BSG - If You're the Answer, What's the Question?
Battlestar Galactica
Kara/various
Spoilers: 3.01/3.02 Occupation/Precipice
Summary: At first Kara hadn't even been afraid.
If You're the Answer, What's the Question?
Kara's mother was a difficult woman. Difficult to be married to according to Kara's dad, difficult to work for if the whispers were to be believed, difficult to be the daughter of… Kara knows this firsthand.
Kara doesn't remember the first time her mother hit her. She doesn't remember the first time her mother shook her hard enough for her to see the spots that ended with her shaking uncontrollably on the floor in fear. She remembers the second time and the third. There are these phrases that flit across her mind at random times… concussion, fracture, bruising of the brain, internal bleeding…
She thinks about her brain sloshing in her skull when she slips in the shower.
She remembers fingers that wouldn't bend and joints so swollen that she couldn't play the piano properly. That was even worse.
It was one thing to be wrong; it was something else entirely to disappoint.
Disappointment was a four-letter word when Kara was small. Nothing has changed in the last twenty-odd years. She was a disappointment by virtue of being small, of not standing up tall enough, coming in second instead of first, being a girl instead of a boy.
Kara's mother was very disappointed that Kara was not a boy -- someone to carry on the Thrace name from the warrior line they were descended from -- so she made do with Kara instead.
Boyish haircuts, boyish hobbies, drills in the rain to make Kara a stronger person, because girls were weak. Soldiers and Cylons, not tea and dolls. Kara never even saw a dress until her father's funeral when she was twelve.
She did have one doll, once, a gift from her mother's commanding officer. The doll's name was Triballi, after the race of Thracians from which Kara's family was descended. The Triballi were once a wild and warlike people, respected for their skills in battle; Kara's dad used to say that Kara's mom only married him for his bloodline.
Kara thinks that's probably true.
What Kara remembers about Triballi, though, was the night her mother cut off all of Triballi's hair because Kara forgot Demeter during her evening prayers. She then left the hair on the tiny altar in Kara's room and took the doll away. Kara still has a lock of Triballi's hair somewhere in her belongings on Caprica.
Kara always promised herself that she would never be someone's mother. She would never lock her daughter in the linen closet for two days because she had spilled juice on her jumper in a room full of guests. She would never subject anyone to what her mother had put her through. She would never even take the risk.
The last thing Kara remembers properly is the Cylon invasion. Sam was sick; she had just put him to bed again, because he had frakking pneumonia, but all he wanted to do was play pyramid. Sam was so frakking difficult, and that was why she loved him; because he was stubborn and unyielding and he wanted to protect her. Kara didn't need anyone to protect her, but Sam thought he could, and they lived under this illusion because it was better than nothing. Not like her and Lee. Lee couldn't even protect Kara from a cold.
Lee.
Lee.
Lee.
She hates him for staying up in his Pegasus castle while the rest of them toughed it out with grey skies and grey food and a life bereft of shifts and Vipers and uniforms. She misses her regulation clothes sometimes. Mostly when she's cold. It's always cold on New Caprica.
Was not is.
She was cold all the time. Cold and dirty and irritated. And then the Cylons came and brought their chaos, and she had just wanted to find Sam, but he had found her first.
At first Kara hadn't even been afraid.
Leoben Conoy didn't have the sense of a Dionysian sacrifice, but he would never hurt her, and she'd actually stood there between the rows of tents as he'd approached her. People had run by her, screaming, pushing, shoving. She'd stumbled to her knees in the mud, feeling the cold dampness seeping into the fabric of her pants, and when she'd looked up there was Leoben with his half-smirk.
She had opened her mouth to say something, and he'd hit her.
And everything had gone black.
Black.
Black.
Black.
Kara had been near the top of her class in everything at school, not out of natural intelligence, but out of desperation. Math, science, religion, art, history -- Kara had loved Caprican history; she had dissected the Muses and the stupidity of Orpheus. The library was her safe haven, because if she was studying, she wasn't at home, and if she wasn't at home, then she wasn't on the battle lines with her mother. Her only other means of escape were the pyramid pitch and the arcade, because if she was at the arcade playing in the Viper simulator then she wasn't drawing fire when her mother came home, the lines around her mouth tight because her squadron hadn't met with her approval.
Kara was one of those puzzles who drove her professors crazy; she knows this because they told her so repeatedly. She worked hard, harder than almost any other student, but she couldn't stay out of trouble. She couldn't stop mouthing off. If she wasn't impressing her teachers with her knowledge, she was picking fights with bigger kids and fleecing the pyramid team during lunch at triad. Her team didn't seem to mind, but Kara's religion teacher, Dr. Peterson, called in her mother anyway. Kara knows this because that night she ended up with a broken arm for her mother's trouble. She told Dr Peterson she fell down the stairs at the Library of Athena. The pyramid team lost six games while she was out.
Three months later Kara got in trouble again.
This time, when she fell, she injured her knee. It was amazing the injuries Kara could collect by tripping over her mother's regulation boots.
The doctor said she would never play pyramid again. Her coach said the Picon Dryads had recalled their scout. Dr. Peterson said he would pray for her; Kara told him to save it for the pyramid team.
That night she stayed at the arcade playing the Viper Sim until they closed. When she got home her mother was waiting up. Kara threw her crutches across the room and waited for her mother to do her worst. She was used to it by now.
Kara woke up in a cinder block. Her head hurt, her mouth hurt, there was a bright light shining into her eyes, and no matter which way she turned all her muscles cried out in agony at the fetal position she refused to move out of. Old habits died hard.
Eventually Kara got up and moved around the room, counting footsteps from corner to corner and stretching her arms to figure out the width. She shoved her fingers into the crevices and poked and prodded, bending back two fingers in the process and scrabbling at the walls until the pads of her fingers bled. Time passed, but because she didn’t know how long she'd been unconscious she couldn't say how long. So Kara did some calisthenics and waited.
When the door finally opened, Kara was in a handstand, her feet resting against the wall, reciting the Twelve Articles of Artemis and praying for strength.
She was almost surprised not to see her mother in the doorway, but her mother didn't have short, spiky blonde hair and a slightly bulging stomach. Her mother was dead -- definitely -- and there was nothing anyone could do to her that was worse than what she'd already been through. So, Kara pushed her legs off the wall and stood up.
All the blood rushing out of her head made her slightly wobbly, but she had enough direction to launch herself at the Cylon that stood between her and freedom.
There was the snap of a neck meeting concrete and losing, and the secondary click of a door closing. The third noise was all Kara's own because she had too much forward momentum. She ran smack into the door and fell backward onto her ass. She could taste the blood from her split lip, and her hand shook as she touched her forehead. There was blood there too.
The barred window to the door slid back and he was there too. He was everywhere. "Kara," Leoben said with a trace of amusement in his voice. "You know you can't kill me."
Kara looked down at the broken Leoben on the floor of her cell and tried to control the tightening around her lungs. She'd known, but seeing it before her was something else entirely. "That won't keep me from trying," she said giving him her toothiest grin, the one that said 'bring it on, you'll just lose.'
Kara didn't trust women. They were treacherous and deceitful and dangerous, so while the rest of the girls in her year at the Academy bonded over the best sports bras and how to get the most out of your regulation hair cut, Kara sparred in the weight room with the bag. The bag didn't hit back. Left. The bag didn't leave you so crippled you lost your chance at playing pyramid professionally. Right. The bag didn't drive your father to drink and smoke himself to death. Left.
"Did the bag insult you?"
Kara ignored the interloper. Right.
"Are you righting some wrongs the bag did to your ancestors?" the interloper carried on. Left.
"You really should figure out another way to get rid of all that excess energy," the interloper persisted.
Kara stopped and turned towards the boy who was harassing her. He was barely two inches taller than she was; she could take him down in a heartbeat. It didn't matter since she preferred her men a bit bigger, like Helo. Except that Helo wasn't quite as smart as Kara preferred them either, which was why they were just friends, with the occasional frakking.
"What do you suggest?" she said disdainfully. "Frakking?"
The boy had huge blue eyes and unruly brown hair. "Well, I thought I should at least introduce myself first -- Cadet Zak Adama -- but, you know, I'm not objecting to the frakking thing."
Kara raised an eyebrow and set to tugging at the fastenings of her right glove with her teeth. "Don't just stand there," she said, punching Zak softly in the stomach to get him to hold her glove, "help me."
Zak stared. "You mean right now?" he asked holding her now-empty glove.
Kara rolled her eyes. "You have someplace else you'd rather be?"
Zak shook his head rapidly. "No, not really."
"Well, okay then. Time's wasting."
Kara sat in her cell and waited. And waited. And then she waited some more. No food, no light, no nothing. And then the Cylon came. It wasn't Leoben; it wasn't Sharon; it was D'Anna Biers. And it had absolutely no problem with trying to kick Kara's ass. Kara had absolutely no problem with giving as good as she got, except that the Cylon hadn't been food-deprived and locked up in a cell. The Cylon didn't have lingering claustrophobia issues. Kara would've won regardless if the godsfrakking toaster hadn't snapped her right forearm. It was the arm her mother had broken after the Dr. Peterson conference. Kara thinks it broke in the same place.
She couldn't even talk for the pain. She couldn't even curse for the blood in her mouth, so she just lay there on the floor, face numb against the concrete, and pretended to be dead. Eventually he came.
"I know you're not dead," the Cylon said, crouching down by her side and brushing the damp hair out of her eyes. Kara twitched where his fingers brushed her face. She wanted to claw away her own skin to rid herself of his infestation.
He set down something metallic with a heavy thud. "I know you're just pretending," he carried on. There was the sound of water splashing and then there was a wet washcloth brushing along the side of Kara's face. The water was cool, but Kara's skin felt as though it were being scalded. She felt as though she were being stained irrevocably, and for the first time in a long time she was too broken to do anything about it.
"I would know if you were dead, because I would feel it. We're connected," Leoben's voice was even and soft, tinged with something that would've been emotion if it were human. "I love you, Kara; you just don't see it. But you will in time."
Kara didn’t know whether to scream or to cry, so she did neither.
Kara didn't like Lee Adama when she met him. He was uppity and snobbish and irritating and self-important and all the words that her writing teacher had insisted she learn instead of just calling Julia Voreni a bitch over and over. Kara thought Lee was a bitch though, and she didn't hesitate in telling that to Zak. To his credit Zak just laughed. And then he laughed more. And when they went back into the party he even told Lee that Kara had said he was a bitch. Lee didn’t take it particularly well, but when Kara tried to start a fight he didn't take the bait either.
The second time Kara met Lee she liked him even less than the first time. He seemed even more high-handed and sanctimonious. Zak adored him, and Lee never seemed to see that; there was clearly some sort of competition between them, but it all seemed to be on Lee's side. So that night Kara made a point of ashing her cigar in Lee's beer, and when that didn't work, while Zak was in the bathroom, Kara actually poured her beer on Lee.
It was a waste of a good beer, but it made her feel a lot better.
She felt even better thirty seconds later when he dragged her out in the street for an explanation, and she clocked him a good one. When he hit her back, she only paused long enough to shake it off and give him the toothy grin she gave Helo during their sparring matches.
When Zak came back from the bathroom he found them tussling in the gutter outside The Drunk Minotaur in front of a small audience, with Kara sitting on Lee's chest and demanding he call her CAG.
Lee refused to acquiesce.
Kara refused to move.
Zak went back in the bar.
Eventually they passed out.
The next morning Kara woke up on top of Lee Adama in the street in front of the pub. She was drooling on the neck of his jacket, the sun was shining, and three guys from the Department of Sanitation were standing across the street drinking coffee and tossing bits of trash at them.
Kara woke up on her back. The ceiling was white, there was a low throbbing in her head, and her back wasn't cold, which told her she wasn't stretched out on the cell floor anymore.
Her right forearm was wrapped in a cast and the ends of her hair were no longer stained with her own blood. She was wearing clothing she hadn't put on herself. If she thought too hard about it she would never get up. Never move. She knew what it was like to be a prisoner already. She'd spent most of her life in fear, and with each blink of her eyes she processed more information, becoming more aware of her surroundings, more in tune to finding a way out.
In bed.
Blink.
On her feet.
Blink.
Covered windows. Thick. Too thick for a fist.
Blink.
Down the hall. Bathroom. No window.
Blink.
Leoben Conoy sitting at a table covered with food.
Blink.
Kara padded across the room, the carpeting soft beneath her feet. She couldn't remember the last time she'd felt real carpeting. Not in her tent with Sam, not on the Galactica with Lee, not even in her apartment in Caprica City with Zak. She had actually made a point of not having carpeting in her apartment, because carpeting always seemed to lead to stains and stains led to punishment for spilling things. The whole cycle was too traumatic for words, but Kara was a survivor. It was what she did. She hadn't survived her mother and Zak and the end of the world and Lee and Sam just to fall apart now.
Sam was sick; he needed her.
No Cylon could take her from him.
She'd already lost Zak. She'd already lost Lee. She wouldn't do this again.
"The fair Kara lives," Leoben said, giving her the half-smirk smile that seemed to be his only other expression besides grave understanding. "I was waiting for you to start eating breakfast." He gestured to the bacon, eggs, pancakes, and all sorts of decadent things that Kara hadn't seen since Caprica City.
Kara blinked at the table setting before her. Plate, glass, fork, spoon, knife.
"Sit down, you must be exhausted. The doctor said you had a repeat fracture of the ulna and the radius. Why didn't you tell me you'd injured your arm before? I know that model is excessive; I told her before I killed her that she shouldn't have injured you so. I can't have that. The divine one wants us to treat others as we want to be --"
Leoben stopped talking because Kara had slit his throat with the knife from her place setting.
Blood splattered all over the table, seeping into the porous pancakes before Leoben's torso crashed onto the table. The Cylon body convulsed as Leoben grabbed his throat.
Kara didn’t think about that.
Kara didn't think about Leoben killing the Cylon that had almost killed her . She didn't think about her repeat fracture or what it took to break both of the bones in someone's forearm. She didn't think about what an examination by a Cylon doctor could do to her that hadn’t already been done. She didn't think about how hungry she was -- all she wanted was out.
She ran up the stairs, yanked open the door and saw the bars.
She ran back down the stairs and into the bedroom. The windows were too thick. The bathroom didn't have a window. In the living room, Leoben's body gave a spasm on the table.
Kara ignored it and grabbed the chair at her place setting and threw it at the window with her good arm.
The window quivered at the force, but it didn't crack. The chair landed with a heavy thud.
Kara picked up the chair and threw it again. Again nothing happened.
The third time she tried to use her right arm as well; the subsequent pain made her vomit onto the sofa.
It didn't matter.
She could hurt now and be free later.
She tried again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
When Leoben the Third arrived, Kara's clothing was damp with sweat. The muscles in her left arm shook with overuse and her right arm hung limply at her side. She didn't even hear him enter over the blood rushing in her head.
"You won't get out that way," he said officiously from the bottom of the stairs.
So Kara threw the chair at him; no one was more shocked than she was when the leg of the chair punctured his chest. Even with the last model Kara hadn't realized there was so much blood in a Cylon body. This time it stained everything: the walls, the carpet, some of it even spattered on Kara as Leoben staggered across the living room.
"Kara, Kara, Kara," he chanted her name like a prayer as he fell at her feet. "You have to accept your situation in order to find the freedom in it."
Kara could hardly breathe. Terror squeezed her lungs the way the footfalls of her mother outside her bedroom had when she was small. With each word it just got worse, so Kara ran, except that there was nowhere to go. So she locked herself in the bathroom, sat in the bathtub waiting for an idea to come, and tried to ignore the pain in her arm.
When she emerged from the bathroom two days later, Leoben the Fourth was there. All the blood had been cleaned away. There was a new dining set. The table was covered in food. Her arm hurt horribly.
"I waited for you," he said when she collapsed into the chair across the table from him. "I'll always wait for you."
Kara looked down at her place setting. There was no fork. No knife. No nothing.
So she ate a roll with her left hand.
That was the last thing she remembered.
Kara didn't love Sam when she left him on Caprica, but she loved the idea of him enough to go back for the real thing. Kara loved that Sam stood up to her and for her and wasn't afraid to show it. Sam wasn't so afraid of loving her that he had to roll over and let her walk all over him. Kara loved that she could save him in the way she hadn't been able to save Zak. Kara loved that Sam wasn't too bogged down by a competition with his dead brother to love her while they were both alive. Kara loved Sam enough to marry him. Maybe he wasn't her first choice or her second choice, but he was her best choice, so she took it. He said if she didn't want to have kids that was fine with him too.
Kara woke up on her back. The ceiling was white, there was a low throbbing in her head, and the pain in her arm was gone. Then she tried to get out of bed and couldn't. She couldn't move her arms or her legs. She couldn't do anything besides look at the ceiling.
She couldn't believe he'd resorted to strapping her to the bed.
All she could do was blink at the ceiling and think of how the hell she was going to get out of this. Eventually the Cylon came. He had a tray in his hands, which he set down on the nightstand beside the bed. "I knew you'd wake up and come back to me," he said good-naturedly.
No matter how many times she killed him, he never seemed to get cross. Well, unless you counted drugging her as being cross. "I want out," Kara said, turning her head away from the contents of the spoon he tried to feed her. "I want to feed myself."
"So you can stab me with a spoon this time?" Leoben said, the omnipresent half-smirk slid into something darker than Kara had seen before.
"Damn straight!" She spat the contents of the spoon in his face.
Kara had never heard Leoben laugh before; it was horribly disconcerting. Like he didn't know how to laugh and had tried to figure it out on his own. "No cutlery. No freedom. I won't make the same mistake I made before," he said quietly. "And if you don't want to eat, then I won't feed you."
And then he got up and left.
It had been a very long time since Kara had had anything to eat.
It had been a long time since she'd gone to the bathroom either.
She waited.
And waited.
And then she waited some more.
In the end it was the little ways he stripped her of her dignity that broke Kara the most. He kept her strapped to the bed for eleven days. He made her use a bed pan. She couldn't even blow her own nose. She had never felt so humiliated in all her life. Even at her mother's hand Kara had been taught that she was special, that she was better, that she had a standard to meet, something to achieve.
Leoben treated her like a doll.
Her only standard was what he wanted.
He didn't violate her physically, he didn't need to.
At night Kara sat by Kasey's bed stroking her hair and thinking of all the promises she'd made to herself -- that she'd never bring a child into this world because of how horrible it could be; that she'd get back to Sam and they'd fight the Cylons together; that the next time she saw Lee, she was going to beat him into the ground for leaving her side.
Her daughter changed everything, and just when Kara thought she couldn't take anything else, now she had someone she had to protect. Now she had someone she had to make concessions for.
Kara had spent a lifetime learning to depend on herself, because everyone else abandoned and betrayed her in the end. As long as she took care of herself, the gods would take care of the rest. She'd made deals for this. She'd prayed to Artemis every night for this. She'd held up her end of the bargain. This was not how the Lords of Kobol were supposed to repay the faithful.
If her mother didn't defeat her, and neither did Zak's death, nor Lee's abandonment, she'd taken more than her share. She was willing to kill Leoben for as long as she had to because this was war, and no Cylon would ever break a Thrace.
And yet, not in a million years did she think a half-Cylon child from her own egg might trump them all in breaking her heart.
-end-
Betas by oxoniensis and serialkarma.
Notes about the Triballi here.
Kara/various
Spoilers: 3.01/3.02 Occupation/Precipice
Summary: At first Kara hadn't even been afraid.
If You're the Answer, What's the Question?
Kara's mother was a difficult woman. Difficult to be married to according to Kara's dad, difficult to work for if the whispers were to be believed, difficult to be the daughter of… Kara knows this firsthand.
Kara doesn't remember the first time her mother hit her. She doesn't remember the first time her mother shook her hard enough for her to see the spots that ended with her shaking uncontrollably on the floor in fear. She remembers the second time and the third. There are these phrases that flit across her mind at random times… concussion, fracture, bruising of the brain, internal bleeding…
She thinks about her brain sloshing in her skull when she slips in the shower.
She remembers fingers that wouldn't bend and joints so swollen that she couldn't play the piano properly. That was even worse.
It was one thing to be wrong; it was something else entirely to disappoint.
Disappointment was a four-letter word when Kara was small. Nothing has changed in the last twenty-odd years. She was a disappointment by virtue of being small, of not standing up tall enough, coming in second instead of first, being a girl instead of a boy.
Kara's mother was very disappointed that Kara was not a boy -- someone to carry on the Thrace name from the warrior line they were descended from -- so she made do with Kara instead.
Boyish haircuts, boyish hobbies, drills in the rain to make Kara a stronger person, because girls were weak. Soldiers and Cylons, not tea and dolls. Kara never even saw a dress until her father's funeral when she was twelve.
She did have one doll, once, a gift from her mother's commanding officer. The doll's name was Triballi, after the race of Thracians from which Kara's family was descended. The Triballi were once a wild and warlike people, respected for their skills in battle; Kara's dad used to say that Kara's mom only married him for his bloodline.
Kara thinks that's probably true.
What Kara remembers about Triballi, though, was the night her mother cut off all of Triballi's hair because Kara forgot Demeter during her evening prayers. She then left the hair on the tiny altar in Kara's room and took the doll away. Kara still has a lock of Triballi's hair somewhere in her belongings on Caprica.
Kara always promised herself that she would never be someone's mother. She would never lock her daughter in the linen closet for two days because she had spilled juice on her jumper in a room full of guests. She would never subject anyone to what her mother had put her through. She would never even take the risk.
The last thing Kara remembers properly is the Cylon invasion. Sam was sick; she had just put him to bed again, because he had frakking pneumonia, but all he wanted to do was play pyramid. Sam was so frakking difficult, and that was why she loved him; because he was stubborn and unyielding and he wanted to protect her. Kara didn't need anyone to protect her, but Sam thought he could, and they lived under this illusion because it was better than nothing. Not like her and Lee. Lee couldn't even protect Kara from a cold.
Lee.
Lee.
Lee.
She hates him for staying up in his Pegasus castle while the rest of them toughed it out with grey skies and grey food and a life bereft of shifts and Vipers and uniforms. She misses her regulation clothes sometimes. Mostly when she's cold. It's always cold on New Caprica.
Was not is.
She was cold all the time. Cold and dirty and irritated. And then the Cylons came and brought their chaos, and she had just wanted to find Sam, but he had found her first.
At first Kara hadn't even been afraid.
Leoben Conoy didn't have the sense of a Dionysian sacrifice, but he would never hurt her, and she'd actually stood there between the rows of tents as he'd approached her. People had run by her, screaming, pushing, shoving. She'd stumbled to her knees in the mud, feeling the cold dampness seeping into the fabric of her pants, and when she'd looked up there was Leoben with his half-smirk.
She had opened her mouth to say something, and he'd hit her.
And everything had gone black.
Black.
Black.
Black.
Kara had been near the top of her class in everything at school, not out of natural intelligence, but out of desperation. Math, science, religion, art, history -- Kara had loved Caprican history; she had dissected the Muses and the stupidity of Orpheus. The library was her safe haven, because if she was studying, she wasn't at home, and if she wasn't at home, then she wasn't on the battle lines with her mother. Her only other means of escape were the pyramid pitch and the arcade, because if she was at the arcade playing in the Viper simulator then she wasn't drawing fire when her mother came home, the lines around her mouth tight because her squadron hadn't met with her approval.
Kara was one of those puzzles who drove her professors crazy; she knows this because they told her so repeatedly. She worked hard, harder than almost any other student, but she couldn't stay out of trouble. She couldn't stop mouthing off. If she wasn't impressing her teachers with her knowledge, she was picking fights with bigger kids and fleecing the pyramid team during lunch at triad. Her team didn't seem to mind, but Kara's religion teacher, Dr. Peterson, called in her mother anyway. Kara knows this because that night she ended up with a broken arm for her mother's trouble. She told Dr Peterson she fell down the stairs at the Library of Athena. The pyramid team lost six games while she was out.
Three months later Kara got in trouble again.
This time, when she fell, she injured her knee. It was amazing the injuries Kara could collect by tripping over her mother's regulation boots.
The doctor said she would never play pyramid again. Her coach said the Picon Dryads had recalled their scout. Dr. Peterson said he would pray for her; Kara told him to save it for the pyramid team.
That night she stayed at the arcade playing the Viper Sim until they closed. When she got home her mother was waiting up. Kara threw her crutches across the room and waited for her mother to do her worst. She was used to it by now.
Kara woke up in a cinder block. Her head hurt, her mouth hurt, there was a bright light shining into her eyes, and no matter which way she turned all her muscles cried out in agony at the fetal position she refused to move out of. Old habits died hard.
Eventually Kara got up and moved around the room, counting footsteps from corner to corner and stretching her arms to figure out the width. She shoved her fingers into the crevices and poked and prodded, bending back two fingers in the process and scrabbling at the walls until the pads of her fingers bled. Time passed, but because she didn’t know how long she'd been unconscious she couldn't say how long. So Kara did some calisthenics and waited.
When the door finally opened, Kara was in a handstand, her feet resting against the wall, reciting the Twelve Articles of Artemis and praying for strength.
She was almost surprised not to see her mother in the doorway, but her mother didn't have short, spiky blonde hair and a slightly bulging stomach. Her mother was dead -- definitely -- and there was nothing anyone could do to her that was worse than what she'd already been through. So, Kara pushed her legs off the wall and stood up.
All the blood rushing out of her head made her slightly wobbly, but she had enough direction to launch herself at the Cylon that stood between her and freedom.
There was the snap of a neck meeting concrete and losing, and the secondary click of a door closing. The third noise was all Kara's own because she had too much forward momentum. She ran smack into the door and fell backward onto her ass. She could taste the blood from her split lip, and her hand shook as she touched her forehead. There was blood there too.
The barred window to the door slid back and he was there too. He was everywhere. "Kara," Leoben said with a trace of amusement in his voice. "You know you can't kill me."
Kara looked down at the broken Leoben on the floor of her cell and tried to control the tightening around her lungs. She'd known, but seeing it before her was something else entirely. "That won't keep me from trying," she said giving him her toothiest grin, the one that said 'bring it on, you'll just lose.'
Kara didn't trust women. They were treacherous and deceitful and dangerous, so while the rest of the girls in her year at the Academy bonded over the best sports bras and how to get the most out of your regulation hair cut, Kara sparred in the weight room with the bag. The bag didn't hit back. Left. The bag didn't leave you so crippled you lost your chance at playing pyramid professionally. Right. The bag didn't drive your father to drink and smoke himself to death. Left.
"Did the bag insult you?"
Kara ignored the interloper. Right.
"Are you righting some wrongs the bag did to your ancestors?" the interloper carried on. Left.
"You really should figure out another way to get rid of all that excess energy," the interloper persisted.
Kara stopped and turned towards the boy who was harassing her. He was barely two inches taller than she was; she could take him down in a heartbeat. It didn't matter since she preferred her men a bit bigger, like Helo. Except that Helo wasn't quite as smart as Kara preferred them either, which was why they were just friends, with the occasional frakking.
"What do you suggest?" she said disdainfully. "Frakking?"
The boy had huge blue eyes and unruly brown hair. "Well, I thought I should at least introduce myself first -- Cadet Zak Adama -- but, you know, I'm not objecting to the frakking thing."
Kara raised an eyebrow and set to tugging at the fastenings of her right glove with her teeth. "Don't just stand there," she said, punching Zak softly in the stomach to get him to hold her glove, "help me."
Zak stared. "You mean right now?" he asked holding her now-empty glove.
Kara rolled her eyes. "You have someplace else you'd rather be?"
Zak shook his head rapidly. "No, not really."
"Well, okay then. Time's wasting."
Kara sat in her cell and waited. And waited. And then she waited some more. No food, no light, no nothing. And then the Cylon came. It wasn't Leoben; it wasn't Sharon; it was D'Anna Biers. And it had absolutely no problem with trying to kick Kara's ass. Kara had absolutely no problem with giving as good as she got, except that the Cylon hadn't been food-deprived and locked up in a cell. The Cylon didn't have lingering claustrophobia issues. Kara would've won regardless if the godsfrakking toaster hadn't snapped her right forearm. It was the arm her mother had broken after the Dr. Peterson conference. Kara thinks it broke in the same place.
She couldn't even talk for the pain. She couldn't even curse for the blood in her mouth, so she just lay there on the floor, face numb against the concrete, and pretended to be dead. Eventually he came.
"I know you're not dead," the Cylon said, crouching down by her side and brushing the damp hair out of her eyes. Kara twitched where his fingers brushed her face. She wanted to claw away her own skin to rid herself of his infestation.
He set down something metallic with a heavy thud. "I know you're just pretending," he carried on. There was the sound of water splashing and then there was a wet washcloth brushing along the side of Kara's face. The water was cool, but Kara's skin felt as though it were being scalded. She felt as though she were being stained irrevocably, and for the first time in a long time she was too broken to do anything about it.
"I would know if you were dead, because I would feel it. We're connected," Leoben's voice was even and soft, tinged with something that would've been emotion if it were human. "I love you, Kara; you just don't see it. But you will in time."
Kara didn’t know whether to scream or to cry, so she did neither.
Kara didn't like Lee Adama when she met him. He was uppity and snobbish and irritating and self-important and all the words that her writing teacher had insisted she learn instead of just calling Julia Voreni a bitch over and over. Kara thought Lee was a bitch though, and she didn't hesitate in telling that to Zak. To his credit Zak just laughed. And then he laughed more. And when they went back into the party he even told Lee that Kara had said he was a bitch. Lee didn’t take it particularly well, but when Kara tried to start a fight he didn't take the bait either.
The second time Kara met Lee she liked him even less than the first time. He seemed even more high-handed and sanctimonious. Zak adored him, and Lee never seemed to see that; there was clearly some sort of competition between them, but it all seemed to be on Lee's side. So that night Kara made a point of ashing her cigar in Lee's beer, and when that didn't work, while Zak was in the bathroom, Kara actually poured her beer on Lee.
It was a waste of a good beer, but it made her feel a lot better.
She felt even better thirty seconds later when he dragged her out in the street for an explanation, and she clocked him a good one. When he hit her back, she only paused long enough to shake it off and give him the toothy grin she gave Helo during their sparring matches.
When Zak came back from the bathroom he found them tussling in the gutter outside The Drunk Minotaur in front of a small audience, with Kara sitting on Lee's chest and demanding he call her CAG.
Lee refused to acquiesce.
Kara refused to move.
Zak went back in the bar.
Eventually they passed out.
The next morning Kara woke up on top of Lee Adama in the street in front of the pub. She was drooling on the neck of his jacket, the sun was shining, and three guys from the Department of Sanitation were standing across the street drinking coffee and tossing bits of trash at them.
Kara woke up on her back. The ceiling was white, there was a low throbbing in her head, and her back wasn't cold, which told her she wasn't stretched out on the cell floor anymore.
Her right forearm was wrapped in a cast and the ends of her hair were no longer stained with her own blood. She was wearing clothing she hadn't put on herself. If she thought too hard about it she would never get up. Never move. She knew what it was like to be a prisoner already. She'd spent most of her life in fear, and with each blink of her eyes she processed more information, becoming more aware of her surroundings, more in tune to finding a way out.
In bed.
Blink.
On her feet.
Blink.
Covered windows. Thick. Too thick for a fist.
Blink.
Down the hall. Bathroom. No window.
Blink.
Leoben Conoy sitting at a table covered with food.
Blink.
Kara padded across the room, the carpeting soft beneath her feet. She couldn't remember the last time she'd felt real carpeting. Not in her tent with Sam, not on the Galactica with Lee, not even in her apartment in Caprica City with Zak. She had actually made a point of not having carpeting in her apartment, because carpeting always seemed to lead to stains and stains led to punishment for spilling things. The whole cycle was too traumatic for words, but Kara was a survivor. It was what she did. She hadn't survived her mother and Zak and the end of the world and Lee and Sam just to fall apart now.
Sam was sick; he needed her.
No Cylon could take her from him.
She'd already lost Zak. She'd already lost Lee. She wouldn't do this again.
"The fair Kara lives," Leoben said, giving her the half-smirk smile that seemed to be his only other expression besides grave understanding. "I was waiting for you to start eating breakfast." He gestured to the bacon, eggs, pancakes, and all sorts of decadent things that Kara hadn't seen since Caprica City.
Kara blinked at the table setting before her. Plate, glass, fork, spoon, knife.
"Sit down, you must be exhausted. The doctor said you had a repeat fracture of the ulna and the radius. Why didn't you tell me you'd injured your arm before? I know that model is excessive; I told her before I killed her that she shouldn't have injured you so. I can't have that. The divine one wants us to treat others as we want to be --"
Leoben stopped talking because Kara had slit his throat with the knife from her place setting.
Blood splattered all over the table, seeping into the porous pancakes before Leoben's torso crashed onto the table. The Cylon body convulsed as Leoben grabbed his throat.
Kara didn’t think about that.
Kara didn't think about Leoben killing the Cylon that had almost killed her . She didn't think about her repeat fracture or what it took to break both of the bones in someone's forearm. She didn't think about what an examination by a Cylon doctor could do to her that hadn’t already been done. She didn't think about how hungry she was -- all she wanted was out.
She ran up the stairs, yanked open the door and saw the bars.
She ran back down the stairs and into the bedroom. The windows were too thick. The bathroom didn't have a window. In the living room, Leoben's body gave a spasm on the table.
Kara ignored it and grabbed the chair at her place setting and threw it at the window with her good arm.
The window quivered at the force, but it didn't crack. The chair landed with a heavy thud.
Kara picked up the chair and threw it again. Again nothing happened.
The third time she tried to use her right arm as well; the subsequent pain made her vomit onto the sofa.
It didn't matter.
She could hurt now and be free later.
She tried again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
When Leoben the Third arrived, Kara's clothing was damp with sweat. The muscles in her left arm shook with overuse and her right arm hung limply at her side. She didn't even hear him enter over the blood rushing in her head.
"You won't get out that way," he said officiously from the bottom of the stairs.
So Kara threw the chair at him; no one was more shocked than she was when the leg of the chair punctured his chest. Even with the last model Kara hadn't realized there was so much blood in a Cylon body. This time it stained everything: the walls, the carpet, some of it even spattered on Kara as Leoben staggered across the living room.
"Kara, Kara, Kara," he chanted her name like a prayer as he fell at her feet. "You have to accept your situation in order to find the freedom in it."
Kara could hardly breathe. Terror squeezed her lungs the way the footfalls of her mother outside her bedroom had when she was small. With each word it just got worse, so Kara ran, except that there was nowhere to go. So she locked herself in the bathroom, sat in the bathtub waiting for an idea to come, and tried to ignore the pain in her arm.
When she emerged from the bathroom two days later, Leoben the Fourth was there. All the blood had been cleaned away. There was a new dining set. The table was covered in food. Her arm hurt horribly.
"I waited for you," he said when she collapsed into the chair across the table from him. "I'll always wait for you."
Kara looked down at her place setting. There was no fork. No knife. No nothing.
So she ate a roll with her left hand.
That was the last thing she remembered.
Kara didn't love Sam when she left him on Caprica, but she loved the idea of him enough to go back for the real thing. Kara loved that Sam stood up to her and for her and wasn't afraid to show it. Sam wasn't so afraid of loving her that he had to roll over and let her walk all over him. Kara loved that she could save him in the way she hadn't been able to save Zak. Kara loved that Sam wasn't too bogged down by a competition with his dead brother to love her while they were both alive. Kara loved Sam enough to marry him. Maybe he wasn't her first choice or her second choice, but he was her best choice, so she took it. He said if she didn't want to have kids that was fine with him too.
Kara woke up on her back. The ceiling was white, there was a low throbbing in her head, and the pain in her arm was gone. Then she tried to get out of bed and couldn't. She couldn't move her arms or her legs. She couldn't do anything besides look at the ceiling.
She couldn't believe he'd resorted to strapping her to the bed.
All she could do was blink at the ceiling and think of how the hell she was going to get out of this. Eventually the Cylon came. He had a tray in his hands, which he set down on the nightstand beside the bed. "I knew you'd wake up and come back to me," he said good-naturedly.
No matter how many times she killed him, he never seemed to get cross. Well, unless you counted drugging her as being cross. "I want out," Kara said, turning her head away from the contents of the spoon he tried to feed her. "I want to feed myself."
"So you can stab me with a spoon this time?" Leoben said, the omnipresent half-smirk slid into something darker than Kara had seen before.
"Damn straight!" She spat the contents of the spoon in his face.
Kara had never heard Leoben laugh before; it was horribly disconcerting. Like he didn't know how to laugh and had tried to figure it out on his own. "No cutlery. No freedom. I won't make the same mistake I made before," he said quietly. "And if you don't want to eat, then I won't feed you."
And then he got up and left.
It had been a very long time since Kara had had anything to eat.
It had been a long time since she'd gone to the bathroom either.
She waited.
And waited.
And then she waited some more.
In the end it was the little ways he stripped her of her dignity that broke Kara the most. He kept her strapped to the bed for eleven days. He made her use a bed pan. She couldn't even blow her own nose. She had never felt so humiliated in all her life. Even at her mother's hand Kara had been taught that she was special, that she was better, that she had a standard to meet, something to achieve.
Leoben treated her like a doll.
Her only standard was what he wanted.
He didn't violate her physically, he didn't need to.
At night Kara sat by Kasey's bed stroking her hair and thinking of all the promises she'd made to herself -- that she'd never bring a child into this world because of how horrible it could be; that she'd get back to Sam and they'd fight the Cylons together; that the next time she saw Lee, she was going to beat him into the ground for leaving her side.
Her daughter changed everything, and just when Kara thought she couldn't take anything else, now she had someone she had to protect. Now she had someone she had to make concessions for.
Kara had spent a lifetime learning to depend on herself, because everyone else abandoned and betrayed her in the end. As long as she took care of herself, the gods would take care of the rest. She'd made deals for this. She'd prayed to Artemis every night for this. She'd held up her end of the bargain. This was not how the Lords of Kobol were supposed to repay the faithful.
If her mother didn't defeat her, and neither did Zak's death, nor Lee's abandonment, she'd taken more than her share. She was willing to kill Leoben for as long as she had to because this was war, and no Cylon would ever break a Thrace.
And yet, not in a million years did she think a half-Cylon child from her own egg might trump them all in breaking her heart.
-end-
Betas by oxoniensis and serialkarma.
Notes about the Triballi here.