BSG fic: The Patience of the Gods (Kara, Helo)
Look at me, exploring my new fandom! Seriously, why is it that the very first BSG plot bunny that hits me is the last character I expected to be my POV girl. Oh, well. It's just like Lost all over again, and me rooting around in Sawyer's head even though he's the least like me of anybody on the island.
Title: The Patience of the Gods
Characters: Kara, Helo (references to Kara/Sam and Helo/Sharon)
Rating: PG-13 for language
Summary: a short scene, post-"Torn" (3.06), when Starbuck finally returns to the pilots' rec room. 3500 words.
Note: Thanks to alissabobissa for the encouragement and helping me get all the canon straight, since I'm new to the fandom. And, you know, for sucking me into BSG in the first place.
The Patience of the Gods
She hasn't been to the pilots' rec room in five days. She knows. She's counted them.
Cutting her hair was all fine and good, and she mostly means this new outlook of hers, or maybe it's a return to an old one, a welcome back to herself. But then there's the other part of it, the attitude that feels like slipping on a pair of boots that always pinch a little but are her favorite nonetheless. At least that's what it feels like sometimes down here: Kara at her most Starbuck, squeezing into that skin even if it hurts, because that's what they expect out of her, what she expects out of herself.
What she finds remarkable as she pauses in the doorway, looking in like she hasn't seen this room in years, is that this place which is Starbuck's place should be easiest of all, but it's not, and it's because she's who he kicked out of the chair.
What it boils down to, what she was afraid of: she still doesn't know how to sit down beside these people like nothing's wrong. Something's always wrong, and she's always dealing with it; that's what she is in this place. But she doesn't know how, now, and it makes her stomach knot up. Oh, Kara cut her hair and learned to breathe again, but it turns out Starbuck didn't learn a damn thing in five days.
Probably, though, she wouldn't learn in five hundred. That leaves, as always, the hard way, so she steps through the threshold.
She thanks the gods Sharon isn't here. It's not that she dislikes Sharon. In fact, if she could get past Boomer and bullet holes in Adama and that nagging kernel of distrust rolling around underneath her skin, despite the instinctive feeling she has that Karl isn't just being Karl in believing the best in her, she could really love Sharon. It's just not possible, not with so much water under the bridge, so having her across the table sometimes makes Kara somehow tense and itchy, especially when she's not feeling a hundred percent. Not a good way to ease her back into the routine of drinking the CAP away and putting the other pilots in their place.
No, Helo's alone, back against the wall, rolling a sucker stick between his fingers and watching the boisterous swell of people in and out of room. It's not like he doesn't know how to drink and play cards, but he does that so rarely, instead choosing to sit like a benevolent god over the proceedings, present and smiling and chatting with people as they come by but still somehow aloof. He's always been a little like this, but especially since Sharon, and most especially since he became XO. It's weird to think of him in Tigh's place, but he's still Helo, underneath the new titles and burden of responsibility. He gives her a quizzical smile and nods at her when she comes in, but he doesn't get up. Only Karl could gauge her need for space that well.
It's not until she sits down at an empty table, just beside the game of Triad, that she feels this strange energy come into the room. It's like a hush, but the sound doesn't diminish. People are still talking and laughing. It's just like suddenly everything's muffled, and she realizes with a start that she did it to herself. She's drawn up inside herself so fast she wouldn't even realize it if she hadn't been actively combating that impulse for most of her adult life, and especially in the last few days. You can't fly-and you can't live-when you're that disconnected from what's happening around you.
When she lays her arms on the table, palms up, and relaxes her face for just a second, she realizes why she clammed up: every eye is on her. She ought to be used to that, but not like this. They don't grin at her or challenge her; they simply glance furtively, as if they know something. As if the Admiral told them exactly what he said to her, how he took her gun away from her and said something she doesn't think he ever believed but he meant her to feel. She tries to smile nonchalantly as she pulls the bottle off the table next to hers and pours herself a drink. She breathes and reminds herself that all they know is she got called out. Wouldn't be the first time or the last. In fact, now that she takes the time to think about it, she knows they're not expecting anything from her, nothing out of the ordinary: only that she doesn't act like she's been cowed.
But the thing is, she has been. And, sure, she could march in here and act like she hasn't been AWOL for days because her rage burned so hot the old man felt it where he is and had to try to put it out, but she has. Not just days, but all the time on New Caprica. Feels like frakkin' years sometimes.
Kat, gods bless her, finally stumbles on the right thing to do. She turns and gives Kara's chair a playful kick with her foot.
"You in or out, Captain?"
"What's it look like?"
"Looks like you're still drowning your sorrows. What? They didn't have the good stuff down on New Caprica?"
Godsdammit, Kat actually smiles at that, lips curling right around something that might be insult and might be easy bullshit but nobody would ever be able to tell, not even the two of them.
Kara arches an eyebrow and says, "I don't know, Katraine." Then she smiles. "You might get a more accurate answer out of Colonel Tigh."
Kat looks like she's going to accept Starbuck's less-than-stinging answer and start dealing the cards, but instead she turns back and says so quietly it bites: "I would ask your other drinking buddy, but I hear he's gone and left the ship."
A chair only barely scrapes the floor, but it doesn't have to do more than that when it's Helo pushing it back as he stands up and strides across the floor. For a second, the entire room is silent, but only a second. Helo takes the bottle out of Kara's hands and pulls out the chair opposite her with a swift motion, and she really sort of hates him for it.
By now, everyone's pretending like this isn't the beginnings of the kind of brawl that Kat and Starbuck are famous for. And it wouldn't be, anyway, not now. They have to be more than just surly, and right now neither of them are anything more than darkly bored and bone tired. Not enough liquor or energy to pull their punches. Neither one is venomous enough for that rare kind of more dangerous fight right now.
So she most definitely didn't need Helo riding in to the rescue. She frowns at him, ready for him to drop down into the chair and make conversation with her, like she's a frakkin' leper or something, needs him to make her feel like the world doesn't hate her. She's not a leper. If she has to force her way into that frakkin' card game, slap on her Starbuck armor until the rusted edges crush bruises into her skin to prove it, she will. But Helo just makes a face at her, something like rolling his eyes without giving away the gesture to the rest of them, before he pushes his chair in between Kat and Hot Dog and plunks the bottle down on the table.
"I'm in," he says.
That earns him a chorus of oohs from the peanut gallery, Kara included. When Helo chooses to play cards, he usually does really well. Nobody knows how to play against him because they can't decide if he's too honest to bluff worth a damn or he's simply playing up that image as its own sort of bluff. Kara's pretty sure the truth is somewhere in the middle: that he's no worse or better than the rest of them at pretending to be something he's not. It's just that he so rarely wants to be in any other position than the one he's in. True of life but especially true of cards: because Helo's a lucky bastard at cards. The rest of his contentment…well, that's just Karl.
But he's not as lucky when he drinks too much. It makes him too sure of himself, so that he doesn't trust luck and manages to screw himself over. So when she sees him start to knock it back, she's a little worried, but she slowly but surely realizes she needn't be. He's not trying to win. He's playing cards, but, really, he's simply still watching. He baits Kat, mostly with skeptical looks (she's easy to goad into going all in), and he talks pyramid with Hot Dog as though he doesn't realize he's throwing the boy off his game (doesn't take much). All this he does not because he's particularly being sneaky or even that mischievous. He's just smiling and drinking and enjoying people's company, and she realizes she used to do that. Now, maybe she had to knock heads a little more to take the edge off, but it used to be this easy to get her to leave her own head for a while.
Until, like everything, New Caprica. It always comes down to that, and shouldn't it? A year and half of her life in that place so new and strange and now haunting, the last four months of it like a nightmare. She's waited it out, this rehabilitation that the old man seems to think would be easy, the numbness and panic alternating in her soul until she sometimes finds herself standing in front of the mirror, splashing water into a face she stares at so long the water begins to dry. Every time she thinks it's gotten easier-and, hell, it should; she's trying now, isn't she?-every time, something will happen to bring it all back. Strangely, it's not Kacey, not any of the obvious things that look and smell and feel like New Caprica and that place and him. No, those things she's learned to deal with. It's the things that shouldn't remind her that make her gut seize up and her hands claw into fists that send her into the training room to put those fists into a heavy bag because if she got in a viper like that, she'd frak it up, probably herself, too.
She was walking down the corridor the day before, crossing the threshold into the CIC, when someone called out Sam, and she froze. The hair literally stood up on the back of her neck and she felt about small enough to fit in the palm of someone's hand. Leoben's, at least metaphorically. Sam's, if she had actually gotten what she prayed to the gods for every night she was held in that place that looked like it should have been a home but didn't feel like it, not with bars on the door. Standing there on her own ship, she felt insignificant, vulnerable enough to be trapped and thrown open to a dozen lines of attack, all striking into some deep part of her she couldn't defend herself from, because it wasn't physical. It might've been bearable if it were.
That the woman who called his name wasn't her didn't matter, and it didn't matter that Sam turned out to be an older man, hair so gray he might've been her grandfather. She pulled him along with her, and Kara couldn't help but wonder, for the thousandth time, what would've been different if she'd spent the New Caprica conflict with Sam, blowing up Cylons and fighting back, godsdammit, instead of defenseless. Would she feel any less worthless now? Would she still have driven him away?
Probably, and it would probably hurt about as much as this does, sitting in the rec room without him, almost pouring him a shot, too, out of habit. Sam would know how to force Starbuck out. He'd have her rolling on the floor giggling, lost to the rest of the world. But who knows if that would be a good thing. And who knows what the frak he'd do with this frakked up version of Kara Thrace. She's still not sure how he's survived her this long. Actually, she finds as she stares into the bottle, she's not sure how she survived those four months or anything that came after, either.
Suddenly, she feels more than hears the dull clink of Helo's fingernails on the neck of the bottle. Her eyes jerk up, too quickly to put on anything like a public face, but he'd probably give her his patented concerned look anyway, like he is now as he takes the bottle from her hands, stands up, and says with a shake of his head, "I had no idea I could suck this bad at Triad."
Kat's head lolls back so she can shoot Kara a look as she tells him, "You're no worse than she is."
Kara flips her the bird and stands up. The now-dwindling crowd oohs, thinking they're about to get a show, but Kara just pats Kat on the back and says, "Don't clean 'em out, Kat. They're gonna need some of it left so I take it all away from them tomorrow."
Hot Dog throws a paper cup at her half-heartedly, and Racetrack just snickers from her position in the corner. That raptor pilot that came over from the Pegasus right before the settlement-she never did learn his name, just calls him Smirk in her head-purses his lips and makes a face that decidedly means he's still trying to get in her pants. He probably doesn’t even know why.
For a long second, this feels not just familiar but normal. Then she jars back to reality as Helo nods at the table farthest from the commotion and she follows, a chorus of lazy jeers at her back. But this is a reality she recognizes, and she gives herself permission to be okay with that.
"They've been going stir-crazy without you down here," Helo says, settling into a chair.
"Nah. Looks like Kat's maybe more fun than me."
He shakes his head, smiling. "Can't hold her liquor as well."
"And I thought I was the most fun when I was drunk off my ass."
"Depends," he says, and she frakkin' hates that, when he slips from light to serious so fast, and with no warning.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah," she replies, stealing the bottle back. "I know."
She doesn't offer anything else, no words about how she sometimes gets when she drinks, because she never talks about it, not even to the people who most often have to deal with her angry ass when she's decided to throw her life as hard as she can down into a bottle to see if she can get it to lodge there. Helo's seen it too often. Kat, too. Lee. She closes her eyes, rubs her hands over her face. Sam.
When she opens her eyes again, Helo's glance flits over her face so fast it would make her nervous if it was anyone else. Then he's watching the game again, eyes half closing because it's late and he's kind of drunk and he'd normally be home now, but she knows he's standing watch over her, and she'd resent it if she thought this was like some frakkin' suicide watch. But she's starting to see that it's not. It's just that Helo never stopped being a frakkin' ECO. He just keeps taking his readings and waiting. Kara knows she's a viper pilot for a reason. If she had somebody watching her back like that all the time, she'd go nuts. But tonight, she's too grateful to be annoyed. As long as he doesn't try to fight her battles for her.
His leg is propped up in the chair beside her, and she rocks it with her hand, bringing his attention back to her.
"How do you do that?" she asks.
"What?"
"Be so calm and…patient?"
He gives her a bewildered smile, then she sees a face about as rare as any he has: a genuinely sardonic smile. "I wasn't on New Caprica."
Her jaw doesn't fall open, but she knows her face looks about like it anyway.
He continues, "I know we don't know what you all went through. I know you think we don't get that, but we do."
It's clear now that he's more patient than she even realized, because it's obvious he's been holding this in since her outburst, maybe since the rescue. And he was waiting to tell it to her.
"Karl," she says. If he doesn't frakkin' stop it, he's gonna make her cry, and she's really sick of how all this bullshit about dealing with the last few months means crying all the time.
He says, "So maybe you should bust our asses about it. I don't know. I just-"
"Hey," she says, knocking his foot to the ground. It startles her for a second, but it doesn't stop her from saying, "It was out of line. Godsdammit, Helo, I know-I know if you'd been down there, you would've been with us, doing everything we did. Hell, probably better. Just like Sharon was."
He knows she means it all of it, but he also knows she said that last part because he wanted to hear it. He gives her a wide but sleepy grin and looks at his hands on the table in front of him.
"We gave her a call sign," he says, softly.
"Athena. Suits her."
"Yeah." He's quiet, the kind of curious pause that always means he's thinking and plans to talk. You'd run right over that hesitation if you didn't know him. He says, "You know, I can almost forget she was Boomer. Except when she's down here."
"Is that why she's not here now?"
He shakes his head. "She was tired. I think she wanted to be alone. She's moodier than Boomer ever was," he says with a small curious smile. "And that's saying a lot."
"Karl, did you and-?"
"Never. Not once. Because Boomer never…"
"How do you know what I was going to ask?"
"Because you haven't yet. And you wouldn't be the first."
"The Chief?"
He lets his gaze travel around the room. "Everybody. Boomer never loved me, not like this."
"But you…?"
He rolls his eyes at himself. "Hell, I don't know. Probably?"
"The patience of the gods."
"You know, patience isn't some virtue, Kara. It's just the same thing as being stubborn."
"Sounds like that's a nice new word for how big a pain in the ass I can be."
"Which is how I know things'll get better for you. I wasn't kidding about what I said before, either. I wasn't on New Caprica. You all, it's like you have this special club, and part of me wishes I could join, just so I'd be as fearless and tough as you are."
Her head rolls to the side, and her face pinches up against tears. "No, you really don't."
"Yeah," he replies, softly. "I know." What he knows is not New Caprica but old Caprica, how he's already in a club of survivors, with her and Sharon, and with the ones who spent even longer there, waiting. Sam. She takes a deep breath. Sam.
Pushing back his chair, Helo stands up and slides the bottle back to her.
"But the night's still young," she says with a friendly smile.
"Not when you're XO."
"Maybe Tigh-" She cuts herself off as he shakes his head. "Yeah."
"Glad to see you down here again, Starbuck. Don't stay up too late," he says over his shoulder as he walks away.
She watches him weave his way through the room, and it seems to her now almost exactly like it always did, except maybe smaller and brighter. But she feels like she can sit here now, inside her own skin-Starbuck's skin, which, after all, was probably what she needed for a little while. Kara Thrace was frakkin' exhausted.
"Helo," she calls out, raising the bottle. "To the patience of the gods."
He nods at her, walking on. Then he stops, and she can almost see him pondering something, so she has a little warning he's going to be serious. It still catches her off guard, though, making the tears spring up again in her eyes.
He turns and says, "You know who else has the patience of the gods?" He nods at her tattoo.
That's as close as he'll probably ever come to telling her she's crazy for letting Sam leave Galactica, that it doesn’t have to be this way. But it's nothing she doesn't already know, so she's grateful for Karl Agathon's sixth sense about when to push her and when to leave her be.
Title: The Patience of the Gods
Characters: Kara, Helo (references to Kara/Sam and Helo/Sharon)
Rating: PG-13 for language
Summary: a short scene, post-"Torn" (3.06), when Starbuck finally returns to the pilots' rec room. 3500 words.
Note: Thanks to alissabobissa for the encouragement and helping me get all the canon straight, since I'm new to the fandom. And, you know, for sucking me into BSG in the first place.
The Patience of the Gods
She hasn't been to the pilots' rec room in five days. She knows. She's counted them.
Cutting her hair was all fine and good, and she mostly means this new outlook of hers, or maybe it's a return to an old one, a welcome back to herself. But then there's the other part of it, the attitude that feels like slipping on a pair of boots that always pinch a little but are her favorite nonetheless. At least that's what it feels like sometimes down here: Kara at her most Starbuck, squeezing into that skin even if it hurts, because that's what they expect out of her, what she expects out of herself.
What she finds remarkable as she pauses in the doorway, looking in like she hasn't seen this room in years, is that this place which is Starbuck's place should be easiest of all, but it's not, and it's because she's who he kicked out of the chair.
What it boils down to, what she was afraid of: she still doesn't know how to sit down beside these people like nothing's wrong. Something's always wrong, and she's always dealing with it; that's what she is in this place. But she doesn't know how, now, and it makes her stomach knot up. Oh, Kara cut her hair and learned to breathe again, but it turns out Starbuck didn't learn a damn thing in five days.
Probably, though, she wouldn't learn in five hundred. That leaves, as always, the hard way, so she steps through the threshold.
She thanks the gods Sharon isn't here. It's not that she dislikes Sharon. In fact, if she could get past Boomer and bullet holes in Adama and that nagging kernel of distrust rolling around underneath her skin, despite the instinctive feeling she has that Karl isn't just being Karl in believing the best in her, she could really love Sharon. It's just not possible, not with so much water under the bridge, so having her across the table sometimes makes Kara somehow tense and itchy, especially when she's not feeling a hundred percent. Not a good way to ease her back into the routine of drinking the CAP away and putting the other pilots in their place.
No, Helo's alone, back against the wall, rolling a sucker stick between his fingers and watching the boisterous swell of people in and out of room. It's not like he doesn't know how to drink and play cards, but he does that so rarely, instead choosing to sit like a benevolent god over the proceedings, present and smiling and chatting with people as they come by but still somehow aloof. He's always been a little like this, but especially since Sharon, and most especially since he became XO. It's weird to think of him in Tigh's place, but he's still Helo, underneath the new titles and burden of responsibility. He gives her a quizzical smile and nods at her when she comes in, but he doesn't get up. Only Karl could gauge her need for space that well.
It's not until she sits down at an empty table, just beside the game of Triad, that she feels this strange energy come into the room. It's like a hush, but the sound doesn't diminish. People are still talking and laughing. It's just like suddenly everything's muffled, and she realizes with a start that she did it to herself. She's drawn up inside herself so fast she wouldn't even realize it if she hadn't been actively combating that impulse for most of her adult life, and especially in the last few days. You can't fly-and you can't live-when you're that disconnected from what's happening around you.
When she lays her arms on the table, palms up, and relaxes her face for just a second, she realizes why she clammed up: every eye is on her. She ought to be used to that, but not like this. They don't grin at her or challenge her; they simply glance furtively, as if they know something. As if the Admiral told them exactly what he said to her, how he took her gun away from her and said something she doesn't think he ever believed but he meant her to feel. She tries to smile nonchalantly as she pulls the bottle off the table next to hers and pours herself a drink. She breathes and reminds herself that all they know is she got called out. Wouldn't be the first time or the last. In fact, now that she takes the time to think about it, she knows they're not expecting anything from her, nothing out of the ordinary: only that she doesn't act like she's been cowed.
But the thing is, she has been. And, sure, she could march in here and act like she hasn't been AWOL for days because her rage burned so hot the old man felt it where he is and had to try to put it out, but she has. Not just days, but all the time on New Caprica. Feels like frakkin' years sometimes.
Kat, gods bless her, finally stumbles on the right thing to do. She turns and gives Kara's chair a playful kick with her foot.
"You in or out, Captain?"
"What's it look like?"
"Looks like you're still drowning your sorrows. What? They didn't have the good stuff down on New Caprica?"
Godsdammit, Kat actually smiles at that, lips curling right around something that might be insult and might be easy bullshit but nobody would ever be able to tell, not even the two of them.
Kara arches an eyebrow and says, "I don't know, Katraine." Then she smiles. "You might get a more accurate answer out of Colonel Tigh."
Kat looks like she's going to accept Starbuck's less-than-stinging answer and start dealing the cards, but instead she turns back and says so quietly it bites: "I would ask your other drinking buddy, but I hear he's gone and left the ship."
A chair only barely scrapes the floor, but it doesn't have to do more than that when it's Helo pushing it back as he stands up and strides across the floor. For a second, the entire room is silent, but only a second. Helo takes the bottle out of Kara's hands and pulls out the chair opposite her with a swift motion, and she really sort of hates him for it.
By now, everyone's pretending like this isn't the beginnings of the kind of brawl that Kat and Starbuck are famous for. And it wouldn't be, anyway, not now. They have to be more than just surly, and right now neither of them are anything more than darkly bored and bone tired. Not enough liquor or energy to pull their punches. Neither one is venomous enough for that rare kind of more dangerous fight right now.
So she most definitely didn't need Helo riding in to the rescue. She frowns at him, ready for him to drop down into the chair and make conversation with her, like she's a frakkin' leper or something, needs him to make her feel like the world doesn't hate her. She's not a leper. If she has to force her way into that frakkin' card game, slap on her Starbuck armor until the rusted edges crush bruises into her skin to prove it, she will. But Helo just makes a face at her, something like rolling his eyes without giving away the gesture to the rest of them, before he pushes his chair in between Kat and Hot Dog and plunks the bottle down on the table.
"I'm in," he says.
That earns him a chorus of oohs from the peanut gallery, Kara included. When Helo chooses to play cards, he usually does really well. Nobody knows how to play against him because they can't decide if he's too honest to bluff worth a damn or he's simply playing up that image as its own sort of bluff. Kara's pretty sure the truth is somewhere in the middle: that he's no worse or better than the rest of them at pretending to be something he's not. It's just that he so rarely wants to be in any other position than the one he's in. True of life but especially true of cards: because Helo's a lucky bastard at cards. The rest of his contentment…well, that's just Karl.
But he's not as lucky when he drinks too much. It makes him too sure of himself, so that he doesn't trust luck and manages to screw himself over. So when she sees him start to knock it back, she's a little worried, but she slowly but surely realizes she needn't be. He's not trying to win. He's playing cards, but, really, he's simply still watching. He baits Kat, mostly with skeptical looks (she's easy to goad into going all in), and he talks pyramid with Hot Dog as though he doesn't realize he's throwing the boy off his game (doesn't take much). All this he does not because he's particularly being sneaky or even that mischievous. He's just smiling and drinking and enjoying people's company, and she realizes she used to do that. Now, maybe she had to knock heads a little more to take the edge off, but it used to be this easy to get her to leave her own head for a while.
Until, like everything, New Caprica. It always comes down to that, and shouldn't it? A year and half of her life in that place so new and strange and now haunting, the last four months of it like a nightmare. She's waited it out, this rehabilitation that the old man seems to think would be easy, the numbness and panic alternating in her soul until she sometimes finds herself standing in front of the mirror, splashing water into a face she stares at so long the water begins to dry. Every time she thinks it's gotten easier-and, hell, it should; she's trying now, isn't she?-every time, something will happen to bring it all back. Strangely, it's not Kacey, not any of the obvious things that look and smell and feel like New Caprica and that place and him. No, those things she's learned to deal with. It's the things that shouldn't remind her that make her gut seize up and her hands claw into fists that send her into the training room to put those fists into a heavy bag because if she got in a viper like that, she'd frak it up, probably herself, too.
She was walking down the corridor the day before, crossing the threshold into the CIC, when someone called out Sam, and she froze. The hair literally stood up on the back of her neck and she felt about small enough to fit in the palm of someone's hand. Leoben's, at least metaphorically. Sam's, if she had actually gotten what she prayed to the gods for every night she was held in that place that looked like it should have been a home but didn't feel like it, not with bars on the door. Standing there on her own ship, she felt insignificant, vulnerable enough to be trapped and thrown open to a dozen lines of attack, all striking into some deep part of her she couldn't defend herself from, because it wasn't physical. It might've been bearable if it were.
That the woman who called his name wasn't her didn't matter, and it didn't matter that Sam turned out to be an older man, hair so gray he might've been her grandfather. She pulled him along with her, and Kara couldn't help but wonder, for the thousandth time, what would've been different if she'd spent the New Caprica conflict with Sam, blowing up Cylons and fighting back, godsdammit, instead of defenseless. Would she feel any less worthless now? Would she still have driven him away?
Probably, and it would probably hurt about as much as this does, sitting in the rec room without him, almost pouring him a shot, too, out of habit. Sam would know how to force Starbuck out. He'd have her rolling on the floor giggling, lost to the rest of the world. But who knows if that would be a good thing. And who knows what the frak he'd do with this frakked up version of Kara Thrace. She's still not sure how he's survived her this long. Actually, she finds as she stares into the bottle, she's not sure how she survived those four months or anything that came after, either.
Suddenly, she feels more than hears the dull clink of Helo's fingernails on the neck of the bottle. Her eyes jerk up, too quickly to put on anything like a public face, but he'd probably give her his patented concerned look anyway, like he is now as he takes the bottle from her hands, stands up, and says with a shake of his head, "I had no idea I could suck this bad at Triad."
Kat's head lolls back so she can shoot Kara a look as she tells him, "You're no worse than she is."
Kara flips her the bird and stands up. The now-dwindling crowd oohs, thinking they're about to get a show, but Kara just pats Kat on the back and says, "Don't clean 'em out, Kat. They're gonna need some of it left so I take it all away from them tomorrow."
Hot Dog throws a paper cup at her half-heartedly, and Racetrack just snickers from her position in the corner. That raptor pilot that came over from the Pegasus right before the settlement-she never did learn his name, just calls him Smirk in her head-purses his lips and makes a face that decidedly means he's still trying to get in her pants. He probably doesn’t even know why.
For a long second, this feels not just familiar but normal. Then she jars back to reality as Helo nods at the table farthest from the commotion and she follows, a chorus of lazy jeers at her back. But this is a reality she recognizes, and she gives herself permission to be okay with that.
"They've been going stir-crazy without you down here," Helo says, settling into a chair.
"Nah. Looks like Kat's maybe more fun than me."
He shakes his head, smiling. "Can't hold her liquor as well."
"And I thought I was the most fun when I was drunk off my ass."
"Depends," he says, and she frakkin' hates that, when he slips from light to serious so fast, and with no warning.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah," she replies, stealing the bottle back. "I know."
She doesn't offer anything else, no words about how she sometimes gets when she drinks, because she never talks about it, not even to the people who most often have to deal with her angry ass when she's decided to throw her life as hard as she can down into a bottle to see if she can get it to lodge there. Helo's seen it too often. Kat, too. Lee. She closes her eyes, rubs her hands over her face. Sam.
When she opens her eyes again, Helo's glance flits over her face so fast it would make her nervous if it was anyone else. Then he's watching the game again, eyes half closing because it's late and he's kind of drunk and he'd normally be home now, but she knows he's standing watch over her, and she'd resent it if she thought this was like some frakkin' suicide watch. But she's starting to see that it's not. It's just that Helo never stopped being a frakkin' ECO. He just keeps taking his readings and waiting. Kara knows she's a viper pilot for a reason. If she had somebody watching her back like that all the time, she'd go nuts. But tonight, she's too grateful to be annoyed. As long as he doesn't try to fight her battles for her.
His leg is propped up in the chair beside her, and she rocks it with her hand, bringing his attention back to her.
"How do you do that?" she asks.
"What?"
"Be so calm and…patient?"
He gives her a bewildered smile, then she sees a face about as rare as any he has: a genuinely sardonic smile. "I wasn't on New Caprica."
Her jaw doesn't fall open, but she knows her face looks about like it anyway.
He continues, "I know we don't know what you all went through. I know you think we don't get that, but we do."
It's clear now that he's more patient than she even realized, because it's obvious he's been holding this in since her outburst, maybe since the rescue. And he was waiting to tell it to her.
"Karl," she says. If he doesn't frakkin' stop it, he's gonna make her cry, and she's really sick of how all this bullshit about dealing with the last few months means crying all the time.
He says, "So maybe you should bust our asses about it. I don't know. I just-"
"Hey," she says, knocking his foot to the ground. It startles her for a second, but it doesn't stop her from saying, "It was out of line. Godsdammit, Helo, I know-I know if you'd been down there, you would've been with us, doing everything we did. Hell, probably better. Just like Sharon was."
He knows she means it all of it, but he also knows she said that last part because he wanted to hear it. He gives her a wide but sleepy grin and looks at his hands on the table in front of him.
"We gave her a call sign," he says, softly.
"Athena. Suits her."
"Yeah." He's quiet, the kind of curious pause that always means he's thinking and plans to talk. You'd run right over that hesitation if you didn't know him. He says, "You know, I can almost forget she was Boomer. Except when she's down here."
"Is that why she's not here now?"
He shakes his head. "She was tired. I think she wanted to be alone. She's moodier than Boomer ever was," he says with a small curious smile. "And that's saying a lot."
"Karl, did you and-?"
"Never. Not once. Because Boomer never…"
"How do you know what I was going to ask?"
"Because you haven't yet. And you wouldn't be the first."
"The Chief?"
He lets his gaze travel around the room. "Everybody. Boomer never loved me, not like this."
"But you…?"
He rolls his eyes at himself. "Hell, I don't know. Probably?"
"The patience of the gods."
"You know, patience isn't some virtue, Kara. It's just the same thing as being stubborn."
"Sounds like that's a nice new word for how big a pain in the ass I can be."
"Which is how I know things'll get better for you. I wasn't kidding about what I said before, either. I wasn't on New Caprica. You all, it's like you have this special club, and part of me wishes I could join, just so I'd be as fearless and tough as you are."
Her head rolls to the side, and her face pinches up against tears. "No, you really don't."
"Yeah," he replies, softly. "I know." What he knows is not New Caprica but old Caprica, how he's already in a club of survivors, with her and Sharon, and with the ones who spent even longer there, waiting. Sam. She takes a deep breath. Sam.
Pushing back his chair, Helo stands up and slides the bottle back to her.
"But the night's still young," she says with a friendly smile.
"Not when you're XO."
"Maybe Tigh-" She cuts herself off as he shakes his head. "Yeah."
"Glad to see you down here again, Starbuck. Don't stay up too late," he says over his shoulder as he walks away.
She watches him weave his way through the room, and it seems to her now almost exactly like it always did, except maybe smaller and brighter. But she feels like she can sit here now, inside her own skin-Starbuck's skin, which, after all, was probably what she needed for a little while. Kara Thrace was frakkin' exhausted.
"Helo," she calls out, raising the bottle. "To the patience of the gods."
He nods at her, walking on. Then he stops, and she can almost see him pondering something, so she has a little warning he's going to be serious. It still catches her off guard, though, making the tears spring up again in her eyes.
He turns and says, "You know who else has the patience of the gods?" He nods at her tattoo.
That's as close as he'll probably ever come to telling her she's crazy for letting Sam leave Galactica, that it doesn’t have to be this way. But it's nothing she doesn't already know, so she's grateful for Karl Agathon's sixth sense about when to push her and when to leave her be.