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padmeonpaper2009-05-01 11:02 pm
padme_kenobi) wrote in padmeonpaper2009-05-01 11:02 pm
Entry tags:
Fic: "The Sound of One Hand Clapping" (Battlestar Galactica, Lee/Kara, 7/11)
Title: The Sound of One Hand Clapping
Author:padme_kenobi
Previous Chapters: Can be read here.
Characters/Pairings: Lee/Kara with mentions of Lee/Dee, Sam/Kara and Zak/Kara
Status: Complete. One chapter will be posted per day.
Word Count: 2,744 this chapter
Rating: PG-13 this chapter (mature themes)
Spoilers: Through S3's "Crossroads, Part 2"
Summary: It’s different, darker, all of her demons deciding at once that this is an appropriate time to make an appearance. No doubt Lee’s suspicion is correct, and the morpha is behind it, but that doesn’t make it any easier to take. She can’t tell herself that in the dream; all she can do is watch as the past parades across her field of vision, berating her for both real and imagined sins.
Author's Notes: This was a tough chapter to write, but I think it's an important one nevertheless. Full disclosure: the "mature themes" mainly refers to an appearance by Kara's mother, and all the attendant issues there, plus a reexamination of the New Caprica incidents. As always, more extensive author's notes can be found here.
She has another nightmare.
It’s different, darker, all of her demons deciding at once that this is an appropriate time to make an appearance. No doubt Lee’s suspicion is correct, and the morpha is behind it, but that doesn’t make it any easier to take. She can’t tell herself that in the dream; all she can do is watch as the past parades across her field of vision, berating her for both real and imagined sins.
New Caprica. The prison cruelly masquerading as an apartment. She knows who’s going to appear but she fights it, won’t face him until he’s standing right behind her and makes her turn, trailing his hand along her jaw in a hideous travesty of the gesture she loves from Lee. She looks about for potential weapons and realizes there are none at the same time she gazes down and sees that her hands are still wrapped and therefore useless.
Leoben has her by the wrists anyway, draws her towards him, and she fights desperately, as hard as she can, but it’s too hard without hands and Kara, panicked, topples. Topples against him and panics more as his words tickle her ear.
“He’s dead, Kara. Now I can show you your destiny.”
“Motherfrakking liar!” She finds her voice, but not any reassurance. “Why should I believe a godsdamned word you say?”
“I killed him myself.” Leoben’s tone is still soft, but there is now an uncompromising quality to it that is utterly chilling. “Lee Adama was an obstacle, Kara. An obstacle to your discovery of your true self. As was Anders. They were a part of a future that was never designed for you.”
Sam is dead. She knows that. She buried him last week.
Is it possible, then …?
“NO!” Kara screams, loudly enough to make the Cylon draw back. So much the better. “YOU – ARE – A – GODSDAMNED – MOTHERFRAKKING – LIAR!”
The toaster takes it. Calmly.
“Through me, you will find the way, Kara Thrace,” Leoben says. He carefully draws a bloodstained metal chopstick from his pocket. “So useful, those lessons you taught me …”
Her stomach churns. The blood is vivid, bright. She has a horrible suspicion just whose it might be.
“Fortunately, unlike myself, Apollo will not be coming back,” he finishes. Tucks the chopstick back into his pocket, satisfaction written all over his face.
Kara falls to the ground in earnest. She is retching before she hits the carpet.
Leoben comes with her. “Such petty attachments,” he murmurs, sounding almost curious as he grabs her wrists again. “We will have to work on that, Kara.”
Fingers slide torturously upwards, and by the time they have reached her hands, she is staring into her mother’s face.
“Why do you think you deserved his love, Kara?” Socrata snaps, clutching her daughter’s hands. Hard. “How can you think you deserve anyone’s? Didn’t you pay attention? Look at me, worthless brat. Look me in the eye.”
Kara hates herself for starting to shake from the pain. Hates herself because the only word she can muster is, “Momma …”
“Obviously not.” The open-handed smack catches Kara before she can even contemplate a reaction. “Remember why your father left? Remember why Lee died? I’ll have to teach you again.”
Kara grits her teeth, bites her tongue and does what she’s always done. The only thing she can do.
Wait it out.
“Kara! KARA!”
Someone is on top of her, and she knows exactly who it is. He’s not going to get her again. This time she’s going to fight, she’s going to hit him, no matter how much it hurts. This time he’s not going to take advantage of her, conjure up the ghost of her mother, torment her with Lee’s death and the bloodied murder weapon. This time she’s going to be strong.
Kara lashes out and the punch meets its mark, cheek by the sound of it, exactly the spot to leave a deep bruise. There’s an “OW!” and she’s no longer trapped and plans to take advantage of it, or at least she would if her hand wasn’t being cut off, right now, without anesthetic. She gasps at the ferocity of the pain, tears stinging her eyes, and it just goes on and on and someone’s pressing her to them now –
Her eyes fly open.
“Lee!”
It’s a choked gasp.
And suddenly she doesn’t care about her reputation anymore, or being Starbuck, or anything else. Lee is alive and Leoben hasn’t killed him and that’s all that matters and she’s crying but she can’t frakking stop and it’s so good to be in his arms –
His arms.
Security returns slowly. It returns as Kara feels Lee’s hands on her back, caressing gently, and his kisses in her hair and his voice as he whispers, “Hey, hey, it’s okay, you’re all right.” It returns as the panic gradually flows out of her, as she can attune her breathing to the beat of his heart. All that’s left is the pain, the terrific pain in her hand, and the wetness on her cheeks and the way he doesn’t question her, just tries to soothe.
“Kara?” Lee finally says, when the fight goes out of her.
She looks up, needing to see his face, his eyes, make sure he’s really alive, but next second the image of Leoben driving a chopstick into Lee’s neck makes bile rise in her throat and she ducks back down again, grimacing.
“Do you want some more pills?” Lee asks gently.
Dejectedly Kara nods. Then it strikes her that the morpha was what gave her the nightmare in the first place and that maybe she shouldn’t take more, but Lee’s already climbed out of the bunk and is rummaging through one of the lockers beyond the curtain. She hears him exchange quiet words with someone else in the bunkroom – Racetrack, by the sounds of it – and then the curtain rustles as Lee climbs back through. He opens his palm and holds out four pills.
“Four?” Kara blinks.
Instead of responding immediately, Lee fixes her with one of his direct stares. “You had another nightmare, right?”
She can feel panic sneaking up behind her. “Lee, I – I don’t want to talk about this right now –”
“I went to Cottle after the shower and I got some of these. They’re not tranquilizers,” he adds as Kara opens her mouth to protest. “They’ll help you relax. And you won’t have any more nightmares.”
Her eyes find his jaw. As she suspected, there’s a large red spot that will have blossomed into a lovely bruise by morning. Guilt grips her, guilt and fear and so many other emotions that she can neither count nor categorize them all. Emotions she packed away after New Caprica and vowed never to examine again.
“Kara, please.” His fingers come up, stroke her cheek, and she hates how she flinches. “Do you know I tried to wake you for ten minutes? You were moaning, thrashing around, crying. Racetrack actually asked me if she should call sickbay.”
A hot blush creeps to Kara’s face. If Racetrack’s heard, odds are the whole bunkroom has as well. Reluctantly she leans forward, opens her mouth, allows Lee to deposit the pills one by one onto her tongue. His fingers brush her lips, spreading warmth that she so desperately needs, and she wonders why the gods have seen fit to allow this man to love her so unconditionally. She certainly doesn’t deserve it.
“There, that’s better,” Lee says after the last swallow of water. He helps her to lie down, arranges her so that she’s wrapped in him once again without pressure on her hands.
Kara bites her lip, waits for the pain to go away, and prays that he won’t want to talk.
“Kara,” begins Lee, and inwardly she sighs. Oh well, at least the gods are consistent. “What was that about?”
“What’s there to tell?” Kara replies, trying to keep her voice light despite the discomfort present. “It was a morpha dream. You said yourself, they’re hell.”
He tenses, holds her more tightly, and she can tell he’s preparing for one of their customary battles of will. So be it then. “Not just any dream. You were saying names, Kara. Names of people and denials that other people were dead and – well, you talked about Cylons.”
It’s her turn to go rigid. But it’s rigidity with fear. “What do you mean?”
“The model that held you captive on New Caprica, what was its name?”
He’s looking at her now and no matter how much her eyes dart around the small rack, searching for an escape, he won’t stop looking and Kara finds none. She doesn’t want to have this conversation, doesn’t want to confess to Lee how weak she was on that godsforsaken planet. How the Cylons mindfrakked her into submission. How, under the right circumstances, even something as simple as a fork or a chopstick could be converted to a deadly weapon.
Lee is still looking.
He’s seen a lot of weakness from her in the last two weeks.
“Leoben,” she finally chokes.
He nods, comprehension in his eyes. “That’s what you called me just before I woke you up. You told me to get off of you, and then … well, it’s good to know your left hook still works.” Lee smiles as he gingerly probes his jaw.
Kara’s left hand stings in sympathy. “Sorry,” she whispers miserably.
“Hey, you think I can’t take what you dish out? Come on, Starbuck. You know me better than that.”
His use of her callsign prompts a smile, at least, however small and weak it might be. It’s wiped off her face with Lee’s very next question.
“Kara, what happened on New Caprica?”
She summons Starbuck now, the part of her that clamps armour in place and throws up the invisible shields that very few are ever able to penetrate. She’ll need her alter ego during the coming conversation, she can tell.
“You read the reports. You should know.”
“Frak the reports. The reports don’t say shit. They don’t tell me that you left for New Caprica happy and drunk and actually looking forward to the future, and that when you came back I hadn’t seen you looking so frakking sick of life since Zak died.” Kara shuts her eyes tightly at the intrusion of yet another unwanted memory, but Lee isn’t finished yet. “And they sure don’t tell me why. I know about Sam. I know you were kept in a detention cell. But there’s something else, something you haven’t told anybody. Something that made my father knock a chair out from under your frakking ass when you came back. You are my best friend, and I love you, Kara. And I want to know why the hell you woke up screaming that Cylon’s name. Please. Tell me.”
Kara wills the tears not to fall, but they do anyway.
“Why now, Lee?” she manages. “Why?”
“Because I know you, that’s why. I know that if we don’t resolve this now you’ll never talk about it. You’ll keep it inside. And I know that’s what you do, you keep everything that happens to you inside, but you can’t. It’s going to get to be too much. It isn’t like you’re trying to conceal weakness, either. You’re the strongest frakking person I know. These last few weeks have proven that, beyond a doubt.”
She concentrates on how safe she feels in his arms, how she molds into his touch, rather than the truth of his words. It’s just easier that way.
Sort of.
“It wasn’t a detention cell.” Kara’s whispering now, outright.
“I’m sorry?”
Yeah. Right. “Lee, it wasn’t a detention cell. On New Caprica. They kept me in an apartment, within the detention complex.”
Even without looking at him she can tell his brow is furrowed in confusion. “An apartment? Why?”
Kara snorts. “I suppose it’s easier to make someone fall in love with you if you offer them a setting that’s like home.”
“What?”
Lee is still rigid against her. Whether he’s angry or disturbed or both, she can’t tell.
“From the second I met that skin job he wouldn’t shut up about me. Kept saying I had some kind of special destiny and that he was going to show me the way to it. Apparently on New Caprica that meant I had to return his frakked-up version of love. Frakking crazy godsdamned stalker was how I saw things.” She lets out a mirthless laugh. “So I’d kill him. I’d wait until he wasn’t looking and I’d sneak up behind him and kill him. Then he’d resurrect and come back a few hours later and it was like nothing had happened. Eventually the son of a bitch learned I couldn’t be trusted with a weapon, and took all the knives and hid them. So I had to get creative.”
Lee has started stroking her hair, but she doesn’t notice.
“I remember one night I was setting the table and I picked up a fork and wondered if it would go through human flesh, inflict enough damage to kill. Eventually I used a chopstick, a metal one. Went right through his neck. I wiped the blood off my hands and sat back down at the table and finished my supper with his body bleeding out on the floor beside me.” Kara pauses, recalling her next thoughts. “It was the ninth time I’d killed him. I wondered if he was like a cat, if he only had nine lives. Of course I was wrong. Later that night the door opened and the frakker’d come right back for number ten.”
There’s a sharp intake of breath from beside her. “Did that skin job ever –”
“No. Not once.” She cuts Lee off before he can complete the sentence because the very thought makes her go cold. “He didn’t want that from me. He wanted me to say I loved him. Evidently in his mind I despised him enough without rape being added to the picture.”
Lee kisses her forehead, strong and firm, and somehow that helps her continue. That and the medications are finally seeping into her system, giving her a pleasant feeling of lightheadedness. The earlier pain has mercifully vanished.
She needs that, needs it for the part of the story that follows.
“The next day, Leoben left for a few hours. When he came back, he had a little – a little girl in his arms. A little two-year-old baby.” Kara closes her eyes, remembering Kacey’s blond curls, her hazel eyes, the sound of her laughter. “He said – he said she was mine. A half-human like Helo’s kid. When I was on Caprica at that Farm, they took one of my ovaries. And Leoben said this girl was my daughter. My daughter, by him.”
“I remember Dad mentioning you had a child with you when you came back,” Lee says softly. He’s being careful, and Kara hates it.
“It was a lie, Lee!” she bursts out, and he looks stricken. “It was all a godsdamned lie. Another one of his mindfraks. I brought her back to Galactica, I went back to that frakking apartment with the bombs falling all around me on New Caprica just to get her. And five minutes after I’d landed her mother appeared, her real mother. She thanked me for saving her daughter’s life, took her back … and that was it.” Kara gazes defiantly into Lee’s eyes. “So that is what happened to me on New Caprica. Aren’t you glad to know? Isn’t it a comfort to realize how frakking gullible I can be?”
She’s putting up the armour again but she doesn’t care.
Lee knows her so well that he doesn’t even try to break through.
He simply wraps her tighter in his arms, tight like the day in the shower when he caught her and she realized everything was going to be okay. He rubs his hand in concentric circles over her back and pulls up the extra blanket at the end of the rack, cocooning them both. Lee kisses her softly and she pillows her head against his chest, listening to the beat of his heart. With each successive thump Kara lets the pills take over, breathing deeply and leaving behind the pain, her hands, New Caprica, the Cylons, her mother.
She sleeps without dreams, safe in his arms.
Author:
padme_kenobiPrevious Chapters: Can be read here.
Characters/Pairings: Lee/Kara with mentions of Lee/Dee, Sam/Kara and Zak/Kara
Status: Complete. One chapter will be posted per day.
Word Count: 2,744 this chapter
Rating: PG-13 this chapter (mature themes)
Spoilers: Through S3's "Crossroads, Part 2"
Summary: It’s different, darker, all of her demons deciding at once that this is an appropriate time to make an appearance. No doubt Lee’s suspicion is correct, and the morpha is behind it, but that doesn’t make it any easier to take. She can’t tell herself that in the dream; all she can do is watch as the past parades across her field of vision, berating her for both real and imagined sins.
Author's Notes: This was a tough chapter to write, but I think it's an important one nevertheless. Full disclosure: the "mature themes" mainly refers to an appearance by Kara's mother, and all the attendant issues there, plus a reexamination of the New Caprica incidents. As always, more extensive author's notes can be found here.
She has another nightmare.
It’s different, darker, all of her demons deciding at once that this is an appropriate time to make an appearance. No doubt Lee’s suspicion is correct, and the morpha is behind it, but that doesn’t make it any easier to take. She can’t tell herself that in the dream; all she can do is watch as the past parades across her field of vision, berating her for both real and imagined sins.
New Caprica. The prison cruelly masquerading as an apartment. She knows who’s going to appear but she fights it, won’t face him until he’s standing right behind her and makes her turn, trailing his hand along her jaw in a hideous travesty of the gesture she loves from Lee. She looks about for potential weapons and realizes there are none at the same time she gazes down and sees that her hands are still wrapped and therefore useless.
Leoben has her by the wrists anyway, draws her towards him, and she fights desperately, as hard as she can, but it’s too hard without hands and Kara, panicked, topples. Topples against him and panics more as his words tickle her ear.
“He’s dead, Kara. Now I can show you your destiny.”
“Motherfrakking liar!” She finds her voice, but not any reassurance. “Why should I believe a godsdamned word you say?”
“I killed him myself.” Leoben’s tone is still soft, but there is now an uncompromising quality to it that is utterly chilling. “Lee Adama was an obstacle, Kara. An obstacle to your discovery of your true self. As was Anders. They were a part of a future that was never designed for you.”
Sam is dead. She knows that. She buried him last week.
Is it possible, then …?
“NO!” Kara screams, loudly enough to make the Cylon draw back. So much the better. “YOU – ARE – A – GODSDAMNED – MOTHERFRAKKING – LIAR!”
The toaster takes it. Calmly.
“Through me, you will find the way, Kara Thrace,” Leoben says. He carefully draws a bloodstained metal chopstick from his pocket. “So useful, those lessons you taught me …”
Her stomach churns. The blood is vivid, bright. She has a horrible suspicion just whose it might be.
“Fortunately, unlike myself, Apollo will not be coming back,” he finishes. Tucks the chopstick back into his pocket, satisfaction written all over his face.
Kara falls to the ground in earnest. She is retching before she hits the carpet.
Leoben comes with her. “Such petty attachments,” he murmurs, sounding almost curious as he grabs her wrists again. “We will have to work on that, Kara.”
Fingers slide torturously upwards, and by the time they have reached her hands, she is staring into her mother’s face.
“Why do you think you deserved his love, Kara?” Socrata snaps, clutching her daughter’s hands. Hard. “How can you think you deserve anyone’s? Didn’t you pay attention? Look at me, worthless brat. Look me in the eye.”
Kara hates herself for starting to shake from the pain. Hates herself because the only word she can muster is, “Momma …”
“Obviously not.” The open-handed smack catches Kara before she can even contemplate a reaction. “Remember why your father left? Remember why Lee died? I’ll have to teach you again.”
Kara grits her teeth, bites her tongue and does what she’s always done. The only thing she can do.
Wait it out.
“Kara! KARA!”
Someone is on top of her, and she knows exactly who it is. He’s not going to get her again. This time she’s going to fight, she’s going to hit him, no matter how much it hurts. This time he’s not going to take advantage of her, conjure up the ghost of her mother, torment her with Lee’s death and the bloodied murder weapon. This time she’s going to be strong.
Kara lashes out and the punch meets its mark, cheek by the sound of it, exactly the spot to leave a deep bruise. There’s an “OW!” and she’s no longer trapped and plans to take advantage of it, or at least she would if her hand wasn’t being cut off, right now, without anesthetic. She gasps at the ferocity of the pain, tears stinging her eyes, and it just goes on and on and someone’s pressing her to them now –
Her eyes fly open.
“Lee!”
It’s a choked gasp.
And suddenly she doesn’t care about her reputation anymore, or being Starbuck, or anything else. Lee is alive and Leoben hasn’t killed him and that’s all that matters and she’s crying but she can’t frakking stop and it’s so good to be in his arms –
His arms.
Security returns slowly. It returns as Kara feels Lee’s hands on her back, caressing gently, and his kisses in her hair and his voice as he whispers, “Hey, hey, it’s okay, you’re all right.” It returns as the panic gradually flows out of her, as she can attune her breathing to the beat of his heart. All that’s left is the pain, the terrific pain in her hand, and the wetness on her cheeks and the way he doesn’t question her, just tries to soothe.
“Kara?” Lee finally says, when the fight goes out of her.
She looks up, needing to see his face, his eyes, make sure he’s really alive, but next second the image of Leoben driving a chopstick into Lee’s neck makes bile rise in her throat and she ducks back down again, grimacing.
“Do you want some more pills?” Lee asks gently.
Dejectedly Kara nods. Then it strikes her that the morpha was what gave her the nightmare in the first place and that maybe she shouldn’t take more, but Lee’s already climbed out of the bunk and is rummaging through one of the lockers beyond the curtain. She hears him exchange quiet words with someone else in the bunkroom – Racetrack, by the sounds of it – and then the curtain rustles as Lee climbs back through. He opens his palm and holds out four pills.
“Four?” Kara blinks.
Instead of responding immediately, Lee fixes her with one of his direct stares. “You had another nightmare, right?”
She can feel panic sneaking up behind her. “Lee, I – I don’t want to talk about this right now –”
“I went to Cottle after the shower and I got some of these. They’re not tranquilizers,” he adds as Kara opens her mouth to protest. “They’ll help you relax. And you won’t have any more nightmares.”
Her eyes find his jaw. As she suspected, there’s a large red spot that will have blossomed into a lovely bruise by morning. Guilt grips her, guilt and fear and so many other emotions that she can neither count nor categorize them all. Emotions she packed away after New Caprica and vowed never to examine again.
“Kara, please.” His fingers come up, stroke her cheek, and she hates how she flinches. “Do you know I tried to wake you for ten minutes? You were moaning, thrashing around, crying. Racetrack actually asked me if she should call sickbay.”
A hot blush creeps to Kara’s face. If Racetrack’s heard, odds are the whole bunkroom has as well. Reluctantly she leans forward, opens her mouth, allows Lee to deposit the pills one by one onto her tongue. His fingers brush her lips, spreading warmth that she so desperately needs, and she wonders why the gods have seen fit to allow this man to love her so unconditionally. She certainly doesn’t deserve it.
“There, that’s better,” Lee says after the last swallow of water. He helps her to lie down, arranges her so that she’s wrapped in him once again without pressure on her hands.
Kara bites her lip, waits for the pain to go away, and prays that he won’t want to talk.
“Kara,” begins Lee, and inwardly she sighs. Oh well, at least the gods are consistent. “What was that about?”
“What’s there to tell?” Kara replies, trying to keep her voice light despite the discomfort present. “It was a morpha dream. You said yourself, they’re hell.”
He tenses, holds her more tightly, and she can tell he’s preparing for one of their customary battles of will. So be it then. “Not just any dream. You were saying names, Kara. Names of people and denials that other people were dead and – well, you talked about Cylons.”
It’s her turn to go rigid. But it’s rigidity with fear. “What do you mean?”
“The model that held you captive on New Caprica, what was its name?”
He’s looking at her now and no matter how much her eyes dart around the small rack, searching for an escape, he won’t stop looking and Kara finds none. She doesn’t want to have this conversation, doesn’t want to confess to Lee how weak she was on that godsforsaken planet. How the Cylons mindfrakked her into submission. How, under the right circumstances, even something as simple as a fork or a chopstick could be converted to a deadly weapon.
Lee is still looking.
He’s seen a lot of weakness from her in the last two weeks.
“Leoben,” she finally chokes.
He nods, comprehension in his eyes. “That’s what you called me just before I woke you up. You told me to get off of you, and then … well, it’s good to know your left hook still works.” Lee smiles as he gingerly probes his jaw.
Kara’s left hand stings in sympathy. “Sorry,” she whispers miserably.
“Hey, you think I can’t take what you dish out? Come on, Starbuck. You know me better than that.”
His use of her callsign prompts a smile, at least, however small and weak it might be. It’s wiped off her face with Lee’s very next question.
“Kara, what happened on New Caprica?”
She summons Starbuck now, the part of her that clamps armour in place and throws up the invisible shields that very few are ever able to penetrate. She’ll need her alter ego during the coming conversation, she can tell.
“You read the reports. You should know.”
“Frak the reports. The reports don’t say shit. They don’t tell me that you left for New Caprica happy and drunk and actually looking forward to the future, and that when you came back I hadn’t seen you looking so frakking sick of life since Zak died.” Kara shuts her eyes tightly at the intrusion of yet another unwanted memory, but Lee isn’t finished yet. “And they sure don’t tell me why. I know about Sam. I know you were kept in a detention cell. But there’s something else, something you haven’t told anybody. Something that made my father knock a chair out from under your frakking ass when you came back. You are my best friend, and I love you, Kara. And I want to know why the hell you woke up screaming that Cylon’s name. Please. Tell me.”
Kara wills the tears not to fall, but they do anyway.
“Why now, Lee?” she manages. “Why?”
“Because I know you, that’s why. I know that if we don’t resolve this now you’ll never talk about it. You’ll keep it inside. And I know that’s what you do, you keep everything that happens to you inside, but you can’t. It’s going to get to be too much. It isn’t like you’re trying to conceal weakness, either. You’re the strongest frakking person I know. These last few weeks have proven that, beyond a doubt.”
She concentrates on how safe she feels in his arms, how she molds into his touch, rather than the truth of his words. It’s just easier that way.
Sort of.
“It wasn’t a detention cell.” Kara’s whispering now, outright.
“I’m sorry?”
Yeah. Right. “Lee, it wasn’t a detention cell. On New Caprica. They kept me in an apartment, within the detention complex.”
Even without looking at him she can tell his brow is furrowed in confusion. “An apartment? Why?”
Kara snorts. “I suppose it’s easier to make someone fall in love with you if you offer them a setting that’s like home.”
“What?”
Lee is still rigid against her. Whether he’s angry or disturbed or both, she can’t tell.
“From the second I met that skin job he wouldn’t shut up about me. Kept saying I had some kind of special destiny and that he was going to show me the way to it. Apparently on New Caprica that meant I had to return his frakked-up version of love. Frakking crazy godsdamned stalker was how I saw things.” She lets out a mirthless laugh. “So I’d kill him. I’d wait until he wasn’t looking and I’d sneak up behind him and kill him. Then he’d resurrect and come back a few hours later and it was like nothing had happened. Eventually the son of a bitch learned I couldn’t be trusted with a weapon, and took all the knives and hid them. So I had to get creative.”
Lee has started stroking her hair, but she doesn’t notice.
“I remember one night I was setting the table and I picked up a fork and wondered if it would go through human flesh, inflict enough damage to kill. Eventually I used a chopstick, a metal one. Went right through his neck. I wiped the blood off my hands and sat back down at the table and finished my supper with his body bleeding out on the floor beside me.” Kara pauses, recalling her next thoughts. “It was the ninth time I’d killed him. I wondered if he was like a cat, if he only had nine lives. Of course I was wrong. Later that night the door opened and the frakker’d come right back for number ten.”
There’s a sharp intake of breath from beside her. “Did that skin job ever –”
“No. Not once.” She cuts Lee off before he can complete the sentence because the very thought makes her go cold. “He didn’t want that from me. He wanted me to say I loved him. Evidently in his mind I despised him enough without rape being added to the picture.”
Lee kisses her forehead, strong and firm, and somehow that helps her continue. That and the medications are finally seeping into her system, giving her a pleasant feeling of lightheadedness. The earlier pain has mercifully vanished.
She needs that, needs it for the part of the story that follows.
“The next day, Leoben left for a few hours. When he came back, he had a little – a little girl in his arms. A little two-year-old baby.” Kara closes her eyes, remembering Kacey’s blond curls, her hazel eyes, the sound of her laughter. “He said – he said she was mine. A half-human like Helo’s kid. When I was on Caprica at that Farm, they took one of my ovaries. And Leoben said this girl was my daughter. My daughter, by him.”
“I remember Dad mentioning you had a child with you when you came back,” Lee says softly. He’s being careful, and Kara hates it.
“It was a lie, Lee!” she bursts out, and he looks stricken. “It was all a godsdamned lie. Another one of his mindfraks. I brought her back to Galactica, I went back to that frakking apartment with the bombs falling all around me on New Caprica just to get her. And five minutes after I’d landed her mother appeared, her real mother. She thanked me for saving her daughter’s life, took her back … and that was it.” Kara gazes defiantly into Lee’s eyes. “So that is what happened to me on New Caprica. Aren’t you glad to know? Isn’t it a comfort to realize how frakking gullible I can be?”
She’s putting up the armour again but she doesn’t care.
Lee knows her so well that he doesn’t even try to break through.
He simply wraps her tighter in his arms, tight like the day in the shower when he caught her and she realized everything was going to be okay. He rubs his hand in concentric circles over her back and pulls up the extra blanket at the end of the rack, cocooning them both. Lee kisses her softly and she pillows her head against his chest, listening to the beat of his heart. With each successive thump Kara lets the pills take over, breathing deeply and leaving behind the pain, her hands, New Caprica, the Cylons, her mother.
She sleeps without dreams, safe in his arms.