Fic: Give You All
Title: Give You All
Author: nicole_anell
Rating: R
Characters: Lee, Lida!Six, Kara, Adama, Dee
Pairings: Lee/Kara, Lee/Lida, minor Lee/Dee and Kara/Sam
Summary: Alternate New Caprica and post-NC arc. As in the prompt, Lee happens to be on New Caprica at the time of the occupation and is the Kara to Six's Leoben. However, I stepped away from the original prompt in that Kara and Lee's places aren't exactly reversed; I did not change what happened to her. Screwed around with some timeliney things, also.
Prompt: NC roles are reversed somewhat. Kara is with the fleet, Lee is on NC and is taken by the Cylons just after the invasion. This could possibly lead to Kara helping him recover from four months in Cylon hands, depending on where your muse decides to take you
Warnings: angst, dubcon, offscreen (non-canon) character death, infidelity
Word Count: 8,500
Betas: sunshine_queen and sabaceanbabe
Author's Notes: Thank you to sci_fi_shipper for putting this ficathon together and for being VERY patient while I finished this mini-epic. And thank you to sabaceanbabe and sunshine_queen for their invaluable and generous beta-ing.
Give You All
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She's gone longer this time before he hears her again, finds her on his dradis far away from him, and she sounds suddenly calmer. She tells him, It's gonna be okay. She tells him, Come with me.
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He could send someone else. Dee wants him to send someone else. She's not even jealous, entirely; she's concerned about what this does to him. But he raids the supplies for the pills Kara asked for and takes a raptor to the planet's surface. He wants to remember the pilot and ECO's names, later. He should know these things.
She meets him looking tense and tired, moves her hand to grab the pill case from him before even saying hello, and he pulls it slightly out of her reach. It's not meant to be hurtful, only desperate, and he's half-expecting and waiting for her to smack him in the jaw. She doesn't, though, only drops her hands at her sides, silently glaring at him. "I want to talk first," he says.
She rubs a hand over her face, looking away. "Well I wasn't exactly the one who cut off communication, was I?"
"That's - something we could argue about," he grants her. He wouldn't mind arguing.
She sighs. She doesn't have time for this, he can see it in her face. He doesn't know what he's doing here, except helping or fighting her. "Forget it, just- here." He tosses her the medicine and she catches it awkwardly in her palms, glaring again. He feels like an idiot, but he can't touch her or apologize.
He walks down to the woods after, throws a stone into the river and then another one. It's on the third he hears the sound of atmo breaking overhead.
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Their home is still inside the prison. He knows because the door locks, not just from her keys but from the outside. Someone lets her in to him, and back outside now and then if she needs to. He also knows because the screaming returns, a little farther away now; it's buried enough that he can hope or assume it's only in his head sometimes.
He wakes sometimes to the Cylon's hand in his hair. She's one of the Sixes, the blond one. She doesn't have a name. She kisses his jawline and the bottom of his lip. He sits up, not too quickly, like it's normal -- he kisses her back almost before breaking away, so she only says "Lee" and not "what's wrong?" or "how can I help?" It's easier this way. It's a fact, a basic tactical one, that this cell is nicer and less torturous from a physical point of view. It doesn't mean he likes it more, or that it's not in other ways worse.
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He's grounded for a while when they get back to Galactica. It's nearly a year later.
He's not a commander anymore, now that they're down to one ship, and he's not immediately CAG again either. He fights to slip back into these kinds of roles, or he could be nothing. He's physically and mentally sound, and he's needed.
He doesn't lash out like the others, at people like Lieutenant Gaeta. Kara hates them for a while, Lee and him both. She hates Lee for not being involved in what happened there except to end it. He says things like, "We can't turn on each other." She thought he'd get it more.
"Look, Captain, some people didn't have a choice," Seelix tells him, desperate to justify. "Some people did." He thinks about the guard he saw once. She was human and knew him. He pushes it out of his mind.
"We don't know why anyone-" he says. "He's not the enemy. They did this, they did this to us."
President Roslin asks to see him once, only to tell him how proud she is of him, and how happy to see him. (Alive, unscarred, all the alternatives unspoken in the pauses between her words.) She puts it in terms of the human race though -- how much better they all are for his strength, for his returned leadership. All this makes him feel humble and uncomfortable, but he nods emphatically because this is how she says that she missed him. "The same," he stammers back to her. "Madam President, we are all... so happy to see you in that chair again. It's, uh, where you belong." She smiles with a glint in her eye and says, "Yes."
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There's another cell before the house, and it's just one of the metal machines that applies water to the bruises on his face, which makes him almost bust out laughing. He is lightheaded from hunger and isolation. There's a bucket for a bathroom, no windows or bed. They question and beat him, then leave him alone for days, lights flicking on and off after so many hours pass. He was trained for this. It takes him days to realize the faint, distant noises he sometimes heard coming from somewhere else in the building are screams, and with that epiphany they become the only thing he can hear. He knows he is asleep or drugged when they move him, and he wakes up in a place that seems vaguely like his old apartment. Maybe it's meant to feel like everything since then was a dream, but he's saner than that, so the more confusing thing at first is whether he's dreaming now.
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The Cylon they brought to the brig is blond and her bones show through her chest. Her face is worried and lonely in a certain light, but there's a hardness in it still. She sits with her hands folded, reflexively turns toward noises with an almost vicious, warning look before relaxing again. She's not his Six, he thinks, and hates himself for so much of that thought. He tries to talk to her once, at least shadow Baltar's lawyer talking to her; roughly everyone on the ship thinks it's a bad idea but does not stop him.
"Do you know who I am?" he asks her before anything. He's not going to talk that much but he needs to say this.
"Yes," she says uncertainly. "You're the admiral's son, I know that." She says, "I saw a picture from someone, a long time ago."
"From another Six?"
"No," she says, like an apology.
He watches her. "Did you know where I was on New Caprica?" he asks, and her shoulders sag.
"No," she says again, a little firmer. He recognizes courage. "I'm sorry. I doubt it's something you're happy about." He's backing off already and doesn't really need Lampkin to step in and take over as urgently as he does. She came here with Hera. Lee stands farther toward the wall and doesn't talk to her again.
A few minutes of the examination and he says, "I can't." She doesn't say the word love, only shifts unconsciously in her chair when she hears it. She wants to protect him; Lee watches when it's gently pulled out of her like a thread. and he needs to be away from here. "You're doin' great," he tells Baltar's lawyer. "All of you," he tells the guards. He nearly says something to the Cylon, or to the mirror with the president behind it -- he feels regret for not being stronger than this, almost for *her* (The human race is better off with you here), which is ridiculous because she's the last person who wanted him here. Or maybe she did want him here, for just this reason. "I can't," he says and goes.
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She doesn't distinguish between fiction and nonfiction books. Or she does, but he didn't specify, so she's punishing him for that vagueness. She brings him four: one is a history of the Libran justice system, two are paperback mysteries, the kind the former president liked (they could be hers, he thinks for a paranoid moment), and one is a wireless broadcaster's operating manual.
He gets into a habit of staring at the pages and thinking about something else. His eyes glaze over the same handful of middle chapters while someone screams very far away in the silence, and she doesn't bother him until 3:00 when they pray, and then eat, and then he can sit with the books again in peace. Eventually he's bored enough that he starts absorbing what he's reading. It does make the time pass, makes it bearable, but admitting this pisses him off, like it's a victory the Cylons won.
"Tell me what you read about," is what she asks the first time she joins him in bed, curling into his arm as he lies stiffly at her side. Nothing else happens. He tells her about the Libran history, the one he's read the most of. She closes her eyes and seems to go to sleep before he has to resort to a vague description of a fictional heiress's murder, or how to install a ground satellite television.
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He fraks her from behind in the shower or in bed, once over a table. He's never enjoyed this before, even with Shevon. Dee's gotten to expect it now, and love it, without asking why. It's very likely she prefers not to look in his eyes anymore either.
Afterwards he tries to sleep. Once she held him, because he might've been shaking, but when she went to touch his shorn hair he moved away from her with such violent panic that she hasn't once tried to initiate touching him since. They stay together some nights, and spend others in the refuge of opposite shifts.
The child they have feels unreal, not like a miracle but a changeling. Her name is Cady. "I love her so much," Dee says sometimes from nowhere. She's born a month after he comes home. He's not trained for this, the replacement of a fantasy he didn't recognize with another one. "I wouldn't have had her if you hadn't..." she trails off. "I couldn't, Lee, I'm sorry. It felt like all I had from you."
He kisses her forehead. He tells her, "Don't be sorry, don't be sorry." Cady is beautiful and he loves her. He also doesn't want to be left alone with her, and Dee doesn't want him to be either.
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"Samuel Anders," the Cylon reads. "Died of pneumonia. Two months ago."
"Let me see it," says Lee. His voice is tired and hoarse. She isn't lying, at least about the paper. It's one of their newsletters, something they circulate for the outer farmlands. Death notices in the back, next to birth notices. She tells him about Chief and Cally's baby this way. They're incomplete, she's admitted that much to him, and it's not always clear if the causes match reality. But they're trying, she says, to provide closure.
"And what about me? Do I have one of those?" he asks.
She twirls a strand of his hair; it needs to be cut so frakkin' badly. "You're not dead," she tells him, a note of confusion and reassurance in her voice. "You're alive."
"Could fool me sometimes." He tries to make it sound like a joke. Inside he tries to read something into this. If they haven't reported him dead, it means there's no sure plan to kill him or to keep him infinitely. There's that. He tries not to live in false hope. He's in limbo, missing, maybe worse than dead. It feels like a tiny difference sometimes, but huge. Her hand trails to his cheek and he's barely conscious of moving into her touch. He raises his voice slightly, but the word is lonely and strained. "And?"
"No one else," she tells him. "I checked all the records. I did that for you. I didn't find Kara Thrace anywhere." The name doesn't change her inflection or seem to affect her more than anyone else's. He doesn't think she understands. She's probably not lying either.
It's more of an answer than he's ever gotten, even if he doesn't know how to begin trusting it. "I'll do anything for you," he thinks she says, softer than a whisper. Limbo is not dead, he tells himself. This is something else.
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He and Kara don't talk about what happened the year before; they don't talk about New Caprica before the invasion. He knows it was summer there once, but it seems like another world. Lee breaks his life down into a series of lifetimes, so distinct from each other that some don't even make sense anymore; the only common factor is him, and a few other details. The Academy. Before Zak. Gianne, before the worlds ended. Pegasus. Six. He shuts the door on them. Like someone painted the world in different colors is how Kara says it.
He tells her he's leaving Dee once, and she shakes her head. They're drinking alone like they used to -- this is another constant in most of his lives. "And what," she says, her mouth curling up, "you want to marry me?" She still carries a ring on her dog tags, that ugly tattoo on her like a curse. He doesn't. He would. She says, "You got someone, Lee. You have more to screw up."
"You think you'd be happy with Sam now?"
She looks violent for a second, like she wants to swear at him and strike back, but then her mouth just hangs open uselessly. She says, "I don't know."
"It's not something you've been thinking about." Her eyes tear. He's curious, only. She downs whatever's in her glass.
"It's my fault you were on the ground, right?" she says after she swallows. It's a drastic shift in the conversation to him, but maybe not to her. "That and if you weren't such a dick about coming in the first place."
"Or maybe more of one," he chimes in. He doesn't want to fight and he knows they're going to. She's smiling without her eyes.
He doesn't do as many shots as her; he thinks it's what he wants, but as soon as he starts feeling bleary he stops, wants to shake himself out of it. She keeps going, stealing the rest of the bottle for herself.
"He never frakked me, all right?" she says when she's sufficiently hammered. He must look too perplexed at this, maybe for the wrong reason. "Leoben?" she clarifies. "Motherfrakking gentleman of a toaster. The whole flowers and candy phase. He..." Her voice cracks and she clears her throat to cover it, takes a commanding breath. "Just, everybody wants to ask me that and they don't want to ask me, so. There you go."
"I know," he tells her, feeling a rush through his head of guilt and relief and mostly emptiness. "And I wasn't- going to." He did want and not want to ask.
"It's okay." She shrugs at him. He touches her face and she instinctively rolls her eyes, but then softens and doesn't move away. "Whatever, he just- it never got that far, okay? It was like that, but it wasn't."
"I know," he says again, half a lie.
She's looking at the table again, her voice brittle. "Just don't do it for me all right?" she says quietly. "With Dee. 'Cause this is frakking nothing."
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From 3:00 to 4:00 he learns to pray. Once a week it continues until 6:00. He's never wished so much to believe in the gods, just for some extra spiritual ammunition against this. But it just seems like trading one fiction for another.
He remembers her doing this in the other cell, blisters on his knees and plastic cutting into his wrists and so cold -- was it her or a different one? (Does it matter, even?) It was the blond; Six, she'd tell him at some point.
"Do you want to pray to something else?" she would ask. "I understand. You have other gods. We see them all as the true one." This is how they met.
She said, "Do you want to pray to Apollo?" and he'd say nothing. Then, yes. He tries it once. When she says Apollo he tries to imagine himself standing far off in a lake, tries to pray to some out-of-body soldier soul of his own to stay with him, to help him live through this. He prayed to Kara and then to the Tighs and Chief and Cally and any of the others he can remember who settled here, and Kara again. He prayed to them in gods' names. Apollo, Artemis, Ares, Aphrodite.
"I understand," the Six said, lying for him. Her fingers ran a small, soothing circle around a cut on his neck. "The others don't see how we're connected, our God and yours." This had to be her, the same one from the house. She said, "I'm here for you. I can make you feel better."
It's changed now. She holds his hands and says heavenly father and waits for him to repeat after her. The prayer is long and repetitive and it's a gradual process to learn to say in unison with her, but he starts irrationally hoping that something'll happen when he finally does. A medal, a release form. Occasionally he skips ahead without realizing and she gently pinches his hands and corrects him. In the last half hour she'll go off-script and change it every day. She says things like God, you have a plan for all things and a plan for Lee Adama, God help us trust in your plan. She says father watch over us and father save us and then she asks him to say something and he begins to lie.
He talks slowly when he's inventing things so he'll have less to say. He starts hiding words and tallies into what he's saying like he did in the other cell, marking time that way, which he feels very smart for doing even though he also has a calendar and a television. He prays to embrace her and to love her and to save his soul. "You don't mean it," she tells him, watching him skeptically, hurt. "I do," he responds flatly, staring her coldly in the eyes. She grips his hands tighter and he endures. They start from the beginning. It's been five months.
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The workers at the daycare are so young, teenagers mostly. Lee notices it whenever he visits there. They could've grown up here. An older boy is rocking Cady and feeding her formula; she's quiet, alternates between sucking and fluttering her eyes closed. They leave her a little less now that Tigh's back to work and Dee's stepped down from being XO. He'll get better at this, he decides, and he will trade shifts with his wife and watch her without standing out in the hallway to breathe and he'll be better at this.
Lee tries not to stare at Hera Agathon when he's here. She's independent, plays on her own and cries a lot. She's begun to react more to Helo, or at least mimic his ecstatic smile when she sees him. "It's the best," Helo will tell Lee and clap him lightly on the back, compensating for desperate relief. "We're blessed, you know that? God, the gods, somebody was watching." Lee smiles stiffly and has nothing to say.
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Lee is dreaming about the lake again, only he's alone. He wades in holding no one's hand, just to see that he can, that he doesn't have to stop. It's not about death, he thinks when he wakes up, the Six scrambling eggs in the other room. This thought lingers in his head as the rest of the dream fades. It's not death but something else.
He dreams of rocks along the floor of the lake, moving under his feet. He starts to breathe underwater. He didn't realize he was wearing his helmet. There are torn pieces of newspaper lining the ground that are too blurry to see, and a voice reads it for him.
If it were you, it says, we'd never leave.
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If she can try to get into his head, he can do the same to her. Make her trust him, make her want him to trust her. Empathy, he decides he's going to teach her, once he accepts that he might be going crazy.
"If you had a choice," he tells her. "Okay, say there was a dog."
She watches him intently, smiling a little. They're having a conversation; she enjoys that.
He says, "You have a choice to pet it, or kick it, or cut it open, or just leave it alone. Right?"
It's not working. Maybe it is. She's listening but looks offended by this whole line of questioning. "We're not soulless."
"You killed twenty billion people," he argues before he can reel it in. "So you know, that's debatable." She frowns.
"We're not doing that now, Lee," she says softly.
"Why?"
She considers this. "It's different when there's less of you."
He swallows. "Right. All right. So I believe, individually, you don't want to hurt someone."
"Did you lose someone?" she asks. "When... we killed those people." Her voice aches on we.
"Yes," he says bluntly. "My mother died. Most of the people I knew died."
"Your father lived." He's not sure if she means it as a question or statement of encouragement, but he almost laughs.
"I wasn't counting him in people I knew." He doesn't know when this conversation got away from him. Gods. "I still want to talk about the dog," he says.
"The dog wasn't real," she says. "I would pet him. You're real."
He's starting to see the flaw in this metaphor, much too late. Not a dog, it should've been a child. Something that thinks, something with parents, you can't just take it home with you and feed it.
"I love you," he says, and her eyes light, her face perks up instinctively. "What does that mean?" he asks her. "What does that mean to you?"
"I'm not sure I know yet," she tells him, sinking a little. "We're going to love each other. I've seen it." She tells him, "I wanted to save you. You were so unhappy, I wanted to help."
"Humanity created love," he says slowly. "You get this from us. And what we say is that if you love someone you let them go." He regrets putting it that way. It's so convenient, even if it's true, he's sure she doesn't believe him.
"We're not like that," is all she says. He's not sure if she means him or the Cylons. "Why would anyone say that?"
"I don't know," he sighs. "Because- because it proves how they feel about you. When they come back. You have to leave them alone, though, and let them."
"You wouldn't come back. Not yet."
"Look, you said my name," he says. "You know who I am. That's why I'm here. It wasn't about love."
She says nothing for a moment. Then, "Yes. That's why you were here. It's your name. They said it was leverage."
"And you saw I was unhappy, and you wanted to help me. I believe you. I believe you love me. Okay? But I don't need to be here for the other reason. My father- Galactica isn't coming back. The resistance is dying. You don't need to hang onto me for anything."
"Because he loves you?"
"What?"
"When humans think they love people, they leave them alone. Like Galactica left you all here." She's curious, only. Trying to tie it together. It's not even cruelty.
"No," he says. "That was... another thing. Listen to me."
"We don't do that. We're better than that."
"You can help me," he says carefully. "You're different from the others. You want to make me happy, you're programmed to." She doesn't like the word programmed, her eyes cast downward sadly, and he alters it quickly. "You're- destined to," he says.
"I will." She kisses his cheek. "I am helping you. If you leave here, you'll go back to another cell."
"No," he says, starting to tremble in frustration. "No, then help me leave the building."
"I can make it better," she promises.
Desperately he says, "I- I'll take you with me." He feels a glimmer of regret for saying it instantly. It's a lie that seems mean to her somehow, and it worries him that he cares.
"You won't," she says knowingly, somberly. She studies him. "Not yet."
The regret leaves him just as fast. He wants to hurt her. He exhales. "Please help me," he tries. "Please."
She says, "I am."
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He kills her once. It's the only time. It's a precise shot to an artery with a knife, from before they thought to take the silverware and he hid one away. She's a machine, Number Six of a production line somewhere, but still her last gasp as she looks at him makes him cringe. It seems innately vulnerable and human. Afterwards he starts testing the walls for escape, without spying or distractions.
He is terrified of her body. When he summons the nerve to touch it again, it's to turn her so she's facing the ground. He sees the sun grow dimmer and set outside the window, which refuses over and over to shatter, and which he can see only leads to a four-story fall. He's not that desperate yet.
He takes her keys and opens the door, to the extra set of bars outside. He knew this. He needed to try. He looks for a place to put them outside, but there's nothing. It's a pad out of his reach, all code and fingerprints. He slams his hand into the bars, once and then twice, and wants to shout something. "HEY!" is what he goes with, "HEY!" and waits for something to happen. It guts him suddenly that he's one of those voices, the empty and far-away ones screaming. He doesn't yell after that.
It's outside the door where he falls asleep eventually, after he swears the sun rises and falls at least one more time. The Six is there with someone in a black mask who says, "Step away from the bars, captain." It's a female voice but he can't place it. It's not his rank anymore, if he has one. He wants to correct her but doesn't know if she hears. She says, "Step away from the bars," and he goes back inside.
He sits on the couch and the Cylon follows him. She goes to where her former body is and touches it gingerly, then looks at him. She looks like she might hurt him, and she looks sad. These go together on her.
"You changed your hair," he says when he finds his voice. It seems a little darker than the usual blond now -- honey-colored, even in the light.
She looks at him unusually. "I changed my body," she reminds him.
"I thought they all looked..." he doesn't finish. He left the knife inside her, the old her, and he has nothing now. Why did he do that? She takes it out and makes a face, turning it in her hands when she looks at him again. "I'm sorry," he says under his breath, because she's holding a knife and he's holding nothing. He could've kept it, if he had it now, or when the guard...
She returns up the stairs, to the door, and tosses the knife through the bars like trash. He feels short-term relief, long-term depression. He feels like an idiot about the guard now. It's all he can think about, fighting or appealing to her. She was human, and she knew him. He could do this again, he thinks. Would it be the same person, someone else? He can wait a few days and do this again. He feels exhausted thinking about it, though, and now neither of them are armed.
When she's locking the door with her key again, he follows her up the stairs from behind -- not for any reason, just to see how far she threw it -- and she glides around and slaps him then. It's the only time. It knocks him back but doesn't sting as much as it sounds like it should've. He was waiting for it.
Her face crumples and her hand hovers by his cheek for an instant before covering her mouth. She looks softer than he remembered, besides the hair. Like something ethereal from a storybook. He might be going crazy. It's the first time he thinks she looks kind, like kindness suits her. It scares him. He'd rather it feel calculated and fake than this.
She wraps her arms around him on the stairs and holds him for a long time, until he instinctively puts his arms around her, too. Maybe they thought it'd be better for him, if she looked different from the others. Or maybe they just gave her a defective body in case she loses it again. He stops himself from saying he's sorry again, or that he didn't mean to hurt her. He says nothing, just lets this happen, while the words frakking moron occasionally play in his head in Kara's voice.
"It's all right," she tells him over and over. "Shhhh. It's all right."
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He tells Kara about the baby because he has to. She's got Kacey's doll stuffed in her locker -- she thought of giving it to him and Dee, she says in a moment of honesty, and she couldn't yet -- and she tries to sound happy and past-tense when she talks about it. He has to stay sane.
"Huh," she says finally. "And you wonder why those two crazy kids couldn't just make it work."
"When did you stop knowing?" he asks Kara. "You knew he was lying, right? When did you just... stop?"
She's frustrated. She asked for this, the talking and sharing. She opened the door. "You get stupid," she says. "They take advantage of that."
"Then sometimes I still think she wasn't," he admits slowly. He might be pleading for her to smack him; that might help.
"Well, that you need to stop," Kara says quickly. "Because you're not that stupid anymore. Even I don't think you are." He says nothing and she forces a laugh. "I mean, she was gonna give you a tiny little toaster, Lee? Maybe she was pregnant. Maybe you and Karl had the super magic sperm to get it done, of all the thousands of people left in the world, and the millions before that. Maybe you're just that good."
He clenches his teeth; he asked for this. "Good talk," he says.
"Apollo," she calls before he can leave.
"She was getting bigger," he says dumbly, defensive.
"Maybe she was eating," Kara shrugs. "I know, okay? I felt frakked over, and I felt... weak. It..." She takes in some air. "It wasn't your fault," she mumbles. It's hard for her to say, only for him.
"I know," he says. "I mean, I know what happened. I just start thinking if she wasn't lying, then I left her there and-"
"Lee. She was eating. And when it got closer, she was gonna go leave you for the hospital, and she was gonna come back with someone else's cute little baby. Some other-" her voice trembles a little, "some other person's son or daughter, that they needed back."
They don't mind that, he thinks. Like taking home a stray. "Like us," he says without thinking. They stand three inches apart and never touch.
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Look at me. He is seventeen and fumbling with someone in his bunk because it's the first time he's been away from home and the first time he's felt this with a girl. Her name is Lida Sterling, and she's done this before and isn't scared and he's going to marry her. He is in the woods with Kara and she keeps laughing, she spits and cackles like a madwoman every time he touches her and he loves that she laughs.
He opens his eyes for just an instant because both her hands are trembling on his face, but his gaze wanders quickly to the prison ceiling and then he just shuts them again. She's slowing down and he doesn't want her to stop. (It's not going to stop, unless maybe he fights, and he's so tired of fighting this, he just wants to drown.) She rides him like Kara did and the sheets are grass under his back. Look at me, Lee, she says again, strangled with joy and desperation.
He tries to stay here. He's not even doing this on purpose anymore.
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He's told her things. He forgets exactly what. That he had a younger brother, and how he died. She didn't ask his name; he told her anyway. The dam breaks down gradually. It's always unimportant, nothing that could be turned against the fleet, the civilians. And not against him, at first, but it becomes harder to maintain where that boundary actually is once it's breached. He went through a stage of staying completely silent and hard, or only respond as much as he needed. He was trained for this. But now no one is coming and he has to stay sane. He could make her trust him, and want to return the favor. He has to stay sane.
"I had a younger brother," she says to him one day. "We can't talk about him."
"I'm stuck here," he presses her. "Talk to me."
"No," she says. "I want to. I don't know it anymore." She seems to struggle for something to keep this conversation going. "Sometimes I dream about him," she offers. "When you... when I downloaded, I thought I remembered him." She tries to explain to him -- he thinks she really is trying. Of the ones they don't talk about, her brother is different. They must not try to get the others back. They can't get him. She looks far away when she says this, not to him, and her eyes flutter but don't cry. She says, "Do you understand?" and he does. Limbo and dead, the difference is tiny but huge.
She rests her head on his shoulder and puts her hand around his waist, breathes contentedly against him. It's too quiet for too long. He tells her, "I dream about Zak." He tells her they're in the lake, as kids, the way they used to hold hands and go as far as they both dared together. It was never past their chins. They worried, Lee more for his brother than himself. Only in the dream he keeps walking, and Lee doesn't. And Lee gets older and older, and Zak stays small, smaller than he was when he died. Six's breathing is so slow and serene, like she's falling asleep. She laces her hand into his. "I'm sorry," she says.
"I had that dream with Kara once," he tells her. "Only she pulled me in."
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"Kara, slow down," he gasps. They are suffocating in each other's kisses, but at the moment he can think of worse ways to die. He always could.
She says his name again, because they need this. His jaw still aches from where she punched him and her eye is swollen and ugly. He tastes blood in her mouth and doesn't know whose it is. She yanks at his pants with so much force it's uncomfortable. "Godsdammit, Kara," he groans, and shoves her hands back. Lee, she whimpers.
(Look at me, Lee.)
It's rough and short and it's Kara and she doesn't want to marry him. He is married. It's Kara. She breathes raggedly into his ear, the words I wanna kill them all, and he comes without the energy to judge himself for it.
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An older civilian he doesn't think he's met interviews him for the truth commission. It's as awkward as he was prepared for it to be. "You're not expected to remember every detail," she says in a formal rush. "You're not expected to share details you consider private or inconsequential. This is about making your voice heard." She makes a face on this last part, like she's trying to smile but half her facial muscles are rebelling. She looks inhuman and extremely tired.
"I was captured right after the occupation started," he says.
"How soon?" Then she launches unhaltingly into, "'A few days' or 'a week' would be fine. You don't need to know the exact-"
He gives the day and time, within the hour. He says, "That soon."
He asks to see the hard records when it's over, only his own. But they're still disorganized enough and she's exhausted enough that she just hands him an entire file and tells him what he's looking for should be toward the top. A, Adama. He fights looking in the middle of the file, looking for T, like he somehow didn't understand where she was directing him -- but he sees Kara then on his own page, under Anders. "She didn't take his name," he blurts with a little too much urgency. He points to show her. They got these records from the Cylons anyway, shoved in a drawer in Colonial One somewhere, but there are pencil revisions throughout them. "That's not the name she used," he tells her. "That's why they lost her on paper."
The woman shrugs. "She didn't correct it." He feels suddenly like a jackass.
There's nothing next to it on the printed page, no official status or location. DC for Detention Center, someone scratched in pencil there, post-exodus. A check mark for living. He moves up to his own name and there's also a check mark, but nothing else in pencil was necessary. In the black ink it says high-value, and it says exp. He doesn't know what it means, but his brain starts filling in variants of the word 'experiment', and he scans the list for anyone else with that abbreviation who isn't dead. It never repeats.
At 1500 he mouths the heavenly-father, sometimes.
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"Did you hear me?" the Six asks, still watching him expectantly with those wide, gentle eyes. He turns over on the bed, facing up to see her better, and nods. Sunlight is breaking through from outside. She says, "This is a miracle. I was going to wait to tell you. I don't know when it happened."
She's not claiming their baby was conceived the night before, anyway. It's taken time for her to know for sure.
"I know it means nothing to you yet, but you'll see this life is a miracle. It's everything we've dreamed of."
"You wanted this," he agrees, something clicking in his mind.
"And you," she insists. It chills him for a moment, because he doesn't know where she's getting it from. A way he acted, something she knew or read about him. He's told her things. "Maybe you didn't imagine it this way, but you did want this. God wouldn't have blessed us this way if you didn't." Her face is pleading.
"How do I know to trust you?" he says honestly, unblinking. There was something he wanted about this, trust, but he's not thinking of that now.
Her eyebrows wince sympathetically. "I know you do," she says. "And it doesn't matter, because you'll see him. You'll see him when he comes."
"You're a machine. You don't have babies."
"You have to know it's happened before, the Eight..."
"Sharon. Other Sharon." He doesn't know why he's defending her with a name. "The Eight," he mutters. Then, "So why don't you kill me now?" It's the first time he's said something like this. It unnerves him, a little, that it might sound like a request. But he doesn't backtrack now. "You got what you want. She claimed they would've killed... the father." Unless she was lying. Frakking Other Sharon-
"That's not what I want. I want you to love me." Kinder, she says, "I can only be with you if you're alive."
"And the baby proves we love each other?"
"I'm not sure," she says, thinking. She takes her hand away from his cheek and it suddenly feels cold. "I'm going to pray for our baby now," she tells him, softly urgent. "I can't do it in here. You can sleep until breakfast."
"Yeah," he says uncertainly. "All right."
"Unless you want to come with me." She doesn't wait long for an answer. When she leaves, he starts to breathe harder, his mind racing too much to sleep again. He considers going after her, an irrational force of habit. He forces himself not to move.
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"Hey," Kara says through clenched teeth, glancing away from him and back again. She's already pulled a sheet up to cover herself, and he gets to collecting his uniform. Her hand lingers on his, tugging it slightly. He kisses the side of her head again, then her mouth, and holds her for too long. He thinks, don't be sorry.
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The Six spends three days in the infirmary -- they have one of these in the building, apparently -- during which she almost loses the baby. She is out buying groceries at the market when it's attacked by insurgents, gets caught on the wrong side of a blast. Ten steps over and she would've died -- downloaded somewhere, but she won't let them euthanize her because of the baby she says she's having.
She'll think he planned this. The idea won't leave him. He wanted her away, just to be away from her for a while so he could think about what's happening on his own. She has a way of getting in his thoughts when she's here.
It's his fault in every way but actively wishing it. He left the refrigerator open when she wouldn't notice, because she wouldn't be in the kitchen for fear of being sick -- everything's been making her sick from the baby. That's one of the things he needed to think about on his own, how she might lie about that. The dairy went bad and that's when she left for more groceries, and if he'd wanted her to get caught in an explosion he honestly couldn't have timed it better. He tries to think logically about what'll happen to him now, only to realize numbly that it's not fear keeping this in his head. It's guilt, it's so much guilt, and imagining the agony in her if she's left blaming him for this.
He loses track of the time she's resting, until she opens her eyes and says his name softly. She says, "I'm sorry." He realizes he has clasped his hands around one of hers, like a prayer, and not moved from this seat for hours. Her fingers feel so small between his. He can't lose them. He was almost a father again. The truth of this is debatable and hits him like a train anyway. He'll be nothing without her, this her, without the hair and the soft features and the baby, not here. He was a father. He'll be nothing.
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He dreams of her. "It's going to be a boy," she's telling him again.
"We need to name him," Lee says.
"Mmm," says the Cylon, "we do." It's half a question. She didn't have a name before. It's Lida now, he remembers. She had a younger brother.
"Lee," she says. Look at me.
She lies over him like a blanket, draped around his neck. He is sinking. He is in the kitchen of the prison and everything smells clean, and she's holding something in her arms but he can't see its face.
"Look at me, Lee," she says. "Stay with me. I've seen it. You can stay."
"I want to," he breathes. "I love you." He wakes up sweating, his hands curled in so tightly that Dee is awake and staring at him from a chair.
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"You need to get your shit together."
"Thanks," Lee says. "Really, thanks, Dad."
"You've got a kid now, a daughter." Lee flinches. Cady, he tells himself.
Lee takes another drink, trying futilely to match him. He knows he's at least casual-drunk when he says, "You know, Tigh says he always knew you were coming back. I think he wanted to break a bottle over my head when I said we didn't know that."
"Colonel Tigh's been through a lot," his father murmurs a little too quickly, cutting him off. He remembers himself and adds "also" afterwards, unconvincingly.
"You know why I didn't know?" Adama sighs and looks at his desk. "You know why?"
"Every day I woke up thinking about you. Every day we were training our people to find you out there."
"I know, I get that," he's saying at the same time. "I'm just asking you to understand why I didn't-"
"'Cause I left you before, when you were kids," he guesses suddenly. The unexpected honesty of it, the total out-of-left-fieldness, hits Lee harder than he was prepared for. "You don't trust me," says Adama.
He's helpless for a long time before he answers himself, chastened. "'Cause I would've done it. If I wasn't on New Caprica. I wouldn't have come back."
Adama searches his eyes for a minute. "I don't think so, son."
His voice rises a step louder. "I stopped thinking you were coming back because I would've run. I'd get the frak out of there and not look back."
"Not if it was your son," he says definitively, so firm and patronizing and idealistic that it wounds.
Lee clears his throat. "Permission to leave, sir."
"Lee," he says. Then a dismissing nod, and his title, whatever it is now. He salutes and leaves the bottle.
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The Six walks with her leg in a cast for a few weeks. Her hair is growing out, longer than his -- she cuts his sometimes now, not as short as it was in the military but enough that he doesn't look like a transient. She's always asked him, that and shaving, and he's started saying yes. He finds himself thinking she'll let him use a razor on himself eventually, and he'd shave his stubble down a little closer and more frequently than she does. This is his first thought. She can trust him. She's thirteen weeks pregnant and starting to show. She dresses in longer, more flowy clothes.
He doesn't forget anything, his life before this, but he can feel strangely comfortable and normal for days at a time now. She starts to call the baby he. "It's going to be a boy," she confirms. Then, "I don't think we should name it yet." She's picked this up from him, worrying.
"You don't have a name," he reminds her with affectionate sarcasm, tossing a baby carrot that she catches with her hand.
"Humans need names," she says thoughtfully. He can't tell if she's agreeing or not. "You need to name things."
She wants him to call her Lida, to think of her that way. He told her this, his first. He wants to say no but he's concerned about any more suggestions she might have. He thinks, Lida. The hair and the baby and now a name for what's different in her. But it's so late it never really catches on, and they never name the baby.
"They're coming," she tells him, the day after. Lida. She puts her keys on the table in front of him, and he doesn't move for a minute. She says, "You could stay with me." Her heart is not in the naivete. "They'll come and leave again, and you could-"
Something breaks outside and he runs for the door. It's a crazy, ungainly instinct, and he doesn't look back at her. He means to look back. There is smoke outside and the bars burst open, and everyone there he tells to keep running. He's at the ground floor when the knowledge this is really happening starts to envelop him, wipes out everything else in his head. He doesn't know what happens then -- if it's a dream or not that he says no, goes running back to the cell where his life is, and there's nothing there. He doesn't remember anything after that. He dimly recalls being restrained on a raptor. The next thing he's conscious of is being hooked to an IV in sickbay, and his face is wet, and his dad's face buried in his shoulder. He tries to say something and only a choked sound comes out; his throat is sore.
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Kara starts disappearing in her Viper, just a few moments at a time. He's disappeared from his bed, or from his counseling session, or from Joe's after saying "five minutes," or from his quarters when he's meant to be watching Cady. He's just needed to prove he could. He never leaves her in the air, though.
"I don't trust myself," she told him. "I keep seeing." She had her eyes closed. This is more than them. He wants to promise to rein her in, keep her from acting like a lunatic. He does promise, and wants to mean it.
She's gone longer this time before he hears her again, finds her on his dradis far away from him, and she sounds suddenly calmer. She tells him, It's gonna be okay. She tells him, Come with me.
He calls her Starbuck, then Kara, when she's too far into the storm to pull out. He doesn't want to go farther. He was always such a worrier.
He begs and cries and curses at her, because she's another notch over the line and slowing down, and he knows it's not to turn around, it's for timing, it's to wait for him because he's still chasing her. He's chasing her and not being pulled. He's making a choice, he realizes; he recognizes it because every choice has been a gift these last few months, and they've hurt like this. He pulls his ship up and away from the pressure in tiny increments, just to prove he can until he can't, but there is a dim light and a soft hand on his back and it's not that he's afraid. That's never what it was.
Kara makes an airless noise, like a giggle. She's not his Six, he thinks, because she's impatient. "I know what I'm doing," he hears her say. "I don't want to rush you, Lee, but you kinda need to let go now."
(This isn't death -- the thought's insane but somehow fixed in his head, all of a sudden. This is something else.)
He hesitates still, and his body feels like lead. He hears her say, "This better work," under her breath. "Stay with me, Apollo," she says in her normal voice.
(You could stay with me.)
He does this time. He does always.
Author: nicole_anell
Rating: R
Characters: Lee, Lida!Six, Kara, Adama, Dee
Pairings: Lee/Kara, Lee/Lida, minor Lee/Dee and Kara/Sam
Summary: Alternate New Caprica and post-NC arc. As in the prompt, Lee happens to be on New Caprica at the time of the occupation and is the Kara to Six's Leoben. However, I stepped away from the original prompt in that Kara and Lee's places aren't exactly reversed; I did not change what happened to her. Screwed around with some timeliney things, also.
Prompt: NC roles are reversed somewhat. Kara is with the fleet, Lee is on NC and is taken by the Cylons just after the invasion. This could possibly lead to Kara helping him recover from four months in Cylon hands, depending on where your muse decides to take you
Warnings: angst, dubcon, offscreen (non-canon) character death, infidelity
Word Count: 8,500
Betas: sunshine_queen and sabaceanbabe
Author's Notes: Thank you to sci_fi_shipper for putting this ficathon together and for being VERY patient while I finished this mini-epic. And thank you to sabaceanbabe and sunshine_queen for their invaluable and generous beta-ing.
Give You All
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She's gone longer this time before he hears her again, finds her on his dradis far away from him, and she sounds suddenly calmer. She tells him, It's gonna be okay. She tells him, Come with me.
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He could send someone else. Dee wants him to send someone else. She's not even jealous, entirely; she's concerned about what this does to him. But he raids the supplies for the pills Kara asked for and takes a raptor to the planet's surface. He wants to remember the pilot and ECO's names, later. He should know these things.
She meets him looking tense and tired, moves her hand to grab the pill case from him before even saying hello, and he pulls it slightly out of her reach. It's not meant to be hurtful, only desperate, and he's half-expecting and waiting for her to smack him in the jaw. She doesn't, though, only drops her hands at her sides, silently glaring at him. "I want to talk first," he says.
She rubs a hand over her face, looking away. "Well I wasn't exactly the one who cut off communication, was I?"
"That's - something we could argue about," he grants her. He wouldn't mind arguing.
She sighs. She doesn't have time for this, he can see it in her face. He doesn't know what he's doing here, except helping or fighting her. "Forget it, just- here." He tosses her the medicine and she catches it awkwardly in her palms, glaring again. He feels like an idiot, but he can't touch her or apologize.
He walks down to the woods after, throws a stone into the river and then another one. It's on the third he hears the sound of atmo breaking overhead.
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Their home is still inside the prison. He knows because the door locks, not just from her keys but from the outside. Someone lets her in to him, and back outside now and then if she needs to. He also knows because the screaming returns, a little farther away now; it's buried enough that he can hope or assume it's only in his head sometimes.
He wakes sometimes to the Cylon's hand in his hair. She's one of the Sixes, the blond one. She doesn't have a name. She kisses his jawline and the bottom of his lip. He sits up, not too quickly, like it's normal -- he kisses her back almost before breaking away, so she only says "Lee" and not "what's wrong?" or "how can I help?" It's easier this way. It's a fact, a basic tactical one, that this cell is nicer and less torturous from a physical point of view. It doesn't mean he likes it more, or that it's not in other ways worse.
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He's grounded for a while when they get back to Galactica. It's nearly a year later.
He's not a commander anymore, now that they're down to one ship, and he's not immediately CAG again either. He fights to slip back into these kinds of roles, or he could be nothing. He's physically and mentally sound, and he's needed.
He doesn't lash out like the others, at people like Lieutenant Gaeta. Kara hates them for a while, Lee and him both. She hates Lee for not being involved in what happened there except to end it. He says things like, "We can't turn on each other." She thought he'd get it more.
"Look, Captain, some people didn't have a choice," Seelix tells him, desperate to justify. "Some people did." He thinks about the guard he saw once. She was human and knew him. He pushes it out of his mind.
"We don't know why anyone-" he says. "He's not the enemy. They did this, they did this to us."
President Roslin asks to see him once, only to tell him how proud she is of him, and how happy to see him. (Alive, unscarred, all the alternatives unspoken in the pauses between her words.) She puts it in terms of the human race though -- how much better they all are for his strength, for his returned leadership. All this makes him feel humble and uncomfortable, but he nods emphatically because this is how she says that she missed him. "The same," he stammers back to her. "Madam President, we are all... so happy to see you in that chair again. It's, uh, where you belong." She smiles with a glint in her eye and says, "Yes."
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There's another cell before the house, and it's just one of the metal machines that applies water to the bruises on his face, which makes him almost bust out laughing. He is lightheaded from hunger and isolation. There's a bucket for a bathroom, no windows or bed. They question and beat him, then leave him alone for days, lights flicking on and off after so many hours pass. He was trained for this. It takes him days to realize the faint, distant noises he sometimes heard coming from somewhere else in the building are screams, and with that epiphany they become the only thing he can hear. He knows he is asleep or drugged when they move him, and he wakes up in a place that seems vaguely like his old apartment. Maybe it's meant to feel like everything since then was a dream, but he's saner than that, so the more confusing thing at first is whether he's dreaming now.
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The Cylon they brought to the brig is blond and her bones show through her chest. Her face is worried and lonely in a certain light, but there's a hardness in it still. She sits with her hands folded, reflexively turns toward noises with an almost vicious, warning look before relaxing again. She's not his Six, he thinks, and hates himself for so much of that thought. He tries to talk to her once, at least shadow Baltar's lawyer talking to her; roughly everyone on the ship thinks it's a bad idea but does not stop him.
"Do you know who I am?" he asks her before anything. He's not going to talk that much but he needs to say this.
"Yes," she says uncertainly. "You're the admiral's son, I know that." She says, "I saw a picture from someone, a long time ago."
"From another Six?"
"No," she says, like an apology.
He watches her. "Did you know where I was on New Caprica?" he asks, and her shoulders sag.
"No," she says again, a little firmer. He recognizes courage. "I'm sorry. I doubt it's something you're happy about." He's backing off already and doesn't really need Lampkin to step in and take over as urgently as he does. She came here with Hera. Lee stands farther toward the wall and doesn't talk to her again.
A few minutes of the examination and he says, "I can't." She doesn't say the word love, only shifts unconsciously in her chair when she hears it. She wants to protect him; Lee watches when it's gently pulled out of her like a thread. and he needs to be away from here. "You're doin' great," he tells Baltar's lawyer. "All of you," he tells the guards. He nearly says something to the Cylon, or to the mirror with the president behind it -- he feels regret for not being stronger than this, almost for *her* (The human race is better off with you here), which is ridiculous because she's the last person who wanted him here. Or maybe she did want him here, for just this reason. "I can't," he says and goes.
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She doesn't distinguish between fiction and nonfiction books. Or she does, but he didn't specify, so she's punishing him for that vagueness. She brings him four: one is a history of the Libran justice system, two are paperback mysteries, the kind the former president liked (they could be hers, he thinks for a paranoid moment), and one is a wireless broadcaster's operating manual.
He gets into a habit of staring at the pages and thinking about something else. His eyes glaze over the same handful of middle chapters while someone screams very far away in the silence, and she doesn't bother him until 3:00 when they pray, and then eat, and then he can sit with the books again in peace. Eventually he's bored enough that he starts absorbing what he's reading. It does make the time pass, makes it bearable, but admitting this pisses him off, like it's a victory the Cylons won.
"Tell me what you read about," is what she asks the first time she joins him in bed, curling into his arm as he lies stiffly at her side. Nothing else happens. He tells her about the Libran history, the one he's read the most of. She closes her eyes and seems to go to sleep before he has to resort to a vague description of a fictional heiress's murder, or how to install a ground satellite television.
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He fraks her from behind in the shower or in bed, once over a table. He's never enjoyed this before, even with Shevon. Dee's gotten to expect it now, and love it, without asking why. It's very likely she prefers not to look in his eyes anymore either.
Afterwards he tries to sleep. Once she held him, because he might've been shaking, but when she went to touch his shorn hair he moved away from her with such violent panic that she hasn't once tried to initiate touching him since. They stay together some nights, and spend others in the refuge of opposite shifts.
The child they have feels unreal, not like a miracle but a changeling. Her name is Cady. "I love her so much," Dee says sometimes from nowhere. She's born a month after he comes home. He's not trained for this, the replacement of a fantasy he didn't recognize with another one. "I wouldn't have had her if you hadn't..." she trails off. "I couldn't, Lee, I'm sorry. It felt like all I had from you."
He kisses her forehead. He tells her, "Don't be sorry, don't be sorry." Cady is beautiful and he loves her. He also doesn't want to be left alone with her, and Dee doesn't want him to be either.
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"Samuel Anders," the Cylon reads. "Died of pneumonia. Two months ago."
"Let me see it," says Lee. His voice is tired and hoarse. She isn't lying, at least about the paper. It's one of their newsletters, something they circulate for the outer farmlands. Death notices in the back, next to birth notices. She tells him about Chief and Cally's baby this way. They're incomplete, she's admitted that much to him, and it's not always clear if the causes match reality. But they're trying, she says, to provide closure.
"And what about me? Do I have one of those?" he asks.
She twirls a strand of his hair; it needs to be cut so frakkin' badly. "You're not dead," she tells him, a note of confusion and reassurance in her voice. "You're alive."
"Could fool me sometimes." He tries to make it sound like a joke. Inside he tries to read something into this. If they haven't reported him dead, it means there's no sure plan to kill him or to keep him infinitely. There's that. He tries not to live in false hope. He's in limbo, missing, maybe worse than dead. It feels like a tiny difference sometimes, but huge. Her hand trails to his cheek and he's barely conscious of moving into her touch. He raises his voice slightly, but the word is lonely and strained. "And?"
"No one else," she tells him. "I checked all the records. I did that for you. I didn't find Kara Thrace anywhere." The name doesn't change her inflection or seem to affect her more than anyone else's. He doesn't think she understands. She's probably not lying either.
It's more of an answer than he's ever gotten, even if he doesn't know how to begin trusting it. "I'll do anything for you," he thinks she says, softer than a whisper. Limbo is not dead, he tells himself. This is something else.
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He and Kara don't talk about what happened the year before; they don't talk about New Caprica before the invasion. He knows it was summer there once, but it seems like another world. Lee breaks his life down into a series of lifetimes, so distinct from each other that some don't even make sense anymore; the only common factor is him, and a few other details. The Academy. Before Zak. Gianne, before the worlds ended. Pegasus. Six. He shuts the door on them. Like someone painted the world in different colors is how Kara says it.
He tells her he's leaving Dee once, and she shakes her head. They're drinking alone like they used to -- this is another constant in most of his lives. "And what," she says, her mouth curling up, "you want to marry me?" She still carries a ring on her dog tags, that ugly tattoo on her like a curse. He doesn't. He would. She says, "You got someone, Lee. You have more to screw up."
"You think you'd be happy with Sam now?"
She looks violent for a second, like she wants to swear at him and strike back, but then her mouth just hangs open uselessly. She says, "I don't know."
"It's not something you've been thinking about." Her eyes tear. He's curious, only. She downs whatever's in her glass.
"It's my fault you were on the ground, right?" she says after she swallows. It's a drastic shift in the conversation to him, but maybe not to her. "That and if you weren't such a dick about coming in the first place."
"Or maybe more of one," he chimes in. He doesn't want to fight and he knows they're going to. She's smiling without her eyes.
He doesn't do as many shots as her; he thinks it's what he wants, but as soon as he starts feeling bleary he stops, wants to shake himself out of it. She keeps going, stealing the rest of the bottle for herself.
"He never frakked me, all right?" she says when she's sufficiently hammered. He must look too perplexed at this, maybe for the wrong reason. "Leoben?" she clarifies. "Motherfrakking gentleman of a toaster. The whole flowers and candy phase. He..." Her voice cracks and she clears her throat to cover it, takes a commanding breath. "Just, everybody wants to ask me that and they don't want to ask me, so. There you go."
"I know," he tells her, feeling a rush through his head of guilt and relief and mostly emptiness. "And I wasn't- going to." He did want and not want to ask.
"It's okay." She shrugs at him. He touches her face and she instinctively rolls her eyes, but then softens and doesn't move away. "Whatever, he just- it never got that far, okay? It was like that, but it wasn't."
"I know," he says again, half a lie.
She's looking at the table again, her voice brittle. "Just don't do it for me all right?" she says quietly. "With Dee. 'Cause this is frakking nothing."
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From 3:00 to 4:00 he learns to pray. Once a week it continues until 6:00. He's never wished so much to believe in the gods, just for some extra spiritual ammunition against this. But it just seems like trading one fiction for another.
He remembers her doing this in the other cell, blisters on his knees and plastic cutting into his wrists and so cold -- was it her or a different one? (Does it matter, even?) It was the blond; Six, she'd tell him at some point.
"Do you want to pray to something else?" she would ask. "I understand. You have other gods. We see them all as the true one." This is how they met.
She said, "Do you want to pray to Apollo?" and he'd say nothing. Then, yes. He tries it once. When she says Apollo he tries to imagine himself standing far off in a lake, tries to pray to some out-of-body soldier soul of his own to stay with him, to help him live through this. He prayed to Kara and then to the Tighs and Chief and Cally and any of the others he can remember who settled here, and Kara again. He prayed to them in gods' names. Apollo, Artemis, Ares, Aphrodite.
"I understand," the Six said, lying for him. Her fingers ran a small, soothing circle around a cut on his neck. "The others don't see how we're connected, our God and yours." This had to be her, the same one from the house. She said, "I'm here for you. I can make you feel better."
It's changed now. She holds his hands and says heavenly father and waits for him to repeat after her. The prayer is long and repetitive and it's a gradual process to learn to say in unison with her, but he starts irrationally hoping that something'll happen when he finally does. A medal, a release form. Occasionally he skips ahead without realizing and she gently pinches his hands and corrects him. In the last half hour she'll go off-script and change it every day. She says things like God, you have a plan for all things and a plan for Lee Adama, God help us trust in your plan. She says father watch over us and father save us and then she asks him to say something and he begins to lie.
He talks slowly when he's inventing things so he'll have less to say. He starts hiding words and tallies into what he's saying like he did in the other cell, marking time that way, which he feels very smart for doing even though he also has a calendar and a television. He prays to embrace her and to love her and to save his soul. "You don't mean it," she tells him, watching him skeptically, hurt. "I do," he responds flatly, staring her coldly in the eyes. She grips his hands tighter and he endures. They start from the beginning. It's been five months.
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The workers at the daycare are so young, teenagers mostly. Lee notices it whenever he visits there. They could've grown up here. An older boy is rocking Cady and feeding her formula; she's quiet, alternates between sucking and fluttering her eyes closed. They leave her a little less now that Tigh's back to work and Dee's stepped down from being XO. He'll get better at this, he decides, and he will trade shifts with his wife and watch her without standing out in the hallway to breathe and he'll be better at this.
Lee tries not to stare at Hera Agathon when he's here. She's independent, plays on her own and cries a lot. She's begun to react more to Helo, or at least mimic his ecstatic smile when she sees him. "It's the best," Helo will tell Lee and clap him lightly on the back, compensating for desperate relief. "We're blessed, you know that? God, the gods, somebody was watching." Lee smiles stiffly and has nothing to say.
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Lee is dreaming about the lake again, only he's alone. He wades in holding no one's hand, just to see that he can, that he doesn't have to stop. It's not about death, he thinks when he wakes up, the Six scrambling eggs in the other room. This thought lingers in his head as the rest of the dream fades. It's not death but something else.
He dreams of rocks along the floor of the lake, moving under his feet. He starts to breathe underwater. He didn't realize he was wearing his helmet. There are torn pieces of newspaper lining the ground that are too blurry to see, and a voice reads it for him.
If it were you, it says, we'd never leave.
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If she can try to get into his head, he can do the same to her. Make her trust him, make her want him to trust her. Empathy, he decides he's going to teach her, once he accepts that he might be going crazy.
"If you had a choice," he tells her. "Okay, say there was a dog."
She watches him intently, smiling a little. They're having a conversation; she enjoys that.
He says, "You have a choice to pet it, or kick it, or cut it open, or just leave it alone. Right?"
It's not working. Maybe it is. She's listening but looks offended by this whole line of questioning. "We're not soulless."
"You killed twenty billion people," he argues before he can reel it in. "So you know, that's debatable." She frowns.
"We're not doing that now, Lee," she says softly.
"Why?"
She considers this. "It's different when there's less of you."
He swallows. "Right. All right. So I believe, individually, you don't want to hurt someone."
"Did you lose someone?" she asks. "When... we killed those people." Her voice aches on we.
"Yes," he says bluntly. "My mother died. Most of the people I knew died."
"Your father lived." He's not sure if she means it as a question or statement of encouragement, but he almost laughs.
"I wasn't counting him in people I knew." He doesn't know when this conversation got away from him. Gods. "I still want to talk about the dog," he says.
"The dog wasn't real," she says. "I would pet him. You're real."
He's starting to see the flaw in this metaphor, much too late. Not a dog, it should've been a child. Something that thinks, something with parents, you can't just take it home with you and feed it.
"I love you," he says, and her eyes light, her face perks up instinctively. "What does that mean?" he asks her. "What does that mean to you?"
"I'm not sure I know yet," she tells him, sinking a little. "We're going to love each other. I've seen it." She tells him, "I wanted to save you. You were so unhappy, I wanted to help."
"Humanity created love," he says slowly. "You get this from us. And what we say is that if you love someone you let them go." He regrets putting it that way. It's so convenient, even if it's true, he's sure she doesn't believe him.
"We're not like that," is all she says. He's not sure if she means him or the Cylons. "Why would anyone say that?"
"I don't know," he sighs. "Because- because it proves how they feel about you. When they come back. You have to leave them alone, though, and let them."
"You wouldn't come back. Not yet."
"Look, you said my name," he says. "You know who I am. That's why I'm here. It wasn't about love."
She says nothing for a moment. Then, "Yes. That's why you were here. It's your name. They said it was leverage."
"And you saw I was unhappy, and you wanted to help me. I believe you. I believe you love me. Okay? But I don't need to be here for the other reason. My father- Galactica isn't coming back. The resistance is dying. You don't need to hang onto me for anything."
"Because he loves you?"
"What?"
"When humans think they love people, they leave them alone. Like Galactica left you all here." She's curious, only. Trying to tie it together. It's not even cruelty.
"No," he says. "That was... another thing. Listen to me."
"We don't do that. We're better than that."
"You can help me," he says carefully. "You're different from the others. You want to make me happy, you're programmed to." She doesn't like the word programmed, her eyes cast downward sadly, and he alters it quickly. "You're- destined to," he says.
"I will." She kisses his cheek. "I am helping you. If you leave here, you'll go back to another cell."
"No," he says, starting to tremble in frustration. "No, then help me leave the building."
"I can make it better," she promises.
Desperately he says, "I- I'll take you with me." He feels a glimmer of regret for saying it instantly. It's a lie that seems mean to her somehow, and it worries him that he cares.
"You won't," she says knowingly, somberly. She studies him. "Not yet."
The regret leaves him just as fast. He wants to hurt her. He exhales. "Please help me," he tries. "Please."
She says, "I am."
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He kills her once. It's the only time. It's a precise shot to an artery with a knife, from before they thought to take the silverware and he hid one away. She's a machine, Number Six of a production line somewhere, but still her last gasp as she looks at him makes him cringe. It seems innately vulnerable and human. Afterwards he starts testing the walls for escape, without spying or distractions.
He is terrified of her body. When he summons the nerve to touch it again, it's to turn her so she's facing the ground. He sees the sun grow dimmer and set outside the window, which refuses over and over to shatter, and which he can see only leads to a four-story fall. He's not that desperate yet.
He takes her keys and opens the door, to the extra set of bars outside. He knew this. He needed to try. He looks for a place to put them outside, but there's nothing. It's a pad out of his reach, all code and fingerprints. He slams his hand into the bars, once and then twice, and wants to shout something. "HEY!" is what he goes with, "HEY!" and waits for something to happen. It guts him suddenly that he's one of those voices, the empty and far-away ones screaming. He doesn't yell after that.
It's outside the door where he falls asleep eventually, after he swears the sun rises and falls at least one more time. The Six is there with someone in a black mask who says, "Step away from the bars, captain." It's a female voice but he can't place it. It's not his rank anymore, if he has one. He wants to correct her but doesn't know if she hears. She says, "Step away from the bars," and he goes back inside.
He sits on the couch and the Cylon follows him. She goes to where her former body is and touches it gingerly, then looks at him. She looks like she might hurt him, and she looks sad. These go together on her.
"You changed your hair," he says when he finds his voice. It seems a little darker than the usual blond now -- honey-colored, even in the light.
She looks at him unusually. "I changed my body," she reminds him.
"I thought they all looked..." he doesn't finish. He left the knife inside her, the old her, and he has nothing now. Why did he do that? She takes it out and makes a face, turning it in her hands when she looks at him again. "I'm sorry," he says under his breath, because she's holding a knife and he's holding nothing. He could've kept it, if he had it now, or when the guard...
She returns up the stairs, to the door, and tosses the knife through the bars like trash. He feels short-term relief, long-term depression. He feels like an idiot about the guard now. It's all he can think about, fighting or appealing to her. She was human, and she knew him. He could do this again, he thinks. Would it be the same person, someone else? He can wait a few days and do this again. He feels exhausted thinking about it, though, and now neither of them are armed.
When she's locking the door with her key again, he follows her up the stairs from behind -- not for any reason, just to see how far she threw it -- and she glides around and slaps him then. It's the only time. It knocks him back but doesn't sting as much as it sounds like it should've. He was waiting for it.
Her face crumples and her hand hovers by his cheek for an instant before covering her mouth. She looks softer than he remembered, besides the hair. Like something ethereal from a storybook. He might be going crazy. It's the first time he thinks she looks kind, like kindness suits her. It scares him. He'd rather it feel calculated and fake than this.
She wraps her arms around him on the stairs and holds him for a long time, until he instinctively puts his arms around her, too. Maybe they thought it'd be better for him, if she looked different from the others. Or maybe they just gave her a defective body in case she loses it again. He stops himself from saying he's sorry again, or that he didn't mean to hurt her. He says nothing, just lets this happen, while the words frakking moron occasionally play in his head in Kara's voice.
"It's all right," she tells him over and over. "Shhhh. It's all right."
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He tells Kara about the baby because he has to. She's got Kacey's doll stuffed in her locker -- she thought of giving it to him and Dee, she says in a moment of honesty, and she couldn't yet -- and she tries to sound happy and past-tense when she talks about it. He has to stay sane.
"Huh," she says finally. "And you wonder why those two crazy kids couldn't just make it work."
"When did you stop knowing?" he asks Kara. "You knew he was lying, right? When did you just... stop?"
She's frustrated. She asked for this, the talking and sharing. She opened the door. "You get stupid," she says. "They take advantage of that."
"Then sometimes I still think she wasn't," he admits slowly. He might be pleading for her to smack him; that might help.
"Well, that you need to stop," Kara says quickly. "Because you're not that stupid anymore. Even I don't think you are." He says nothing and she forces a laugh. "I mean, she was gonna give you a tiny little toaster, Lee? Maybe she was pregnant. Maybe you and Karl had the super magic sperm to get it done, of all the thousands of people left in the world, and the millions before that. Maybe you're just that good."
He clenches his teeth; he asked for this. "Good talk," he says.
"Apollo," she calls before he can leave.
"She was getting bigger," he says dumbly, defensive.
"Maybe she was eating," Kara shrugs. "I know, okay? I felt frakked over, and I felt... weak. It..." She takes in some air. "It wasn't your fault," she mumbles. It's hard for her to say, only for him.
"I know," he says. "I mean, I know what happened. I just start thinking if she wasn't lying, then I left her there and-"
"Lee. She was eating. And when it got closer, she was gonna go leave you for the hospital, and she was gonna come back with someone else's cute little baby. Some other-" her voice trembles a little, "some other person's son or daughter, that they needed back."
They don't mind that, he thinks. Like taking home a stray. "Like us," he says without thinking. They stand three inches apart and never touch.
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Look at me. He is seventeen and fumbling with someone in his bunk because it's the first time he's been away from home and the first time he's felt this with a girl. Her name is Lida Sterling, and she's done this before and isn't scared and he's going to marry her. He is in the woods with Kara and she keeps laughing, she spits and cackles like a madwoman every time he touches her and he loves that she laughs.
He opens his eyes for just an instant because both her hands are trembling on his face, but his gaze wanders quickly to the prison ceiling and then he just shuts them again. She's slowing down and he doesn't want her to stop. (It's not going to stop, unless maybe he fights, and he's so tired of fighting this, he just wants to drown.) She rides him like Kara did and the sheets are grass under his back. Look at me, Lee, she says again, strangled with joy and desperation.
He tries to stay here. He's not even doing this on purpose anymore.
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He's told her things. He forgets exactly what. That he had a younger brother, and how he died. She didn't ask his name; he told her anyway. The dam breaks down gradually. It's always unimportant, nothing that could be turned against the fleet, the civilians. And not against him, at first, but it becomes harder to maintain where that boundary actually is once it's breached. He went through a stage of staying completely silent and hard, or only respond as much as he needed. He was trained for this. But now no one is coming and he has to stay sane. He could make her trust him, and want to return the favor. He has to stay sane.
"I had a younger brother," she says to him one day. "We can't talk about him."
"I'm stuck here," he presses her. "Talk to me."
"No," she says. "I want to. I don't know it anymore." She seems to struggle for something to keep this conversation going. "Sometimes I dream about him," she offers. "When you... when I downloaded, I thought I remembered him." She tries to explain to him -- he thinks she really is trying. Of the ones they don't talk about, her brother is different. They must not try to get the others back. They can't get him. She looks far away when she says this, not to him, and her eyes flutter but don't cry. She says, "Do you understand?" and he does. Limbo and dead, the difference is tiny but huge.
She rests her head on his shoulder and puts her hand around his waist, breathes contentedly against him. It's too quiet for too long. He tells her, "I dream about Zak." He tells her they're in the lake, as kids, the way they used to hold hands and go as far as they both dared together. It was never past their chins. They worried, Lee more for his brother than himself. Only in the dream he keeps walking, and Lee doesn't. And Lee gets older and older, and Zak stays small, smaller than he was when he died. Six's breathing is so slow and serene, like she's falling asleep. She laces her hand into his. "I'm sorry," she says.
"I had that dream with Kara once," he tells her. "Only she pulled me in."
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"Kara, slow down," he gasps. They are suffocating in each other's kisses, but at the moment he can think of worse ways to die. He always could.
She says his name again, because they need this. His jaw still aches from where she punched him and her eye is swollen and ugly. He tastes blood in her mouth and doesn't know whose it is. She yanks at his pants with so much force it's uncomfortable. "Godsdammit, Kara," he groans, and shoves her hands back. Lee, she whimpers.
(Look at me, Lee.)
It's rough and short and it's Kara and she doesn't want to marry him. He is married. It's Kara. She breathes raggedly into his ear, the words I wanna kill them all, and he comes without the energy to judge himself for it.
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An older civilian he doesn't think he's met interviews him for the truth commission. It's as awkward as he was prepared for it to be. "You're not expected to remember every detail," she says in a formal rush. "You're not expected to share details you consider private or inconsequential. This is about making your voice heard." She makes a face on this last part, like she's trying to smile but half her facial muscles are rebelling. She looks inhuman and extremely tired.
"I was captured right after the occupation started," he says.
"How soon?" Then she launches unhaltingly into, "'A few days' or 'a week' would be fine. You don't need to know the exact-"
He gives the day and time, within the hour. He says, "That soon."
He asks to see the hard records when it's over, only his own. But they're still disorganized enough and she's exhausted enough that she just hands him an entire file and tells him what he's looking for should be toward the top. A, Adama. He fights looking in the middle of the file, looking for T, like he somehow didn't understand where she was directing him -- but he sees Kara then on his own page, under Anders. "She didn't take his name," he blurts with a little too much urgency. He points to show her. They got these records from the Cylons anyway, shoved in a drawer in Colonial One somewhere, but there are pencil revisions throughout them. "That's not the name she used," he tells her. "That's why they lost her on paper."
The woman shrugs. "She didn't correct it." He feels suddenly like a jackass.
There's nothing next to it on the printed page, no official status or location. DC for Detention Center, someone scratched in pencil there, post-exodus. A check mark for living. He moves up to his own name and there's also a check mark, but nothing else in pencil was necessary. In the black ink it says high-value, and it says exp. He doesn't know what it means, but his brain starts filling in variants of the word 'experiment', and he scans the list for anyone else with that abbreviation who isn't dead. It never repeats.
At 1500 he mouths the heavenly-father, sometimes.
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"Did you hear me?" the Six asks, still watching him expectantly with those wide, gentle eyes. He turns over on the bed, facing up to see her better, and nods. Sunlight is breaking through from outside. She says, "This is a miracle. I was going to wait to tell you. I don't know when it happened."
She's not claiming their baby was conceived the night before, anyway. It's taken time for her to know for sure.
"I know it means nothing to you yet, but you'll see this life is a miracle. It's everything we've dreamed of."
"You wanted this," he agrees, something clicking in his mind.
"And you," she insists. It chills him for a moment, because he doesn't know where she's getting it from. A way he acted, something she knew or read about him. He's told her things. "Maybe you didn't imagine it this way, but you did want this. God wouldn't have blessed us this way if you didn't." Her face is pleading.
"How do I know to trust you?" he says honestly, unblinking. There was something he wanted about this, trust, but he's not thinking of that now.
Her eyebrows wince sympathetically. "I know you do," she says. "And it doesn't matter, because you'll see him. You'll see him when he comes."
"You're a machine. You don't have babies."
"You have to know it's happened before, the Eight..."
"Sharon. Other Sharon." He doesn't know why he's defending her with a name. "The Eight," he mutters. Then, "So why don't you kill me now?" It's the first time he's said something like this. It unnerves him, a little, that it might sound like a request. But he doesn't backtrack now. "You got what you want. She claimed they would've killed... the father." Unless she was lying. Frakking Other Sharon-
"That's not what I want. I want you to love me." Kinder, she says, "I can only be with you if you're alive."
"And the baby proves we love each other?"
"I'm not sure," she says, thinking. She takes her hand away from his cheek and it suddenly feels cold. "I'm going to pray for our baby now," she tells him, softly urgent. "I can't do it in here. You can sleep until breakfast."
"Yeah," he says uncertainly. "All right."
"Unless you want to come with me." She doesn't wait long for an answer. When she leaves, he starts to breathe harder, his mind racing too much to sleep again. He considers going after her, an irrational force of habit. He forces himself not to move.
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"Hey," Kara says through clenched teeth, glancing away from him and back again. She's already pulled a sheet up to cover herself, and he gets to collecting his uniform. Her hand lingers on his, tugging it slightly. He kisses the side of her head again, then her mouth, and holds her for too long. He thinks, don't be sorry.
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The Six spends three days in the infirmary -- they have one of these in the building, apparently -- during which she almost loses the baby. She is out buying groceries at the market when it's attacked by insurgents, gets caught on the wrong side of a blast. Ten steps over and she would've died -- downloaded somewhere, but she won't let them euthanize her because of the baby she says she's having.
She'll think he planned this. The idea won't leave him. He wanted her away, just to be away from her for a while so he could think about what's happening on his own. She has a way of getting in his thoughts when she's here.
It's his fault in every way but actively wishing it. He left the refrigerator open when she wouldn't notice, because she wouldn't be in the kitchen for fear of being sick -- everything's been making her sick from the baby. That's one of the things he needed to think about on his own, how she might lie about that. The dairy went bad and that's when she left for more groceries, and if he'd wanted her to get caught in an explosion he honestly couldn't have timed it better. He tries to think logically about what'll happen to him now, only to realize numbly that it's not fear keeping this in his head. It's guilt, it's so much guilt, and imagining the agony in her if she's left blaming him for this.
He loses track of the time she's resting, until she opens her eyes and says his name softly. She says, "I'm sorry." He realizes he has clasped his hands around one of hers, like a prayer, and not moved from this seat for hours. Her fingers feel so small between his. He can't lose them. He was almost a father again. The truth of this is debatable and hits him like a train anyway. He'll be nothing without her, this her, without the hair and the soft features and the baby, not here. He was a father. He'll be nothing.
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He dreams of her. "It's going to be a boy," she's telling him again.
"We need to name him," Lee says.
"Mmm," says the Cylon, "we do." It's half a question. She didn't have a name before. It's Lida now, he remembers. She had a younger brother.
"Lee," she says. Look at me.
She lies over him like a blanket, draped around his neck. He is sinking. He is in the kitchen of the prison and everything smells clean, and she's holding something in her arms but he can't see its face.
"Look at me, Lee," she says. "Stay with me. I've seen it. You can stay."
"I want to," he breathes. "I love you." He wakes up sweating, his hands curled in so tightly that Dee is awake and staring at him from a chair.
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"You need to get your shit together."
"Thanks," Lee says. "Really, thanks, Dad."
"You've got a kid now, a daughter." Lee flinches. Cady, he tells himself.
Lee takes another drink, trying futilely to match him. He knows he's at least casual-drunk when he says, "You know, Tigh says he always knew you were coming back. I think he wanted to break a bottle over my head when I said we didn't know that."
"Colonel Tigh's been through a lot," his father murmurs a little too quickly, cutting him off. He remembers himself and adds "also" afterwards, unconvincingly.
"You know why I didn't know?" Adama sighs and looks at his desk. "You know why?"
"Every day I woke up thinking about you. Every day we were training our people to find you out there."
"I know, I get that," he's saying at the same time. "I'm just asking you to understand why I didn't-"
"'Cause I left you before, when you were kids," he guesses suddenly. The unexpected honesty of it, the total out-of-left-fieldness, hits Lee harder than he was prepared for. "You don't trust me," says Adama.
He's helpless for a long time before he answers himself, chastened. "'Cause I would've done it. If I wasn't on New Caprica. I wouldn't have come back."
Adama searches his eyes for a minute. "I don't think so, son."
His voice rises a step louder. "I stopped thinking you were coming back because I would've run. I'd get the frak out of there and not look back."
"Not if it was your son," he says definitively, so firm and patronizing and idealistic that it wounds.
Lee clears his throat. "Permission to leave, sir."
"Lee," he says. Then a dismissing nod, and his title, whatever it is now. He salutes and leaves the bottle.
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The Six walks with her leg in a cast for a few weeks. Her hair is growing out, longer than his -- she cuts his sometimes now, not as short as it was in the military but enough that he doesn't look like a transient. She's always asked him, that and shaving, and he's started saying yes. He finds himself thinking she'll let him use a razor on himself eventually, and he'd shave his stubble down a little closer and more frequently than she does. This is his first thought. She can trust him. She's thirteen weeks pregnant and starting to show. She dresses in longer, more flowy clothes.
He doesn't forget anything, his life before this, but he can feel strangely comfortable and normal for days at a time now. She starts to call the baby he. "It's going to be a boy," she confirms. Then, "I don't think we should name it yet." She's picked this up from him, worrying.
"You don't have a name," he reminds her with affectionate sarcasm, tossing a baby carrot that she catches with her hand.
"Humans need names," she says thoughtfully. He can't tell if she's agreeing or not. "You need to name things."
She wants him to call her Lida, to think of her that way. He told her this, his first. He wants to say no but he's concerned about any more suggestions she might have. He thinks, Lida. The hair and the baby and now a name for what's different in her. But it's so late it never really catches on, and they never name the baby.
"They're coming," she tells him, the day after. Lida. She puts her keys on the table in front of him, and he doesn't move for a minute. She says, "You could stay with me." Her heart is not in the naivete. "They'll come and leave again, and you could-"
Something breaks outside and he runs for the door. It's a crazy, ungainly instinct, and he doesn't look back at her. He means to look back. There is smoke outside and the bars burst open, and everyone there he tells to keep running. He's at the ground floor when the knowledge this is really happening starts to envelop him, wipes out everything else in his head. He doesn't know what happens then -- if it's a dream or not that he says no, goes running back to the cell where his life is, and there's nothing there. He doesn't remember anything after that. He dimly recalls being restrained on a raptor. The next thing he's conscious of is being hooked to an IV in sickbay, and his face is wet, and his dad's face buried in his shoulder. He tries to say something and only a choked sound comes out; his throat is sore.
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Kara starts disappearing in her Viper, just a few moments at a time. He's disappeared from his bed, or from his counseling session, or from Joe's after saying "five minutes," or from his quarters when he's meant to be watching Cady. He's just needed to prove he could. He never leaves her in the air, though.
"I don't trust myself," she told him. "I keep seeing." She had her eyes closed. This is more than them. He wants to promise to rein her in, keep her from acting like a lunatic. He does promise, and wants to mean it.
She's gone longer this time before he hears her again, finds her on his dradis far away from him, and she sounds suddenly calmer. She tells him, It's gonna be okay. She tells him, Come with me.
He calls her Starbuck, then Kara, when she's too far into the storm to pull out. He doesn't want to go farther. He was always such a worrier.
He begs and cries and curses at her, because she's another notch over the line and slowing down, and he knows it's not to turn around, it's for timing, it's to wait for him because he's still chasing her. He's chasing her and not being pulled. He's making a choice, he realizes; he recognizes it because every choice has been a gift these last few months, and they've hurt like this. He pulls his ship up and away from the pressure in tiny increments, just to prove he can until he can't, but there is a dim light and a soft hand on his back and it's not that he's afraid. That's never what it was.
Kara makes an airless noise, like a giggle. She's not his Six, he thinks, because she's impatient. "I know what I'm doing," he hears her say. "I don't want to rush you, Lee, but you kinda need to let go now."
(This isn't death -- the thought's insane but somehow fixed in his head, all of a sudden. This is something else.)
He hesitates still, and his body feels like lead. He hears her say, "This better work," under her breath. "Stay with me, Apollo," she says in her normal voice.
(You could stay with me.)
He does this time. He does always.