle. She hadn’t expected it to be a cakewalk, but she had hoped someone would have kept their wits about them. “You have four Cylon Basestars up your ass. Don’t you think I’m the least of your worries at this point?”
Lee blinked, and then holstered his sidearm, “Take it to the brig.”
*****
Kara sat on the cot, still in her flight suit. Her head was tilted to the side as she extended her hands before her. When it was cold, they ached. At least they had ached, before. But they weren’t aching and they should have been.
She wasn’t oblivious. Not this time. She knew what the big question was. Knew what they were all asking.
Was she a Cylon?
It was a good question, one even she was asking. She just wasn’t asking as loudly as everyone else because she wasn’t sure she wanted the answer.
Whatever else she was, she was still Kara, still Starbuck.
The cell door creaked as someone was admitted, she looked up to see the Admiral enter. He paused in the doorway, eyes narrowing before moving to stand directly in front of her. Was it her imagination, or did his step falter?
“I expect everything, it’s something you pick up. But you? I can never anticipate what you’ll do next, Kara. Really, resurrection shouldn’t come as that much of a shock to me,” he said as a guard moved in to place a chair behind him before leaving the cell.
“We didn’t get blown up by Cylons?” Kara inquired lamely.
“No. I think you’d have noticed,” he said dryly, sinking into the seat.
“You’d be surprised; I seem to be rather resilient when it comes to being blown up.”
“I noticed.”
They fell into silence for a few minutes, the Admiral searching her face… for what she could only guess. Signs of the woman he had known? Proof that she wasn’t who she claimed to be? “The Cylon fleet?”
“Jumped as soon as you boarded. It seems they were escorting you.”
“Doesn’t look good for me then, does it? Straight to the airlock I suppose?” Her eyes dropped to her hands again as she shifted on the mattress.
“That depends.”
“On?”
“Lee said you knew where Earth was.”
“How is he?” Adama paused, his breath caught as if he was surprised that she’d enquire after Lee’s wellbeing.
“In life, Kara…you…drove him insane. In death… he was barely hanging on. And now? He’s grounded and sedated.”
Her eyes widened, “Sedated?”
“He tried to drag Sharon from the head, was determined to get her here. Have her prove you were a Cylon so he could throw you out the nearest airlock.”
“Lee wants to throw me out the airlock? Just like old times.”
“A lot of people want to see you thrown out of the airlock.”
“Like I said. Old times.”
The Admiral’s mouth nearly curved into a smile before snapping back into thin lipped disapproval, “Earth, Kara.”
“I’ve been there. I found it,” Kara hated how wistful and enthusiastic she sounded, but even now, even after the awe and wonder of Earth had worn off, she still spoke of it with an expanding chest and light head.
“Do you hear yourself? Do you know what you are asking me to believe?”
“I never expected you to believe me, Sir. Isn’t that why I’m here?”
“Where is Earth?”
Kara’s mouth shut briefly, she had to consider this carefully because this was going to be the deal breaker. How exactly did one say ‘I forget’ without actually saying it?
“There’s a path we have to follow. Prompts, clues, visions. The Gods are going to guide us there.”
“Through you?”
“Hey, I never said the Gods had taste.”
“If you can’t tell me right now, I see no reason―”
“Dirt, Sir. Dirt, sandy dirt. I touched it. I touched Earth. Decay and fertility in a handful of grains. I held it and that’s going to have to be enough proof for you.”
His eyes fixed on hers and for the briefest second she thought that just maybe this wasn’t an all-out interrogation. “You know that we―”
“We can’t go there,” Kara finished for him, “We can’t go because the Cylons will follow.”
“That’s why they sent you back, isn’t it? If you are really Kara Thrace…”
“I never would have led them to Earth.” She’d rather die. She had been willing to die.
“They are going to keep following us,” the Admiral concluded. “They have to know we won’t lead them there.”
“Not yet, maybe. But in ten years? Ten years of being followed around and they are betting we’ll grow tired or lazy, or both, and just give in. They won’t age. We will. How many of us want to find Earth before we die?”
“Do you know what you are asking, Kara?”
“I’m asking for faith.”
“If you’re a Cylon―”
“I have no malicious intent.” Kara continued when Adama didn’t reply, “At least, no more than I always had.”
Silence stretched between them. Finally, the Admiral stood and held out one hand to Kara. For a moment, she wanted to reach out and take it, instead she fisted her hands on her knees and spoke, “These visions aren’t new. I had them before, ask Helo. He knew.”
He nodded, stood and moved to knock on the cell door. As he exited he spoke to the guard, and then called over his shoulder “You’re free to go.”
Kara smiled hopefully, “Am I back on rotation?”
“Don’t push it.”
*****
Sleep seemed like a good idea. It seemed like the best frakking idea he’d had in days. Because that whole getting-Sharon-to-prove-that-it-was-a-Cylon thing had been a bust. Lee stumbled on unsteady legs. The sedatives hadn’t agreed with him. They’d been overkill. Kara wasn’t alive and was he the only person who knew it? He knew the danger. He had to be vigilant. It would be so frakking easy to step up to that skinjob ― the skinjob that even frakking smelled like Kara ― and drop to his knees, begging her not to scare him like that again. But no matter how much he wanted it to be her, it wasn’t. There was no way. He’d watched her life end ― in spectacular light and violence, much the way she had always lived.
Lee stumbled again, his shoulder smacking into a closed hatch. He needed to find a bed. His bed, he reminded himself, like he had done for the past few nights. Throughout the trial he’d fought a losing battle to curb one particularly disturbing habit and as he found himself steering away from his own quarters and towards the officers’ racks, he knew he was going to do it again. He was going to sleep in Kara’s bed.
Two weeks after her death he’d summoned the courage to go and collect her stuff. He’d found it all gone, of course, taken by her husband. But her rack, her locker. Her places were poignantly empty and bare. No one seemed willing to move in on Starbuck’s old territory, despite the desperate the need for space. He’d heard the hushed joke that no one was willing to steal her bed, just on the off chance she came back from the dead to kick their asses for the offence.
But he was different. This was different. Kara’s space was the only thing he had left of her. The stale cigars and general issue soap mingled in the small space of her rack to provide a place that was all hers. The air still thick with the memory of her, with the way she’d grab his ankle as he was getting out of bed, back in the days he’d claimed the rack above hers. No one questioned his right to be there, and if they questioned his sanity… well, at least they never did it to his face.
He pushed at the door with clumsy hands and stumbled into the room. The curtains of Kara’s rack were pulled closed, but as he neared them he caught a flash of black cloth and pale skin between the curtains. His stomach fell and his blood grew thick.
No. Nonononononono. There wasn’t tears in his eyes. There wasn’t. But something was burning a hot trail over his cheeks and the sight of that thing that looked so like Kara, but couldn’t be, was more than he could bear. Why wasn’t it in hack? What the frak was happening?
Asleep and un-alert as she was, it was easy for Lee to drag her through the curtains and dump her onto the floor, “You. Don’t. Sleep. Here. Frakkin’ Toaster!” he ground out. “You don’t get her life! You took it!”
Kara woke quickly enough. Her bare feet scraped against the floor, connecting with the flight suit she’d left by the bed - apparently the only clothing she had left. She wore only her briefs and a singlet, what she’d been wearing underneath the suit. Lee’s hand swept over her skull as he gripped at her hair and pulled. Hard. He dragged her that way from the room, simply throwing her out the door, her suit thumping down beside her. He didn’t bother with her shoes.
He shut the door and felt a little more settled.
A hesitant voice sounded from behind a curtain. “Major?”
But Lee said nothing as he slipped into Kara’s rack and pulled the curtains shut. He didn’t sleep though, he couldn’t.
Not with the warmth of a body so like Kara’s clinging to the sheets and seeping up into his. It was altogether too unsettling for him to think how human that warmth was.
*****
“Bill.” It’s only his name that she’d said, but he could already hear the censure in it.
“Laura?” He sat, reaching for his drink. They were past the stage of him having to invite her to sit, these days, she sat where and when she damn well pleased.
“Do you think it’s wise to have let her out of the brig so soon? She could be in danger, people think she’s a Cylon, they might―”
“Please, cut to the chase, Laura.”
“I’m concerned that you let Kara go because of your relationship with her. I’m concerned that you haven’t fully considered this.”
“It is Kara. And even if it weren’t, I don’t see the harm. If the Cylons wanted us gone, they just had their chance. They ceased hostilities the moment Kara was returned to Galactica. I believe there is a reason for that. I know there is a reason for that.”
Laura pursed her lips, then reached out and took the glass from his hand before taking a sip, “What reason?”
“She’s going to take us to Earth.”
“The Earth you don’t believe in?”
“I believe in something,” Bill said quietly. He just wasn’t sure whether it was Earth or Kara that he believed in.
*****
At the best of times people were sparse in the memorial hallway. But at 0300, that mid point between night shifts when those on rotations were busy and everyone else was dead asleep, it wasn’t unusual to find the walkway deserted.
With her flight suit pulled up and over her hips and tied at the waist, she wandered barefoot past a section of images, before finding a niche behind a stack of crates. With her back to the wall, she sank down, wrapping her arms around her knees. She should have been chasing some sleep. Gods knew, she needed it. She ran her hand through her hair and winced. Her skull ached; Lee had really meant to toss her from that bed. Her bed.
The bed he had just happened to wander past?
Gods, she was manufacturing mysteries for herself! Didn’t she have enough to worry about? Like a whole month full of frakking nothing? More holes and gaps and mysteries than facts. What did she remember? A crash and heat, a heat running up her spine and clawing at her scalp, bringing her to her knees… then Earth. She was standing on Earth, had her feet planted solidly on the ground. Whatever else she knew, she knew that much was true. Earth was real and she had been there. She just had no recollection of how she’d gotten there or how she’d come back. Or why she was alive or… anything.
No. That was a lie. She remembered Leoben Conoy. She did, she just wasn’t sure what she remembered. What had he said? She knew, it was right there, but damned if her mind would let her in on the secret. If Kara Thrace had been the sort for introspection, she might have figured that things would clear up when she got past the trauma of waking up in her cockpit with a handful of memories and Lee at her side.
But Kara didn’t do introspection. So she sat in the hall flexing her fingers and rolling her shoulders. It was then that she noticed something, or rather, the lack of something. Her tattoos were missing. As far as Kara was aware, tattoos didn’t just vanish.
Except, hers had. Like the ache in her hands and… well she wasn’t going to look at her knee. Nor was she going to begin a lengthy cataloguing of identifying marks and scars. She wouldn’t find them. Of course she wouldn’t. She was a frakking Cylon!
She exhaled sharply, her breath hissing out between her teeth.
“Starbuck?” someone called, but she remained silent and hidden. It would be just her luck that it was one more person out to toss her on her ass. Once in a night was enough, thanks.
“Kara?” This time she recognized the voice.
“Sharon?”
Sharon stepped around the crates and stood in front of Kara, “Wow,” was all she could say for a moment. She opened her mouth to continue but faltered, merely repeating herself, “Wow.”
“You, of all people, are surprised to see me?” Kara deadpanned.
Sharon lifted and eyebrow and snorted - Gods, she even snorted elegantly. Her hands shifted to her hips as she spoke. “You a Cylon?”
“Why, do you want to start a book club?” Kara asked as she shifted on the hard floor.
“Are you?”
“I don’t know, am I?”
“You sound like Lee.” Suddenly, Kara recalled what the Admiral had said about Lee dragging Sharon from the head as her eyes landed on the small bruise forming on Sharon’s wrist.
“It doesn’t work like that, Kara. We don’t get decoder rings, special handshakes, passwords.”
“Then what do I get? How do I know I’m a Cylon?”
“You don’t. That’s not why I’m here. Gossip on watch has spun up like the frakking FTL drives. Lee tossed you out of your rack on your ass. You don’t have a bed; don’t have a thing to your name.”
“And?”
“Helo and I have a sofa.”
“You aren’t afraid I’m going to go Cylon on your ass?”
Sharon shrugged and turned, “Just offering.”
Kara weighed her options. The Agathon’s short sofa or… the floor.
“Throw in the loan of some clothes and you have yourself a houseguest.”
*****
She was a Cylon! She was a Cylon and, suddenly, for Sam Anders, things made a whole lot of frakking sense. This was fate. This was design. In all the worlds, in all the time and all the places, she had found him. She had come back, for him. He knew it. She was special and he was a part of that. Their fates had been linked, their designation marked ‘Cylon’ long before either of them had suspected anything more than hormones and adrenaline was responsible for bringing them together.
“I need to see my wife,” he announced when he was finally cleared to go and find Kara in the brig.
The guard’s face barely shifted as he spoke, “She’s out.”
“Out?” Gods, Sam thought, maybe they didn’t suspect she was a Cylon.
“As in not here, but if you want to hang around, I’m sure she’ll be back. She always is,” something close to a smile flicked across his face, “Starbuck loves hack.”
*****
“You missed a gourmet breakfast. Algae in algae broth with a side of algae.” Helo dropped a ration on his coffee table for Kara, and tossed a bottle of water at her. “You can come and eat with us, you know.”
Kara was sprawled across his sofa, the same way she’d been when he’d come back from CIC to find Sharon waiting outside of their quarters for him, whispering, “Don’t freak,” as she led him through the door.
“I could,” she yawned, “But I figure it’s a fast track to a spork between the ribs. I’m fine right here.”
“So the plan is… what? You stink up my sofa and stop me from getting laid for the next couple weeks?”
“It’s a definite plan,“ Kara said with a small grin as she broke off a piece of her ration, sniffed it and dropped it into her mouth with a sigh. Sharon had been on duty for an hour now, and had taken Hera to daycare. Only she and Helo remained in the room.
“You can tell me anything, Kara,” he said as he lifted her feet and flopped onto the small sofa. Kara propped her feet back into his lap and pressed her lips together as she considered what to say.
“Because you married a Cylon? You’d understand, right?”
He gave her a long suffering look. “No, you can tell me anything because we go back. Way back and I have your back on this… whatever this is.”
“What if I said I’d been to Earth?”
Helo’s mouth fell open as he dropped his head back with a thud. “Have you? Been to Earth?”
“That’s what I told the Old Man.”
“Was it the truth?”
“Maybe.”
“There are no maybes, Kara. You never did ‘maybe’. You aren’t about to start.”
“I remember what happened. Out there, I mean. I saw it… that… pattern? The one I painted. It led me into something. Down. And then there was hot and cold and nothing. Then I woke up and I was standing on Earth. And I know that I was there, and I swear that I had Earth beneath my feet.”
“And then?”
“Bits, pieces. Then Lee and a gun on the flight deck. That’s it. That’s what I know.”
“So you can find Earth?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“But?”
“I’m just not sure how I’m sure of it.”
“Gods, Kara… if the Admiral heard this―”
“He’d give Lee his blessing to blow me out the nearest airlock, I know. I do. Don’t think I don’t see how frakked up this is. I mean… what do we have now? Stalemate? I’m not taking the fleet to Earth while the Cylons are following us. And the Cylons are going to follow us. That’s why they let me go. Remember? Kara Thrace and her Special Destiny.”
“What do you need, Kara? How do I help?”
She didn’t have an answer; she merely continued to eat while Helo stared at the ceiling. After a while she felt his eyes on her, he observed her for a handful of minutes before speaking, “Your tattoos?”
“Gone,” she confirmed with a nod.
“No. Not all,” he said, as he reached across and turned her head to the side, flicking her hair out of the way. One blunt finger tapped against the back of her neck, “This one is still here.”
She couldn’t stop herself from moving her own hand to cup the back of her neck. So she still had one? What the frak did that mean? Why bother to copy just the one? Why take the others?
Gods those Cylon frakkers were trying to do her head in.
Someone knocked at the door. Helo looked at Kara and she shrugged. He stood and opened the door a crack, not far enough for whoever was on the other side to see Kara.
She watched as his shoulders tensed, whoever was on the other side was not a friendly. “Yes?” he asked.
“I know she’s here; watch saw her with Sharon.” It was Lee’s voice, and Kara felt her body tense as she drew her knees a little closer.
“Well, someone kicked her out of her rack.”
“Not her rack!” Lee damn near growled.
Helo dropped his voice and Kara strained to catch what he said next, “Not yours either.”
She was going to have to ask what he had meant by that, but later.
“Look, I’m not here for a social call, Captain. I’m grounded, so the Admiral has me doing his dirty work. ‘Captain Thrace’” Gods, she could hear the inverted commas, “Is scheduled to report to sick bay in an hour. Cottle’s going to assess her.”
“That it?” Helo asked.
He didn’t receive a reply, as Lee had already left.
He turned back to Kara, with a raised eyebrow, “I don’t suppose, after all these years, you feel like behaving like a human being?”
*****
“Inconclusive?” Kara choked. “Inconclusive? How? I’m either a toaster or I’m not, Doc. There has to be a conclusive frakkin’ answer.”
“There is. You are, for all intents and purposes, a healthy female” He paused and took a drag on his cigar before offering it to Kara. “Except, your DNA has some synthetic markers.”
“Like a Cylon?”
“Like a Cylon. But not.”
Kara slid the cigar between her lips, clenched it between her teeth and muttered, “I thought you were from the ‘tell it like it is’ school of medicine.”
“Well, there is nothing straightforward about this, Starbuck. Old injuries have vanished, but one or two remain. That small shrapnel nick on your left wrist? Still there, but all the others? Gone. There is something different about your DNA sequences. At the base level they are the same, but there’s some… I guess you’d call it ‘synthetic trash’ attached to them. It’s not an uncommon thing to see in people who have received transfusions of synthetic blood. It was a procedure only just becoming common on Caprica before the end. But your records show no transfusions.”
“So… Cylon?”
“No. We know that Cylons have a low resistance to a lot of illnesses that humans have developed antibodies to. You have fully firing antibodies. That’s not typical of a Cylon. That’s more typical of Athena, or her daughter.”
“Cylons with a kick of human blood?” Kara asked, dropping the cigar stub into a medical waste container.
“Maybe," Doc Cottle conceded, “Or, human with a kick of Cylon blood.”
Author: becisvolatile
Part: 1/?
Rating: NC-17 (in the near future)
Pairings/Characters: Lee/Kara, Bill, Roslin, Helo, Sharon, Cottle, Anders.
Word Count: 3918
Category: Novella
Genre: Romance, Angst, Action with Romance, Drama
Archiving: The Fallout Shelter, Apollo/Starbuck Fan Fic, Beyond Insane all others please ask
Warnings: Language, violence, sexual content (anticipated anyway)
Spoilers: Up to and including S3
Summary: “If there is anyone in this fleet that I thought would be able to tell if I’m a Cylon or not I would have put money on it being you.”
Author's Notes: So I’ve been holding this fic close to my chest for a month or two now, it’s quite developed and I felt it was time to push it out of the nest. It’s broken down into three sections: Engagement, Attrition and Reparation. They’ll be marked as they pass. For any interested, in terms of “reparation”, I am referring to both the theological concept of “God demanding satisfaction for the injuries which man had done Him” and the compensative actions after war. As always I’m insanely grateful for any feedback, speculation and (especially) concrit that you feel like sharing. And a big hand to Angylinni for the beta.
Engagement
Lee Adama’s sidearm was held so close to Kara’s face that if she blinked, her eyelashes would have skimmed it.
She had expected nothing less.
“I told you, it really is me,” she said gently, peripherally aware of the marines and crew forming at her front. It felt good to be back on Galactica, even under such circumstances. Lee’s hand shook and the gun brushed past her cheekbone.
“I watched Kara die, I saw her―” his voice broke a little as he readjusted his grip on his gun, a barely audible growl issuing from his throat.
“You saw my Viper go down, Lee.”
“Don’t call me that,” he hissed. “You frakkers took her out and now… you don’t get to call me that.”
Kara dropped her helmet on the hangar deck by her feet. The crowd jumped a little and the marines drew closer, closing around her in a semi-circle. She hadn’t expected it to be a cakewalk, but she had hoped someone would have kept their wits about them. “You have four Cylon Basestars up your ass. Don’t you think I’m the least of your worries at this point?”
Lee blinked, and then holstered his sidearm, “Take it to the brig.”
*****
Kara sat on the cot, still in her flight suit. Her head was tilted to the side as she extended her hands before her. When it was cold, they ached. At least they had ached, before. But they weren’t aching and they should have been.
She wasn’t oblivious. Not this time. She knew what the big question was. Knew what they were all asking.
Was she a Cylon?
It was a good question, one even she was asking. She just wasn’t asking as loudly as everyone else because she wasn’t sure she wanted the answer.
Whatever else she was, she was still Kara, still Starbuck.
The cell door creaked as someone was admitted, she looked up to see the Admiral enter. He paused in the doorway, eyes narrowing before moving to stand directly in front of her. Was it her imagination, or did his step falter?
“I expect everything, it’s something you pick up. But you? I can never anticipate what you’ll do next, Kara. Really, resurrection shouldn’t come as that much of a shock to me,” he said as a guard moved in to place a chair behind him before leaving the cell.
“We didn’t get blown up by Cylons?” Kara inquired lamely.
“No. I think you’d have noticed,” he said dryly, sinking into the seat.
“You’d be surprised; I seem to be rather resilient when it comes to being blown up.”
“I noticed.”
They fell into silence for a few minutes, the Admiral searching her face… for what she could only guess. Signs of the woman he had known? Proof that she wasn’t who she claimed to be? “The Cylon fleet?”
“Jumped as soon as you boarded. It seems they were escorting you.”
“Doesn’t look good for me then, does it? Straight to the airlock I suppose?” Her eyes dropped to her hands again as she shifted on the mattress.
“That depends.”
“On?”
“Lee said you knew where Earth was.”
“How is he?” Adama paused, his breath caught as if he was surprised that she’d enquire after Lee’s wellbeing.
“In life, Kara…you…drove him insane. In death… he was barely hanging on. And now? He’s grounded and sedated.”
Her eyes widened, “Sedated?”
“He tried to drag Sharon from the head, was determined to get her here. Have her prove you were a Cylon so he could throw you out the nearest airlock.”
“Lee wants to throw me out the airlock? Just like old times.”
“A lot of people want to see you thrown out of the airlock.”
“Like I said. Old times.”
The Admiral’s mouth nearly curved into a smile before snapping back into thin lipped disapproval, “Earth, Kara.”
“I’ve been there. I found it,” Kara hated how wistful and enthusiastic she sounded, but even now, even after the awe and wonder of Earth had worn off, she still spoke of it with an expanding chest and light head.
“Do you hear yourself? Do you know what you are asking me to believe?”
“I never expected you to believe me, Sir. Isn’t that why I’m here?”
“Where is Earth?”
Kara’s mouth shut briefly, she had to consider this carefully because this was going to be the deal breaker. How exactly did one say ‘I forget’ without actually saying it?
“There’s a path we have to follow. Prompts, clues, visions. The Gods are going to guide us there.”
“Through you?”
“Hey, I never said the Gods had taste.”
“If you can’t tell me right now, I see no reason―”
“Dirt, Sir. Dirt, sandy dirt. I touched it. I touched Earth. Decay and fertility in a handful of grains. I held it and that’s going to have to be enough proof for you.”
His eyes fixed on hers and for the briefest second she thought that just maybe this wasn’t an all-out interrogation. “You know that we―”
“We can’t go there,” Kara finished for him, “We can’t go because the Cylons will follow.”
“That’s why they sent you back, isn’t it? If you are really Kara Thrace…”
“I never would have led them to Earth.” She’d rather die. She had been willing to die.
“They are going to keep following us,” the Admiral concluded. “They have to know we won’t lead them there.”
“Not yet, maybe. But in ten years? Ten years of being followed around and they are betting we’ll grow tired or lazy, or both, and just give in. They won’t age. We will. How many of us want to find Earth before we die?”
“Do you know what you are asking, Kara?”
“I’m asking for faith.”
“If you’re a Cylon―”
“I have no malicious intent.” Kara continued when Adama didn’t reply, “At least, no more than I always had.”
Silence stretched between them. Finally, the Admiral stood and held out one hand to Kara. For a moment, she wanted to reach out and take it, instead she fisted her hands on her knees and spoke, “These visions aren’t new. I had them before, ask Helo. He knew.”
He nodded, stood and moved to knock on the cell door. As he exited he spoke to the guard, and then called over his shoulder “You’re free to go.”
Kara smiled hopefully, “Am I back on rotation?”
“Don’t push it.”
*****
Sleep seemed like a good idea. It seemed like the best frakking idea he’d had in days. Because that whole getting-Sharon-to-prove-that-it-was-a-Cylon thing had been a bust. Lee stumbled on unsteady legs. The sedatives hadn’t agreed with him. They’d been overkill. Kara wasn’t alive and was he the only person who knew it? He knew the danger. He had to be vigilant. It would be so frakking easy to step up to that skinjob ― the skinjob that even frakking smelled like Kara ― and drop to his knees, begging her not to scare him like that again. But no matter how much he wanted it to be her, it wasn’t. There was no way. He’d watched her life end ― in spectacular light and violence, much the way she had always lived.
Lee stumbled again, his shoulder smacking into a closed hatch. He needed to find a bed. His bed, he reminded himself, like he had done for the past few nights. Throughout the trial he’d fought a losing battle to curb one particularly disturbing habit and as he found himself steering away from his own quarters and towards the officers’ racks, he knew he was going to do it again. He was going to sleep in Kara’s bed.
Two weeks after her death he’d summoned the courage to go and collect her stuff. He’d found it all gone, of course, taken by her husband. But her rack, her locker. Her places were poignantly empty and bare. No one seemed willing to move in on Starbuck’s old territory, despite the desperate the need for space. He’d heard the hushed joke that no one was willing to steal her bed, just on the off chance she came back from the dead to kick their asses for the offence.
But he was different. This was different. Kara’s space was the only thing he had left of her. The stale cigars and general issue soap mingled in the small space of her rack to provide a place that was all hers. The air still thick with the memory of her, with the way she’d grab his ankle as he was getting out of bed, back in the days he’d claimed the rack above hers. No one questioned his right to be there, and if they questioned his sanity… well, at least they never did it to his face.
He pushed at the door with clumsy hands and stumbled into the room. The curtains of Kara’s rack were pulled closed, but as he neared them he caught a flash of black cloth and pale skin between the curtains. His stomach fell and his blood grew thick.
No. Nonononononono. There wasn’t tears in his eyes. There wasn’t. But something was burning a hot trail over his cheeks and the sight of that thing that looked so like Kara, but couldn’t be, was more than he could bear. Why wasn’t it in hack? What the frak was happening?
Asleep and un-alert as she was, it was easy for Lee to drag her through the curtains and dump her onto the floor, “You. Don’t. Sleep. Here. Frakkin’ Toaster!” he ground out. “You don’t get her life! You took it!”
Kara woke quickly enough. Her bare feet scraped against the floor, connecting with the flight suit she’d left by the bed - apparently the only clothing she had left. She wore only her briefs and a singlet, what she’d been wearing underneath the suit. Lee’s hand swept over her skull as he gripped at her hair and pulled. Hard. He dragged her that way from the room, simply throwing her out the door, her suit thumping down beside her. He didn’t bother with her shoes.
He shut the door and felt a little more settled.
A hesitant voice sounded from behind a curtain. “Major?”
But Lee said nothing as he slipped into Kara’s rack and pulled the curtains shut. He didn’t sleep though, he couldn’t.
Not with the warmth of a body so like Kara’s clinging to the sheets and seeping up into his. It was altogether too unsettling for him to think how human that warmth was.
*****
“Bill.” It’s only his name that she’d said, but he could already hear the censure in it.
“Laura?” He sat, reaching for his drink. They were past the stage of him having to invite her to sit, these days, she sat where and when she damn well pleased.
“Do you think it’s wise to have let her out of the brig so soon? She could be in danger, people think she’s a Cylon, they might―”
“Please, cut to the chase, Laura.”
“I’m concerned that you let Kara go because of your relationship with her. I’m concerned that you haven’t fully considered this.”
“It is Kara. And even if it weren’t, I don’t see the harm. If the Cylons wanted us gone, they just had their chance. They ceased hostilities the moment Kara was returned to Galactica. I believe there is a reason for that. I know there is a reason for that.”
Laura pursed her lips, then reached out and took the glass from his hand before taking a sip, “What reason?”
“She’s going to take us to Earth.”
“The Earth you don’t believe in?”
“I believe in something,” Bill said quietly. He just wasn’t sure whether it was Earth or Kara that he believed in.
*****
At the best of times people were sparse in the memorial hallway. But at 0300, that mid point between night shifts when those on rotations were busy and everyone else was dead asleep, it wasn’t unusual to find the walkway deserted.
With her flight suit pulled up and over her hips and tied at the waist, she wandered barefoot past a section of images, before finding a niche behind a stack of crates. With her back to the wall, she sank down, wrapping her arms around her knees. She should have been chasing some sleep. Gods knew, she needed it. She ran her hand through her hair and winced. Her skull ached; Lee had really meant to toss her from that bed. Her bed.
The bed he had just happened to wander past?
Gods, she was manufacturing mysteries for herself! Didn’t she have enough to worry about? Like a whole month full of frakking nothing? More holes and gaps and mysteries than facts. What did she remember? A crash and heat, a heat running up her spine and clawing at her scalp, bringing her to her knees… then Earth. She was standing on Earth, had her feet planted solidly on the ground. Whatever else she knew, she knew that much was true. Earth was real and she had been there. She just had no recollection of how she’d gotten there or how she’d come back. Or why she was alive or… anything.
No. That was a lie. She remembered Leoben Conoy. She did, she just wasn’t sure what she remembered. What had he said? She knew, it was right there, but damned if her mind would let her in on the secret. If Kara Thrace had been the sort for introspection, she might have figured that things would clear up when she got past the trauma of waking up in her cockpit with a handful of memories and Lee at her side.
But Kara didn’t do introspection. So she sat in the hall flexing her fingers and rolling her shoulders. It was then that she noticed something, or rather, the lack of something. Her tattoos were missing. As far as Kara was aware, tattoos didn’t just vanish.
Except, hers had. Like the ache in her hands and… well she wasn’t going to look at her knee. Nor was she going to begin a lengthy cataloguing of identifying marks and scars. She wouldn’t find them. Of course she wouldn’t. She was a frakking Cylon!
She exhaled sharply, her breath hissing out between her teeth.
“Starbuck?” someone called, but she remained silent and hidden. It would be just her luck that it was one more person out to toss her on her ass. Once in a night was enough, thanks.
“Kara?” This time she recognized the voice.
“Sharon?”
Sharon stepped around the crates and stood in front of Kara, “Wow,” was all she could say for a moment. She opened her mouth to continue but faltered, merely repeating herself, “Wow.”
“You, of all people, are surprised to see me?” Kara deadpanned.
Sharon lifted and eyebrow and snorted - Gods, she even snorted elegantly. Her hands shifted to her hips as she spoke. “You a Cylon?”
“Why, do you want to start a book club?” Kara asked as she shifted on the hard floor.
“Are you?”
“I don’t know, am I?”
“You sound like Lee.” Suddenly, Kara recalled what the Admiral had said about Lee dragging Sharon from the head as her eyes landed on the small bruise forming on Sharon’s wrist.
“It doesn’t work like that, Kara. We don’t get decoder rings, special handshakes, passwords.”
“Then what do I get? How do I know I’m a Cylon?”
“You don’t. That’s not why I’m here. Gossip on watch has spun up like the frakking FTL drives. Lee tossed you out of your rack on your ass. You don’t have a bed; don’t have a thing to your name.”
“And?”
“Helo and I have a sofa.”
“You aren’t afraid I’m going to go Cylon on your ass?”
Sharon shrugged and turned, “Just offering.”
Kara weighed her options. The Agathon’s short sofa or… the floor.
“Throw in the loan of some clothes and you have yourself a houseguest.”
*****
She was a Cylon! She was a Cylon and, suddenly, for Sam Anders, things made a whole lot of frakking sense. This was fate. This was design. In all the worlds, in all the time and all the places, she had found him. She had come back, for him. He knew it. She was special and he was a part of that. Their fates had been linked, their designation marked ‘Cylon’ long before either of them had suspected anything more than hormones and adrenaline was responsible for bringing them together.
“I need to see my wife,” he announced when he was finally cleared to go and find Kara in the brig.
The guard’s face barely shifted as he spoke, “She’s out.”
“Out?” Gods, Sam thought, maybe they didn’t suspect she was a Cylon.
“As in not here, but if you want to hang around, I’m sure she’ll be back. She always is,” something close to a smile flicked across his face, “Starbuck loves hack.”
*****
“You missed a gourmet breakfast. Algae in algae broth with a side of algae.” Helo dropped a ration on his coffee table for Kara, and tossed a bottle of water at her. “You can come and eat with us, you know.”
Kara was sprawled across his sofa, the same way she’d been when he’d come back from CIC to find Sharon waiting outside of their quarters for him, whispering, “Don’t freak,” as she led him through the door.
“I could,” she yawned, “But I figure it’s a fast track to a spork between the ribs. I’m fine right here.”
“So the plan is… what? You stink up my sofa and stop me from getting laid for the next couple weeks?”
“It’s a definite plan,“ Kara said with a small grin as she broke off a piece of her ration, sniffed it and dropped it into her mouth with a sigh. Sharon had been on duty for an hour now, and had taken Hera to daycare. Only she and Helo remained in the room.
“You can tell me anything, Kara,” he said as he lifted her feet and flopped onto the small sofa. Kara propped her feet back into his lap and pressed her lips together as she considered what to say.
“Because you married a Cylon? You’d understand, right?”
He gave her a long suffering look. “No, you can tell me anything because we go back. Way back and I have your back on this… whatever this is.”
“What if I said I’d been to Earth?”
Helo’s mouth fell open as he dropped his head back with a thud. “Have you? Been to Earth?”
“That’s what I told the Old Man.”
“Was it the truth?”
“Maybe.”
“There are no maybes, Kara. You never did ‘maybe’. You aren’t about to start.”
“I remember what happened. Out there, I mean. I saw it… that… pattern? The one I painted. It led me into something. Down. And then there was hot and cold and nothing. Then I woke up and I was standing on Earth. And I know that I was there, and I swear that I had Earth beneath my feet.”
“And then?”
“Bits, pieces. Then Lee and a gun on the flight deck. That’s it. That’s what I know.”
“So you can find Earth?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“But?”
“I’m just not sure how I’m sure of it.”
“Gods, Kara… if the Admiral heard this―”
“He’d give Lee his blessing to blow me out the nearest airlock, I know. I do. Don’t think I don’t see how frakked up this is. I mean… what do we have now? Stalemate? I’m not taking the fleet to Earth while the Cylons are following us. And the Cylons are going to follow us. That’s why they let me go. Remember? Kara Thrace and her Special Destiny.”
“What do you need, Kara? How do I help?”
She didn’t have an answer; she merely continued to eat while Helo stared at the ceiling. After a while she felt his eyes on her, he observed her for a handful of minutes before speaking, “Your tattoos?”
“Gone,” she confirmed with a nod.
“No. Not all,” he said, as he reached across and turned her head to the side, flicking her hair out of the way. One blunt finger tapped against the back of her neck, “This one is still here.”
She couldn’t stop herself from moving her own hand to cup the back of her neck. So she still had one? What the frak did that mean? Why bother to copy just the one? Why take the others?
Gods those Cylon frakkers were trying to do her head in.
Someone knocked at the door. Helo looked at Kara and she shrugged. He stood and opened the door a crack, not far enough for whoever was on the other side to see Kara.
She watched as his shoulders tensed, whoever was on the other side was not a friendly. “Yes?” he asked.
“I know she’s here; watch saw her with Sharon.” It was Lee’s voice, and Kara felt her body tense as she drew her knees a little closer.
“Well, someone kicked her out of her rack.”
“Not her rack!” Lee damn near growled.
Helo dropped his voice and Kara strained to catch what he said next, “Not yours either.”
She was going to have to ask what he had meant by that, but later.
“Look, I’m not here for a social call, Captain. I’m grounded, so the Admiral has me doing his dirty work. ‘Captain Thrace’” Gods, she could hear the inverted commas, “Is scheduled to report to sick bay in an hour. Cottle’s going to assess her.”
“That it?” Helo asked.
He didn’t receive a reply, as Lee had already left.
He turned back to Kara, with a raised eyebrow, “I don’t suppose, after all these years, you feel like behaving like a human being?”
*****
“Inconclusive?” Kara choked. “Inconclusive? How? I’m either a toaster or I’m not, Doc. There has to be a conclusive frakkin’ answer.”
“There is. You are, for all intents and purposes, a healthy female” He paused and took a drag on his cigar before offering it to Kara. “Except, your DNA has some synthetic markers.”
“Like a Cylon?”
“Like a Cylon. But not.”
Kara slid the cigar between her lips, clenched it between her teeth and muttered, “I thought you were from the ‘tell it like it is’ school of medicine.”
“Well, there is nothing straightforward about this, Starbuck. Old injuries have vanished, but one or two remain. That small shrapnel nick on your left wrist? Still there, but all the others? Gone. There is something different about your DNA sequences. At the base level they are the same, but there’s some… I guess you’d call it ‘synthetic trash’ attached to them. It’s not an uncommon thing to see in people who have received transfusions of synthetic blood. It was a procedure only just becoming common on Caprica before the end. But your records show no transfusions.”
“So… Cylon?”
“No. We know that Cylons have a low resistance to a lot of illnesses that humans have developed antibodies to. You have fully firing antibodies. That’s not typical of a Cylon. That’s more typical of Athena, or her daughter.”
“Cylons with a kick of human blood?” Kara asked, dropping the cigar stub into a medical waste container.
“Maybe," Doc Cottle conceded, “Or, human with a kick of Cylon blood.”