In the Whole World: Chapter 13, "Magical Thinking, Part 2"
"Magical Thinking, Part 2"
Word Count: ~4,900
Chapter: 13/14 (in Act I; stay tuned for Act II)
Rating: R? M? Let's just say, this one's for folks who are at least basically grown-ups.
Disclaimer: I own no part of the Battlestar Galactica setting/characters/etc.
A/N: This is a huge chapter, in terms of both emotional investment and story content. I thought I could get "Magical Thinking" done in two parts, but when Part 2 (posted below) became 10,000 words long, I realized it was rightfully several chapters. So Chapter 14 is already mostly written and will follow swiftly, to close Act I with a bang.
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Previously: Sarah Porter and Leoben Conoy campaigned against Lee Adama on a platform of "Cylon humanization" (demanding that all Cylons' shared memories be deleted and that they live as individuals), which fomented the ongoing unrest between Cylons and humans.
Lee's policy of centralizing control of the colony's remaining tylium supplies led two ships, the Greenleaf and the Hitei Kan, to flee the system with an eighth of the fleet's reserves.
Bill Adama held Sarah Porter hostage as the election began, demanding that she renounce humanization and theocracy, and negotiate the peaceful return of the rogue ships.
Kara Thrace believed that her destiny would be completed when she finished building a Temple of Unity, and she moved Sam Anders into it, to control the grid as the settlement's hybrid.
And Gaius Baltar's half-Cylon son's blood was used to revive Sam from his hybrid coma, in the temple's central chamber.
Complicated enough? It's about to get simpler.
By seventeen hundred hours, when the polls closed, military forces loyal to the Adamas had secured Galactica and fired up its weapons systems. The standoff was official.
Around eighteen hundred hours, her staff had finally noticed Sarah Porter was missing. They immediately assumed she'd been kidnapped and began a full-scale search of her rivals' offices and quarters. During a panicked staff meeting, her vice-presidential running mate, Leoben Conoy, suggested she'd been assassinated under military orders.
By nineteen hundred hours, the final results were tallied. Lee Adama had been defeated by 1,148 votes. Sarah Porter was the new colonial president, needing only Adama's concession to formalize it before a swearing-in (if only anyone could find either of them).
At nineteen-thirty, the Sixes, in conjunction with most of the Eights, a handful of wary Twos, and Ellen Tigh, announced the outcome of their own private election: they intended to secede and form a separate Cylon government, and formally rejected Cylon humanization. The resisters were rapidly enclosed by an ad hoc human militia, armed with weapons stolen out of Galactica's off-site arms locker the night before.
In Galactica's CIC, debates as to whether the military should intervene in this second standoff raged as Karl Agathon's patience grew thinner.
At nineteen-forty-five, calls for Lee Adama's formal concession grew violent when a mob gathered around Galactica and rained on it with bullets and epithets. It was then that Gaius Baltar threw a dark robe over his wife and began a swift journey up the mountainside to Admiral Adama's empty cabin. He claimed (somewhat disingenuously) that he'd hide with her under the floorboards if necessary. There was nowhere else left to hide, that either could name.
At around the same time, Bill Adama asked Sarah Porter, whom he'd handcuffed to the lectern in the Colonial One chapel, to renounce Cylon humanization in order to restore peace. She refused again. He began to doubt the wisdom of his intervention.
Fifteen minutes after that, the war claimed a first casualty. When a party including two former ship captains, Sarah Porter's chief of staff, and a Two and an Eight attempted to board Galactica to negotiate a peace settlement, a member of the crowd pulled out a shotgun and drilled a shell into the Eight's brain. "Humanization or you're all monsters!" the gunwoman yelled.
And after that, chaos reigned.
As they trudged up into the hills on a path that Lee was surprised to see was already well-worn, they were mostly silent. Kara tried to rile him about how out-of-shape civilian life was making him, though it wasn't, and about how finicky he was about being out in nature, though she was more annoyed by the twilight insects than he was.
But it was, she was fairly confident, the last night of her life, and so she wasn't really in the mood. His grunted responses said he wasn't, either. His pace was brisk, as if he were running late for a meeting.
Kara, however, felt calm. She knew this feeling from before; she was no longer afraid to set herself on fire. She knew how to behave at her own funeral.
"There it is," she murmured, as they rounded a corner and came into sight of what she'd wanted to show him.
She tried to remember the last time she'd given someone a gift, of any kind. She hated giving them. They always seemed to mean too much, or not enough. And Lee… she'd never gotten anything right, that she'd tried to give him. But maybe this time.
Just now, he didn't say anything, although she was very sure he saw it. He tensed-more, if it were possible-and something hard and bright came into his eyes.
One thing about Lee. She'd been watching him for years, and she still couldn't tell terror from hope.
When they finally stopped in front of her gift, he stood there for a long while, measuring its dimensions with his eyes: two stories, with a peaked roof over a third floor attic. Hatch-style bracings visible on the outside, so its strength was apparent; alcoved windows with perfect symmetry aside from a recessed porch and a stray third floor window, so its beauty grew the longer you looked. But if there were metaphors here, they were accidents and no design. The design had been centered only around the idea that this building should last.
"What the hell is this?" he asked, low and urgent-low because he was angry, urgent because he already knew.
She steeled herself. "I built you a house."
That hard, bright glint again. "You built me a house."
"Yeah."
"You built me a frakking house."
"Having trouble with words, today, tiger?"
"Frak. How's that for a word?" He spun away from her and kicked so a clod of rock and dirt when flying. "What were you thinking, Kara?"
She blinked back her tears rapidly, before he could spin back and see them. "I was thinking that I wanted you to have a place to live. That wasn't a tent."
He didn't look at her, couldn't trust himself. "Unbelievable. Un-frakking-believable!"
"I take it you don't want a tour."
"Oh, by all means. Give me a tour to the house that you built to salve your godsdamned conscience."
Kara pressed her lips together hard. "That's not what I was doing."
"I get it. A nice little hat tip. The quote-unquote-real version of that invisible frakking house where you told me-" He cut himself off, swore again. "My consolation prize is a godsdamned suburban dream home all to myself. Well. Thanks, but no thanks."
He shoved his hands in his pockets and turned back down the path they'd come up.
"Wait! That's not what I meant! Lee. Calm the frak down!"
He spun back to her, grabbed for her. "Then what the hell did you mean, Kara? Can you say it? For once, can you frakking say it? Can I hear what you're thinking one godsdamned time in your entire frakked-up life?" He was yelling, shaking her shoulders, and she was scared, and hurt, and hurt for him, and so she couldn't stop the tears, this time.
"I wanted to have a part of your life!" The words burst through her lips, and busted open a dam with them. "Just one. I have to leave you, and every other damn person on the planet gets more of your life, more minutes, more meals, more meetings, more…" She gritted her teeth. "I have to leave you with Hylene Fauvre, who you'll probably have an army of rugrats with, and every Six in the universe will have her eyes all over you for the next godsdamned half century, and Helo and Hoshi and the Chief, who you'll sit around and drink beers with and tell stories and… and laugh with …" Her voice finally caught.
Lee cocked his head to the side. "Kids with Captain Fauvre? Kara, you know that's insane, right?"
"I just wanted to give you something-for once. To build something. Instead of destroying, ruining. I wanted to make something, for you. So you could… remember me. Sometimes. Happily, I mean." She wiped an angry sleeve across her face.
"So I could remember you. Sometimes. Happily?" Lee breathed.
"Really are having trouble with the words, today, Apollo. Good thing it didn't happen at the debates or-"
"Shut up." And then he kissed her, not hungrily, not tenderly, just lips on lips, the kissing version of triage.
"I just wanted to be here," she whispered against his mouth. "Just, you know, in a way-"
He crushed her back against him, lips and nose pressed into hers so hard he was almost breathing for her. "Seriously, shut up."
When he let her go, it wasn't very far. He pulled back a few inches from her face. "Let me spell out the problem here, for you, now that I can see you don't get it."
"I just need you to understand that this wasn't about my ego, Lee." He ignored her.
"You're leaving. Forever. Nothing can make up for that. There's nothing you could say or do. So this house… Every beam, every window, every frakking door knob is actively, relentlessly you, leaving. Again and again, every time I look at it for the rest of my life, leaving-leaving only a godsdamned house with a bunch of godsdamned door knobs. And leaving me with 'em."
She waited a long beat. "You know, I haven't actually gotten all the door knobs installed just yet." She was covering up how hard her heart was racing with a kind of wild… was that joy? It couldn't be, not tonight of all nights.
He shot her a look. "Insult to injury, Kara." He scowled. "The real kicker is that you think it might make me happy." His own eyes were bright, but his thumb was brushing away the tears she hadn't realized were still falling down her face. He nodded at the house. "It looks beautiful, sweetheart. For a torture chamber."
Now she was grinning on top of it all. Gods, this woman. Like sunlight glittering through raindrops, all sparkle and incongruity. And she did it to him, too; he'd been furious thirty seconds ago, and now he wanted to laugh. "And here I thought you might be into that stuff," she murmured. "You know, just another one of your little kinks."
"And you think I might have a problem remembering you. Like I'm going to be getting one of those beers you mentioned with Galen in twenty years, and I'll find myself saying, 'oh, yeah, that was back when what's-her-name was around, you remember-blonde, feisty, never met a bad idea she didn't like…"
"C'mon. Man up, Apollo. Let me show it to you. Just so you can… know?"
She bit her lip, afraid that he'd ask what he would know. Afraid, because the answer still hurt too much to say aloud.
I want you to know what I wanted my life to be like.
He sighed. "Yet another bad idea." He hung his head for a moment, she thought she heard him say a word-torture-and when he lifted his head, there were those eyes, again, at their lightest blue because of the depth of the darkness inside him, light because he accepted it.
Gods. She couldn't bear it.
"Alright. Show me our house, then."
Sam had no idea how successful his hybrid pretense had been, for the unfortunate reason that he'd lost consciousness four times in the same number of hours, since Baltar had awakened him. Intermittent seizing, pounding headache, crippling nausea-they weren't, he knew, in the hybrid job description.
A few minutes before, a group of Twos speaking with the accent of Gemenon had finished the statue installation above his head. Until they'd left, he hadn't dared let himself look at it. He'd looked, now, and had had a hard time maintaining any kind of composure.
In limestone, a fifteen-foot tall Kara Thrace loomed behind him. She had a fine replica of the Arrow of Apollo in her hands, and Earth at her feet, her hair ringed by a guttered crown, like Artemis's except that it was spouting an eternal flame. Her shoulders were thrown back and her eyes resolutely forward, in a composite posture of righteousness.
He knew she must be dead if they'd made a statue. No one would blaspheme so visibly, and in permanent, indelible stone. But it was also the case, he realized, that, hybrids' voices didn't break. So he held his peace, and his tears, as he attempted to hold onto consciousness.
He had to get to Galactica. Sorting through the electrical grid files he was plugged into, he'd discovered that some idiot-genius had burrowed a tunnel under the temple and into the battlestar. It was encrypted, and defended by Galactica's own system at the other end. A frakking secret tunnel under a temple, of all things.
This holy place had been built with contingencies for battle. And no one was supposed to know.
He doubted he could make it through the tunnel himself; he felt instinctively that unplugging the wires connecting him to the bath would probably kill him. He just needed someone, anyone he could trust, to come along. Swiftly. But most of the people he'd trusted were dead. Oh, God. May your gods bless and keep you, Kara. "C'mon. Saul. Galen. Apollo. I'd take Laura frakking Roslin at this point," he muttered. Sam squeezed his eyes shut and began, again, to catalogue the dangers that the hybrid dream had revealed to him.
"President Roslin's no longer with us." Leoben Conoy stepped quietly out of the shadows of the columns by Sam's right hand. "But it's nice to see that you are, sir."
Sam was almost relieved that someone was finally here, even if it were the last person he'd wanted to see. "Leoben." His vision went black for a moment. "You're frakked, Conoy. I know your game." He was angry, but Leoben looked so much like Sam's brother, Ben, after whom he'd been modeled, that Sam's voice softened as he looked at him. God, to remember-it was so strange that he'd ever forgotten. "It's a young man's game. You can't go back, Horn or no Horn. You can't save him. You can't save any of those people."
"You're wrong, sir. They're alive. And Daniel's with them. Kara can find them-she's the only person alive who's been there. And the Horn can take us back."
Sam scoffed. The same pie-in-the-sky idealism his brother had been born with. "We're all murderers, Leoben. You have to find a way to live with the mistake you made. It's destroying you. It's going to destroy everyone."
"Wrong. On this world, I've been an agent of chaos, snipping pieces of the pattern out, rearranging others. But it's only to fix the pattern, sir. You know I've only ever wanted to fix it." He nodded at Kara's statue, over Sam's head. "Those flames around her head… it's exactly how I see her. It's how we all saw her, when her parents brought her in. An angel-you were the one who said it, sir, remember? An angel aglow with the light of God."
The nausea was stronger, now. "That wasn't what I meant. She was a child."
"It doesn't matter, not anymore. That past is over and done with, and thank God for it." Leoben set himself down on the edge of Sam's tub, reached into the water almost casually to jerk a wire out of Sam's shoulder and force it into his own palm. "Where's the Horn, sir?"
"You won't find out that way."
"But I know it's here somewhere. Everything points to it…" He sighed, as the information from the electrical grid siphoned into his brain and was unencrypted. "Of course she built a tunnel out of this temple. Good God! I would have been shocked if she'd done anything else."
When Sam's brother had laughed, several thousand years ago on another Earth, it hadn't had that mineral sound, like a coin clinking on a stone cup.
"Kara built this place?"
"I forgot how deeply asleep you were, sir. But yes, this is Kara Thrace's Temple of Unity, here on New Earth. I'm sure she'll be along shortly. Can't imagine what's keeping her." He slid the wire stem back into Sam's shoulder. "I'll be ready with the Horn by then." As he scuttled behind the statue to open the hatchway to the tunnel, he called one last thing over his shoulder. "If I don't see you again, thank you for my life, doctor. I'll do you and your brother proud."
And then Sam lost consciousness again, and the camp's power flickered out with him.
Kara showed him the study, the storage closets, the root cellar. In the kitchen, she'd shown him how to pump water from the well the Chief had personally installed with the aid of the dozens of Centurions and military vets she'd commissioned for the project. They'd both drunk from the top gun stein that had reverted to Kara when she'd found Earth, and which she ceremoniously passed to Lee, tonight. It was funny how quickly it had come to seem quaint.
Now, they were making their way into the upstairs hallway, and Lee was continuing to critique her design choices.
"C'mon. How many lookouts does one house need?"
"This one just has three. One with a direct eyeline to Galactica." She squinted through it now, noticed that there seemed to be some bonfires down around it in the camp. She supposed they must be celebrating, and looking for Lee, one way or the other. But they'd have to wait. "One toward your father's cabin. I know, I know-but he's not getting any younger, Lee, and at least this way you can see if his house goes dark, or gods forbid catches fire…"
He rolled his eyes. "So I can what, shout at him about it? Maybe we can run a string between the houses for Tauron telephone?"
"The third's not really a lookout, just a skylight shaped like one." She pulled him into the largest room on the floor, the master bedroom, though it was empty of furniture. "See? It's where the moon was, the night we were putting in the roof."
"So it'll show me the moon once every few… Frak! Gods, we have to get back to camp. Did you see that?"
Lee was halfway out the door. "What? I was looking where you were, Apollo-"
"You didn't see that Raider go flying across the sky?" He was incredulous.
"Apollo." She got his attention. "Be serious. The only Raiders left are friendly. And if they weren't, you know as well as I do that Galactica's detection systems would have gone off long before it got close enough that we could see it. Battlestar klaxons are audible at what, 8 miles? Not to mention the signal flares…"
"You're right." He stepped out onto the balcony, stared at the sky, anyway. "I know you're right, but holy gods, I haven't felt that jolt in… too long."
She took that last admission in stride. They all missed the war. "Take it from someone who's seen a phantom Raider or two in her day… let it go."
He leaned against the balcony railing and rubbed his hands over his face, hard. Her heart jolted because he suddenly looked so much like she'd imagined him, there. Glad she'd had the foresight to stock some beers for just this moment, she rifled them out of the hall closet and opened one for each of them.
"Is that what you would do, Kara? If you could go back to that moment?"
"Let that Raider go?" She thought a moment, took a long swig. "Nah… even with hindsight, I guess I couldn't, right? I don't know how I remembered the song-if it came out of all that-but I do know that it, you know, that it happened for a reason."
Lee clenched his jaw, and for once it gave her no satisfaction to have made him mad. "You, of all people, believe that?"
"C'mon, Apollo. I know they call you a heretic in the camp, but I thought I'd made a believer out of you."
"The gods? Sure. Can't argue with a higher power anymore." He swallowed his beer harder than he had to. "But given that they're out there, I have a hard time believing that they couldn't come up with a better way."
"Aww, thanks, sir, your vote of confidence-"
"No, I mean, not a better way than you, a better way for you. 'Cause, you know, we got Earth. You just got screwed."
"'Gods' design, means it's fine.' And given that it's my last night on Earth, I'd love to get screwed." She raised suggestive eyebrows at him, because she definitely didn't want compassion, tonight. "Whaddaya say to one last one for the road, Lee?"
That broke the pity party up. He threw his head back and laughed. "Gods, I'm going to miss your sense of romance." His grin faded slowly, at that. "I'm going to miss you. So damned-"
"Outside?" she asked brightly. "I haven't shown you the yard yet." And she couldn't bring herself to jump him here, in the master bedroom, because of a pathetic corner of her soul that wanted it too hard. It would feel too much like stealing from his future. Haunting his house. No more taking, Kara. Or-not too much.
He pushed away from the railing, let his eyes trace over her as she walked out of the bedroom in front of him, memorized her there. And let himself be led outside.
"…the number of unknown variables alone makes it prohibitive," Saul was saying, his knuckles white as he pressed his fingers down on the glass table at the center of the CIC. Helo had had enough.
"C'mon, Colonel. Starbuck, Apollo, Sarah Porter, and the Admiral are all MIA. There are eighteen structures in the camp that are currently on fire. The power is going on and off like fireworks. And meanwhile, our only sure allies outside this ship, the Sixes and Eights, are holding ground against armed extremists who have already opened fire on colonial citizens in the name of Sarah Porter and 'humanization.'"
"Sarah Porter is the democratically elected president. I repeat, I'm not sure we have the authority to side against her."
"She put people's lives up to a frakking vote. That makes the 'will of the people' beside the point."
"Not to the people outside, it doesn't."
"We don't have time to debate this, sir. With every minute that we sit on our hands, all the Sixes and Eights-who, I repeat, are colonial citizens-are in danger of being gunned down by a mob. We have to send aid."
"I'm still waiting for your plan, Helo."
"We send out a small squadron. Me, maybe five others. The squadron notifies the Cylon resisters to retreat to the temple-high ground, it's defendable. And Galactica sends a team of Raptors with Viper escorts to pick 'em up and bring 'em home."
"And then, what, we're all holed up in here? That's not a strategy, that's suicide."
"Well, it's a step up from mass murder, Colonel."
Saul's one eye seemed not to blink in the minute after he gave the go-ahead.
Kara had thought Lee would be extraordinarily, probably irritatingly, gentle with her tonight, but she had misunderstood his mood, how volatile it was. He had her off her feet and pressed up against the fruit tree in the backyard within ten seconds of stepping outside-before she could even spread the drop cloth she'd grabbed from inside.
He was impatient with her clothing, and wanted right to the point, his fingers clever but unusually forthright as they moved between her legs. Very unusual. She'd joked with him long ago, back in those insane hours on the algae planet, that his callsign ought to be Foreplay. He liked to slow her down; she liked to speed him up. If it went too fast, he couldn't think it through; if it went fast enough, she didn't have to think.
As usual, their opposite approaches were actually parallel: they both just liked to make the other lose control, in this, the only space it was safe to.
There were other reversals. While normally Kara got just as much from a man with his tongue between her legs as she did from the act of pressing him to his knees, nothing on Earth made her feel weaker and less sexually powerful, less in control, than the sight of Lee Adama on his knees beneath her. It was partly that she could tell in his eyes, tonight, every time, how powerful he felt, giving her pleasure.
He knew not to overstimulate-he'd gauged her reactions long since, and adjusted accordingly-but a swift lap of his hot tongue, his thumbs pressing on either side of her clit as he brushed an impatient hand over his own erection, and she was all but shaking in minutes.
She couldn't believe what she was thinking-it had never occurred to her before, in her entire sexual history, that she could remember. She especially couldn't believe it when she heard herself say it. "Hey… slow down?"
His hands gripped to her thighs, harder, and he took a deep breath, and then another, against her. His head fell against her lower abdomen. "I can't."
She could tell that the walls he'd built up around the knowledge that this was their last meal, so to speak, were crumbling, so she sank down to her knees in front of him and wrapped her arms around him and gave what comfort she could.
And then she gave him yet another gift. It was simple. "Lee. I need you. I've needed you for so long."
His arms convulsed around her until she could barely breathe, and she felt his erection jump against her stomach, and thought, foolishly, that something about that was so poignant that she wanted to carry it with her, wherever she was going, wherever destiny led her. And then she wanted him too badly to think about any of it anymore. She took his face in her hands, and she kissed him like she probably never had, like she didn't want to win.
Kara could tell by the way he was gripping her hips and holding her against him that he was thinking about where she was going, about what a last time was like, about how to behave at a funeral.
"How do you want it… tonight?" he demanded, a little more hoarsely than he likely intended. Her own history didn't incline her toward sentimentality, because as a last meal--should she want it the first way they'd had it, in an air field on Delphi, with him driving into her from behind, so they wouldn't have to meet each other's eyes during that first, worst betrayal, as she'd come harder than she'd known she could? To reprise that dark, holy night on New Caprica, surging above him and trembling like a feather poised to fall from the wing of a bird standing over a fault line during an earthquake?
"Surprise me," she whispered, but he was already pulling her to her feet and pushing her back up against the tree trunk, and there was desperation in the jerkiness of his movements.
"Hold on," he said, and fixed one of her hands to the branch over her head, before sliding into her in one stroke, which burned hot as she stretched to accommodate him there.
She dropped the branch, reached for his shoulders, digging her fingers into his smooth muscles before her feet came up off the ground as he grabbed for her hips and drove up, hard, again and again.
It was enough-Kara could tell from her body's clenching and unclenching around his cock that if she settled in, she'd probably come before all too long. But she wanted more.
"No, I was wrong. Down, Apollo," she whispered, and pushed his shoulders back with old instincts. "On the ground." But it was Lee, tonight, who wanted her above him, so he pulled her astride him, his hands reaching as if he couldn't help himself along her smooth stomach, lightly rounded above the wall of hard muscle, up between her breasts, to her shoulders, to pull her down on him harder. He moved his hands to her hips to leverage better position. She wanted, badly, to squeeze her eyes shut and concentrate on the animal pleasure swelling out from her core, but this was it, last meal, so she watched him through narrowed eyes as she rode ever faster.
"Agh!" He'd screamed. Thanks gods, she'd made him scream. But he wasn't coming-and so she rolled to her side, swung him above her.
"More. Dammit. More."
Which one of them had said it? Had she only thought it? Did they both say it?
And then she was above him again, moving him in and out, and then he, back above her, the instincts of the moment impelling them around each other like orbiting moons, like two lions rollicking out on the nearby plains. Afterward, she wouldn't even be able to remember who was on top and who was on bottom when she came, although she seemed to remember the moon behind his shoulder as he threw back his head when he did.
What she remembered was how hard she held on-how much she'd wanted to keep and extend this one moment, as a solid road she could walk on, as a wall between her and whatever ploy of the gods was coming for her, as a way by which, if she prayed hard enough, Lee Adama might somehow pin her body to Earth and keep it here, beside his house.
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( Next)
Word Count: ~4,900
Chapter: 13/14 (in Act I; stay tuned for Act II)
Rating: R? M? Let's just say, this one's for folks who are at least basically grown-ups.
Disclaimer: I own no part of the Battlestar Galactica setting/characters/etc.
A/N: This is a huge chapter, in terms of both emotional investment and story content. I thought I could get "Magical Thinking" done in two parts, but when Part 2 (posted below) became 10,000 words long, I realized it was rightfully several chapters. So Chapter 14 is already mostly written and will follow swiftly, to close Act I with a bang.
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Previously: Sarah Porter and Leoben Conoy campaigned against Lee Adama on a platform of "Cylon humanization" (demanding that all Cylons' shared memories be deleted and that they live as individuals), which fomented the ongoing unrest between Cylons and humans.
Lee's policy of centralizing control of the colony's remaining tylium supplies led two ships, the Greenleaf and the Hitei Kan, to flee the system with an eighth of the fleet's reserves.
Bill Adama held Sarah Porter hostage as the election began, demanding that she renounce humanization and theocracy, and negotiate the peaceful return of the rogue ships.
Kara Thrace believed that her destiny would be completed when she finished building a Temple of Unity, and she moved Sam Anders into it, to control the grid as the settlement's hybrid.
And Gaius Baltar's half-Cylon son's blood was used to revive Sam from his hybrid coma, in the temple's central chamber.
Complicated enough? It's about to get simpler.
By seventeen hundred hours, when the polls closed, military forces loyal to the Adamas had secured Galactica and fired up its weapons systems. The standoff was official.
Around eighteen hundred hours, her staff had finally noticed Sarah Porter was missing. They immediately assumed she'd been kidnapped and began a full-scale search of her rivals' offices and quarters. During a panicked staff meeting, her vice-presidential running mate, Leoben Conoy, suggested she'd been assassinated under military orders.
By nineteen hundred hours, the final results were tallied. Lee Adama had been defeated by 1,148 votes. Sarah Porter was the new colonial president, needing only Adama's concession to formalize it before a swearing-in (if only anyone could find either of them).
At nineteen-thirty, the Sixes, in conjunction with most of the Eights, a handful of wary Twos, and Ellen Tigh, announced the outcome of their own private election: they intended to secede and form a separate Cylon government, and formally rejected Cylon humanization. The resisters were rapidly enclosed by an ad hoc human militia, armed with weapons stolen out of Galactica's off-site arms locker the night before.
In Galactica's CIC, debates as to whether the military should intervene in this second standoff raged as Karl Agathon's patience grew thinner.
At nineteen-forty-five, calls for Lee Adama's formal concession grew violent when a mob gathered around Galactica and rained on it with bullets and epithets. It was then that Gaius Baltar threw a dark robe over his wife and began a swift journey up the mountainside to Admiral Adama's empty cabin. He claimed (somewhat disingenuously) that he'd hide with her under the floorboards if necessary. There was nowhere else left to hide, that either could name.
At around the same time, Bill Adama asked Sarah Porter, whom he'd handcuffed to the lectern in the Colonial One chapel, to renounce Cylon humanization in order to restore peace. She refused again. He began to doubt the wisdom of his intervention.
Fifteen minutes after that, the war claimed a first casualty. When a party including two former ship captains, Sarah Porter's chief of staff, and a Two and an Eight attempted to board Galactica to negotiate a peace settlement, a member of the crowd pulled out a shotgun and drilled a shell into the Eight's brain. "Humanization or you're all monsters!" the gunwoman yelled.
And after that, chaos reigned.
As they trudged up into the hills on a path that Lee was surprised to see was already well-worn, they were mostly silent. Kara tried to rile him about how out-of-shape civilian life was making him, though it wasn't, and about how finicky he was about being out in nature, though she was more annoyed by the twilight insects than he was.
But it was, she was fairly confident, the last night of her life, and so she wasn't really in the mood. His grunted responses said he wasn't, either. His pace was brisk, as if he were running late for a meeting.
Kara, however, felt calm. She knew this feeling from before; she was no longer afraid to set herself on fire. She knew how to behave at her own funeral.
"There it is," she murmured, as they rounded a corner and came into sight of what she'd wanted to show him.
She tried to remember the last time she'd given someone a gift, of any kind. She hated giving them. They always seemed to mean too much, or not enough. And Lee… she'd never gotten anything right, that she'd tried to give him. But maybe this time.
Just now, he didn't say anything, although she was very sure he saw it. He tensed-more, if it were possible-and something hard and bright came into his eyes.
One thing about Lee. She'd been watching him for years, and she still couldn't tell terror from hope.
When they finally stopped in front of her gift, he stood there for a long while, measuring its dimensions with his eyes: two stories, with a peaked roof over a third floor attic. Hatch-style bracings visible on the outside, so its strength was apparent; alcoved windows with perfect symmetry aside from a recessed porch and a stray third floor window, so its beauty grew the longer you looked. But if there were metaphors here, they were accidents and no design. The design had been centered only around the idea that this building should last.
"What the hell is this?" he asked, low and urgent-low because he was angry, urgent because he already knew.
She steeled herself. "I built you a house."
That hard, bright glint again. "You built me a house."
"Yeah."
"You built me a frakking house."
"Having trouble with words, today, tiger?"
"Frak. How's that for a word?" He spun away from her and kicked so a clod of rock and dirt when flying. "What were you thinking, Kara?"
She blinked back her tears rapidly, before he could spin back and see them. "I was thinking that I wanted you to have a place to live. That wasn't a tent."
He didn't look at her, couldn't trust himself. "Unbelievable. Un-frakking-believable!"
"I take it you don't want a tour."
"Oh, by all means. Give me a tour to the house that you built to salve your godsdamned conscience."
Kara pressed her lips together hard. "That's not what I was doing."
"I get it. A nice little hat tip. The quote-unquote-real version of that invisible frakking house where you told me-" He cut himself off, swore again. "My consolation prize is a godsdamned suburban dream home all to myself. Well. Thanks, but no thanks."
He shoved his hands in his pockets and turned back down the path they'd come up.
"Wait! That's not what I meant! Lee. Calm the frak down!"
He spun back to her, grabbed for her. "Then what the hell did you mean, Kara? Can you say it? For once, can you frakking say it? Can I hear what you're thinking one godsdamned time in your entire frakked-up life?" He was yelling, shaking her shoulders, and she was scared, and hurt, and hurt for him, and so she couldn't stop the tears, this time.
"I wanted to have a part of your life!" The words burst through her lips, and busted open a dam with them. "Just one. I have to leave you, and every other damn person on the planet gets more of your life, more minutes, more meals, more meetings, more…" She gritted her teeth. "I have to leave you with Hylene Fauvre, who you'll probably have an army of rugrats with, and every Six in the universe will have her eyes all over you for the next godsdamned half century, and Helo and Hoshi and the Chief, who you'll sit around and drink beers with and tell stories and… and laugh with …" Her voice finally caught.
Lee cocked his head to the side. "Kids with Captain Fauvre? Kara, you know that's insane, right?"
"I just wanted to give you something-for once. To build something. Instead of destroying, ruining. I wanted to make something, for you. So you could… remember me. Sometimes. Happily, I mean." She wiped an angry sleeve across her face.
"So I could remember you. Sometimes. Happily?" Lee breathed.
"Really are having trouble with the words, today, Apollo. Good thing it didn't happen at the debates or-"
"Shut up." And then he kissed her, not hungrily, not tenderly, just lips on lips, the kissing version of triage.
"I just wanted to be here," she whispered against his mouth. "Just, you know, in a way-"
He crushed her back against him, lips and nose pressed into hers so hard he was almost breathing for her. "Seriously, shut up."
When he let her go, it wasn't very far. He pulled back a few inches from her face. "Let me spell out the problem here, for you, now that I can see you don't get it."
"I just need you to understand that this wasn't about my ego, Lee." He ignored her.
"You're leaving. Forever. Nothing can make up for that. There's nothing you could say or do. So this house… Every beam, every window, every frakking door knob is actively, relentlessly you, leaving. Again and again, every time I look at it for the rest of my life, leaving-leaving only a godsdamned house with a bunch of godsdamned door knobs. And leaving me with 'em."
She waited a long beat. "You know, I haven't actually gotten all the door knobs installed just yet." She was covering up how hard her heart was racing with a kind of wild… was that joy? It couldn't be, not tonight of all nights.
He shot her a look. "Insult to injury, Kara." He scowled. "The real kicker is that you think it might make me happy." His own eyes were bright, but his thumb was brushing away the tears she hadn't realized were still falling down her face. He nodded at the house. "It looks beautiful, sweetheart. For a torture chamber."
Now she was grinning on top of it all. Gods, this woman. Like sunlight glittering through raindrops, all sparkle and incongruity. And she did it to him, too; he'd been furious thirty seconds ago, and now he wanted to laugh. "And here I thought you might be into that stuff," she murmured. "You know, just another one of your little kinks."
"And you think I might have a problem remembering you. Like I'm going to be getting one of those beers you mentioned with Galen in twenty years, and I'll find myself saying, 'oh, yeah, that was back when what's-her-name was around, you remember-blonde, feisty, never met a bad idea she didn't like…"
"C'mon. Man up, Apollo. Let me show it to you. Just so you can… know?"
She bit her lip, afraid that he'd ask what he would know. Afraid, because the answer still hurt too much to say aloud.
I want you to know what I wanted my life to be like.
He sighed. "Yet another bad idea." He hung his head for a moment, she thought she heard him say a word-torture-and when he lifted his head, there were those eyes, again, at their lightest blue because of the depth of the darkness inside him, light because he accepted it.
Gods. She couldn't bear it.
"Alright. Show me our house, then."
Sam had no idea how successful his hybrid pretense had been, for the unfortunate reason that he'd lost consciousness four times in the same number of hours, since Baltar had awakened him. Intermittent seizing, pounding headache, crippling nausea-they weren't, he knew, in the hybrid job description.
A few minutes before, a group of Twos speaking with the accent of Gemenon had finished the statue installation above his head. Until they'd left, he hadn't dared let himself look at it. He'd looked, now, and had had a hard time maintaining any kind of composure.
In limestone, a fifteen-foot tall Kara Thrace loomed behind him. She had a fine replica of the Arrow of Apollo in her hands, and Earth at her feet, her hair ringed by a guttered crown, like Artemis's except that it was spouting an eternal flame. Her shoulders were thrown back and her eyes resolutely forward, in a composite posture of righteousness.
He knew she must be dead if they'd made a statue. No one would blaspheme so visibly, and in permanent, indelible stone. But it was also the case, he realized, that, hybrids' voices didn't break. So he held his peace, and his tears, as he attempted to hold onto consciousness.
He had to get to Galactica. Sorting through the electrical grid files he was plugged into, he'd discovered that some idiot-genius had burrowed a tunnel under the temple and into the battlestar. It was encrypted, and defended by Galactica's own system at the other end. A frakking secret tunnel under a temple, of all things.
This holy place had been built with contingencies for battle. And no one was supposed to know.
He doubted he could make it through the tunnel himself; he felt instinctively that unplugging the wires connecting him to the bath would probably kill him. He just needed someone, anyone he could trust, to come along. Swiftly. But most of the people he'd trusted were dead. Oh, God. May your gods bless and keep you, Kara. "C'mon. Saul. Galen. Apollo. I'd take Laura frakking Roslin at this point," he muttered. Sam squeezed his eyes shut and began, again, to catalogue the dangers that the hybrid dream had revealed to him.
"President Roslin's no longer with us." Leoben Conoy stepped quietly out of the shadows of the columns by Sam's right hand. "But it's nice to see that you are, sir."
Sam was almost relieved that someone was finally here, even if it were the last person he'd wanted to see. "Leoben." His vision went black for a moment. "You're frakked, Conoy. I know your game." He was angry, but Leoben looked so much like Sam's brother, Ben, after whom he'd been modeled, that Sam's voice softened as he looked at him. God, to remember-it was so strange that he'd ever forgotten. "It's a young man's game. You can't go back, Horn or no Horn. You can't save him. You can't save any of those people."
"You're wrong, sir. They're alive. And Daniel's with them. Kara can find them-she's the only person alive who's been there. And the Horn can take us back."
Sam scoffed. The same pie-in-the-sky idealism his brother had been born with. "We're all murderers, Leoben. You have to find a way to live with the mistake you made. It's destroying you. It's going to destroy everyone."
"Wrong. On this world, I've been an agent of chaos, snipping pieces of the pattern out, rearranging others. But it's only to fix the pattern, sir. You know I've only ever wanted to fix it." He nodded at Kara's statue, over Sam's head. "Those flames around her head… it's exactly how I see her. It's how we all saw her, when her parents brought her in. An angel-you were the one who said it, sir, remember? An angel aglow with the light of God."
The nausea was stronger, now. "That wasn't what I meant. She was a child."
"It doesn't matter, not anymore. That past is over and done with, and thank God for it." Leoben set himself down on the edge of Sam's tub, reached into the water almost casually to jerk a wire out of Sam's shoulder and force it into his own palm. "Where's the Horn, sir?"
"You won't find out that way."
"But I know it's here somewhere. Everything points to it…" He sighed, as the information from the electrical grid siphoned into his brain and was unencrypted. "Of course she built a tunnel out of this temple. Good God! I would have been shocked if she'd done anything else."
When Sam's brother had laughed, several thousand years ago on another Earth, it hadn't had that mineral sound, like a coin clinking on a stone cup.
"Kara built this place?"
"I forgot how deeply asleep you were, sir. But yes, this is Kara Thrace's Temple of Unity, here on New Earth. I'm sure she'll be along shortly. Can't imagine what's keeping her." He slid the wire stem back into Sam's shoulder. "I'll be ready with the Horn by then." As he scuttled behind the statue to open the hatchway to the tunnel, he called one last thing over his shoulder. "If I don't see you again, thank you for my life, doctor. I'll do you and your brother proud."
And then Sam lost consciousness again, and the camp's power flickered out with him.
Kara showed him the study, the storage closets, the root cellar. In the kitchen, she'd shown him how to pump water from the well the Chief had personally installed with the aid of the dozens of Centurions and military vets she'd commissioned for the project. They'd both drunk from the top gun stein that had reverted to Kara when she'd found Earth, and which she ceremoniously passed to Lee, tonight. It was funny how quickly it had come to seem quaint.
Now, they were making their way into the upstairs hallway, and Lee was continuing to critique her design choices.
"C'mon. How many lookouts does one house need?"
"This one just has three. One with a direct eyeline to Galactica." She squinted through it now, noticed that there seemed to be some bonfires down around it in the camp. She supposed they must be celebrating, and looking for Lee, one way or the other. But they'd have to wait. "One toward your father's cabin. I know, I know-but he's not getting any younger, Lee, and at least this way you can see if his house goes dark, or gods forbid catches fire…"
He rolled his eyes. "So I can what, shout at him about it? Maybe we can run a string between the houses for Tauron telephone?"
"The third's not really a lookout, just a skylight shaped like one." She pulled him into the largest room on the floor, the master bedroom, though it was empty of furniture. "See? It's where the moon was, the night we were putting in the roof."
"So it'll show me the moon once every few… Frak! Gods, we have to get back to camp. Did you see that?"
Lee was halfway out the door. "What? I was looking where you were, Apollo-"
"You didn't see that Raider go flying across the sky?" He was incredulous.
"Apollo." She got his attention. "Be serious. The only Raiders left are friendly. And if they weren't, you know as well as I do that Galactica's detection systems would have gone off long before it got close enough that we could see it. Battlestar klaxons are audible at what, 8 miles? Not to mention the signal flares…"
"You're right." He stepped out onto the balcony, stared at the sky, anyway. "I know you're right, but holy gods, I haven't felt that jolt in… too long."
She took that last admission in stride. They all missed the war. "Take it from someone who's seen a phantom Raider or two in her day… let it go."
He leaned against the balcony railing and rubbed his hands over his face, hard. Her heart jolted because he suddenly looked so much like she'd imagined him, there. Glad she'd had the foresight to stock some beers for just this moment, she rifled them out of the hall closet and opened one for each of them.
"Is that what you would do, Kara? If you could go back to that moment?"
"Let that Raider go?" She thought a moment, took a long swig. "Nah… even with hindsight, I guess I couldn't, right? I don't know how I remembered the song-if it came out of all that-but I do know that it, you know, that it happened for a reason."
Lee clenched his jaw, and for once it gave her no satisfaction to have made him mad. "You, of all people, believe that?"
"C'mon, Apollo. I know they call you a heretic in the camp, but I thought I'd made a believer out of you."
"The gods? Sure. Can't argue with a higher power anymore." He swallowed his beer harder than he had to. "But given that they're out there, I have a hard time believing that they couldn't come up with a better way."
"Aww, thanks, sir, your vote of confidence-"
"No, I mean, not a better way than you, a better way for you. 'Cause, you know, we got Earth. You just got screwed."
"'Gods' design, means it's fine.' And given that it's my last night on Earth, I'd love to get screwed." She raised suggestive eyebrows at him, because she definitely didn't want compassion, tonight. "Whaddaya say to one last one for the road, Lee?"
That broke the pity party up. He threw his head back and laughed. "Gods, I'm going to miss your sense of romance." His grin faded slowly, at that. "I'm going to miss you. So damned-"
"Outside?" she asked brightly. "I haven't shown you the yard yet." And she couldn't bring herself to jump him here, in the master bedroom, because of a pathetic corner of her soul that wanted it too hard. It would feel too much like stealing from his future. Haunting his house. No more taking, Kara. Or-not too much.
He pushed away from the railing, let his eyes trace over her as she walked out of the bedroom in front of him, memorized her there. And let himself be led outside.
"…the number of unknown variables alone makes it prohibitive," Saul was saying, his knuckles white as he pressed his fingers down on the glass table at the center of the CIC. Helo had had enough.
"C'mon, Colonel. Starbuck, Apollo, Sarah Porter, and the Admiral are all MIA. There are eighteen structures in the camp that are currently on fire. The power is going on and off like fireworks. And meanwhile, our only sure allies outside this ship, the Sixes and Eights, are holding ground against armed extremists who have already opened fire on colonial citizens in the name of Sarah Porter and 'humanization.'"
"Sarah Porter is the democratically elected president. I repeat, I'm not sure we have the authority to side against her."
"She put people's lives up to a frakking vote. That makes the 'will of the people' beside the point."
"Not to the people outside, it doesn't."
"We don't have time to debate this, sir. With every minute that we sit on our hands, all the Sixes and Eights-who, I repeat, are colonial citizens-are in danger of being gunned down by a mob. We have to send aid."
"I'm still waiting for your plan, Helo."
"We send out a small squadron. Me, maybe five others. The squadron notifies the Cylon resisters to retreat to the temple-high ground, it's defendable. And Galactica sends a team of Raptors with Viper escorts to pick 'em up and bring 'em home."
"And then, what, we're all holed up in here? That's not a strategy, that's suicide."
"Well, it's a step up from mass murder, Colonel."
Saul's one eye seemed not to blink in the minute after he gave the go-ahead.
Kara had thought Lee would be extraordinarily, probably irritatingly, gentle with her tonight, but she had misunderstood his mood, how volatile it was. He had her off her feet and pressed up against the fruit tree in the backyard within ten seconds of stepping outside-before she could even spread the drop cloth she'd grabbed from inside.
He was impatient with her clothing, and wanted right to the point, his fingers clever but unusually forthright as they moved between her legs. Very unusual. She'd joked with him long ago, back in those insane hours on the algae planet, that his callsign ought to be Foreplay. He liked to slow her down; she liked to speed him up. If it went too fast, he couldn't think it through; if it went fast enough, she didn't have to think.
As usual, their opposite approaches were actually parallel: they both just liked to make the other lose control, in this, the only space it was safe to.
There were other reversals. While normally Kara got just as much from a man with his tongue between her legs as she did from the act of pressing him to his knees, nothing on Earth made her feel weaker and less sexually powerful, less in control, than the sight of Lee Adama on his knees beneath her. It was partly that she could tell in his eyes, tonight, every time, how powerful he felt, giving her pleasure.
He knew not to overstimulate-he'd gauged her reactions long since, and adjusted accordingly-but a swift lap of his hot tongue, his thumbs pressing on either side of her clit as he brushed an impatient hand over his own erection, and she was all but shaking in minutes.
She couldn't believe what she was thinking-it had never occurred to her before, in her entire sexual history, that she could remember. She especially couldn't believe it when she heard herself say it. "Hey… slow down?"
His hands gripped to her thighs, harder, and he took a deep breath, and then another, against her. His head fell against her lower abdomen. "I can't."
She could tell that the walls he'd built up around the knowledge that this was their last meal, so to speak, were crumbling, so she sank down to her knees in front of him and wrapped her arms around him and gave what comfort she could.
And then she gave him yet another gift. It was simple. "Lee. I need you. I've needed you for so long."
His arms convulsed around her until she could barely breathe, and she felt his erection jump against her stomach, and thought, foolishly, that something about that was so poignant that she wanted to carry it with her, wherever she was going, wherever destiny led her. And then she wanted him too badly to think about any of it anymore. She took his face in her hands, and she kissed him like she probably never had, like she didn't want to win.
Kara could tell by the way he was gripping her hips and holding her against him that he was thinking about where she was going, about what a last time was like, about how to behave at a funeral.
"How do you want it… tonight?" he demanded, a little more hoarsely than he likely intended. Her own history didn't incline her toward sentimentality, because as a last meal--should she want it the first way they'd had it, in an air field on Delphi, with him driving into her from behind, so they wouldn't have to meet each other's eyes during that first, worst betrayal, as she'd come harder than she'd known she could? To reprise that dark, holy night on New Caprica, surging above him and trembling like a feather poised to fall from the wing of a bird standing over a fault line during an earthquake?
"Surprise me," she whispered, but he was already pulling her to her feet and pushing her back up against the tree trunk, and there was desperation in the jerkiness of his movements.
"Hold on," he said, and fixed one of her hands to the branch over her head, before sliding into her in one stroke, which burned hot as she stretched to accommodate him there.
She dropped the branch, reached for his shoulders, digging her fingers into his smooth muscles before her feet came up off the ground as he grabbed for her hips and drove up, hard, again and again.
It was enough-Kara could tell from her body's clenching and unclenching around his cock that if she settled in, she'd probably come before all too long. But she wanted more.
"No, I was wrong. Down, Apollo," she whispered, and pushed his shoulders back with old instincts. "On the ground." But it was Lee, tonight, who wanted her above him, so he pulled her astride him, his hands reaching as if he couldn't help himself along her smooth stomach, lightly rounded above the wall of hard muscle, up between her breasts, to her shoulders, to pull her down on him harder. He moved his hands to her hips to leverage better position. She wanted, badly, to squeeze her eyes shut and concentrate on the animal pleasure swelling out from her core, but this was it, last meal, so she watched him through narrowed eyes as she rode ever faster.
"Agh!" He'd screamed. Thanks gods, she'd made him scream. But he wasn't coming-and so she rolled to her side, swung him above her.
"More. Dammit. More."
Which one of them had said it? Had she only thought it? Did they both say it?
And then she was above him again, moving him in and out, and then he, back above her, the instincts of the moment impelling them around each other like orbiting moons, like two lions rollicking out on the nearby plains. Afterward, she wouldn't even be able to remember who was on top and who was on bottom when she came, although she seemed to remember the moon behind his shoulder as he threw back his head when he did.
What she remembered was how hard she held on-how much she'd wanted to keep and extend this one moment, as a solid road she could walk on, as a wall between her and whatever ploy of the gods was coming for her, as a way by which, if she prayed hard enough, Lee Adama might somehow pin her body to Earth and keep it here, beside his house.
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