DVD commentary: Eleusis
I promised back when I first wrote this fic that I would write a commentary for it because the sheer amount of references and meta that went into it were worth explaining, but it's taken me over six months to find the time :D And man, did it take time. There was a LOT to talk about.
Feel free to pick out anything you like and discuss it with me further, especially in the light of post-Maelstrom S3 events.
Background first: the impetus for this fic came from the distillation of a whole lot of thoughts about Kara Thrace's character journey, obviously, but also from this fic by crazylittleme, which is about being both prisoner and participant in one's own narrative. As I often point out, writing fic is my way of reacting to the ideas a show sparks off in me: I tend to not write meta, but to weave my meta commentary on a canon into the fics that I write. This fic in particular arose because in the aftermath of 'Maelstrom' I needed to wax meta-ly about Kara's story arcs, and this was both the most natural and the most enjoyable way to do so.
Eleusis
(and by my God have I leaped over a wall)
Title first. 'Eleusis' is a place in Greece (now called Eleusina) where the Eleusian Mysteries were held: these were the inititation ceremonies for the cult of Demeter and Persephone. The Persephone story is THE single most important myth in this fic -- the girl who continually switches between living with Hades in the Underworld, and living with her mother the fertility goddess, thus creating the cycle of the seasons.
'and by my God have I leaped over a wall' is a line from the Bible: Psalm 18, in fact. I wanted something from the Christian mythos to contrast with the Greek one, because that's what's at the core of BSG's religious constructions. The gods of the Colonies, and the One God of the Cylons. Also, the line is one of escaping. Of a higher power helping you to escape. And that's important.
They shut me up in Prose --
As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet --
Because they liked me "still" --
- Emily Dickinson
I nearly fell over myself at the perfection of that quote, and tweaked a few later sections to better fit in with it. The layers here are of a small girl being abused (obviously, for Kara's childhood), of someone being 'shut up in Prose' (entrapment by a fiction) and also the word 'still', which became the heartbeat of this particular fic.
~
She will raise her hands and smile at Lee Adama, and he will say, You’re dead.
I always knew that the structure and chronology of this one would be tricky. The tenses themselves are consistent: 'she will' denotes the future, 'she would' is the past, 'she is' is the present. And there's a plot, there's a thread of events to follow, so it's not like you're just being shown a whole lot of snapshots of different points in time. The reference point is NOW, and NOW will experience time in a normal linear fashion.
Kind of.
~
On New Caprica she would spend hours winding cobwebs around twigs as though by keeping her own corner of the planet clean she could hold the dust, which was not the dust of space, at bay. She wakes up with that white stickiness matted behind her eyes and with Leoben humming something tuneless from where he sits on the floor of the heavy raider. Dust in her lungs, and she coughs herself dry.
Obviously, the NOW begins just after her 'death' in the series. The only important image here is 'white stickiness', which we return to later.
“I took your helmet off,” Leoben says, helping her to sit up, pushing her hair out of her eyes. “We’re about to dock.”
“Did I eject?” she mumbles, and is abruptly horrified that she can’t remember. “I…wasn’t going to. I was ready.”
“But your hand touched the lever,” he says, and just smiles when she stares. She decides that she is too stubborn to ask him how he knows. Maybe she hasn’t changed all that much after all.
“Was it you? Were you flying…?”
“This thing?” He jerks his thumb, amused. There’s a jolt that is probably the raider settling, and the hatch starts to shudder open. “It flies itself.”
“Nobody believed me,” she says from behind the dust and the hole in her memory where her salvation - presumably - resides. But she’s almost smiling. “Bastard.”
From the episode itself: nobody believed her when she said that she saw the raider. Nobody else DID see it. We don't know if it was in her head or not; this fic takes the premise that it was there, but perhaps only visible to her.
“Starbuck? Who are you talking to?”
She freezes as Sharon Valerii appears, not needing the severely cut jacket to know that it is the Valerii; Boomer, not Athena. The absent bitterness in her pretty face is enough.
“She can’t see you?” Leoben shakes his head in response; she knows that look, the smug one. He puts a finger to his lips - winks - but she speaks anyway. “What - how is that possible?”
Head!Leoben <33 I have been wanting to write this particular version of the Kara-Leoben relationship for a very long time.
He sighs. Says, “It’s the end of the world, Kara.”
Says, “Anything is possible.”
It's the end of the world. Anything is possible. Another heartbeat. This was the first direct comment on the show Battlestar Galactica itself: its theme of society's (and reality's) rules being rewritten in the wake of humanity's near-destruction, and also the fact that the show's creators have a HUGE amount of freedom because of the speculative nature of the show. They can make up their own rules (and frequently do). They can REWRITE their own world (and frequently do...). I fucking love BSG, but this fic has a list of critical commentary hidden in it as well as thematic reflection :D
~
And it appears that anything is: as well as moving through the real world without being seen by anyone but her, Leoben shows her how to close her eyes and find herself in her old apartment, surrounded by brushes and chaos and wearing a shirt that used to be her father’s. It’s more than a dream, less than real, but she walks around and enjoys the intensity of the illusion. She stops in front of the mandala and Leoben stands next to her, tracing the black words that cut across its symmetry.
This is, of course, the equivalent of Head!Six transporting Baltar back to his apartment on Caprica. And the dream-scenes with the mandala and the paint were so powerful in the show itself that I knew I had to use them -- repeat them -- until their significance became clear.
“I’m not dead,” she says wonderingly, realising how surprised she is by this fact.
“Never said you were,” Leoben says. She looks at him.
“And you’re not -”
“Uh-uh.” He puts his fingers over her lips and she tastes paint. “We’ve been here before.”
What she's about to say is, and you're not real, because she's thinking about the dream!Leoben who helped her remember her mother and bring together the mandala (see the patterns!) and find peace. It's not a very Leoben thing to do, considering that the last time they encountered each other he was emotionally torturing her and she was killing him on a semi-regular basis. But her relationship with Leoben is incredibly central to her character, and this is less a genuine assertion that she COULD suddenly start manifesting an imaginary version of him and more a conviction that he is the best mouthpiece for the meta.
'We've been here before' - he's been inside her head before (the dreams) and it doesn't matter whether he's real or not. It doesn't matter what she believes. It doesn't matter if she's dead or not.
It's also the first direct reference to the all-important cycle of time, that mainstay of both her religion and (apparently) his.
~
They move her to a room that is not a cell, but has a lock, and she is left alone but for the cold organic humming of the metal. Lights are set into the ceiling and the air is cold, sterile, restless; she imagines that she can almost feel the atoms knocking clumsily against her skin.
I like that line. The fic couldn't have been ALL meta :)
Leoben is settling himself on the edge of the bed, and he says, “You’re free now.”
She thinks, We’ve been here before.
“Sure,” she drawls. “Locked in the bowels of a Cylon basestar. Looks like it’s my turn to be the prisoner again. What am I free from, exactly?”
Starbuck does NOT submit to metaphor without a bit of attitude along the way. You know this to be true. And the cycle of prisoner/captor is something that I have been fascinated by since it first came up in 'Flesh and Bone', and another of the canon elements to their relationship that I built this around.
“Impetus,” he says simply, resting his elbows on his knees and looking at her as though he is waiting for her to figure something out. “You’ve moved out of the light. How do you feel?”
This is a very important line. The dichotomy of being imprisoned, but free, for the sole reason that she is no longer an active character in the show's narrative. All of this is happening in the cracks between what the camera and the script shows us: in my experience the best example of fictional characters deliberately escaping their story is that of Sophie and Alberto in Sophie's World, when they awaken to their status as characters within the Major's book for Hilde -- they slip out of the narrative while he is distracted, and start an autonomous existence. Kara is one of the major characters in the show and what Leoben is saying is that through her 'death' (be it real or not; and at the time of writing this, I truly didn't know if she WAS dead) she is, for the first time, devoid of narrative impetus. She is still. And she has moved out of the (spot)light and into the darkness that is the area invisible to the audience. This is the cycle of Persephone -- out of the light and into the darkness.
She considers.
“Forgotten,” she says, and thrills.
~
“I want to see, want to see, want to see!” She bounced up and down with an impatience that she was only partly feeling, knowing with a six-year-old’s unerring gift for cruelty that this would provoke a reaction, which was all she really needed in that moment.
Sure enough, the blow was hard enough to snap her head sideways.
“Be still, Kara,” her mother snapped.
I needed a 'be still' that was in her past, preferably FAR in her past.
~
Nobody will try to stop her when she leaves. She will walk past Leoben Conoy, standing with his hands buried in the flickering gel, and he will wink at her.
There can be advantages to playing at madness.
Man, I love all of the future-projections in this fic, they're my favourite tiny segments. This says two things: one of them is that Leoben, the REAL Leoben, may actually be aware of (and instrumental in?) what's going on inside her head. I left this deliberately ambiguous. The second line is, obviously, a reference to Hamlet, though liberally flavoured with the more manipulative Hamlet featured in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead -- one of the major points made by both of those plays is that the truth of the matter doesn't have to be as importance as what people think and how they react. Hamlet's madness could be real or imaginary. What matters is how the other characters -- and, tellingly, the audience of the play -- perceive the appearance of madness. Whether Kara Thrace was actually dead or alive did not matter at all in the few episodes between Maelstrom and the finale: what mattered was the effect her apparent death had on the characters of the show, the catalytic effect she had in absentia. And, of course, what the show's viewers thought. Their speculation and theories and emotional reactions.
~
In the apartment in her head, the mandala always needs to be covered up; she will paint over it, but next time it will be exactly the same as it always was. She wonders if she is trying to tell herself something, or if it’s a way of keeping herself occupied, or if she’s just a contrary bitch.
This represents the futility of trying to cover things up, sweep them under the rug, whatever, without dealing with them. As we know, Kara does this a LOT. Zak. Lee. Her mother. She doesn't deal with her issues, she ignores them, and sometimes she's self-destructive about them. The entire point of this 'still' period, out of the spotlight, is that she no longer has to be interestingly broken in the way that a fictional character has to be. She can start to mend.
“There is a small sect on Virgon,” Leoben says, handing her a brush, “whose members place great importance in a mandala very similar to this one.”
“Oh?” She makes careful arcs, erasing.
“They call it the kyil kohr. It means enlightened vision.”
Sweeney handed me the kyil kohr when I was tossing ideas around, and I really liked it. Although, um, I think I spelt it wrong and it's actually 'kyil khor', but WHATEVER, it's also from Tibet and not Virgon, so I think a little inconsistency is allowed. It IS a mandala, and I liked the phrase 'enlightened vision' because, well, Leoben is all about being able to see patterns. As Kara is about to point out.
“Well, no wonder you like it so much,” she says. “You and your frakking patterns. What do you see at the moment, with your enlightened vision? Any rivers?”
“You,” he says, after a moment, meeting the mockery with his steady gaze. “You always manage to get so messy.”
“That’s me,” she says, and trips on the syntax. “Messing everything up.”
True.
“This.” He pulls her around and gestures towards the truncated tattoo covering her arm. “What was this for?”
For a moment she considers lying, but doesn’t. “It was easiest,” she says. Halting. “I wanted something to show what I’d committed to, something…”
“Visible evidence in place of emotional proof,” Leoben says. “Lazy.”
This was a completely blatant statement about how lazy the writers were when it came to Kara and Sam's relationship, yes. But it's also an echo of the point made about covering the mandala, again and again: she gets messy, she covers herself, she uses masks and symbols instead of actually expressing the way she feels.
She stares, and does not want to admit that he is right.
“You’re not the prisoner, Kara,” he says. “Not this time. You need to realise that.”
In other words: she doesn't have to hide behind anything.
~
The tall blonde one comes to see her; leans against the door as though she is posing for something and smiles like thorns.
“You almost died.”
“Someone up there must like me,” Kara says, and refuses to say anything further.
And this one was my near-certainty that no character that Ron D. Moore was so very fond of was going to STAY dead :D
“God has a plan,” the Cylon says.
“She’s bluffing,” says Leoben.
Oh man. I love Leoben so much. I love that this line sounds so him while simultaneously being a jab at the writers for the way they do, indeed, keep reshaping their own world. "And they have a plan" has always been the most chilling part of the show's message, and -- especially in the latter seasons -- it's also become less and less likely. The writers could at the very least PRETEND that they're not making it up as they go along.
~
Privately, she’s always been convinced that the gods were entertained by her suffering. She resented them for it. But she never stopped believing; you can’t resent something that isn't there.
Hahah. Um. Yes. She's fictional, her childhood was dreadful and her personality is fucked-up and her life is turbulent and it can all be blamed on her creator.
“Existence takes priority over essence,” Leoben says when she tries to explain this.
This was a point that I got really excited over when I came across it in...probably Sophie's World, again...and now I can't remember which philosopher to attribute it to. Descartes, I think. Though I could be wrong. Argh.
She’s pleased. “Yeah. Exactly.”
The beginning of existence: there are creation myths told to children with bright coloured illustrations to match, but for some reason Kara finds herself thinking about the morning of the decomissioning ceremony, when they were bumping shoulders with disaster and never suspected a thing.
“It wasn’t the end of the world at all, was it?”
This is the other main point, and something that I've always found deliciously ironic: the end of the world, for the characters, was the beginning of the show for us. The creation of their world has no meaning because it's outside the frame of the show's narrative -- this is something else I took from Ros & Guil, wherein the characters have no memory of anything that happened before the events of Hamlet because it was not necessary for them to exist then. Again: all that matters is what the audience perceives. What you do when you are in the light. And only once you LEAVE the light can you recognise the relative importance, the overall arc, of the events that you yourself took part in.
To oberve the pattern one must step out of it. Any sociologist or anthropologist or psychologist -- or creator of fictions -- can tell you that.
Leoben smiles.
Beginnings and ends, beginnings and ends, blurring. She is thinking in circles, coloured ones, concentric ones: and at the centre is her death, which never really happened.
So what this all means is that their ending was our beginning, which is pretty damn telling when the entire show's mythos revolves (ha) around cycles. And circles. And mandalas.
~
Laura Roslin said: “Do you believe in the gods, Lieutenant?”
Said: “If you believe in the gods, then you believe in the cycle of time.”
Said: “May I tell you the part in the story that it would seem I am playing?”
Said: “I am dying.”
Kara thought about her mother, thought: all of this has happened before.
I wanted to point this parallel out because I found it fascinating. Kara had only just started to pull her family around herself -- the Kara-Lee-Roslin-Adama family -- when she found out that her mother figure was dying Just as her own mother died. The cycle of time does not just travel at one speed: there are many circles, of different sizes, nested within each other (is this sounding familiar yet?). So it is possible that Roslin can be the dying leader of the Scriptures even though thousands of years have passed, and that Kara and Leoben can switch between captor and prisoner both across and between lifetimes, and that her mother will die and she will betray the man she loves. Over and over again.
This is a huge concept, to me, and I don't know if I'm explaining it very well. Gah.
~
There are not many ways in which she can break the monotony. Sometimes she takes five hours to cover the mandala and sometimes it’s just the buckets, frantic, and letting Leoben press her against the sticky wall and leave bruises on her collarbone. Sometimes the mess is random and sometimes there is purpose to it. They play at warpaint with the most delicate brushes; they make handprints on each others skin. For some reason it always comes down to their hands.
Mmm, paintsex against the wall. It was hot on the show and it's STILL HOT. The handprints are a reference to the show's obsession with camera shots of people's hands, which I do not object to in the slightest, and especially love when it's used with Leoben (HI LIZZEN).
She puts her palms on his shoulders - leaves a mark - and pushes upwards, downwards, watches his face as he comes, tilts her neck and drenches her hair with paint; it doesn’t matter, because she always opens her eyes clean.
Again: Kara and her tendency to cover herself up and ignore the implications. 'She always opens her eyes clean' -- it doesn't matter that she's sexing Leoben (seriously, girl, what the hell) because it's all in her head. What happens in the apartment-in-her-head doesn't have to mean anything in reality (she tells herself). She's not betraying anyone (she tells herself). And this is a smaller circle inside the larger circle, which is the fact that she's escaped the narrative and nothing that she does is important because she's not being observed. This concept knocked up against two things in my head: quantum physics (by observing something you change it -- which, thinking about it, is that tenet of sociological study I was talking about earlier. huh.) and also the Hamlet-idea again. This isn't part of the show: it's the darkness (it's fanfiction!). She can sleep with whomever she damn well wants; it won't have altered her story if/when she returns to the narrative proper.
~
There will be weapons pointed at her, fingers on triggers shivering with the shock that will ripple across the deck, and she will raise her empty hands slowly above her head.
~
“I killed you so many times,” she says, running her fingertips over him and watching the smudges of white that she leaves behind. Remembering, and wondering if she could do it again. But she’s had enough of death for the moment.
He gives a little laugh, like a punctuation mark. “Nobody really dies, Kara. That would close a door. We Cylons are just a little more blatant about it.”
Back to snarking at the writers. I love love love this point, though, and I played a lot with it in Paramagnetic, my enormously meta Torchwood fic: the creators of TV shows are unwilling to kill characters off for good (especially in science fiction, when the rules can be bent to allow their return!) because it does, indeed, close a door. RTD seems unable to kill Suzie for good. Jack's bloody immortal. And Kara, the darling of the BSG creators, isn't dead. I find the Cylons to be a clever (if inadvertent) little piece of self-reference, with their ability to die many times and just keep on coming back. You don't get much more sci-fi than that!
He likes to quote Scripture into her mouth, punctuating not with laughter but with his own tongue, and he likes to tell her stories while she throws buckets after bucket of paint against the wall until her shoulders ache with the effort. He tells her about Aurora. He tells her about Apollo. He tells her about Persephone, the Kore, the girl who stepped out of the world of the living and into the underworld, and she’s heard it before but she listens anyway because, by now, she can tell when he is making a point.
Aurora, the dawn goddess, is sometimes considered by the mythos-fond corners of fandom to be Kara's symbol because (although she's Roman rather than Greek) she's the sister of the sun god (Apollo!) and she renews herself every morning. The cyclic nature of her existence is what prompted me to namedrop here. And now the Persephone myth becomes explicit rather than just shadowed.
Also, I like that she's still throwing paint at the mandala. Still trying to cover it up. But at least she's listening to him, taking in the clues.
“Persephone never stayed still,” she says, to annoy him. “Never in one place.”
Large circles and small circles. Kara is referring to the fact that as the Kore she would then be destined to leave him -- she's teasing, but she's starting to hit on the truth of the pattern -- but the fact remains that at this moment, she IS still. There are moments of no net movement within the larger envelope of a sine wave...um, sorry, physics, but it's the best way to convey the image. There can be pockets of stillness within a constantly moving cycle.
He catches her in the cheek with a dab of water. “Persephone,” he says, teasing, “should not have eaten the seeds.”
Oh, Persephone's pomegranate seeds <33 If there was a special significance to this line then I can't remember it, but I love that aspect of all of the Underworld myths, the DON'T DRINK THE KOOL-AID rule. I do find it interesting that Kara and Leoben's prisoner scenes tend to revolve around tables for serving food.
~
She has moved out of the light and into the shadow; she lives within a sine wave; a pattern that can be seen only from a higher perspective. Occasionally she will catch a glimpse of her own equation, but existence is positivistic: you can’t live it and observe it at the same time.
About here, all of my references start to cohere into a whole, and I start to explicitly state all of the things that...I've been explaining in this commentary. Light and shadow, the eternal oscillation, escaping from the pattern. Equations that govern sine waves. And hey, I'd forgotten that there was an actual word to desribe the positivism theme, but there you go.
~
“What do you think is going on?” she asks, sitting on the bed and staring at the lights set into the ceiling of her cell. “With the war, I mean.”
“You could ask.”
“I don’t know. I think it could make it worse, to know.” She frowns. “Besides, then I’d be…part of it. Again. I wasn’t supposed to be in any danger of going back.”
Oh, there we are, something I haven't mentioned yet. Kara killing herself to escape whatever was coming next in the story of her life, and erase what had come before. And she's escaped, certainly, but now she's past the still point at the tip of the wave and she's starting to become curious about what everyone else is up to. The impetus has caught hold of her again.
“And yet, here you are.” He sounds neutral. “Maybe it’s best to assume that everything is going according to plan.”
She laughs, unbelieving, aware of how long she has been sitting in this room. “Do you expect me to believe that anyone has a plan, at this point, beyond survival?”
Er, yes, back to the NOBODY HAS A PLAN. Not the writers. Not the Cylons. Nobody.
“Perhaps not.” Leoben spreads his hands. “Perhaps you’ve slipped through the gaps.”
Slipped through the gaps = the explicit statement of that Sophie & Alberto thing. The idea that maybe all of this is taking place in some kind of limbo of decision, that maybe it hasn't yet been DECIDED if she'll live or die, and because her path is not yet clear -- and the attentions of the creators are focused upon other characters right now -- she is able to pass into the darkness and gain some autonomy.
But then he says, “Did you plan to survive?”
~
They do not seem to want anything of her. Sometimes one model or other will sit with her and ask awkward questions, but never try to force the answers, and hours slip by like grey water. Only Boomer seems comfortable with her, and only because Kara will tell her stories about the everyday tensions that should have been hers. She drinks up Athena’s life with a sharp hungry masochism that makes Leoben laugh and Kara ache: unable to live her own existence, Sharon Valerii takes her observations second-hand. Swallows the bitterness and pretends it’s enough.
That was just a quick echo of the positivism theme. I wanted there to be SOME tiny breaks in the constant Kara-Kara-Kara of this fic.
~
“How do you feel?”
“Restless.”
Persephone never stayed still.
She beats time to his humming with her bare feet, on the metal, which hums back.
The impetus is building, and she's once again aware of the larger cycles.
PS - Restless!
~
The morning of the refuelling, she and her best friend sat side-by-side and talked about how, despite everything, they were right back where they started. It was true enough to stand up to scrutiny, but they held each other’s gazes in silence and something even truer fell into the gaps. For a few moments she could not imagine a destiny, special or ordinary, without him in it.
Later, she said: “Do you think I’m crazy?”
He said: “I think you’re a raving lunatic.”
But Lee Adama loved Kara Thrace, so it was all right to laugh.
What? Write a BSG fic without pilotshipping in it? NEVER.
~
She throws a bucket of white paint onto the mandala and steps back to inspect her handiwork.
“Do you think I’m crazy?” she asks the wall.
Leoben steps up behind her and puts his arms around her waist. “What do you think?”
“I’m not sure,” she says, “but from the perspective of anyone else, I’m talking to myself right now.”
He laughs. “Well, that assumes that whether you are or you aren’t isn’t the point. You’re assuming that what matters is what others perceive of you.”
Hamlet, natch. But also a quick reference back to Baltar, the early Hamlet of BSG: IS he mad? Is head!Six real? He certainly spent enough time appearing to talk to thin air that most of the other characters were convinced he was kind of nuts...but we knew more than they did, and now Kara knows more as well. Outside the pattern, she can look back with more knowledge.
She turns around and raises an eyebrow at him, and he lifts the half-empty can of paint out of her hands.
“I never said it was a bad assumption. There can be advantages,” he tells her, “to playing at madness.”
*wriggles happily* I love that he says it first here, but I quote it first at the beginning of the fic.
“What others perceive of me,” she says, two beats late, “is that I’m dead.”.
“You made that choice.” He shrugs.
She dips her hands into the paint and smears them slowly across her cheeks.
THIS, I stole from 'Restless' (see?), the Buffy episode with the perfect name considering this fic's themes. The image of Buffy smearing her face with the paint. But BSG gave me the paint in the first place, and Kara's fondness for masks.
“Is it better to stay alive, even if life doesn’t seem worth it?”
Yes, that is indeed a modern translation of the crux of the 'to be or not to be' speech, seeing as how we're Hamleting at the moment. But it's also the ubiquitous question of suicide & exisentialist philosophy...hi there, Sartre & Camus.
Leoben says: “You’re asking the wrong questions.”
And that's a direct quote from 'Restless' as well, but what Leoben's trying to tell her (again) is that the point it not what she herself believes about life and death, and their worths, but what their entertainment value is. Whether she would be allowed to die. In this sense, in the context of a fiction, suicide is indeed the ultimate expression of free will.
~
Kyil khor,
kill Kore,
still Kara.
You have no idea how proud I am of that little progression. It's, like, the whole fic. In three pairs of gradually-evolving words.
~
The hatch will open and she will step out and the light will fall onto her like shackles.
And this is my favourite line! Because the darkness is freedom, and as soon as she returns to the Galactica -- and to her place in the show itself -- she will once again be trapped by the narrative. That is the larger circle of prisoner/freedom within which she and Leoben play out the smaller version.
~
The idea occurs to her suddenly - “Did I die?” she asks, curious. “Is this…what did you call it…the space between life and death? Am I dead?”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it does.”
“No. It’s like the madness question.” Today they are wild, extravagant; there is not a surface in the apartment untouched by splatters of thick white paint like bleached blood, like snow. They stand in the midst of the blizzard and he traces her jaw with his thumbs. “What matters is what others perceive.”
Man, I'd forgotten that I pointed everything out so blatantly D: This must seem like such overkill by now, seeing as how I've been elaborating at every turn.
She’s starting to get irritated. “I’d prefer to maintain control over my own death, if it’s all the same to you.”
Suicide as free will! Hello again, Camus-and-Hamlet.
“Good girl,” Leoben murmurs, but it sounds condescending, so when he kisses her she bites his tongue. So he pulls her fingers back sharply; so she growls and kicks him; so they are wrestling and stumbling across the floor in their own local whirlwind. And it is only when Kara has to wrench herself out of his grasp to wipe away the paint dripping into her eyes that she realises that she’s doing exactly what he wants her to do, again.
“Why can’t we do this without the paint?” she asks, frowning.
Leoben says: “You’re asking the wrong questions.”
But she thinks she might be getting warmer.
Her tattoos are as deeply buried in white as the mandala, but what has she really done but exchange one set of coverings for another? She strains to remember who she was when she was unmarked; once upon a time she was comfortable in her own bare skin.
I think that's all fairly self-explanatory: Kara's awakening to the significance of her tendency to cover her true self.
I live in the action of death, she thinks, and opens her eyes.
That's another 'Restless' quote, from the First Slayer, but it's so perfect. In death she is still alive. The paradox is the cycle.
~
Adama said: “What do you hear, Starbuck?”
And she said: “Nothing but the rain.”
This, this was the point on which the existence of Kara Thrace began -- the FIRST TIME we ever see her on screen -- and also ended. If her life is considered as only existing within the frame of the show, it is bookended by this conversation with Adama. I elaborate on this in the next section.
~
Nothing but the rain. There is a cyclic pattern there that she can almost see if she looks at it from side on; if she thinks too hard about it then it slides out of focus, but she gathers her patience and sneaks looks at it, soft darting thoughts:
(The morning of the decomissioning ceremony: not an ending, but a beginning.)
(The morning of the refuelling: she decided to die, and ended up living.)
(The endless rise and fall of the sine wave but they’re right back where they started, beginning and ending exactly the same, two points moving in perfect phase.)
That's her and Lee. If you didn't get that :D
(And then she slipped through the gaps, out of the spotlight, into the underworld, forgotten.)
(Living and dying in a pattern larger than herself,
in cycles -
in circles -
with a common centre.)
And she has it.
I...don't think I can add anything. This is the section where either all of my hard work hammering the symbolism into Kara -- and the reader -- pays off, or it doesn't. You see it or you don't. You have to realise that up until the moment of posting I was secretly convinced that I was just seeing bewilderingly large patterns that were invisible or meaningless to everyone else.
But that's it. The beginning is the ending, the Kore moves from death into life, and the cycle of time is not one cycle but a mandala.
That's it.
~
“I’m leaving,” she says very calmly.
Leoben looks over at her and raises his eyebrows. “Your place is here now, Kara. I thought we’d agreed.”
Kyil kohr.
Enlightened vision.
“I see the patterns,” she says. And grins at him; Starbuck’s grin. “I know what is expected of me. Nobody really dies: you told me that. You’re part of my destiny, but other people are as well.”
“You won’t be free any more,” he warns her.
And she knows that that depends entirely on the meaning of freedom; she has rewritten her own definitions, her own self, a hundred times. She knows how to do it, this eternal oscillation between roles. She knows that being the prisoner is not nearly as bad as it sounds.
Everything from here on in is just coming down off that climax of realisation, really. She saw her own equation, and now she is perfectly at ease with the next part of her cycle, which must be spent in the light. Impetus and shackles, but life.
“Will you come with me?” she asks.
After a long moment, he shakes his head, and she imagines that he looks proud of her. “You’ll come back to me.”
She nods.
“Don’t I always?”
Rereading this gives me the bizarre urge to write Hades/Persephone fic. Um. Lizzen will understand. (It's the archetype that's important!)
~
She will step down onto the deck with her hands raised and not a speck of paint on her face, and she will seek out Lee Adama and she will smile at him.
He will say, You’re dead.
And she will say, That doesn’t matter.
She will say, I’m still Kara.
For obvious reasons, the fic ends in the same place that it begins.
And that's the ending that I wish for her: no need for anything to cover herself, but content in her own skin and at peace with both her past and her future. Aware that death is not an end but a marker in the cycle. Finding Apollo, who is the sunlight into which she has passed, and smiling.
And still Kara.
Feel free to pick out anything you like and discuss it with me further, especially in the light of post-Maelstrom S3 events.
Background first: the impetus for this fic came from the distillation of a whole lot of thoughts about Kara Thrace's character journey, obviously, but also from this fic by crazylittleme, which is about being both prisoner and participant in one's own narrative. As I often point out, writing fic is my way of reacting to the ideas a show sparks off in me: I tend to not write meta, but to weave my meta commentary on a canon into the fics that I write. This fic in particular arose because in the aftermath of 'Maelstrom' I needed to wax meta-ly about Kara's story arcs, and this was both the most natural and the most enjoyable way to do so.
Eleusis
(and by my God have I leaped over a wall)
Title first. 'Eleusis' is a place in Greece (now called Eleusina) where the Eleusian Mysteries were held: these were the inititation ceremonies for the cult of Demeter and Persephone. The Persephone story is THE single most important myth in this fic -- the girl who continually switches between living with Hades in the Underworld, and living with her mother the fertility goddess, thus creating the cycle of the seasons.
'and by my God have I leaped over a wall' is a line from the Bible: Psalm 18, in fact. I wanted something from the Christian mythos to contrast with the Greek one, because that's what's at the core of BSG's religious constructions. The gods of the Colonies, and the One God of the Cylons. Also, the line is one of escaping. Of a higher power helping you to escape. And that's important.
They shut me up in Prose --
As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet --
Because they liked me "still" --
- Emily Dickinson
I nearly fell over myself at the perfection of that quote, and tweaked a few later sections to better fit in with it. The layers here are of a small girl being abused (obviously, for Kara's childhood), of someone being 'shut up in Prose' (entrapment by a fiction) and also the word 'still', which became the heartbeat of this particular fic.
~
She will raise her hands and smile at Lee Adama, and he will say, You’re dead.
I always knew that the structure and chronology of this one would be tricky. The tenses themselves are consistent: 'she will' denotes the future, 'she would' is the past, 'she is' is the present. And there's a plot, there's a thread of events to follow, so it's not like you're just being shown a whole lot of snapshots of different points in time. The reference point is NOW, and NOW will experience time in a normal linear fashion.
Kind of.
~
On New Caprica she would spend hours winding cobwebs around twigs as though by keeping her own corner of the planet clean she could hold the dust, which was not the dust of space, at bay. She wakes up with that white stickiness matted behind her eyes and with Leoben humming something tuneless from where he sits on the floor of the heavy raider. Dust in her lungs, and she coughs herself dry.
Obviously, the NOW begins just after her 'death' in the series. The only important image here is 'white stickiness', which we return to later.
“I took your helmet off,” Leoben says, helping her to sit up, pushing her hair out of her eyes. “We’re about to dock.”
“Did I eject?” she mumbles, and is abruptly horrified that she can’t remember. “I…wasn’t going to. I was ready.”
“But your hand touched the lever,” he says, and just smiles when she stares. She decides that she is too stubborn to ask him how he knows. Maybe she hasn’t changed all that much after all.
“Was it you? Were you flying…?”
“This thing?” He jerks his thumb, amused. There’s a jolt that is probably the raider settling, and the hatch starts to shudder open. “It flies itself.”
“Nobody believed me,” she says from behind the dust and the hole in her memory where her salvation - presumably - resides. But she’s almost smiling. “Bastard.”
From the episode itself: nobody believed her when she said that she saw the raider. Nobody else DID see it. We don't know if it was in her head or not; this fic takes the premise that it was there, but perhaps only visible to her.
“Starbuck? Who are you talking to?”
She freezes as Sharon Valerii appears, not needing the severely cut jacket to know that it is the Valerii; Boomer, not Athena. The absent bitterness in her pretty face is enough.
“She can’t see you?” Leoben shakes his head in response; she knows that look, the smug one. He puts a finger to his lips - winks - but she speaks anyway. “What - how is that possible?”
Head!Leoben <33 I have been wanting to write this particular version of the Kara-Leoben relationship for a very long time.
He sighs. Says, “It’s the end of the world, Kara.”
Says, “Anything is possible.”
It's the end of the world. Anything is possible. Another heartbeat. This was the first direct comment on the show Battlestar Galactica itself: its theme of society's (and reality's) rules being rewritten in the wake of humanity's near-destruction, and also the fact that the show's creators have a HUGE amount of freedom because of the speculative nature of the show. They can make up their own rules (and frequently do). They can REWRITE their own world (and frequently do...). I fucking love BSG, but this fic has a list of critical commentary hidden in it as well as thematic reflection :D
~
And it appears that anything is: as well as moving through the real world without being seen by anyone but her, Leoben shows her how to close her eyes and find herself in her old apartment, surrounded by brushes and chaos and wearing a shirt that used to be her father’s. It’s more than a dream, less than real, but she walks around and enjoys the intensity of the illusion. She stops in front of the mandala and Leoben stands next to her, tracing the black words that cut across its symmetry.
This is, of course, the equivalent of Head!Six transporting Baltar back to his apartment on Caprica. And the dream-scenes with the mandala and the paint were so powerful in the show itself that I knew I had to use them -- repeat them -- until their significance became clear.
“I’m not dead,” she says wonderingly, realising how surprised she is by this fact.
“Never said you were,” Leoben says. She looks at him.
“And you’re not -”
“Uh-uh.” He puts his fingers over her lips and she tastes paint. “We’ve been here before.”
What she's about to say is, and you're not real, because she's thinking about the dream!Leoben who helped her remember her mother and bring together the mandala (see the patterns!) and find peace. It's not a very Leoben thing to do, considering that the last time they encountered each other he was emotionally torturing her and she was killing him on a semi-regular basis. But her relationship with Leoben is incredibly central to her character, and this is less a genuine assertion that she COULD suddenly start manifesting an imaginary version of him and more a conviction that he is the best mouthpiece for the meta.
'We've been here before' - he's been inside her head before (the dreams) and it doesn't matter whether he's real or not. It doesn't matter what she believes. It doesn't matter if she's dead or not.
It's also the first direct reference to the all-important cycle of time, that mainstay of both her religion and (apparently) his.
~
They move her to a room that is not a cell, but has a lock, and she is left alone but for the cold organic humming of the metal. Lights are set into the ceiling and the air is cold, sterile, restless; she imagines that she can almost feel the atoms knocking clumsily against her skin.
I like that line. The fic couldn't have been ALL meta :)
Leoben is settling himself on the edge of the bed, and he says, “You’re free now.”
She thinks, We’ve been here before.
“Sure,” she drawls. “Locked in the bowels of a Cylon basestar. Looks like it’s my turn to be the prisoner again. What am I free from, exactly?”
Starbuck does NOT submit to metaphor without a bit of attitude along the way. You know this to be true. And the cycle of prisoner/captor is something that I have been fascinated by since it first came up in 'Flesh and Bone', and another of the canon elements to their relationship that I built this around.
“Impetus,” he says simply, resting his elbows on his knees and looking at her as though he is waiting for her to figure something out. “You’ve moved out of the light. How do you feel?”
This is a very important line. The dichotomy of being imprisoned, but free, for the sole reason that she is no longer an active character in the show's narrative. All of this is happening in the cracks between what the camera and the script shows us: in my experience the best example of fictional characters deliberately escaping their story is that of Sophie and Alberto in Sophie's World, when they awaken to their status as characters within the Major's book for Hilde -- they slip out of the narrative while he is distracted, and start an autonomous existence. Kara is one of the major characters in the show and what Leoben is saying is that through her 'death' (be it real or not; and at the time of writing this, I truly didn't know if she WAS dead) she is, for the first time, devoid of narrative impetus. She is still. And she has moved out of the (spot)light and into the darkness that is the area invisible to the audience. This is the cycle of Persephone -- out of the light and into the darkness.
She considers.
“Forgotten,” she says, and thrills.
~
“I want to see, want to see, want to see!” She bounced up and down with an impatience that she was only partly feeling, knowing with a six-year-old’s unerring gift for cruelty that this would provoke a reaction, which was all she really needed in that moment.
Sure enough, the blow was hard enough to snap her head sideways.
“Be still, Kara,” her mother snapped.
I needed a 'be still' that was in her past, preferably FAR in her past.
~
Nobody will try to stop her when she leaves. She will walk past Leoben Conoy, standing with his hands buried in the flickering gel, and he will wink at her.
There can be advantages to playing at madness.
Man, I love all of the future-projections in this fic, they're my favourite tiny segments. This says two things: one of them is that Leoben, the REAL Leoben, may actually be aware of (and instrumental in?) what's going on inside her head. I left this deliberately ambiguous. The second line is, obviously, a reference to Hamlet, though liberally flavoured with the more manipulative Hamlet featured in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead -- one of the major points made by both of those plays is that the truth of the matter doesn't have to be as importance as what people think and how they react. Hamlet's madness could be real or imaginary. What matters is how the other characters -- and, tellingly, the audience of the play -- perceive the appearance of madness. Whether Kara Thrace was actually dead or alive did not matter at all in the few episodes between Maelstrom and the finale: what mattered was the effect her apparent death had on the characters of the show, the catalytic effect she had in absentia. And, of course, what the show's viewers thought. Their speculation and theories and emotional reactions.
~
In the apartment in her head, the mandala always needs to be covered up; she will paint over it, but next time it will be exactly the same as it always was. She wonders if she is trying to tell herself something, or if it’s a way of keeping herself occupied, or if she’s just a contrary bitch.
This represents the futility of trying to cover things up, sweep them under the rug, whatever, without dealing with them. As we know, Kara does this a LOT. Zak. Lee. Her mother. She doesn't deal with her issues, she ignores them, and sometimes she's self-destructive about them. The entire point of this 'still' period, out of the spotlight, is that she no longer has to be interestingly broken in the way that a fictional character has to be. She can start to mend.
“There is a small sect on Virgon,” Leoben says, handing her a brush, “whose members place great importance in a mandala very similar to this one.”
“Oh?” She makes careful arcs, erasing.
“They call it the kyil kohr. It means enlightened vision.”
Sweeney handed me the kyil kohr when I was tossing ideas around, and I really liked it. Although, um, I think I spelt it wrong and it's actually 'kyil khor', but WHATEVER, it's also from Tibet and not Virgon, so I think a little inconsistency is allowed. It IS a mandala, and I liked the phrase 'enlightened vision' because, well, Leoben is all about being able to see patterns. As Kara is about to point out.
“Well, no wonder you like it so much,” she says. “You and your frakking patterns. What do you see at the moment, with your enlightened vision? Any rivers?”
“You,” he says, after a moment, meeting the mockery with his steady gaze. “You always manage to get so messy.”
“That’s me,” she says, and trips on the syntax. “Messing everything up.”
True.
“This.” He pulls her around and gestures towards the truncated tattoo covering her arm. “What was this for?”
For a moment she considers lying, but doesn’t. “It was easiest,” she says. Halting. “I wanted something to show what I’d committed to, something…”
“Visible evidence in place of emotional proof,” Leoben says. “Lazy.”
This was a completely blatant statement about how lazy the writers were when it came to Kara and Sam's relationship, yes. But it's also an echo of the point made about covering the mandala, again and again: she gets messy, she covers herself, she uses masks and symbols instead of actually expressing the way she feels.
She stares, and does not want to admit that he is right.
“You’re not the prisoner, Kara,” he says. “Not this time. You need to realise that.”
In other words: she doesn't have to hide behind anything.
~
The tall blonde one comes to see her; leans against the door as though she is posing for something and smiles like thorns.
“You almost died.”
“Someone up there must like me,” Kara says, and refuses to say anything further.
And this one was my near-certainty that no character that Ron D. Moore was so very fond of was going to STAY dead :D
“God has a plan,” the Cylon says.
“She’s bluffing,” says Leoben.
Oh man. I love Leoben so much. I love that this line sounds so him while simultaneously being a jab at the writers for the way they do, indeed, keep reshaping their own world. "And they have a plan" has always been the most chilling part of the show's message, and -- especially in the latter seasons -- it's also become less and less likely. The writers could at the very least PRETEND that they're not making it up as they go along.
~
Privately, she’s always been convinced that the gods were entertained by her suffering. She resented them for it. But she never stopped believing; you can’t resent something that isn't there.
Hahah. Um. Yes. She's fictional, her childhood was dreadful and her personality is fucked-up and her life is turbulent and it can all be blamed on her creator.
“Existence takes priority over essence,” Leoben says when she tries to explain this.
This was a point that I got really excited over when I came across it in...probably Sophie's World, again...and now I can't remember which philosopher to attribute it to. Descartes, I think. Though I could be wrong. Argh.
She’s pleased. “Yeah. Exactly.”
The beginning of existence: there are creation myths told to children with bright coloured illustrations to match, but for some reason Kara finds herself thinking about the morning of the decomissioning ceremony, when they were bumping shoulders with disaster and never suspected a thing.
“It wasn’t the end of the world at all, was it?”
This is the other main point, and something that I've always found deliciously ironic: the end of the world, for the characters, was the beginning of the show for us. The creation of their world has no meaning because it's outside the frame of the show's narrative -- this is something else I took from Ros & Guil, wherein the characters have no memory of anything that happened before the events of Hamlet because it was not necessary for them to exist then. Again: all that matters is what the audience perceives. What you do when you are in the light. And only once you LEAVE the light can you recognise the relative importance, the overall arc, of the events that you yourself took part in.
To oberve the pattern one must step out of it. Any sociologist or anthropologist or psychologist -- or creator of fictions -- can tell you that.
Leoben smiles.
Beginnings and ends, beginnings and ends, blurring. She is thinking in circles, coloured ones, concentric ones: and at the centre is her death, which never really happened.
So what this all means is that their ending was our beginning, which is pretty damn telling when the entire show's mythos revolves (ha) around cycles. And circles. And mandalas.
~
Laura Roslin said: “Do you believe in the gods, Lieutenant?”
Said: “If you believe in the gods, then you believe in the cycle of time.”
Said: “May I tell you the part in the story that it would seem I am playing?”
Said: “I am dying.”
Kara thought about her mother, thought: all of this has happened before.
I wanted to point this parallel out because I found it fascinating. Kara had only just started to pull her family around herself -- the Kara-Lee-Roslin-Adama family -- when she found out that her mother figure was dying Just as her own mother died. The cycle of time does not just travel at one speed: there are many circles, of different sizes, nested within each other (is this sounding familiar yet?). So it is possible that Roslin can be the dying leader of the Scriptures even though thousands of years have passed, and that Kara and Leoben can switch between captor and prisoner both across and between lifetimes, and that her mother will die and she will betray the man she loves. Over and over again.
This is a huge concept, to me, and I don't know if I'm explaining it very well. Gah.
~
There are not many ways in which she can break the monotony. Sometimes she takes five hours to cover the mandala and sometimes it’s just the buckets, frantic, and letting Leoben press her against the sticky wall and leave bruises on her collarbone. Sometimes the mess is random and sometimes there is purpose to it. They play at warpaint with the most delicate brushes; they make handprints on each others skin. For some reason it always comes down to their hands.
Mmm, paintsex against the wall. It was hot on the show and it's STILL HOT. The handprints are a reference to the show's obsession with camera shots of people's hands, which I do not object to in the slightest, and especially love when it's used with Leoben (HI LIZZEN).
She puts her palms on his shoulders - leaves a mark - and pushes upwards, downwards, watches his face as he comes, tilts her neck and drenches her hair with paint; it doesn’t matter, because she always opens her eyes clean.
Again: Kara and her tendency to cover herself up and ignore the implications. 'She always opens her eyes clean' -- it doesn't matter that she's sexing Leoben (seriously, girl, what the hell) because it's all in her head. What happens in the apartment-in-her-head doesn't have to mean anything in reality (she tells herself). She's not betraying anyone (she tells herself). And this is a smaller circle inside the larger circle, which is the fact that she's escaped the narrative and nothing that she does is important because she's not being observed. This concept knocked up against two things in my head: quantum physics (by observing something you change it -- which, thinking about it, is that tenet of sociological study I was talking about earlier. huh.) and also the Hamlet-idea again. This isn't part of the show: it's the darkness (it's fanfiction!). She can sleep with whomever she damn well wants; it won't have altered her story if/when she returns to the narrative proper.
~
There will be weapons pointed at her, fingers on triggers shivering with the shock that will ripple across the deck, and she will raise her empty hands slowly above her head.
~
“I killed you so many times,” she says, running her fingertips over him and watching the smudges of white that she leaves behind. Remembering, and wondering if she could do it again. But she’s had enough of death for the moment.
He gives a little laugh, like a punctuation mark. “Nobody really dies, Kara. That would close a door. We Cylons are just a little more blatant about it.”
Back to snarking at the writers. I love love love this point, though, and I played a lot with it in Paramagnetic, my enormously meta Torchwood fic: the creators of TV shows are unwilling to kill characters off for good (especially in science fiction, when the rules can be bent to allow their return!) because it does, indeed, close a door. RTD seems unable to kill Suzie for good. Jack's bloody immortal. And Kara, the darling of the BSG creators, isn't dead. I find the Cylons to be a clever (if inadvertent) little piece of self-reference, with their ability to die many times and just keep on coming back. You don't get much more sci-fi than that!
He likes to quote Scripture into her mouth, punctuating not with laughter but with his own tongue, and he likes to tell her stories while she throws buckets after bucket of paint against the wall until her shoulders ache with the effort. He tells her about Aurora. He tells her about Apollo. He tells her about Persephone, the Kore, the girl who stepped out of the world of the living and into the underworld, and she’s heard it before but she listens anyway because, by now, she can tell when he is making a point.
Aurora, the dawn goddess, is sometimes considered by the mythos-fond corners of fandom to be Kara's symbol because (although she's Roman rather than Greek) she's the sister of the sun god (Apollo!) and she renews herself every morning. The cyclic nature of her existence is what prompted me to namedrop here. And now the Persephone myth becomes explicit rather than just shadowed.
Also, I like that she's still throwing paint at the mandala. Still trying to cover it up. But at least she's listening to him, taking in the clues.
“Persephone never stayed still,” she says, to annoy him. “Never in one place.”
Large circles and small circles. Kara is referring to the fact that as the Kore she would then be destined to leave him -- she's teasing, but she's starting to hit on the truth of the pattern -- but the fact remains that at this moment, she IS still. There are moments of no net movement within the larger envelope of a sine wave...um, sorry, physics, but it's the best way to convey the image. There can be pockets of stillness within a constantly moving cycle.
He catches her in the cheek with a dab of water. “Persephone,” he says, teasing, “should not have eaten the seeds.”
Oh, Persephone's pomegranate seeds <33 If there was a special significance to this line then I can't remember it, but I love that aspect of all of the Underworld myths, the DON'T DRINK THE KOOL-AID rule. I do find it interesting that Kara and Leoben's prisoner scenes tend to revolve around tables for serving food.
~
She has moved out of the light and into the shadow; she lives within a sine wave; a pattern that can be seen only from a higher perspective. Occasionally she will catch a glimpse of her own equation, but existence is positivistic: you can’t live it and observe it at the same time.
About here, all of my references start to cohere into a whole, and I start to explicitly state all of the things that...I've been explaining in this commentary. Light and shadow, the eternal oscillation, escaping from the pattern. Equations that govern sine waves. And hey, I'd forgotten that there was an actual word to desribe the positivism theme, but there you go.
~
“What do you think is going on?” she asks, sitting on the bed and staring at the lights set into the ceiling of her cell. “With the war, I mean.”
“You could ask.”
“I don’t know. I think it could make it worse, to know.” She frowns. “Besides, then I’d be…part of it. Again. I wasn’t supposed to be in any danger of going back.”
Oh, there we are, something I haven't mentioned yet. Kara killing herself to escape whatever was coming next in the story of her life, and erase what had come before. And she's escaped, certainly, but now she's past the still point at the tip of the wave and she's starting to become curious about what everyone else is up to. The impetus has caught hold of her again.
“And yet, here you are.” He sounds neutral. “Maybe it’s best to assume that everything is going according to plan.”
She laughs, unbelieving, aware of how long she has been sitting in this room. “Do you expect me to believe that anyone has a plan, at this point, beyond survival?”
Er, yes, back to the NOBODY HAS A PLAN. Not the writers. Not the Cylons. Nobody.
“Perhaps not.” Leoben spreads his hands. “Perhaps you’ve slipped through the gaps.”
Slipped through the gaps = the explicit statement of that Sophie & Alberto thing. The idea that maybe all of this is taking place in some kind of limbo of decision, that maybe it hasn't yet been DECIDED if she'll live or die, and because her path is not yet clear -- and the attentions of the creators are focused upon other characters right now -- she is able to pass into the darkness and gain some autonomy.
But then he says, “Did you plan to survive?”
~
They do not seem to want anything of her. Sometimes one model or other will sit with her and ask awkward questions, but never try to force the answers, and hours slip by like grey water. Only Boomer seems comfortable with her, and only because Kara will tell her stories about the everyday tensions that should have been hers. She drinks up Athena’s life with a sharp hungry masochism that makes Leoben laugh and Kara ache: unable to live her own existence, Sharon Valerii takes her observations second-hand. Swallows the bitterness and pretends it’s enough.
That was just a quick echo of the positivism theme. I wanted there to be SOME tiny breaks in the constant Kara-Kara-Kara of this fic.
~
“How do you feel?”
“Restless.”
Persephone never stayed still.
She beats time to his humming with her bare feet, on the metal, which hums back.
The impetus is building, and she's once again aware of the larger cycles.
PS - Restless!
~
The morning of the refuelling, she and her best friend sat side-by-side and talked about how, despite everything, they were right back where they started. It was true enough to stand up to scrutiny, but they held each other’s gazes in silence and something even truer fell into the gaps. For a few moments she could not imagine a destiny, special or ordinary, without him in it.
Later, she said: “Do you think I’m crazy?”
He said: “I think you’re a raving lunatic.”
But Lee Adama loved Kara Thrace, so it was all right to laugh.
What? Write a BSG fic without pilotshipping in it? NEVER.
~
She throws a bucket of white paint onto the mandala and steps back to inspect her handiwork.
“Do you think I’m crazy?” she asks the wall.
Leoben steps up behind her and puts his arms around her waist. “What do you think?”
“I’m not sure,” she says, “but from the perspective of anyone else, I’m talking to myself right now.”
He laughs. “Well, that assumes that whether you are or you aren’t isn’t the point. You’re assuming that what matters is what others perceive of you.”
Hamlet, natch. But also a quick reference back to Baltar, the early Hamlet of BSG: IS he mad? Is head!Six real? He certainly spent enough time appearing to talk to thin air that most of the other characters were convinced he was kind of nuts...but we knew more than they did, and now Kara knows more as well. Outside the pattern, she can look back with more knowledge.
She turns around and raises an eyebrow at him, and he lifts the half-empty can of paint out of her hands.
“I never said it was a bad assumption. There can be advantages,” he tells her, “to playing at madness.”
*wriggles happily* I love that he says it first here, but I quote it first at the beginning of the fic.
“What others perceive of me,” she says, two beats late, “is that I’m dead.”.
“You made that choice.” He shrugs.
She dips her hands into the paint and smears them slowly across her cheeks.
THIS, I stole from 'Restless' (see?), the Buffy episode with the perfect name considering this fic's themes. The image of Buffy smearing her face with the paint. But BSG gave me the paint in the first place, and Kara's fondness for masks.
“Is it better to stay alive, even if life doesn’t seem worth it?”
Yes, that is indeed a modern translation of the crux of the 'to be or not to be' speech, seeing as how we're Hamleting at the moment. But it's also the ubiquitous question of suicide & exisentialist philosophy...hi there, Sartre & Camus.
Leoben says: “You’re asking the wrong questions.”
And that's a direct quote from 'Restless' as well, but what Leoben's trying to tell her (again) is that the point it not what she herself believes about life and death, and their worths, but what their entertainment value is. Whether she would be allowed to die. In this sense, in the context of a fiction, suicide is indeed the ultimate expression of free will.
~
Kyil khor,
kill Kore,
still Kara.
You have no idea how proud I am of that little progression. It's, like, the whole fic. In three pairs of gradually-evolving words.
~
The hatch will open and she will step out and the light will fall onto her like shackles.
And this is my favourite line! Because the darkness is freedom, and as soon as she returns to the Galactica -- and to her place in the show itself -- she will once again be trapped by the narrative. That is the larger circle of prisoner/freedom within which she and Leoben play out the smaller version.
~
The idea occurs to her suddenly - “Did I die?” she asks, curious. “Is this…what did you call it…the space between life and death? Am I dead?”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it does.”
“No. It’s like the madness question.” Today they are wild, extravagant; there is not a surface in the apartment untouched by splatters of thick white paint like bleached blood, like snow. They stand in the midst of the blizzard and he traces her jaw with his thumbs. “What matters is what others perceive.”
Man, I'd forgotten that I pointed everything out so blatantly D: This must seem like such overkill by now, seeing as how I've been elaborating at every turn.
She’s starting to get irritated. “I’d prefer to maintain control over my own death, if it’s all the same to you.”
Suicide as free will! Hello again, Camus-and-Hamlet.
“Good girl,” Leoben murmurs, but it sounds condescending, so when he kisses her she bites his tongue. So he pulls her fingers back sharply; so she growls and kicks him; so they are wrestling and stumbling across the floor in their own local whirlwind. And it is only when Kara has to wrench herself out of his grasp to wipe away the paint dripping into her eyes that she realises that she’s doing exactly what he wants her to do, again.
“Why can’t we do this without the paint?” she asks, frowning.
Leoben says: “You’re asking the wrong questions.”
But she thinks she might be getting warmer.
Her tattoos are as deeply buried in white as the mandala, but what has she really done but exchange one set of coverings for another? She strains to remember who she was when she was unmarked; once upon a time she was comfortable in her own bare skin.
I think that's all fairly self-explanatory: Kara's awakening to the significance of her tendency to cover her true self.
I live in the action of death, she thinks, and opens her eyes.
That's another 'Restless' quote, from the First Slayer, but it's so perfect. In death she is still alive. The paradox is the cycle.
~
Adama said: “What do you hear, Starbuck?”
And she said: “Nothing but the rain.”
This, this was the point on which the existence of Kara Thrace began -- the FIRST TIME we ever see her on screen -- and also ended. If her life is considered as only existing within the frame of the show, it is bookended by this conversation with Adama. I elaborate on this in the next section.
~
Nothing but the rain. There is a cyclic pattern there that she can almost see if she looks at it from side on; if she thinks too hard about it then it slides out of focus, but she gathers her patience and sneaks looks at it, soft darting thoughts:
(The morning of the decomissioning ceremony: not an ending, but a beginning.)
(The morning of the refuelling: she decided to die, and ended up living.)
(The endless rise and fall of the sine wave but they’re right back where they started, beginning and ending exactly the same, two points moving in perfect phase.)
That's her and Lee. If you didn't get that :D
(And then she slipped through the gaps, out of the spotlight, into the underworld, forgotten.)
(Living and dying in a pattern larger than herself,
in cycles -
in circles -
with a common centre.)
And she has it.
I...don't think I can add anything. This is the section where either all of my hard work hammering the symbolism into Kara -- and the reader -- pays off, or it doesn't. You see it or you don't. You have to realise that up until the moment of posting I was secretly convinced that I was just seeing bewilderingly large patterns that were invisible or meaningless to everyone else.
But that's it. The beginning is the ending, the Kore moves from death into life, and the cycle of time is not one cycle but a mandala.
That's it.
~
“I’m leaving,” she says very calmly.
Leoben looks over at her and raises his eyebrows. “Your place is here now, Kara. I thought we’d agreed.”
Kyil kohr.
Enlightened vision.
“I see the patterns,” she says. And grins at him; Starbuck’s grin. “I know what is expected of me. Nobody really dies: you told me that. You’re part of my destiny, but other people are as well.”
“You won’t be free any more,” he warns her.
And she knows that that depends entirely on the meaning of freedom; she has rewritten her own definitions, her own self, a hundred times. She knows how to do it, this eternal oscillation between roles. She knows that being the prisoner is not nearly as bad as it sounds.
Everything from here on in is just coming down off that climax of realisation, really. She saw her own equation, and now she is perfectly at ease with the next part of her cycle, which must be spent in the light. Impetus and shackles, but life.
“Will you come with me?” she asks.
After a long moment, he shakes his head, and she imagines that he looks proud of her. “You’ll come back to me.”
She nods.
“Don’t I always?”
Rereading this gives me the bizarre urge to write Hades/Persephone fic. Um. Lizzen will understand. (It's the archetype that's important!)
~
She will step down onto the deck with her hands raised and not a speck of paint on her face, and she will seek out Lee Adama and she will smile at him.
He will say, You’re dead.
And she will say, That doesn’t matter.
She will say, I’m still Kara.
For obvious reasons, the fic ends in the same place that it begins.
And that's the ending that I wish for her: no need for anything to cover herself, but content in her own skin and at peace with both her past and her future. Aware that death is not an end but a marker in the cycle. Finding Apollo, who is the sunlight into which she has passed, and smiling.
And still Kara.